by Brad Parks
But how, exactly, did it all relate? I gazed at the TV screen, bewildered. Windy Byers stared back at me with his ridiculous pencil mustache and his fat face—but precious few answers. My mind began toying with the possibilities.
Scenario No. 1: Akilah and Windy, the star-crossed lovers, decided to run off together but didn’t feel like dragging the kids along. Hence the fire. But that didn’t work. One, it made them unimaginable monsters. And while Akilah was a liar and Windy was a dimwit, they just didn’t seem like they had that much evil in them. Besides, why would Akilah keep returning to the house if that was the case? And why would she have slept at Sweet Thang’s place if she really just wanted to run off with her boyfriend?
No, Windy and Akilah didn’t seem to be in cahoots on this one. If anything, it was possible they were both being victimized—after all, there was blood in the foyer of Windy’s place, while Akilah’s house had been made to double as a barbecue pit. But by whom? Who would want to hurt both of them?
Of course. Scenario No. 2: Rhonda Byers, the councilman’s churchgoing wife, learned of her husband’s affair, then parted company with her sanity. She torched the love shack with the bastard children still inside, then sliced up her husband. Now she was reporting him missing in the hopes no one would ever suspect a member of the Ladies’ Fellowship Group could go on a homicide spree.
I held up Scenario No. 2 for a moment or two, turned it around a few times so I could look at all sides. And yes, it worked. I thought about her demeanor at that press conference, so self-assured, so preternaturally composed, so unruffled. Shouldn’t she have been a little more distraught? Isn’t that what everyone did for the six o’clock news?
I’m not saying I would put Scenario No. 2 in the newspaper yet—I still had a lot to prove before I reached that point. But the jealous wife was certainly a dangerous animal, capable of all kinds of nasty. Especially if the wife in question was packed in as tight a box as Rhonda Byers, with her proper suits and her toe-pinching shoes. It tended to make the explosion that much more spectacular when it all came unwrapped.
It would also explain why Akilah was making herself such an elusive figure and would lend some sense to her rant on the fire escape. After all, you’re not paranoid if people really are out to get you.
I pulled my attention away from the television and turned toward Bertie Harris and her pile of sodden Kleenex. Bertie didn’t necessarily have all the answers—it didn’t sound like she and her daughter were too close anymore—but she at least had some of them.
“Mrs. Harris, would you mind if I sat down?” I said.
She pointed toward an empty chair. “You can call me Bertie, you know.”
I sat. Sweet Thang smiled at me, like she was proud I was now a member of the Call Me Bertie Club. I took off my jacket and draped it around the chair, then sat down.
“I know this is painful to talk about, but it may help me figure out who killed your grandchildren,” I said. “Can you tell me about Akilah and that man you just saw on the screen, Windy Byers?”
“Byers!” she said. “That’s the fool’s name, Windy Byers. Of course! Lord. You think he had something to do with those poor children?”
“I don’t know what to think right now,” I said. “You have heard he’s missing, yes?”
“What do you mean?”
“He didn’t come home Sunday night. His wife called the police Monday morning. That’s why his face was on the TV just now. The cops are calling it a suspicious disappearance. A police source told me they found blood in the house. I think he may be in trouble.”
Bertie absorbed this news for a moment.
“And Akilah is in trouble, too?” she asked.
“I’m not real sure,” I said, not wanting to haul out my Rhonda Byers theory just yet. “But I’m hoping I can take what you know about Windy and Akilah and use it to learn a little more.”
“Well, I’m not sure how much I know. Akilah and I weren’t real chitchatty about that sort of thing,” she said, pantomiming “chitchatty” with her hands. “She knew I disapproved of her sneaking around with a married man. She say, ‘But Mama, we in love.’ And I tell her, ‘Akilah, you can’t be saying that about another woman’s husband. He ain’t yours to be in love with.’ But she didn’t listen.”
“How did they meet?” I asked.
“Oh, I was there when it happened,” Bertie said. “He came here campaigning one time—you know, those politicians always come around when they looking for your vote. He was walking around and he took a real interest in Akilah. She couldn’t have been no more than eighteen. Can you imagine that?”
Quite easily, I thought, as I sneaked a glance at Sweet Thang in her formfitting knit dress, her perfect, slender legs crossed beneath her. If there was a straight man who wasn’t attracted to younger women, I had yet to meet him.
“I didn’t think nothing of it at first,” Bertie continued. “I thought he was just helping her, like a mentor. He got her a job over at the hospital”—another area where Akilah didn’t fib—“and he looked after her. I didn’t think there was nothing going on.”
“I heard this part already,” Sweet Thang told me. “I’m going to check on the banana bread.”
She rose from her seat and slid by me, brushing me lightly with her hand as she passed, giving me a little chill down my spine. It made me wonder: if she could do that with a single light touch, what would full-body contact be like?
Bertie Harris brought me back into the conversation before my mind drifted too far.
“Are you going to put this in the newspaper?” she asked.
“I have no idea what I’m going to do,” I said, which happened to be an honest answer.
“Well, I guess it don’t matter now. You reap what you sow.”
I wasn’t sure who was reaping or who was sowing in this particular farming metaphor. But if it made Bertie more comfortable talking to me, she could plant a whole field for all I cared.
“So when did you realize they were…” I groped for wording that wouldn’t seem crude. “When did you start to think they were getting intimate?”
“Well, I should have known before I did. He was always giving her little presents, jewelry and stuff—a real charmer, he was. I’d see her wearing a necklace and say, ‘Where’d you get that, girl?’ and she wouldn’t say nothing. But I knew,” Bertie said. “Then she went and got herself pregnant.”
I nodded. Yes, that would be a strong indication intimacy had occurred.
“Then he bought her a house,” she added.
“He what?” I asked. Jewelry. Jobs. Even an apartment. I had heard of politicians getting those things for their girlfriends. But never a house.
“Uh-huh. A house. The house that burned down, he bought it for her,” Bertie said, shaking her head. “She came home one day and said, ‘Mama, me and the kids is moving out. My man got me a house.’ ”
It was, I realized, one final lie out of the mouth of Akilah Harris. She wasn’t struggling under the weight of a mortgage, as she told us. She was getting it for free.
Which was just lovely for Akilah, I’m sure. But I could only begin to imagine how Rhonda Byers felt when—as wives inevitably do—she learned about it. Your fifty-something-year-old husband is not only cheating on you with a twenty-something-year-old-woman, but he has two kids with her and bought her a house.
I’m no expert on the mysterious workings of that alien planet known as the female psyche, but I’ll posit that would make any woman pretty damn mad.
Mad enough to kill.
* * *
Sweet Thang returned to the living room, looking pleased with her domesticity.
“It’s done and it’s perfect,” she announced. “But we should give it at least twenty minutes to cool.”
I hadn’t eaten a thing since breakfast. A nice hunk of warm, fresh-out-of-the-oven banana bread sounded delightful. And it was tempting to think that since I was in possession of information no one else had, I didn’t need to be in
too much of a rush. But I had learned, mostly the hard way, that nothing stays secret too long. And this story was sensational enough—SOURCE: MISSING POL WAS TWO-TIMING!—the New York tabloids would be swarming across the Hudson River as soon as they learned of it. I had to get as much of a head start on the competition as I could. There was no time to dawdle. Not even for fresh baked goods.
“Unfortunately, I think Bertie will have to enjoy it by herself,” I said to Sweet Thang. “You and I have to be going. We’ve got work to do.”
Bertie turned to Sweet Thang with a conspiratorial smile.
“Well, the boss has spoken!” Bertie said.
“Oh, he’s not so bad,” Sweet Thang assured her.
Bertie stood and shuffled toward her new friend.
“I just have to give you a hug,” she said, grabbing her, her voice choking slightly. “Thank you so much for listening to an old lady go on like I did.”
“Oh, my goodness, it was so lovely meeting you,” Sweet Thang said, hugging back. “Thank you for your hospitality.”
I stood up and extended a hand as soon as they broke their embrace. “Bertie, it was very nice talking with you,” I said as she lightly grabbed my hand for one of those nonshake shakes. “If you hear from Akilah, please give us a call.”
“Oh, she don’t come around here no more,” Bertie said. “We always end up fighting because I always tell her what I think. I know I should be more understanding, but I just can’t deal with her and that married man. I just can’t.”
“You mentioned she had brothers and sisters,” I said. “Do any of them have contact with her?”
“I don’t know. They wouldn’t tell me if they did. They’d know it would just upset me. But if Akilah was going to run to any of them, she would run to Tamikah. That’s her oldest sister. She was like a second mother to that child. They was always close.”
Bertie gave me Tamikah’s phone number.
“That’s her home number,” Bertie said. “She don’t like it when I call her on her cell, so I just call her at home.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I hope you don’t mind if we call you when we have more questions. And sorry again about last night.”
“You just be good to this young lady, you hear?” she said.
I assured her I would. And with that, we departed. I waited until we were down the stairwell and out into the courtyard, headed for our cars, before I spoke.
“Holy crap,” I said. “That was pretty incredible.”
“Which part?” Sweet Thang asked.
“Uh, the part where Windy Byers, the suddenly absent city councilman, had two children out of wedlock and bought a house for his mistress,” I said. “I thought that was kind of obvious.”
Sweet Thang had this look on her face like the Clue Fairy had not yet visited her.
“I thought we didn’t put people’s personal lives in the paper,” she said.
“We do when they turn up missing under mysterious circumstances,” I assured her. “Heck, in this case, we’d do it even if ol’ Windy was still hanging around. I mean, he’s a public figure. Sure, we might look the other way if a councilman has a quiet little something on the side. But a councilman having two kids with his mistress and buying her a house? That’s not just adultery. That’s practically polygamy. And it certainly raises hard questions about how he’s affording it, which is something a voter has a right to know.”
“Oh,” she said. She thought for a moment, almost said something, then stopped herself. If she was an NFL lineman, I would have whistled her for a false start.
She paused for another tick, then asked, “So what do we do now?”
“Well, we have one source saying Windy and Akilah were knocking boots, but we need more,” I said. “Then we need a law enforcement source to link Windy and Akilah and tell us Rhonda Byers, the scorned woman, is the primary suspect in the investigation.”
“She is?”
“Sure she is. Think about it. Windy Byers was unfaithful to his wife, and not in a small way. Then his girlfriend’s house gets burned down and he goes missing. Who else but the wife did it? Let’s face it, Windy is probably somewhere off the Jersey shore right now with a weight tied to his leg, slowly sinking to twenty thousand leagues under the sea. Or at least he is if Rhonda has contracted out her work properly.”
“But how…” she began and paused. Still no visit from the Clue Fairy. “But how are the cops going to figure that out?”
“We’re going to tell them.”
“We are?”
I sighed. Didn’t the journalism schools teach anything these days?
“Of course we are. It’s one of the oldest tricks in our bag,” I explained, feeling a bit professorial myself for a moment. “We learn something that we strongly suspect is true, but we can’t prove it with enough certainty to put in the newspaper—not without major investigative resources and subpoena authority. We just don’t have those things. But the cops do. So we tip off the cops, they check it out, and when it comes back that we got it right, they leak us the story as a nice thank-you. We get to run it as a big exclusive. They solve the case. Everybody wins.”
“But how do we attribute it?”
“As ‘law enforcement sources said,’ of course.”
“But it wasn’t law enforcement sources. It was us.”
“Well, yes and no,” I said. “It was us that planted the idea, sure. But by the end, it becomes something the cops really do believe. So it’s quite accurate to say ‘law enforcement sources said.’ ”
“But isn’t that, I don’t know, like, influencing the news or something?” Sweet Thang asked. “Aren’t we making the news instead of just reporting it?”
“Well, technically?” I said, a bit stumped for how to rationalize it. “Technically, a little bit. It’s a gray area, but only slate gray, not charcoal. If our ultimate responsibility is to the public and its right to know important information, and this becomes a way to serve that right? To me it becomes something we’re obligated to do.”
Not that we brag about it, of course. Tipping off the cops is the sort of thing that could get a newspaper sued in half a heartbeat if, God forbid, we turned out to be wrong and the person in question really was innocent. A lawyer could argue the act of tipping shows malice, a key element in libel cases.
Still, this sort of interplay between the authorities and the newspapers happens all the time. Not long ago, one of our best reporters learned an ex-mayor had a warehouse full of smoking-gun documents. We knew we couldn’t get into the warehouse, but the feds could. So our reporter tipped off the feds. They raided the warehouse. We got the scoop the mayor was under investigation. The mayor ultimately went to jail. The feds looked like they were doing their jobs. We stayed well ahead of the competition on the story the whole way because, of course, the feds were feeding it to us. Again, everybody won.
Well, except the mayor.
* * *
We reached the outer limits of Baxter Terrace and I walked Sweet Thang over to Walter the BMW.
“So what’s next? Do we go down to police headquarters and file a report or something?”
“It takes a bit more finesse than that,” I said. “But don’t worry about that. I’ll handle it.”
“Oh,” she replied. “What do you want me to do?”
“Why don’t you go find Akilah’s older sister Tamikah,” I said, tearing off a piece of notepad paper and copying down the number Bertie had given me.
Sweet Thang looked uncertain.
“But what do I dooooo?” she whined.
“The same thing you did with Bertie Harris.”
“Play mah-jongg with her?”
I laughed because I thought she was kidding. But no, Sweet Thang wasn’t smiling. Silly intern. She had all the raw ability in the world but didn’t have the first idea what to do with it. She’d learn.
“No. Not mah-jongg. I meant earn her trust, like you did with Bertie,” I said. “Once she trusts you, let her tell you the story
of what happened with her sister and Windy Byers. Hopefully she’ll confirm everything Bertie told us and add a few new bits of information. If we’re lucky, Tamikah is Akilah’s confidante and knows everything.”
“But what if she won’t talk to me?”
Sweet Thang pouted. I smiled and patted her on the shoulder.
“She will. People like talking to you,” I said. “Besides, if Rhonda Byers really is what I think she is, Akilah is in all kinds of trouble right now. And we’re working to get her out of that trouble. Tamikah will see that and she’ll want to help us lock up the woman who is trying to kill her sister.”
She reached out and grabbed my arm.
“I’m so glad we’re working together,” she said. “It’s, like, just amazing. You know so much. I’m learning so much more from you than I ever learned from any of my professors.”
“Well, it’s their job to teach you the rules,” I said. “You have to know what they are before you know which ones you can break.”
She nodded. I pointed down at the goose bumps that were forming on her thighs.
“C’mon, let’s get you and your bare legs out of this cold,” I said. “Call me later.”
“Okay. Bye. Thanks again for everything.”
I gave her a little wave—but not the little wave—and went to my car, pleased that I’d managed to have an interaction with Sweet Thang that didn’t feel sexually charged. Maybe I had just been misreading her intentions all along. Maybe she just flirted because it was how she related to men, and there was nothing behind it. All the incidental contact—the grabbing of the arm, the brushing of the hand—was just because she was a naturally touchy-feely person. She hugged me this morning. She hugged Bertie when we departed. She was just like that with everyone.
And sure, Tina thought Sweet Thang was trying to get me in bed. But just because Tina devoured men like they were Tic Tacs didn’t mean Sweet Thang did. She was a nice young woman who was pleased to have found a mentor, nothing more. I vowed to rinse my mind of the dirty thoughts I kept having about her and treat her with pure professionalism for the rest of our time together.
