by Angela Dews
“That’s good. But I’m not talking about the kids. I’m talking about my people. Can you do it without the religious thing—the Buddhist thing? They might hear it from you, I think. You have chops and a persona. I don’t think they would sit still for some otherworldly guru.”
“I wish I could. But I’m leaving this weekend.”
“You can come by on Friday as the shift changes. We have training in our roll calls. Meditation will be our training on Friday. I’ll say so. It’s at 3:30. They can stay or come early. We’ll see who shows up.”
“I like it,” I said. “Very much the fierce practice of city meditation.”
He said, “That’s right. That’s how I practice when I’m on the job. I learned to turn the energy coming at me in the street when I started fighting. And it is fierce. It’s all about the energy.”
“That’s the language I use to lead meditation,” I said. “We talk about turning the energy.”
“When you teach meditation, do you also teach them to fight?”
“Roger is my partner. He teaches martial arts. I usually block the kicks, but I can’t risk showing up on the set black and blue.”
I got out of the car with a mind full of ideas and had to make an effort to turn my attention from planning my mediation back to being in the present on 125th Street.
The nomadic businesses were gone but they had left their garbage. There was the pungent smell of a dried puddle of piss. One of the horseplayers from Off Track Betting must have decided not to buy a burger next door at McDonald’s to use the toilet. Perhaps he had lost his last 69 cents.
I went to unlock the metal door next to the building’s glass entrance now covered by metal gates. “Look at this. Strange,” I said to Obie.
“Strange how?”
“It should be locked.”
“Wait. Don’t touch anything else.” He put on gloves to inspect the sophisticated lock box and pushed the door open. We found the lobby empty.
While we waited, Obsidian ranted about people not doing their jobs.
“I was making my rounds,” the guard explained as he walked out of the elevator and into the lobby. “What are you doing here at 9:30 at night?”
“Why is the front door unlocked, Max?” I asked.
He started over to check. “Hell if I know. Are you sure?”
“Don’t touch it,” Obsidian barked at him. “What time do you rattle the doors?”
Max actually came to attention. “Always every two hours. I’ve been here since 7.”
“Come on, Pearl. Let’s get this over with,” Obie said.
“The Captain’s in a hurry?” Max asked me as Obsidian stalked off. “In the middle of the night? Something I should know about?”
“I hope not.”
Obsidian stepped off the elevator upstairs first, with his hand on his gun. He took my keys and unlocked the newspaper’s front door.
“Notice anything different?” he asked. “Look carefully and put on these gloves.”
I inhaled through the layer of tension I’d carried with me up the elevator and looked from the doorway. I put on the gloves and walked behind the desk to the heavy black floor safe.
“Okay. The bank documents were in the safe and they’re gone. It wasn’t broken into. I actually don’t think it can be. But I don’t know who all has the combination.”
“As soon as we finish here, write down everything you remember about those documents. And for now, don’t touch anything else.”
I took off the gloves and put them on the desk and put my hands up to smooth my hair in a nervous gesture I couldn’t help.
When he walked over to the desk and held out his hands with both palms up, I hesitated before I let mine drop into his. He held them for a moment before he raised them to his lips, then let them rest on his shoulders, and he circled my waist with his arms.
“We’re a good fit,” he said.
“I remember.”
I pressed his arms, which didn’t give. “You’ve kept up your training,” I said.
“I have to work hard and train hard to police these streets,” he said. “And you’ve kept up your training. I can feel it. You’re strong, tight.”
“I have to work hard and train hard to make those movies. And I rarely use stunt doubles. It’s kind of the least I can do to be real in the made-up movie world.”
“Indeed.”
I loved the smell of him and the taste of his lips, tentatively, slowly, and then, in a breath, his mouth was searching mine and my whole body was in that kiss. I rode a wave of memories on it too.
He stopped. Maybe I would have stopped eventually. I can’t say. Seems unlikely.
“Soon,” he said. “But we’re not quite finished here.” He stepped away.
I was annoyed.
C H A P T E R • 15
* * *
Obsidian turned back to the desk. “Get me a light.” He was in command mode, kneeling beside the desk.
I got up and snatched the floor lamp so it came unplugged.
“Here Sherlock.”
But he grabbed for it before I could set it on the rug beside him.
“Plug it in.” He was peering at the desk drawer. “Come here and look at this.”
The rug was dirty around the front of the desk. The drawer was split at the top and splintered where it had been forced loose around the lock. He opened it and we saw the contents were a jumble.
“Oh Lord. I guess he had to search all the places I might have put the lists.”
He got up quickly and went to the phone. From where I stood just at the door, I heard him say into the phone, “I want you to have the building searched.”
A rustling noise from the production room in the back caught my attention.
He whirled around when I touched his arm, but kept talking as I touched my ear for noise and held my finger to my lips.
He put one hand up in a stop command like I was some kid at a crosswalk.
I turned away and walked out to the front office and I heard him say into the phone, “There’s a guard in the lobby. The street door wasn’t forced. It was probably unlocked with a key.”
I then tipped down the hall to the production room. The floor creaked as I reached the door. From there I could see a shape revealed in the red light at the emergency fire exit across the dark room. I pressed myself against the wall in the hallway, reached around the doorjamb and turned on the light.
I heard the gunshot and, right after, the sound of Obsidian’s gun clattering against the floor next to me. I was up with his gun in both hands and running for the open, empty emergency fire exit door. By the time I reached the top of the back stairs, the downstairs door had slammed shut. Good thing for him. Because I was good enough to hit him with the six-shot luger at that range. Not just because I was Lt. Knight, but because my father grew up with guns and so I did too. And he took me with him for the pistol practice he loved.
When I turned around Obie was leaning against the wall for support. The only sound the pain made was a deep groaning pushed out on each breath.
He was reaching under his jacket for the radio on his belt with his working hand. The other was dangling from his shoulder.
“Don’t talk and don’t move. I’ll get it.”
I screamed into his cop radio, “Officer down. Captain Bailey has been shot. Second floor. 215 West 1-2-5. Shooter ran out downstairs and out the back. Check building exit at 126th closer to Seventh.”
I dropped the radio and struggled out of my coat and suit jacket and held my jacket against him to staunch the blood coloring the front of his shirt.
“You don’t have on a vest?”
“I’m not supposed to be working. Not so hard. It feels kind of loose in there and it hurts like hell.”
“This can’t be happening.”
“My life’s flashing before my eyes, girl. You’re all over it.”
We were in a bull’s eye of space and I told the man what I wanted him to know in case he was going to die.
>
“I love you Obie. I always have. I always will.”
“Been waiting for that.”
“This is how you protect me?” I couldn’t help it, even with what was going on. We always gave each other sarcasm and laughter with the love.
“Sorry. I owe you one.”
“I’ll be collecting on the debt. Believe me,” I said, and I had to force it past the fear.
There was a confusion of noise coming down the hall from the front. And a voice called my name.
“Pearl! Captain?”
Max didn’t sound like reinforcements with his kind of squeaky, nervous voice, but I thanked God for him.
“Max. Here! Obsidian’s been shot.”
And then more voices were walky-talky disembodied things. I heard a siren, then another, and another, getting closer. Reinforcements had arrived. They were surrounding us.
C H A P T E R • 16
* * *
Harlem Hospital was an experience in sensory overload. A drunk maybe ranted, although I’m not sure what that is, and definitely raved, on a bench in the corner where nobody was paying him any mind. He was wet and swollen and seemed to me to need hospitalization.
Somebody’s grandmother was sitting slumped on a chair looking like she was asleep. But how unlikely is it to come out of your house to go to sleep in the ER? I hoped she wasn’t dead. At least she wasn’t making noise. Everybody else seemed to need to moan or holler about something. And, even knowing my neighborhood hospital is famous for successfully treating gunshots and other trauma, I couldn’t imagine. There was too much opportunity for disaster. I kept slipping under my senses to occupy the place where dread lived. The herd of police was growing and getting louder and they were making it worse. It would have been a good time to rob a bodega way south of 135th Street.
Viola showed up and I watched her stamp in flat shoes across the tile floor to the window where two nurses sat. They let her go around to the back where they wouldn’t let me go. I heard her back there yelling.
When she came out, she was holding her jacket, and she sashayed slowly now in front of the watching cops, like the point was to show them her ass in the tight jeans and the skin on her back and shoulders—high yellow, red-boned contrasting against her off-the-shoulder black sweater.
“Drop this trank. It’ll help you keep a lid on it,” she said in her deep singer’s voice and she held the big pill in one palm. Her nails were a startling red around a little cup of water.
I felt it coming out as a scream. “A lid on what? What did they say?”
She sighed. “Honey, to calm you down. I think he’s going to be good as new. You know I’m psychic.” And she averted her eyes.
The instinct of the psychic? I took the pill and I had to make a fist around the empty paper cup with both hands to keep them from around her neck.
“Why are you here anyway?”
“I heard about the shooting at the Kat and I didn’t want you to be here alone. One of the nurses at the desk over there is a regular at the bar. She let me go into the back and talk to them and they gave me the four-one-one. Said the bullet went into his shoulder and didn’t come out. But it didn’t hit the artery.”
I felt the next breath calming me a little and took a few more with the same intention.
“Tell me what happened,” she said.
“Obsidian said he was investigating Cecelia’s accident and I was going to give him some documents she left about the bank. But the bank paper was stolen out of the safe. And whoever did it shot Obsidian.”
“Bless his heart.”
Hearing her say the blessing thing connected me to all the women in my life who say it at such times and it gave me my tiny share of comfort.
But then I was up, pacing, distracted by the disturbing possibilities swirling around in my mind.
She patted the seat beside her. “Pearl, you sit back down.”
“Do you understand I can’t just sit here?”
“Do you understand you can’t do anything else?”
“Viola, do not start your bullshit. Not tonight. In fact, why don’t you go back to the bar. I think I’d rather sit here alone.”
“I can’t leave. My being here can help both of you. You’ll see. And I need to be here when we find out he’s going to be well.”
In truth, I know acting and her routine of concern was not half bad, nervous and full of flutter. I sat and I breathed.
“I knew it was something important when my new bartender gave me the message you called on a Wednesday,” she said. “Your father had me trained not to bother him when he was putting his paper to bed.” She stopped. “God, I miss that man.” Her voice caught in a little sob.
“I miss him too.”
Blah, blah blah is what else she said as far as I could tell. And I just sat. And I hated everybody.
Finally, a doctor went out of his way to find me and made me ashamed of myself for what I was thinking about my neighborhood hospital.
“He was lucky. The bullet is deep but high in his shoulder. I was able to relieve the resulting hematoma,” he said. “We’ll operate to remove the bullet as soon as he’s stable.”
“Can I see him?”
“Not yet,” he said. And he turned back to the room full of his responsibility.
“I would like a drink, Pearl. Can I come over to the house for a drink?”
“Yes,” I said because I couldn’t think of a good reason to say no.
C H A P T E R • 17
* * *
We shared a gypsy cab and she walked into me at the top of the stoop as I fumbled for my keys.
“I have mine,” she said.
“I changed the locks.”
When we were inside the house, she picked up a long-legged rag doll lounging in a basket by the door next to a small guitar.
“I meant to ask you about this doll,” she said. “Virginia has been pretending Lucy’s at sleep-away camp.”
Daddy was crazy about Viola’s 8-year-old niece Virginia. Since we lost Viola’s sister to the AIDS virus, Ginny inherited a community of stepmothers but her home was with her Aunt Viola.
“Can I get you something while you change out of those clothes?” she asked. “There’s vodka here. I’m sure you know that.”
“But not after that pill. Make it a light one.”
The creaks the old wood made when I walked upstairs to change clothes offered a familiar accompaniment, and the house announced me again when I came down with my bloody skirt and jacket in a shopping bag. But she wasn’t fazed, and I got all the way to the bottom of the stairs on the ground floor before she turned from where she was bending over an open drawer in Daddy’s desk.
“What were you looking for, Viola? I don’t know Daddy to keep money at the house.”
“You daddy sometimes brought his newspaper stories home to read. Is the story you’re working on here in this mess? What is all this?”
“No. I keep the newspaper business at the newspaper so it will be there when I leave. That’s important to me. Those boxes are some things I’m sending back to California.”
“Before you send anything to California, I need to see what you’re taking out of here and I’ll need a new set of keys. Some of these things are probably mine.”
“How about you don’t even think about coming here until I get back,” I said.
“I’m his wife, you know. His widow. It’s kind of my house.” I watched her walk around the kitchen, touching things. “It might be nice to move farther away from the bar. Living across the street doesn’t give me any privacy.”
I didn’t say anything while I listened to her version of the way things were and only paused to take some slow, mindful breaths—conscious of the familiar heat of anger settling in my body, but also the awareness, learned over the years, that my reaction was what she wanted. The best I could do was withhold it, which was satisfying because I knew she hated that. But, perhaps, one day my meditation practice will take me to a place where I can
actually accept the feeling but know it’s not personal and watch it change. One day.
“I brought the Kit Kat Klub into our marriage and he brought this.” She waved her arm in an arc taking in my house and, apparently, everything in it. “Your daddy and I were going to make the Kat into a whole new experience. Maybe you noticed. It’s even more of a jazz club than just a bar now. And we haven’t even made the buy. The building next door is for sale. He used to say I could be Bricktop, that diva with the club in Paris.”
We sat down with our drinks in front of us.
“I think I’ll go home and relieve the babysitter and get Ginny and a little bag and then we’ll come back. But don’t wait for us. I’m used to sleeping in your daddy’s bed and she sleeps so well in her little bed in the room in the back. And she loves it when you’re home and you can tell your stories and listen to hers. Maybe she can take your mind off things.”
Something on my face prompted a second bad idea.
“Or, we can pull out Ginny’s trundle bed,” she said. “I could sleep with her. It don’t make me no never mind. But I don’t think you should be by yourself. And only for tonight. I’m going to Chicago tomorrow where I’ll be presenting at the Black Business Women’s Expo.”
“Neither one.”
She got up and threw back the last of her drink. “You know, I am kind of your stepmother. You don’t have too many other people to talk to. Am I right?”
Neither one of us expected me to answer. But, as I stood up, I felt the need to tell her, “You know, although my father cared for you, and he loved Virginia, he didn’t bring you into my life as my stepmother.”
She didn’t miss a beat. “I’ve got one for you. Did you know Obsidian has a serious girlfriend? I think he’s going to marry her. And I’m going to need a key.”
She tossed her head, and I let her walk upstairs and out the door before I followed and locked it behind her. I had forgotten what a bitch she was. But remembering to be mad at her was a welcome distraction during a restless night.
C H A P T E R • 18