God Don't Play (33 page)

Enjoy the following excerpt from Mary Monroe’s

SHE HAD IT COMING

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CHAPTER 1

I
saw my best friend kill her vicious stepfather on the night of our senior prom. While our classmates were dancing the night away and plotting to do everything we had been told not to do after the prom, I was helping Valerie Proctor hide a dead body in her backyard beneath a lopsided fig tree.

Ezekiel “Zeke” Proctor’s violent death had come as no surprise to me. It happened sixteen years ago but it’s still fresh in my mind, and I know it will be until the day I die, too.

Mr. Zeke had been a fairly good neighbor as far back as I could remember. When he wasn’t too drunk or in a bad mood, he would haul old people and single mothers who didn’t have transportation around in his car. He would lend money, dole it out to people who needed it, and he never asked to be repaid. He would do yard work and other maintenance favors for little or no money. And when he was in a good mood, which was rare, he would host a backyard cookout and invite everybody on our block. However, those events usually ended when he got too drunk and paranoid and decided that everybody was “out to get him.”

When that happened, barbequed ribs, links, and chicken wings ended up on the ground, or stuck to somebody’s hair where he’d thrown them. People had to hop away from the backyard to avoid stepping on glasses that he had broken on purpose. There had not been any cookouts since the time he got mad and shot off his gun in the air because he thought one of the handsome young male guests was plotting to steal his wife. In addition to those lovely social events, he’d also been the stepfather and husband from hell.

Valerie’s mother, Miss Naomi, bruised and bleeding like a stuck pig herself after the last beating that she’d survived a few minutes before the killing, had also witnessed Mr. Zeke’s demise. Like a zombie, she had stood and watched her daughter commit the granddaddy of crimes. Had things turned out differently, Miss Naomi would have been the dead body on the floor that night, because this time her husband had gone too far. He had attempted to strangle her to death. She had his handprints on her neck and broken blood vessels in the whites of her eyes to prove it.

To this day I don’t like to think of what I witnessed as a murder, per se. If that wasn’t a slam dunk case of self-defense, I don’t know what was. But Valerie and her mother didn’t see things that way. They didn’t call the cops like they’d done so many times in the past. That had done no good. If anything, it had only made matters worse. Each time after the cops left, Miss Naomi got another beating. They also didn’t call the good preacher, Reverend Carter, who had told them time and time again, year after year, that “Brother Zeke can’t help hisself; he’s confused” and to be “patient and wait because things like this will work out somehow if y’all turn this over to God.” Well, they’d tried that, too, and God had not intervened.

“None of those motherfuckers helped us when we needed it, now we don’t need their help,” Valerie’s mother said, grinding her teeth as she gave her husband’s corpse one final kick in his side. She attempted to calm her nerves by drinking vodka straight out of the same bottle that he had been nursing from like a hungry baby all day.

Miss Naomi and Valerie buried Mr. Zeke’s vile body in the backyard of the house that Miss Naomi owned on Baylor Street. It was the most attractive residence on the block, not the kind of place that you would expect to host such a gruesome crime. People we all knew got killed in the crack houses in South Central and other rough parts of L.A., not in our quiet little neighborhood in houses like Miss Naomi’s. Directly across the street was the Baylor Street Mt. Zion Baptist Church, which almost everybody on the block attended at some time. Even the late Mr. Zeke….

The scene of the crime was a two-story white stucco with a two-car garage and a wraparound front porch that was often cluttered with toys and neighborhood kids like me. The front lawn was spacious and well cared for. A bright white picket fence surrounded the entire front lawn like a hounds-tooth necklace. Behind the house, as with all the other houses on the block, was a high, dark fence that hid the backyard, as well as Valerie’s crime.

Miss Naomi’s house looked like one of those family friendly homes on those unrealistic television sitcoms. But because of Valerie’s stepfather’s frequent violence, the house was anything but family friendly. He had turned it into a war zone over the years. Valerie’s baby brother, Binkie, referred to it as Beirut because Mr. Zeke attacked every member of the family on a regular basis, including Valerie’s decrepit grandfather, Paw Paw, and even one-eyed Pete, the family dog.

Even though there was blood in every room in that house, that didn’t stop me from making it my second home. Over the years I had learned how to get out of the “line of fire” in time to avoid injury whenever Mr. Zeke broke loose.

That night, I had innocently walked into the house and witnessed Valerie’s crime. As soon as I realized what was happening, I threw up all over the pale pink dress that had cost me a month’s worth of my earnings. I continued to vomit as I watched Valerie and her long-suffering mother drag the body across the kitchen floor to the backyard so casually you’d have thought it was a mop.

Before they reached the gaping hole in the ground that had several mounds of dirt piled up around it like little pyramids, they stumbled and dropped the corpse. There was a thud and then a weak, hissing sound from the body that made me think of a dying serpent. Somebody let out a long, loud, rhythmic fart. I could smell it from where I stood in the door like a prison guard. And it was fiercely potent. I couldn’t tell if it had come from Valerie, her mother, or if it was the last gas to ooze from the asshole of the dead man. It could have even been from me, but I was such a wreck, I couldn’t tell. I squeezed my nostrils and then I froze from my face to the soles of my feet.

I held my breath as Valerie stumbled and fell on top of one of the mounds of dirt. Miss Naomi, breathing hard and loud, fell on top of Mr. Zeke’s corpse. One of us screamed. I didn’t realize it was me until Valerie scolded me. “Dolores, shut the fuck up and help us.” Why, I didn’t know. With the tall dark fence protecting the backyard like a fort, none of our neighbors could see her. “We need to get him in this hole
now,
” she said, huffing and puffing. I couldn’t believe that this was the same girl that Reverend Carter had baptized less than a week ago, in the church across the street from the scene of her crime.

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Copyright © 2006 by Mary Monroe

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ISBN: 978-0-7582-5793-2