by Blake Banner
KNIFE EDGE
Copyright © 2021 by Blake Banner
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One
“I wish,” she said, “it was as easy as just being color-blind. But the problem isn’t really that the color of our skin is different. It isn’t even a question of race. It’s much deeper than that. And however hard the Mitchells tried, at the end of the day, they were the mighty white intellectuals, and Leroy was a black orphan they were trying to rescue. They tried not to see it that way, but that was the way Leroy saw it.”
She paused and gazed down at her Styrofoam cup on the Formica interrogation-room table. It was a sad gaze in a beautiful face. She turned the cup around several times, like she was trying to find some redeeming feature about it, but knew she wouldn’t. In the end it was just a white Styrofoam cup full of black coffee.
“I guess that sounds selfish and ungrateful to you, but to a lot of black people, charity and help is like the final insult.” She raised large, black eyes to look at me. “White people brought us to this condition, now they want to tell us, ‘You will never make it alone, you need white men to achieve anything.’” She paused again and returned her gaze to the cup. “I didn’t see it that way. I don’t. I was grateful, especially to Emma Mitchell. She took Leroy into her family, into her home, like he was her own child. At least, she tried real hard to make it seem that way. Though he never really believed it. Trust was hard for him.”
“What made it hard for him to trust, Sonia?”
She thought about it. “I should start from the beginning,”
“I’d be grateful. I am not familiar with this case.”
She sighed and sagged back in her chair. She thought for a moment and said, “My sister, Cherise, she got involved with this man. I say man for want of a better word. Earl Brown, he was no good,” she darted me a glance, “like so many men, I am afraid to say. He always had a bottle in his hand, beer, whiskey, whatever. And in the other hand he always had a joint. What he never had was a steady job, and if ever he got one, he made damn sure it didn’t last. He was a bad man, but we didn’t realize how bad he was until it was too late.”
“What happened?”
“She had two children by him, Leroy and Shevron. Like I said, he was never at work. He was at home all the time, watching TV, drinking and smoking weed. So it was she had to go out to work to feed the family and keep a roof over their heads.” She paused to stare at the wall. “Eight years they went on like that. I told her, more times than I can remember, ‘You have got to get rid of that man, Cherise! You have got to be free of that man!’ But she never listened. Women can be just as stupid as men sometimes. She made excuses for him, justified him, and supported that evil parasite right to the end.”
She paused again and took a deep breath. “One day, I remember it like it was just yesterday: 14th May, 2010, she come home early from work because she didn’t feel well. She was sick. She opened the door, the front door of the house, it opened right onto the living room from the street, and she sees Leroy sitting in the armchair watching his daddy rape his little sister Shevron. She’s only six years old, and that bastard was there raping her. Well, it turned out later, he’d been doing that for years, to both of the kids.”
“So what did your sister do?”
“What did she do? What would you do? What would I do? What would anybody do? She dropped her bag and ran for the kitchen. She grabbed the kitchen knife and ran at him, screaming like a wild thing. They had an almighty fight.”
She shook her head. Her bottom lip curled in and tears balanced on her eyelids, then spilled onto her cheek.
“It’s ten years ago, maybe more, but it feels like it was just this morning. There was a big fight. A real big fight. Little Shevron tried to protect her mother, and that bastard killed her for it, hit her so hard he broke her neck. Then, it seems, Cherise stabbed Earl in the back with the kitchen knife. Should have killed him, but somehow he took it from her and stabbed her several times in the belly, in some kind of frenzy, before he collapsed and they both died.”
I frowned and raised a hand to stop her. “How do you know this, Sonia?”
She nodded, as though she agreed with the question. “Leroy was so traumatized his memory was pretty vague, but he witnessed everything. Also, the medical examiner and the investigating detectives pieced it all together that way, by the position of the bodies and where the wounds were. And it all made sense. It was the only way it could have happened.”
She paused, gathering her thoughts.
“Several of the neighbors called the cops when they heard the screams and shouts. I think there was a couple of them the cops were interested in for a while, but they had alibis and in the end they figured it went down the way they said, they killed each other and left poor Leroy alone in the world.”
“You didn’t adopt him?”
“I couldn’t. I live alone and I work long hours. There was no way I could afford the money or the time to look after a traumatized kid of eight.” She shook her head, confirming the impossibility. “No, he went to the orphanage. But not for long. The Mitchells had read about the murder, they live in the Bronx, and they offered to adopt him. They changed his name. Dr. Mitchell, Brad, said it would help him to reinvent himself after the trauma, but I believe it just sounded less black to them than Leroy.”
“What can you tell me about the Mitchells?”
“They are both academics. They lecture at NYU, he is a psychiatrist, I think, and she is in sociology or women’s studies or something like that. Anyhow, there was a lot of debate and discussion about whether a white family should adopt a black kid. Brad accused the orphanage of instigating apartheid through the back door and said he would sue them and have them shut down, so they agreed to approve the adoption and Leroy went to live with them about six months after the murder.”
I cleared my throat and scratched my head. “Was he seeing a therapist of any sort at that time?”
“Yes, the court appointed a child psychologist to see him on a regular basis. Ms. Simone Robles. He saw her once a week to begin with, but it was less than that, about once a month, by the time…”
She hesitated. She looked away, blinking.
“Let’s stay with his move to the Mitchells for now. He was what, eight, nine?”
“He was still only eight.”
“How did he get on with the Mitchells? They had children of their own?”
She nodded. “They were very nice to him, and at first he appreciated that. They were good, kind people, especially Emma. With Brad, even though he was a good man, you always felt he was doing what he was doing out of a sense of principle, or obligation. He believed he should be doing it, so he did it. But with Emma…,” she smiled, “with her you felt it was more from the heart. She was warmer.”
“They had kids?” I asked again.
“They had two kids, a little younger than Leroy. There was Marcus, who was about six or seven, and Lea, who was four or five.”
“And how did Leroy get on with Marcus and Lea?”
She nodded several times, looking down at the Formica top of the table. Eventually she said, “They got on well. He was maybe too keen to please, too excitable, but the whole family was kind and patient and tolerant, and very slowly he began to settle down into the family. Marcus was real kind to him, called him his brother. Everything was fine, or at least it seemed to be fine.”
“You mean it wasn’t? Was there something you didn’t know about?”
She heaved a big, heavy sigh. “I don’t know. For four years he seemed to be happy, in as much as he could be. But when he turned twelve, in August 2013, his attitude started to change. He started talking a lot of stupid crap about blacks and whites, about how black men were better and stronger than white men, about how white women preferred black men—I don’t know where he was getting that stuff, but it began to worry me.”
“He was in touch with you, obviously.”
“He used to come visit with me. Sometimes he’d stay the weekend. We used to write WhatsApp messages to each other. He loved his aunt,” she smiled, “but when I told him he was talking a lot of BS, and that God made all men and women equal, he told me I didn’t know what I was talking about. That made me unhappy. I told him I did not want him talking like that in front of the Mitchells. He promised me he wouldn’t, but I didn’t really believe him.
“I spoke to Emma about it once, and she told me not to worry about it. She said he had had a very traumatic experience and it would take him years to deal with it and come to terms with it. What he was doing with all that racist rubbish was to try and find his own identity, his own sense of self, and for that he would have to go through a lot of garbage. She was a wonderful woman, Detective Stone.”
“So what happened?”
“Just about a week after we talked, I got a phone call from Emma. She told me Leroy had been killed, and so had her little girl, Lea. Marcus had not been hurt,” she jabbed at her body with her fingertips, “physically, but he was in a bad state of shock and he was being seen by a psychiatrist.”
The story was new to me. I had vague memories of having read something about it, and hearing talk at the stationhouse, but I had not retained any of the details. I frowned. “How were they killed?”
“It was Sunday, June 13th. Brad and Emma had been sitting drinking coffee after breakfast and the kids were playing in the backyard. It was a big area.” She stretched out her hand to indicate it was large. “They had a big lawn with trees at the end, and flower beds and stuff, and they had a garden shed where they kept the gardening tools and flowerpots…” She trailed off.
“What happened?”
“They were having coffee, like I said, and suddenly they heard a lot of screaming. Brad said it sounded hysterical. They recognized the voices of the kids, and they ran to see what was going on. According to Brad, the voices were coming from the gardening shed. They rushed to see what had happened, thinking maybe one of the kids had hurt themselves with one of the tools. But it was much worse than that.”
She placed her fingertips over her mouth, as though she was receiving the shock all over again. She closed her eyes and spoke in a strange monotone, like some kind of android.
“They found Lea and Leroy dead on the floor of the shed. Emma said there was blood everywhere. The floor was thick…” She shook her head without opening her eyes. “Thick, with blood. Lea had had her throat cut, and Leroy had been stabbed in the back, repeatedly, as if in a frenzy.”
“What about…” I checked my notes, “Marcus? Where was Marcus?”
“They found him, poor kid, they found him hiding under a tarp in the shed. He was shivering and the ME said he was in a deep state of shock. He couldn’t speak.”
“But,” my frown deepened, “they must have spoken to him eventually. What did he say had happened?”
She shook her head. “No, the doctor said he needed time to get over the shock, but he gradually slipped into a catatonic depression, which just got worse. He never spoke again, from that morning on, till now, he hasn’t said a word. And as far as I know he hasn’t got out of bed.”
I scribbled some notes and asked, “What was the outcome of the investigation, do you know?”
“It was never solved. There was no DNA other than the kids’, nor any…” She made little flapping motions with her hand. I said, “Forensic evidence?”
She nodded. “Yes, forensic evidence. And the only witness, as far as they could tell, was Marcus. And he wasn’t talking. So the case went cold.”
I leaned back in my chair and tapped my pen on my notepad.
“As far as I can tell, from what you’ve told me, Sonia, there is nothing new here. You’ve described the two murders, very clearly and concisely,” I smiled at her, “and thank you for that, but there is nothing new. Unless we have some fresh evidence, it is hard to see how we can go any further with the investigation.”
She nodded at her hands, clasped on the table, but she didn’t move. I watched her narrowly for a moment, then went on.
“But you didn’t come here after six years just to repeat to me what I could have found in the file. Has something new come up? Is there something that wasn’t mentioned in the original investigation?”
She sighed again. “Not exactly. You see…” She stopped, then started again. “I told you that Leroy started going through a difficult phase, where he was rebelling against Brad and Emma.”
“Sure, it didn’t seem to worry them too much.”
“Well, what they didn’t know was that he wrote me a text message one day, a couple of weeks before…” She faltered again. I said, “Before the crime.”
“Yes, before the crime. In that message he said that he knew Brad was seeing another woman. He’d heard him on the phone, talking quietly, and he said he’d seen messages. So he cut school a couple of times and went to the university, where he said he saw Brad with another woman.” She reached in her purse and pulled out a cell. She opened her photographs and slid the phone across the table to me. “He sent me this picture.”
It showed a tall, slim man in his early forties. He was wearing a tweed jacket and chinos, and had a shock of prematurely white hair swept back from his face. He was smiling, talking to an attractive woman in her early thirties. By their expressions you’d guess they liked each other, but not much more than that. I gave my head a shake and looked at her.
“I’m afraid this proves nothing, Sonia. A university professor must speak to hundreds of people every week.”
“I know, and that’s why I never mentioned it at the time. I put it down to Leroy’s feelings of rebellion and inadequacy about Brad. He said he was going to use the photograph to blackmail Brad. I got real mad and scolded him, and told him he should be ashamed of himself, and to be honest I never thought any more about it until last week.”
“What happened last week?”
“A friend of mine at work pointed it out to me. It was an article in the paper. Brad Mitchell has opened a rehab clinic upstate, beyond White Plains, in the Silver Lake Preserve.” She stopped again, rubbing the fingers of her right hand with her left. I asked, “And…?”
“The psychiatrist in charge of the Mitchell Clinic will be Dr. Margaret Wagner, the woman in that photograph.”
I winced.
It was close, but not close enough. “In itself,” I said, “if they are colleagues, there is nothing odd about that. If they have been working together for five or six years, perhaps much longer, you would expect him to name her, a close, trusted colleague, over somebody else.”
She was nodding. “Yeah, I know, and that’s why I didn’t come straight here. But I kept asking myself, what if there was something in what Leroy saw and heard? What if when Leroy saw them together, they were a lot more intimate than what comes across in that picture? What if he went to Brad Mitchell and did try to blackmail him? That was only six years ago; maybe they were already planning their clinic for celebrity drug addicts. That little black brat, he could have screwed it up for them for good.”
I puffed out my cheeks and blew. She shook her head again. “I am not saying that’s what happened. I am just asking, what if?”
I thought about it for a long moment.
“OK, Sonia, send me the picture, I’ll discuss it with my partner and maybe we’ll review the case and go and have a talk with Brad Mitchell and Dr. Wagner. I can’t promise you anything, but we’ll have a look and see if the lead is worth following.”
She smiled and thanked me, and sat a moment. I figured she was in her late forties. She was attractive and elegant, but looked tired, drawn and unhappy. Finally she stood and left, and I reached for my cell.
Two
The phone rang three times before she picked it up. When she spoke she was out of breath.
“Yeah, Stone, what’s up?”
“Where are you?”
“I’m working out in the gym, why?”
“Because we’re going to visit Brad and Emma Mitchell, in Castle Hill.”
“Uh-huh. Why?”
“Git yer ass up to your desk and you can read why in the file.”
I heard a soft grunt. “I love when you talk rough like that, you bad, bad man.”
I hung up and went down to my desk to sort through our cardboard filing system, comprised of two large cartons, and found Brown 2010, and Mitchell 2014. They were cross-referenced. I read them over briefly, called Frank, the ME, about something I didn’t understand, and was making copies of the two files when Dehan walked in, looking fresh and lithe. I shoved a file in her hands.