If I Should Die Read online

  “Yeah. Let’s see. I got somebody comin’ in at eleven. A weave. Gonna take couple hours dependin’ on what all she Want. So best time is ten. Ten sharp, okay?”

  I gave her the location of St. John the Divine, hung up, and called Tad. I woke him, and his voice, sleep-soft, seemed to move right through me.

  “Come on back, baby. I’ll fix a special breakfast in the morning. With whipped cream on top … Come on …”

  “Unh-unh. We’re meeting Viv at ten. If I come back, neither you nor I will be in any shape tomorrow.”

  I managed to stand my ground even though it was shifting beneath me.

  “Damn, you’re hard, baby.”

  “Not as hard as you.”

  “I love you, baby.”

  He sounded so mellow I was starting to rethink this whole situation, but making love on that hardwood floor had put more knots in my back than it had taken out so I bit the side of my mouth and whispered, “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “Well, okay. If you gonna be like that. Leavin’ me in all this distress.”

  “Nine-thirty tomorrow morning, Tad.” I was trying to sound firm, trying to break the feeling that was beginning to point me in the wrong direction. After all, I was closer to his house than I was to my own. It would have been so easy to turn around.

  “Okay. Okay. I’ll pick you up. Wear some glasses and something to cover your head. And you know enough to leave the high heels in the closet.”

  “High heels. Very funny. Headgear and glasses sounds like I Spy. Do I need a trench coat?”

  “Maybe. Rain’s in the forecast.”

  The next morning, I wore a light nylon raincoat, hoping for a smile, but when Tad pulled up, he was in police mode again and didn’t comment. He was behind the wheel of a nondescript, dark Buick with one headlight dented.

  I settled into the front seat. The seat belts didn’t work, nor did the locks.

  “Where’s your car?” I asked, wondering why this one was still on the road. The upholstery was torn and I felt a spring moving under my left hip.

  “In the shop. This is on loan.”

  I looked at the peeling paint on the hood and decided that maybe this car should be loaned to a salvage yard. But when he turned the ignition, the motor was very quiet and the acceleration was quick when we pulled away.

  We headed downtown and he moved his hand from the wheel to touch my ear, but said nothing. Crosstown traffic was light on 125th Street and a minute later we turned at Amsterdam Avenue and parked several yards away from the main entrance of the cathedral.

  Directly in front, a three-man Con Ed crew was examining a manhole and preparing to set up shop, probably to disrupt traffic for the rest of the year.

  We sat in the car watching the entrance as Tad reviewed the plan. When Viv showed up, I was to point her out and Tad would give her a minute to climb the stairs, then he would approach her alone. I was to stay in the car and keep my eyes open. I was disappointed, I wouldn’t be involved.

  He checked his watch again, and as he did, I saw her turn the corner.

  “There she is, Tad. That’s Viv.”

  She moved quickly, with a flowing black silk top billowing around her, but the yellow spandex tights did nothing to minimize the heavy hips, nor did the yellow open-back high-heel sandals help. She looked around, hesitated, then began to climb the stone steps.

  She was on the third or fourth step and Tad had his hand on the car door, ready to open it, when two men got out of a black Cadillac and strode up behind her. One touched her arm and the other grabbed her wrist. She turned around and the expectant smile faded to blank panic.

  “Tad! She’s got company!”

  “Shit! It’s a snatch!”

  For a second, I was speechless. Then I reached to open the door, to run to help her, but Tad grabbed my arm and his grip was like steel. “Don’t move. Don’t you move!” he yelled.

  “What?”

  “You heard me! Don’t move!”

  He flicked his radio and shouted into it. “It’s a damn snatch. Move, dammit!”

  The Con Ed crew at the manhole slammed the cover on and climbed into the van just as Viv was shoved into the car. The Cadillac drove a half block before the van took off, accelerating with a souped-up roar, and slammed into its rear. The impact set off alarms of cars parked across the street, and people crossing the avenue yelled. A woman with a stroller screamed. Others, probably thinking that the woman had been hit, rushed up and a crowd quickly gathered. A cruising patrol car halted as the two men in the Cadillac rushed out to confront the Con Ed workers.

  “Blind-ass motherfucker, didn’t you see us? What the hell’s wrong with you?”

  The largest of the workers grabbed the driver, pinned him to the hood of the Cadillac, and slapped the cuffs on. Then he began to bang his head to the staccato rhythm of his question.

  “Who. Uhn. You. Callin’. Mother. Fucker. Uhn. Mother. Fucker?”

  The crowd roared.

  “Hey, hey, hey! What you think you doin’?” the other man yelled, reaching into his jacket. He withdrew his hand, empty, when he saw the cuffs and the other uniformed police elbowing their way over.

  “What’s goin’ on?”

  The Con Ed men had pulled out their police shields and I watched Viv use the moment to scramble out the opposite door. The leather strap of her purse was looped around her neck and she was barefoot. She used her 180 pounds to burst through the crowd and run right past us.

  Without a second thought, I rolled out of the car and took off behind her as she cut into the park adjoining the church. She was several feet ahead of me and moving like a linebacker, skirting around trees, crossing dirt paths, and plowing through hedges and whatever else stood in her way.

  “Viv! Wait! Wait!”

  Either she did not hear me or panic fueled her flight so much it was impossible for her to stop. She scrambled up an incline, and by the time I reached it, she had slid down to the other side, got up, and continued to run.

  My breath came in painful bursts and there was a thick pounding in my ears. My chest hurt so much that tears stung my eyes. I became angry, realizing that after last night, I was one hundred percent out of shape and couldn’t keep up with her.

  Several yards away, she stepped on something—broken glass or a sharp rock—and suddenly went down to her knees. She rolled up against a tree and was trying to get back on her feet. When I reached her, she tried to scramble away.

  “Bitch! You fuckin’ white-eyed bitch! You dimed me out, didn’t you? Didn’t you?”

  “Are you crazy? Why would I do that?”

  “Those are Johnnie’s boys. How … how did they—”

  I sank to my knees beside her and held my hands over my aching chest. “Because, Viv, your line is probably tapped. I made sure to call you from a pay phone but your line is tapped. Seems like every damn phone in Harlem is.”

  She was breathing harder than I was, and from the look on her face, she was not convinced. I moved closer, not wanting to talk too loudly and knowing that we couldn’t stay here. I took off the nylon raincoat, now dripping wet, my head wrap, and my shoes.

  “Listen, I wouldn’t do that to you, Viv. Here. Put this stuff on.”

  She reached for the scarf and her hands shook as she tied her hair up. My size 10 sneakers fit her but the raincoat was too small. She tied it as best she could around her waist to partially hide the yellow tights, at least until she could sneak out of here and into a cab. Then she looked around and started crying.

  “I gotta git outta here. Away from here …”

  “I’ll help you, but I have to know something.”

  “Somethin’ like what?” Panic caused her to shake and she looked around, listening to every sound that floated our way.

  I touched her shoulder and spoke fast. “Viv. You know that Erskin Harding and Gary Mark were murdered. Did Johnnie … did Johnnie have something to do with it? Did he kill them? Or have them killed? This is important to me, Viv. E
rskin was a friend of mine, a good friend, and I need to know.”

  She glanced around again, looking everywhere. Sweat poured down her face and neck and her blouse was wet enough to wring out. “They knew I was gonna talk, cut a deal. My ass ain’t worth shit now.”

  “Viv, please—I’ll get you out of here in one piece, if I have to carry you. Now tell me …”

  She wiped her face with the palm of her hand, leaving a thin streak of grime across her nose and mouth. “I know about Gary Mark. I don’t know anything about that other guy, Erskin.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I damn sure am sure. Too late to lie now.”

  I stood up slowly and looked around. We were in a thick enclosure of evergreens and I wondered if she could stay here until dark, or at least until Tad hooked up with her. She saw my face and read my thoughts. “You ain’t leavin’ me. You said you’d get me out.”

  And she started to cry again.

  I knelt back down. “I’ll get you out. There’s even a witness protection program that—”

  “Fuck witness protection. I got my own program.”

  “Where will you go, Viv? You have to be careful.”

  “Down to John’s Island. My people there’ll look after me.”

  “St. John’s … in the Virgin Islands?”

  She looked at me and a second later nodded her head. “Yeah. Yeah. Right. That’s right.”

  Then her face and her whole attitude seemed to change.

  “Now listen, Mali. Here’s what you do for me. I got a paper bag in a drawer at Bert’s shop. Third drawer on the right. In the back, behind them jars and tubes and stuff, is a lot of money. Don’t know how much. Probably couple thousand. Emergency stash, you understand? Got more in a safe-deposit but this’ll do me till I can get out of this shit.”

  Her breathing had slowed remarkably and she was much calmer now that she had a glimmer of a plan.

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Tell Bert to put it in a plastic bag, not the kind you can see through, but a thick black one. Tell her to drop it in the recyclin’ can right outside the shop tonight when she close. Tell her to do it the last minute when she lockin’ up. I’ll have somebody watchin’ from somewhere. Then that person’ll go right behind her with a bag with some bottles in it and make like they rummagin’ through the recyclin’. They’ll pick it up for me.”

  “You sure this’ll work? If it doesn’t, I don’t want to hear you calling me out of my name again.”

  “Look Mali, I—I’m sorry about that. I thought—I don’t know what I thought. I ain’t never been in no shit like this in my whole life. That man was garbage from the git-go. Come to think of it, his dick wasn’t all that sweet …”

  “Well, okay, you can get mad but you gotta do it someplace else. We can’t stay here. We gonna find a cab and—”

  “No. Once we step out, we gotta split up. The shit is too hot. We gonna walk as far as the edge of this park, or whatever it is we in, then I’m goin’ out by myself. I know somebody not too far from here. Where we at? Amsterdam Avenue? Yeah. I can make it. That’s the only way to do it.”

  I was amazed at how well she’d taken control of her situation. A minute earlier, she had been blind with panic; now she was like a general, throwing out commands left and right.

  She stood up and pulled at the yellow spandex and I closed my eyes, wondering if she planned to stroll down Amsterdam Avenue wearing only that silk top. A second later I was relieved to see that she had worn a black knee-length Lycra bodyshaper underneath.

  “This supposed to be a girdle only they don’t call it that. If they did, nobody’d buy it.”

  She balled up the yellow tights and threw them in the underbrush. Then she tightened my raincoat around her middle and we moved along a narrow path, away from the direction we had come. I wondered where Tad was and what he was doing. I’d find out soon enough, but right now first things first.

  It was nearly 10:30 when we emerged. Viv went first, stepping quickly out of the exit near 110th Street. I stood near the gate and watched her move fast down Cathedral Parkway until she was swallowed up in the noonday crowd of strollers and college students near Morningside Drive. Then I walked out and circled two blocks in my bare feet. The Cadillac was gone and so was the crowd and the Con Ed crew. I walked to the car where Tad was standing talking to two men.

  One had a ponytail and the other wore a small backpack. They were young and looked like college students except that they were carrying palm-size radios. All three turned to look. There were no introductions and Tad walked up to me quickly.

  “Are you … all right?”

  “I think so.”

  He turned to the two men with a wave of his hand. “Okay. That’s it for now. I’ll hook up with you later.”

  They had not walked out of earshot before he whispered in a shaking voice, “Where the hell did you run to? And where the hell are your shoes?”

  I saw the muscle moving near his jaw and the look in his eyes and it reminded me of a parent who wanted to hug his kid for having survived a disaster but chastises it instead for having gone near the danger in the first place.

  He opened the car so quickly I thought the door would fly off the hinge. We drove three blocks and in the silence I tried to figure out the best time to tell him what I’d learned: now, when he was still angry, or later, when he had calmed down and could absorb it all.

  Suddenly, he pulled to the curb and I sat there, listening as he drummed his fingers against the wheel. Then he exhaled and put his arms around me so tight I lost my breath.

  “Mali. Don’t—don’t do that again. If anything happened to you, it would be the end of me …”

  As it turned out, there was no need to call Bert with any instructions. There was no need for the black plastic, and no one needed to rummage through the recycling bin, much to the disappointment of the two young college looking boys parked across from the shop in that raggedy on-loan Buick.

  When I called Bert from a nearby pay phone, she simply said, “Joe Turner done come and gone.”

  “What?”

  “Just what I said.” And she hung up.

  Five fast minutes later I walked into her shop. She was working on a plump, middle-aged woman, twisting swaths of hair into thick Senegalese-style braids.

  “You all right, Bert?”

  “Yeah, I’m fine. Viv sent her two nephews here to pick up that bag.”

  “A brown paper bag?”

  “Yep.”

  “With something in it?”

  “Uhm-hm. A lotta something in it. Matter a fact, they just left. Two young boys wobblin’ on them new Rollerblades.”

  “And they had the cutest accents,” the woman in the chair said. “Sorta like West Indian but more like southern. You know, like them Geechees.”

  “How young were they?”

  “No more than eight or nine,” Bert said. Her fingers seemed to be flying at the end of the long braids.

  I closed my eyes and as hard as I tried, could not imagine two little boys skating down Frederick Douglass Boulevard and over to Amsterdam Avenue with several thousand dollars in a paper bag.

  Bert glanced at my face and sucked her teeth.

  “Don’t you go gettin’ gray hair over it, Mali. Viv know what she doin’. Girl been in the game too long not to know how to put one foot in front of the other.”

  Bert was right. And I had to give Miss Viv credit. She certainly knew how to put her feet in front by several yards. Probably sat in a cab right around the corner waiting for her nephews to join her. All that talk about black plastic bags and recycling bins gave her just the breather she needed to book.

  “This is Viv’s customer,” Bert said, changing the subject. “Decided on braids. Too hot for a weave. This’ll hold her till Viv gets back from her emergency.”

  Beyond Bert was Viv’s workstation, just as she’d left it: combs, curling irons, oils, and lotions in perfect alignment on a clean white towel�
�as if she had only popped out to Laura’s Luncheonette on the corner and was expected back momentarily.

  Who else knew she was headed out of the country? At any rate, Tad needed to get to her before someone else did.

  The next day when Tad called, I could hear the frustration in his voice. “We have people at Kennedy and Newark. Customs was alerted at St. John’s, St. Thomas, St. Croix, and Puerto Rico but there’s been no sign of her. And she sure as hell didn’t swim.”

  “Maybe,” I said, “she didn’t go there at all.”

  “Well, if you think of anything else, page me and I’ll come by. She turned out to be one slick sister.”

  I hung up and went into the bathroom and filled the tub. A few minutes later I lay back in a cloud of scented bubbles, closed my eyes, and tried to recall everything Bert had said.

  Which wasn’t much, except that Viv knew how to put one foot in front of the other.

  … Those boys had cute accents, sounded like—

  … Geechees.

  I opened my eyes and stared at the ceiling, trying to remember if Viv had that accent. The few times I’d heard her speak, she was either cursing her diet or the ineffectiveness of it; the loss of her shop and the general bad breaks in her life. Maybe that’s why Bert had kept the TV turned up so high. Too much negativity floating around wasn’t good for business. People came to get away from troubles and maybe trade some light gossip but not to get bogged down in heavy-duty stuff that no one could do anything about.

  Even when Viv had done my nails, I was more affected by her anger than by the information I knew she had. I hadn’t noticed any accent.

  … Even in the park. Word for word. What did she say …

  … John’s Island. My people there’ll look after me …

  Dad had once complained about a young sax player newly arrived in New York sporting orange loafers and no socks who could make a horn do everything but cook dinner.

  “Hear Manny’s axe, knock you out. We even excuse them country kicks, but his Geechee got to go. Got to take it back.”

  “Back where?”

  “John’s Island, where he come from. South Carolina need to put out a special dictionary just for that bad-talkin’ boy.”