Schooled In Lies (25 page)

“Hello?” I said, trying hard not to choke on half-chewed food.

“Why are you so out of breath?” asked Carl, chuckling softly. I quickly swallowed the toast and washed it down with a gulp of orange juice.

“Hey, sweetie. How’s the trial going?”

“That’s why I’m calling. Looks like things are going to wrap up sooner than I thought. So I’ll be in town tomorrow night instead of Saturday afternoon. Have you been thinking about what we talked about?”

“I’ve hardly thought of anything else,” I replied, slumping into a nearby kitchen chair.

“Good. Then I bet you have an answer for me. I’ll see you tomorrow night, babe.” He hung up and I sat there holding the receiver, staring off into space.

This was not good. He was going to want an answer to his marriage proposal and I just wasn’t prepared at all for that conversation. I still didn’t know what I was going to tell him. I had a sinking feeling that our entire relationship was going to be decided during that little chat. The bleating dial tone startled me and I hung up the phone.

I arrived at Cherisse’s house ten minutes later and noticed a familiar car in her driveway. It was a black BMW convertible. It was Gerald Tate’s car. I parked across the street. It was still pretty early and her curtains were drawn. There were no signs of life coming from Cherisse’s house, which told me that Gerald must have spent the night. I had no idea they were an item. Of course, I could be completely wrong as to why his car would be parked in her driveway before 7:30 in the morning. I tried to keep an open mind. Maybe they were running buddies and hooked up every morning to run. But thinking about the gut Gerald had acquired since high school, the only running he was doing was back and forth to the fridge. Clearly, I needed to get a closer look to verify my suspicions.

Except for a paperboy, who looked about twelve, flinging papers from his bike a few houses down, the block was deserted. I started to open my car door when Cherisse’s front door opened suddenly. I quickly slid down in my seat until the only thing showing was the top of my head. I peered through my window and watched as Gerald, dressed only in a towel slung around his middle, opened the screen door and reached down to get the paper that was laying on the doormat. In doing so, the towel slipped off and he caught it just before his privates were exposed to the cool morning air. He turned with the paper in one hand, and the towel in the other, and I got a crystal clear view of a round, brown ass bisected by a hairy butt crack. Eew! So much for them being
running
buddies. But they were buddies all right. The kind that starts with F and ends with K.

Gerald was too busy with the towel to notice me and thankfully pulled the front door shut behind him. I got out of my car and quickly crossed the street to Cherisse’s front yard and walked around to the side of the house. I was hoping there was a window open so that I could eavesdrop. There were two windows on the side that faced the house next door. The blinds on both windows were closed tight and they were both locked. I moved around to the back of the house. There were two small windows that looked out onto the backyard as well as a concrete patio with green metal patio chairs arranged around a matching glass table with a fringed umbrella. The back door was open and I could hear voices coming from inside the house. I couldn’t really hear what they were saying because of the loud hum of Cherisse’s central air-conditioning unit, which I was standing next to. I started to creep towards the back door so I could hear better when the voices got closer. The back door opened. I turned and ran back around the side of the house, slipping on the wet, dew soaked grass, getting grass stains on my white pants and hurting my wrist as I threw my hand down to catch my fall. I had to stifle a moan as I clutched my throbbing wrist to my chest. I looked around the corner into the backyard and saw that Cherisse and Gerald were eating their breakfast at the patio table. I willed my rapidly beating heart to slow down and listened.

“I still can’t believe you did it,” said Cherisse, spooning what looked like honeydew melon into her mouth. She was dressed in the same red Kimono robe that she’d had on yesterday and didn’t sound nearly as congested.

“I told you I was going to. I didn’t have a choice, did I? If I didn’t stop her, she was going to ruin everything.” Gerald had put on sweatpants and a white wifebeater T-Shirt. My ears perked up at that last part. Was he talking about Clair Easton or Ms. Flack?

“I just wish there’d been another way. I mean what you did was so brutal? Don’t you feel bad at all?” asked Cherisse.

“Hell no!” replied Gerald vehemently. “She gave me no choice. It was her own damned fault. It needed to be done. I couldn’t afford to have her running her mouth to Wheatley. I need my job.”

“Do you really think she would have gone to your boss?” Cherisse was pulling apart a croissant and spreading jam on it. Gerald shrugged nonchalantly and shoveled scrambled eggs into his mouth.

“I didn’t want to take any chances. I just wanted the bitch gone and now she is,” he said grimly after taking a gulp from a large coffee mug.

“Well luck seems to be on your side because you’re home free now. But you need to be more careful. Next time you won’t be so lucky.”

“Hell, lucky is my middle name,” said Gerald, laughing nastily. Charisse gave him a sharp look and took another bite of croissant. She started to tell him something that from the look on her face wasn’t going to be anything nice, when the cordless phone sitting next to her plate started ringing.

“Hello,” she said, cradling the phone between her ear and shoulder. I saw her frown and look around wildly. “What are you talking about?”

“Who is it?” asked Gerald, looking worried.

“Mrs. Grable from across the street. She said there’s a woman watching us,” Cherisse said, covering the receiver with her hand.

Crap. Someone had seen me. I looked over my shoulder and saw a woman in a green housedress, with fat pink curlers in her hair, watching me from the front porch of the Pepto pink house across the street. She was on the phone babbling and jabbing an accusing finger in my direction. I straightened up and turned back to look at Gerald and Cherisse.

Gerald immediately got up from the table and started looking around the backyard. I hot-footed it across Cherisse’s front yard, ran across the street, jumped in my car, and started the ignition just as Gerald ran into the front yard.

“I’m callin’ the po po on yo ass. You better run!” The woman I assumed to be Mrs. Grable called out in a gravelly smoker’s voice as I pulled away from the curb.

I looked back as I sped away and my eyes met and locked with Gerald’s. If the look on his face chilled me to the bone, then the slashing motion he made across his throat after pointing at me, made me almost wet my already dirty pants.

Later that day, during the two-hour break between the morning and afternoon sessions, I sat at my desk in my empty classroom to think things over. Two women were dead and there was one person both women had in common: Gerald Tate. From the conversation I’d overheard, Gerald had done something that Cherisse had described as brutal to some woman. Both Ivy Flack and Clair Easton posed threats to Gerald and both died in violent brutal ways, Ms. Flack by electrocution and Clair Easton by stabbing. Could Gerald have killed them both, or was Cherisse in on it too? Cherisse did have Ms. Flack’s silver compact. What was it doing in her bathroom? She had to have taken it after she shoved her into the bathtub with her blow dryer. It must be some kind of trophy.

I felt pain flare up in my wrist as I tossed my empty pop can in the trash. I’d had Iris tape it with an ace bandage from the first aid kit when I’d gotten to work, but even though I knew it wasn’t broken, it was still sore and swollen. I should probably see a doctor. And I knew just the one I wanted to see. I took the rest of the afternoon off and headed to the doctor’s office where I knew Cherisse worked as a secretary.

The medical practice of Drs. Mann, Freeling and Parks was located on Main Street in a three-story brick building that, in the years since it had been built, had been everything from an insurance office to a secretarial school, and everything in between. When I was a teenager, the ground floor was where my old dentist, Dr. Richman, now deceased, had had his office. It had been home to a medical practice for the past five years. I ought to know. Dr. Irene Freeling was Mama’s doctor and I’d brought her to many an appointment. Cherisse worked for Dr. Trent Mann, whose office was on the second floor. I walked into the packed waiting room and spotted Cherisse from across the room. She looked up with a smile when she heard the door to the office open. It immediately left her face when she saw that it was me. She was purposely avoiding my eyes and was pretending to be busy shuffling a stack of papers together as I approached the counter she was sitting behind.

“Can I help you?” she asked, through tight lips coated in peach lip gloss.

“Only if you plan to tell me the truth.” I looked around the waiting room to see if anyone was listening. The room was filled with mostly elderly people who were either watching the large TV mounted to the wall, dozing, or reading magazines.

“Are you here to see the doctor?” she asked, nodding towards my bandaged wrist.

“No. I’m here to see you, and I’m sure you know why.”

She sighed heavily and scowled at me. “I’m at work. I don’t have time for this,” she whispered fiercely, looking dramatically around the waiting room. I looked, too. No one was paying us any attention. Apparently, we couldn’t compete with Judge Judy and Reader’s Digest.

“Take a break. We really need to talk. I’m not going away until we do.”

We stared each other down for a few seconds and then Cherisse got up and stomped off to another room. I overheard her asking someone named Leanne to cover for her while she took a break. She came out from behind the counter and headed towards the doorway to the hallway. I assumed she wanted me to follow her. I did. She walked quickly to the stairwell and down two sets of steps and out the back exit to the parking lot, at which point she rounded on me.

“What the hell do you want?”

Instead of answering her, I pulled the silver compact that I’d found in her bathroom out of my purse and waved it in her face.

“I found this in your bathroom yesterday. It was Ms. Flack’s. What were you doing with it?” She reeled back a little like I’d just swung at her and her mouth fell open. No sound came out, though. I pressed on.

“You killed her, didn’t you? Or maybe it was Gerald. Did you guys do it together? And what about Clair Easton? Which one of you killed her?”

“Is that why you ran off this morning like the police were after you? You thought you overheard us talking about a murder?” She started laughing. It was a harsh condescending little laugh accompanied by the slow deliberate shake of her head meant to mean that she couldn’t believe how stupid I was. I could feel my blood start to boil.

“That’s what you get for spying on us and dipping into our conversation. All up in our Kool-Aid and don’t even know the flavor.” She laughed even louder. I just gave her the death stare until she finally shut up and wiped the tears from her eyes.

“We weren’t talking about Ms. Flack or that crazy Clair Easton. We were talking about Sunny Abou.”

“Sunny who?” I asked. The name did ring a bell. Then it came to me. Sunny Abou was the receptionist at Wheatley Financial. “Sunny the receptionist?” Cherisse nodded.

“Sunny and Gerald had a four-month-long affair. That’s why his last marriage ended. Sunny’s pregnant. She thought Gerald would marry her.”

“And he isn’t?”

“Gerald never had any intention of marrying Sunny. He thought she was bluffing about being pregnant. And even if she isn’t, he’s not about to pay child support for another kid. When she found out, she got nasty and started making threats.”

“Sunny runs things in that office. She has keys to everyone’s offices and knows everyone’s passwords and access codes. She was able to get into Clair Easton’s account and routed a bunch of her money into an account in the Cayman Islands with his name on it. She made it look like Gerald stole it. Gerald’s been scrambling trying to figure out a way to get Ms. Easton’s money back before his boss finds out. Sunny just sat back and started waiting for the phone calls from Clair Easton about her money. Every time she called, Sunny handed Gerald the message and told him he could make it all go way. All he had to do was buy her a ring and set a date.”

“What did he do to her that was so brutal?”

“He reported her to the INS. She was here on a student Visa that expired two months ago. Some INS officials showed up at work yesterday and took her into custody. She’s being deported.”

“Oh my God!”

“Yeah, I feel really bad for her. She just wanted Gerald to do right by her and the baby. Can you imagine what’s going to happen to her when she gets home, having been deported with no degree, unmarried, and pregnant?” That took me be surprise. Weren’t Cherisse and Gerald an item? She saw the look on my face and answered my unspoken question.

“Gerald isn’t my man. We just hook up now and then when we’re both between relationships, or in Gerald’s case, marriages.”

“Even after how he and his friends treated you in high school?”

“It’s just sex. It’s no big deal. We’re just having fun. Besides, I know he respects me more than those other chicks because I’m hip to his game.”

“His game?”

“Yeah,” she said, laughing. “You know how men are. They’ll do and say anything to get laid. They’ll pretend to be everything from your savior to your soul mate to get into your pants. It’s only after they’ve gotten what they want, and can’t get away from you fast enough, that you realize it was all just a bunch of bullshit. Gerald’s no different. He’s good at spotting a woman’s insecurities and working them to his advantage. But I’m not like Gerald’s other chicks. I can see way past all his crap.” She laughed like it was a big joke.