One Dead Lawyer (David Price Mysteries)

by Tony Lindsay

  Back in his truck, Ricky reminds me that I need to go see Daphne’s parents.

  Chapter Fourteen

  When we get out to Harvey, Mr. Nelson is standing in his front yard in the shade of his huge oak tree. He stops nailing the HOUSE FOR SALE sign in the ground and greets me. He’s solemn upon approach but accepts my hug. Dressed in a pair of green work pants and thick black suspenders over a V-neck T-shirt, he directs me inside the house.

  In the kitchen I greet old neighbors and walk up on Regina, toting her customary tuna casserole. We nod to each other and turn away. I walk into the dining room to get a seat and notice a picture of Daphne and Eleanor on the mantle.

  They look like happy sisters hugged up cheek to cheek. It’s a very recent photo. In the background of the photograph, I notice a black DTS Caddy across the street. At first glance I think it’s mine, but Daphne’s parents live behind Regina’s house. They share an alley. Most of the time my car is parked in front of Regina’s house. The DTS in the picture can’t be mine.

  As Mr. Nelson walks in through the front door, I ask him about the owner of the car in the photo. He tells me Martin, Daphne’s boyfriend. I’m about to ask him a couple of questions, but his eyes tear up. He grabs a hold of my arm and pulls me into a bedroom. I guess it belongs to him and his wife.

  He stands right up on me and says, “She was a good girl, Mr. Price. Her and Stanley didn’t deserve to get shot down like dogs in the street. Everything she did wasn’t right, but people make mistakes. What her and that white lawyer was doing wasn’t a secret to me. She called me yesterday and told me she was going to tell you. She trusted you, Mr. Price, always did.

  “When that white lawyer got her that first big check, my little girl was hooked. There was nothing me or her mama could say to turn her around. The money talked to her louder than we did. But something was happening with her here lately. I think she was starting to see that some things are better than money.

  “Last month she started talking different. She was regretting things she had done. She told her mama and me about the bus accident. We prayed for her and told her to pray. Our God is a forgiving God. I told her all she had to do was ask and He would forgive her. But it wasn’t God she was afraid of; it was that white lawyer. She thought he would hurt her if she told people what happened.”

  Mr. Nelson is standing right in my face and it’s getting uncomfortable. I take a step back, and for clarification I ask, “Are you talking about Randolph Peal?”

  “Yeah, he was the devil who worried her. You see, Mr. Price, Daphne didn’t want Stanley involved in that crooked business. But she didn’t know how to stop it from happening. She started bringing him around here, hoping I could tell him something. But young men looking for riches don’t listen to their poor granddaddies.

  “But I thank the Lord she brought him around here those last couple of months, at least I got to know him and her again. She would even bring her friend Eleanor by from time to time. That picture on the mantle is from a little birthday thing she had over here for Eleanor. Boy, we played some dominos that day! I even got that uppity boyfriend of hers to play a game.

  “At first I didn’t believe the boy was from Chicago. He was too white-acting to be from around here. Some of us may put on airs around white folks, but very few of us put on airs around each other. That boy kept putting on. It wasn’t until I found that I knew his daddy did I believe he was from around here.”

  “You knew Matthew MacNard.”

  “We were lodge brothers. He was a good-natured man, always a kind word.”

  “Really? I heard he was a melancholy type of man.”

  “No! Not Matthew. He loved life. He was the chairman of the entertainment committee. A robust man, he was. He loved new Cadillacs and fat Cuban cigars. Martin driving that Caddy is the only thing about him that reminds me of his father. Matthew MacNard enjoyed life and he had a good one, until that tragic bus accident. It ruined him.

  “He couldn’t come back after it happened. He held himself responsible because the brakes on one of the trucks failed. He must have told me a hundred times how he fixed the truck’s brakes that morning.

  “People say Matthew killed himself because he lost his business. Hell, it was a two-truck business and he drove one of the trucks. No. He killed himself out of guilt. You see he lied and told the company he was getting them trucks fixed at a shop, but he wasn’t. Matthew would keep all the repair money and work on the trucks himself. It was guilt that drove him to eat a bullet.

  “But then I come to find out it wasn’t the truck’s fault, and the whole thing was a setup, a phony accident to make some money. And here this man now went and killed himself. If it was anybody’s fault, it was the lawyer’s. He set the crooked mess up, him and . . . my baby . . . But it was him, that white lawyer who led her down that sinful path.

  “Ain’t no justice in this world, Mr. Price. I learned that when I came back from Korea. A poor man ain’t gonna never get his due, not from man, anyhow. It was wrong that Matthew and all them people on the bus had to die so that lawyer could make some money, and it was wrong that my daughter and her son got shot down to keep his secret safe. And that’s what I think happened. She wanted out of that business, but he wouldn’t let her go that easy. She probably threatened to go to the police, so he her killed.

  “The quick and the dead, the good Lord judges them both, Mr. Price. We might get past man’s law, but there is no getting by the Father. And I find my comfort in knowing that that moneychanger is being dealt with by my Father.

  “Mr. Price. I know you remember when the drink had control of my life. It wasn’t a secret that things weren’t getting done for my family. There was no fatherly guidance in this house for my daughter or my grandson.

  “Other people in the neighborhood spent time with them. Mrs. Coleson, bless her soul, took Daphne with her up to New York every summer, and you with Stanley. I remember him bursting out our back gate running over to your house. He couldn’t wait to spend time with you. As soon as he got off the school bus he was headed to your yard.

  “What I’m trying to do, Mr. Price, is thank you for the time you spent with my grandson. You was there for him when his grandfather wasn’t, and for that I thank you.” He gives me a quick awkward hug.

  “I’m moving come week’s end. Me and the missus are headed back home to Alabama. We going to bury Daphne and the boy in our family plot. I’m through with up here. We were planning on going down next year, but there is no sense in putting it off any longer. It’s time to take these old bones south.”

  I nod my head but say nothing. We shake hands and walk back into the living room. I look for Mrs. Nelson to offer my condolences, but before I can find her, I notice a gathering of neighborhood ladies staring at me, and none of the looks are friendly. The group opens a little and I see Regina is in the middle of the crowd. Suddenly I feel closed in and decide it’s time to leave.

  Climbing into Ricky’s truck, I’m engulfed by a cloud of weed smoke. He must have smoked a heck of a lot to have a cloud this dense; especially since the air conditioner is on full blast. He passes me the joint. I decline because getting high redirects and slows my thoughts. Ricky claims smoking weed targets his thinking and allows him to concentrate. I doubt it.

  “D, I was thinkin’ we should put Eleanor, Martin and Peal’s daddy together. I’m thinkin’ Peal’s daddy is a suspect too. I didn’t trust him fo’ a minute. He up in there taking over his son’s business and the man ain’t been dead a day.”

  Waving the smoke from my face, I say, “He told us he was a silent partner. I kind of trust the man.” Who I didn’t trust was Martin and Eleanor. Ricky’s earlier thought about them being in cahoots was starting to make sense to me.

  “What! If you trust dat guy you in over ya head.” Ricky takes a long, deep hit from the joint. The cloud he exhales is huge. “Didn’t Martin say that they was da top-billin’ personal-injury firm in da city?”

  “Yep.”

&n
bsp; “Dat’s got to be a lot of money. Now da daddy gets it all.” He hit the joint hard and exhaled another dense cloud.

  Maybe I’m getting a contact high because Ricky’s point seems valid. He tries to pass me the joint again. This time I take it and hit it. While I’m exhaling my own cloud, Regina starts tapping on Ricky’s driver window. He flips the power button and the window rolls down, letting free a boulder of weed smoke.

  Regina fans the smoke out of her face and says, “I know damn well you two are not sitting out here getting high in front of these people’s house! They just lost their daughter and grandchild! You are not that insensitive, are you, Ricky?”

  Ricky’s sitting there looking at her with his mouth hanging open, saying nothing. She’s coming at him too fast. I know his brain is overloading. He wants to say something but he can’t. I can’t help him, after hitting the joint . . . I’m stuck too.

  “You are two ignorant-ass motherfuckers!” She turns and walks away with heels clicking on the sidewalk.

  I was going to go see Chester, but not now . . . I hit the joint again. Ricky is looking at Regina walking back to the house. He starts the truck and I hit the joint again.

  “Man, give me my damn joint!”

  I want to pass it to him, but my arm won’t move in his direction. Matter of fact, my arm is not moving at all.

  Ricky turns his globe of a head to me, and he looks worried. “Damn, I forgot ya ass hardly smoke weed. Dat shit is too potent for you. Dat’s dat hydro, baby!” His worried frown changes to a grin. “How you feelin’?”

  Like I’m stuck is what I want to tell him, but talking is out of the question. I force my arm to pass Ricky the joint. Something is wrong with me. If it wasn’t for seeing the passing houses I would not know the truck is moving. It feels like I’m stuck in a hole full of heavy mud. I don’t like this here feeling at all. This situation calls for closed eyes, I didn’t get any good sleep last night; maybe it’s time to try again. Smoking weed has really never been my thing. I can remember the first time Ricky and I tried it.

  We were in my grandmother’s backyard at the brick barbecue pit in the middle of her yard. Ricky had the matches and I had the “punks,” brown incense sticks that supposedly keep the mosquitoes away, but we used them to act like we were smoking joints. We held them between our thumb and index finger and made the hissing, inhaling noise of those who smoked weed.

  This hot afternoon, however, we were using them to burn the spiders we found in the corners of my grandmother’s brick pit. We thought it amazing that the spiders would wrap their legs around the incense sticks, while the hot tip was burning through them. We’d killed about five, and the game wasn’t getting boring at all. This was better than dropping lit matches on ants.

  My older brothers, Charles and Robert, were on the upstairs back porch looking down at us. They were drinking the remains of a case of Schlitz that my uncle had left after the Fourth of July celebration. And they were also getting high smoking green weed.

  Commercial is what they called the weed, and they weren’t happy about having to smoke it. Columbian or “Bo” had just arrived in our neighborhood, but it cost ten dollars. And Mama left them the same amount of money she left Ricky and me: five dollars. We were all supposed to go to Taurus Flavors and get ice cream and steak sandwiches.

  They wanted “Bo,” me and Ricky wanted Taurus Flavors, and at eleven years of age, armed with screwdrivers and sticks, we were keeping our five dollars. We thought they were stupid; why smoke something on a hot day when you could sit inside the air-conditioned Taurus Flavors and eat a steak sandwich and ice cream? We wasn’t going for it, so they had to get commercial instead of “Bo.”

  Ricky and I were so engrossed in our hunt for another spider we didn’t see them come down the stairs. “Man, what you lames doing?” Charles asked.

  “Killing,” Ricky said.

  “Killing what?”

  “Spiders,” I told him.

  Robert asked, “Why?”

  “’Cause they hold on, even after they got a hole burned through them,” I told him.

  “Man that’s some lame little-kid stuff. When y’all gonna start actin’ cool? Y’all gonna be in fifth grade next year, that’s too old to be killing bugs. That ain’t cool.”

  We pulled our heads from the pit and stopped immediately. They pulled us in by using the dreaded phrase of any eleven-year-old kid, “It ain’t cool.”

  After all, they were the big brothers. They understood cool. They wore Chuck Taylor All Star gym shoes, pressed khaki pants and silk T-shirts. Their Afros were so big they used rakes, not picks. They rode five-speed polo bikes with steering wheel handlebars and sissy poles. They knew whole Richard Pryor albums and had done “it” to girls. If they said something “ain’t cool,” it wasn’t.

  “Here, drink these and come on over here in the shade with us.”

  The four of us stood in the shade of my grandmother’s crab apple tree with Shlitz cans in hand. My brothers drank theirs while Ricky and I held ours. We’d tasted beer and we didn’t like it. Ricky’s mother’s Boone’s Farm wine was much better.

  “Man, why y’all standing there like some lames holding them cans? Here, do it like this.” My brother Robert opened another can and downed it in three gulps. “That’s how you do it. Now y’all try, see how many swallows it takes you.”

  We had only tasted Boone’s Farm wine and beer. We had never gulped either. And gulping with the purpose of finding out how many gulps it took to empty a can motivated us through four cans a piece.

  Robert lit a joint and began smoking it. Ricky and I watched him out the corner of our eyes. I wanted to smoke some as long as it didn’t cost us our five dollars. Robert called me to him. He put the joint inside his mouth backward, cupped his hands around my nose and mouth and blew smoke into me. He did the same to Ricky. We both bent over and gagged. When we finished coughing I looked over at Ricky to see if he looked any different. He didn’t. And I didn’t feel any different except for the beer bubbling in my stomach.

  Charles passed us a bottle of some stuff that looked like water. I knew it wasn’t water by the smell, but we drank it anyway. It was gin, and we promptly threw up all that was inside our stomachs. While we were bent over regurgitating, my brothers went through our pockets and took the five dollars.

  When my grandmother got home from her part-time job at the alderman’s office, she found us passed out drunk under the crab apple tree. She pieced together what happened from our slurred answers.

  All my childhood life, Grandma had threatened to get me with the razor strap that hung on her bathroom door, but it never came off the hook for me. My brothers told me of the horrible beatings they received from it, and that was enough to stop me from being too bad over Grandma’s. Obviously my brothers had forgotten about the strap.

  With the strap in her pocketbook she walked Ricky and me to Taurus Flavors. There in the air-conditioned restaurant sat my brothers, eating steak sandwiches and ice cream. I didn’t think grandma was going to go in there and beat them in front of the man who owned the store, but she did.

  At the time my grandmother was bigger than both of my brothers. So when they tried to stand up she shoved them back down in the booth. She was hitting them hard with that strap and harder with words.

  She told them God cursed people who taught little kids how to sin, and she couldn’t figure out how “chilrens” so evil could be part of her. When she finished beating them she dragged them home by the back of their shirts. Needless to say, that sight didn’t help their “cool” image a bit. It took years for kids in our neighborhood to stop talking about it.

  Once home, she made them cut the front and back grass with her rusty old push mower, and they had to edge the grass with butcher knives. That evening she fried me and Ricky pork chops, but the best part was, she got her ice-cream maker out and made my brothers churn it, but me and Ricky got all the custard.

  I haven’t dreamed about my grandmother in a while.
It’s been even longer since I’ve dreamed of my childhood.

  When I open my eyes, I see white and pink suds cover the windows of Ricky’s truck. We’re in a car wash. Ricky is sipping on an iced cappuccino. I spot one in the cup holder for me.

  “’Bout time you woke up. You been out for over two hours. I now went and bought a city sticker, made a bank drop and picked up some souse.”

  “Souse? You got crackers?”

  “Yeah in the back seat in da bag with da souse. Ain’t but a pound, don’t find a home in it.”

  The souse meat is in deli paper. That meant he drove all the way down Fifty-first Street to get it. I been ’sleep awhile. He’s got some pepper cheese in the bag also. I take a slice of souse and cheese and fold them both between the crackers.

  “D, I don’t think you gonna get to the bottom of dis here mess. Ya dealing with some rich, powerful, wicked motherfuckers who don’t care ’bout killing they own. I think Peal’s daddy did it all. Think about it, man. Peal wasn’t a killer. You made him piss in his pants.

  “Yeah, at first thought I went with Peal, but man, dis was some cold, calculated shit. Dis was cleanin’ up da loose ends. And Peal was a loose end. I think the daddy found out the bus was a hooked-up accident and tripped. He couldn’t afford to be associated with dat type of disaster. I mean dis man does work for the Reverend Jesse Jackson. He cain’t be involved in no lowlife accident cases. You feel me?”

  What I was feeling was another souse, cheese and cracker sandwich, so I reached to the back and quickly made me another one.

  “Ricky, you talking about this man killing his son. And for what, money? He’s already rich.” Jet streams of water are spraying the truck.

  “Man, rich white people kill each other over money all da time. They ain’t never rich enough.”

  “You forgetting Ricky, they’re not white.” Ricky reaches into the back seat and folded up the souse, cheese and crackers. I guess that’s it for the snacks. I grab the cup of cappuccino and blow the foam from the top and drink.