Thrilling Thirteen

by Ponzo, Gary

  Little D was waiting for me when I pulled up in front of Fisher’s Pawn, in a line of forlorn shops on Silver Hill Road. We walked together toward the shop, wedged between Rayelle’s House of Beauty and The Chicken Shack. The air reeked of hot grease and singed hair.

  In the pawn shop, a transparent counter extended the length of the store, reminding me of a bowling lane. A Plexiglass wall separated the counter from the crammed-together merchandise. Everything from computer monitors to old radios and musical instruments packed the shelves.

  A short, slight man, café au lait in color, looked up from the far end. I could see his resemblance to Tina.

  “Rodney Fisher?” I asked.

  “Who wants to know?” he asked, in a low, gruff voice.

  “I’m Sam McRae.” I held up his card. “You wanted to see me. And it so happens, I want to see you.”

  Fisher opened a gate and emerged from behind the counter. He strode down the long aisle toward us, eyes fixed on me. He seemed to be on a mission. I sensed Little D’s presence behind me. My stomach felt hollow with anxiety.

  Fisher stopped about ten feet away. His gaze bore into me. “Where is she?” he asked. “Where’s my girl?”

  I blinked. “I have no idea where Tina is. I was hoping you might know.”

  “How would I know? I ain’t seen her. But you know, don’t you?” He was looking past me now, at Little D.

  “Mr. Fisher, I need to ask something else,” I said. “Where were you a week ago Wednesday night—the night Shanae was murdered?”

  “What bid’ness is that o’ yours?”

  I started to speak, stopping when I realized that, like Greg Beaufort, Fisher was skinny and short. And they were both light brown. He looked more like Tina than Greg had. In the right clothes, with a cap pulled low over his face, he could have passed for Tina. And he could have left the house that night—after killing Shanae.

  “I’m interested, Mr. Fisher, because I know Shanae had evidence she wanted to use to get more child support.” I chose my words carefully. “I know that must have worried you. And maybe made you mad at her.”

  “Yeah, bitch stole that shit from me. But so what? I di’nt have nothing to do wit’ it. I was jus’ the middleman, you know?”

  Recalling the evidence Little D had shown me, I said, “She stole the financial records.”

  “Nah, not records. Some stuff wasn’t even mine, you know.”

  This was news. Big news. I paused, trying to figure out what he meant without revealing that I didn’t have a clue. “She stole that stuff. And she used it to force you to pay more money,” I ventured, praying he’d fill in the blanks.

  “Well, sure, then she got all pissed off when she find out what it was. But that shit not even mine. I dunno nuthin’ ’bout that shit. I di’nt care, so long as I got my ten percent. You know what I’m sayin’?”

  I got it. “She took one of the packages. One of the DVDs.” She had found out about the janitor and the sex parties.

  “Yeah. Whatchoo think I meant?” His glare shifted back to Little D. “Now, my man Narsh say you got Tina. So where is she, niggah?”

  I turned to look at Little D, who had locked eyes with Tina’s father. “D,” I said. “Is this true?”

  The front door flew open, banging against the wall. Startled, I yelped. Little D flinched and turned to face Tina’s uncle, the portly William Jackson. The stink of booze rolled off him in waves.

  “You knew,” he bellowed at Fisher. “You knew what my niece was doing, but you didn’t care. Her own father!”

  Fisher’s face contorted. “Whatchoo talkin’ ’bout? You seen my Tina?”

  “Yeah, I seen her.” Jackson staggered toward Fisher. Little D and I stood between them. “She’s safe, wit’ me. I intend to take her far from you and your filthy bid’ness.” He pointed at Little D. “He tole’ me all about the shit she been doing so you can make a little money on the side!”

  I gawked at Little D, but he looked away.

  “But I dunno nuthin’ ’bout that,” Fisher whined. “I swear.”

  “Did you set it up with them white boys?” A drop of sweat etched a line down Jackson’s cheek. “Did you set it up so my girl would be a ho’ for them dirty videos?”

  “I didn’t set nuthin’ up,” Fisher muttered. “He came to me.”

  “Who?” I asked. “Beaufort? One of the white guys?”

  “It weren’t no white guy.” Fisher shifted from foot to foot. “I dunno his name. He never said.”

  In seeming slow motion, Jackson reached into his jacket. Little D grabbed me and threw me against the wall, sheltering me with his body. I heard two shots. Fisher crumpled and fell. The door banged again, and Little D released me from his hold. For a moment, it was the three of us again—me, Little D and Fisher, a pool of blood spreading beneath him.

  People emerged from nowhere, crowding inside, babbling. The air was pungent with cordite and the odor of lye-based hair straightener. Women from the beauty parlor—beauticians in pink aprons and ladies with damp, half-combed hair—screamed and swooned. Men mumbled and shook their heads.

  “You see that mutherfucker run outta here?”

  “Yeah, man, I saw him. He took off in that blue Mercedes—”

  “Blue? Mutherfucker, that car was gray—”

  “Whatever it was, he musta been doing ninety mile a hour.”

  I kept my eyes averted from Fisher and focused on Little D. He returned my gaze. Without a word, we picked our way through the swooning, mumbling crowd and stepped outside. Feeling woozy, the gunshots still ringing in my ears, I took a moment to steady myself, before pulling out my cell phone and dialing 911.

  As we waited for the police, Little D said, in a low voice, “You understand why, right?”

  “Tell me, anyway.” My voice sounded tinny and far away, obscured by the ocean roar in my head.

  “Tina came to me, ’cause I was friends with her mom. If I’d turned her over to you, you’d have had to take her to the police. If I handed her over to her dad, they probably would’ve found her with him.” He gazed at the traffic on Silver Hill Road. “I wanted to make sure we had an alibi for her, before that happened.”

  “So you left her with her uncle?”

  “I knew him, figured she’d be safe with him.” He shook his head. “And I knew he didn’t like Fisher, but I didn’t figure on him doing this.”

  I nodded. “I do understand. You did what you thought was best.”

  “And now, we standing out here with no more information than we had before.”

  “Maybe a little more,” I said. “Maybe a little.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  A long series of interviews ensued. They started on the scene and moved to a CID interview room when it became clear this was much more than a garden-variety shooting. By the time we arrived at the station, my ears were still ringing, but not enough to drown out the cops’ persistent questions.

  “And why were you at Fisher’s Pawn?” the detective asked for the third time. A disheveled fellow in a shiny brown suit that matched his hair, he’d told me his name. For a million dollars I couldn’t recall it.

  “As I said, I was trying to locate my client, Tina Jackson. I thought Fisher might know where she was.” I nodded at Detective Tamara Harris, a short, solid woman with freckled skin and a mini-Afro. Harris, the investigator on Shanae Jackson’s murder, sat beside Brown Suit, tossing questions from time to time but mostly listening. On behalf of the State’s Attorney’s Office, my “good friend” Ray Mardovich was there. He wore the remnants of the bruise I’d inflicted. To my surprise, he also had a tape across his nose. I took guilty pleasure in having broken it. Ray sat next to Detective Harris, but I ignored him.

  “Little did I know,” I went on, “that Tina was with her uncle. What’s going to happen to her, now that her father and Bill Jackson are in the hospital?”

  “Don’t worry,” Harris said. “We’re taking care of that.”

  Jackson had
fled the scene, like a stock car racer on speed, only to wreck his car a few blocks away. He’d veered to avoid a pedestrian, bounced off another car and smashed into a telephone pole.

  Harris spoke in rapid, no-nonsense bursts. “Fisher was a potential suspect from the start, but he had an alibi.” Ray started to say something. Harris silenced him with a look. I began snickering and pretended to sneeze, to cover it.

  “Given the way Shanae Jackson was killed,” Harris continued, “we started looking at the gang angle. Girls usually don’t use guns. They tend to go with bats or razor blades. Anyway, the forensics seemed to back our theories. When the neighbor placed a young girl who looked like Tina at the house around the time of the murder, we figured we probably had our killer. If it wasn’t Tina, we thought it might be one of the gang. We hoped Tina would squeal on her.”

  “But Tina and her gang were busy that night,” I said. “Detective Willard should have the DVD that shows what they were doing.” I looked at the two-way mirror on the wall. Willard was no doubt watching.

  “Yeah, I saw it. Even if Tina left before her friends did, I think the recording probably gives her an alibi. She was at Beaufort’s place about twenty minutes before the witness thought she saw her at the house. That doesn’t give her much time to go home and kill mom. So, we’re left with the ten-million-dollar question: ‘If she didn’t do it, who did?’”

  “I’ve been trying to figure that out,” I said. “I think it may have been someone Shanae was blackmailing. Possibly the janitor, Greg Beaufort, though he would have had to sneak away from the party first. Fisher seems to be the more likely suspect. Both were short, light-skinned black men, but Fisher looks a lot like Tina. If he’d dressed in the right clothes, he could have passed for her.”

  “But Fisher had an alibi,” Harris repeated.

  “Right,” I said. “Before he was shot, though, Fisher said someone had set up the arrangement between the boys at Kozmik Games and Greg Beaufort. I’d been wondering all along how these people got together. I think Fisher knew who it was. I know it wasn’t a white man, but that’s about all. Whoever it was would have been threatened by Shanae’s knowledge of the setup.”

  While I was talking, Detective Willard walked in and leaned against the wall. A dark-haired white man in a navy blue suit stood by his side. “Ms. McRae, this is Detective Norris from Philadelphia,” Willard said. “We’ve been touching base on Darrell Cooper’s homicide and how it may relate to the Jones murder.”

  “Nice to meet you, Detective,” I said. I was starting to feel like I’d walked into a cop convention. “So it was a homicide?”

  “We have reason to believe so,” Norris said. Apparently, he didn’t want to talk about those reasons.

  “The evidence you sent gave us grounds to bring in the two Kozmik game developers and their boss, Mr. Fullbright, and get a warrant to seize their computer equipment—at home and at work,” Willard said. “They’ve lawyered up, but if we find child porn on their computers, there won’t be much for them to say.”

  “How about the embezzlement?” I asked.

  “They aren’t talking, about the embezzlement or anything else,” Willard said.

  “I have copies of a check written on Kozmik’s account to ITN, and financial records mentioning ITN that someone broke into Fisher’s office to get.”

  “Since the police weren’t involved, there’s no Fourth Amendment problem with that. We’ll need the person to testify how he got the records.”

  I tried, but failed to imagine Little D being a witness for the prosecution.

  “I didn’t get them,” I said. “But I can tell you what I know.”

  “The question remains.” Ray spoke at last, his voice nasal. “Who killed Shanae Jackson? More to the point, who can we prove killed her?” Harris nodded. I didn’t have a ready response.

  <><><>

  Later, I sat in Frank Powell’s office, still trying to make sense of everything I’d learned over the last few days. I asked Powell, rocking in his squealing chair, whether Beaufort had ever told him about the Pussy Posse’s ventures into child porn.

  Powell shook his head. “No, he never mentioned that. He did tell me the kids were having sex, but nothing specific.”

  “Would you have any idea how Beaufort might have hooked up with a couple of white guys at a computer gaming company?”

  He spread his arms. “I haven’t the slightest notion. I didn’t know Beaufort well. He was a source of information. That’s all.”

  “Hmm. Do you know if he knew a man named Darrell Cooper?”

  He shrugged. “As I said, he was merely someone who kept me abreast of the school grapevine.”

  “Frank.” A secretary stuck her head in. “Reggie says he needs to see you.”

  “I have a meeting here.” Powell sounded annoyed.

  “He says it’s important.”

  Powell sighed. “My boss calls. I’m sorry. Will you excuse me a moment?”

  “Of course.”

  Powell left. I got up and wandered over to examine his photos. They were mostly of football teams Powell had played on. I scanned the pictures and discovered that he was on the 1986 All-Met team. Goosebumps puckered my flesh. I’d heard of that team before. I checked the caption. There he was—Don “Diesel” Diezman, the fullback. In the next row was a name I hadn’t expected to find—Darrell Cooper. He played center for the team. Powell was quarterback.

  I looked at the jerseys. Diezman wore number 44. Powell wore 17. The numbers in Cooper’s calendar.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  I left Powell’s office before he could come back and tell me more lies. I drove about a mile, pulled over, and called CID. The man who answered said Detective Harris wasn’t in, and Detective Willard was in a meeting.

  “I think I’ve solved one of Detective Harris’s cases,” I said. “At least, I’m reasonably certain that I have a prime suspect for her.”

  “Really.” I heard a suppressed guffaw. Sure, Crimesolver Sam, doing police work now. Tell me another one, I expected him to say.

  “The guy just lied to me about knowing someone connected to the case. Plus, he’s in exactly the kind of position that would enable him to commit the crime.” As Tina’s guidance counselor, Powell must have arranged to meet Shanae at home, ostensibly to talk about Tina. She no doubt appreciated this accommodation since she hated going to Tina’s school to discuss her problems. Shanae must have wanted to discuss Tina’s performance with Beaufort on the DVDs. Powell had to know it was a matter of time before his part in the arrangement came out.

  “So shall I have one of the detectives call you?” the man said, in a voice appropriate for dealing with small, unruly children.

  “Can I have Detective Harris’s cell phone?”

  “I can take a message.”

  I gave him my cell number and told him to have her call right away.

  I leaned back with my eyes shut. A sickening feeling overcame me. I shouldn’t have left Powell’s office. He would wonder about that. At some point, he would think of the photos and realize that they tipped me off to his lies. Which meant he’d come after me. Or he’d send Diesel.

  I wondered if there was a motel far enough away for me to hide. And what would I do with Oscar? He didn’t travel well. I couldn’t ask Russell to take him again.

  My phone rang. Reed Duvall’s cheery voice greeted me.

  “Hey,” I said, trying to collect my thoughts. “How was your trip?”

  “As good as it gets when you move your mother into assisted living,” he said. “Now that’s done and I’ve got a week’s worth of backup to deal with. I thought I’d check in and see how things are going.”

  “Funny you should ask,” I said, pondering how much had changed in a week. I gave him a bare bones update, including my revelation about Powell. “I’m trying to figure out where I can hide from a homicidal guidance counselor and a killer with a body that would make Arnold Schwarzenegger weep with envy.”

  “Let
me help.”

  “Don’t tell me. You’ll give me your frequent flier miles to go to Tahiti?” The truth is, I’ve never been on a plane and I’m scared to death of flying, but I would ride shotgun with The Red Baron rather than face Diesel again.

  “How about this?” Duvall said. “I’ll be your bodyguard.”

  <><><>

  “This is not the kind of service I usually provide,” Duvall said, two hours later in my living room. “But, in your case, I’ll make an exception.”

  Duvall had brought a small overnight bag that Oscar sniffed with great enthusiasm.

  “I can’t offer much in accommodations. I hope you don’t mind sleeping on the sofa.”

  He grinned and brushed back the light-brown cowlick over his brow. “Of course not,” he said. I thought I saw a glimmer in his green eyes. Unspoken desires?

  “I can offer you dinner. I hope you like leftover moo goo gai pan.”

  “But what will you have?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. Bread and water, maybe?”

  Duvall went to the kitchen and opened the frig. “You’ve got eggs. I see cheese and ham. I’ll make us omelets.”

  “Duvall, you don’t have to cook—”

  “Shut up. Sit down. Let me handle this.”

  I sat at the breakfast bar, answering occasional questions about the location of my pans and bowls, and watched as Duvall made magic in the kitchen. While the eggs sizzled, he grated the cheese, shredded some deli ham, and retrieved a few slices of green pepper from the salad-in-a-bag I kept in the produce drawer. He diced them, added them to the other ingredients and folded the eggs over the filling. The place smelled heavenly.

  As he toiled, I described the events of the past week and a half in greater detail, noting how much Little D had helped.

  “He didn’t tell me about Tina,” I said. “But I understand his reasons.”

  “I told you he has his own way of doing things, didn’t I?” Duvall said. “You can count on him, though, when things get rough.”

  As he slid the omelets onto plates, I said, “That stove will need a vacation. It’s not used to working that hard.”