Blue Avenue

by Michael Wiley

  He moved his tongue around the inside of his mouth as if checking for loose or broken teeth. He spit blood and saliva on to the pavement. ‘I know Ashley. She was a sad girl, always looking for something.’

  ‘Who was her pimp?’

  ‘Nah, I can’t tell you that. I tell you and that man come looking for me. I’m small time. I got Evelyn and her sister. Bread and potatoes. I don’t fuck with big-time guys.’

  I cocked my fist above his face. ‘I want the man’s name.’

  He shook his head. ‘Go ahead, get it over with. Anything you do’s no worse than what he do to me he find out I tell you his name.’

  I relaxed my fist. ‘A big-time guy was running a broken-down whore like Ashley Littleton?’

  ‘She wasn’t always broke down. Till about three months ago, she did escort. Private parties. Weekends in Nassau. But then she started with the drugs and the drugs started fucking with her head and she was on the street like the rest of us, except she was prettier than most and sometimes her man still pick her up for a special gig with his friends or paying customers.’

  ‘What do you know about Tonya Richmond?’ I asked.

  ‘Never met her. Word is she was new to the street. Don’t know what she did before and don’t care.’

  ‘Belinda Mabry?’

  ‘Never heard of her neither.’

  He said it too fast and I wondered if he was lying and if he was, why, but sirens were approaching from the distance, so I said, ‘What do you know about the guy who’s killing them?’

  ‘Rumors. Just rumors.’

  ‘Like?’

  ‘Like the man drive a green Mercedes SUV. Like he do some nasty thing to the girls after he kill them. Sick things.’

  The sirens were a couple of blocks away. I stood and opened the door to my car.

  ‘What else?’ I asked.

  ‘That’s all I know. Maybe I don’t even know that.’

  I slid into the front seat.

  ‘Hey,’ he said looking at me from the pavement.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Next time you come here I cut your throat.’ Blood between his teeth, he grinned at me.

  FOUR

  On July afternoons the air gets heavy and electric, the blue sky darkens from the west, and lightning storms split the tedious peace. Thunder shakes the roof and your heart skips a beat though you’ve sat through a thousand storms like this over the years. Raindrops the size of nickels hit the pavement. Steam rises. After a half hour or an hour the clouds break and the sun shines again and the air is cool and the ozone smells sweeter than springtime. You can stand outside your front door and suck the sweetness into your lungs and it will make you happy for a while. Then the water evaporates in the heat and the world begins to bake again.

  The rain started falling while I was standing in the open service bay at my Shell station. Wind whipped the dampness through the opening and softened the heavy guitar music that the kid I’d hired to change oil and tires played on the garage stereo whether he was working or inside flirting with the cash register girl. I’d told him three times that I didn’t like the music and when he’d ignored me I’d stopped telling him.

  Lightning flared above the strip mall across the street and a blast of thunder shook the air. My heart leapt. The girl inside at the register laughed. I let myself smile.

  My first time with Belinda, a hard summer rain had fallen. We’d snuck from our houses, met in a park by the water purification plant, and were walking on a woodchip path between a circular brick building and a stand of scrub pines. She’d worn a brown cotton dress with a print of something on the front, a flower maybe, maybe a bird. Before the rain she’d carried a closed umbrella and as we walked our hands never brushed, our skin never touched. We were afraid to touch when we were out of doors in the daylight, even on a deserted path between a windowless brick wall and trees that fell away into swamp. Walking together was enough. It was for me.

  A sudden wind had broken the still air and the rain had come hard. Belinda opened the umbrella and it blew back in the wind and when she straightened it, it wasn’t big enough to cover us both. We ran for the brick wall as if it could shelter us and we huddled under the umbrella as best we could. She turned to me. Her eyes were large, black, almost as wet as tears. We kissed and I pulled away.

  Touch was dangerous.

  She whispered, ‘Fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke.’

  She pushed me against the brick wall and came to me. She was half my size and twice my strength. She slid a hand into the top of my jeans and a desire unlike any I’d ever known consumed me like an open mouth. I took her against the wet brick wall and the rain flew sideways against us and stung our bare skin.

  A ’95 Dodge Charger pulled into the Shell station, rainwater slicking off its back tires. The car was red with a wide gray stripe extending from front to rear. Ten years ago a man had dropped off the car for a tune-up and new set of tires and had never returned to get it. I ducked through the rain and climbed into the passenger seat. Charles shifted into drive and touched the accelerator.

  I peered through the rain-smeared windshield. I said, ‘With that hood stripe, I feel like I’m riding in a skunk.’

  ‘Not my fault,’ he said. ‘You sold me the car.’

  ‘If I remember, I gave it to you.’

  ‘Same thing. Nothing in life comes free.’

  ‘Mmm,’ I said. ‘Where was she living?’

  ‘Big fancy house on the Intracoastal.’

  ‘She had money?’

  ‘Apparently.’

  ‘So she wasn’t hooking?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know what she was doing. But if she was hooking she was doing it for the kink. From what they tell me she and her husband had a live-in cook, a gardener and a thirty-eight-foot Fairline tied to the dock behind the house.’

  I knew better than to ask who told him this. ‘She was married?’

  ‘Was,’ he said. ‘Man named Jerry Stilman. Married fourteen years ago, then eighteen months ago he had a heart attack. He was a big man. Had a big heart attack.’ Charles cut the steering wheel and we merged on to the highway toward the beach. ‘What did you find out?’ he asked.

  ‘The guy who’s doing this might be driving a green Mercedes SUV. The hookers and pimps I talked to might know who he is but if they do they’re scared.’

  ‘Might, might, might.’

  ‘No one was very happy to talk with me.’

  ‘Hmm,’ he said and I knew that for Charles, a person’s unwillingness to talk was no excuse for not getting the facts.

  We drove past wetland pinewoods, highway-side developments with matching houses and community pools, a shopping center and more wetlands. A long low concrete bridge rose over the Intracoastal Waterway, a slow saltwater river ebbing and flowing around marsh-grass islands and stands of marsh trees. The rain eased as we came off the bridge, took the first exit and drove south on a well-groomed, tree-lined street past stucco houses built on a single architectural plan, then more stucco houses built on another architectural plan.

  The developments gave way to single-design mansions constructed on roads named after seabirds. Charles cut the wheel and we turned on to Great Egret Way, a short dead-end street sided by a canal that extended through the marsh to the waterway.

  The last house on the street was a peach-colored two-story stucco with terracotta tiles on the roof and balconies on both sides of a dark-wood grand front door. A long, straight, neatly raked gravel path, sided by flowering plumbago bushes, cut to the front steps across a sweeping front lawn. A pair of young live oaks grew on each side of the path.

  We pulled up the driveway and parked outside a triple garage. The yard and house had the look of a place maintained for absent owners. The lawn was cut short and the beds were weeded and blooming but there were no cars on the driveway, no toys or outdoor furniture on the lawn, no flag in the bracket by the front door, no mat on the doorstep, no sign of the living. I pushed the doorbell and listened t
o the chime echo through the house.

  A light-skinned black man in his mid-twenties opened the door. He wore khakis, a pink golf shirt and no shoes. ‘May I help you?’ he asked, his voice soft.

  Charles said, ‘You the cook or you the gardener?’

  ‘Neither,’ the man said. ‘Who are you?’

  A voice from deep in the house called, ‘Who is it, Terrence?’

  I recognized the voice though I hadn’t heard it in twenty-five years. Belinda’s brother, Bobby. I called past the man who’d opened the door, ‘Bobby, it’s William Byrd.’

  Bobby Mabry emerged from behind the man he’d called Terrence, put an intimate hand on his back and said, ‘I’ll take care of this.’ Terrence eyed me and Charles, and disappeared into the house.

  Bobby stepped into the door in white shorts and a white T-shirt. His Nikes had never touched dust or dirt. ‘What do you want?’ he asked. He was a small man but lithe and strong with a scalp shaved close and a short neat beard. He wore a gold cross stud in one ear and a thin gold chain around his neck.

  I reached a hand to shake his, but he ignored the gesture. I said, ‘Still mad after all this time? Takes too much energy to stay angry so long.’

  He shrugged.

  ‘I heard about Belinda,’ I said, and his anger seemed to break.

  ‘Yeah, the police left an hour ago. I need to …’ He broke off, seemingly uncertain what he needed to do.

  ‘You going to invite us in?’ I asked.

  Bobby looked at Charles, his eyes fixed on the tear-trail scars. ‘What happened to you?’

  ‘Long story,’ said Charles.

  ‘Looks like you cry acid. Me too, today,’ Bobby said, and turned to me. ‘What the hell, come on in.’

  The foyer rose to a large pewter chandelier and a vaulted ceiling above. A black marble floor surrounded a three-tiered marble fountain. A broad stairway wrapped around the back wall. Bobby led us to the living room, which faced through large windows across a pool patio, down a sloping backyard and to a private dock and the Fairline motor cruiser. The living-room sofas and a pair of upholstered chairs were white. So was the carpet. Framed prints hung on the wall – colorful scenes of a jazz club, a dance floor, a northern city street.

  ‘Sit down,’ Bobby said, and I took one of the sofas. Charles went to the window and stared at the drizzle and gray sky. Bobby sat across from me. ‘What do you want, BB?’

  ‘I didn’t know Belinda was back in town. Until I heard today …’

  ‘Yeah, the detective said you identified her. I suppose I should thank you.’

  ‘Unnecessary,’ I said.

  ‘So what do you want?’

  I didn’t know exactly. ‘You’ve been living here with her?’

  He nodded. ‘Since her husband died.’

  ‘And the man who opened the door?’ I asked.

  The faintest smile crossed his lips. ‘Sure, him too. A happy little family, except Belinda was kind of broke up since Jerry died. But losing men always did that to her. Me too. You remember that.’

  I let that pass. ‘What did she do all these years?’

  ‘After you fucked us up?’ he said.

  ‘I’m not here to fight with you, Bobby. I loved her. You know that.’

  ‘Took her a long time to get herself back together.’

  ‘After she did, it looks as if she did all right for herself.’

  ‘She did OK.’

  ‘What did she do to get all this?’ I asked.

  ‘Real estate mostly. Chicago’s South Loop. They bought when it was black and sold as it was turning white. Lot of things have changed in this country but not the color of property.’

  The man who’d opened the front door came into the room, eating yogurt from a plastic container. He sat in a chair, his legs tucked under him.

  ‘What did she do for all these years?’ I asked again.

  ‘Nothing unusual,’ Bobby said. ‘Finished high school, went to college. She started law school but she dropped out. Unlike you, she lived a quiet life.’

  ‘What do you know about how I’ve lived?’

  He shook his head. ‘You don’t think our family kept an eye on you? Especially for the first ten years or so. Since then we tried to forget you. But you’ve had a way of popping up just when we’ve thought we were rid of you.’

  ‘Like the undead,’ Charles said as if he were talking to the window.

  ‘Return of the repressed,’ said the man with the yogurt.

  Bobby put his hands behind his head and stretched. ‘So after she dropped out of law school, she got involved in grassroots politics in Chicago, feeding the inner city, community organizing. That lasted until she met Jerry. The rest you know. They bought property and sold it. They made money.’

  ‘They have any children together?’

  ‘Belinda and Jerry? Nah. I think Jerry had a problem. Not something they were comfortable talking about.’

  ‘What brought them back here?’ I asked.

  ‘Tired of the north? Our mom died seven years ago, our dad five.’

  Nothing he’d told me gave me a clue about why Belinda had gotten killed alongside two bottom-rung hookers. She’d lived a straight life if Bobby was telling the truth, a life with a couple of lows and some good highs, like the lives of most of us.

  Bobby said, ‘You still haven’t told me what you want.’

  ‘Is there going to be a funeral?’ I asked.

  ‘Yeah, there’s going to be a funeral. What do you want?’

  ‘Why would someone kill her?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘What else?’

  I sighed. ‘I want to get the asshole who did it.’

  Bobby shook his head and lowered his eyes as if he’d known the answer all along. ‘Fuck you, BB.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Fuck you. You didn’t do her any good when she was alive. What good d’you think you’re going to do her now?’

  I didn’t think I would do her any good. I thought I could do this for myself. ‘I’d like to help.’

  ‘You can’t help her,’ he said. ‘Maybe a long time ago you could’ve. No one needs your help now.’

  ‘I’m going to get whoever killed her,’ I said.

  He stood and said, ‘Get out of this house.’

  He said it calmly but I knew the skin on Charles’ neck had tightened. I could feel it from across the room. I stood and offered Bobby my hand again, and again he refused to shake it. ‘Good to see you, Bobby,’ I said.

  The man on the white chair ate his yogurt as Bobby led Charles and me to the front door.

  Outside on the front step, Charles turned and faced Bobby. ‘Was your sister whoring downtown?’

  Bobby’s eyes lit up with anger.

  ‘Charles,’ I said.

  ‘Someone had to ask it.’ He sounded disgusted. ‘Hell if you were going to.’ He looked at Bobby again. ‘Was she?’

  Bobby looked for a moment like he might attack Charles. But he saw something fearsome in Charles’ eyes and scarred face. He turned to me. ‘Thanks for coming by, BB. But don’t come again, OK?’

  We walked toward the car. ‘Well, that was a waste of time,’ Charles said.

  ‘What? You would’ve beaten information out of a grieving brother?’

  ‘Good to hit them when they’re already soft,’ he said. ‘Anyway he didn’t look like he was grieving too much.’

  The rain had stopped and the sun had broken through a cleft in the clouds. The gray was a tattered fabric, with holes and fissures showing blue sky. Steam rose from the asphalt driveway and odd spots on the lawn. Rainwater dripped from the eaves of the house.

  Terrence, the yogurt-eating man who’d opened the front door, leaned against the hood of Charles’ car.

  Charles said, ‘Get off it.’

  The man stayed where he was. ‘She wasn’t hooking.’

  ‘Off,’ Charles said and headed for the car but I stopped him with a hand on his shoulder. As far as I knew, Terrence was o
nly Bobby’s plaything and his words meant nothing, but a weight on my chest lifted.

  ‘How do you know?’ I asked.

  ‘The first year after Jerry died she never went out. In the last six months she started dating again. Some nights she stayed over with the men but mostly she came home.’

  I looked at him closely. There was something in his face I didn’t trust. ‘How long’ve you and Bobby been together?’

  A smile curled on his lips. ‘I’ve known him my whole life.’

  ‘You’re living together with him here?’

  ‘I’m living here, yes. It’s my house.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘My name’s Terrence Stilman.’

  I squinted at him. ‘You’re their son?’

  He shook his head. ‘Belinda’s.’

  ‘But Bobby said—’

  ‘Jerry wasn’t my father,’ he said. ‘I took his name when my mom married him.’

  I felt dizzy. ‘How old are you, Terrence?’

  He smiled. ‘Twenty-four.’

  As I did the math, Charles laughed. It was a dirty laugh. ‘Jesus Christ, BB. Somebody give me a cigar.’

  Terrence said, ‘You didn’t know about me?’

  My head spun. ‘Belinda didn’t … Why didn’t you get in touch with me?’

  ‘She said you were gone. Out of it.’

  I stepped toward him. ‘No, I was never gone.’

  He slid off the car and stood facing me. He was seven or eight inches shorter than I was and stood with his shoulders squared as though he were preparing for pain.

  ‘I was never gone,’ I said again.