by Angela Henry
“No reason. I was in the area and thought I’d stop by to say hi. I didn’t realize she’d left for her trip already.”
“Would you like to leave her a note or something?” he asked, as he pulled out a ring of keys and unlocked the office door.
“That would be great. Thanks.”
Esther Wade’s office was small and stuffy but very neat and sparse, with only a wooden desk in the center of the room and a row of file cabinets along the wall to the left. Jay, the cleaner, began running the sweeper, and I pretended to search my purse for pen and paper as I looked around. I was disappointed not to see any pictures in the office. With Jay in the office, I couldn’t search the drawers of her desk. But I was happy to see twelve rows of keys hanging on hooks on the wall by the door. These must be the master keys to all the apartments arranged in numerical order from the first floor apartments all the way to the twelfth floor, which only had one key with a red tag. It must have been Esther’s apartment. I quickly grabbed the key while Jay’s back was turned and left.
The elevator was out of order. I was sweaty, breathing heavily, and had to lean against the wall next to the stairwell to catch my breath after walking up twelve flights. Once I’d done so, I walked over to the one and only door and was about to slide the master key into the lock when suddenly the door to the apartment was flung open. The person on the other side had been on her way out and was startled to see me standing there.
“Ms. Clayton?” she said in her velvety voice. She was dressed as elegantly as usual, this time in a black fur-lined leather jacket over a blue sweater and black leather pants. Crap! I hadn’t expected her to actually be here.
“Ms. Wade, I’m sorry to bother you but I needed to talk to you about Lewis Watts. But I can come back another time,” I told the woman who’d been pretending to be Esther Wade. I’d have probably been able to pull it off had I not seen what was hanging around her neck. It was Brenda Howard’s flower pendant with the ruby in the center that had been in Lewis’s apartment the last time I’d seen it. I was sick to my stomach. Was she wearing it as a trophy? My face must have registered my disgust, because she laughed.
“I think you’d better come in, Ms. Clayton,” said Gloria Newcastle, Sharon’s stepmother, aka Diamond, the prostitute.
“Where’s the real Esther Wade? Is she really on vacation or did you kill her, too?” I asked, not about to step into that apartment.
“I assure you, she’s really away on vacation. I saw her get into the cab myself when I was walking Mrs. Wilkin’s dog. I knew she lived alone. As circumstance would have it, I needed a private place to stay for a while, away from prying eyes. Luckily, I know someone who was able to sublet me this place discreetly. But let’s not talk out here in the hallway. I must insist you come inside.” Was she talking about Stevie Carson? Had he illegally sublet her Esther Wade’s apartment, like he’d sublet Lewis my place? Was this why he’d gotten fired? I laughed out loud.
“You were hiding from Dibb, too, weren’t you? Well, I’ve got news for you lady. The idiot who sublet you this place is sitting in jail as we speak,” I told her, knowing full well Mrs. Carson had probably bailed her thieving son out by now. “All anyone would have to do was show him your picture and he’d sing like a bird, especially when he finds out you’re the wife of the judge who put him away for seven years. But Dibb’s dead now. So why are you still coming here?” Her hand flew reflexively to her wrist. And then I recalled her telling me she’d misplaced a bracelet her husband gave her. I’m betting it was the diamond cuff bracelet she had on in the picture with the other Gems.
“You lost your bracelet somewhere in Esther Wade’s apartment, didn’t you? And you can’t risk Esther finding it. Is it engraved?” Gloria flinched and I knew I was right. “Don’t worry. I bet her son or one of his friends found it when they were partying here the night of the drive by. It’s probably at the pawn shop.”
Instead of answering, she suddenly pulled a knife on me. I backed away, figuring I could get to the stairwell faster than she could catch me in her high-heeled boots. I ran. Unfortunately for me, I ran right into Paul Kirkland, who’d come walking through the stairwell door.
He tied me to a kitchen chair. My coat had been removed and my bindings were so tight I was afraid my circulation had been cut off. No amount of wriggling around had any effect on my bindings and only served to dig them deeper into my arms. There were beer cans, liquor bottles, and take-out containers all over the counters. The trash can was filled with garbage and the sink piled high with dirty dishes. I’d noticed as I was marched through the living room that the place reeked of cigarettes from several overflowing ashtrays. It must have been one hell of a party. Paul Kirkland was a nervous wreck, with his arms crossed, pacing back and forth. I wasn’t sure where Gloria had disappeared to. But maybe I could appeal to what little decency this man had.
“Dr. Kirkland?” I said, as he hadn’t bothered to gag me. He kept pacing. “Dr. Kirkland!”
“Shut up!” He was looming over me, face red and contorted in rage. His crazy eyes were wide and well, crazy.
“I’d already called the police before I got here. If you leave now, you can get a head start. Maybe leave the country and disappear.” He leaned against the kitchen counter, burying his face in his hands, and groaned.
“Did you cover your tracks and get the pills from Sharon’s place?” asked Gloria. Neither of us had seen her walk in, and we both jumped at the sound of her voice. Could I have just heard her right?
“Why were you trying to kill Sharon Newcastle?” I yelled at Paul. “What did she ever do to you?”
“Nothing.” His voice was flat. He turned to face me. “Not a goddamned thing. I don’t even know her.”
“Then why?”
“Because he’ll do anything I tell him too. Ever since we were kids. Always has and always will,” concluded Gloria. Paul rushed over to her.
“Ria, the pills were gone when I got there. I’m so sorry. I can fix this. I swear!”
“Idiot!” She slapped his face so hard I winced in pain. “You had better! There can be no loose ends! Do you hear me?”
“How could you kill your own stepdaughter? Your own niece?” She looked at me like she was surprised the loose end could talk.
“I’m saving my niece from suffering and becoming like her mother and grandmother. And this does not come without a great deal of sorrow and regret. But make no mistake,” she said, poking a long red fingernail into my chest, “killing you will not keep me up at night.”
“Saving her?” I said, snorting with laughter, “You tried to kill her because her illness is taking up all your husband’s time and attention. Time attention you want only for yourself. It’s the same reason you had Sharon’s mother Constance killed in that bogus robbery in 1973. What did you tell Dibb and Otis? Did you tell them the same thing you just told your lackey here? There can be no loose ends and not to leave a witness? You knew she was schizophrenic and heard voices and paced the house at night, and she’d be up when they broke in. And then there were Brenda and Betty Howard. Charles fell for Betty and you sent her to sleep with a client who you knew had AIDS. It may have taken longer but you killed Betty, too. Then fast forward thirty years and Charles has a fling with Brenda because she reminded him a little of Betty, and she ends up dead in an alley. You wanted Charles Newcastle all to yourself. And you will kill anyone who gets in your way.”
“I didn’t kill anyone.” She looked over at Paul who was looking back and forth between the two of us.
“You may not have committed the acts, but you have blood on your hands, just like Dibb Bentley, Otis Patterson, and him,” I said, nodding towards the befuddled- looking Paul.
“Look,” Paul said in a shaky voice. “This is it, Ria. I’m done. I’m not killing anyone else. You helped me out, and I did what you asked but no more.”
“I’ll say when you’re done! You owe me, Paul! When you came sniveling to me after you killed Dibb, did I turn you away? N
o! Not only did I help you hide the body in the basement freezer so that wife of yours wouldn’t know what you’d done, but I also found someone else to take the fall. I even put his body in Lewis’s trunk all by myself, and I drove Dibb’s car all around town wearing his hat and coat so everyone would think he was still alive.”
“That was you I saw that night?” But neither of them was paying me any attention.
“It was self-defense!” Paul yelled. “That big motherfucker threatened me when I refused to give him any more money. Said he was going to tell everyone what Joyce had done! I had to do something! I had to protect myself! I had to protect Joyce! I’ve more than paid you back. I got rid of Brenda for you and doctored Sharon’s pills! But I’m done! Do you hear me? Done!”
“Oh, really?” She walked up to him and he backed into the counter. “I wonder if you’d be so protective of your precious Joyce if you knew how she used to get down back in the day.”
“What are you talking about?” His eyes narrowed. I knew exactly where she was going with this and knew it wasn’t going to be pretty. But I also recognized the mad glint in Gloria Newcastle’s eyes. She was out for blood. This was something she’d been wanting to tell him for years.
“I’m talking about our little club back in the seventies. The Gems, remember? Me, Joyce, Brenda and Betty?”
“What about it?”
“What exactly do you think we did in that club?” She asked in a mocking tone, while I frantically searched the kitchen for any way to escape these two lunatics. Because I couldn’t imagine any man taking very well the news that his wife used to turn tricks. But maybe I could use this to my advantage.
“How the hell should I know? What are you getting at?” Paul replied, warily.
“I’ll give a hint. We weren’t playing cards, we weren’t knitting sweaters for homeless orphans, and we weren’t handing out food in the soup kitchen. We were all about having a good time. And getting paid for it.”
“Didn’t you read your own wife’s dissertation, Dr. Kirkland?” I asked. His gaze, along with his ire, immediately swung in my direction and I pressed on, eager to fan the flames of this information into an inferno.
“No.” he said, looking indignant. “Women’s studies isn’t my field of interest and Joyce knew that. She never expected me to read her dissertation.”
“It’s called Sex Work for Fun and Profit: A Feminist Perspective. It was a case study of four women working as hookers in a small college town. They didn’t need the money. They weren’t poor or hard up for cash. They did it for fun. For kicks.”
“And for power,” added Gloria Newcastle. “We loved the power of men doing and paying anything for our time and attention. It was heady stuff to four young black women living in a small going nowhere town. Joyce was a doctoral candidate at Kingford and was having a hard time finding subjects for her thesis. Most of the prostitutes she encountered answered to a pimp or a madam who took huge cuts of their earnings and told them who to sleep with. Joyce was looking for women who used sex work as a business opportunity and answered to no one. It was my idea for her to use the four of us. Betty was down for anything, and Brenda blindly followed her wherever she went. Joyce took some persuading, but in the end she decided the research was worth it. To be honest, she enjoyed herself. A lot.” She spat that last part out at Paul Kirkland, who put his hands over his ear and rocked back and forth mumbling.
“Not Joyce. Not my Joyce.”
“Your little club even had a robbery division, didn’t it? Dibb Bentley and Otis Patterson were robbing your clients,” I said, as matter-of-factly with as much bravado as any person tied to kitchen chair could muster.
“They weren’t thieves,” said Gloria. “They were debt collectors. All those men had outstanding debts to us that they refused to pay. But what they didn’t know was that my mother had been a maid in Pine Knoll for forty years. She trained most of the maids who worked there for decades. All I had to do was call up the maids of these men and drop my mama’s name into the conversation, and they were more than happy to spill all their employer’s secrets, including where their precious possessions were in the house. Once Dibb and Otis got the stuff for me, I called and arranged the necessary fee for its safe return.”
I quietly and ever so slightly scooted my chair to position myself between her and Paul, who was on the other side of the kitchen. One of the legs of the cheap wooden spindle chair I was tied to was loose, and all my exertions had loosened the right armrest. All the chair needed was one good hit and it would fall apart. At least I hoped it would. If it didn’t, I was screwed because I had no clue how else to get free.
“And one of those men was your cousin’s husband?” I asked.
“I’ve loved Charles all my life, but he only ever thought of me as a little sister, Connie’s tagalong little cousin. But they hadn’t been married for very long when her illness manifested itself after Sharon’s birth. She started hearing voices. She wouldn’t always take her medication and couldn’t sleep, pacing the house at all hours and neglecting the baby and him. But I was there. I was a comfort to him. Gave him what he wasn’t getting from Connie. It didn’t take him long to stop seeing me as anyone’s little sister.”
“You loved him, but you made him pay for your time? You turned him into a trick?”
“Charles was never a client,” she insisted indignantly. She walked around the chair to face me looking like she could chew nails.
“And yet his name was in the GEMS ledger as being partial to golden showers. Which one of you did he pay to pee on him? Was it you? Brenda? Betty? Or Joyce?” Gloria snorted with laughter. And a groan escaped from Paul.
“A little piss never hurt nobody. And like I already told you, I took care of Charles’s needs. Me and me alone. It wouldn’t have mattered whether she’d gotten sick or not. Connie was too much of a goody two shoes to give Charles what he really wanted. He’d have come looking for me eventually.”
“You sure about that? I hear he had quite the thing for Betty Howard. Is that why you sent her to sleep with a john with AIDS? Isn’t that why Brenda hated you and Joyce?”
“That wasn’t my fault!” she snapped, her hard veneer finally beginning to crack. “That man was supposed to be Brenda’s client. She had the flu and asked Betty to cover for her, which she did. We insisted that all our clients wear condoms. But he offered Betty five hundred dollars extra to go raw, and she took it. We didn’t know anything about AIDS back then. All we knew was Betty got real sick almost ten years after she slept with that man, and the doctors at the time didn’t know what was wrong with her. By then the Gems had moved on. Joyce got married, then me, and Brenda was training to be a nurse’s aide. She saw the man her sister slept with in the hospital. He was dying and covered in sores. He mistook her for Betty and told her he had AIDS and she better get checked out as well. Brenda didn’t hate us for what happened to Betty. She hated herself for asking Betty to take her place. She thought it should have been her that died.” I wasn’t sure I believed her. But she’d been so forthcoming about all her other sins that she could have been telling the truth. Brenda could have ripped her out of the Gems picture because she was screwing Gloria’s husband.
“And Dibb and Otis never wondered why they were breaking into the house of a lowly public defender?”
“Dibb and Otis did whatever the hell I told them to! They didn’t ask questions.”
“Which one of them shot your cousin?” I persisted, acutely aware of Paul Kirkland’s heavy breathing. He was red in the face and glaring at Gloria like he could tear her limb from limb.
“I never got to find out since they turned on each other. No big surprise, since they were nothing but common thugs. I told Otis that Dibb was holding out on him and he’d taken some expensive jewelry from the Newcastle house and didn’t share the proceeds of the sale with him. I let nature take its course. Otis ended up dead and Dibb got sent to prison, although there was always a rumor that he’d taken the fall for someone
else.” She looked over at Paul with just a hint of a gleam in her eye. And that’s when Paul Kirkland finally snapped.
“You lying, backstabbing bitch!” he screamed, as he hurled himself across the tiny kitchen with his hands outstretched, reaching for her throat. But there was one big problem. Me. I was smack in the middle of him and Gloria.
She shrieked and jumped out of the way of his grasping hands while I braced myself for impact. He slammed into me, sending me smashing against the counter behind me and causing the chair I was in to break apart. I lay in a heap on the kitchen floor amongst the ruins of the chair, the armrests of which were still attached to my forearms like wooden shields. My whole body was one big throbbing ache. But I had no time to concentrate on the pain as Paul Kirkland, who’d fallen on top of me, was frantically trying to extricate himself from the tangle of my limbs and the broken chair. He finally got free enough to stand and lunged for Gloria Newcastle as she ran past him out of the kitchen. Before he could grab her, his ankle got caught in between the spindles of the back of the broken chair. He angrily kicked out and would have kicked me right in the face if I hadn’t thrown up my armrest-clad arms to shield myself.
Seconds later, he was free of the chair and racing after Gloria. Screams from the living room told me he’d caught up with her. By the time I was able to get loose from the chair and staggered into the living room, Paul was on top of Gloria choking the life out of her. I rushed as quickly across the room as my sore body would allow. But Gloria hardly needed my help. She grabbed a flower vase that must have fallen onto the floor from the overturned coffee table and smashed it against the side of his head. He grunted and fell on top of her. He was out cold. Gloria staggered to her feet swaying and taking in great gulps of air into her oxygen-starved lungs. I should have left her to her fate and run right out the door when Paul had her pinned to the ground. This was a woman that didn’t need saving from the likes of me. I was cursing my stupidity as her dazed gaze swung in my direction and she realized I was still a loose end to be dealt with. I attempted to walk past her. She stood in my path.
