Chapter Fourteen
I drove out through the surface streets and turned onto Northlake Boulevard, headed east. My attention was not laser-focused. I was giving it just enough to keep the car in the lane. My mind was drifting here and there, alternating between Tania Bryson and then Danielle.
Then, for no reason at all my eye caught a flash of pink on the sidewalk and before I knew what I was doing I had pulled off the road into a strip mall. There was a pizza place and a hair salon and a cigar store. I stopped in front of a mailbox outlet and saw the pink again, a slash of color in black hair, and I jumped out of my car.
“Keisha,” I said.
As I said her name, I suddenly wondered if I had gotten it wrong, but she turned and I saw L’nita’s loitering accomplice. More than just surprise, she wore a look of uncertainty, and I wondered if she didn’t know quite how to communicate without L’nita as her mouthpiece. She carried a little more weight than L’nita but not too much, just enough to give her features a rounded look. Her hair was longer than L’nita’s and there was that stripe of pink.
“L’nita not with you?” I asked. I still wasn’t sure if she had placed me.
“No.”
“You hanging out on your own?”
“No, I’m going to work.”
“You work?”
“Yeah.”
“I thought L’nita said you’ve got too much on to bother with stuff like that.”
“She don’t work.”
“But you do. What is it you do?”
She jinked her head at the hair salon.
“You’re a barber?”
“A what?”
“A hairstylist.”
“I wanna be.”
“But you aren’t right now?”
She shook her head. “I sweep the floors.”
I nodded. “Fair enough. You gotta start somewhere.”
“Yeah.”
“You going to work now?”
“Yeah. I only get casual hours.”
“You gotta start somewhere,” I said again. “So you went to school with Tania, is that right?”
“Elementary and high school.”
I glanced farther down the strip mall and saw something that gave me an idea.
“You got some time right now?” I asked.
“I got a few minutes before work, why?”
“I wonder if I could ask you a few questions about Tania. I’ll buy you an ice cream.”
She frowned. “An ice cream?”
I nodded at the Carvel ice cream shop.
She shrugged like it would be inconvenient but at the same time crazy to refuse an ice cream. We walked over to the store and I held the door.
“Whatever you like,” I said. “My treat.”
She got a chocolate-dipped soft serve and I took the regular vanilla, and we took seats by the window.
“So you know Tania?”
“Everyone knows Tania.”
“But I mean, you were friends.”
“I guess so,” she said biting the top off her soft serve.
“Guess so?”
“We were, when we was little.”
“And you drifted apart.”
She shrugged and licked. “She got into her basketball, so, you know.”
“No, I don’t know.”
“I don’t play basketball.”
“Why not?”
She frowned. “Look at me.”
“You’ve got two arms and two legs.”
“I’m short and fat.”
“You’re what? You’re pretty much average height and you most certainly are not fat.”
The frown softened but she still looked unsure.
“I’m not Tania Bryson thin.”
“Me, either. Who told you that you were fat?”
She shrugged. “The mirror.”
“No, I don’t think so. Is it your friend, L’nita?”
“She doesn’t say anything that isn’t true.”
“That wasn’t my experience.” I ate some ice cream and watched her. I’d never seen someone eat ice cream with such a lack of joy.
“So you want to be a hairdresser?”
Keisha nodded. “A stylist.”
“That’s your dream?”
“Yeah, what’s wrong with it?”
“There’s nothing wrong with it, nothing at all. If you love doing it, go for it.”
“Well, sweeping is as close as I’ll ever get, and I can’t do that forever.”
“Why not?”
“You know what it pays, sweeping floors?”
“Not much, I bet. But you put in your time, you get a reputation as a hard worker, opportunities will come.”
The frown returned. “You live on a different planet from me.”
“No, I don’t.”
“You think someone’s gonna take pity on the sweeper girl and hand them a pair of scissors? I don’t got no training.”
“So get some.”
She shook her head. “L’nita’s right, man. You got all the answers.”
“What’s wrong with what I’m saying?”
“You don’t get it. I don’t got time for school, and even if I did, it costs money.”
“You don’t have time for school? Are you kidding me? Would school cut into your time spent hanging around schoolyards and shopping malls?”
“I’m supposed to drop my friends like Tania did, is that what you’re saying?”
“From where I’m sitting, Tania didn’t drop her friends as much as they dropped her for chasing her dream.”
“Whatever.”
“And in my experience, a friend who holds you back from chasing your dreams is no kind of friend at all.”
“We didn’t hold Tania back. She’s in the NBA now.”
“I’m not worried about what you did back then, I’m worried about what you’re doing now.”
“What do you mean? We hardly see her since she went to college.”
“And yet L’nita acts like you’re all best buddies. She said she was going to be Tania’s posse.”
“She’s just talking.”
“Really? Because I’m concerned that maybe she wants her little piece of the action, and she might do something stupid to get it.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Tania has received threats, and certain people are looking at L’nita. And at you.”
I took a bite of my soft serve to allow that to sink in. I didn’t mention that certain people were in fact, just me.
“I wouldn’t do nothing to hurt Tania. Are you crazy?”
“What about your little friend?”
“Look, L’nita talks a big game, you know?”
“She doesn’t work, but she has money. Does that come from you?”
Keisha shrugged. “I buy things, you know, here and there. Like all friends do. And she gets some money from the government.”
“From the government? For what?”
“I don’t know, disability or something.”
“What disability?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know? You’ve been friends since elementary school and you don’t know what disability she has that warrants government payments?”
She shrugged again. It was becoming a thing.
“You know, they have a word for that,” I said. “It’s called fraud. If she gets caught, she’ll have to pay it back, with interest, and she might go to jail.”
“No, I don’t think . . .”
“Then maybe you should.”
“What?”
“Think, Keisha, think. Think about what happens to people when they hang with the wrong crowd. Think about the contrast between a Tania—who works her backside off instead of talking—and a L’nita, who complains about her lot but does very little to improve it. Which one would you model yourself on?”
As expected, another shrug.
“If you don’t want to end up in the wrong place, don’t follow the wro
ng road.”
“What are you, Yoda?”
“Only when I have a hangover. All I’m saying is, you don’t want to get caught up in something bad because of someone else.”
“My friends, you mean?”
“I mean Tania. If something bad happens to Tania.”
“What do you want from me?”
“You know everyone around here, the way I don’t. You’ll see someone who looks out of place. I just want you to keep your eyes open, that’s all. I don’t want anything to happen to Tania, and I’m sure you don’t, either.”
“Of course I don’t, but you’re asking me to spy . . .”
“No, I’m just asking you to keep your eyes open. I think people have underestimated you your whole life, and I don’t want to be one of them. I think you can do better.”
“Listen, I gotta get to work.” She stood, her ice cream only half-finished. I stood and walked with her to the door, where we both tossed our joyless soft serves into the trash.
As we walked back toward her salon and my car, I pulled out my wallet, took out one of my business cards, and handed it to her.
She glanced at it and then at me.
“If you hear anything or see anything out of order, call me. Anytime.”
She looked at the card and did something somewhere between a shrug and a nod. She stepped toward the salon and I watched her go, looking at my card as she went.
“And, Keisha,” I said. “You should think about the beauty school thing. If you want to toss around some ideas, just call. I’m happy to help.” I smiled. “As long as you don’t become a Beauty School Dropout.”
She frowned again. “Why do you think I would become a dropout?”
“No, I mean, you know. Frankie Avalon, Grease.”
“What?”
“The movie, Grease.”
“Is that an old-time movie? I never seen it.”
I felt the skin on my arms crackle like bark on a tree. Sometimes it felt like the population was aging in reverse.
“Never mind,” I said. “But I mean it. If I can help, just give me a call.”
She turned and went inside the salon, and I shook my head and wondered how a kid could have missed Grease.
Chapter Fifteen
Parking can be a bear around the police department on South County Road, so I parked at Ron and Cassandra’s apartment on South Ocean Boulevard and walked along the beach and took in some of those negative ions, before cutting down Australian Avenue.
I knew the cop on the duty desk, and he buzzed me in. I found Ronzoni at his desk wrangling an Italian meatball sub. The sandwich was winning, if Ronzoni’s face was anything to go by.
“What does the other guy look like?” I asked.
Ronzoni frowned and wiped the marinara sauce from his cheek so that it looked like he’d been slashed with a stiletto.
“What do you know?” he asked through his half-full mouth.
I pulled out my phone and brought up the picture of the text threat sent to Tania. Ronzoni looked at it and then at me and then at the screen again.
“Text?” he mumbled.
“Apparently it was sent using something called SneakyChat.”
Ronzoni made a face like his sandwich had suddenly secreted fish oil.
“You know it?” I said.
“Yeah, I know it. Damned tech companies. It’s like they’re siding with the bad guys.”
“So you can’t trace it?”
“I can’t do anything with it—that’s why I hired you.”
I gestured for him to return the phone, and then I found another photo and passed it back. It was the shot of the graffiti in her locker. He frowned again.
“It was left several days ago, before the letter Camille intercepted.”
“This is in the Boys and Girls Club?” he asked.
“Yes.”
He stood and wiped crumbs from his shirt. He had marinara sauce on his tie, but it was pizza-colored to begin with so it was pretty much camouflaged.
“What?” I asked.
“This is evidence, we need to take this to the sheriff’s office.”
Ronzoni took his Taurus from the lot beside the station house and drove me back to my car, and then I followed him across the bridge back to West Palm. We both parked in the lot beside my building—me in my reserved spot and Ronzoni wherever he damn well pleased. We walked up to the PBSO building.
“He’s not out at Gun Club Road?” I asked.
Ronzoni shook his head. “Word is they don’t have a desk for him there yet. The other word is the other detectives don’t care for him.”
We wandered inside and Ronzoni flashed his badge and the guy at the desk gave me a nod. Ronzoni asked for Detective Crozier. The desk guy made a call and then directed us to interview two.
Ronzoni was about to ask where that was, but I saved him the bother. The door buzzed and I pushed through and led him down a corridor to a string of rooms that were bare enough to be cells but with tables instead of beds. There were no mirrored walls for the detectives to stand behind and watch—this wasn’t the movies—but there were video cameras.
I pushed open the door of interview two and directed Ronzoni inside. There was a table with four chairs—two on either side. Ronzoni hesitated for a moment. I got the sense he didn’t know which side was the cop side and which was the perp side, and given we were meeting a sheriff’s detective, whether that by default put Ronzoni on the side of the bad guys.
“Take a seat,” I said, pointing at the chair nearest him.
“You know your way around.” He took the seat.
“Danielle was stationed here for a time.”
I sat on the other side from Ronzoni. I figured it would tell me some things. It would tell me if this new detective had the same hang-ups about sides of the interview table. It would also tell me the kind of relationship I was going to have with the guy. In my line of work, I tended to run across law enforcement folks fairly often, and while I preferred to be on good terms—and mostly I was—it helped to know early on who was going to yank my chain.
We waited fifteen minutes, which told me plenty. We weren’t perps, so we didn’t need to be left to sweat for a while. We were trying to help.
The door flew open and in stormed a big guy with red hair cropped so close it was yellow on the sides. He had a military countenance about him, and his pale skin suggested he was more Minneapolis than Alabama.
“This better not be a waste of my time,” he said, louder than was necessary in the small room.
Ronzoni sat up straight, and for a moment, I thought he was going to snap to attention.
“You mean like the fifteen minutes we’ve wasted waiting in here?” I said. The good angel on my shoulder had told me not to antagonize the guy right out of the gate, but that angel just never came up with the most persuasive arguments.
“You are?”
“Miami Jones,” I said.
“Is that supposed to mean something to me?” asked Crozier.
“You’re new in town, so probably not.”
“And who the hell are you to me?”
“I’m a private investigator. I’m working on the Tania Bryson case.”
Crozier laughed. “You are, are you?”
“Uh-huh.”
“And who brought you into this?”
I glanced at Ronzoni and saw something in his eyes. Not fear, really. Just an intense desire that I would not say he had been the one to hire me.
“Let’s just say I’m a friend of the family.”
“Well, friend of the family, you’re on the wrong side of the table.”
“Am I? Did you draw straws? I must have missed that.”
He looked at me, perhaps waiting for me to move, which I wasn’t going to do, so I pushed the chair next to me out with my foot.
Crozier didn’t concede easily, but eventually he realized that the longer he stood there, the stupider he looked. He kicked the chair around so the back faced the table and
he sat like he was mounting a really short horse.
“So now you’re here, wasting my time, trying to learn everything I know about the case so you can pretend to be a detective.”
“If I wanted to know all you know about the case,” I said, “I would have to go back in time and forget half of the things I’ve learned.”
“That right, smart guy?”
“Sadly for my property tax dollars, yes, it is.”
“What do you think you know?”
“Tania got a threat letter.”
“Tell me something I don’t know.”
“It wasn’t the first threat.”
This got his attention, although he tried not to show it. I brought up the photo of Tania’s locker and I handed it to him. He looked it over.
“When?”
“A couple days before the letter.”
His pink face grew red, and he clenched his jaw.
“What the hell was she thinking? She should bring this stuff to me.”
“You weren’t involved when this happened.”
“Well, she should have told me.”
“You didn’t interview her, did you?”
“Because her father and her agent asked me not to, like it would hurt her damn feelings.” He stabbed his finger at Ronzoni.
“You should have brought this to me.”
“That’s why I’m here,” said Ronzoni.
“This is my investigation,” said Crozier.
“Again, that’s why I’m here,” said Ronzoni.
Crozier didn’t look convinced, but he turned his attention back to the photo.
“Where is this?”
“The Boys and Girls Club,” said Ronzoni.
“So any of those people could have done this.”
“Those people?” I asked.
Crozier glared at me. “The kids at the club.”
“That’s what I thought you meant. And they could only have done it if they could pick a padlock.”
“It was locked?”
“Yes.”
“Whose lock?”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“The girl’s lock or the club’s lock?”
“Tania’s.”
“Right,” he said, like this told him something. “She needs to come in and give me a statement.”
“She’ll be at the club later today.”
“I’ve wasted enough time on this already.”
Half Court Press Page 10
