Dying in the Dark (2 page)

“Did you hear about my mama?”

“Yes. I'm so sorry. Do they know—”

The rage that came into his face was so intense it made me stop midsentence. Then his eyes watered so quickly I was sure he was going to cry, but he was too big for that. He balled his right hand into a fist and hit the palm of his left hand three times. If he hadn't been a kid, I would have been scared of him. His eyes got hard, and he stared straight out my dirty office window to the buildings outside. When he shifted his gaze back to me, tears were still in his eyes, but he
didn't try to keep them back this time. My first impulse was to offer some comfort, but knowing teenage boys like I do, I knew that was the last thing he would want from somebody else's mama. So I sat back and watched them roll down his hollow cheeks straight down to his just-grown beard.

“What's your name?” I asked him.

“Cecil Jones.” He raised his chin in an odd show of defiance.

“Cecil Jones,” I repeated his name, wondering about the father whose name he didn't carry. “What can I do for you today?” I asked, but I knew what he wanted and that there wasn't a damn thing I could do for him.

“I want you to find out who killed my mama.” There it was anyway.

“What have the police told you?” I asked the predictable question.

“Fuck the police.” He gave the predictable answer, colored with so much anger I was sorry I'd asked.

“What made you come to me?”

“My mama wrote your address down in her book, and it was open to the page with your name on it the day she died.”

“Why do you think that I would be able to do more than the police can?” He looked puzzled, then hurt, then he narrowed his eyes.

“How much you want?” he asked.

“It's not about the money, it's—”

“How much you want?” His voice grew louder, more demanding.

“Nothing,” I said in exasperation.

“You work for free?” He looked doubtful, suspicious.

“No, I have a sliding scale. I usually charge fifty to seventy-five
dollars an hour plus expenses, depending on the job, but I'm not sure if I should take—”

“You knew my mama, right?” His eyes flashed with anger.

“Not for many years,” I said gently.

“You knew my mama, right?” He was a boy again, the tears back in his eyes.

“Yeah.”

“Why won't you do it then?”

I paused for a moment, running through my options, trying to think of an excuse so I wouldn't have to get involved. It's usually wise to let the past stay in the past. But sometimes I'm not a wise woman, and something inside me told me I didn't have a choice.

“Okay,” I said, giving in.

“Then how much you want?”

“Look, you're a kid, so whatever you can manage is fine. If you don't have the money now, I can bill you when you get grown or you can pay me whatever you can pay me.” He smiled a quick, confident grin, Celia's grin when she beat me at poker.

“I got money.” He pulled an assortment of items out of his pocket: a box cutter, two felt pens, a beeper, a pack of chewing gum, a cell phone, a small plastic case, and a thick wad of bills held together by a rubber band. He peeled off four hundred dollars in twenties, counted them twice, then slammed them down on the desk between us. “That enough?” He shoved the rest of the money and his other things back into his pockets.

“Where did you get all that money?”

“Is that enough to start?”

“Yeah,” I said, picking up the money, worrying about where he
got it, but knowing that there was no way in hell he would ever tell me. I sighed and put it back down on the table, then decided maybe I owed the kid the benefit of a doubt. “That's enough to start.”

“When you going to start then?” he asked with a child's impatience.

“We can start now, if you want to. But first, I need you to answer a few questions, and I want you to be as honest with me as you can, even though the answers might make you uncomfortable. When something like this happens, the smallest thing or answer to an embarrassing question is the very thing that will lead me to where I want to go, do you understand?”

He thought about it for a moment. “Okay.”

“I also want you to understand that at some point, I will probably have to involve the police. Are you okay with that?”

A longer pause. “Yeah.”

I took out a pad and pencil to jot down some notes.

“Do you have any idea why your mother wrote my name in her book?”

“Naw, all she wrote was Tamara Hayle, Hayle Investigative Services. I found the book in her room when I found her.”

A chill went through me as I put my pen down. “You found your mother's body?”

“Yeah.” He spoke with no emotion, and I knew that he wasn't able to feel it yet, and it would be a long time before he'd be able to, if he ever did. It had been taken me a decade to get over finding my brother, and I am still haunted by it. Some things never leave you.

“Was she afraid of anybody?”

A shadow crossed his face, and I knew without pushing it that she was, so I didn't wait for an answer. “When did this person threaten her?”

His face turned to stone, and I could see that however tough this kid thought he was, his mama had been dealing with somebody bigger and badder, and he might still be scared of whoever it was.

“So you're not sure who was threatening her?”

“No.”

“Do you know why she didn't go to the police?”

“She did. She went a couple of times.” His voice cracked.

“So they didn't do anything?”

“Naw They didn't do shit.”

I made a quick note to check with the cops about restraining orders placed by Celia against boyfriends, past or present.

“Was she dating anybody?”

The sound that came out of his mouth was somewhere between a grunt and a laugh. “Dating? My mama?”

I put it bluntly. “Did your mother have a man?”

He sighed, an old man's sigh. “There was always dudes hanging around my mama,” he said. That had always been the case with Celia Jones. She was never without a man for long, not even as a teenager. Traveling with a pair and a spare she used to call it.

“What about your father?” His eyes widened, but I couldn't tell what emotion was behind them. “Do you have any contact with him?”

He studied me for a long time before he answered me. “Yeah. Every now and then, my old man comes by.”

“And his name is?”

He paused for so long I wondered if he knew it. “Brent. That's who my daddy is. Brent Liston.”

I tried to conceal my reaction, but couldn't quite do it. I'd known Brent Liston in high school. He was the first of the “bad” boys Celia hung out with who actually ended up doing time in prison. He hadn't been a bad kid then, but a troubled one with a temper that could turn mean at the drop of a dime. But he had been good-looking and charming in his own rough way. He'd ended up doing time in Railway for shooting his cousin over a hundred bucks in a drunken game of blackjack. I'd heard he was out. I wondered if the kid knew his father's history.

“Have you seen your father recently?”

He didn't say anything.

“Had your mother?”

He shrugged.

“Do you know if they ever had a violent confrontation?” The way the kid's face dropped told me that my question had come out of left field. I knew the murder had probably been committed by somebody Celia knew well, and a man who had just done some years for killing somebody over a card game was as likely a suspect as any. I wondered if the cops had talked to him yet.

“No. He never hit her.”

I waited a couple of beats before I asked the next one.

“Do you think he could have done this to your mama?”

“No. I know he definitely didn't do it. I know that! He wouldn't do nothing like that!”

I didn't push it. That would come later.

“Who was she afraid of, Cecil?” He glanced down at his hands, not wanting to answer, so I asked again.

“I don't know the names, I told you, dudes were always hanging around her.”

‘And you don't know which one was threatening her?”

“No.”

“But it wasn't your father?” I went back to Brent Liston.

“I told you already. Naw, it wasn't my father.” I thought about Jamal and his relationship with my ex-husband, DeWayne Curtis. Jamal could talk about his father like a dog, but if he heard anybody utter the slightest criticism, he was on them like white on rice. No matter what DeWayne did, he was still his father, and that counted for something.

‘About the book you got my name from? Do you still have it?” There might be names I could follow up with, even Brent Liston's number or address.

He pulled a book covered in red cloth out of an inside pocket and put it on my desk. I picked it up, glanced through it, then put it back down. “I'd like to keep it, okay?”

“It was my mama's.”

“It will only be for a couple of days while I go through it, and then I'll give it back.”

He looked doubtful. “Okay.”

His beeper went off, and he pulled it out, glanced at me, then at the beeper, then pulled out his cell phone, changed his mind about using it, and put it back in his pocket.

“Can we talk later on? I got an appointment.” He looked nervous, and I wondered exactly what kind of business this boy was in.

“Sure.” I pulled out my appointment book. “What about tomorrow, around this time.”

“Okay.”

“By the way, where do you live?”

“Sometimes I stay with my girlfriend over on Eighteenth Street. But you can reach me at one of these numbers if you need to talk to me.” He jotted down three numbers on the edge of the blotter on my desk. I stood up to shake his hand. He looked surprised, but when I smiled he returned it. Celia's smile.

“I'll ask around, see what I can find out. But don't get your hopes up. I'm sure the cops are still trying to find out who killed your mother, and I really think you should talk to them again.”

“I'll think about it,” he said.

“Everything will be okay, Cecil.” He nodded like he believed me.

After he left, I put his money and the book into a safe I had recently installed. It was then that I noticed the small case he'd left on the edge of my desk. I wasn't surprised when I opened it to find Celia's locket. The fact that she'd kept it for all these years brought tears to my eyes. I placed it in the safe with the money and the book, planning to give it back to Cecil when I saw him the next day.

But the next day came and went, as did the next, and when I hadn't heard from him by Thursday, I called the first number he'd jotted down on the blotter.

“What you want with him?” The woman's voice was rough and ugly.

“Who is this?” I asked her.

“What you want with him?”

“Just let me talk to him, please.”

The woman choked out a laugh that sounded like a croak and came from the back of her throat. “You better make yourself a date with St. Peter then. That boy was stabbed through his heart Monday night. He dead and gone, just like his slut of a mama,” she said.

CHAPTER TWO

I
don't remember hanging up
the phone or even what I was thinking. I just felt cold, as if somebody had shoved a bag of ice into the center of my heart. By the time I got myself together enough to ask the woman for more information, the line was dead. When I called back, the phone was either busy or off the hook; I suspected the latter. So all I knew for sure was that the kid was dead, that he had left my office and run into somebody evil who had wiped him, the last little bit of Celia Jones, off this earth. I've seen a lot of death in my time: my parents, my brother Johnny, more good folks than bad. But when a kid dies like this one did, his future gone before he knew he had one, it's hard as hell for me to shake it off. I'm used to death, but I ain't that used to it.

I'd never seen so much sorrow in a kid's eyes, and the thought of it made me utter one of those long, sad sighs that take everything out of you. I finally got up to make myself some tea, hoping it would make me feel better. Celestial Seasonings is my brand, and I picked through the assortment I keep in a plastic bag in my desk drawer for something to soothe my nerves. Sleepytime wasn't going to do it.
Red Zinger had too much zing. I settled on Tension Tamer, then laughed out loud at my choice. Hell, there wasn't that much “tension tamer” in the world. A slug of bourbon from that bottle Wyvetta Green, the owner of Jan's Beauty Biscuit, keeps stashed in her closet would do me better, and I thought about going downstairs to ask her for a shot.

But it was very late on a Friday night, and although Wyvetta worked late on Fridays, she was probably on her way out. She was a good friend, and I knew she'd help me out if she could, but there wasn't anything she or anyone else could do about what had happened. The boy was dead. His mama was dead, and as far as I knew, I was their last and only link to the living.

I won't lie about it. Part of me wanted to forget the whole damn thing. I didn't really know the boy, I reminded myself. He'd shown up with his bad-boy attitude topped with his mama's smile and forced his woeful little self into my world. As for Celia Jones, that was one sister who was decidedly in my past. And what
was
that dream about anyway? Leftover thoughts from some article in the
Ledger?
My belly turned sour on ribs gobbled down in record-breaking time? It was plain foolish of me to think that a woman, dead as she was, could send me messages from her grave. Yet I could still hear her voice.

Help me!

“To hell with you, Celia Jones!” I said aloud what I'd once before declared through the dust of that car. I had too many other things on my mind now to worry about Celia and her wayward child. I had my own son to take care of, a car to buy, and half-dozen unpaid bills stashed in the top drawer of my desk. True, things weren't as bad as they sometimes are. Although my life is usually a struggle between
broke and broker, this year hadn't been half bad. But I wasn't rich enough to spend time looking for a killer who even the cops had probably given up on finding. Time is money in my business. I charge by the hour, and I've got to be smart about how I use my time. I'd bet the bucks I owe PSE&G, my unforgiving utility company, that the police already had a lead on the bastard who stabbed Celia's boy, and that would probably lead to who had killed her. They sure as hell had more resources than me. Maybe for once, I should leave it to the experts. Truth was, Celia and Cecil Jones had confronted someone hateful and vicious enough to kill them both, and I sure didn't want that craziness touching me or my child.