The Dying Ground (15 page)

“Everybody, this is Regina. Regina Fowler, Felicia’s roommate.”

Cissy wandered in while I made the introductions. Cissy is Gra’mère’s late-in-life child, born six months before me. After my own mother died Gra’mère nursed me with the milk meant
for Cissy. She never let her hatred of my father—the man who killed her daughter—affect how she felt about me. She took me to her breast as if she’d birthed me herself. I’ve heard again and again how she returned from her daughter’s funeral to find me crying uncontrollably for my mother. “Hush,
bébé,”
she said, and pressed me to her heart. She’d been saving me from grief ever since.

“Sit down, baby.” Gra’mère motioned for Regina to take a seat.

“Regina’s gonna stay here for a little while, if that’s okay.”

Gra’mère waved me away. “She can stay in the spare room.”

Cissy turned to Regina. “Or you can stay with me. I have a computer in my room. I know you’re in midterms this week.”

“Anything is fine. Thank you.”

“Y’all heard anything about Flea?” Cissy directed the question to Regina and me.

“Nope, but Noone and Charlie already been there,” I answered.

She rolled her eyes at the mention of Noone’s name.

“Hey, heifer, you ain’t gonna speak to nobody else?” Phine stuck her cheek out to Cissy to receive a kiss.

“I got your heifer. What’s for lunch?”

“What you bring?” Phine countered. “You grown and everything trying to have boys spend the night in Momma and Daddy’s house. I think you can fend for yourself in the kitchen.”

“Hush, Josephine.” Gra’mère stirred a pot of stew at the back of the stove. My nose told me it was shrimp Creole.

“You didn’t hear the whole story,” Cissy said.

Phine turned with her hand on her hip. “True or false. Was there some ratty-ass boy ’sleep on the couch at two o’clock in the morning?”

“True, but—”

“Uh-uh, no buts. You know better.”

“We were studying, and he fell asleep when I went upstairs to get a sweater.”

“And that’s when Daddy Al came in from the garage,” I added, remembering the shouts of anger he had directed at the sleeping boy.

“Shut up, Maceo. You just lucky you got that cottage before me.” My occupancy of the cottage was the only point of contention between Cissy and myself.

“You don’t need that cottage, Cissy. You think your daddy would let you have boys back there?”

“Why are we talking about my sex life?”

“Sex life!” Gra’mère dropped her spoon, as did Phine. “If I taught you right you don’t have one!”

Cissy colored to her hairline, the one thing that saved her. Gra’mère’s tone softened.

“I’m glad you got the sense to be embarrassed.”

Cissy looked to me for help, but I raised my hands in surrender. She made a face and tried a new tactic. “I finished my biggest midterm this week.”

Her announcement was met with silence. Neither Gra’mère nor Phine were ready to excuse her earlier mistake. Cissy was a senior English major at Mills College with dreams of becoming a playwright. She had bypassed Cal and Stanford for California’s only single-sex college.

“How’d you do?” I asked.

Phine shot me a look. “There they go, thick as thieves.”

“Been that way since I was nursing them.”

“Momma’s little titty babies.” Phine laughed wickedly. “That’s what me and Nelia use to call y’all.”

“None of that in mixed company,” I said.

“What? You shamed? We know you a different kind of titty
baby now.” Phine laughed again, and I remembered why I was glad she and the tart-tongued Nelia had moved out of the Dover house.

Cissy shot me a look that said, That’s what you get.

Regina laughed. “This reminds me of my father’s side of the family.”

“That’s enough, Josephine.” Gra’mère spooned
grillades
over a plate of grits and poured shrimp Creole into bowls. “Maceo, Cissy, go ’head and set the table.”

Cissy, grateful for the reprieve, rushed to the china cabinet. “How many?”

“Set the whole table. I think we might have a full house. And go tell Redfield to come in and eat something.”

Phine took a seat across from me just as Nelia and Rachel came into the room. Rachel was dressed in the no-nonsense clothes of a high school principal while Nelia wore a sassy red sundress. While there were signs of Daddy Al in all four of the daughters present, Rachel definitely had a look of her own. She was darker than the rest, with soft brown eyes and an Afro she kept short and close to the scalp. In her ears, as usual, large Afrocentric earrings dangled.

She dropped her jacket over a chair and moved to the sink. I watched her and noted that she always went right to work without being asked. Sometimes I had the feeling that Aunt Rachel saw herself as more a boarder than a daughter.

Nelia, Phine’s twin, was the flashiest of all the sisters. As she moved forward to kiss Gra’mère I smelled her perfume as it took over the kitchen. She winked at me with the big green eyes I’d loved since I was a little boy. Rachel walked by and pulled lightly on my ear, a greeting we had between the two of us. The gesture made my throat tighten. Wherever Felicia was hiding she didn’t have the comfort of family, and Billy was far beyond it.

L
ake Merritt, a natural saltwater lake in the middle of the city, was working double time as a pickup spot. At its inception, the wildlife sanctuary had been lined with mansions, but they’d long since been replaced by restaurants, laundromats, apartments, a freeway overpass, and a movie theater.

I circled the north side of the water twice and gunned the Cougar at stoplights to get attention. The Cougar was a showpiece, and I knew once I parked I’d be surrounded by guys asking about the engine. Then the girls would come one by one. The Cougar had the same drawing power as puppies and babies.

I finally found a parking space on Grand Avenue, the center of activity and just below Grand Lake Theater. Holly fed the meter as I grabbed a pretzel from a street vendor.

Through the window of Faye’s Alterations I could see Emmet Landry standing in front of a three-paneled mirror. Every new piece of information, every rumor, would put us
closer to finding Felicia so we went inside. Besides that, Emmet was already an outright member of the fuck-Smokey team.

“Fellas.” Emmet stepped down from the pedestal where he was getting his pants hemmed. “Wassup, Holly?”

“You, baby.”

Emmet, more redbone than my aunties, was fair-skinned with a ruddy orange complexion. Freckles rimmed the outside of his gray eyes like circles, and he wore a low red fade. He made up for the oddity of his appearance with a stylish wardrobe.

The tailor continued to nip and tuck while Emmet stood in front of the mirror. “I’m getting hooked up for the funeral. You know everybody gonna be there frontin’.”

Somehow in the busywork of searching for Flea I had forgotten about the funeral. Despite the evidence, the picture in the paper, and the steady build of danger I still couldn’t imagine Billy as irreversibly dead.

“Emmet—”

At the sound of her voice, Holly and I glanced toward the dressing room as Emmet’s legendary wife, Yolanda, stepped out. Only twenty-three years old, Emmet had been married for five years to Yolanda Perry. Holly had attended their Vegas wedding, two days after high school graduation. Emmet was proud that he never strayed, and she gave him every reason to keep it up.

Emmet was at least six feet tall and so was Yolanda, but she topped that with a Marie Antoinette hairdo strung with beads and pearls. Everything about her was exaggerated, from top to bottom: hips, thighs, lips, ass, calves, chest—it was like someone had created her purely for male enjoyment.

Holly, more than once, had said she was the only thing that would make him kill Emmet and not think twice. I doubt if he was joking.

“Hey, Mrs. Landry.” Holly did not look directly at Yolanda when he spoke to her. I think he feared his eyes would betray
the desire in his heart. Emmet, I guessed, was used to men speaking to the air above his wife’s head. All in all he was a pretty level-headed brother, considering the ammo at his side.

“Holly, how you doing? And Maceo, I remember you. How are you?”

“Fine, and yourself?”

The two of us sounded like choirboys.

“Emmet, you think this is okay?” She held out the hem of her dress and twirled from side to side. I might have drooled.

“That looks nice, baby. You should get it.” He winked at her, and she blew him a kiss, which he moved in to take directly from her mouth. When they came up for air they turned to admire themselves in the mirror. Besides being married they also had a wicked habit of wearing matching outfits. Same fabric, different dimensions. His as a suit, hers as curves.

“Man, we gonna get out of here,” Holly said to Emmet, but he wanted us to wait.

We greedily took in Yolanda’s assets while Emmet had his back turned.

“Hold up a second, y’all.”

Yolanda returned to the dressing room with another dress handed to her by Emmet. She waved to us absentmindedly over her shoulder. Already forgotten. Everybody wanted Yolanda, but few could put in the serious work that Emmet did.

He waited until his wife closed the door to her dressing room before asking the tailor to step away. He lowered his voice anyway. “I heard some shit went wrong out in Marin with them white boys and Charlie.”

“How?”

“Don’t know the details, but looks like Charlie was skimming from Billy to set that deal up.”

“Serious?” Holly asked.

“You seen him?”

“Yesterday. At Felicia’s house harassing her roommate.”

“The boy’s unraveling. Could be guilty about something. The fool definitely knows more than he’s saying.”

“You know anything else about the white boys? They related to anybody?”

“Not that I know of, but this is how I see it.” He did a three-quarter turn in front of the mirror. “Folks just sitting at home. Deciding. Making choices about who falls where, who did what”—he looked meaningfully at Holly—“which means a lot of loose cannons on the road.”

“Deciding?” Holly wanted him to explain his position.

Emmet accepted a shoehorn and a pair of loafers from the tailor, who quickly faded into the background. “This is what we got.” He counted it off on his fingers. “Smokey could have shot Billy purely for drama, status, territory, take your pick. Then we got Charlie, who’s been skimming drugs and money. Maybe he moved on Billy before Billy could move on him.” Yolanda joined us for the second time. “Then we got his woman, and there’s a million and one reasons she coulda had him smoked.”

I spoke up. “It wasn’t Flea.”

“Hold up. Hold up. There’s somebody to defend everybody on the list, but I’m just running down what the average nigga on the street think.” Yolanda slipped away again after a quick kiss and a no to the shoes Emmet held up for himself. “Then, just to complete the circle, we got the two of y’all. I don’t buy into it myself, but plenty of folks might.”

“I hear ya.” I hated that anyone thought either Holly or I could have killed Billy.

We heard a tap on the window and turned to find Crowley surrounded by a group of raggedy kids. I never got over the sight of him as the ghetto Pied Piper. His clients, as he called them, ran the brown gamut from Asian to Hispanic and back to Black.

Outside we stood on the sidewalk, engulfed by kids, eating pretzels and watching Yolanda through the plateglass window. Emmet had disappeared into the dressing room so we feasted on her while she twirled in front of the mirror.

“That girl should be illegal.” Crowley ran his tongue slowly around the edges of his lips.

“She is. ’cause you’ll definitely be on lockdown, permanent, if you fuck with Emmet’s woman.”

“He should put a fence up around her or something.”

Yolanda turned and waved to us before disappearing behind the wall of glass.

With the spell broken, Crowley turned his full attention to us. “Crockett and Tubbs on the case, huh?”

Holly laughed. I laughed too. How many times had we arrived late to parties in order to view the last seconds of
Miami Vice.

“Off-Beat know how to get in touch with the white boys if you need the information.”

“Might could use it.” Holly shot a glance my way. “You think they connected to this?”

“Who knows? Smokey thinks so. He came around manhandling Off-Beat.”

“He get anything?”

“Not as far as I know. Off-Beat ain’t too keen on the Grape Ape. But you, Holly, he wants to impress.”

Holly frowned. He knew that asking a favor of Off-Beat would link them together. The look he gave me said, You owe me. He turned back to Crowley. “Hook it up and call me at the bar.”

“Alright. Maceo, heard somebody took a shot at you, boy!”

“Something like that.”

“Be careful, man. You know Holly made of steel but you a square.” He used his pinky fingers to make the shape in the air.

I punched a hole through it. “Plan to stay that way.”

“Not if you keep rolling with players, jocking beautiful women. Ain’t you been schooled.?”

I laughed.

“Here, let me give ya a little something for the road.” He broke a weak beat box then whispered the lyrics with his back turned to the kids. “These bitches gonna do anything they feel/’cause if a game don’t exist then a nigga ain’t real.”