Death, Deceit & Some Smooth Jazz

by Claudia Mair Burney

  I shrank away from his voice, tears springing to my eyes. Part of me needed to console him. My whole heart rent in two.

  With one hand, he covered his eyes. He brushed away his tears with the other. The barrier of this heinous crime stood between us. He stood only feet away, but it may as well have been a million miles. His shoulders shook with grief.

  Oh, God, I loved this man.

  “Jazzy?”

  When I spoke his name, he sobbed, big heaving wails. I thought the sound would kill me. My heart couldn’t take any more. He dropped to his knees and held his head. He choked out the words: “I didn’t kill her.”

  I couldn’t help myself. I went to him. I gathered him in my trembling arms. My hands stroked and rubbed his arms, back, head.

  “I don’t understand,” he said, weeping.

  I rocked him for a long time. Held him. Shushed him. Wiped his moist eyes with my cheek. Kissed each eyelid.

  Bad idea.

  We were okay until the eyelid kissing. He responded to my motherly gesture by giving me a soft, brief kiss on the lips. And then another. And another.

  I closed my eyes, realizing I needed his tenderness as much as he needed mine. I willed myself to forget about murder. It reminded me of words that I’d heard in an old Billie Holiday song. Her haunting voice sang about knowing she was a fool, but she loved her man so. I was the woman in that blues song, and in his arms, I just didn’t care.

  The intensity of our kisses grew. The bodice-threatening smooch we’d shared earlier seemed chaste by comparison. While I was glad to see we’d gotten a momentary respite from our anguish, my great-grandmother, if she could see us from heaven, would have said we’d jumped out of the frying pan straight into the fire. Clichéd, yes, but mystical black women are entitled to use clichés. Besides, we’d moved from a hot place to a hotter place, and honestly, I wished she could leave the celestial realm for a moment to hose us down.

  My good sense slowly began to return. Did Ireally want to be like Lady Day?

  “Uh…Jazz?” I grabbed his hands, which were trying to make their way past my Victoria’s Secret pajamas to the parts of me that were meant tostay secret, at least until vows were exchanged. “Didn’t you say something earlier about not wanting to sin?”

  His voice sounded husky with desire. “We’re not sinning yet. You just moved my hands away.”

  “We’re close enough. You don’t really want to be intimate under these circumstances, now, do you?”

  In answer, he covered my mouth with his. I wrenched myself away, showing impressive restraint for a woman filled with lust. “I think we’re acting out in reaction to the stress we’re experiencing tonight.” I did realize that, while astute, my observations were not the same as saying “Please stop doing that.”

  “How can you make out with meand psychoanalyze me?” He showered my neck with kisses, not bothering to wait for an answer. His hands got busy again. Mine blocked his efforts. I still hadn’t asked him to cease and desist.

  “This won’t make us happy, Jazz. The same challenges will be there tomorrow.”

  “It’ll make parts of us happy. Parts of me are happy already.”

  Jazz Brown, the man I loved, was about to rip my bodice for real. When we’d shared our first impulsive kiss, I had told him I wanted to be in love, even if only for a minute. Shoot, that had happened in September. Now most people had their Christmas trees up! Didn’t I deserve another minute of love——a few of them?

  I tried to return myself to a place of rationality by analyzing the situation from a professional viewpoint. It was obvious that Jazz, unable to cope with the shock of his ex being murdered, was coping by using classic avoidance techniques——attempting to affirm life by making love.

  Or was he fleeing his own guilt by pretending he hadn’t been capable of performing such a heinous act? Was he just trying to distract me from the truth?

  My Jazz couldn’t have done it, could he? Hadn’t the evidence pointed to a killer very different from Jazz? I told myself he couldn’t have done such a horrible thing. The hands caressing my back and tangling in my hair could not have strangled a woman to death this very night.

  Or could they?

  On the other hand, I wanted to do what was right——for God, and for Jazz and me.

  Needless to say, I was conflicted on more than one level. I silently prayed. God told us in His Word to flee fornication. It sure wasn’t easy when you were practically starved for intimacy. Especially when the man of your dreams wanted it, too.

  God, help me, I don’t want to do something you don’t want me to do. Help us get out of this mess.

  Then I heard it.Yip, yip, yip. “What is that?”

  He lifted his head and listened, and then an expression of annoyance showed on his face. “Ignore it,” he said quickly, pressing his lips to mine.

  When I gave his hand a hard smack, he stopped smooching and groping to plead with me like a sixteen-year-old. “C’mon, baby, please.”

  As much as I liked having Jazz beg for my affections like a rhythm-and-blues singer, the noise had captivated my attention. Finally, it dawned on me what I had heard. “That’s Amos. It’s a sign.”

  “No, it isn’t,” he lied, his expression giving him away.

  “Jazz, you know Amos is over there barking like a rat dog.” The saleslady hadn’t said anything about barking, either, and I still hadn’t gotten around to cracking open that owner’s manual. I laughed.Don’t tell me God doesn’t have a sense of humor.

  Jazz eased away from me. “Amos is full of surprises, isn’t he?”

  “It’s the barking of God,” I said.

  “Don’t violate my brain with that thought.”

  “God once spoke through an ass. He can bark through a sugar glider.” I laughed again, but Jazz did not find this divine intervention funny.

  As inexplicably as it had started, Amos’s yipping stopped.

  I pulled myself up from the floor, trying to suppress another round of giggles. “Are you okay, Jazz?”

  “I can’t believe what just happened.”

  “We were out of control.”

  “Thatdid not just happen.”

  “One day you’ll look back on all this and laugh.” I thought about it and cracked up again. “I’m laughing already.”

  “I don’t think I will, Amanda.”

  “You’re not calling me Bell. You don’t love me anymore?”

  “Not at the moment.”

  “You’ll thank Amos for this one day.”

  “No, I won’t.”

  He raked his hand through his hair and blew air from his cheeks. A blush crept up his neck.

  I extended my arm to him. “C’mon, get up.”

  He took my hand and picked himself up off the floor. “I’m embarrassed,” he said.

  “Don’t be. Thank God for Amos.”

  “Yeah, right. The prophet Amos! Did I mention that I hate Amos?” I rubbed his shoulder. He backed away. “We’d better go back to our no-touching policy. I’m not quite settled down yet.”

  “Truth be told, neither am I.”

  His shoulders sagged and he cursed, ignoring my no-swearing-in-Amos’s-presence policy. “I’m sorry, Bell. I wasn’t supposed to sin with you.”

  “I’m Bell again?”

  “You’ve always been Bell. You were Bell at first sight.”

  “Jazz, we just made a mistake. We could have gotten in a lot more trouble than we did.”

  He sighed and walked over to my door. I followed him.

  He turned to look at me with startlingly mournful eyes. “I can’t afford any more mistakes.”

  “And what is that supposed to mean?” My reactions splintered. The psychologist in me wanted to analyze. Was it a confession of sorts? The other me, the shocked, scared woman, ached for more of his comfort, no matter how illogical it was. I thought it best to cling to whatever logic I had left. I tried to ignore the me who needed his love more than the truth. “When do you think they’ll
arrest you?”

  “When they find me.If they find me.”

  “Jazz, you have to turn yourself in.”

  “No, I don’t. I didn’t kill anyone.”

  “If you run, they’ll think you did it.”

  “They already think I did it.”

  “Will you at least consider turning yourself in? Please?”

  He glared at me like I was asking him to go to jail for me personally.

  “It’s the right thing to do,” I said.

  He sighed. Shrugged. “Maybe. Probably.” He sighed again. “I don’t know. I don’t want to go to jail.”

  I unlawfully touched his arm. “Let’s talk some more. We could have more tea.”

  He responded by running his finger up my arm. “That’s not what I want to have. You’re tempting me.”

  “Coffee? With biscotti?” I offered, even though I was grossly overcaffeinated, hyped up on sugar, and flushed from almost having my bodice ripped. It would probably be three days before I could sleep.

  Jazz smiled, a slow, seductive dazzler. “You’re not listening to your great-grandmother. Don’t start no stuff, and it won’t be none.”

  Ma Brown would be so proud of him.

  “It won’t be none,” I said, lying to myself.

  “It will be if I stay. I promise you that, beautiful.” He clapped both hands on my shoulders.

  Maybe my MIA good sense had fled to him, but good sense meant nothing to me now. “Don’t leave yet.” Even as I said it, I wondered,Why would any sane woman want a potential killer in her house? I guess that was precisely it. I wasn’t sane. I was wrapped up in the Jazz spell.

  He searched my eyes. “Why are you doing this to me, baby?”

  “Doingwhat ? Nothing really happened. I just want to talk.” Not true, but I couldn’t bring myself to admit, even to myself, how good his desire for me felt.

  “You know exactly what you’re doing, and a lot happened. At least, it did for me.”

  So he knew I wanted him——needed him like I need air and water. Still, we’d stopped ourselves once. We could again. I still had so many questions to ask.Just a few more moments with him, Lord. Everything inside of me screamed no. I ignored everything. “Jazz, I want to see you again. I mean…I’d like for us to talk about this.”

  “I know exactly what you want. We’re adults.” His hands circled my waist, and he groaned before releasing me. “Under the circumstances——all of them——it’s probably best if we stay away from each other.”

  “Please” slipped out of my mouth. I still ached for his touch.

  He ran his hand across his smooth chin, and my fingers followed until he took my hand in his again. “You sure make it hard for a brotha to say good night.”

  A nervous laugh escaped my mouth. “I don’t really want anything to happen…” A flat-out lie and I knew it.God help me. “But I’m feeling…so…”

  “I feel it, too.”

  My ability to intellectualize abandoned me, leaving a gelatinous mass of feelings in its place. “Jazz, I feel a million different——”

  “I know.”

  “I’m so scared. What’s going to happen to you?”

  “If they catch me, I’m going to go to jail, and I’ll probably stay there until they find out who killed her. Only, they think I killed her, so they won’t be real motivated to find someone else.”

  “Jazzy…” I had no idea what to say. It all seemed too enormous to figure out. The world was like ground zero, debris covering every surface around us, and my place was a sanctuary. “Stay with me,” I pleaded. I wasn’t even sure why.

  He placed his mouth on mine. He hesitated and finally gave me a long, lingering kiss. “I want to stay. I want to hold on to you until whatever is going to happen to me happens. I want them to drag me away from you. That’s why I should go, baby.”

  “Jazz…”

  “Bell, you aren’t yourself tonight, either. People only get so many sugar-glider barks before they do what’s natural. You’d regret it, and I don’t want you to have any regrets when I make love to you.”

  I nodded. God knows I didn’t want to run out of sugar-glider barks. I had a lifetime of regrets. I didn’t want to add another.

  Jazz let me go. “I don’t know what’s going on, but Kate is dead, and the killer was bold enough to off her in my loft. Something could happen to you because of me.”

  I touched his lips with my finger. “But I just got you back.”

  He took my hand in his and kissed my fingertips. “I should have let you go when you told me you didn’t want to see me again. I couldn’t even protect a woman in my own loft——which is like a fort! What could I offer you now?” He placed my hand by his heart and kissed me on the forehead. “I wanted tonight to be the beginning of something beautiful for us. Now it looks like Kate wins again. Even in death, she wins.”

  “How could she win? She was murdered.”

  “And the police want me for it. That’s how she wins.”

  “Jazz, a lot has happened, and you’re right——neither one of us is thinking clearly. But you have to know the only person who is winning is the person who killed her.”

  He shoved his hands into his jacket pockets. “I shouldn’t have come here. But honest to God, Bell, when I came here earlier, it was about you and me. Kate was alive when I left her.” He sighed. “I’m so sorry. Good-bye, Bell.”

  “I’ll see you later, Jazz. Right?”

  “I don’t think——” He squeezed his eyes shut. “I can’t go to jail. I can’t do that, baby.” He opened his eyes again, and they were moist.

  “Don’t do anything crazy. Just turn yourself in.”

  “Make sure you lock all three locks. Be extra careful. Don’t trust anybody.”

  Including you?

  I closed the door behind him, dutifully bolted all the locks, and rested my back against the door, willing myself not to cry. I tried not to think about the fact that my body still burned for him——guilty or innocent——even standing alone in the empty space he’d left behind.

  I cried anyway.

  chapter five

  WHEN THE MAN YOU LOVEis suspected of murder, it’s a grand excuse to beg off work. I called the Washtenaw County Jail and told my boss, Dr. Eric Fox, that I had a crisis of a personal nature. Next, I made a visit to my dear sister at the morgue rather than partaking of the more comfortable option of wallowing in self-pity for several hours.

  When I arrived at the morgue, I had to go through the maze of security. Honestly, you wouldn’t think the dead needed so much protection. I’d gone through the morgue’s security checks once before, the day after I first met Jazz. It was like going through airport security bearing a ticking parcel. Finally, I made it to the double doors that led to the autopsy room. I took a deep breath and tried to prepare myself. Didn’t Carly have a desk somewhere in the building? Was she always crouched over the dearly departed? I hoped this time she’d be on her way out of the autopsy room to fill out paperwork.

  Nice try, but no prize.

  I opened the double doors to the room where all the action happened. The place made me queasy. All those metal tables. All those sinks and hoses. All those jars and saws and crowbars and…My head started to swim. Before the room began spinning, I focused my attention on my sister in the middle of the room wearing hot-pink scrubs, a lab coat, a surgical mask, and vinyl gloves. She held an eyeball in her hand.

  Things suddenly got very fuzzy.

  I don’t know if the surprise on her face meant she hadn’t expected to see me or she hadn’t expected to see me about to give up my breakfast and/or pass out on the floor.

  “Woooooooo” sort of slipped out of my mouth, followed by bobbing and weaving, even though my feet hadn’t moved since I’d opened the door.

  She came over to me, still holding that eyeball. “Snookums, what are you doing here?”

  So it was “snookums” now. At any moment my sisterly moniker could change. She tried to hold me up with her
elbows. “Carly, don’t touch me withthe eye hand !”

  “Then stand up straight.”

  Couldn’t do it.

  My sister could be a ruthless dictator, like our mother. She directed, “Take a deep breath. You’re wobbling, just like one of those Weebles you used to play with when you were a kid.”

  I knew she meant that I wasn’t steady on my feet. But Weebles didn’t have feet. They were egg-shaped dolls I used to take great pleasure in destabilizing. I couldn’t help but think she was also alluding to my less than perfect figure. My defenses went up like the price of movie tickets. “Well, Weebles wobble but they don’t fall down,” I countered.

  I’m sure Carly found that statement ridiculous. She responded the way she typically did when I acted dumb. “Whatever.” Then she added cruelly, “Suck it up.”

  I sucked, but not quite up.

  “Do it.I can’t hold you like this. If you haven’t noticed, one of my hands is full.”

  With that in mind——vividly——I did suck it up. Besides, she was too much like our mother for me to defy her in this kind of situation. I straightened my shoulders and hightailed it over to the nearest chair. Carly and her sidekick The Eye went back over to the metal autopsy table. She plopped the eye into a container of liquid.

  “I hate this place, Car. Why couldn’t you be a pediatrician or something?”

  “Do I ask you why you couldn’t be anything other than a psychologist?”

  Actually, she had on several occasions. “Did you finish doing the autopsy on Jazz’s ex-wife?”

  She had her back to me, engaged in clanking around strange-looking tools and doing what looked to me like busywork. At last the reality dawned on me. She was purposefully ignoring me. She didn’t want me there.

  “Carly?”

  She stopped clanging for a moment, not turning to face me yet, but kept arranging tools, more quietly. “I haven’t started it yet. She’s not the only dead woman in Wayne County, you know. Contrary to what you and Maguire think, I’ve got other cases. He’s been pressing me all morning about it. I’ve had no sleep, no coffee, my mood is foul, and you shouldn’t be here.” She went back to banging things around.