Dying in the Dark (17 page)

“Well, is anybody going to tell me what happened at the Businessman's Club?” the woman asked again. I was tempted to say it was none of her business, that in the interest of peace, Wyvetta and I had agreed to let the thing go, but sharp-eyed Wyvetta, spotting my inclination, discreetly shook her head. Wyvetta doesn't alienate good-paying clients, and I suspected this woman, with her head full of conditioner and appointment first thing on a Friday morning, was a regular for “the works.” She also had that husband in the Business-man's
Club, and that mink coat swung over her chair. There were as many beauty shops in town as there were liquor stores and churches, and she could have her pick of beauticians. I was sure Wyvetta regretted the fact she'd referred to the members of her husband's club as “stuck-up fools” earlier in our conversation, and didn't want to stoke further embers of dissatisfaction.

“Teresa Waterman, this is Tamara Hayle,” Wyvetta said, gracefully bowing out of the conversation with an introduction. ‘And this is Tamara Hayle's tale to tell.”

The mention of my name caught the interest of the woman in the gray T-shirt sitting next to me. “So you're Tamara Hayle? I've always wondered who you are. You've got that office right above the Biscuit, don't you?”

I nodded as Wyvetta added, “We been neighbors for as long as I been here, and if you ever need help finding some lost somebody or rescuing some poor soul from disaster, this here is the lady to call. She's one of the best in the business. You can take that firsthand from me, Wyvetta Green, owner of Jan's Beauty Biscuit!” I suspected that Wyvetta was trying to make amends by diverting attention from my “tale” to my profession; it didn't work. Gray T-shirt's curiosity was satisfied, but Teresa Waterman's interest had been piqued. She was like a hungry dog with a day-old stew bone.

“That club! If I've told my husband once, I've told him a thousand times, they should make more of an effort to get some female members or they're going to find themselves on the receiving end of a nasty little sex discrimination lawsuit. Wyvetta, why aren't you a member? Or you, Ms. Hayle? I hope that's why you made a scene. It's about time somebody raised hell about it, and that's one way to get
their attention.” Her eyes eagerly fastened on my face awaiting my response.

The woman in the gray T-shirt came to my rescue. “Do you have a card, Ms. Hayle? One never knows when one is going to need a good private eye.”

‘And Tamara Hayle is
a good
PI!” Wyvetta Green added.

“So are they going to make you one of the first female members?” asked Teresa Waterman.

“I very much doubt it.” I picked up the
Star-Ledger
and started furiously paging through it.

She looked puzzled. “Well, why not?”

“It wasn't exactly what you think,” I muttered.

“Ooh, Lord, I know who you are!” Teresa sat up full in her seat, her small eyes brimming with curiosity and disgust. Wyvetta grabbed a towel and wiped away the conditioner that had dripped down her neck. “You're that woman who broke into the club yesterday afternoon and terrorized poor Mr. Sampson, aren't you?”

“Honey, you better lay back down here so I can finish up this head. I got two clients waiting and two more on the way.” Wyvetta tossed me an apologetic glance as she pulled the woman back into her seat and squirted a generous amount of conditioner into her hair.

“Now, Wyvetta. Don't put too much of that on, I don't like the way it smells.”

“It's good for your hair, honey,” Wyvetta said, with a subtle roll of her eyes.

“Good for you!” the woman who was sitting next to me whispered.

“I think that's just terrible for you to have embarrassed yourself
and everybody else by trying to insult Mr. Sampson. My husband told me all about it!” said Teresa.

“Did you terrorize that horrible man for the obvious reasons or has he done something new?” muttered the woman in the gray T-shirt in a low voice. “By the way, my name is Laura Hunter. I'm an emergency room nurse at Memorial.”

“But why would you do something like that?” Teresa returned to my “embarrassing” behavior.

Ignoring her, I turned toward Laura Hunter. “What are the obvious reasons?” I asked, reaching into my bag and pulling out the business card she requested.

“Well, there was that business with the drugs.”

“What kind of drugs?”

“Not the kind you're thinking of,” she said with a chuckle. “Prescription drugs. There was a batch of counterfeit drugs that got on the market, and some of them were traced back to his stores. Nobody could ever get anything on him, and maybe he didn't do anything wrong, but it struck a lot of us as funny, since it was only poor black folks, who are predominantly his customers, who were affected.”

“So there was never an investigation?”

“Not much of one. I know of at least one patient, though, a lady fighting breast cancer, who died. Now nobody knows if she died because the drugs weren't what they should have been or if she would have died anyway, but it made a lot of us uncomfortable.”

“Both my father and my brother are members of the Businessman's Club
and
physicians over at Memorial, and they
both
say that
Drew Sampson had nothing do with that,” Teresa Waterman said, emphatically defending both the integrity of the club and her kin.

“I'm sure you're right,” Laura Hunter backed down, turning back to her magazine. But I wasn't about to let her read in peace.

“So what do
you
think about Drew Sampson?” I asked her. “What's your impression of him?”

“I don't really know the gentleman, so I'm not comfortable saying too much about him. There was just that incident with the drugs, but other than that, I can't say anything about him one way or the other,” she said, clearly unwilling to challenge Teresa Waterman and the authority of the local medical establishment.

“So you haven't heard anything else?” I dug for dirt. To her credit, Laura wasn't about to hand me a shovel.

“I'm afraid the only thing I should really talk about is my own life or the emergency room where I work,” she said with a slight smile. ‘Ask me about that, and I can tell you anything you want to know. Other than that, I probably shouldn't share what I don't know for a fact.”

“I didn't know you were a nurse, Laura,” said Wyvetta.

“Really, Wyvetta. Well, I've been over at Memorial for the last ten years.”

“Is it anything like that TV show
ERY’

Laura chuckled and shook her head. “Most of the time it's pretty dull, and we sure don't have any young doctors like Eriq LaSalle or George Clooney”

“If you did, I'd be over there tomorrow!” said Wyvetta.

“TV does have a way of making things seem more interesting
than they are in real life,” Laura said, putting down her magazine, obviously ready to talk if we wanted to listen.

“I'll give you that,” added Teresa Waterman. “My husband owns a waste management company and everybody thinks he's connected to the mob because of
The Sopranos.
Especially with this being Jersey and everything. How many black men do you know who are connected to the Mob? One of my best girlfriends is Italian, and she's as mad as a bee about the stereotypes on that show. She talks about
The Sopranos
the way my mother used to talk about
Amos and Andy.
It's a shame the lies they spread about ethnic groups on TV”

Finding something we could all agree upon, the four of us nodded in unison.

“Well, sometimes my ER does get close to real life, though,” Laura said after a few minutes. “Life in an emergency room can be full of sad ironies, just like on TV Like last summer. I had a terrible thing happen on my shift.”

We all turned to Laura, eager to hear what she had to say.

‘A woman came in with her husband, who died right in the same cubicle that she'd been in a couple of months before. That shook me up, I'll tell you that.”

“What happened to him?” asked Teresa.

“Walking pneumonia,” Laura said.

“Really?” I asked, wondering if she was talking about Rebecca and Clayton Donovan.

“I had an uncle who died of that. You got to watch that shit, it will take you right out if you're not careful,” Wyvetta said, shaking her head as if trying to dislodge the memory.

“That was Judge Clayton Donovan, wasn't it?” Teresa said, lifting her head again despite Wyvetta's warning.

“Yes, I think he must have been a judge or something important like that because when he died, cops were all over the place. It was a shame though, I felt so sorry for his wife.”

“Rebecca?” I asked, although I knew.

“Yes, that was her name. My niece is named Rebecca. It's such a pretty, old-fashioned name, that's why I remember it. Do you know her?”

“We've met. Nice woman.”

“Yes, very nice. Not more than three months before he died, she came in with terrible pelvic pain. It was diagnosed as pelvic inflammatory disease. I don't know what caused it, but sometimes an IUD will cause an infection like that. We saw a lot of women with that disorder when that horrible Dalkon Shield was on the market.”

“I remember that thing,” said Wyvetta with a shudder. “My girlfriend had that thing up in her, damn near sterilized her.”

“Well, it did cause a lot of problems,” Laura said. “When you see pelvic infections, they can be caused by improperly inserted IUDs. But other things can cause them, too. However a woman gets it, though, if she doesn't catch it in time, it can seal her fallopian tubes and make her infertile. Lord, I guess all this information about the judge's wife is supposed to be confidential, isn't it!”

‘Anything you say within these walls is confidential,” Wyvetta reminded us, with a warning look at everybody. “My mother, Jan, may she rest in peace, used to say that a beauty parlor is like a church confessional. Ain't nothing said within these walls gets out. So don't you
worry, girl. Everything is held in confidence. So what happened to her?”

Laura paused a moment before she spoke. “The woman was devastated, just devastated because that infection had spread so fast. And one of the nurses told me later that she had lost a child to crib death. Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.”

“Now you know that's a shame,” said Wyvetta.

We were all silent for a moment, each lost in her thoughts.

“My first baby died like that. I was twenty-one, just married, and I thought my world had come to an end,” Teresa said, and for a moment the grief she must have felt that day was written on her face. “But I had my husband with me, and even with all his faults, and he does have some faults, we were able to heal and have three more kids, all grown now. Thank God. You never know what pain a woman carries inside her soul.”

That was another thing we could all agree upon and we did, each sharing her varied confidences in the warmth and privacy of Wyvetta's shop.

“So, Tamara, tell me this, exactly what did happen to you at the Businessman's Club last Wednesday?” Teresa asked again, but this time the question was asked with humor and honest curiosity, and we all teased her because she wouldn't let the thing go. But we were friends by then, as close anyway as four women could be on a rainy Friday afternoon in a cozy beauty parlor. So I shared the details of my trip to the sidewalks of Newark by way of two burly brothers, and everyone had a good-natured laugh at my expense.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

E
ven before I heard the kid scream,
I knew something terrible had happened. They had blocked off the sidewalk leading to Annette Sampson's house with yellow tape, and cops were walking around with that look of woe that comes when they've confronted tragic death. An officer, who looked closer in age to my son than to me, stopped me before I could get to the door.

“What business do you have here?”

“I am a friend of Annette Sampson's, and we have an appointment this afternoon.” I went with the present tense, hoping for the best, even though DeeEss sat on the stairs of the porch, shaking as if he were coming apart. His wails of grief stunned us both.

“Jesus Christ!” the cop muttered.

“What happened?”

“I feel sorry for the kid.”

“Officer, what happened?” He looked at me as if just remembering I was there.

“Suicide. That's the husband there.” He nodded toward the house as Drew Sampson ran down the stairs and sat on the curb next
to his son. He put his arm around the boy and held him as if he could will away his pain.

“The husband found the body. Good thing the kid was in the car. The husband called us. Who did you say you were?” he asked, suddenly suspicious. He was obviously a rookie, probably just out of the academy, young enough to be more forthcoming with information than he should be, but tragedy takes precedence over training even with hard-core cops; I knew that from experience. The scowl that was now on his face told me “the Cop” was back in charge.

“Sorry, I didn't say. I'm Tamara Hayle, a private investigator.” I rummaged through my bag for a copy of my license. He gave it a quick perusal and handed it back.

“This area is closed,” he said, giving me no chance to argue.

Lucky for me, I spotted the burly form of my ex-boss Roscoe L. DeLorca, chief of the Belvington Heights Police Department, heading into the house. “By the way, is Chief DeLorca here yet?” I asked with feigned innocence.

“The Chief?” The glassy gaze of respect that fills a rookie's eyes when his boss's name is mentioned changed the officer's expression from that of tough cop to impressionable kid.

“Yeah, DeLorca and I have worked together in the past,” I said, casually linking the Chief's name to mine with an exaggerated nod of self-importance.

“I think he just walked inside.”

“I
think it might be a good idea for you to let me talk to him,” I said with just enough threat to make the kid think I had some crime-scene authority.

“What did you say your name was again?” There was newfound respect in his voice.

“Tamara Hayle.”

He surveyed the area, which except for me and the Sampsons was empty.