“Did you see . . . anything on the news about kidnappings sweetie?” I asked smiling sarcastically. I’d started to ask about the girl with Taya’s eyes and quickly changed my mind. No buddy, he already thought I was deranged. Even though she seemed kind of real and I think that knife felt real as hell. It was hard to say but my throat seemed to hurt from where the tip was pressed against it. There was no explaining how she’d gotten in and out without him seeing her.
“I did not. But, I did ask how you were feeling?”
I was beyond miserable. They gave me miserable flavorless food and I wouldn’t eat it so they shoved IVs into me and fed me that way. I honestly just hoped Rah would just show up and prove to them all that I wasn’t crazy. Even if he killed me, at least I’d die with everyone knowing I was a sane woman who did not kidnap her children. Devon would sit beside the bed and talk and talk. Whatever drugs they gave me kept me so mellow I could only look at him at times; blinking alone seemed to drain ounces of my energy. I didn’t even know what day it was or how much time had passed.
On this particular day he was extremely chipper. The sound of his voice made me want to do nothing more than stab myself in the ears with anything I could get my hands on ear-hole size. They wondered why people lost their minds and lashed out? It was because of overzealous doctors who sat in your face and their very presence was a slap in the face. They made you remember passionate kisses and warm smiles, made you angry because they should have fought for you. Even if they were the only ones who believed you.
“Michelle, are you listening?” Devon sat there looking at me expectantly.
I shrugged in response since I had no idea what he’d said.
“Good, I’ll have you escorted in as soon as everything’s set up.”
As soon as what was set up? I sat there staring at the closed door, trying to figure out what the hell was going on. Moments later Denise came in and sat me down in a wheelchair.
She spoke so quick and hushed I had to strain to understand her. “Your boy’s doing fine, Michelle. I don’t know what all’s going on but I promise I’m looking out for him. He’s at a homeschool my nieces run out of their place right now. They good people don’t worry. If it was me and this shit happened I’d want somebody looking out. Shit, with the way they scoot folk in, out, and around on the fifth wing fuck that. I don’t make enough money up in here to catch a charge over some uppity actress they check in for killin’ folk who checks herself out before she even sees the doctor. Especially when regular folk like you catchin’ the third degree. Anyway, he’s been asking for you, and I told him you were at mommy daycare, resting up. So once you finish resting, he’s waiting for you.”
I had to look down at my hands in my lap so no one would see the teary smile on my face. Every now and again we still get angels to look out for us and I was so thankful for Denise’s words. Devon refused to talk to me about anything relevant until I rewarded him by acknowledging any of my story as made up.
Denise wheeled me into a dim room. “Sorry boo-boo, I imagined strappin’ you up but not like this,” she said in a soft whisper, giving me a weak smile.
She strapped my forearms down onto the arms of the wheelchair and secured my ankles as well before turning to leave the room. The lights came up and I saw Momma sitting across from me in another room, strapped to a wheelchair as well. She stared at me through the thin pane of glass and seeing her for the first time since Lataya’s death made me realize why I was strapped to the chair. Snarling, clawing, and growling, my hair flew wildly around my face, spittle hung off my lip as I looked at her through that glass. She’d taken Lataya, and now I was up in this hell because of her ass.
“Calm down, Michelle.” Devon’s voice sounded overhead on the intercom.
Chest heaving, I stared at the clinical pea-green tiled floor in front of me. Everything was pea green from the floor to the walls, even the toilet was that macabre shade of squished caterpillar, sea-sick green. As much as I hated looking at the tile, I refused to make eye contact with the woman across from me and I damn sure refused to cooperate with anything Devon planned.
“Chelle? I been wondering why I ain’t seen you in a while.” Reena’s voice rang into the silence.
I stared blindly at the floor, trying to turn off my ears the same way I seemed to have turned off my eyes.
She isn’t even sorry for what she did. Hell, she probably doesn’t even know.
“Don’t look like we going anywhere anytime soon, child.” She paused like she was thinking or remembering something. “I ever tell you about the time I decided to become a madam?”
Chapter 22
Minding Madam Business
After everything blew over with Frankie I’d sold his car. Well, what I mean by that is I gave it to the Mexicans who ran the chop shop down the block. That was decent money to live off of for a while. At least until Mona came across Fink her ex. She called him an innovative misunderstood dreamer. He was a penitentiary pioneer. I called him that because every idea he had landed his ass in prison. Fink was definitely innovative. If that’s what you call a fool that hides in a custodial closet at the bingo hall until everyone’s gone so he can creep up on Mabel and Ms. Sarah countin’ out the money. Only to be standing there holding the gun when his bowels creep up on him, fool was going through withdrawal so bad he had the shits. Police caught him in the bathroom of course they had to wait a good twenty-minutes or so until he was all clear. But you get my point. He’d just gotten out again and he had Mona on some hard stuff. Couldn’t tell you what because she had a cocktail of whatever you could think of depending on which day of the week it was.
I’d stomped into her filthy bedroom and stared down at the mattress on the floor. I picked a naked leg and started kicking. “Mona, wake your trifling ass up. Wake up, girl.” I was screaming at the top of my lungs and wasn’t nobody moving.
The rent was already a month late and I’d come up with the back end of it donating plasma and selling some of Rasheed’s old clothes. It would have put us in the clear for a minute. Mona had found my cash by pulling out my bottom dresser drawer and looking underneath. What the hell she was doing down there I’ll never know but she ran right through every dime. If we got put out we ain’t have anywhere else to go. We ain’t have any options left, no favors, no nothing. I’d used every last one, at least twice a month for something with Mona staying up in the house.
I decided that one time, I’d do the only thing I knew I would bring me quick money. I sat Rasheed on the floor in her room. “Watch Rasheed, Mona. You hear me?”
“Watching,” was the muffled response I got back.
I started on the side of the track closest to downtown. That time of day the shipyard workers would be taking lunch breaks. It’d be easy to make a quick $500, $600.
My first customer was Tim Washington. He pulled up in an old blue pickup. It squeaked and rocked to a stop in front of me.
“What can I do you for, baby?”
“What can’t you do for a hundred dollars?” he croaked out the window.
If you heard Tim Washington’s voice and a croak coming backward out of a bullfrog’s ass, I swear you wouldn’t know the difference. I’d climbed up in that old toe-jam, corn-chipoil refinery and sweat smelling truck and when he dropped trow I had a mind to charge him another hundred for having a third leg. There is such a thing as too big and if a woman ever said otherwise I’d let Tim say hello. That voice was the sound of his donkey dong pulling on his tonsils. Just think of the “camel through the eye of a needle” scripture. He gave me an extra fifty dollars for being a good needle.
I was climbing down out of his truck when he started looking all sheepish.
“Reena? I know that ain’t little Ms. Top Seller herself. You stole my man from me and now you out here stealing my customers,” Royce snapped at me.
“Your man? A pimp ain’t no man for any woman, sweetie. He married to and respect money. You were just a way to get it.”
She s
wung all that hair like she was about to do somethin’ to somethin’. “That’s why I’m married now anyway. Got me a good man.”
I laughed in her face. “Royce? He so good, why the hell are you out here? And where is your married nah rock.” I mocked her, throwing her words back at her when I didn’t see a ring.
That’s when I noticed Royce didn’t have all that dazzle to her, not like she did a few years back. Her black and tan was looking a little more like ashy and burnt.
“He’s rich, and he took my ring. He don’t give me shit because he worried I’ll shoot it up.”
That had my full attention. “How rich, Royce?”
Her eyes got as wide around as footballs. “Filthy rich, Reena.”
That shit gave me an idea so big I birthed the Northern Lights on the other side of the world. In order for it to work I’d have to keep Royce just high enough so she could function normally during the day. I’d started turning a couple extra tricks but I knew it’d be worth it in the end. Even ran into Lacy and offered her a percentage of everything overall if she cut me in on her earnings so I could keep Royce good. Royce’s husband was used to her fien’ing or so high she couldn’t see straight. Once we got her to a middle ground everything fell right where it was supposed to. She got the insurance policies changed over, the wills. She knew all the bank information. It was time.
I’d gone and seen this lady over at the African shop once when Rah had whooping cough and I couldn’t afford a doctor. All I had to offer her was a peanut butter jar I’d started collecting change in. It won’t even halfway full but she took it and cured him.
“Reena. Long time no see. How are you, my queen?” She greeted me soon as I walked in and I couldn’t remember her name.
“I’m all right. um, you know it’s been a while I’m sorry,” I apologized because I should have known.
She laughed and waived me off, “You wouldn’t pronounce it right even if you did remember it gal. Balifama tamu-nominini Bello, but call me Fama.”
“You right, about that one. Girl that’s a mouth full. I need something Fama, and I can pay. I’ll pay extra if I need to.” I strolled through, looking at the shelves by the counter. There was shea butter, black soap, coconut oil, nothing that I could use.
“What is this somet’ing?”
I put two hundred dollar bills on the counter and she snatched them up, making them disappear somewhere underneath the long sleeves of her tunic.
I made sure no one was standing down any of the tiny aisles before leaning across the counter and whispering, “I need to make a man die and it has to look like an accident.”
“Hmmm. Are you sure?”
She’d just gotten $200 of my money. Hell yeah, I was sure. I nodded. “I’m very sure.”
She went into the back and came out with a little box of powders and oils. My $200 bought me a bottle of oil that couldn’t have held more than a thimble full of whatever she’d mixed up.
“Two drops in their bathwater for three nights; after that massage one drop on the soles of each foot. That’s it.”
That’s it? Royce had a hard enough time remembering the instructions to boil a damn egg.
I gave Royce the bottle the next day and on the fourth day she gave it back.
“Did it work?” I asked her.
Me and Lacy were about to gnaw each other’s hands off in anticipation.
Royce in all her splendid, ditzy wonder said, “I don’t know. I didn’t check. Was I supposed to check him or something? I mean, I just came to out here. I didn’t think.”
“Royce, where was your husband when you got out the bed this morning?” I asked through my teeth.
“In his bed and I got up and took my morning poo, and showered and had coffee, and put on my not going out-going out face, and I walked Kimpy our Kane Corso and then when I . . . Oh, I think it worked.”
Don’t forehead slap her, was the look Lacy was giving me.
“Don’t you think it’s going to seem strange that you got up, went in and out the house and did all that, and ain’t call 911? Go home and call now please.”
We waited to hear back from her and waited, and waited. A week passed and finally we went to catch the bus out to that old ritzy rich million dollar homes neighborhood. All the houses looked like castles and if I were Royce I’d have just kicked my damn habit. We went by the address on one of the forms she’d messed up when I was helping fill out the insurance paperwork at a restaurant. Something told me to keep one just in case, and I was glad I did. We walked up just in time to catch this heffa hopping into a shiny little Benz and speeding away.
We were leaving and I was scheming, looking to see what other eligible paychecks lived in the area. I looked over at Lacy. “I think we found another one and this time you are gonna do the marrying and hoodwinking.”
Lacy took a little more work to refine. Royce already had all the beauty school guidance any single head could possibly hold. It would explain why her flighty ass couldn’t retain much of anything else. I put Lacy on a diet, got her eating right so her skin would stay bright. She had high cheekbones and one of them beauty marks. That’s what she called it. I’d call it a dern mole if you ask me. But, from the way fools acted when they saw her, she’s the reason that model girl got famous, I’m telling you. The one with the big old big-ass mole on her face. I can’t even remember her name.
Anyhow, we’d taken our money and gotten her hair permed and cut into one of those little bobs with the bang that’s pointy and long on one side. It framed her face, accenting that big-ass mol . . . I mean beauty mark. I remember stepping back, looking at my baby-doll-faced perfection on many an occasion. No one would have ever guessed she’d gone from a hooker to a looker.
It took two years for her to woo that man and get married. But that was two years of extra money so we was off the street. We were enjoying gifts and all the luxuries that come with dating rich men. I had her treat this one the same as the last one. Slowly made sure she had all the details, got everything changed into her name. I wasn’t worried about Lacy skipping out on me like Royce did. Lacy was loyal.
Another one down and unlike the first time Lacy actually came through; she only missed a couple of minor details but we still had a payout of hundreds of thousands each. We had a way to take a life with nothing pointing to foul play. It’d looked like he’d had a heart attack, no chemicals in his blood stream, absolutely nothing.
However, I wanted millions and so did she. Anyone who’s ever gone fishing knows you’ve got to follow the tide and venture out if you want to catch bigger fish. We went up north to Philadelphia, following the money flow. Rented out a place and in less than a week’s time I had four girls working for me in exchange for a place to stay, protection, and bail money. I always remembered the look on Royce’s face the day she took off with her millions. Lacy and me didn’t have that look just yet though. No, if we actually went out and bought the mansion we wanted with the fleet of matching Mercedes we’d be broke.
It took me drawing her a pie chart on paper before she barely understood how millionaires got that way. A mansion cost millions and we only had hundreds of thousands. Million-dollar property came with a million-dollar property tax. She was addicted to all the diamonds, champagne, and flashy parties. I’d modified Frankie’s business practice, only taking a fair percentage of my girls’ money and Lacy was blowing through it like Kleenex.
We lived like this for years. The entire time my sister thought I’d just found a job out of state. I could never send her more than enough to scrape by with at a time. If she knew anything she’d have blown through it, or run her mouth in the streets and raised suspicion. We were making so much off the girls I started stashing money to keep Lacy from finding and running through it. When Lacy came and told me she’d run across a wealthy widower in the steel industry I was thanking my lucky stars. Then, I sat there and plucked every last one of those stars out of my unlucky sky. She came and told me the man’s mother passed the very day
before he was set to die. Lacy stuck me with his spoiled, miserable heathen of a child. I had no choice but to get rid of him. Told her she’d never pick her own mark again. That child was something that’d been on my conscious to this day.
We all packed up and went to Jersey near Alpine after that. A lot of good years were spent there. Think we had two or maybe three weddings in Jersey. Then there came a time when Lacy thought she was just too grand to be living with me and the girls. She even thought she could pick her next one. She pointed out five and I said no to them all, showing her who I liked instead, better targets. She went ahead anyway and I couldn’t work with her anymore. Not like that.
“Dr. Harrington, how well did you like your stepmother? I don’t think she goes by Lacy though. By the time she met your daddy she was probably calling herself Melanie Mal . . .”
Chapter 23
Psychics Get Called Crazy—Until They’re Right
“Melanie Malia.” Devon’s voice was barely above a childlike whisper coming through the loud speaker. Static crackled through it and then the intercom went silent.
I didn’t know what to think of Reena’s story; the woman could have told me she was a royal cat burglar for the Queen of England and I wouldn’t have batted an eye. None of it was gonna bring my little girl back, though. All this story time and power-hour crazy house shit was pointless. I wasn’t crazy; everybody, including Reena, was. The lights dimmed and I could barely make out the other side of the room. The panel window had gone dark, showing nothing, reflecting nothing. Reena was still there, singing at the top of her lungs. It was her rendition of “Amazing Grace” and “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
“No one would know my stepmother’s name, let alone her maiden name; how’d she do that?” Devon asked the question from behind me.
I shrugged. “Maybe because she obviously knows what she’s talking about.”
“No one could know what she’s talking about. I didn’t even find out myself until a little over a week ago. They’d told us she was suspected of murdering all her late husbands. They couldn’t press any charges because there was no murder weapon, nothing linking the deaths except her being their widow. It hasn’t gone public yet, but it’s only a matter of time.”
Baby Momma Saga, Part 2 Page 17