Alibi II

by Teri Woods

  As time passed, Webster would enter his residency. And Daisy would graduate from college in 1990 and quickly use her bachelor’s degree in psychology to obtain an entry-level position as a social worker at the Children’s Hospital in Phoenix. Up until she met Webster, she had really never experienced a true and honest relationship. Webster made her see her life much more clearly. He was a good-hearted person, a kind soul, and a gentle spirit. He opened doors for her, took her to the best restaurants in and outside of Phoenix and Scottsdale, spent all his free time with her, and called her at least twice a day regardless of how busy he was, just to make sure she was okay. He often offered to buy her things, but Daisy decided that he was too nice and she couldn’t take his money. Well, actually, she didn’t need it. She had plenty of money still tucked away, thanks to weasel-ass Reggie’s trying to be so slick. She actually didn’t feel so bad cashing in on her dead momma’s Social Security checks after she realized that her account’s being frozen was the only thing that had saved her from Reggie getting away with his check scam on her. She thought about all the creeps she had slept with, some of them so deviant that the law had sex codes to arrest such people. Unfortunately, in Daisy’s previous line of work, the more deviant they were, the better customers they would become. They could pay, do all sorts of things the average woman would never allow to be done to her body, and leave in a three-piece suit as if leaving a business meeting on Wall Street. Even she was completely humiliated at some of the things she had done for money.

  She thought of Webster. The last thing on his mind was fun. He studied the complexities of the brain. The thought of his being able to save people’s lives really attracted her to him. He was a fascinating man. Webster lived off-campus and had his own apartment. He cooked, cleaned, and was incredibly neat. His conversation was different, because he didn’t speak with the slang she was accustomed to hearing from the guys that she normally dated. His clothes weren’t trendy at all, but that was irrelevant. Over time, Daisy came to appreciate Webster more than anyone she had ever met in her life. He became the only person in the world she could truly call her friend. They did everything together, at least everything humanly possible, considering they both had classes.

  “Hey, Diana, we’re going to the movies. Want to come?” asked Paige, swinging open their dorm room door. She looked like a little girl, with two ponytails on the sides of her head, legging stockings, sheer white pantyhose, a skirt, and a leather jacket, a complete remake of Pretty in Pink gone punk rocker. Paige had turned out to be the best friend she ever had, the sister she always wanted, the only person in the world she ever thought of telling the truth to but didn’t. She always remembered what Lori Snelling told her.

  “Never, ever tell anyone, ever, that you are in police protective custody, or everything you’ve done, everything we’ve done getting you here, will be jeopardized, and trust me, no one keeps secrets, someone always tells someone else. Keep this to yourself until the day you die.”

  Lori held Daisy’s shoulders, staring into her eyes, making her promise.

  “I won’t tell a soul,” said Daisy, and she never ever would. That would be one secret she would carry to her grave, and as far as she was concerned Daisy Mae Fothergill never existed.

  Whenever anyone asked, she simply made up a story, a good, heartbreaking, tear-jerker story, and people believed her.

  “My parents died in a fatal car accident when I was a little girl. My dad’s brother and his wife, my aunt Lori, raised me. They’re okay, but it’s not the same, you know,” said Daisy as she pretended to be sad. She would over the years repeat that story until she knew it like the back of her hand and no one would ever think different, especially her roommate, Paige.

  “Well, I’m not leaving you here alone for the holidays,” said Paige, now sitting straight and determined. And she did take her home, every year, on every holiday since they had become roommates. Paige opened her heart and her family’s home so her friend wouldn’t be alone.

  “No, I can’t go to the movies, I’m going over to Webster’s, but maybe next time,” said Diana Poitier, who had groomed herself into the perfect college student, with the perfect grades, the perfect friends, and the perfect boyfriend, who would one day be her perfect husband, and she would live a perfect life. It was destined for her.

  Green Penitentiary, Waynesburg, Pennsylvania

  Nard was only twenty-one when he went inside, a baby. And when you’re as young as Nard, with as much notoriety as the Somerset murder case had brought, you’re going to have a lot of guys waiting to see just what you’re made of when you get there. And that was certainly the case for Nard. But Nard had bigger fish to fry; Nard had a hit put out on him before he even touched down inside Green, and worse, he had no one to hold him down. Wink had already put the word in and Nard was nothing more than a dead man walking.

  In prison, it was another world, survival techniques were different, cooking techniques were different, communicating techniques were different, and the art of war was different. There were no guns in prison. You had to man up, and most problems were settled the old-fashioned way, though some were not. Incidents of gang-related violence in Green were commonplace. The warden turned a deaf ear and a blind eye and so did the correctional officers. Anything could happen to you in prison and no one would see a thing and no one would say a word. Your beef was yours to settle and it was every inmate for himself. That’s why the gangs were so relevant and very much needed. Who was going to look out for you? If you didn’t join a gang, then you joined Islam, and even then there weren’t any guarantees that nothing would happen to you.

  Life inside Green changed many a man into an animal and many an animal into a beast. Reform and rehabilitation was the pretense created by the prison system to justify itself but the truth was that nobody was getting rehabilitated—if anything, they came home worse than when they went in. And Nard unfortunately was now a number, and for Nard, the road inside Green would be the roughest road of his life.

  He remembered the day after he was sentenced and the news that his momma had been shot in the head and was in the hospital, how, behind bars, he couldn’t do anything to help her. How he wished his life had turned out differently. Shortly afterward, he was shipped off to Green, his possessions and things from his cell at CFCF packed up and shipped to Green for him. After two weeks of being confined to quarantine he was let out into population. Assigned to D block, cell 14, he clearly had no options but the top bunk. His celly, some nigga from Southwest Philly named Otis, who had a life sentence for a double homicide, would become Nard’s worst nightmare. He had it all figured out that Nard would pay his dues to him. Unfortunately, it wasn’t just the prison system that did its own special processing while holding an inmate before allowing them to enter population; some of the inmates had their ways of figuring out who was who before ever meeting them. And unfortunately for Nard, Simon Shuller’s phone call went to Graterford and not Green. It could have happened to anyone, but Nard had nothing to bargain and no one bargaining for him. Possibly, maybe there was something that could have changed fate, but there wasn’t. Inside nobody cared about who you thought you were or what you thought you were doing on the streets. The inside was designed to break you completely down and then build you back up, and very few survived without selling their souls to something or someone.

  Nard learned this in less than a month of being in population. He had come inside from the yard, showered, and was back in his cell. Otis smiled kindly, but truth was Otis was nothing but trouble, and usually when people saw him and his crew coming, they went the other way. No one wanted to be a part of trouble. Trouble in prison meant more time. And Otis was notorious for bringing trouble. Otis walked out of the cell without saying a word, but right after he walked out, three men walked in. Set up by his cellmate, Nard tried his best to fight them off. Maybe had the correctional officer assigned to the block called for help or even blown his whistle, maybe just maybe it could have saved Nard. Nard didn�
�t get in one blow before having the wind knocked out of him with an uppercut to his midsection. Nard fell to the floor, unable to breathe.

  “We’re gonna see just what you’re made of, bitch!” His assailant laughed, bending down and picking Nard up.

  The air had been knocked out of him, and all he could do was hold his stomach, gasping as he felt his pants being ripped below his knees. Before he could protest, he felt a long, hard dick penetrating him. He tried to free himself, but was sucker punched in the face.

  “Take it, nigga,” said a big, tall guy everyone called Smitty. Smitty, Mel, and Hawk, all under the orders of Otis, tore into Nard as he tried to fight them off. Overpowered, he continued to struggle. Not once did he give in, fighting as best he could as everyone on the block made it their business to get busy and as far away from what was transpiring as possible. No one would see or hear anything. And if asked, they would all have the same response. “I don’t know nothing.”

  The correctional officer assigned to the block was finishing up a crossword puzzle before making his rounds. Someone shouted out, “Five O!” to alert the others on the block, but more important, Smitty and Hawk.

  Smitty dropped the hold he had on Nard’s hips, letting his ass go at the same time. He pulled his dick out of Nard and watched Nard fall to the floor in excruciating pain while blood and semen dripped down his legs.

  “I’ll be back to finish your bitch ass off, ya heard,” he said, intending to kill Nard as instructed, but not having enough time because Five O was en route.

  “Don’t you have something you should be doing?” asked C. O. Parks.

  “You right, I do,” said Wilson Gray, watching as Smitty, Mel, and Hawk walked back down the block to their own cells, acting as if nothing had happened, and if it did, they didn’t know anything about it.

  “Break it up and get back to where you belong.”

  Otis lay down on his bottom bunk and picked up a magazine, acting as if nothing was going on.

  When C. O. Parks walked down the hall and looked into the cell, he saw Nard, who was still on the floor, unable to get up, unable to move.

  “What the fuck, Otis? What the fuck did you do to him?”

  “Man, I ain’t did nothing to him. I was out there with you. I just walked back in here and he was laid out on the floor. I don’t know what you talking about.”

  Nard would spend the next week healing in the prison’s infirmary. But, as soon as he was sent back to D block, cell 14, it seemed as if Otis and his crew had been doing nothing more than sitting around waiting for his return. Walking down the block, Nard could feel all eyes on him like praying mantises waiting to engulf their prey. The entire block was now ready to take a shot at Nard, and he knew it. Even bitch-ass niggas thought they could try him. It was only a matter of time before they did. And time was something he just didn’t have. Little did he know that all that had transpired was because of Jeremy Tyler, a thief, who thought he could rob Nard, and had snuck through a window and gotten his brains blown out. All this was over his dumb ass and a phone call that his dumb-ass brother had made, attempting revenge. Little did Nard know, but he would soon find out.

  Merlin Watkins was two cells down. He had silently listened to the attack on Nard from his cell. Merlin understood how Nard was feeling, he, too, had been raped by Otis and his crew. So, he understood how Nard had to be feeling—ashamed, scared, and lonely. Merlin waited and waited, watching the movements of the block. Everybody would be called to go outside, and even though it was freezing cold, the chance for fresh air and walking outside the concrete jungle they lived in had a way of making a nigga feel free, even if there were twelve foot fences and barbed wire surrounding them. When Merlin found a safe zone to move, he walked into Nard’s cell, slid one of his handmade wooden knives under Nards pillow, smiled at him, then walked back out the cell, not saying a word.

  That’s how his sentence started, fucked up, but it wouldn’t be how his sentence ended.

  North Philadelphia

  Beverly’s House

  Uncle Ray Ray sat quietly, listening to Beverly as she spoke to Mr. DeSimone about Nard and what had happened to him. He had a hundred and one questions to bombard his niece with once she hung up the phone. He looked at Beverly, remembering how it seemed like yesterday that she was lying lifeless in the hospital. Not a day would pass that he didn’t thank God for sparing their lives that night. The city murder rate was sky-high, shootouts and drive-bys happened in the inner city every day. Ray didn’t understand what was happening to his neighborhood. It just wasn’t how he had come up. He was forty-eight years old, and he came up in the sixties and the seventies. There were drugs, always an element of crime, and even gangs, but the fight was for the power, the fight was against the man. And there was a level of solidarity that seemed to be missing among the young men he encountered now.

  “I can’t believe him, we did everything to get him off, and he beat that case! You mean to tell me he done went to jail and is facing another twenty-five years to life in prison for murder?”

  Beverly wanted to throw the phone, but she didn’t, she stood still, barely maintaining her composure as tears began to melt down the side of her face.

  “Well, what did the lawyer say?”

  “He said Nard has been charged with murder. He killed a man, knocked some other guy’s eyeball out and squished it in his hand, attacked another guy, stabbing him with a wooden shank and whatever else you can think of,” said Beverly, spinning around and falling into the chair next to the phone.

  “Did they have the hearing, yet?”

  “He said he’s going inside now.” Beverly shook her head, then put her head in her hands, resting her elbows on her knees. “What’s wrong with him?” She looked up at her uncle with tears in her eyes. “He had eighteen months, with his served time, a year if that, and would have been eligible for parole. Why couldn’t he just do the years and come home?” Beverly asked, not understanding why her son was spending his life behind bars like some caged animal. She could see him doing the year and then making parole. She had swallowed the pain two years ago when he was first arrested. But now DeSimone was saying he could possibly be sentenced to another fifteen to twenty-five years for a prison murder.

  “He told me that he didn’t have no choice, Beverly. That could only mean one thing…and if the boy’s in there fighting for his life, then he’s doing what he got to do to survive. The lawyer is on it, DeSimone will do the best that can be done. All this is out of our hands, so ain’t no need in crying over spilled milk.”

  As Uncle Ray Ray was speaking on behalf of Nard, he heard someone at the door. It was Crystal, and to say the least, time had changed her, so much so that Beverly didn’t know if she was coming or going. The only thing that was still stable was Tyrone. For the first time, in all the years they had been together, she could honestly say that their relationship was solid, like a rock. Tyrone was still right there, right by her side. He had moved in, fully committed to her and their relationship. He got a job down at a steel factory in South Philly and was a hard-working man, doing the right thing by her.

  Her cousin Chris, oh, jeez, this fool was caught trying to break into their house. And he had been snatching old ladies’ purses, taking their ATM cards and trying to figure out their bank card codes to withdraw their money from the ATM. You would think he would have known he was on camera standing at the ATM machine, but he didn’t. So he had many charges of theft and burglary, and Uncle Ray Ray kept bailing him out of prison. He was so thin and frail, he just looked bad. Beverly felt sorry for Uncle Ray Ray. He had tears in his eyes every time he saw his son.

  “What in the world is wrong with this boy? I’ve done the best I can. There is nothing I can do with him,” explained Uncle Ray Ray to Sergeant Wright as they watched the police manhandle a fighting, yelling, kicking, and screaming Chris into the back of a police car after Mr. Clarence spotted a man in the alleyway in the back of their house. Not knowing it was Chris, Mr. Claren
ce had called the police, looking out for Ray and Beverly. When the police arrived they caught Chris climbing through a window that he had broken in the back of the house that led into the basement. It was really sad, but worse than Chris was Crystal. She had turned out to be the neighborhood crack whore and Uncle Ray Ray, Beverly, Donna, Maeleen, and Rev all had to witness her life crumble in front of them. Crystal really let herself go and Beverly couldn’t help her.

  “Here she go, right here, I told you she’d show up…”

  “Crystal?” Beverly asked, cutting her uncle right off.

  “Mmm-hmm, the one and only,” he answered peering out at her, not sure if he should open the door.

  “Where’s them papers I need her to sign?” asked Beverly, tired of Crystal and her games. She had gotten strung out on crack cocaine real bad. All she did was get high. They said she sold her body out at Cobbs Creek Park in Southwest Philly where she had moved with her momma. She was thin and raggedy-looking, her hair was never done, just pulled back, and her teeth were turning a dark yellow-gray color. Her clothes stayed dirty, and whenever she wanted something she showed up at Beverly’s door, where she had abandoned Dayanna shortly after she started getting high with her momma and her momma’s boyfriend. Beverly heard through the grapevine that it was the mother’s boyfriend who got the mother turned out first, and then the mother turned a blind eye when the boyfriend went after Crystal and started getting her high so he could have sex with her. All the mother cared about was getting her daily doses of crack cocaine. As long as she was straight, she didn’t care what happened to Crystal, and that’s how it was. Crystal was staying inside a crack house off of Fifty-seventh and Webster Street. Beverly knew that if Nard could see her now, he wouldn’t believe she was his baby’s mother. Crystal used her pretty looks to get her high, but her looks didn’t last long chasing after Mr. Gusto, and once the streets got hold of her, she was done. Beverly’s only concern was for her grandbaby, Dayanna, whom she and Uncle Ray Ray had taken in and cared for now for over a year and a half. You couldn’t tell Beverly that wasn’t her baby. You couldn’t tell Uncle Ray Ray the baby wasn’t his either. Both felt the same, and Crystal better not even think she would be taking that baby out of that house and away from them, especially the way she looked and was carrying on in the streets. She could stop by and see the baby but Dayanna wasn’t going anywhere.