Of Blood and Sorrow (5 page)

I should know by now that when things stir that easy, there’s always something lumpy at the bottom of the pot. Yet there I sat, sated by wine gulped too fast and greasy tuna fish, congratulating myself on earning a week’s wages without a day’s hard work. I went upstairs feeling good, not even bothered by Jamal ignoring my knock at his door.

“Stay mad, I love you anyway,” I called out, amused by his stubbornness. Sick of the world and slightly drunk, I filled my bathtub with lavender bubbles and soaked until my toes got wrinkled; then I went to bed remembering the last time I made love to Basil Dupre.

FIVE

I
WOKE WITH A START
, heart beating fast. I was lying on the same old bed, staring at the same cracked ceiling that stretched across the same room I’d slept in for more years than I care to remember. But my stomach was clenched so tight I couldn’t catch my breath.

Just getting old.

That was what my grandma would say when she woke, one hand clutching her heart, the other holding me. I’d creep into her room when my parents fought, seeking peace in the softness of her narrow bed. When I think of her, I can still smell the camphor sweetened by lavender cologne that lingered on her sheets.

Just getting old, that’s all, baby. What you don’t think about in the day meets you when the sun go down.

Are you scared, Grandma?

Getting old passes, too.

“Ain’t that old, Grandma!” I said aloud to the memory of her and those times.
Ain’t that old.

Yet there was that tightening beneath my heart.

Jamal!

Always my first thought when I need to worry. I glanced at the clock: 8:45. I’d overslept, and Jamal was in summer school going for those extra credits, if he knew what was good for him. I yawned and stretched, still tired as hell; Lilah and Barnes had really put me through it.

“Jamal, you better be up and out!” I yelled just in case.

No answer. Good. At least he’d started
his
day. I felt bad about the fight we’d had last night. I’d make it up to him tonight. Red Lobster with all the trimmings would be a start. His taste in seafood grew more expensive each year; popcorn shrimp was a thing of the past, but Barnes’s check would clear in a day or two, so I could afford to play big spender.

I grinned when I thought about that check. I had a lot to be thankful for this morning. I said a silent prayer of gratitude for everything that came to mind, then jumped into the shower and got dressed. I gulped down a cup of coffee while spreading butter on an English muffin I’d eat on the road, then headed to Jersey City.

The sun was shining brightly as I entered the old port city, second only in size and people to Newark. Chilltown, as folks here liked to call it, was flying high these days, flaunting the style and money my dear hometown could only aspire to. Eleven miles of waterfront on the Hudson had made it a developer’s dream, and the city was strutting its wealth.

It hadn’t always been that way. The violence and blight that swept through Newark in the sixties and eighties and was still having its way had run through Jersey City, too. There was a time when the roughest dudes in the Central Ward avoided the place like the plague. Then the city came into its own. Rich folks not quite rich enough for Manhattan suddenly discovered that “interesting” little spot across the river closer to Wall Street than Fort Greene or Park Slope, and before you knew it, things had turned around. The “gentry” moved in and gentrified the deserted Victorians and decrepit factories, and suddenly they were selling for close to a million. The city still had pockets of poverty as deep as those in Camden and Newark, but nobody talked about them much, and folks tended to forget they were there. It wasn’t like Newark, with its spate of teenage killings that had brought down property values and haunted my son. Our new mayor, kid that he was, was getting good press. For the sake of my son, I prayed he deserved it.

Ken Gibson, Newark’s first black mayor, was running things when I was a girl. On the day he won, my daddy and all the brothers on our block toasted the man with anything they could get their hands on—Johnny Walker Red, in my father’s case—which laid him out for damn near two days. The riots in ’67 brought Gibson in but changed my town forever—the riots and the highway that ran through the middle of the well-kept homes of Newark’s middle class. A highway through the center of town will scar a city’s soul as fast as a crime wave, and we had both.

This tale of two cities was running through my mind as I looked for Thelma Lee Sweets’s address. I was late, and I knew it. The girl had said morning, and it was going on eleven. I was surprised I hadn’t heard from Barnes. He’d been so eager to get his hands on the child, it was strange he hadn’t called. I wondered if he’d decided to come and get his grandchild himself.

If you come over here first thing tomorrow morning, you can have this Baby Dal back.

Scared little Thelma Lee was as serious about getting rid of the kid as Barnes was about getting her, and it would be better for everybody involved—especially me—if she gave the child directly to her grandfather. I sure didn’t want Lilah Love hauling me in on a kidnapping charge for being the go-between. I halfway hoped it would go down like that. Then I could go back home, grab a second cup of coffee, and start my day doing what I like to do best—absolutely nothing.

I thought again about Basil Dupre, always there when I wanted to forget him. What the hell was he doing in Barnes’s building anyway? Was he up to no good with Barnes, or was this just some cosmic coincidence come to kick my ass once again? I’d have to ask him the next time—I stopped myself right there. There would be no next time. And yet…There was always “and yet” with Basil Dupre.

The skyscrapers of Manhattan sparkled in the distance as I drove onto Ogden Avenue and pulled in front of a ramshackle gray Victorian. The three-story house was a tacky rebuff to its neighbors, which peered down like queens at a puddle of pee. But I knew enough about real estate to see that this one had been royalty once, too. The steep gabled roof was trimmed with so much gingerbread, I could almost smell it, and the wraparound porch with its ornate carvings demanded elegant women in flowing white gowns and pale blue ribbons. With its view of Manhattan and well-to-do neighbors, this one was a jewel; it just needed a rich somebody to discover and polish it.

But the place had a sad-sack look to it now. The roof needed shingles yesterday, and weeds had taken root in the gutters. Some optimistic soul had planted pink impatiens on the edge of the sun-scorched lawn, but that was it in the landscaping department. I got mad at Lilah all over again. The girl could deck herself out in Jimmy Choos but couldn’t send a dime to folks who clearly needed every penny. But if she grew up here, surrounded by wealth on either side, I could understand her material-girl obsession. I realized again that I really didn’t know squat about Lilah Love except what she’d told me, and that usually wasn’t worth a cup of spit. I assumed, though, that most of what she had told me about the baby was true.

I stepped on the porch and rang the doorbell, and somebody darted behind the sheer, drawn curtain. I knocked for good measure.

“Who there?”

It was an old woman’s scared, cautious voice, not the high-pitched, fast-talking one I’d heard last night.

“Good morning, ma’am. My name is Tamara Hayle. I’m a private investigator. I have a meeting scheduled with Thelma Lee.” I stepped close to the door and listened. No sound of a baby.

“Private investigator? Jimson said you called. What you want with my niece?” Although I’d left the message for Thelma Lee, she must have heard about it. I wondered if she’d bothered telling her.

“I’d like to come in and talk to Thelma Lee if I may. I’m going to give you one of my business cards. You’ll find the telephone number of the public defender’s office on the back. Please give his office a call, and he’ll verify my identity.” I scribbled Jake’s number on the back of a card and shoved it under the door. Jake’s name followed by
Esq.
was always good for a pass. I heard what sounded like dead bolts turning, and she cracked the door, peered at me across the chain, then stood back so I could enter.

I stepped into an old-fashioned parlor with spacious high ceilings and long, narrow windows that dropped to the floor. The corner fireplace boasted its original mantel, although the marble was stained and darkened with dust. Stacks of old newspapers and dank, dusty curtains gave the room an unpleasant musty smell, but sunlight drifting in from the windows caught the intricate scrolls carved on the molding. The cheap braided rug couldn’t conceal the dark pine floors that it covered. This place was, as they say, the
real
thing.

An ancient TV blasted from a makeshift coffee table, and the green sofa behind it looked as if it had been dropped in from a 1960s sitcom. Two matching black cups were next to the TV, and a baby’s high chair with a soiled pink bib tossed on it leaned against a back wall. The smell of burned toast and fried bacon drifted in from what I assumed was the kitchen.

The woman herself was stocky and moved awkwardly, but her face was pretty, with flawless red-brown skin and high, angular cheekbones. Bright strands of silver ran through her silky black hair, which she wore high on her head in an unruly bun reminiscent of Mrs. Butter-worth. But she had probably been as much a beauty in her day as this old house was; time and hard luck had worn them both down. I put her in her early seventies, but she moved like someone older. Her red chenille housecoat was buttoned to the top and looked as threadbare as the couch to which she led me. Avoiding my eyes, she pulled a Marlboro out of a purple case and lit it, pulling the smoke in hard and blowing it out harder.

“Beautiful place you have here.” I made a stab at conversation, and she smiled.

“It’s all I got, this house; love it like kin. Each and every soul I have ever loved been part of it.” I was as struck by her candor as I was by the sorrow in her brown eyes.

“Did Thelma Lee tell you she’d asked me to come?”

She shook her head, and her eyes were blank. “She didn’t tell me nothing.”

“Does she live here?”

“Yes, she does.”

“And the baby?”

“She stay here, too.”

I wondered how much she knew and what I should tell her. Best to start with the truth—or a piece of it.

“I’m working for the baby’s grandparents, Mr. and Mrs. Treyman Barnes. They hired me to find their grandchild, who is missing. I received a call from Thelma Lee last night, and she told me that she had the child and was eager to turn her over to the Barneses. I’m here to pick her up.”

“She’s just the cutest thing I’ve ever seen, that baby, ain’t she? Just like her pretty little mama.”

“Yes, she is. Is Thelma Lee here?” Best to get this over and get out as soon as I could.

“You see her sitting here? I don’t see her sitting here. Unless she turned invisible, she ain’t here. You think she invisible?” She said it with a cackle that surprised me; the woman definitely had an edge. I remembered then that Lilah Love had called her Sweet Thing. Maybe folks called her “sweet thing” like they’ll call a six-foot kid “little man,” chuckling whenever they said it.

“Do you know where she is?”

“Heard the phone ring this morning, then I heard her hightail it out of here before you knocked at the door.” She picked up the cup and took a sip of whatever was in it.

“Did she say who it was?”

“Nope.”

Probably Barnes,
I thought. “Before we go any further, let me get your name.” When I did my report for Barnes describing our conversation, “Sweet Thing” wasn’t going to get it.

A door opened suddenly, and the smell of breakfast food filled the air. “Call her Miss Edna; that’s her given name. Miss Edna Sweets. I call her Sweet Thing, but that just for family,” said the man who walked through it, holding a slice of bacon in one hand and coffee in the other.

“You here about Thelma Lee and that damned baby, ain’t you? You here about that call. You watch too much of this thing, honey,” he said to Sweet Thing as he walked over to the television and switched it off. “The Man feed you all kinds of shit on this goddamn thing. You can’t trust nothing he got to say. Don’t you know that by now?”

“How did you know about that? About Thelma Lee?” Sweet Thing asked, as perplexed as I was.

“I know everything that affects you, baby. Everything,” he said with a tender smile, and kissed her on top of the head. He was roughly the same age as Sweet Thing but built like a boxer, with broad, thick shoulders and a muscular chest. He walked like a young man, too, a strong one, with a bouncing swagger and no hint of a stumble. He had the look of a Masai warrior—sharp cheekbones, pretty lips that curled slightly, a scar on his cheek as angular as a tribal mark. I could feel the hard calluses on his palm when he grabbed mine and shook it. A workingman’s hand, like my father’s had been.

“Jimson. Jimson Weed. That’s what they used to call me, the same way I call her Sweet Thing, ’cept she never called me that ’fo’ I told her to.”

“Nice to meet you, Jimson.” I couldn’t bring myself to say Mr. Weed.

“Jimson Weed Carter, to be exact.” He winked naughtily, as if it were a dirty joke. “You don’t know what jimsonweed is, do you, girl?”

“I’m afraid you’ve got me there.”

“That’s what some folks used to call marijuana back in the day. I used to smoke so much of it, weed that is, when I got out of the service back in ’67, the name stuck, like a lot of other stuff that never leaves you. But they all dead now. All of them.” He pulled a folding chair in from the dining room and sat down next to us.
Too close,
I thought.

“Funny how things come back, ain’t it? They called it pot in the fifties, smoke in the sixties, grass in the seventies, now it’s back to weed. Shit don’t never go nowhere. Just back to where it come from when you don’t expect to see it.”

I smiled agreeably like I knew what he was talking about.

“You want some breakfast?”

“No, thank you.”

“I work late. Night shift. Just got home. I’m eating breakfast when most people be eating lunch. What you want to know about that baby?” As he finished up his bacon and gulped his coffee, I told him what I’d told her. He leaned toward me, listening intently.

“I don’t want nobody making trouble for Sweet Thing, you hear me?”

“And not for Thelma Lee, either. Not for Thelma Lee,” Sweet Thing added.

“I didn’t come to make trouble for anyone, but Thelma Lee is not the baby’s mother, and she has no custodial rights,” I said, shifting my attention away from Jimson Weed and back to Sweet Thing.