Box of Rain, page 2
He avoided the mirror above the sink. It was old and flawed, for one thing, so his face would look like a fun house reflection. Mostly, though, he found that ignoring mirrors made it easier to forget the pockmarks on his forehead and chin. He’d hated looking at his own face ever since acne made a mess of it. Between that, being black, and the scar along his right cheek, he had a face even a mother would be scared of. It sure freaked little kids out.
He dried off with a hand towel and folded it carefully when he returned it to its bar so that the tulip image faced outward. A workbench made of crude boards black with grime and grease, took up one whole wall of the room, and held a jumble of power tools, hammers, saws, screwdrivers, and piles of screws and nails.
In contrast, the other side of the room looked spotless: pink fluffy towels folded on shelves within easy reach of a corner shower. Matching washcloths, an extra bar of that perfumey soap Mrs. C liked so much, and an assortment of Oil of Olay products. Around the showerhead she had hung a plastic curtain with huge tulips that matched the hand towels and slip-free bathmat placed just a step outside the stall. The two windows in the room, small and high on the wall, were covered with purple gingham curtains that had a tasseled fringe across the top.
That shower belonged to Mrs. C and Mrs. C alone. Always had, and Lord help a boy who thought it would be funny to try using it when she wasn’t looking. She kept the room locked up these days, even though she no longer had foster kids living with her.
He locked the door behind him when he left, hanging the key on the nail above the top of the frame. The floor creaked above him—Mrs. C walking around the kitchen. The washer load he’d thrown in before he started working had finished, so he moved everything to the dryer. One of his socks fell on the floor. Cursing, he picked it up, unlocked the door again, and returned to the sink where he scrubbed the sock hard with the soap bar, over and over again. It wasn’t until his fingers grew numb from the cold water that he was satisfied and returned the sock to its mate in the dryer. Throwing in a fabric softener sheet, he set the timer to Auto-dry and went upstairs.
Mrs. C’s gray head was bent over the sink as she washed dishes. Booker T would have offered to help, but Shorty’s stomach got queasy just thinking about putting his hands in the food scum floating beneath the soapy bubbles. Besides, he’d done plenty to help out already, hadn’t he? He’d almost thrown up downstairs while he was power washing the concrete. All that slime and grime sliding along like some wriggling, living thing.
“You sure you’re okay with me staying here tonight, Mrs. C?” he asked.
“Sure enough, Darnell.” Shorty winced like he always did when she used his proper name. “’Sides, I got that extra bed now that Rico took off.” Mrs. C put the last dish in the drainer and pulled the plug. She glanced back at him, shaking her head, then watched the water whirl away. “Three days and no word at all from the boy. You think he’d at least send for his things.”
Shorty kept mum about that. Mrs. C must be pretty unplugged not to know the deep shit Rico was in for moving into Vice Lord territory. How the man thought he could get away with that and not deal with the consequences, God only knew. You’d never find Shorty being so dumb.
The Formica top of the kitchen counter was curling along the edges. Someone had used roofing tacks to nail it down in the corners, but it still buckled in the middle, gaping to reveal years of dirt and grime packed in the crevice. It had looked almost as bad when Shorty and Booker were fostered there. Mrs. C’s hair had gone pure gray since then, too. The stainless steel sink was scrubbed clean as a nurse’s tit, however, and the chili digesting in his belly showed she could still cook as good as she used to.
“Booker T left his wallet, the fool.” Shorty picked it up from the kitchen table and held it up to show her. “How much flash that boy be holding, I wonder?” He grinned and started flipping through the inside.
“Now you give that here.” Mrs. C grabbed it from him. “He was showing me his photo ID, that’s what happened. I ain’t seen him since he started school last September. Both you boys too busy to visit old ladies these days.” She put the wallet on a shelf by the wall phone and used her apron to shine up the lenses of her glasses. “If it wasn’t for my tenants, I’d be all by my lonesome in this here big house.”
The “big house” Mrs. C had been living in for over twenty-five years was a ground-floor apartment in a three-flat building. As building manager for a landlord no one Shorty knew had ever seen face to face, she always talked like she owned the place, and she did in a way. She selected the tenants, collected the rents, and half the time, Shorty suspected, paid for repairs out of her own pocket when they needed to be made. As long as the mysterious, absent owner got his cut of the rents, he seemed content as a whore rifling through the billfold of a snoring john.
“Now you know I been busy, Mrs. C.” Shorty eyed the wallet she’d shelved, and shuffled toward it a bit without being too obvious. He’d seen a few leaves of green before Mrs. C took it from his hands. “’Sides, I been living down by 75th and Cottage these days. That be a long trek up north here. And T, hell, since my boy got into that fancy community college, he don’t hardly associate with none of the old crew no more. If I wasn’t betting bucks on some of his b-boy battles every once in a while, I wouldn’t see him much myself.” He picked up his backpack off the kitchen chair and took one step closer to the wallet.
“Now, Darnell, I warned you about gambling like that. It’s all well and good for Booker to earn some money with his dancing—boy’s got talent, don’t he? Always did.” She chuckled like she was remembering the time Booker and Shorty did a routine in her parlor. They’d been ten, eleven at the most, and she’d been laughing and clapping so hard it made them grin like idiots. Like she was grinning now, until she got back on track and frowned again. “But you’re courtin’ all kinds of trouble if you—”
The back door burst open with a rush of rain and Booker T himself charged in. He was soaked clean through, panting like he just finished one of the dance battles they’d just been talking about. Except his eyes were so wide all you could see were the whites.
“Oh there you are.” Mrs. C didn’t seem to notice how upset Booker looked. “I knew you’d figure it out before long. Now, lemme see. Where’d I put that wallet?”
Then Booker yelled, “There’s a body out there.”
Mrs. C stopped patting her pockets and looked around like a blind rat searching for the cheese. “What?”
Booker’s teeth chattered and he shook all over, but when a shudder ripped through him, Shorty could tell it was more than just the cold and wet making him that way.
“R-Rico,” he stuttered. “I found Rico’s… Rico’s head… In the…” Before he could get any more words out, he rushed to the sink, leaned over and heaved his guts out. The sound and the stench made Shorty’s stomach turn, too, till he had to swallow hard.
Mrs. C didn’t seem to get it, though. She smiled. “You found Rico? Where? What has that young man been up to?”
Shorty put a hand on her arm. “I don’t think he means that, Mrs. C. His head, you say, T? What you mean you found his head? Where?”
Booker turned on the tap and cupped up a handful of water to rinse out his mouth. When he turned to answer, they could barely hear him whisper over the sound of running water. “The dumpster.” Clearing his throat, he pointed with a trembling hand. “Down the alley behind the Chophouse. His head and his arm. Might be the rest of him’s in there, too.”
Mrs. C’s gasp was drowned out by Shorty asking, “What you doing digging through the trash anyway, T?”
“That’s all you got to say?” Booker turned off the water so hard the pipes shuddered. “I find a home boy in bits and pieces and you wonder what I’m looking for in the trash?”
“What else I s’posed to say?” Shorty turned away and started going through his backpack so they couldn’t see his face. Not that he needed anything other than a second to settle his thoughts. “Rico got his, that’s all. Been asking for it for days now.”
“Rico got his?” Booker shook his head. “It’s like I don’t know you no more, Shorty.” He appealed to Mrs. C with hands extended. “We got to call the police.”
“Oh, dear.” Mrs. C sat in one of the kitchen chairs with a thump, wrapping her apron around and around in her hands. “This is gonna cause trouble,” she muttered, gazing at the floor. “You mark my words.” Then she seemed to pull herself together and looked up with tears in her eyes. “Oh that poor young man. What must he have done to deserve such a horrible thing?”
Shorty could have told her, but he knew she didn’t want to hear it and he didn’t need to draw attention to himself. Booker headed for the phone.
“No,” Shorty barked, grabbing his arm. “Let’s stop and think a minute here, T. We really want to get involved? Mrs. C’s already in the line of fire on this, him staying here and all. She could get in trouble with the police if that boy been up to no good.” Which he damn well had been. Shorty gritted his teeth and jutted out his jaw. “They might not even find the body. Garbage men don’t pay no mind to what shakes out in their trucks. Once that trash compacter makes hamburger of him, ain’t no one gonna know where he come from. Or maybe even know who he is.”
“You crazy, Shorty? Rico,” Booker started real slow, like he thought Shorty was stupid or something, “is dead. Cut up in pieces, man. Whoever did that’s got to pay. You should know that.”
“Since when we stick our nose in other people’s business? You forget what life in the real world is like, did you, big time college boy? What Rico was wrapped up in? A Latin King camping on VL territory. You really want any of them boys knowing you was the one called attention to this?” There, he had said it. He just prayed nobody asked him no more about it.
“Boy, boys, no fighting now, hear?” Mrs. C made it sound like they were kids again arguing over who got the last piece of corn bread. “I know neither one of you had a hand in this, did you? No sense in getting either of y’all in trouble here.”
Guilt itched at the back of Shorty’s mind, but just like he used to do when he was the one who ate all the cookies, he knew how to shut that shit up quick.
“Both y’all are right,” she continued. “Rico do deserve better’n to be left to the garbage men without a word, but there’s no sense in bringing down more trouble than we’ve a need to. Booker T, you go on and get going to wherever it is you staying the night. Darnell, you best see if any of your old friends still hang out at the arcade on Broadway.” She winked at Shorty then stood up with a straight back and head held high. “I think it’s about time I take the trash out, don’t you, boys? I guess I’ll just cart it all down the alley there and see if I find room for it.”
It took a second for it to sink in. Booker was the first to object. “But you can’t—”
Mrs. C shook her hand at him and put on her stern face. “Off with you, Booker T. Shoo now. Both of y’all.” She waved her apron like they were alley cats getting into the trashcan. “Do as you’re told.”
Booker ran a hand down his face and looked worried, but Shorty knew he didn’t want any more part of this than he did, not if they didn’t have to. If a young black man finds a dead body, the cops would be all in his face for sure. But neither the cops nor the Vice Lords would question the word of a little old lady like Mrs. C, an upstanding member of the community.
“It be all good, bro,” Shorty encouraged him. “Mrs. C got us covered, just like always.” When Booker still hesitated, he added, “Go on now. I’ll see you Saturday night like we talked about.”
When Booker finally left without another word, Shorty glanced at Mrs. C, who had turned back to the sink. He hadn’t seen her spine so straight since Crazy George accused her of stealing his pension checks. That drunk had been out on his ass so fast. No one insulted Mrs. C and got away with it. Shorty always wondered what had happened to the good for nothing, but never cared enough to ask.
“You sure you okay with this, Mrs. C?” Relief swept through him when she waved at him with a ‘go on, go on’ gesture. Things were gonna work out, like they always did when Mrs. C was around.
He’d been worried, at first, when Booker said he’d found Rico. But now that he’d had time to think about it, this could work out just perfect. Rico dead was much better news than Rico being missing. Yeah, he could work this to his advantage just fine.
He called goodbye as he left, thankful that neither Mrs. C nor Booker had remembered the forgotten wallet on the shelf.
Chapter 3 – Jo
Jo Sullivan’s cell phone sang the ring tone of Eminem’s “My Mom,” making the device vibrate across her desk. She frowned and stared harder at her computer monitor, then tried to relax the wrinkles she could feel bunched together in her forehead. She was at work, she told her mother in her mind. No time to talk with a deadline looming.
Unfortunately, there was time for thinking. Hunched over her keyboard with the newsroom noise surrounding her, she continued to draft her article on the upcoming spring benefit, but the back of her mind churned out a different story entirely.
Her father had always boasted about what a good student he’d been. As a child, she used to be proud of that fact. All through high school and college, though, she’d felt like strangling him every time he said something. Of course, she’d had other reasons for considering patricide by then.
However, he hadn’t been happy about passing the test for admittance to the clinical trial at UIC Cancer Center, even though it presented his best chance of recovering from his lung cancer. “I’d rather be dead than go through this,” he’d told Jo’s mother just the other day.
Jo hadn’t heard those words first hand. In the two months since her parents had taken up temporary residence near the hospital, she’d only seen him once, and she only stayed long enough to exchange a few words of stilted niceties. She preferred receiving news about his progress second hand through her mother, if she had to hear any news at all.
Which was why she was letting her ring-tone rattle her cubicle-neighbor for the second time that morning.
“Hey, Sullivan, you going to answer that crap or not?” Ed Logan grumbled through the slate-gray not-so-soundproofed fiber panel. Apparently he wasn’t a big fan of Eminem.
“What’s the matter, Ed? You tired of hearing about my mom?”
“Just keep it down.” Ed didn’t get her reference to the lyrics, or didn’t care. “I’ve got to finish this piece by press time.”
The Winds of Change office was filled with the clatter of printers, copy machines, chatter, and something that sounded like a YouTube Hip Hop video. Yet it was her cell phone rap tone that set off Ed. He’d been grumpy ever since she’d scooped him on a story last week and Jo couldn’t help but think there was something more personal in his response than a concern for meeting his deadline. Nevertheless, she turned the volume to mute and returned her attention to her own computer screen.
“Tickets for the May 15 spring benefit sponsored by the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless sold out weeks ago,” she read out loud quietly, “but that doesn’t mean you can’t still do your part to support efforts to prevent and end homelessness—” Breaking off, she edited the line to read, “But you can still do your part to support their efforts.” Satisfied, she murmured quickly through the remainder of the short article and clicked Send to get it off to the copy editor’s queue for review.
Getting the task done left her feeling unsatisfied, however, because now she had no excuse not to return her mother’s call. The voice mail icon on her cell blinked blatantly like a neon sign on a dark, clear night.
Thankfully, her work phone rang before she could do anything too radical. She had a visitor at the front desk. Jo felt like kissing the receptionist as she dodged desks and overflowing trashcans to get to the lobby.
Jack Prescott was pacing back and forth when she got there. He was frowning before he saw her, his hazel eyes clouded, but a smile brightened his dark features when he saw her approach. The swift change sent a delicious chill up her spine, surprising her, so of course she had to respond with a reprimand.
“Jack, finally. Hopefully you’re here because you found out something. My mom has been trying to call me all morning.”
“Nice to see you, too, Jo.” He grinned. They had only known each other about nine months, but he already had her number and obviously wasn’t at all put off by her greeting. That pleased her, too, so that she had to look away as she led him to some chairs in the corner.
“Well?” She leaned forward in her seat, hands clenched on her knees. “Did your friend know the guy? What’s his reputation among the other oncologists?”
“They work together occasionally, so yeah, Barry felt he knows him pretty well, on a professional level at least. Rest easy. Al Lawson knows his stuff. Your dad is in good hands.”
“What about on a personal level? Mom says he’s abrupt and cold.”
“He could be a complete dick to his wife and kick the dog every chance he gets, Jo, and still give your dad the best possible care medically. What more do you want? You act like you’re afraid he’s going to shoot air bubbles into the intravenous tube or something.”
“Do you blame me for being paranoid about doctors after the last one I had to deal with?”
“Apples and oranges, Jo, apples and oranges. Levinson was a psychiatrist, not an oncologist.”
“And a psycho,” she reminded him. “I still have the scar from where he slashed me with those scissors.” She held her wrist out to demonstrate, but Jack’s words did relax her. His overuse of clichés used to drive her nuts, but now she found it comforting somehow.
