by Tracy Brown
Gillian stroked Frankie’s head and spoke softly. “Why did she do it?” Gillian had to know.
He looked at her, silent for a while.
“She thinks he was molesting her son.”
Gillian’s expression changed and she stopped stroking Frankie’s head. She frowned slightly and touched her diamond necklace absentmindedly. Frankie took note. He expected that everyone would respond that way, questioning the possibility that Steven was a pedophile. Frankie had seen the local newspaper reporters assembling at his home in the wee hours as word spread of a bloody crime scene in his upper-crust neighborhood. He had heard what Misa said, seen her conviction. He knew that his dead brother would be judged publicly without ever having the chance to defend himself.
“Oh my God,” Gillian managed.
Frankie cleared his throat again. “She sat there and looked me in my face…” He didn’t complete the thought, but it was obvious that Frankie was struggling with what had happened.
Gillian had one eyebrow raised. Gently, and in her most angelic voice, she prodded. “Steven couldn’t be capable of something like that … could he?”
Frankie didn’t move. He didn’t respond. He simply stared off into space as if he were mesmerized by some long-ago thought.
Gillian didn’t nudge any further out of respect for the fact that he had just lost his brother. But she began thinking about Steven—about all the times she had interacted with him over the years, trying to assess if she had missed any warning signs that he could be a pervert.
“Nah…” Frankie said at last. “I mean…”
Silence lingered between them for so long that Gillian got up and poured herself some of the coffee she’d made earlier. She made some tea for Frankie, since she’d been around him long enough to know that he hated coffee. When she returned to the living room, Frankie was holding his head in his hands. Meanwhile, Tremaine and the goons came in and told Frankie that they were going to leave. Gillian noticed that Tremaine’s demeanor seemed just as downtrodden as Frankie’s. After all, Tremaine had witnessed the carnage up close and personal. He had seen Steven’s bullet-riddled body, watched his friend come to terms with the loss of his brother and what he was accused of. The two friends shared a strong handshake embrace and when they were all gone, Frankie sank back down on the couch, and again the silence came.
“Drink your tea,” Gillian said, wondering how things could get any worse. First her father had been slain, her brother maimed, and now Steven was dead, Camille was pregnant, Misa was in jail. And Frankie sat mute before her.
“I’m so sorry, baby,” she said, watching him ignore the steaming mug in front of him. She knew that he probably wanted something much stronger than peppermint tea. “I know you looked out for Steven all his life.” She thought back to a conversation she and Frankie had only weeks earlier, on the night when they made love for the first time. He had shared with her some painful details of his childhood. They were things that Frankie had never shared with anyone; how his father suffered from some type of mental illness that had gone undiagnosed for so long the family seemed to have just found a way to cope with it.
Frankie looked at Gillian. “I told you that my father was crazy,” Frankie said, as if reading her mind. “He was the type to go off—just snap at any minute.”
“Yeah,” Gillian said, nodding. “You told me that he would sit down for dinner and smile, he’d tell your mom that it was delicious, and then he’d bug out and ask why she was looking at him like that. He accused her of poisoning his food.”
Frankie nodded. “That wasn’t the half of it.” He stared ahead before looking at Gillian again. “He was like a psychopath.”
Gillian felt like a psychologist. “You said that he used to bully everybody, and beat you.”
Frankie looked at her in a way that made her stop speaking. “We were all scared of him.” He frowned. “But my brother was the most afraid because he was the little one, you know? He was a little kid, bony and frail, and my father used to tease him, call him Gimpy and shit like that.”
Frankie had told Gillian that his father committed suicide one night as his brother and mother lay asleep. By then, Frankie had fled the home and was working for Gillian’s father, Doug Nobles. Frankie admitted to Gillian that he had felt no sorrow when his father died. He had only been relieved that he hadn’t taken the rest of the family with him.
“After I left home, I would sneak in and see Steven all the time. He told me that Dad wasn’t beating them like he used to. I never knew if that was true or not, ’cuz I wasn’t seeing my mother. She was like a slave to my father, you feel me?”
Gillian nodded, but truly had no idea what that kind of upbringing must have been like. Her father had doted on her from the moment she entered the world and her mother had been smothering, as opposed to distant and nonparticipatory. Her parents’ marriage had been a happy one and she had rarely heard her father raise his voice at her mother.
Frankie continued. “I never knew what happened after I left. I got out and got away, but he probably bore the burden of it.”
“You feel guilty about that?” she asked.
Frankie nodded. “Yeah, I do. I left. And Steven and my mother were left behind to deal with my father.”
“Don’t blame yourself, Frankie.”
He shrugged. “Nah,” he said, as if trying to shake off the feeling of guilt that so obviously haunted him. “It ain’t that. I did what I could to protect him. And I thought I did a good job.” He looked in her eyes. “Camille never understood why I took care of him; why I let him hang around in our kitchen and eat up our food, run up our bills.” He chuckled awkwardly. “I just wanted my little brother to feel like he had a place he could be…” Frankie seemed to lose the words he needed to convey the sense of comfort and safety he had wanted Steven to enjoy after years of being belittled and demeaned at the hands of their tyrannical father.
“I understand,” Gillian said. “I know how you felt about Steven.” She couldn’t believe that Misa had killed him. “Frankie, I’m so sorry.” She shook her head, feeling helpless to ease his pain. “Where is she now—Camille’s sister?”
“She’ll be in court this afternoon,” Frankie said, moving forward in his seat as if he needed to say something. He paused and looked at Gillian. “I can’t let her get away with this.”
Gillian wondered for a moment if Frankie was going to hurt his sister-in-law. She searched his eyes for the answer.
Frankie was staring at the floor as if in a trance. “I have to break this to my mother somehow.” He pictured his mother’s face—Mary Jane Bingham. She was once a beautiful woman, tall and brown, statuesque and ladylike. She was always quiet, had always been shy and soft-spoken. But it had gotten worse over the years, and Mary had remained a scared and beaten-down wife long after her husband was dead.
“Why didn’t you feel the need to take care of your mother the same way you did for Steven after your father died?”
Frankie stared at Gillian, having asked himself the same question over and over. “Because my brother had no choice but to stay there and deal with it. He was a kid, you know what I’m saying. But my mother? She could have left whenever she was ready. She could have got us out of there. She was always so fragile, and … maybe I shouldn’t fault her for it.”
Gillian shook her head. “No, I think I would feel the same way.” She wondered how the news of Steven’s death would affect poor Mary Bingham. “When are you going to tell her? I want to be there with you.”
He laughed a little. “How do I tell her this shit? It’s gonna destroy her.”
“I don’t know how we’ll tell her. But we’ll figure it out, Frankie.”
She made it sound so easy, but Frankie knew that it wouldn’t be. He breathed a heavy sigh and sat back against the pillows on the couch. He couldn’t block out the recollection of Steven’s face in his head. He saw his brother lying in the body bag, his eyes frozen in horror as he lay dead. There was no question i
n his mind that somebody—Camille, Misa—somebody was going to pay for what had been done to Steven.
Gillian looked at him as if she could read his mind. Frankie realized then how much he loved her. She was all that was good in his life at the moment. In his mind, Camille had held him hostage in a marriage he no longer wanted to be in. He had felt obligated to Camille for all the years of loyalty and love she had given him, but truth be told he hadn’t been happy in years. And now, just as he found the courage to leave her and to live his life doing what made him truly happy, she was pregnant with his child. Camille’s sister had killed his brother and accused him of an atrocity, dredging up years of Frankie’s own childhood nightmares, which he had managed somehow to suppress in order to survive. Now he’d have to face his mother with more bad news in a life that had been riddled with nothing but. His “brother” Baron was laid up in the hospital, responsible for the death of his father figure, Doug Nobles. But as he looked at Gillian sitting there, Frankie felt reassured. She was beautiful, she understood him, she had his back and he was grateful.
“I love you, Frankie. And no matter what, nothing’s gonna change that. We’re gonna get through this together.”
Frankie kissed her, pulled her close to him. She lay against his chest and he held her, hoping that their bond could indeed stand the trials that loomed ahead of them.
Fingerprints
It was tight in the back of the squad car as Misa was driven to the police station that night. With her hands cuffed firmly behind her back—the female officer who put the handcuffs on had expressed concern that Misa might slip out of them with her small wrists—she sat uncomfortably as she listened to the two officers in the front seat joke about each other’s mamas.
Misa thought about the look on Frankie’s face. She tried to block it out as she gazed out the window at the passing motorists. She thought instead about Shane, her sweet boy with his big innocent eyes and his beautiful smile. Misa missed him more than she ever had before. She felt tears stinging at the corners of her eyes as she acknowledged her role in what had happened to her son. Misa hadn’t been there to protect Shane. In fact, she’d been so busy trying to be everything Baron Nobles had ever dreamed of that she hadn’t even noticed her own child’s misery.
She had been a terrible mother, she decided. It didn’t matter that her heart had been in the right place; that she had only been out trying to secure a place in Baron’s life so that she and Shane could have a better existence. None of that mattered now. Shane had been victimized and Misa felt that it was all her fault.
They arrived at the precinct and Misa was ushered inside, the cold winter wind howling in her ears, whistling through the trees and nudging them all forward toward the big doors leading into the police station, to her fate. Once inside, one of her captors ordered her to sit on a bench as he approached the desk sergeant and was handed a logbook.
Misa sat on the bench and shivered slightly as her body warmed up from the cold January air outside. She watched the officers gather around and talk about her in hushed tones. “Murdered the guy … said he was molesting her kid … her brother-in-law, can you imagine?”
She felt like an exhibit at the zoo. After several agonizing minutes, she was led up an old, paint-chipped staircase that reminded her of the one in her former high school. The handcuffs still tore at her wrists and she hoped, as they reached the landing, that someone would take them off her soon. They stepped into a room and a heavy iron door shut behind them. She looked around and saw four officers and a few holding cells. She was mercifully uncuffed and ordered to step out of her shoes. Misa was searched again and made to pass through a metal detector. Once they were satisfied that she had no weapons of mass destruction, they gave her back her shoes—without the laces. Next, she was led into a cell that was smaller than her tiny bathroom at home, and she sat on the bench inside as the officer shut and locked the cell door behind her. She massaged her sore wrists as she peered through the bars at the officers filling out paperwork and milling about.
Misa looked around. This place was filthy. Previous poor, unfortunate souls had carved their names into the bench on which she sat, onto the walls surrounding her. Misa couldn’t imagine what would possess a person to want to leave their mark here of all places. She had certainly never imagined that she would find herself in this situation. No one could have predicted that things would’ve turned out the way they had.
Her thoughts were interrupted by a female officer who came and unlocked Misa’s cell. She informed her that she was about to be fingerprinted and photographed. Misa let out a soft moan as she was led to the photographing station. She was familiar enough with the justice system to know that her mug shot would inevitably appear in the newspaper the next day. She stepped into the white-painted square on the floor as the officer instructed her and looked into the camera as she was told.
“How’s my hair?” Misa half jokingly asked the woman wielding the camera.
The brunette seemed caught off guard by the question, but nodded, offered Misa a weak smile. “Good.”
It was true. Compared to most of the people who slid through the precinct late at night, she did look all right. Misa had a fresh new weave, which was less than a week old and still looked great.
She glared into the camera, her expression defiant. The officer told her to turn to her left and another picture was taken. Then she was led over to a high-tech fingerprinting station and processed. When she was done, the officer who had brought her in appeared again and handcuffed her, looser this time, before leading her up another flight of stairs. This time, Misa was led down a maze of hallways and brought into an office where an older white woman with glasses and plainclothes sat behind a large oak desk.
The cop ushered her into a nearby room and ordered her to sit on a folding chair. He left her in there and went back outside the room to speak with the woman at the desk. Misa stared at the wall in the room she had been left in. Photos lined the wall like poorly applied wallpaper—pictures of crime victims. Misa read their names, read the details of their murders.
Trina Samuels, shot numerous times in the head … Darin “Dusty” Fernandez, missing since August 2007 … Martin “Murk” Payton last seen leaving Top Cuts Barbershop … found with a bullet to the back of the head in the basement of 555 Steuben Street … a witness stabbed to death in his home … another bludgeoned to death in the parking lot of Staten Island Savings Bank.
Misa looked at all the faces and all the stories and immediately felt like something was wrong. First of all, Frankie owned Top Cuts Barbershop. It was one of the many legitimate businesses he used as fronts for his illicit drug empire. She had also heard Baron mention Dusty’s name on at least one occasion—particularly in hushed tones during late-night phone calls with Frankie during a trip he had taken with Misa to Miami.
Misa recalled the Miami trip now as she stared at Dusty’s name and face on the poster. She remembered hearing Baron admit to having killed Dusty, recalled how she had judged him for taking the life of another human being. And now she had done the same thing. She had never been the most religious person, but she did believe in God. She knew that murder was a sin, no matter how you cut it. Misa’s faith taught her that God himself would exact revenge against Steven for what he had done to Shane. But Misa’s maternal instincts hadn’t allowed her to wait patiently for justice. She had had to get some kind of immediate closure, and she had done that. Even as she sat there, knowing that she was facing a horrible immediate future in prison, she felt better knowing that Steven was dead—that she had killed him.
She turned her attention back to the wall and read some more of the posters, although no other names, faces, or details jumped out at her. The white woman who had been seated at the desk came into the room, but the other officer stayed outside. She sat across from Misa and offered her a halfhearted hello.
“So, what happened tonight?” she asked.
Misa ignored the question. She had asked for an attorney so m
any times she was sick of saying it. Plus, she was certain that the rookie outside had filled this lady in on all the details.
The woman smirked at Misa. “You’re probably smart not to say too much. Is there anything you need? Any phone calls you need to get out of the way?”
Misa shook her head. “No.”
“Well, it’s late and I’m sure you’d like to get settled in for the night and lay down for a spell. Why don’t you take a look behind you and tell me if you recognize anybody?”
Misa spun around in her seat and looked at the wall behind her. Unlike the wall she’d been facing, this one was papered with photos of wanted criminals and descriptions of the crimes they were accused of. Her eyes danced across it and settled on a photo of Daniel “Danno” Henriquez, an associate of both Frankie and Baron Nobles.
Misa’s stomach flip-flopped.
… wanted in connection with the rape and torture of Trina Samuels … DNA evidence found at the scene …
Misa didn’t want to overreact, but she was stunned.
“If you recognize someone on that wall, I’m sure it would look good for you in court.”
Misa wondered if they already knew that she was familiar with Baron, had vacationed with him, spent nights in his bed. She wondered if they knew that she had seen Danno plenty of times before. Her connection to Frankie was unmistakable, but she wasn’t sure if they knew how close she had gotten to the criminal side of it all, the things she’d heard over the past few months. Misa decided that now more than ever, she needed to keep her lips sealed. She had permanently burned her bridges with Frankie Bingham. The Nobles family was powerful and Misa couldn’t afford to make any more mistakes.
