No Time to Die Read online

  “It’s not about the force and you know it, James.”

  “Whatever. But you’ll be hearin’ from me.”

  “And I’ll be ready,” I called after his retreating back.

  At Malcolm X Boulevard the group of young African women standing in their usual circle at the IRT listened to the subway train pull in. As the doors opened, their chant began, soft, like singing in church. “Evening, madam. Braids, madam? Beautiful braids, right upstairs.”

  One took a solo as I passed. “Sister. Braids will make you especially more beautiful. Won’t you visit our salon?”

  I smiled and shook my head. I had neither the nine hours to spare nor the ninety dollars to spend in order to find out. I walked past the Casablanca Bar, the bright and busy lights of Sylvia’s, and the takeout line at Majestic’s Seafood.

  Thin streaks of purple still dotted the western edge of sky and I walked quickly, moving past sad rows of tenements dotted with buildings sealed up and businesses that had given up. Retail shops that had once opened with promise and fanfare and plastic pennants fluttering in a “V” now announced failure, reflected failure, in graffiti-patterned steel shutters.

  James receded to the back of my mind as I walked past block after block of desolation, thinking of the empowerment zone. Empowerment dollars. Money and power flying right past lives and buildings crumbling brick by brick onto crumbling sidewalks. Dad had described the sixties’ War on Poverty where the warlords stashed the booty and left the poor still waiting for the miracle.

  I managed to cool down a bit when I turned into 139th Street, a block of neo-Italian Renaissance and neo-Georgian houses. W. C. Handy, Noble Sissle, and Eubie Blake once lived here, and Dad swears that he feels their spirit in his work. This block of houses, designed by Stanford White in 1891, had been nicknamed Strivers’ Row because of the number of black professionals who bought homes here.

  I composed myself before I put the key in the door, but when I walked in, Alvin, my not-quite-teenage nephew, glanced up from the television, then stared at me.

  “Who’d you run into? From the look on your face, if you’d been driving, there’d’ve been nothing left to scrape up, but here you doin’ road rage on foot.”

  I preferred not to answer. Getting the last word on James by calling up his mama was low. The poor woman was probably as disappointed in him as everyone else was.

  And Dad once said that back in the day, some folks died from “playing the dozens.” Some got killed on the spot and he knew of one who had managed to do himself in: a young guitar player in a traveling band who had ascribed the b-word to his girlfriend so often, eventually they both forgot her real name. Her memory resurrected quicker than his, and when he came in from a trip one time, he spent three days studying the goodbye note bannered with her real signature. They found him in the bathroom, his head between his knees and the “works,” flushed pink with blood, still in his arm.

  James got the message that I was not playing. The b-word, like the n-word, was off the rim, and I had to make it plain. Now I drew a deep breath, determined to forget about him, at least for now.

  “Where’s Dad?” I said.

  “Downstairs gettin’ ready.”

  I opened the door leading down to his studio, and the muted strains of Miles Davis’s “Blues by Five” floated up. A minute later Dad came upstairs, resplendent in a white dinner jacket and black trousers.

  “You look like a million,” I said. “And, speaking of millions, I just saw Betty stepping out a stretch at the Lido. Tonight’s her birthday. She wants you to stop by after your gig.”

  Dad ran his hand over his close-cut hair—salt and pepper against dark brown skin. His features were regular, and despite years of bass playing in clubs and after-hours spots with cigarette smoke dense enough to require a respirator, his skin was still unlined and he still walked with the sure step of a man much younger than sixty-two.

  “Hey.” He was smiling at the idea of going from one party to another, like the old days. “Maybe I pull some of the guys. Four A.M. we break in like Western Union, a singin’ telegram. She’ll like that.”

  He paused and looked at me narrowly. “What were you doin’ around the Lido? I thought you had headed to the Schomburg earlier to do some research?”

  “Dad, really. That’s what I intended, but I got detoured and—”

  “Mali, your classes begin in less than two months. You don’t want to—”

  “No, Dad. I can promise you right now, I plan to pass those exams and then develop the best dissertation NYU has ever seen.”

  The horn of a waiting car rescued me. But I heard a sigh as he shrugged, grabbed his bass, and angled it out the door. “See you all later. Remember what I said about that television, Alvin. By ten-thirty I want you lookin’ at the inside of your eyelids.”

  “Yes, sir.” Alvin drew his legs up under him, his eyes glued to the choreography of four three-hundred-pound tag team wrestlers bouncing past each other. The hardest thing they seemed to hit was the canvas, with much howling and leaping and palm pounding. I sat down next to Alvin but five minutes of bogus bumping and ricocheting was all I could take.

  “What do you get out of this?” I asked, wondering if I could develop his reply into a dissertation on the need to accept outright fraud and call it entertainment.

  Alvin shrugged. “I don’t know. Guys are bogus but got some dope shifts. I might learn something.”

  I abandoned the sofa for the quiet of my room but I couldn’t relax. James was like a bad taste on my tongue; a pinprick on my skin whose irritation had spread in a poisonous current and was infecting other parts of me.

  I sat at my desk and pored over my small notebook. A half dozen pages were filled and I added a few more, including a note on the weapon Marie carried. I read again the condition of Claudine’s body when she had been found. The fact that nothing had been stolen. The time Elizabeth had last spoken to her. Then I underlined in red James’s remark outside the Lido.

  I turned back to page one and gazed at the date of Claudine’s death and thought about the unfixable grief of her parents. It had been nearly five weeks. Too much time was passing without answers. I thought of Marie again. As much as James had abused her, she didn’t think he was capable of murder. Why then was she hugging that Glock?

  He didn’t like the way the voices sounded lately. Loud, insistent to the point where turning up his Walkman to blast level wasn’t helping. One voice in particular he couldn’t tolerate, couldn’t even breathe when he heard it. Sounded too much like his mama.

  It was his mama.

  Hazel was screaming, reminding him for the thousandth time how she’d been in labor for sixty-eight straight hours just so his worthless ass could see the light of day:

  Begged that fuckin’ doctor to crush your skull, fold it in so your worthless ass could just shoot out of me.

  And the doctor said, “You’re confused, Mother. You don’t mean what you’re saying.” And I told ’im, “Fuck you, motherfucker, and don’t call me ‘Mother.’ You ain’t nuthin’ to me, understand?”

  And you know what that doctor did?

  Ache breathed deeply, knowing the answer, heard it so many times he’d memorized it.

  He said, “Maybe you shoulda lost some a that weight before you decided to become pregnant. Being overweight is dangerous, Mother. Could cause complications. See you in a few hours.”

  And he walked out and shut the door, just like your no-good daddy, that goddamn son of a bitch.

  Well, here you come a whole goddamn two days later, not just some fuckin’ few hours. And everybody looked, said you was ugly as hell. Still ugly. Shoulda put your head in the toilet minute I got home.

  Twenty years ago, when he was younger, they didn’t have Walkmans, and even if they did, he couldn’t have afforded one. But at times he managed to place a small cardboard box over his head and blow in it, made sounds like the wind rushing in his ears while his mother cursed him outside the bathroom door wher
e he’d locked himself.

  In school, where he couldn’t take the box, the jabs came at him like heat-seeking missiles riding waves of sniggering. Even the teacher—who hid her face at the board but couldn’t quite control her shaking shoulders—did nothing when that worn-out Redd Foxx joke broke over the class.

  “You was so ugly when you was born, the doc went and slapped your mama.”

  Worn-out. Old. But powerful enough to cause burning injury. Funny enough for the girls to laugh if the right boy told it. They laughed. The boys were stupid, but the girls, they should’ve known better. So that made them extra-stupid. Just like his mama. They should’ve known better.

  The doc slapped yo’ mama. Aaaaargh!

  And his mama, in turn, had never stopped slapping him. Words. The sharp heel of a shoe, the ironing cord, the iron itself, the key enclosing him in a closet so dark that even the flashing light inside his head went out.

  And that cereal. Spread all over the floor.

  The pounding shook him, made him jump. He looked around the small bedroom, confused. Was the sound coming from outside? Inside? There it was again, like a hammer.

  He snatched the earphones away, listening in the dark. There was a silence, then something like static, like he’d turned to a bad station in Minnesota. A jangle of voices again and finally that dominant one:

  What you waitin’ for, Ache? You saw the way she looked at you. Disrespected you. You don’t have to take that shit from nobody. Nobody, you know what I’m sayin’?

  He managed to close his eyes.

  Yesterday had been bad. The air-conditioning had broken down in the store again and he’d struggled in the heat to stock the shelves and pack the groceries as quickly as he could while that asshole manager was climbin’ all over him.

  Tellin’ me I wasn’t hustlin’ fast enough. Shit. Why the fuck didn’t he pitch in instead of mouthin’ off?

  Then that woman. Movin’ down the aisle like she the point tank for fuckin’ Desert Storm. That tight suede skirt. And snatchin’ stuff and swingin’ that shoulder bag like she had a .45 in it. And starin’ at me like I was a piece a shit.

  The noise faded, gave way to other sounds. Floorboards creaked under his mother’s weight and he lay against the pillows, exhausted, waiting for the door to fly open again and the air to ring hot with her howling for at least another hour.

  When the door slammed open, the inside voice spiraled up again, up and over his mother’s screaming.

  What you waitin’ for, Ache? the voice inside said. You saw how the bitch eyed you. And you know, you be on the news again. Not just WINS, but TV this time. You be on top of the world. You know how O.J. stopped the stock market? The fuckin’ stock market! Hell, they could do that for you …

  A storm passed through during the night, waking me. By dawn, the few inches of rain had already evaporated into the parched pavement and I knew we were facing another ninety-degree day.

  I lay in bed, listening to the undulating wail of an ambulance, then the blast of a fire engine racing to some distant catastrophe; a few doors away a car maneuvered from a parking spot and moved on a whisk of tires down the street into silence.

  Five A.M. An hour before the day actually intruded, before time to shower, walk Ruffin, and before Dad and Alvin stirred. After some research at the Schomburg on early black social work organizations, I wanted to call Deborah to find out how she was feeling; visit Claudine’s parents even though I had nothing new to tell them. Call Elizabeth. Perhaps she’d want to come with me.

  The sound of the phone cut into my reverie.

  “Mali. You awake?”

  “I am now,” I said, easing to sit up straight. Tad came on sounding as if he’d been up all night and he wasn’t calling to tell me how much he missed me.

  “What … what’s going on?”

  The slight hesitation let me know bad news was coming.

  “It’s Marie,” he whispered.

  “Marie? What happened?”

  “She was found in her apartment around one A.M. Door was ajar and a neighbor pushed it but was afraid to go in. Thought robbers were inside. The neighbor ran back to her own place and called in a nine-eleven. It’s a good thing she didn’t go in.”

  “Was it a break-in? Were the perps still in there?”

  “No.”

  “What, then?”

  “She was killed the same way Claudine was. Wire.”

  My stomach contracted. Marie. She’d had the gun. She’d been prepared. How had someone slipped past?

  “Mali? You still there?”

  “Yes. Barely.”

  “We got a net out for James but he’s gone up in smoke. It’ll be in the Daily Challenge this morning, that’s why I wanted to let you know. Before you read about it. Anything breaks, I’ll call right away.”

  The phone went dead and I stared at the receiver in my hands, waiting for more information to spill into the silence.

  … Wire. Like Claudine. And James has disappeared.

  It was hard not to fold up and crawl back under the sheets, shut my eyes, and shut down my brain.

  Marie had been prepared to fight, to pull that piece at the slightest provocation. How had this happened?

  I kicked the covers away and padded to the bathroom to stand under the shower until the stinging-cold water beat me fully awake.

  “I’ll tell you something,” Dad said as he folded the Daily Challenge flat on the dining table. I had opened the door as soon as the paper had been delivered along with the rest of the mail. I was hoping that Tad had been wrong but the lead story stared me in the face.

  Now Dad was reading it. “You know, James really showed his colors the other night in the Lido,” he said. “No wonder the cops are looking for him.”

  My throat went dry and I put my cup down. “At the Lido? You never said anything had happened that night. You said everyone had had a good time and Betty’d been happy that you showed.”

  I watched Dad refill his cup. The breaking sun slanted in through the window and chased the earlier gray, revealing his face in frowning profile.

  “I kept quiet ’cause I know how you feel about James and how he treated Claudine,” he said. “Claudine’s gone and James is still here and it seems a leopard don’t never change his spots.

  “When me and the fellas popped in, the Lido was in full swing. We stepped in, tuned up just like I planned, then made our way to the back and was settin’ up on the bandstand when we hear this noise, this loud crash up front near the door. A table was overturned and there was James, doin’ a ‘60 Minutes’ profile. Except when he opened his mouth, I thought a toilet had backed up. Every other syllable was ‘f’ and ‘n’ and ‘b.’

  “Finally this woman”—he tapped Marie’s photo on the front page—“I guess all that language was aimed at her. Anyway, she left her barstool, walked up the front, and read him out. Told him and the whole bar how he wasn’t even a man, ’cause a real man would be about a man’s business, not about wastin’ time cursin’ and makin’ a fool of himself.

  “He started for her, and this big, clean head brother just come out the men’s room, stepped up. Plus four guys, old as me, sitting at a table, cleared that railing like Olympic high jumpers. Moved like athletes. Next thing I knew, James was out the door and huggin’ up the recyclin’ can at the curb.

  “We cut into a jam and things snapped back. Drinks flowed and folks started partyin’ again.

  “Betty told me later that James had been actin’ crazy from the jump, thought maybe he’d run into some static on the street and his attitude rode in when he stepped through the door. Who knows? Anyway, they evicted him for steppin’ up to this girl.”

  He gazed at the picture. “Damn shame,” he whispered. “A damn shame. This girl’s dead.”

  I stared at the table with the platters of pancakes, bacon, fresh strawberries, and scrambled eggs. Alvin was late getting up and now I heard the shower running and his voice singing above the noise. I wanted to get up and take
the platters back to the kitchen, to keep them warm until he came down, but I could not move.

  I was the person who’d confronted James that night, caused him to get an attitude. Why didn’t he come after me? Instead he’d gone after his ex-girlfriend.

  I collared Ruffin and left the house, heading for St. Nicholas Park, avoiding Edgecombe Avenue because I did not want to look up at the curtainless windows of Claudine’s empty apartment.

  The stairs through the park led up to St. Nicholas Terrace winding behind City University. The grass smelled fresh and a light sprinkle of rainwater still dropped from the leaves when the wind disturbed them.

  From the terrace, I gazed down over the steep incline of the park and the playground. A bus moved busily along St. Nicholas Avenue, discharging passengers, taking in more, and moving on. Purposefully. Everyone on that bus had a destination. Even the driver had a purpose. To get where he had to go, complete the assigned route.

  I turned around to face the Gothic mass of Shepherd Hall, my favorite building on the campus. Students were already in class, poring, just as I once had, over their assignments. With purpose.

  “I’m going to find James,” I said.

  I spoke to Ruffin because there was no one else to make this promise to. Ruffin looked up, then rested his head on the ground between his paws. Two campus security guards watched us from a safe distance across the street, reluctant to approach. They stared at Ruffin and I let a minute pass before I waved good morning. One lifted his hand halfheartedly, as if he feared Ruffin would leap across the street and snack on his arm for breakfast.

  “Come on, Ruffin. The guys are getting nervous.”

  We left the winding walk at 140th Street and came out on Convent Avenue, passing the John Henrik Clarke House, a brownstone named for one of the founders of the Harlem Writers Guild. At Convent Avenue Baptist Church we turned east and walked down the hill at 145th Street, weaving our way through the crowd rushing to the subway.