Black Leather

by Elizabeth Engstrom

  Irene didn’t flinch, didn’t back away from him, didn’t twitch a muscle. “Is it his?”

  Owen backed down, moved sideways a bit in his chair, a move of superiority, of confidence. “The tests are a formality. It’s his, all right.”

  “Circumstantial,” Irene said.

  “We found it in her suitcase.”

  “What else?”

  “We have her vaginal fluids on his dick.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  He smiled, but it was a smile without mirth. Owen may be a ruthless competitor and a self-serving egoist, but he wasn’t cruel. He knew this was hurting her, and he didn’t relish it. “The DNA test is a formality,” he said, a touch softer. “It’s hers, all right.”

  Irene sat quietly, absorbing all the implications. She didn’t know what to say.

  “I hate to see you kiss that judgeship away,” Owen said.

  “You can kiss my ass,” she snapped. Of course he wants to see her lose the appointment, she thought. Assistant DA’s got to the top by stepping on the faces of private-practice defense attorneys.

  “Hey, don’t be that way,” Owen said. “C’mon, we’ve always had a good working relationship.”

  “Is there a deal here?”

  Owen took a deep breath, then sat back, steepling his fingers. That was answer enough for Irene. “I can’t think of one. We’ve got her and it’s ugly. We’ll want to go the distance. Aggravated murder, kidnapping, terrorism. Hate crimes are big news.”

  “Are you speaking for Los Angeles?”

  Owen nodded slowly.

  “She says she didn’t do it,” Irene said, then bit her lip. That was something she’d say to her mother, not to the ADA.

  “Yeah, right,” Owen said.

  “She’s my sister. I believe her.”

  “She did it,” he said, leaning closer to her again. “Oh yes, she did it. This is a twisted, kinky, racist, ritualistic sex murder, Irene, and your sister did it. She’ll choke for it, too. I’ll see to that.”

  Irene tipped down the top of her briefcase, pushed in the locks. “I’ll be in touch,” she said.

  ~~~

  Owen was right about the reporters. There was an entire crowd of them waiting on the sidewalk for her.

  Irene smoothed her hair and faced them with confidence. Before she answered the first question, she turned and saw Owen smiling, watching from a window. Publicity-seeking, self-serving jerk.

  “Miss Nottingham, is it true that your sister has been charged with a grisly racially-motivated sex murder in Los Angeles?”

  Irene smiled indulgently at the young reporter, cleared her voice and spoke the standard public relations statement clearly for the cameras. “My sister, Cynthia Schneider, has been erroneously charged. It is an obvious error, and these charges will be dismissed right away.” She smiled, a tight smile. “Please excuse me.” The crowd parted before her as she walked toward her car, but one last question followed her as she walked away.

  “Will this affect your appointment to the bench?”

  Irene stiffened her back and pretended not to hear. She walked carefully down the sidewalk, feeling the heat of their eyes and the eyes of the cameras on her. Damn that Owen. She was certain that he called the press. And she was certain that he happened to mention her consideration for Judge Harcort’s bench seat while he was at it.

  Irene felt a headache coming on, and she knew it wouldn’t be the only one before this thing was over.

  ~~~

  When Irene called Joseph at work and asked him to meet her at the jail to bail Cynthia out, he almost said no. He had to think about it. Cynthia had been arrested for murder. Cynthia, his wife. Agonized with uncertainty and mixed emotions, he paced, pounded his desk, cursed vehemently if quietly, and if he thought he could get away with it, he’d have smashed his coffee cup against the wall. He tried to consider all the ramifications of his position within Cynthia’s position, but there were too many.

  He could ditch her, and disavow himself from any connection with her. The college would understand, wouldn’t they? Would this screw up his chances for the Vice Presidency?

  He could go be with her, try to help her through this, try to get her into some kind of a professional counseling program, maybe even put into a psychiatric ward for a while.

  Or perhaps she didn’t even do this murder thing. Joseph was not so smug as to think that innocent people were never locked up.

  Cynthia. Goddamned Cynthia. Why did he have to fall in love with—and marry, for Christ’s sake—a woman like Cynthia?

  If he’d grown up in Detroit, he might be interested in black women. But that didn’t necessarily mean an easier road. Women were women. Black or white, they seemed to be trouble.

  Joseph’s parents had met and married in Detroit. They looked around and saw the literal writing on the walls of the inner city. They wished different things, better things for their children, so with a prayer and five hundred borrowed dollars, they went west, and bought a tiny little house in a white neighborhood of San Francisco. It was a good investment. Every extra dollar they had, they put into a college fund for Joseph and Anna. There weren’t many extra dollars, and of course Anna never used hers. Joseph made good use of what his parents had saved for him. His parents saw to that. His parents hovered over him like a couple of paranoid hens, worried that he would exhibit signs of mental illness. He was the whole purpose for their existence. He was their only hope. His successful childhood, his undergraduate degree was their last opportunity for satisfaction in child-rearing, and sometimes the pressure almost split him apart at the seams.

  Joseph Schneider was a little black boy who grew up in a white world. White school, white friends, white aspirations. Seeing his black face in a reflected store front or mirror sometimes surprised him, he was so used to looking at white faces.

  His father was a plumber, his mother a waitress. As a baby, easy-going Joseph was raised as an afterthought, most of his parents’ time and energy taken up by Anna, their difficult child. But they set good examples for him. He saw what happened when his parents disagreed, and how two rational people worked out their differences. He saw what happened when they pulled together and tackled an incomprehensibly difficult task, like committing their daughter to an institution.

  Joseph was born with a fair amount of common sense and he carefully listened to what his parents told him were the important things. They were wise; he believed most of the things they told him, but they didn’t give him much of an opportunity to make his own mistakes. It was worse than being an only child; he was the Only Remaining Child, and he felt he had to live up to their inflated expectations of a family of four by playing his one role well enough for two.

  He hated Anna for doing this to him, but he knew it wasn’t her fault; she was sick.

  While radicals were demonstrating and shouting angry things—a culture turning Detroit into a bombed out domestic version of Beirut as it struggled—Joseph was in San Francisco, studying under his mother’s watchful eye. They didn’t have much hope for sending him away to obtain a complete college education, but with the constant tutoring, he couldn’t help but do well in high school.

  He didn’t know whether to resent or embrace the attention of his parents. When he resented it, the household flew into turmoil and his mother cried.

  That broke Joseph’s heart.

  When he bit the bullet and tried to gracefully accept their cloying ministrations, it stabilized the household; it assuaged their guilt, and it helped solidify his personality. It even helped with the guilt that he felt over Anna’s illness.

  With a grant and a scholarship that his mother obtained for him, and a work-study job, he spent two years at North Beach Community College. From there, keeping one step ahead of the grants and the loans and the jobs and the grades, she made sure he was accepted to San Francisco State. He had just started there—working toward his undergraduate degree in psychology, hoping to help Anna, hoping to help his parents, hoping
to help his parents help Anna—when Anna died.

  One night she ripped her sheet, tied one end around her neck and the other to the headboard and desperately clawed her way down her bed, inch by inch, as the strip of fabric tightened around her neck.

  Her death was a tragedy, but less a tragedy than her life. In a way, everyone was relieved, and Joseph couldn’t help but believe that Anna, who knew and loved her parents and hated the anguish she caused them, was relieved most of all.

  But the pressure Joseph felt to please and honor his parents intensified, and the resentment he felt began to leak out.

  He began to date white women. At first he kept it from his parents, knowing that what he was doing was going to be a slap in the face to them, it was just an exercise in flexing his independent muscles. He hated the deception, though, and eventually told them.

  They didn’t seem to care.

  Joseph didn’t know what they talked about behind the closed doors of their bedroom, but if his dating white women hurt them, they never let on. So he kept doing it, discovering the subtleties in his preferences. Blondes.

  Two more years of hard studying and working long hours got Joseph an undergraduate degree in psychology. He went back to North Beach Community College where he started and got a job as an academic advisor. And then he looked around, surprised to find that while he was dealing with his family, while he was studying, while he was engrossed and absorbed in his future, the black and white world had changed.

  He had been inducted into a “brotherhood” of which he knew nothing, but every black man he came across treated him like they shared the same philosophy, knew the secret handshake, were united against the world. Especially the white world.

  It made Joseph mighty uncomfortable. The race world, the angry world, that separatist world were never a part of his reality. He’d taken good advantage of Affirmative Action, but he was ashamed of it. He didn’t like being judged, or granted privileges just because of a roll of the genetic dice. But he sat back and let his mother manipulate the system for him and said nothing because it was so desperately important to his parents for him to get the education neither of them had been able to have.

  Then his father dropped dead while running pipe at a new construction site. Massive coronary. He was fifty-five. Joseph tried to comfort his mother, even moved back into the house with her, but she would not be consoled, and died six months after.

  That had been a dark, dark year.

  If his parents had a religion, it was education. “It’s the only thing the Lord allows us to take with us, Joseph,” his mother always said.

  With the small amount of life insurance his parents left him, Joseph went back for his graduate degree in counseling. With it, he applied for and became Director of Academic Advising at the community college, a prestigious position with reasonable pay. His parents would be incredibly proud if they knew, and Joseph had a feeling that they did.

  He met and married Cynthia Nottingham, and as their relationship began to deteriorate, in an effort to distance himself from her increasing needs, Joseph applied for, and was accepted into the doctoral program. With a Ph.D. under his belt, he could become a vice president of the college. That was his goal.

  North Beach had become an ethnically-diverse neighborhood, and Joseph’s community college catered to that clientele. But now, every Black, Hispanic, Chinese or Vietnamese who came into his office figured that he’d help them just simply because they were a minority. He hated that arrogance that had come about with the generous government handouts.

  He helped those students because they had drive, not because of their color, but none of them knew that. None of them wanted to know that. They all wanted to believe that he understood simply because he was a man of color himself.

  His parents had tossed him into a white world at birth, and it was in those waters that Joseph swam confidently. He was stunned and amazed by prejudice, not only that of the errant ignorant white, but by those of his own color. He was especially amazed at the hatred thrown at him by black women when they saw him with a blonde.

  Like Cynthia.

  Cynthia. Goddamned Cynthia.

  He wondered, not for the first time, if he would have married Cynthia if his parents had still been alive.

  He knew the answer. He would have, because he loved her. He loved her then, and he loved her now.

  He called Irene back and agreed to meet her. Not because of his career or his conscience, but because, when all the heat and emotion had settled down, the question was not his career or his conscience, but what he could do that was in Cynthia’s best interests. It was not in her best interest to sit in jail, and it was in her best interest to know that she had not been abandoned.

  ~~~

  Less than an hour later, Joseph and Irene shouldered through the crowd of reporters, with Cynthia, looking ragged and disheveled, tiny and mousy, sandwiched between them. Irene made Cynthia wear her dark glasses to cover up the worst of the last few days’ emotional damages.

  “Mr. Schneider,” one reporter asked, shoving a small tape recorder into Joseph’s face, “aren’t you and your wife separated? Why did you bail her out?”

  Joseph put his arm protectively around Cynthia and looked to Irene for assistance.

  She grabbed center stage effortlessly. “Mr. Schneider gives his wife his full and complete support in this ridiculous situation. Thank you. Please excuse us.”

  Joseph had left his car right in front of the courthouse. The two women got into the back seat and Joseph made a quick getaway.

  “Why is this news?” Cynthia asked.

  “Irene is news,” Joseph said. “And you’re her sister.”

  “This crime is news,” Irene said.

  ~~~

  At her apartment, Irene put on a pot of coffee while Cynthia and Joseph talked quietly on the couch. Cynthia looked worn almost beyond recognition. She had no psychological padding, no insulating fat with which to weather this storm, and Irene was concerned about her. This, right on the heels of her impending divorce, was very risky for someone as emotionally fragile as Cynthia.

  When the coffee was ready, Irene brought two steaming mugs in and set them on the coffee table. Cynthia was huddled into herself, curled up next to Joseph, who had his arm around her.

  Irene sat on the chair across from them and looked at Joseph.

  His face was as familiar as her own. She loved Joseph. They’d been acquaintances, teetering upon the lip of friendship before he started to date Cynthia. At first, Irene didn’t know if it was a good idea that Cynthia marry a black man, but hell, it was Cynthia’s life, not hers. And black or white, Irene couldn’t have picked a more handsome, stable, caring individual. By the time they decided to marry, Irene was completely in favor of the union; she’d never seen Cynthia so well-tended, so radiant, so emotionally healthy. Joseph was an educated mental health professional, and he knew how to handle Cynthia the way nobody had been able to handle her before.

  Irene spoke quietly. “Joseph, you’re going to have to go.”

  Cynthia sat up, grabbing a desperate fistful of Joseph’s suit coat. “Why?”

  Joseph pried her fingers off, then smoothed down the fabric.

  “Because you and I have some things to talk about,” Irene said to her.

  Joseph stood up despite Cynthia’s clinging. AI have to go back to work.” He kissed her on the cheek, smoothed the hair away from her forehead, ran a thumb down the side of her face. “I’ll call you tonight,” he said, then kissed her lightly again. With a wave to Irene, he left, leaving Cynthia standing, chewing on a cuticle.

  “Sit down,” Irene said, treading a line between sympathetic, understanding sister and attorney for the defense.

  Cynthia sat, grabbed a pillow to hug, and frowned. She wouldn’t look at Irene.

  “They found a film canister with a long goddamned strip of that guy’s skin in it. They found it in your suitcase.”

  “I saw that film thing when I was packing. I d
idn’t know what it was or where it came from.”

  “Your fingerprints are on it.”

  “I picked it up and looked at it. Jesus Christ, Irene, I didn’t do this.”

  “They think you did.” Irene sipped her coffee and let the tensions settle down a touch. Cynthia had a tendency to fall back into being a little girl. It was up to Irene to keep this dialog on not only a professional level, but an adult one as well.

  She looked at Cynthia, who was scowling like a teenager. Irene softened her voice. She’d been working accused clients for years as a professional defense attorney, but she never thought she’d have to manipulate the emotions of one of her own kin. It was desperately difficult to do. “You’re going to have to talk with me honestly about everything so we can beat this. Okay? Honestly?” She dipped her head down, trying to make eye contact. “Hey, okay?”

  Cynthia looked up with a sullen expression. “Okay.”

  Irene shuffled in her seat, breaking off the old tension and creating a new atmosphere. One of honesty. She sipped her coffee, and Cynthia took her lead, taking a gulp of her own. Then Irene began again. “Did you sleep with this guy?”

  Cynthia put her coffee mug down.

  If Irene had ever seen a guilty expression on a face, this was it.

  “No,” Cynthia said.

  “Be straight with me, goddamnit.”

  Cynthia’s head snapped up, grief stricken. “If Joseph finds out...” she wailed.

  “Joseph will deal with it,” Irene said flatly. “Where did you sleep with this guy?”

  Cynthia picked at the corner of the pillow in her lap. In the midst of her misery, Irene saw a slight smile curl up the corner of her mouth. “I don’t think I’d call it sleeping...”

  Irene closed her eyes in frustration. She had to take a deep breath and bring back her patience. She’d be patient with a paying client, she had to try to be patient with her sister. “Where?”