Drive Me Crazy (13 page)

“Lot of cops are on lockdown. Ask Rafael Perez.”

“I know what to do, how to do it. Keep it simple.”

“The simple art of murder ain’t that simple.”

“It can be. Christmas, he sends everybody home. Stays at the office a little while to make sure everything is cool. Then forwards all calls to a service. He gets killed in his office.”

I ask, “On Christmas?”

“You’re agnostic. It’s just another day to you.”

“But still ... Christmas?”

“When everybody has their spirits up and guards down. Make it look like a robbery at Christmas. Shoot him. Stab him. Drown him. I don’t care as long as it gets done.”

“Shooting him would draw attention.”

“Stab him O.J. style. I can show you how to do it.”

It was getting hot.

She whispered, “Like you said, you’re my backdoor lover. A phantom. You’d never be a suspect. A year from now your nights will begin with blow jobs followed by a lavish dinner.”

“Is that right?”

She nudged me and gave up a short, erotic laugh. “I’ll be sucking your dick to put you to sleep then sucking it again to wake you up to have breakfast in bed.”

“You’re gonna cook for a brother?”

“No. I’ll order in. Me and the kitchen ain’t friends like that.”

“What would I have to do? What would fair exchange be?”

“Just give me babies.” She sounded small, vulnerable. “Love me like I love you.”

“I can do that.”

“You love me?”

I nodded. “Love you.”

I wanted to have a kid too. I’d had a stepson. My ex-wife had been a package deal. I was getting older, looking at forty in the mirror like it was an evil bastard. Hard to get a job at forty, let alone get one with one big strike on your record. Old age was creeping up on me. Old age and no real promises to better my situation. People looked at a man like me and thought I didn’t feel. I felt every-fucking-thing. I just wasn’t allowed to show it and still be called a man.

We left the steam room. Went into the house. Antique mirrors. Artfully stacked books. Chinese carpets. Chandeliers. Marble everything. Pictures of her and her husband standing with celebrities like George Clooney and Magic Johnson decorated the family room. What caught my eye were the pictures of his two kids, Brandon and Fiona, ages five and seven. The little boy looked like Wolf with a black man’s skin. The little girl could pass, go either way.

Lisa dried her feet on the carpet, grabbed bottled water from the kitchen, then took me upstairs to one of the guest bedrooms. Never to her marriage bed. That didn’t bother me. The bedroom she took me to had golden walls, vibrant pictures, and red velvet curtains. The room should’ve been in a museum, or in a Harlem brownstone.

She said, “Twenty-five thousand? How does that sound?”

Her rich words made me swallow the last of my debilitated morals.

I sucked on my bottom lip a while, came back and said, “How thirty sound?”

Thirty could help Momma and Rufus and still leave me in a position to get up on some property, at least a one-bedroom condo. I expected Lisa to balk, at least cock her head like the RCA Victor dog and make a Scooby-Doo sound. She didn’t blink twice. Maybe because what was a lot of money to me wasn’t a lot of money to her. My fortune was her chump change. Maybe because it wasn’t her money she was spending anyway. And I didn’t think she was serious, just angry and testing me. She had too much to lose.

She said, “In Egypt, back in the day, they used to consummate a deal with sex.”

She pulled her damp hair away from her face and took me in her mouth again. Did that until I got hard again. I didn’t get as hard as before. It felt good, but I didn’t bust a nut.

She made a sad face. “The pump’s still working, but the well is dry.”

“Pretty much.”

She kissed my dick like it was her prom date, pulled the covers back and we cuddled.

I yawned. “Let me rest about an hour and I’ll bounce. Cool?”

She was quiet for a moment, then she asked, “Want to drive his Lamborghini?”

I chuckled. “You serious?”

“Stay the night. In the morning you can follow me down to the quarter-mile track.”

I licked my lips, imagined being in that car. “What’s your time on the quarter-mile?”

“Eleven.” Her wide grin told me she was proud. “I have to trust myself and stop holding back on the curves. Pedal-to-the-metal on the straightaway.”

“I’ve never driven like that, not on a track, so I’d probably come in at eighteen.”

“Way too high.” She yawned and laughed at me. “You can do better.”

She got up and went to another part of the estate, came back with a McDonald’s bag. She dumped the contents on the bed. Stacks of
twenties.
It was a hellified Happy Meal. I sat up with a quickness, touched it. Put my hands all over that salvation. My heart sped up.

She took the money away, put it back in the McDonald’s bag, vanished into another room, then came back, money gone, her naked silhouette easing between the sheets again.

I asked, “How much was that?”

“Around fifteen large. Good faith money.”

The texture from that money had my fingers tingling.

I asked, “The other half as soon as it’s done?”

She nodded, her expression as dark as her intentions. I remembered looking around at all they owned and thinking I’d short-changed myself. Should’ve asked for forty. Maybe fifty.

We didn’t say anything else.

Then she smiled. “Forgot. I bought you a present.”

She hopped up and went downstairs, her feet moving pretty fast over the hardwood floor. She came back with a small bag. Clicked on a light again. The bag had a red bow on it.

Inside was a cellular phone. I didn’t have one. Needed one.

I asked, “What’s the occasion?”

“And I know this Asian guy downtown. He has suits for next-to-nothing. I ordered you a couple of Italian suits. Hope you don’t mind. All you have to do is go pick them up.”

I crawled on top of her. Kissed her. Eased deep inside another man’s wife.

She moaned. “I thought the well was dry.”

“The well might be dry, but the pump is still working.”

“Be rough with me. Take it. Choke me ... tighter. Oh ... like ... that ... I’m ... coming.”

By nine the next morning I had breakfast in bed. Lisa had ordered from one of the restaurants on Larchmont. She ordered every meal we ate. By noon we were down in El Toro, away from L.A., the heart of Orange County. We were out on an old abandoned military airport. The landing strips had been converted into a track. All morning she let me run the hell out of that Lamborghini, the ultimate phallic machine. Drove that bitch like she was my own.

Driving a man’s car. Swimming in a man’s pool. Fucking a man’s wife.

I started to want that kinda life. Started to believe I deserved it.

I’d been through enough bullshit in my life. I was tired. Yeah, I deserved it.

Things changed the night I went to kill Lisa’s husband.

“Jingle Bells” playing on the radio. Streets lit up. People waiting for Santa.

Gun resting in the small of my back.

What did we start talking about? Midnight. Christmas Eve. A black man. A white man. Grim reaper. Victim. When it started out you saw race. America taught you that race was always there. Race was as obvious as the weather. And harder than traffic on the 405.

Wood-paneled office. Picture of him and Lisa smiling at me.

Images of his ancestors and children on his walls.

Momma, barely dead.

I walked in that office and saw a drunken man who had been destroyed from the inside out. A pint of rum was on his desk, most of that gone. He was alone, but it looked like he was waiting for somebody.

He slurred, “What can I do for you?”

I asked, “Jason Wolf?”

“Jason Wolf is dead.”

“Who are you?”

“Jason Wolf, that’s my father’s name. I’m Jason Wolf, Jr.”

He sat back when he said that, stared at all the pictures around him. He was drunk, but he was calm. Death had walked in his door and the man sat back and sipped his rum.

He said, “My family, they keep an eye on me.”

I nodded. My momma had just died. No one to watch over me.

He offered, “Drink?”

I saw that amber-colored liquid and it was like he was offering me another memory. I shook my head. Thought he was doing that to fuck with me. He didn’t know my past pains. He seemed so small, so damn harmless. Not like a man who needed to be in the ground.

I said, “These your people?”

Wolf told me about his people, first his grandparents, then his parents, how they admired the politically correct in this country, the ones who went against social mores and allowed black people to eat in their homes. He’d come from a land that never had a black man as a slave. I couldn’t hold him accountable for what other people had done. We talked about history. About places like Philadelphia, Mississippi, about the Choctaw Nation, places where my people had come from. We talked about injustice. Civil rights being violated by the enemies of peace.

He was three sheets to the wind. Depressed. Talkative. A man with burdens.

A man had appeared in his office and he didn’t care.

I had hesitated. Had stood here with a gun ready to be pulled out, and hesitated.

People talked when they didn’t want to kill. Did the same when they didn’t want to die.

In the end he said, “You ever need a job, come talk to me.”

“Just letting you know, I have a felony.”

“It’s my company. I hire who I want to hire.”

That sounded better than the fifteen large I had waiting for me at home.

Other things were said. A lot of it I couldn’t remember.

Momma had died. Her body hadn’t turned cold yet. I didn’t want to deal with that.

Life was a fog. Couldn’t see past the next bend in the road.

Wolf looked up at me, his eyes deep red, bloodied.

He said, “Prison, huh?”

I nodded. Right then I was going to reach for my gun, end this business transaction.

Thou shalt not commit adultery. Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife. I’d broken most, if not all, of the last half of the rules etched in the Decalogue. Thou shalt not kill was still up for grabs.

He struggled to clear his throat, ran his hand over his hair. It was down, not in that smooth ponytail. In the voice of a dying man he said, “Tell me about your prison.”

My prison.

He said that and aroused fragments of memory. Sounds went away and I heard the batons raking against the prison bars. Anger and fear and blood in every wall. The faces. Old. Young. The innocent and guilty were all guilty. Faces lined in fear. Faces lined in hate. Some adjusted to being prisoners the same way some of our ancestors had adjusted to being slaves, not out of weakness but out of self-preservation. You either adapted or you died a horrible death.

I said, “Prison is corrosive. What it doesn’t corrode it swallows up.”

“Love does the same thing. Did you know that?”

Other things were said, his confession to having an affair, then his analogy about a woman never forgiving a man being in the middle of his rambling conversation. Think the man needed somebody to talk to. His money couldn’t buy away the burden on his shoulders.

Not long after one in the morning my cellular phone rang.

I answered without looking at the caller-ID.

No hello on her end. Lisa simply asked, “You get my Christmas present?”

I held the phone for a moment, that gun in the small of my back.

I hung up.

The beginning of the end.

I should’ve given Rufus the lion’s share of that money, then taken the rest and done like W.E.B. Dubois and Stokely Carmichael, quit America, gone to Paris or Africa, become an expatriate.

I stood up. “Have to go. Family problems.”

Then he said, “Read this poet once. Fontaine. He said every man was three men. Who people think he is. Who he thinks he is. And who he really is.”

He said that like he didn’t know which he was. My expression mirrored his.

He said, “Merry Christmas. Or Happy Kwanzaa. Whatever you celebrate.”

I nodded.

He said, “Well, you ever need work, stop by and see me.”

I made it as far as his door before I turned back to him, to those red-rimmed eyes.

He told me, “You might pay your debt to society, but your record will never be clear. That’s like asking your wife to forgive you for cheating on her.”

 

 

All of that rushed through my head, replayed itself in less than two blinks.

Right now Wolf’s pictures stared up at me. His family. The photo of his wife did the same. Thirty large could’ve been mine. I could’ve walked away with a poor man’s lottery.

I could’ve walked away with this entire business.

That goddamn desk could’ve been mine by now. That fucking house could’ve been where I slept at night. I might even have had a few flying lessons out at Hawthorne airport, could’ve been cruising like a top gun high over the Hollywood sign in a bona fide Cessna.

If Rufus hadn’t called me while I was on the way and told me that Momma had just died, if I hadn’t stalked into this dimly lit office and seen a shell of a man, if I didn’t have memories of an ex-wife who had abandoned me, left me feeling the way Wolf was looking ...

Damn, Rufus. Damn the way he’s screwed up my life at every turn.

Maybe I was a fool. Maybe I was a coward. Maybe I realized it was easier to kill a man in your mind that it was in real life. It ain’t easy to kill a man. Maybe I was the kind of man who would rather build his castle brick-by-brick than kill for it.