Sunset Beach

by Mary Kay Andrews

  The office door chimed softly and a burly African-American woman marched directly up to the reception desk. She was dressed in mauve-colored cotton scrubs. Her graying hair was cut close to the scalp. A young girl of eight or nine peeped out from behind her bulk. She wore pink eyeglasses held together with what looked like a paper clip, pink shorts and a T-shirt that featured a sequined pastel porpoise.

  “I’m here to see Brice Campbell,” she announced in an overly loud voice.

  Drue gave the visitor her best smile. “I’m afraid Mr. Campbell is in court this morning.”

  “Yeah, uh-huh,” the woman said, wagging a finger in Drue’s face. “That’s what that woman on the phone been telling me for weeks now. He’s all the time in court. I have called and left messages, and nobody ever calls me back. So I’m here right now, and I’m not leaving until I see that man.” She planted her feet on the plush carpet and crossed meaty arms over her bosom. The little girl gripped the fabric of the woman’s pants tightly in one hand, and twirled one of the dozen pink-rubber-banded cornrows that cascaded to her shoulders.

  “Uh, okay.” Drue picked up a pen. “Could you tell me your name and what case this is in reference to?”

  “My name is Yvonne Howington. H-O-W-I-N-G-T-O-N. You got that? What this is in reference to is how my baby girl, Jazmin Mayes, ended up dead and stuffed in a laundry cart at the Gulf Vista Resort. This is in reference to how, thanks to Brice Campbell, ain’t nobody ever been arrested for killing my baby girl. Been nearly two years now. It’s in reference to how he messed up and let those hotel people get away with paying me hardly anything. That’s what this is in reference to.”

  She looked down at the child and gently removed her hand from her hair. “Stop that fiddling now, Aliyah. You gonna mess up that pretty hairdo.”

  Yvonne Howington gestured at the child. “Aliyah, she’s got asthma. Needs two different inhalers and two different kinds of pills. You know what one of those inhalers costs? A hundred and fifty dollars. And if she gets a cold, or an ear infection, which she does all the time, that’s another visit to the emergency room, and antibiotics and I don’t know what all.”

  “Oh, wow,” Drue said, for lack of anything better to say. “That’s terrible.”

  Aliyah looked up and gave her a shy smile. “Hello.” When she stepped from behind the woman whom Drue presumed was her grandmother, Drue noticed she had what looked like an iPad with a cover plastered in childish stickers.

  “Hi,” Drue said. “I wish I had an iPad like yours. What do you like to do on yours?”

  “I like to read, and sometimes I draw or watch videos.” Aliyah ducked her head and looked away.

  “Her mama bought her that for Christmas, but I can’t afford to let her download all those books and movies she wants. This girl reads all the time,” Yvonne said. “She likes those YouTube videos too. But she needs new glasses. How I’m gonna pay for glasses and medicine and all of that? With a hundred thirty-five thousand dollars but it’s in a trust for her ’til she turns eighteen? Money I can’t touch, even though I’m raising her? How I’m gonna keep my job and look after her and see she keeps out of trouble in that bad neighborhood we live in? Tell me that.”

  “I … I don’t know,” Drue said. She picked up her pen again. “Honest. Mr. Campbell really is in court today. But I can take down your name and let him know you’d like to see him and I’m sure his assistant can get you an appointment—”

  “Listen to me!” the woman thundered. “Me and Aliyah, we are staying right here in this office until that man comes out here and does right by me. A hundred and fifty thousand dollars? Minus Brice Campbell’s lawyer fees? That’s what those hotel people say my baby girl’s life was worth? That’s a joke! But ain’t nobody laughing.”

  She turned and herded her grandchild toward the sitting area, heaving herself down onto the sofa with a grunt. Aliyah sat down too and waited expectantly while her grandmother pawed through the contents of a backpack, handing the girl a juice box and a container of animal crackers. After the child was settled, she plucked a book of crossword puzzles from the backpack and attacked it with a pencil.

  Drue picked up her headset and plugged it into the back of the phone.

  “Oh hi, Wendy,” she said softly. “There’s a, uh, client here who would like to see Mr. Campbell.”

  “I told you, Brice is out of office today,” Wendy said. “And he doesn’t see walk-ins. You know that. Just tell her to call and make an appointment.”

  Yvonne Howington was staring at her, listening in.

  “I suggested that, but she’s pretty adamant about seeing Mr. Campbell.”

  “Who is it?” Wendy asked.

  Drue swiveled the desk chair around so that her back was to the sitting area. “It’s Ms. Howington,” she whispered. “She says her daughter was murdered? At the Gulf Vista? And she’s got her granddaughter with her.”

  “Her again? Jesus H.,” Wendy said. “That woman does not give up. Brice has explained the settlement to her numerous times, but she just doesn’t want to hear it.”

  “Maybe you could come out and talk to her? She’s pretty worked up.”

  “No, I can’t come out there. I’m busy. Do whatever you need to do, but get rid of her. We don’t need a disgruntled client out there scaring off new business.”

  “What if she doesn’t want to leave?” Drue was starting to feel nervous. She hadn’t signed up to be the law firm’s bouncer.

  “Speak to her firmly. Suggest that she leave, or otherwise you’ll call the cops. And then do that.”

  “Call the cops? On a woman whose daughter has been murdered? A grandmother?”

  “Handle it!” Wendy snapped. The phone went dead.

  Drue swiveled the chair back around. Her fingers raced over the computer keyboard, accessing the firm’s case management database. She typed in the name Jazmin Mayes and waited for the files to download.

  She glanced up at Ms. Howington, who was glaring at her again. “I’m on hold with Mr. Campbell’s assistant,” she lied.

  “I don’t wanna talk to that heifer,” Ms. Howington said, waving away the suggestion. “Mr. Campbell is the one promised me we’d get four million, five million easy from those hotel people. Now I want him to look me in the face and have him tell me how I’m supposed to raise Jazmin’s daughter with that little bit of money I can’t even touch.”

  * * *

  As she read the file Drue kept glancing up at the little girl, who sat placidly looking at her iPad.

  Drue arrowed down the intake report, condensing the facts in her mind as she read. Yvonne Howington had called the Justice Line for the first time eighteen months earlier, on October 30. She was forty-six, single and lived in a neighborhood on the city’s south side. She’d listed a sister, Francine Meeks, as her emergency contact, and according to the form, Yvonne had viewed one of the firm’s television commercials, which is where she’d seen the firm’s distinctive 777-7777 Justice Line phone number.

  On the line where the form asked “Relationship to Injured Party” someone had typed MOTHER.

  Drue glanced up at Ms. Howington, who was penciling something into her crossword book. Aliyah, finished with her juice, was folding the plastic straw into segments, and her iPad lay closed in her lap.

  The reception desk’s bottom drawer yielded a stack of white printer paper. In the top drawer she found red, blue and yellow highlighter pens, and pads of the neon-colored self-stick tabs used to designate where clients signed documents. She took the tabs, paper and markers over to the girl, squatting down beside her.

  “Hey,” she said, smiling. “Looks like you finished your book. Do you like to draw?”

  The girl’s face lit up. “Yeah, I like to draw.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Yvonne Howington corrected, not looking up from her book. “We say ‘yes, ma’am’ when we are talking to grown-ups.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Aliyah said.

  Drue handed her a few sheets of paper and put th
e stickies and markers on the carpet beside her. “I’m sorry we don’t have any crayons, but I think markers are way cooler, don’t you?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” she agreed.

  “What do you say to the lady?” Yvonne asked, nodding her head at Drue in a reluctant show of gratitude.

  “Thank you!” Aliyah said. She seized a marker and began drawing.

  * * *

  Jazmin Mayes, according to the intake sheet, had been twenty-six years old at the time of what the form called “the incident” on September 15, 2016, which had occurred at the Gulf Vista Hotel and Resort on Gulf Boulevard on Sunset Beach.

  Drue shivered involuntarily. The Gulf Vista was a gated oceanfront resort development maybe half a mile from her own cottage. She passed the beach side of the property every day during her early morning beach walk, skirting the rows of turquoise-cushioned beach chaises and canvas-topped cabanas. She’d even tried once, but only once, to get a better look at the sprawling property by ignoring all the private property signs and walking up to the fence separating the beach from the pool deck, only to be turned away by a security guard who’d asked to see her resort key.

  She skimmed through all the mundane questions Justice Line clerks asked of prospective clients—time of day, weather, exact location, including address and nearest intersection, and details of what the injured party was doing at the location of the incident—until she got to the meat of the form, known as the narrative.

  “My daughter, Jazmin Mayes, worked at the hotel as a housekeeper,” Yvonne Howington had written. She’d skipped many of the questions on the form, typing in question marks, or “don’t know.”

  Finally, she got down to brass tacks.

  IN YOUR OWN WORDS, PLEASE DESCRIBE WHAT HAPPENED.

  Yvonne’s response was succinct, bone-chilling and heartbreaking.

  Jazmin gets off work at 11 o’clock on Sunday nights, but that night she didn’t come home, like she told me she was going to. The police say she was killed sometime after midnight. Another housekeeper called hotel security after she went to the laundry and found Jazmin’s body wrapped up in sheets in a laundry cart. The guard was the one that called the police. The police told me she’d been strangled. The police came to my door at eight o’clock that morning. There were two of them, a man and a lady, who said they were detectives. That’s when they told me my daughter was dead. They didn’t say nothing about how it happened, not at first. They just asked me a whole lot of questions about Jazmin, and who her friends were at work, and how long she’d been working at the hotel, and whether or not anybody had been bothering her.

  * * *

  Yvonne Howington slapped the crossword book shut. “Look here. Did that assistant say when Mr. Campbell will be back?”

  It was nearly two o’clock. Brice’s office hours could best be described as erratic. Although she hadn’t seen it yet, Drue knew he had an office at home. If he was working on a big case and didn’t want the distractions of the office, he often decided to work alone, at home.

  “Mr. Campbell’s assistant told me he probably won’t be back in the office today,” Drue said. “I really think it would be better if you made an appointment to see him. I can have his assistant call you to set up a time.”

  “That assistant is just stalling me. I been trying to get to see Brice Campbell ever since she called to tell me about the check I was going to be getting. He promised me four, maybe five million dollars. And I get nothing? That ain’t right. He knows it and I know it, and you’d know it too, if you knew what I know.”

  Drue swallowed hard. The desktop phone buzzed. She picked up her headset.

  “Tell me she’s gone.” It was Wendy.

  “Afraid not.”

  “I’m coming out there and we’ll get this taken care of right now.” Wendy disconnected.

  A moment later, the door from the back office swung open and Wendy marched right up to their visitor.

  “Ms. Howington?” Wendy’s voice was pitched. “I’m Mr. Campbell’s office manager, Wendy. I know we’ve met before. And we’ve talked on the phone. The thing is, Ms. Howington, Brice won’t be back to the office this afternoon. If you’d called to ask about an appointment I could have saved you all the trouble of coming down here today.”

  “I been calling about an appointment and getting nothing but the runaround,” Yvonne said, her own voice rising. “So I come down here today, and I brought Jazmin’s girl with me.”

  She touched the child’s shoulder “Stand up, Aliyah.”

  The child scrambled to her feet and ducked her head, self-conscious and shy under Wendy’s none-too-friendly gaze.

  “I want you to look at this girl, Miss Wendy. You look at her and tell me her mama’s life was only worth one hundred and fifty thousand dollars.”

  Wendy let out a long, martyred sigh. “Ms. Howington, we’ve been over this before. Brice and I and everybody here at the firm are deeply sorry for your loss. Truly, we are. And as Brice told you himself, he did everything he could to hold the hotel responsible for what happened to Jazmin. He had hoped to be able to prove wrongful death, which would have resulted in a much larger settlement from the hotel’s insurer. But the fact is, because the incident happened while she was on duty, it became a worker’s compensation claim. And worker’s comp claims in Florida are, by law, capped at a hundred and fifty thousand, which was the amount of your settlement, before legal fees.”

  Yvonne Howington struggled to her feet. “No, ma’am,” she said, her voice hoarse with anger. “Like I told you and anybody who would listen, Jazmin got off work at eleven o’clock that night. She didn’t never work later than that, because I had to get to work, myself, in the morning.”

  “That’s not what her supervisor said,” Wendy replied. “He said she got to work almost one hour late that day, and then begged him to give her an extra shift to make up the time. Our investigator saw her time card, which verifies that account. And we looked at the security videos, which showed Jazmin, in her housekeeping uniform, after her shift should have ended at eleven, entering a room on the first floor with her passkey, then leaving the room around one-thirty.”

  “Those hotel people lie like rugs,” Yvonne said. “All of ’em ain’t nothing but a pack of liars. And criminals.” She started to say something further, then stopped.

  “Aliyah, there’s a water fountain out there in the hallway. Why don’t you go get a drink, and then go in the bathroom. Can you do that by yourself?”

  She leaned down and her voice softened. “Make sure you wash your hands after, and don’t you talk to nobody. You just go in that bathroom and do your business and come right back here.”

  Wendy hesitated, then took a plastic card from the lanyard she wore around her neck. “Here. This is the key to our private bathroom. You hold that up to the round pad on the door, and the light will flash green, and it’ll unlock and let you in. Can you do that?”

  “Yeah, I can do that,” Aliyah said.

  “You mean ‘yes, ma’am,’” Yvonne put in.

  Yvonne walked to the door, held it open and watched as the girl scampered out to the hallway.

  Then she turned to Wendy and Drue. “I didn’t want to say anything in front of Aliyah, but there was bad stuff going on at that hotel. One of the bosses, he was always coming around, Jazmin said, grabbing at her and touching her. She never said his name, just that he was a married white man, and he was old enough to be her daddy!”

  “You told us that before, but the investigator couldn’t find anybody who could corroborate that,” Wendy said. “So it was her word against hotel management.”

  Yvonne’s dark eyes flashed angrily. “And everybody knows a white man’s word is always worth more than what some trashy little colored girl says, right?”

  “I didn’t say that,” Wendy said. “I don’t think that way. Neither does Brice.”

  The office door opened and Brice Campbell strode inside, his briefcase tucked under one arm. His face was sunburned, and he w
as dressed in jeans and an untucked dress shirt.

  “What’s going on?” He looked from Wendy to Drue, and started to say something else, but stopped when he caught sight of Yvonne Howington. He wrinkled his brow, clearly trying to place the face.

  “Oh hi … uh, Ms.…”

  “Yvonne Howington,” the client said, looking him up and down. “You don’t remember me, do you?”

  “I know your face,” he said, untroubled by her glare. “Wrongful death suit. Your daughter, isn’t that right? One of the beach hotels?”

  Yvonne Howington’s clenched fists rested on her hips. “Her name was Jazmin. Jazmin Mayes. It shoulda been a wrongful death suit. Would have been, but nobody cares about another dead black girl.”

  Brice looked stricken. “The Gulf Vista. Of course.” He glanced at Wendy. “You explained to Ms. Howington about the worker’s comp statutory limits?”

  “I tried,” Wendy said.

  Brice touched Yvonne’s elbow. “I’m sorry. The matter is out of my hands. The hotel can prove that your daughter was on the clock when she was killed. The law says—”

  She shook him off. “Don’t you tell me what the law says,” she said, her voice hoarse. “I know what’s going on here. You took some kind of payoff from the insurance company, didn’t you? What’d they pay you?”

  Wendy bristled. “Now just a minute. You can’t come in here and accuse my husband of unethical behavior.”

  “Oh, he’s your husband? That explains a whole lot,” Yvonne shot back. “All of y’all are just a bunch of thieves. But let me tell you, you haven’t heard the last from me. I’mma get me another lawyer.”

  “You do that,” Wendy said.

  Drue saw the door open a crack. Aliyah pressed her face to the opening, her dark eyes wide at the grown-up argument winding down inside. She opened the door and crept silently back into the office, picking up a marker and returning to her art project.