Hold Me in Contempt

by Wendy Williams

  “I was awesome,” Tamika said. “Don’t knock my shine, because you couldn’t pull off a Halle impersonation. And Frantz was cute too.”

  I looked at Tamika and we burst out laughing again.

  “You’re a mess. Let me get your ass home to your child before we get into more trouble,” I said, pulling out of the parking space having looked only to my right to be sure no cars were coming down the street.

  Once the car was in motion, though, I had to brake fast because I’d missed two people coming off the curb on the left.

  “Wait!” Tamika ordered, just in time for me to tap the brake to avoid hitting the pedestrians.

  I looked up, and there, walking right in front of the car, were Strickland and the other detective from the Eighty-Fourth.

  Strickland held his hand out to stop the car, barely looking at me behind the wheel before trotting across the street toward the Clocktower.

  “That’s the heat, isn’t it?” Tamika asked, observing their blue suits and dorky detective sunglasses.

  “Let’s get out of here,” I said, pressing the gas hard and not letting up until I was down the street.

  Once we got to Tamika’s house, after her hassling me, I parked the car to go inside and say good night to Miles. I hugged him and kissed him, commented on how tall and lanky he was getting, and went to his small, blue-painted room with the glow-in-the-dark sticker constellation stuck to the ceiling to look over his prized collection of fencing trophies. It was interesting how that little moment with my big godson slowed my thoughts and brought me back to my world. His braces and chin acne, the little anxious wild hairs sprouting around his upper lip were just so unaware of any of my mania. For just a second, I couldn’t think about myself. “I love you, Miles,” I said to him. “You be safe.” He smiled and replied, “I love you. You be safe, too.”

  Tamika wanted me to stay on her couch for the night so she could know I was safe, but I told her I really didn’t feel like King would try to do anything to me. Why would he? He hadn’t even replied to my text from the night before when I tried to contact him about Vonn, and I was sure he hadn’t seen me at the precinct. I had no reason to believe he even knew who I was. Or cared. Maybe he’d moved on and I could just forget about my whole walk on the wild side. Wake up in the morning to my old life.

  My old life?

  I walked outside in the darkness thinking of that past. What was it? Before King and this? Was that my old life? Paul? Was that it? The accident? What was it? Where was it? Where was the old life I wanted to wake up to?

  The streetlights along the block were half out, and the one over the white rental car was blinking and buzzing, threatening sudden death.

  Halfway up the block to the car, I looked back at Tamika’s house and then out to the dark street that was so quiet for Brooklyn at night. There was not one cat running in the gutter, not one dollar cab twisting through the street, not even a teenage couple snuggling on the front stoop. It seemed like it was just me, the moon, the rental car, and the banged-out streetlights.

  While I felt a little spooked by the solitude, I was determined to keep a level head and rushed quickly to the safety of the car. I made it into the car just in time for the streetlight to shine its last glow.

  Shaking, my nerves wrecked, I shoved the key into the ignition to flee some ghost that I’d thought was on my tail. I sighed in relief at my escape. “Calm down, girl!” I ordered myself. I turned the ignition and went to pull my seat belt on when I saw something black in the backseat over my left shoulder and felt something cold under my right arm at my breast.

  My first instinct was to scream, and I started to, but a hand covered my mouth, muffling the sound.

  “Don’t scream!” a male voice said.

  The hold over my mouth tightened and the cold object in my side warned me to stay in place. I held my hands up and tried to get a look at who was behind me, but I couldn’t see in the rearview mirror.

  “Do not scream!” he said again, jabbing the cold steel into my stomach.

  I shook my head to confirm that I wasn’t going to scream.

  “No screaming. All right?” he said.

  I shook my head again.

  He let go of my mouth slowly, keeping what I assumed was a gun in my side and moving his arm to my chest, where he held me against the seat.

  “Who are you? What do you want?” I cried, trying to look down at the gun. “I don’t have any money. You can have my purse. It’s just Marc Jacobs though. Not worth a lot. Please don’t kill me!” I looked down again, and although the gun was hidden beneath my shirt, I could see the hand holding it. It was white. And a few inches from the wrist there began a tattoo sleeve I’d studied one night in bed when someone’s arm was wrapped around me. “King?”

  “Shhh!” he whispered in my ear. “No need to let the entire street know it’s me.”

  “Oh my God! Don’t kill me! Please don’t! I didn’t say—”

  “Just drive, Queen,” he ordered.

  “Drive? Why do you want me to drive? Where are we going?” I blurted out.

  “Your place. Drive me to your place.”

  “Why are you going to shoot me there?” I cried, looking down at the gun again.

  “Shoot you?” He laughed and then his eyes followed mine to the gun. “What? You think this is a gun?” He pulled the barrel from my stomach and held it up. “My iPhone. Not exactly the most efficient killing device.”

  “Oh my God! You scared the shit out of me!” I said. “What the hell was that about? You didn’t have to play like you were going to kill me in order to talk to me. Jesus Christ! I thought you were some crackhead trying to rob me.”

  King let me go and fell back in the seat. “No. I’m not a crackhead.” He looked at me in the rearview mirror. “Can we go to your place now?”

  “For what? Why do you want to go to my place?” I asked. “Look, I know everything. I know you lied to me—about who you are, what you do! You lied!”

  “I ain’t never lied to you, Queen. Not once,” King said. “Look, the cops are all over my spot. I just need somewhere to lie low for a little while, and I think we need to talk. You say you know about—well, I know about you, too.”

  “How do you—” I tried, but he cut me off. “How I know doesn’t matter. We just need to talk.”

  “There’s nothing else to say.”

  “Queen,” King called to me in the mirror. “Listen to me. You can scream and kick me out of this car right now and never ever see me again. I’ll never bother you, and you won’t have to worry about our little secret. Or you can do what you really want to do and take me back to your place, so we can talk and I can tell you everything you want to know, everything I want to say. It’s your choice, but you need to make it now and you need to make it fast.”

  My eyes still on King’s, my hand moved the gear selector to drive and my decision was made. Just like that. I didn’t know it, but right there I’d let go of the possibility of waking up in the morning to my old life. Whatever I thought it was. I shifted my stare back to the street and put my foot on the gas. Two turns and that car was set in the direction of Manhattan.

  I went upstairs before King. He instructed me to get out of the car and walk straight toward my building. He’d get out alone and walk around the block the long way. Although he didn’t think the cops had tailed him to Tamika’s house, he didn’t want to risk them finding him at my place.

  Those few minutes I was upstairs alone felt like I was awaiting a verdict from an unpredictable jury. I paced the floor and looked at my phone and then out the window. The blizzard of feelings I had to confront in the car driving over the Brooklyn Bridge with King in the backseat beat me into honesty about what he’d made me feel. The reason I couldn’t think of my good life before him was that most of it was so gray or just uninspired. It was always me fighting against something or for something, and I was growing weary of the defeat everywhere.

  There was a tap at the door. I looked ov
er from the window where I’d been searching for King. For the first time I considered that maybe someone had been following us. Who was at the door? The police? Strickland? Paul on one of his late-night visits? Maybe it was him and Strickland and the cops had King in a car downstairs. That was it! Frantz had lied about the video and they were all downstairs. Coming for me.

  I crept to the door lightly, my heart pounding, and looked through the peephole.

  “Oh my God!” I said, opening the door to let King inside, then locking every one of my six locks. “I nearly . . .  ​I thought . . .  ​I thought . . . ” I placed my hand over my beating heart.

  “You thought what?”

  I was thinking of what I was going to say, but then out of nowhere I jumped on King and started pounding him with angry, passionate punches. “Liar! Liar! Fucking liar!” I punched and pushed him until he got a hold of my waist and pulled me so close I could only rest my arms at my side and try to wriggle out of his grip.

  “Calm down. Just stop,” he said, without raising his voice. “Just stop it. I’m here. I’m right here. Just stop it.”

  He started kissing my forehead and then my cheeks.

  “No!” I pleaded. “I don’t want you to kiss me. Stop it! Let me go.”

  “I didn’t lie to you,” King said, loosening his hold.

  “You’re a drug dealer. A fucking drug dealer!” I pushed away from him. “I can’t believe this. I can’t believe any of this. I should’ve fucking known something. Everything you said—everything—just all lies. And you never gave a fuck about me!” I shouted. “You were just using me. You knew who I was the whole time! You knew!” I pointed at him. “You were setting me up.”

  “I didn’t know when we met. I swear to you. I didn’t know anything until after that night we spent together. I didn’t.”

  I walked over to the window and looked out at the cars, the traffic. “You just wanted me to be your alibi. That’s why you held me in your place those nights. Not because you liked me. Because you”—I looked at him—“you had Vonn killed. Vonn and Yellow. Didn’t you? That’s what everyone’s saying. You did it.”

  “No. I had nothing to do with that. There’s more to it. I promise you.”

  “You know how many times I’ve heard that from people like you? That’s what I do. I put liars like you in jail, and it’s always someone else’s fault. Even the court’s fault. Always more to it,” I said. “That’s what men like you say. Always an excuse. The point is that those people are dead and your name is the only name connecting theirs.”

  “It’s not what you think,” King said, sounding tired. He walked over to sit on the couch. “I’ll offer myself a seat,” he said, sitting down and looking around the living room like he was taking it in.

  I looked out the window and said very calmly, “You’re a drug dealer, King.” I looked at him. “I’m an assistant district attorney in New York County. I put men like you in prison.” I laughed lightly to mark the moment in irony. “I don’t sleep with them.”

  “Men like me.” King returned my laugh. “A man. A man.” He looked at his lap.

  “What?”

  “I ain’t no man,” he said, looking back at me. “I’m traill,” he added in a Gaelic accent I’d only heard when he’d mentioned his grandmother. I knew a few Gaelic words from some Irish officers I’d worked with. I’d heard “traill” many times as we’d prosecuted business owners who were a part of the Irish mob. A traill was an Irish slave. “Remember what I told you about my great-grandfather coming through Ellis Island? Well, I didn’t lie—old Rig was on that second ship. He’d been denied a place on the first ship leaving Ireland, so he bought his way onto the next one—like many other men did at the time. Back then there wasn’t anything in Ireland for men like my great-grandfather. He had no choice. He sold himself. He sold all of us.”

  “What? What are you talking about? That’s crazy,” I said. “The Irish mob is dead—dying at least. There’s no way you could still—”

  “The debt is for five generations.” He looked down again. “We’re White Hand. The brothers make you rich. The richer you are, the richer they are. You pay them back. It keeps going. You only leave when you die.”

  “King. The White Hand hasn’t been in operation since the thirties. I mean, even the Westies are done. We ended that organization three years ago, and they were only half functioning. Thugs who wanted the fame and the name of the Irish mob,” I said.

  He looked back up at me, and somehow he seemed so much softer and broken than I’d ever seen him. “The finest trick of the devil is to persuade you that he does not exist,” he said, quoting Baudelaire.

  “Maybe you’re the one who doesn’t want to exist and the mob is long gone and you’re just saying all of this to persuade me otherwise,” I said.

  “I wish I was lying, Queen—”

  “Don’t call me that,” I said. “And if all of this is true and the only way out is death, then where is your father? Is he dead? Because the detectives said he’s—”

  “My father was a favorite. The bosses took a liking to him. He was so smart, and they figured if they sent him to medical school, he’d somehow magically make all their dirty asses Ivory soft and clean. Then they could enjoy their wealth and shit on the up-and-up—move to Fifth Avenue. Eat at the Russian Tea Room. They put so many men like my father through school. Only to bring them out and set them up and steal from them for the rest of their lives. All their clinics—all of it—that was their enterprise. My father had no choice.”

  “Your great-grandfather? Your father? What about you? You have a choice?”

  “They called me everything from Chalky to Leprechaun—I was never anything more to them than an Irish nigger,” he said. “My skin is too dark for them.” He laughed. “Isn’t that funny? Most people see me as white—call me white boy—but to them, the obvious traces of my past were too much to just call me Irish. I wasn’t going to be anything but a street dealer for them.”

  I knew better than to call King a liar about that. If he was telling the truth about the mob and his family’s connection to it, he would be set out to do whatever the heads told him to do. Most mob families operated like a caste system. Your vocation, relationships, and connections were dictated by rules and orders that you hardly knew about. That was true in any crime family. If King’s lineage went as far back in the mob as he said, they would have some rank, some solid ties, but that meant nothing in the history of an operation that had its roots in the early 1800s in New York City, when many Irish immigrants were indentured servants and some were just street beggars. Soon, the poorest of the poor in the city united and got organized. They made profit by bullying business owners. Soon they became the business owners. And some bought their way out of the mob.

  “When the cops came down on my father, we lost everything. They took everything from us. And then the brothers took what was left,” King said. “And what they couldn’t take, they moved onto me. My father’s debt became mine. That’s how it works. A father’s debt becomes his son’s debt.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense. You’re rich, King. I’ve seen it myself. You live in the Clocktower penthouse; you drive a Bentley. You don’t exactly look like someone who’s struggling under the oppression of the Irish mob. Come on.”

  “You don’t understand—the richer I am, the richer they are. They only care that I’m not broke. You make money, they make money—that’s the rule. Anything that might interrupt that is cut.” He leveled his hand to signal cutting something off.

  “Vonn?” I said delicately. “Yellow?”

  He nodded.

  I looked back out to the street. A police car zoomed past with its siren screaming. The black pavement was slick and shining from a fast night shower. I thought of Monique.

  “Vonn was my boy. My friend. I grew up with him,” King said, getting up from the couch. “I kept telling him not to fucking talk to the cops. They were just testing him. Trying to see if he’d sn
itch. Half of those cops are dirty. They’re in the organization.”

  He came over to me and looked into my eyes intensely. “I can’t do this shit anymore. I got to get out. That’s why I’m moving to Manhattan. Get more money. Get the fuck out of here.”

  “And go where?” I asked. “The DA’s already on to you. Building a case against you as we speak,” I said. “He smells blood. He wants you. To put you away.”

  “You want to put me away?” he asked.

  “It’s not my choice,” I said. “It’s my job.” I backed away from him.

  “You always have a choice.”

  “A choice about what? All of this stuff you said aside, you’re still a drug dealer—you sell drugs to people. It ruins their lives. I’ve seen it. I know. It ruined mine,” I said. “I choose not to support anything that can do that. Not to anyone.”

  King tried to reach for me, but I pushed him back.

  “Kim . . .  ​I can’t . . .  ​I . . .  ,” he tried, then just stopped and looked at me, with everything he couldn’t say in his eyes.

  “No!” I shouted. “You can’t!”

  “I—”

  “Don’t say it,” I begged, knowing what the thing he was about to say would require from me and what that would mean to everything I was.

  “Tell me you don’t feel it, too,” King dared me.

  “I can’t do that. I can’t. You’re a—”

  “A drug dealer,” he said. “And I love you.”

  “No! No!” I started walking toward the door, but King followed and grabbed my hand. “Stop it! Let me go!”

  “I love you, Queen. You don’t have to say it back, but I want you to know that. I love you.”

  He wrapped his arms around my waist, but I kept my back to him.