The Twelfth Card (57 page)

“Girlfriend, yo!”

She stopped.

Lakeesha stood on the sidewalk, decked out in tight green stretch pants, a long orange blouse, taut over her boobs, book bag dangling, bling and braids glistening in the sun. Her face had the same somber expression as when Geneva’d seen her last week when that wack bitch Frazier tried to kill her and her father. “Hey, girl, where’ve you been?”

Keesh looked doubtfully at the gap in the chain link; she’d never fit. “C’mon here.”

“Meet me at school.”

“Naw. Wanna talk just us.”

Geneva debated. Her friend’s face told her this was important. She slipped out through the gate and walked up to the big girl. They fell into a slow walk, side by side.

“Where’ve you been, Keesh?” Geneva frowned. “You cut class?”

“Ain’t feelin’ good.”

“Monthlies?”

“Naw, not that. My moms sent a note.” Lakeesha looked around. “Who that old dude you with th’other day?”

She opened her mouth to lie and instead said, “My father.”

“No!”

“Word,” Geneva said.

“He be livin’ in Chicago, or somethin’, you tellin’ me.”

“My moms lied. He was in the system. He got released a couple months ago, came to find me.”

“Where he at now?”

“In the hospital. He got hurt.”

“He down?”

“Yeah. He’ll be okay.”

“And him and you? You phat?”

“Maybe. Hardly know him.”

“Damn, him showin’ up—musta been freaky.”

“You got that right, girl.”

Finally the big girl slowed. Then stopped. Geneva looked at her friend’s evasive eyes and watched her hand disappearing into her purse, gripping something inside.

A hesitation.

“What?” Geneva asked.

“Here,” the girl whispered fast, lifting her hand and thrusting it forward. In her fingers, which ended in black-and-white-checkered acrylic nails, was a silver necklace, a heart on the end of a chain.

“That’s—” Geneva began

“What you give me last month, fo’ my birthday.”

“You’re giving it back?”

“I can’t keep it, Gen. You be needin’ benjamins anyway. You can hock it.”

“Don’t be wack, girl. Not like it came from Tiffany’s.”

Tears were welling in the big girl’s eyes, the prettiest part of her face. Her hand lowered. “I be movin’ next week.”

“Moving? Where?”

“BK.”

“Brooklyn? Your whole family? The twins?”

“They ain’ goin’. None of the family be goin’.” The girl’s eyes swept the sidewalk.

“What’s this all about, Keesh?”

“I’ma tell you somethin’ that happen.”

“I’m not in the mood for drama, girl,” Geneva snapped. “What’re you talking about?”

“Kevin,” Lakeesha continued in a soft voice.

“Kevin Cheaney?”

Keesh nodded. “I’m sorry, girl. Me and him, we in love. He got this place he moving to. I’ma go with him.”

Geneva, silent for a moment. Then: “Was he the one you were talking to when I called last week?”

She nodded. “Listen, I didn’t want it to happen but it jus’ did. You gotta understand. We got this thing, him and me. It ain’t like nothin’ I never felt. I know you wanta be with him. You talkin’ ’bout him all the time, lookin’ him over ever’ day. You so happy that time he walk you home. I know all that and still I done move in on you. Oh, girl, I been worried steady, thinkin’ ’bout tellin’ you.”

Geneva felt a chill in her soul, but it had nothing to do with her crush on Kevin, which had vanished the instant he showed his true self in math class. She asked, “You’re pregnant, aren’t you?”

Wasn’t feeling good . . .

Keesh lowered her head and stared at the dangling necklace.

Geneva closed her eyes for a moment. Then she asked, “How far down?”

“Two months.”

“Hook yourself up with a doctor. We’ll go to the clinic, you and me. I’ll—”

Her friend frowned. “Why I do that? It ain’t like I laid no baby on him. He say he use protection if I say so but he really
want
to have a baby with me. He say it be like part of both of us.”

“It was a line, Keesh. He’s working you.”

Her friend glared. “Oh, that cold.”

“No, that’s
word,
girl. He’s been fronting. He’s working some angle.” Geneva wondered what he wanted from her. It wouldn’t be grades, not in Keesha’s
case. Probably money. Everybody in school knew she worked hard at her two jobs and saved what she earned. Her parents had income too. Her moms’d worked for the Postal Service for years and her father had a job at CBS and another one nights at the Sheraton Hotel. Her brother worked, as well. Kevin’d have an eye on the whole family’s benjamins.

“You loan him any money?” Geneva asked.

Her friend looked down. Said nothing. Meaning yes.

“We had a deal, you and me. We were going to graduate, go to college.”

Lakeesha wiped tears from her round face with her round hand. “Oh, Gen, you a trip. What planet you be livin’ on? We talk, you and me, ’bout college and fancy jobs but fo’ me, it just talk. You write yo’ papers like they nothin’ and take yo’ tests and you be number one at ever’thing. You know I ain’t like that.”

“
You
were going to be the successful one, with your business. Remember, girl? I’ll be a poor professor somewhere, eating tuna out of a can and having Cheerios for dinner.
You’re
the one going to kick ass. What about your store? Your TV show? Your club?”

Keesh shook her head, her braids dangling. “Shit, girl, that just claimin’. I ain’t goin’ nowhere. Best I can hope for is what I doin’ now—servin’ up salads and burgers at T.G.I. Friday’s. Or doing braids and extensions till they go outa style. Which you ask me’ll be all of six months.”

Geneva gave a weak smile. “We always said ’fros’d be coming back in.”

Keesha laughed. “Word. All you need fo’ them is a pick and spray; ain’t no need fo’ no fresh artist like me.” She twined her own blonde extensions around her finger then lowered her hands, her smile fading. “By myself, I’ll end up a played-out old bag. Only way I’ma get over is with a man.”

“Now who’s talking trash ’bout herself, girl? Kevin’s been feeding you crap. You never used to talk this way.”

“He take care of me. He be lookin’ steady for work. An’ he promise he help me take care of the baby. He different. He not like them other boys he hang with.”

“Yes, he is. You
can’t
give up, Keesh. Don’t do it! Stay in school at least. You really want a baby, fine, but stay in school. You can—”

“You ain’t my moms, girl,” Keesh snapped. “I know what I’m about.” Anger flashed in the girl’s eyes—all the more heartbreaking because it was the very same fury that had filled the girl’s round face when she stepped up to protect Geneva from the Delano or St. Nicholas project girls moving on her in the street.

Get her down, cut her, cut the bitch . . .

Then Keesh added softly, “What it is, girl, he sayin’ I can’t hang with you no more.”

“You can’t—”

“Kevin say you treat him bad at school.”

“Treated him bad?” A cold laugh. “He wanted me to help him cheat. I said no.”

“I told him it was fucked up, what he was sayin’, me and you being so tight and ever’thing. But he wouldn’t listen. He say I can’t see you none.”

“So you’re choosing him,” Geneva said.

“I ain’t
got
no choice.” The big girl looked down. “I can’t take no present from you. Here.” She thrust the necklace into Geneva’s hand and released it fast, as if she were letting go of a hot pan. It fell to the filthy sidewalk.

“Don’t do it, Keesh. Please!”

Geneva reached for the girl but her fingers closed on nothing but cool air.

Ten days after the meeting with Sanford Bank President Gregory Hanson and his lawyer, Lincoln Rhyme was having a phone conversation with Ron Pulaski, the young rookie, who was on medical leave but expected to return to duty in a month or so. His memory was coming back and he was helping them shore up the case against Thompson Boyd.

“So you going to a Halloween party?” Pulaski asked. Then paused and added a quick “Or whatever.” The last two words probably were meant to counteract any faux pas created by suggesting that a quadriplegic might attend parties.

But Rhyme put him at ease by saying, “I am, as a matter of fact. I’m going as Glenn Cunningham.”

Sachs stifled a laugh.

“Really?” the rookie asked. “Uhm, who’s that exactly?”

“Why don’t you look it up, Patrolman.”

“Yes, sir. I will.”

Rhyme disconnected and looked over the main evidence board, on the top of which was taped the twelfth card in the tarot deck, The Hanged Man.

He was gazing at the card when the doorbell rang.

Lon Sellitto, probably. He was due soon from a therapy session. He’d stopped rubbing the phantom bloodstain and practicing his Billy the Kid quick draw—which nobody’d yet explained to Rhyme. He’d tried to ask Sachs about it but she couldn’t, or wouldn’t, say much. Which was fine. Sometimes,
Lincoln Rhyme firmly believed, you just didn’t need to know all the details.

But his visitor at the moment, it turned out, wasn’t the rumpled detective.

Rhyme glanced into the doorway and saw Geneva Settle standing there, listing against her book bag. “Welcome,” he said.

Sachs too said hello, pulling off the safety glasses she’d been wearing as she filled out chain-of-custody cards for blood samples she’d collected at a homicide crime scene that morning.

Wesley Goades had all the paperwork ready to file in the lawsuit against Sanford Bank and reported to Geneva that she could expect a realistic offer from Hanson by Monday. If not, the legal cruise missile had warned his opponents that he would file suit the next day. A press conference would accompany the event (Goades’s opinion was that the bad publicity would last considerably longer than an “ugly ten minutes”).

Rhyme looked the girl over. Unseasonably warm weather made gangsta sweats and stocking caps impractical so she was in blue jeans and a sleeveless T-shirt with
Guess!
in glittery letters across the chest. She’d gained a little weight, her hair was longer. She even had some makeup on (Rhyme had wondered what was in the bag that Thom had mysteriously slipped her the other day). The girl looked good.

Geneva’s life had achieved a certain stability. Jax Jackson had been released from the hospital and was undergoing physical therapy. Thanks to some prodding by Sellitto, the man had been officially transferred to the care and feeding of the New York City parole authorities. Geneva was living in his minuscule apartment in Harlem, an arrangement that was not as dire as she’d anticipated (the girl had confessed
this not to Rhyme or Roland Bell but to Thom—who’d become a mother hen to the girl and invited her to the town house regularly, to give her cooking lessons, watch TV and argue books and politics, none of which Rhyme had any interest in). As soon as they could afford a bigger place, she and her father were going to have Aunt Lilly move in with them.

The girl had given up her job slinging McHash and was now employed after school by Wesley Goades as a legal researcher and gofer. She was also helping him set up the Charles Singleton Trust, which would disburse the settlement money to the freedman’s heirs. Geneva’s interest in fleeing the city at the earliest opportunity for a life in London or Rome hadn’t flagged, but the cases that Rhyme overheard her passionately talking about all seemed to involve Harlem residents who’d been discriminated against because they were black, Latino, Islamic, women or poor.

Geneva was also engaged in some project she referred to as “saving her girlfriend,” which she didn’t go into with him either; her advisor for this particular endeavor seemed to be Amelia Sachs.

“I wanted to show you something.” The girl held up a piece of yellowing paper containing several paragraphs of handwriting that Rhyme immediately recognized as Charles Singleton’s.

“Another letter?” Sachs asked.

Geneva nodded. She was handling the paper very carefully.

“Aunt Lilly heard from that relative of ours in Madison. He sent us a few things he found in his basement. A bookmark of Charles’s, a pair of his glasses. And a dozen letters. This is the one I wanted to show you.” With beaming eyes, Geneva added, “It was written in 1875,
after
he got out of prison.”

“Let’s see it,” Rhyme said.

Sachs mounted it on the scanner and a moment later the image appeared on several computer monitors around the lab. Sachs stepped next to Rhyme, put her arm around his shoulder. They looked at the screen.

My most darling Violet:

I trust you have been enjoying your sister’s company, and that Joshua and Elizabeth are pleased to spend time with their cousins. That Frederick—who was only nine when I saw him last,—is as tall as his father is a fact I find hard to grasp.

All is well at our cottage, I am pleased to report. James and I cut ice on the shore of the river all morning and stocked the ice-house, then covered the blocks in saw-dust. We then traveled some two miles north through substantial snow to view the orchard that is offered for sale. The price is dear but I believe the seller will respond favorably to my counter-offer. He was clearly in doubt about selling to a Negro but when I revealed that I could pay him in greenbacks and would not need to offer a note, his concerns appeared to vanish.

Hard cash is a great equalizer.

Were you not as moved as I to read that yesterday our country enacted a Civil Rights Act? Did you see the particulars? The law guarantees to everyone of any color equal enjoyment of all inns, public conveyances, theaters and the like. What a momentous day for our Cause! This is the very legislation about which I corresponded with Charles Sumner and Benjamin Butler at length last year, and I believe
that some of my ideas made their way into this important document.

As you can well imagine, this news gave me cause for reflection, thinking back to those terrible events of seven years past, being robbed of our orchard in Gallows Heights and jailed in pitiful conditions.