Black Orchid Blues (29 page)

The impact sent us both lurching forward. I banged my chest against the steering wheel; Queenie’s head met the windshield with a resounding thump and he sagged against the passenger door. Dazed and in pain, I put a hand to my ribs. It hurt to breathe. I’d never damaged any ribs before, so I didn’t know if the sharp pain that accompanied every breath meant a bruised rib or a broken one, but I knew it meant trouble.

I felt around for my purse, dug out a lighter, and flicked it open. Queenie’s face was slick with blood in the wavering light. He was deathly still, but when I felt the side of his throat, I found a pulse, a strong one. He was alive, but oblivious.

Now was the time make a run for it. I was unsure where we were and I hadn’t seen any cars in the last hour and a half, but it didn’t matter. It was almost dawn now. There would more traffic as the sun rose.

Queenie stirred. He moaned and twitched as though having a nightmare. “Sheila?” he whispered. “Sheila, baby, are you there?”

A shudder rippled through him from head to toe and he blinked open his eyes. He put a hand to his forehead, then turned it to shade his eyes from the flame of my lighter. Confusion and fear filled his face. He looked stunned when he saw that his hand had come away bloody.

“What in the world …?”

His eyes darted to the busted windshield, to the darkness outside, and then came back to rest on me. “Who are you? What—where are we?” His voice was as mellow as always, but deeper and definitely more masculine. And now I saw something else: Queenie’s golden eyes had turned a chocolate brown, and they reflected a deepening sense of panic.

“Junior?”

He studied me in bewilderment. “I know you. You look familiar.” A deeper frown, more puzzlement. “You live on my block, don’t you?”

Hunt Queenie. Save Junior … Which is it now?

I reached out a hand to help him. “Here, sit up.”

He pushed himself away from the door and sat upright with a wince. In doing so, he looked down at himself and saw what he was wearing. He put a hand to his head and felt the wig and hat, which had been knocked askew. “What am I doing dressed like this?” A look of understanding crept over his pretty features, and of horror. “Did
she
bring me here?”

There was no mistaking who he was talking about.

“We’re on the run. The cops are after us.”

His eyes widened. “What for?”

I gave him a brief summary of what happened at the ball.

He shook his head. “But that can’t be—I’d never. And the ball isn’t for another week or so.”

I gave him the date. “It was last night and you hurt a mess of people, including cops, trying to get out of there.” Before he could ask why he’d done it, I told him.

“You mean we actually went ahead with the kidnapping?”

“Yup.”

“No, it can’t be. Why, I—” He stared at me. “But what do
you
have to do with this?”

“It’s a long story and we don’t have time. Just trust me. We’ve got to get out of here. You’re in great danger. We both are.”

“From who?”

How could I explain that the greatest danger to him was himself?

“Where’s Sheila?” he asked.

I paused. “She’s dead.”

“No! Why are you doing this? Why would you lie to me like this?”

“She’s gone … She was killed.”

He froze. His breathing became shallow and his eyes filled with dread. He didn’t want to know, but he had to ask: “How? Not because of …?” He read the answer in my face and closed his eyes. “I don’t believe this. It can’t be. It just … can’t be.”

“Junior, let’s go.”

“Go where? I’m not going anywhere until you tell me everything.”

So I told him about Sheila and Olmo. Finally, I told him about his parents.

“I did that?” he whispered. “No, Queenie did.”

“And I—
she
—forced you to come along?”

I nodded.

He looked out into the blackness of night. “And you say the cops are after us?”

“No doubt about it.”

A long silence followed as tears slid down his face, leaving tracks in Queenie’s elaborate makeup. Finally, he turned away, his hands covering his face, his body convulsing in wrenching sobs.

I let the lighter go out. Maybe the dark would comfort him, help him see more clearly.

“Junior,” I said softly, “it would be better if you turned yourself in. That’s our best chance of surviving.”

“Survive? What for? Even if I could convince them it wasn’t me, even if I could make them see and they let me go, I couldn’t go back to that house. Not now. Not after what’s happened. But they’re not going to let me go. I can’t go to jail, either. I’m not saying I don’t deserve to. It’s just … I wouldn’t survive two days in there. I’m not going down like that. Not me.”

“Junior, please—”

“No! I admit I wanted the money. I deserved it. I’d earned it. All those years … with them.”

“I know what they did to you. It was evil.” To his questioning look, I added, “Queenie told me.”

“Queenie.” His voice was hard and flat. He sized me up. “I can see where she’d talk to you. She would like someone like you. She’d figure she could use you.”

“What’s the last thing you remember?”

“Wednesday night. Having dinner with Sheila.” He screwed up his face in agony. “I’m crazy, aren’t I? I was always worried, but I never did anything bad before. I never killed anyone.”

How would he know? He could have, but just not remembered. “It was Queenie who killed them.”

“But I
am
Queenie.” He tapped himself on the chest. “I did this, and no one else.”

“Turn yourself in. You can get help.”

He laughed bitterly. “I’m a cop killer. They’re not going to help me, except to the electric chair.”

He was probably right.

“I’m not going to do it,” he said. “I’m not going to let them lead me like a damn dog to no electric chair.”

In that, I heard echoes of Queenie.

“All of my life, people have been telling me what to do. Well, I’m not taking it anymore.” He raised his chin. A single tear spilled from his eyes and his voice dropped so that it was low and raw. “You don’t know me, you hear? You think you know a little something. You talked to Queenie and you probably talked to Sheila too. Or they talked and you listened. But that doesn’t mean you know me.”

“I listened when they talked.”

“I’m sure you did. Cause you wanted something. A big story you could put in the paper.”

“I wanted to understand. And I still do.”

“Well, understand this.”

Before I could do anything, he grabbed the gun in his lap, shoved it under his chin, and pulled the trigger.

C
HAPTER
48

T
he gun clicked empty. At the sound, Junior’s face sagged in surprise. He stared at the gun in disbelief. “Damn, damn, damn! I can’t even kill myself right.”

I closed my hand over the gun and took it away from him. He didn’t resist. He was limp.

“Talk to me,” I said. “Tell me your side of it.”

“Why?”

“Because it matters.”

He slumped back, turned his face away. I gave him time. After a while, he started talking. He story came in bits and pieces.

To summarize: His family had been living in a small house in Brooklyn before they moved to Strivers’ Row. That was in 1923, when Junior was eighteen years old. They sent him down to Howard University in D.C., right before they moved.

The move to Strivers’ meant a new beginning. By then, his sexual identity as predominantly male was unmistakable, and it was getting harder to keep him in line. He was big enough to knock Dr. Bernard flat on his butt, if he ever took a mind to. Junior would never do that, of course. Not him. The boy was totally compliant, but his alter ego wasn’t. That
thing
that seemed to take him over every now and then, they couldn’t trust it. Its appearance was what prompted them to start locking him up in the first place.

So they forged a new birth certificate and somehow came up with fake school records. They let him go, because at that point it was easier than holding on to him. Once Junior was gone, he stayed away. For four glorious years, he enjoyed his freedom.

“During the summer, I’d find work in D.C., stay with friends … I was happy. As a matter of fact, I’d say it was the happiest time of my life.”

He had friends; he was admired. No one knew about his dirty secret, about the rapes and the blackouts that had plagued him for as long as he could remember. And Queenie stayed silent.

Then, in his senior year, Junior did something his parents never expected: he took a wife. Her name was Sheila Holt, and he was deeply in love with her. He wanted to do everything for Sheila.

“I felt real when she looked at me, not like somebody’s creation, somebody’s nightmare. I felt loved. I felt confident. I felt proud.”

What about making love? I asked him. What about women in general, and Sheila in particular?

A shadow crossed his face and the soft glow of remembered happiness faded. “I don’t want to talk about that. All I can say is that she was patient. The others weren’t, but she was patient, real patient, and giving. And that’s one of the reasons I loved her.”

He’d been peering down in his thoughtfulness, but now he raised his eyes to me.

“I really thought she’d save me, you know? I thought I couldn’t live—I couldn’t survive—without her.”

Then graduation came, and with it the requirement to enter a rather harsh and unsympathetic world. Junior’s newfound love made him happy. It gave him strength and inspiration. But he still couldn’t summon the courage to strike out on his own. Furthermore, Sheila didn’t want him to. She wanted to move to New York. She wanted to live in a fine town house on the legendary Strivers’ Row, and he didn’t want to disappoint her. He knew she’d married him for love, but he also knew that she’d married him for status. To deny her made no sense, none that he could convince her of, not without telling her the truth, not without sharing his family’s dirty little secret.

So it was decided: they would go back to Harlem. He’d told her nothing of his family history. That was over now, anyway. Sheila would bring love and happiness into their home.

Junior was surprised to find that his parents were thrilled at the news of his marriage. Yes, come home, they said, by all means. Once he and Sheila were there, he saw why his parents were so happy to have her. They had a problem, you see: someone who knew them from the old neighborhood had moved to the block, and for all they knew she might spread the word about them having a beautiful baby girl who had “mysteriously” disappeared. Mrs. Gladys Cardigan, they said, was worth watching. And the thing was, she actually lived
right next door.
How terrible and unbelievable was that? Mrs. Cardigan would raise questions if they suddenly presented a son. So Sheila would be the daughter they never had, and Junior would be their son-in-law.

Junior was astounded and hurt, but he buried the pain and tried to argue the practical. How was he supposed to explain it to Sheila? That, they said, was his business. He’d just better make sure she went along with it.

Junior was confounded. He thought and thought, but couldn’t come up with anything to say to her. He decided, in effect, to let his parents take care of it. It was their lie; let them shoulder it. He was amazed and irritated to see that when they introduced Sheila as their daughter, she merely took it as a sign of affection. She never noticed when they simply introduced him as Junior, or didn’t mention his name at all, just calling him “her husband.”

Everything went fine for about a month. Then Sheila received a social invitation in the mail. It wasn’t addressed to Mrs. Junior Bernard, but to Mrs. Junior Holt. She was a bit put off, more than a bit, actually. Having the right to bear Junior’s family name was an important part of her identity. He shrugged it off as some secretary’s error and tried to get her to do the same. “All right, fine,” she said, “but I’ll call that secretary and get it straight-ened out.”

“Why bother? It’s not a function you want to attend, anyway.”

She thought about it. He was right, she didn’t really want to go to this particular event or encourage invitations from the folks behind it. Better to ignore the whole thing.

Ignore it she did—until she received two letters addressed to Mrs. Junior Holt the following week.

This time she was going to do something about it. Of course, Junior tried to dissuade her, but his efforts backfired. Her suspicions were aroused, and her concern about supposed secretarial errors switched to concern about matters closer to home. She was adamant:
Tell me what is going on!

He explained that it was part of an agreement he’d made with his parents: they were to act as though she was the daughter and he the in-law. No, he couldn’t say why, but he hoped she would comply. Those were the conditions under which his parents had taken him back into the house.

“Does that mean they threw you out before? Why? What could you have possibly done to deserve that?”

He started to deny having done anything. Then he realized that an admission to having committed some horrid, nearly unforgivable, unmentionable sin might be just the thing. Unfortunately, he was a terrible liar, guilt-ridden and wholly unimaginative. He couldn’t think of anything on the spot, so he promised to tell her everything—not then, but one day. When she still pressed for details, he stammered out some vague story about having stolen things when he was small and the family being so embarrassed that they’d—

“What? Sent you away and denied ever having had you?”

“Something like that.”

“Why, that’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard. I have half a mind to go downstairs and—”

“No! Please, don’t. Let it be.”

She looked at him with such pity that his heart broke. She wrapped her arms around him and held him. “I’m so sorry, baby. So sorry. I can’t imagine what—”

“Shh,” he silenced her with a kiss and led her to bed.

Junior said he felt an odd mixture of pride and disgust. He’d lied to his Sheila. And something deep inside him sensed that this was the end of their idyllic relationship, or even worse, the beginning of his descent into a private hell.