Dear Sister Dead, page 12
“Gladys, this is Lanie. You got any messages for me?”
“Nope. Not a one.”
“No one called for me in say, the last hour?”
“Nope. Not a one.”
“You’re sure?”
“As sure as the shoe flies.”
“As sure as the what?”
“The shoe flies. You know. The shoe? The shoe I threw at Oscar the other night?”
“You threw a shoe at Oscar?”
“Sure did. Got him smack upside the head. That’ll teach him. The lousy cuss.”
I had no idea she’d thrown a shoe at anyone, much less Oscar. My first instinct was to ask why. But I caught myself. If I asked that question, I’d be opening the gates to a conversation I didn’t have time to have.
“Thanks,” I said and put down the receiver.
I eased out of my coat. Did I have a bad feeling or did I have a bad feeling? That woman had seemed serious, like she’d thought long and hard before making a difficult decision. Had she changed her mind or had someone changed it for her? Her husband? Had he caught her? Had he been there or standing somewhere nearby when she made the call and then stopped her?
For a moment, I had a grisly image of a hand clamping around her mouth and dragging her back into the shadows.
“Lanie?”
I could just see it, two hands gripped her by the throat, closing tight, and squeezing.
“Hey, Lanie!”
I blinked and came to reality with a jerk. It was George Greene. He sat a couple of desks over from me and he was waving at me, trying to get my attention. He had two women sitting at his desk. They were identical, the only difference being the color of their outfits. One was in powder blue; the other in powder pink. For some reason, they looked familiar.
I nodded at him and Greene took it as permission to come over. I liked him, so that was fine.
“Those two, they’re sisters,” he said. “They came in right after you left. They say they want to talk to you and only you.”
“About what?”
He frowned. “They won’t say.”
“All right. Send them over. Let me just borrow another chair.”
“I’ll fetch it,” he said.
Once they were comfortably seated, Greene tapped his forehead in a goodbye salute and went back to his desk. I looked from one sister to the other. Up close, they looked even more familiar, but I still couldn’t place them. I just hoped their business was simple -- maybe to invite me to a ladies' club charity event. Whatever it was, I hoped we could be done with it soon so I could go back to worrying about that woman. I glanced at the phone, hoping she'd call me back.
The twin in blue smiled. “I’m Ella Mae,” she said. “And this here is Anna Mae.” She gestured to the twin in pink.
Anna Mae gave a polite nod. It was the equivalent of a curtsy the way she did it. “We love your column,” she said. “It’s the main reason we buy this paper.”
“Thank you.” I flashed a brief smile. “So, what's this all about? How can I help you, ladies?”
“Well, actually ...” Ella Mae began. She glanced at Anna Mae, who encouraged her with a nod. Ella Mae continued. “We thought we might be helping you."
"Oh?" Admittedly, that piqued my curiosity.
"It’s like this, miss. I work across the street, at the station house—”
“The police station?” Now, I was intrigued.
“Yes, ma’am. I’m one of the clerks.”
Ah, I thought, realizing I must’ve seen her there.
“I know you in there a lot,” Ella Mae went on. “They always talking about you.”
I could well imagine who ‘they’ were and what they said. Not all the cops were happy with my friendship with Blackie. “Go on. You work at the station.”
“Yes, and I ... Well, I ...”
“Go on,” Anna Mae said.
“You see, we only supposed to look at the stuff we working on,” Ella Mae said. “I mean, we ain’t supposed to look at the stuff we not working on.”
“I’m not sure I understand,” I said.
“We know about the bruises,” Anna Mae blurted out. “The bruises Mrs. Kincaid had. On her face.”
“Oh,” I said. “And you know about them how?”
“Like I said,” Ella Mae swallowed. “We only supposed to look at the stuff we typing up. If we ain’t working on it, then we not supposed to be looking at it.”
“But you did. Correct?”
“Yes,” Ella Mae said. “I mean, I did. Not Anna Mae. She don’t work there. Just me. So, anyways, that’s how I come to know about them bruises. They was in the medical examiner’s report. And the day she got ‘em, that was in the detective’s report.”
“OK,” I said slowly. “So, you know about the bruises. What about them?”
The twins exchanged nervous glances. Ella Mae jerked a thumb at Anna Mae and said, “You tell it.”
Anna Mae fidgeted. “Well, Ella Mae and me, we were talking about the case the other day. I mean, everybody’s talking about it. And Ella Mae, she mentions them bruises, and how the reverend said he was out of town the day his wife got ‘em, so he couldn’t be blamed for them. So I say, ‘What day was that?’ And she tells me. And I say, ‘Wait a minute.’ And so, then I go to check, ‘cause I remembered seeing something. And then I found it.”
“Check what? Found what?”
“She works for the traffic court in Brooklyn,” Ella Mae explained.
I still didn’t get it.
“Maybe, I shouldn’t say nothin',” Anna Mae said. “Maybe, it don’t mean a thing.”
“Maybe, it don’t,” Ella Mae said. “But maybe it do.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, “but what are you two talking about?”
“Well,” Ella Mae said, looking at her sister. “Are you gonna tell her or should I?”
When Anna Mae hesitated, Ella Mae turned to me and opened her mouth, but before she could say a word, Anna Mae chimed in. “A traffic summons,” they said in unison.
Ella Mae gave Anna Mae a look of annoyance. “Well, go on, then. Tell it.”
“It had his name on it,” Anna Mae said.
“Whose name?”
“The Reverend Kincaid’s. He got a parking violation. Got it the very day she got them bruises. Got it and got served with a summons the next day. The officer who delivered it wrote down that he delivered the summons to the reverend personally.”
Understanding dawned. “Oh, I see,” I said softly.
I took down their contact information, thanked them, and promised Ella Mae I wouldn’t tell Blackie that she’d been reading reports she wasn’t supposed to. Then I sat back and thought about what they’d said. It might amount to something. It might also amount to nothing. But clearly, it meant I was going to have to have another difficult conversation with Levy.
But first ...
I glanced at the phone again, wondering. Perhaps, Gladys could confirm where the woman had called from. If it was the drugstore down the street from the diner, then I could—
My desk phone rang. Blackie again. He sounded uncharacteristically upbeat.
“Just calling to see if you’ve got any leads on the man in the drawing.”
“Not really, no.” I picked up a pencil and tapped my desk with it. “You’re likely to find out before I do. Given the shooter’s skills, he’s probably been in trouble before and has a record. That’s something you’d have access to, not me.”
There was a pause, then a disappointed sigh. “It’s all right, Lanie.”
“What do you mean?”
“You can stop ducking and dodging.”
“Excuse me?”
“I know about the soldier. And I know you know, too.”
“That I—what?”
“We have the wife. Nabbed her maybe forty minutes ago. And we know she was on her way to see you.”
"The wife?"
"Yeah, the wife."
“Oh, I see.” Well, now at least I knew where she was—and that her husband hadn’t done her in. I guess that was something. “How did you know she was on her way to see me?”
“We didn’t. You just confirmed it.”
My, my, my. He was having a good old time, wasn’t he, yanking my chain.
He chuckled. “We picked her up just before she reached the diner. It was easy to put two and two together.”
“How did you find out about her to begin with? Did someone drop a dime on her?”
“Let’s just say we got a tip.”
“You’re holding her for questioning?”
“For now. We could make it for harboring a fugitive if she doesn’t cooperate.”
“He was at her house?”
“No. But he had been.”
It would be a lousy thing to do, charge her with that, but I knew he was capable of doing it. “So, did you call me just to gloat?”
“I want you to talk to her, tell her what’s good for her.”
“And what would that be? That she’d better sing? That you’ll keep her locked up if she doesn’t?”
“That would be a good place to begin, yes.”
“You can tell her that yourself.”
“I already have.”
I didn’t respond.
“Look,” he said. “You know me. I can go easy. Or I can go hard. I’m willing to go easy. For now. But my mood is changing fast.”
I gazed out over the newsroom, over the heads of the other reporters bent over their Underwoods, to the dusty windows overlooking the street, and imagined Blackie at his desk, and a soldier’s wife in holding.
“All right,” I said. “I’ll be right over.”
CHAPTER 18
Letitia Glenn was like a lot of Harlem women her age: old before her time. She was probably in her late twenties but was already worn thin. She sat huddled on the cot in the jail cell, her coat drawn tightly around her. She was bitter toward me.
“I trusted you,” she said. “You turned me in.”
“Not quite.” I informed her what Blackie had said.
She turned away.
“We don’t have much time,” I said. “I need you to talk to me. Right now.”
“Why? So, you can go and tell him?” She gave a nod toward the world outside her bars, meaning Blackie.
“I won’t tell him anything you don’t want me to. I won’t print anything you don’t want me to. But you called me. You must’ve had a reason. Now’s your chance. I don’t know when you’ll get another one. First things first: what’s your name?”
“Letitia. Letitia Glenn. And my husband’s name is Hiram.” Tears slid down her cheeks. She sniffed and swiped them away with the back of her hand. More tears fell in rapid succession. “What am I going to do?” she whispered, her voice thick. “They want me to call him, get him to come in. They’ll kill him if I do, but they gonna keep me locked up here if I don’t. I can’t stay here. I got a baby at home. And then there’s them social workers. If they find out I’m here, they’ll take my kid away. They just looking for a reason. They’re vultures. All of ‘em.”
I took out a handkerchief and coaxed her into taking it. “Take a deep breath. And talk to me.”
She mopped her face and balled up the handkerchief. “I wanted to tell you about Hiram, to explain. How he is. He’s a good man, really.”
How many times had I heard that one?
She must’ve sensed my skepticism because she rushed on. “During the war, he got hurt …” She touched her forehead. “Up here. In his head. He wouldn’t talk much about it, but one of his friends, he come by and told me what happened. They got caught in a minefield. Hiram didn’t step on it, but he was close by when another guy did. The explosion, it sent him flying, and when he landed … well, after that, he wasn’t the same no more. They sent him home.”
All right. I’ll admit. That did soften me up. A little.
She drew her knees up and hugged them. “We was so happy to see him. He looked fine. Didn’t look like nothing was wrong with him. But then it started. The headaches, the forgetting things. He couldn’t remember nothing, and he’d wake up screaming and sweating in the middle of the night.”
By now, I was thinking of what she must’ve been going through, living with a man like that, as much I was thinking of him.
She rocked a little, back and forth, back and forth. “One day, he just went plum crazy. He was working in the grocery store down the street. Locked himself back in the stock room, wouldn’t come out. They had to come and get me. Course I lost money that afternoon, cause I had to leave work early and the boss said he wasn’t gonna pay me for the time I wasn’t there. We needed the money, but Hiram needed me more. It’s just that, well, it wasn’t the first time and it wasn’t gonna be the last. It took me an hour to talk him out of there.”
She had me. I admit it. She had me.
“They had him in that hospital for a while. Bellevue. I used to visit him there. He’d be sitting there, holding his head. Said he could hear this kinda hum, like somebody was chanting. And then he’d start pulling at his clothes, saying they was too hot for him, that he was burning up, and then it was just like he was seeing things. Like he didn’t see me, didn’t know where he was—no, it was like he was back there. I don’t know what they put our men through over there, but it show ‘nough ruined them. Not all of them. But I’m telling you, even the ones that look like they sane, they got a little crazy in ‘em. If they was over there, they got a little crazy. They just done learned to bury it, to hide it, but they got it.”
She lowered her legs, let them hang over the edge of the mattress and looked downward. “Hiram told me he wanted to die. Said it would’ve been better if he hadn’t come back. Leastways, me and the baby, we would’ve gotten a little bit of money out of it. I told him that weren’t true. That he was what I wanted, what me and the baby needed. But it didn’t matter. He couldn’t hold on. You know what I mean? He just couldn’t hold on.
“And the people, they didn’t understand. Or care. They looked at him and they didn’t see no hero. He was just one more shiftless Negro. That’s all he was to them.”
For the first time since I’d come in, she gazed directly at me. “It did something to him, ma’am. I swear it did. He had swagger when he come back. He had pride. But the nightmares, the shakes, they took it all away from him. But it was the people here, and how they looked at him, that’s what really brought him down. And it didn’t matter none what I said or did. It really didn’t matter. ‘I’m broke,’ he said. ‘Lettie,’ I’m broke and you can’t fix me.’ Then he walked on out.”
“When was that?”
“‘Bout five years ago.”
“But you’ve seen him since then?”
“Not that much. I know he went to work for a man named Sharkey. I’m guessing he didn’t want to do it, but he couldn’t find nothing else, so he went back to doing what he knew how to do: fighting and killing. Only this time it weren’t for no Uncle Sam.”
“How’d you find out what he was doing?”
“People, gossiping, running their mouths. I told them to hush up, that he was doing the best he could. But deep down, I ached for him. He deserved better than that.”
“So, when was the last time you saw him?” I asked, thinking of Blackie’s threat to charge her with harboring a fugitive.
“It had been a while. I was beginning to think maybe he was dead. Then he showed up day before yesterday. Told me he needed a place to stay till he got back on his feet. Gave me a hundred dollars. I gotta be honest. I knew something was wrong. I wondered what he’d been up to.”
“Did you ask him? ”
“No … no, I didn’t.” She looked down and an expression of shame flitted across her face. “I guess I just didn’t want to know.”
“I understand.”
“We got a baby girl, you see. Annabelle. She six now. And oh, how she loves her daddy. So when he came, she was so happy to see him, you know? So, happy. He’s always been good to her, good to me. Always been gentle with us. And we, we really needed the money.”
She told me how she’d come home the day before to find Hiram there. “That’s his way, you know? I never know when he’s going to show up. I just know that he will. Eventually.”
He was sitting on the living room sofa, with Annabelle snuggled up beside him. “He bought her a little doll. Funny. It looks just like her. Cute and … well, a pretty little thing. And he got her a book. He was reading it to her when I walked in.”
“Mama! Mama!” Annabelle jumped up from the floor and ran to her mother. She held up the doll. “Look what daddy got me, Mama! Look!”
Letitia bent and caught the bundle of energy flying her way and gave her a hug. She smiled at the doll and looked over at her husband. Her breath caught at the sight of him, partly because she still loved him so, partly because she ached to see how life was aging him before his time.
“Hiram,” she said.
“I–I just stopped by right quick to say hello. I don’t mean to cause no trouble.”
“Can daddy stay for supper?” Annabelle asked.
Hiram said, “No, baby, I can’t. I—“
“Oh, please, Daddy, please!” Annabelle cried.
Hiram hesitated. “Well, if your mama says—“
“Mama, you’ll say yes, right? Daddy can stay. He can eat with us, right?”
Letitia looked into her baby’s earnest brown eyes and knew she couldn’t deny her. “All right. Fine. He can stay. For dinner.”
“And he can put me to bed, too, right, Mama? He can put me to bed?”
Letitia’s gaze shifted to meet Hiram’s.
“I’d love to do that, Lettie. If you’ll let me.”
Annabelle’s threw her chubby arms around Letitia’s neck and whispered. “Please, Mama.”
