No Time to Die Page 11

I don’t know when the fog lifted and the music stopped but the dreams vanished and I heard Dad’s voice. “Mali, can you hear me? You had us scared, girl. Really scared. Can you hear me?”

  I floated to shore and opened my eyes.

  “Scared? Of what? What happened?”

  Dad looked like an old man. When Alvin’s face came into focus, he also looked old.

  “What happened to you guys?” I asked.

  They glanced at each other, then at me, but I was staring around. At the hospital curtains, the tall window with its blinds half drawn, the pale pastel color of the bedspread, and finally at the chalk-white plaster of the cast on my left arm and leg and the tubes running into my right arm from a drip line.

  “What happened to me?”

  “You were hit by a car. You had a concussion, your left arm’s broken, your leg’s fractured in two places, and your knee is dislocated. You were out of it for a while. They did a scan and there’re no blood clots. You were lucky. Someone said you flew about fifteen feet before you hit the ground.”

  I looked around, trying to recall where I’d been before I’d ended up here. I couldn’t remember. Finally I said, “Was anyone else hurt?”

  I had visions of a cab jumping a curb and mowing down a line of pedestrians.

  “No. Just you. Hit and run. Tad said he’d left you at 145th Street and Seventh. You were hit on 137th and Lenox. Needless to say, he’s very upset.”

  “Yep. And Bertha and Elizabeth too. As a matter of fact, Tad should be along any minute.” Dad checked his watch again.

  Alvin leaned over my shoulder to kiss my forehead and I felt his tears. “Aunt Mali. You’re gonna be okay. You’re gonna be—” He straightened up and left the room to stand outside in the hallway. I listened to him blowing his nose.

  “Boy was worried, Mali. Plenty worried.”

  “He must’ve been. Imagine calling me Aunt Mali. Makes me feel like I’m ninety years old.”

  “Yeah, well. We were all worried.”

  Dad cleared his throat. I saw that his eyes were also full, and behind the unshed tears was an anxiety I’d never seen before. I wanted to hug him to me and let him know that I was going to be all right and from now on I would be more careful. Look both ways. Cross at the green. I wanted to hug him but the cast was heavier than it looked and my other arm was also immobilized.

  “Dad. Go and see about Alvin. Make sure he’s all right.”

  He rose at once, and the activity, the act of having something to do, having to see about someone else’s comfort, restored him. I watched until he walked out, then I closed my eyes. A hit-and-run. Was the driver drunk? High? Had he had a dizzy spell? Was he blabbing on a cell phone while trying to maneuver through traffic and lost control?

  I was tired suddenly but snapped awake when I felt the soft mustache brush the side of my mouth, then kiss me full on the lips. I tasted the familiar flavor, saw Tad’s half-closed eyes and the small dimple in his chin and the silver in the edge of his hair, and nearly broke my other arm in an effort to hold him to me.

  “Mali. You had us all goin’ for a while, girl. You had us goin’.”

  “I’m sorry. This is all probably my fault. My own carelessness. I should’ve watched where I—”

  His finger went to my mouth, then he kissed me again. “Don’t say anything. Not now. You’re gonna be all right and that’s what matters. That’s what counts. You’re gonna be walkin’ out of here in a couple more weeks. Then we can talk about it. I love you, baby. I love you.”

  Two weeks and more X rays and another CAT scan and I was fitted with a plastic leg brace and released. I left the room in a wheelchair with Dad and Alvin walking beside me. A plainclothes officer who was sitting at the end of the corridor accompanied us onto the elevator, through the lobby, and out to the curb where Tad was waiting with the motor running. He helped maneuver me into the front seat, gave Tad a thumbs-up, then walked across Lenox Avenue and disappeared into the noonday crowd.

  I watched as Tad buckled me into the front seat. My left side felt stiff and a flash of pain shot through me as I tried to turn around.

  “That officer, he a friend of yours?” I asked, trying to ignore my discomfort.

  “You might say that.”

  Dad and Alvin were silent and I could feel something building as we cruised along. Finally I said, “Was the officer there the whole time I was in there?”

  “Couple of ’em.”

  “Why? Was I under arrest? I wasn’t the driver. I was the victim.”

  “It was for your protection, Mali,” Dad finally said.

  Alvin was quiet but I could hear him moving restlessly in the seat behind me. I tried to turn around to look at Dad but the cast made it impossible. I gazed at Tad, who was driving as if he were on a minibike in the fast lane of the Jersey Turnpike.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “We’ll talk when we get home,” he said.

  The ride was short but so quiet I didn’t know if we were coming from or going to a funeral.

  Ruffin was so glad to see me he nearly bowled me over. His wagging tail beat against me with the force and power of a hammer, and all the pain I thought I’d left in the hospital came back. I hobbled over to the sofa and eased down against the pillows. Alvin shooed him back to his favorite spot near the fireplace while Dad made sure I was comfortable. Everyone busied themselves with small activity and my patience faded as I watched.

  “What. The. Hell. Is. Going. On?”

  I try not to use hard language in Alvin’s presence but my patience was gone and something else, fear perhaps, had settled in its space. Tad turned. He had been checking the windows, making sure they were locked. Now he came over to sit next to me.

  “Mali. Here’s what happened. The hit-and-run was no accident.”

  “What?”

  “It was deliberate.”

  My mind scrambled with images, memory. Was it someone from the precinct where I’d filed the lawsuit? The cop who’d harassed me, made all those threatening phone calls, was now dead. Terry Keenan had been killed in a crack den uptown. He and Danny Williams, Tad’s partner, had been part of a drug distribution network, and Danny had shot Terry in that small room just as the DEA busted in. I had been trapped in there and saw the whole thing.

  Was someone at the precinct still nursing some misplaced grudge because two of their own had been brought down and the entire precinct had come under a cloud?

  “How do you know it was deliberate?” I asked. “Who was it?”

  “James.”

  “James?”

  I stared at him. James. When it finally registered, I wanted to laugh but the side of my face still felt as if I’d run into a wall. James. The coward couldn’t deal face-to-face. He had to use a car to get at me.

  “I had the car impounded,” Tad said. “It had been stolen and his prints came up along with some others, plus when he jumped out of the wreck, several witnesses got a pretty good look as he ran.”

  Alvin rose suddenly from the chair where he’d been listening quietly. “If me and my boys find him, Mali, he’s gonna get tagged. He’s gonna wish he’d picked someone else to mess over. I got Morris and Clarence on the drum too. We’ll get him.”

  I watched him pace the floor, his long legs covering the length of the room in what seemed like five steps, his muscular arms pressed against his chest. His dark handsome face had lost its softness. He was about to say more when Dad held up his hand.

  “Alvin, that man is crazy and he’s dangerous. I understand how you feel but I’m asking you not to get involved. And I’m asking you not to involve Morris or Clarence either.”

  “But, Grandpa, he meant to kill—”

  “That’s true but you’ve got to let the police handle this.”

  Alvin shot a glance at Tad, a scowl that said if the cops were doing their job, how come they haven’t found him yet?

  “We’ll get him,” Tad said, acknowledging the unspoken question.

 
Alvin glared at him, then looked at me again. “See, Mali. If Aunt Celia was here, she’d know how to take care of business. She wouldn’t wait for anything or anybody. They’d just slow her down.”

  With that he turned and walked out of the room. His footsteps echoed loudly on the stairs, then we listened to his bedroom door slam shut.

  Dad cleared his throat and rose to move toward the stairs. “That boy is gettin’ beside himself. He needs to—”

  “No, Mr. Anderson. Wait,” Tad said. “Leave him alone for a while. He’s more frightened for Mali than he is angry. He feels we’re not doing enough but we’ll get James. We will get him.”

  Dad nodded but his face looked drawn.

  “Who’s his Aunt Celia?” Tad asked.

  “Actually, it’s my grandaunt,” I said. “She was my mother’s aunt. Lived in Charleston in the twenties and had her own way of dealing with things … Her boy was murdered by a cop for sitting on his own stoop.”

  And I told the story the way my mother had told it to me, the one story in particular that she had carried through the years like a shield on her arm and a rock in her pocket. I told it now to pull my mind away from the pain that was piercing my leg like a bullet.

  “Celia was a medicine woman and went one night to help a midwife with a hard delivery. While she was helping to coax one stubborn child into the world, her own was taken out.

  “It went like this, her neighbor said, who had watched from the shadows of her own porch. ‘Saw the whole thing. Policeman, that big ugly one, come ’round the way, spotted Sun, and told ’im to move. Sun tell him he live in the house. Ugly policeman, you know the one I’m talkin’ about, said he didn’t care. Wanted the boy off the steps by the time he made the corner again.

  “ ‘And naturally Sun, bein’ the boy he was raised to be, didn’t move and the policeman when he made the corner again, came and tooken ’im away. We didn’t know where and by the time we got word to Miss Celia, it was probably too late.’

  “When Celia and Mr. Mickey, the colored undertaker, retrieved the broken body from the alley in back of the courthouse, she said not one word, other than what she instructed Mr. Mickey to do.

  “ ‘No. Don’t clean nuthin’ on him. Leave him, leave his clothes just as you see it now. But you and your boys bring me the finest, the most beautiful box you have. I’ll take care of everything else. Everything, you hear me?’

  “And Mr. Mickey, knowing Celia, knew better than to say a word. So her boy, not quite eighteen, was laid in a velvet-lined casket of African mahogany, placed in the front parlor near the windows for two days with two rows of candles, and for two nights Aunt Celia sat with him in a cloud of frankincense.

  “On the third sunrise, she placed a gold coin on each eyelid, and at his feet, a small hen, the red just beginning to dampen its white feathers, and she closed and sealed the casket herself.

  “When Mr. Mickey arrived, she said, ‘Too bad you colored and that police is white.’

  “Mr. Mickey nodded and loaded the casket onto the horse-drawn carriage, knowing that in seven days the white undertaker would have someone knocking on his door.

  “And sure enough, that cop making his rounds a week later fell to his knees and sucked his last breath right in front of Celia’s stoop.”

  Tad nodded politely but I continued. He needed to hear the entire story in order to understand Alvin’s attitude.

  “Her prices doubled after that,” I said. “Folks even came from out of state and she charged triple for court appearances. One time she waived her fee when a farmer had beaten a white boy for ‘interfering’ with his little girl.

  “The farmer, looking ancient with his skin turned ashen from despair, sat in the first row, his head bowed before the judge, wondering what his new life would be like dragging an ankle chain. If they decided not to hang him.

  “When the case was called, Celia walked in, gliding silently down the aisle. The court took a look at the little gauze bags pinned to her lapels—white bags no larger than postage stamps on the left, and blue bags, even smaller, on the right. One look and the judge, the jury, and the aggrieved plaintiff stampeded through the window, cleared the porch, and disappeared across the lawn.

  “ ‘Miss Celia, how much I owe you?’

  “And she had looked at the light that had come back in the farmer’s eyes and then gazed at his terrified little girl and said, ‘Nuthin’. Wasn’t no trial.’ ”

  Tad looked at me and shook his head. “You’ve got quite a family,” he murmured.

  I heard the skepticism and ignored it, but Dad said, “That’s a true story. Part of our family history.” He rose from the chair and strode up the stairs. “Let me see if Alvin’s calmed down.”

  We listened until the footsteps faded and Tad said, “Kid’s got a strong back.”

  I said nothing, wondering if it had been a good idea to have told Alvin about Aunt Celia.

  “Does Elizabeth know it was James?”

  “No. She probably dislikes him as much as you do, and I’d rather keep this under my cap for now. At least until we nail him.”

  In the quiet, I could hear the tick of the grandfather clock at the foot of the stairs. Tad shifted on the sofa and I heard him clear his throat. “There’s something else,” he said. “I rushed away from you that night because of a call …”

  “What happened?”

  “Felicia Temple was killed.”

  I stared at him. “Felicia? The artist?”

  He nodded. “She’d been dead three days. The housekeeper had been away, and when she returned that Saturday, she found her in the kitchen.”

  The kitchen. I did not have to ask how she was killed. I closed my eyes, picturing what had been found on her body.

  “This makes three now,” he said.

  Even as he said it, I had trouble ingesting it. Felicia Temple. Alone in that huge brownstone since the death of her husband more than five years ago. She was so attractive everyone had wondered how soon she’d remarry but she never did. Instead she’d devoted herself to her art, turning out one magnificent painting after another, and enough pieces of sculpture to fill a small museum.

  In fact, her house was a museum, an art gallery, and a sculpture studio all rolled in one and had been prominently featured on the Harlem house tour last spring.

  She had a remarkable sense of humor. When the first strand of gray appeared, she had stripped all the color from her hair and dyed it an eye-popping silver.

  “You can’t beat Mother Nature,” she’d said, “so the wisest thing to do is to work with her. Enhance her gifts. And have fun doing it. Laugh. Once we stop laughing, it’s all over.”

  That’s what she’d told Dad when he’d attended one of her in-house exhibits. He’d bought one of her sculptures, a twenty-inch statue of an African warrior carved from lignum vitae in the shape of a sword, his shoulders jutting out like the haft and his arms vanishing into his sides to form the blade. A coil of metal encircled his neck and a five-inch helmet of sharply pointed brass extended from his head.

  Dad had placed it on the mantel and stared at its fierce expression, trying to think of a name for it. “Felicia said ‘lignum vitae’ means wood of life and is one of the hardest woods in the world. Well, this is one hard, tough-lookin’ brother. Gotta find a suitable title. Wouldn’t want him mad at me for misnaming him.”

  “Why don’t you ask Felicia?” I’d said.

  Instead, he’d asked her out to dinner. In fact they’d gone out several times and I’d entertained the idea of having a stepmother only ten years older than I was and it seemed like a good idea. Dad had been a widower long enough. But nothing happened. They’d remained good friends and she’d remained single and so had he.

  Now she was gone and now I understood the desolation in back of the unshed tears when Dad looked at me.

  “Listen,” I said as Tad rose and moved toward the bar. “Fix me a double Absolut. No ice.”

  “You sure? What about your pain medication?”


  “I’m not taking it. Makes me too sleepy.”

  I watched him standing at the bar, uncapping the bottles, pouring my drink, and pouring his own, and I wondered what Felicia’d been doing in her last moments. How had the killer surprised her? How had he gotten in the house? Claudine. Marie. Felicia. How had they been so trusting?

  Tad handed me the glass but now I felt a constriction in my throat and lost my desire for the drink. I studied the clear liquid, thinking of the cereal scattered over the bodies.

  “What happened with the videotape?” I asked, trying to clear the images from my mind.

  Tad came to sit near me again. “The film was shot outside the supermarket on 130th Street, just as Billy described, and the hands were there, definitely working on the box of cereal, but when I tried for a possible ID the manager wasn’t too cooperative. Asked for a warrant ’cause he didn’t want to end up on the wrong end of a lawsuit. I got the warrant but meanwhile one of the employees had split.”

  “Who?”

  “Guy who’d been working off the books, no Social Security number, address someplace in the Bronx. Went up there and found a vacant lot. In fact, the whole block had been knocked down. New construction going up all around Prospect. Street guy told me the spot had been vacant about two years. So I’m back to square one.”

  “You’re back to Harlem,” I said. “I think he’s right here, somewhere in the neighborhood. Felicia, Marie, Claudine. All were roughly in the same area so I think the guy’s around here too. Were you able to get a description?”

  “Guy was also vague about that. He was more worried about covering his own back than he was about somebody stealing a box of cereal. Store’s part of a chain but independently managed and he may be skimming.

  “Anyway, he said that the guy was about five feet eleven, not too well developed, but arms like he’s into weights. Brown complexion, perpetual frown, mid-twenties, close-cut hair. Goes by the nickname Ache. But he couldn’t ID the hands. Said it could be anyone and he was going to beef up security. He was nervous as hell. Probably thinks I’m gonna call the Department of Labor to come in and scan his books.”