“Hey Eric, I located the girl Regina,” Tony said on the phone a few days after initially talking to him.
Eric swirled around in his chair and scooted closer to his desk. He grabbed a pen so he could write down whatever information was given to him. “Damn, that was quick. I like how you do business.” His leg moved back and forth as anticipation began to build up inside of him. Tony read off the address to where he located Regina. “You didn’t approach her did you?” Eric asked.
“No, I just watched her from a distance. She looked a little… off.” Tony replied with hesitation. He waited to see what Eric was going to say.
Eric hesitated also but then said with a sigh, “Well… it’s like I said; I’m worried that she might try to hurt herself. She’s been going through a lot of shit lately, so she’s probably…” Eric trailed off not knowing what he should say. “You know…”
Tony hesitated again but then shrugged his shoulders. He did what he was being paid to do and decided not to ask any unnecessary questions. “Well, that’s the address, Bro. Anything else you need from me?”
“No, buddy. Thanks again. I’ll send your payment and a little something extra to the usual account,” Eric replied as he stood from his desk and grabbed his coat.
“Alright, peace.”
Three nights after Tony had that conversation with Eric, Regina’s body was located on the side of the road on Belfield Avenue wrapped in a sheet. “Beaten, raped and strangled…” And now almost three years later, dealing with that bastard again had him sitting in an interrogation room facing possible criminal charges for a crime he didn’t commit.
His attorney came into the room. “Mr. Vasquez?”
Tony looked up and felt relieved to see his face. “Man, am I glad to see you,” he said with a sigh of relief as he shook the lawyer’s hand.
“After that little coke incident, I didn’t think I’d see you again. You wanna tell me what the hell is going on here?” The lawyer sat his briefcase on the table and took a seat across from his client.
Tony blew out air as he put his hands on his head. He didn’t know where to begin so he gave him a short version of the story about him hitting the back of Arianna’s car and Eric grabbing her and putting her in the back of his car.
The lawyer periodically jotted down notes as Tony talked. When he finished, he rubbed the hairs on his chin. “Okay, let me make sure I understand you. You hit the back of the woman’s car. Was it by an accident?”
“Well… yeah,” Tony stammered.
“Did you know this woman?”
“No… not really.”
The lawyer looked at Tony suspiciously feeling like something wasn’t adding up with the story. “Come on Vasquez, don’t bullshit me. We’ve been down this road before and you know how I get down. While I enjoy getting this money to defend your black ass, I will not sit in a court room looking like a complete dickhead because you didn’t give me the whole story. So this is what I’m going to do before the cops come back in here and start drilling you with questions again…” Tony’s lawyer ripped up the paper he was jotting notes on and sat it to the side. “Start from the top and don’t leave anything out. What the fuck happened?”
Tony shook his leg nervously knowing his ass was about to be in some deep shit. Actually, he was already in some deep shit that was pulling him in like quicksand, and the shit was about to get deeper. “Okay, okay, okay. A buddy of mine named Eric contacted me for a PI gig…” he started.
“A buddy of yours?” his lawyer asked.
“Well…yeah. We’ve known each other for a while. He helped me out of a situation a few times and found out I do PI work on the side so he hired me to look into a situation for him,” Tony explained quickly.
“What was the gig?”
“He asked me to locate his girlfriend. Said that she was pregnant by him and she ran off with some guy and he was worried that she was going to do something stupid,” Tony replied.
“Has he ever hired you for a job like this before?” the lawyer asked. Tony fell silent not knowing how he should respond. “Tony?”
“Rob, attorney client privilege means you can’t say anything to anyone about anything I tell you. Even if I suspect that someone else might have done something crazy, right?” Tony asked with a raised eyebrow.
“Anything you say to me stays between me and you, you know that, Tony.” Rob looked at his client as though he should have known better.
Tony waited a moment before telling his lawyer about Regina. “He hired me for a job similar to this almost three years ago and well… you remember a young lady named Regina Smalls who went missing and then a few days after she was reported missing, they found her body on Belfield Ave wrapped in a sheet?”
“I remember the story. She was a young college student from University of Penn. The press was all over it. Wait a minute, you think this guy had something to do with it and you were stupid enough to do another job for him? What kind of special-stupid are you?” Rob asked with a disgusted look on his face.
“Hey, I don’t need this from you, alright.” Tony stood up from his seat and began to pace in the room.
“Okay, no judgments. Just finish telling me.”
“So I tried locating this girl through the normal channels. No charges on her debit or credit cards. No activity on her bank accounts, no cell phone, nothing! It’s almost like the bitch vanished like Batman. I got a real bad feeling man, real bad feeling. I mean when a person disappears like that it's either because they’re dead or because they don’t want to be found.”
“Alright, so what happened after that?”
“I tried to get Eric to leave the situation alone, tried to convince him that maybe the baby wasn’t his if she was really pregnant and suggested that maybe he should walk away. But he insisted on finding this girl. So I tapped the phones of her best friend and her mom and waited to see if she would make contact. She called the best friend,” Tony finished in a low tone.
“And let me guess, the best friend is the dead girl, Arianna?” Rob asked. Tony nodded his head.
Rob shook his head and tapped his pen as he thought for a moment. “This isn’t good, Tony. I might be able to work some angles for you, get them to lessen the charges to accessory…”
Rob was interrupted by the two officers who came back into the interrogation room.
“Sorry Tony, but there won’t be any deal for you. DNA under the victim nails matches yours. We’re busting your ass for 1st degree murder,” the first cop said as he pulled his handcuffs.
Tony backed away becoming frightened. His heart raced as he faced the possibility of going to jail for 25 years for murder. “No! Wait, there has to be something. I didn’t kill that girl, I swear to God!” Tony said frantically.
“Tell it to the judge and your lawyer can try to explain how your DNA got under her nails,” the second cop said.
“Tony, if you know something, now is the time for you to speak up. It’s not much I can do for you with your DNA under her nails man, especially with your prior record,” Rob said to him quietly. Tony looked at him terrified. He knew the consequences of snitching but it was his ass on the line. Would Eric be so quick to take the fall for him if the tables had been turned or would he throw his ass under the bus and play Mr. Innocent? Common sense told him that a man of Eric’s caliber wouldn’t go to jail for any man or bitch. Tony also had another philosophy that he lived by- self-preservation and all that shit.
“Shit man, I’m fucked either way,” Tony said as he shook his head.
“Tell us something, Tony.”
“The guy on the camera whose face you couldn’t see. That’s who killed Arianna,” Tony said.
“That’s pretty fucking convenient. We couldn’t see his got damn face on the camera, how do we know you’re not just trying to throw the blame on someone else.”
“Hear him out,” the lawyer replied. “After all, you can clearly see on the video that my client was talking to her calmly when the oth
er party came over and attacked her. That’s enough right there to get a jury to acquit on reasonable doubt.”
“Give us a name and tell us what happened and even more so, you’re gonna have to get us some kind of evidence to prove what you’re saying. Because contrary to what you’re lawyer is saying, the same way a jury might acquit off of that tiny speck of reasonable doubt, the jury may also see it as a lie that you cooked up to save your own ass,” the second cop replied.
“His name is Eric Washington. He hired me to find a girl and when I couldn’t find her, he had me tap Arianna’s phone and the mother’s phone. His girlfriend Vanessa called Arianna about three weeks ago and that’s why Eric had me follow her. After he took her from the car tonight, he had me drive him to the house in Kensington. They got into a struggle, she tried to make a run for it and I grabbed her. That’s when she scratched me, trying to get away and that’s how my shit got under her nails. And then Eric grabbed her and pushed her…she hit her head on the banister and then she just dropped like a ton of fucking bricks.” Tony stared with a hazy gaze in his eyes as though he could see her again lying lifeless on the floor with blood pouring from her head. “It was a lot of fucking blood. But it was no big fucking deal to Eric. He took her cell phone and stepped over her like she wasn’t shit…like how A.I stepped over Tyron Lu in the finals that year.”
“So who called the cops with the anonymous tip?” the first cop asked.
“I did. Eric had me come back to the house but I lied and said I had another client to see. I keep a burner phone with me for when I have to make calls and I don’t want people to have my number. I called in what happened and then dumped the phone in the dumpster at Spencer Arms apartments,” Tony finished. The room fell silent.
“We’re going to need your statement in writing and you’re also going to have to testify.”
“No fucking way, man. This guy’s got money out the fucking ass. He’ll off me before it even gets to trial!” Tony said hysterically.
“If you testify, your lawyer can argue that you didn’t know what his intentions were. We can get it down to a misdemeanor and you’ll only look at six months. You may not even see jail time, just probation. Not to mention if what you’re saying is true and Eric has Arianna’s phone, we can get him for the murder,” the second officer told him.
Tony shook his head. “Mannn, y’all don’t understand. The minute he’s brought in, I won’t be seeing shit at all!”
“Tony, we know you want to do the right thing because you made the call. This is your chance to get this bastard off the streets for good. Because if he walks free, two more lives are in danger. If what you’re saying is true, there’s a woman and a baby out there that he’s still looking for and if anything were to happen to them, I don’t think you want that on your conscience also, do you?” the first cop asked.
Tony looked at the cops and his lawyer for a moment and gave in. Either way, his fate was sealed and he was on the verge of having a serious problem on his hands by the name of Eric Washington.
13
Eric lay on his bed staring up at the ceiling with his arm under his head. He put a blunt to his lips and took a long drag, holding the smoke in before slowly blowing it upward and watched it fade away as it approached the ceiling. For some reason, Regina Smalls popped into his head also. That bitch. She had caused him a lot of unnecessary problems, running her mouth about things she had no business running her mouth about, causing trouble for him at his place of work and with his colleagues. She was exactly the kind of sassy, trouble making bitch that his father warned him about when he was younger.
“These sassy young gals gotta be taught their place. You gotta learn ‘em, Ricky. You gotta learn ‘em hard and you gotta learn ‘em good.” Eric heard his father saying.
“Shut up, you old bastard,” Eric mumbled before taking another pull from his blunt. He closed his eyes and held the smoke as he did before and then let it escape towards the ceiling.
“Regina Smalls…” Eric thought to himself. He closed his eyes and began thinking back to the day he caught up with her after she called herself leaving him; after she dared to disrespect him and cross him by calling the cops on him. She had to be taught a long lasting lesson…
Eric pulled up to the Days Inn Motel near the airport in an old Cutlass ’88. He had a baseball cap on pulled down low so you could barely see his eyes and a hooded sweatshirt on. He sat partially hunched down in the driver seat of the hoopty he was driving and watched eagerly and with patience for Regina to either leave out or go in.
Multiple times he sat up at attention thinking various women were Regina only for them to not be her. His anticipation was driving him insane as he fantasized over the expression on her face when he finally approached her. He became so sexually aroused that his erection intensified with every passing second. He reached his hand down his pants and slowly began to jerk himself off.
A young woman in a gray hooded sweatshirt and a pair of black tights crossed the street in front of Eric’s hoopty. He sat up at attention when he recognized her as Regina. His heart raced in his chest and his palms began to sweat as every nerve in his body compelled him to spring from the car and grab her.
“Calm down. Not yet. Don’t want to make a scene,” Eric told himself. He breathed heavily as his eyes followed her like an animal stalking its prey. Watching her tight ass sway in her tights heightened his sexual excitement and he licked his lips as he watched her go inside of the motel.
Eric jumped from the car and casually jogged across the street. He stuffed his hands in his pockets and walked with his head slightly bowed so he could still keep an eye on Regina without her seeing and recognizing him. She was the only one getting on the elevator, so he pretended to talk on his cell phone while discreetly keeping an eye out for which floor the elevator stopped at.
“Third floor,” he mumbled to himself. He decided to take the stairs keeping his head bowed and continuing the fake conversation on his cell phone. He got to the third floor and peeped out of the doorway. There was no one around, so he decided to walk the halls to get an idea of his surroundings.
The hallway extended at the end around a corner to another side where a small sitting room was with a vending machine and an ice machine as well. There was also a stairwell. Eric took the stairs down to see where they led and smiled once he saw that they led to a back door which was near an alley way. He checked to see if there were any “No Parking” signs to be sure he wouldn’t get towed and then left out to move his car. He came back through the front and was happy to see no one was at the desk. Eric hurriedly went up the stairs and peeked out to keep watch for Regina. There were only four rooms on the third floor. He eliminated two of the rooms when he saw an Asian couple go into one room and a fat white guy come in and out of the other room a few times without a shirt on. The site of him disgusted Eric and he had to contain his urge to punch the fat bastard in the throat.
It was down to two rooms, one which was right by the stairwell that he was peeking from and the other across the hall from it. He prayed that no one took the stairs and came up behind him, catching him peeking out of the door like a creepy stalker. He then began to worry that she may not come out of the room at all. If that were the case, his next plan was to knock on both doors pretending to need a lighter or change for a dollar and when she answered…
His thoughts were interrupted when one of the doors opened. He stood statue-like still as he watched to see who came from the room.
“What if she’s not alone? Or what if she’s been in the room with the fat fuck or the other room all this time?” he pondered.
“Shit, they can get it, too,” he mumbled.
Regina came out of the room and began walking down the hall towards the ice machine. Eric opened the door wider to see more of her but then quickly closed it back when she abruptly turned around to come back to the room as though she had forgotten something. He cracked the door open and watched her while slipping his hand into t
he pocket of his hoody and rubbed the plastic bag he had. She went inside of the room and then quickly came back out, leaving her door opened.
“This bitch is making this too easy,” Eric mumbled with an evil grin on his face. He reached in his back pocket and pulled out a pair of plastic gloves. Regina turned the corner to go to the vending machine and the ice machine and Eric moved towards her room quick as lightening. He slipped inside and stood behind the door with the plastic bag in his hands.
Regina moved back down the hallway towards her room clueless about what was waiting for her behind her door. She was humming a tune to herself when she went in the room. She never had a chance to defend herself. Eric quickly pulled the plastic bag over her head and kicked the door shut. Regina gagged and clawed frantically at Eric’s hands and then began pulling at the bag.
“Yeah bitch, having trouble talking, now? Huh? This is what happens to bitches who run off at the mouth and don’t know their fucking place!” Eric practically growled as he yanked Regina around like a rag doll.
Regina managed to claw a hole inside of the bag and began to suck in air profusely. Eric placed a strong hand around her throat and squeezed.
“Oh no you don’t, bitch,” he said as he dragged her to the bed and slammed her on it. He continued to squeeze as he leaned close to her face, loving the site of her eyes and the way they were teary, the way she was losing the light in her eyes and the color in her face. “I’ma teach you what happens to bitches who snitch. I’ma learn you today. I’ma learn you hard and good…” Before he had a chance to finish what he was saying, Regina passed out. Eric snickered. “You always were a light weight.”
Love's Deadly Masquerade Page 11