Glenmore Park Mystery 3.5-A Death Not Foretold

by Mike Omer

  “He’s twenty… maybe twenty-five. He’s African American.”

  “You said he was a criminal,” Bernard said. “What makes you think that?”

  “The way he dresses,” she said. “I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking I said that because he’s black. That’s not the reason.”

  “I didn’t say it was,” Bernard said patiently. “How does he dress?”

  “Mostly white shirts, jeans that hang really low. And he has a red cloth… a bandanna tied around his head. Red with white spots.”

  They weren’t spots, Bernard knew. They were diamonds. A red bandanna with white diamonds was one of the ways the Two Four Twos marked themselves. They were the street gang that controlled the drug trade in the northern part of town.

  “Would you be able to identify him if we showed you a picture?”

  “I’m not sure…” She hesitated. “I mostly see him from the window.”

  “Okay.” Bernard pursed his lips. “Is there anything—”

  The dog lunged forward, but Bernard was ready for him, watching him closely from the corner of his eye. His hand darted forward, catching Oscar and lifting him in the air. The dog yelped in frustration.

  “Oscar!” Jenna rose to her feet in horror. “You’re hurting him!”

  “I doubt it,” Bernard said, standing up, shoving the pervert poodle into Jenna’s hands. “Thank you for your time, Mrs. Terrel. We might be back with additional questions.”

  He could feel her angry eyes staring at his back as they left her home.

  Bernard parked their car on the sidewalk by the concrete basketball court in Washington Park, south of Appleton Road. He looked over at the abandoned playground and the unkempt grassy field, spotted with brown dirt areas where the greenery had given up. He knew this park well, and it was one of the few places in Glenmore Park that he thoroughly hated. He had been called twice to this park as a detective, once to investigate the murder of a seventeen-year-old boy, and once to find a bleeding girl, her shirt torn, who had refused to give any statement. As a patrol cop, he’d visited that area at least twice a week.

  A local mother had once told him that she never took her four-year-old daughter there, although the park was thirty feet from her home. She preferred to take her daughter a bit south, to Gage Park, which was mostly gang-free. Judging by the unused, aging slide and swing set, she was not the only one. The only people who regularly roamed this park were members of the Two Four Twos, smoking, drinking, and occasionally catcalling a woman who crossed the street to avoid them.

  Currently, six guys were playing basketball, four of them with red bandannas on their heads or tied around their arms. One had just dunked the ball into the rusty basket, the net long gone. He high-fived his friend, smiling in satisfaction, glistening with sweat. Bernard wondered why he had stopped playing himself. He used to play every weekend with his friends, even after Tom and Gina were born. He resolved to try and play a bit with Tom next weekend.

  “They won’t talk to us,” Hannah said.

  “They might,” Bernard answered, though he believed she was right. Perhaps they should have tried to get Jenna Terrel to look at some mugshots first, identify the man she had seen. But he knew from experience that white men and women often misidentified black people. It was faster this way, if they got any answers.

  He opened the car door and stepped out, walking to the basketball court, his steps slow and measured like they always were when he walked anywhere with Hannah. His partner was almost fourteen inches shorter than him. If he walked too fast, she’d have to run to keep up.

  As they stepped into the basketball court, the six players stopped playing and turned to look at them. Bernard knew three of them by name, and another one seemed familiar. Unconsciously, he changed his posture. His arms loosened a bit, his shoulders drooped, his head turning left and right, nodding slightly with the rhythm of his strides. By his side, Hannah kept her straight posture, her intense stare, her clenched jaw, muscles tight. His partner was a fantastic detective, but she could never blend in. Always looking like a cop, talking like a cop, moving like a cop.

  “You wanna join the game?” one of them asked, grinning.

  “I want to see the woman play,” said another, called Jaylen, tossing the ball in the air and looking at Hannah. “What do you say, Officer? Want to show us how high a white girl can jump?”

  “Maybe some other time,” Hannah said, her voice calm and even.

  “Hey, Jaylen,” Bernard said, and glanced at the others. “Brandon, Michael. That was a nice slam dunk.”

  “Much better than anything you can do, for sure.” Jaylen grinned at him.

  “You’d be surprised.” Bernard raised his eyebrows. “Maybe sometime we should play a little one-on-one, teach you to respect your elders.”

  “Elders, shit.” Jaylen laughed. “I’ll kick your ass so hard, you won’t have any left when I’m done.”

  “We’ll see,” Bernard said. “Right now, I have something else on my mind. Do any of you know Jacqueline Mune?”

  The smiles disappeared. “Sorry, Officer,” Jaylen said. “Can’t help you there.”

  “She lives on Appleton Road,” Bernard continued, unperturbed. “One of you may have come to her place a couple of times.”

  This was the perfect moment for someone to cut in with a dirty joke. Bernard half-expected it, trying to guess what they’d say. But none of them did, which made it clear they all knew who she was. He tensed up. There was something going on here. What did a fortune-teller have to do with a drug-dealing gang? Sure, she could be a client, but he felt as though it was more.

  “If we meet someone like that, we’ll be sure to tell her you said hi,” one of them finally said, and turned around to walk away.

  “You won’t,” Bernard said. “Jacqueline Mune is dead.”

  A long silence settled around the court. Bernard looked at each of them in turn. Most met his eyes evenly; two of them avoided his look.

  “Well,” he finally said, “if any of you think of anything, give me a call.” He drew his card out of his pocket. He held it out to the closest player, who grudgingly took it from him.

  He and Hannah turned and left. He noticed that the six men hadn’t resumed playing. They got into the car, and Bernard stared ahead, thinking.

  “What do you think?” he finally asked.

  “No idea,” Hannah said. “They knew who she was, but I don’t know if she was a client, or someone they just knew from the street, or maybe someone they killed.”

  Bernard’s fingers tapped on the steering wheel. “Let’s go back to the crime scene,” he finally said. “Do some door-to-door. Maybe someone saw one of the Two Four Twos around Mune’s house this morning. And maybe someone can point us to her next of kin.”

  He drove the car, lost in thought.

  “You seem to know everyone here,” Hannah said.

  “Well…” Bernard thought about it. “When I was a patrol cop, Captain Poe… did you know him?”

  “Sure,” Hannah said. “He was the patrol captain when I joined. Marrow became captain only a year later.”

  “Right,” Bernard said. “So whenever anything happened in north Glenmore Park, he asked dispatch to send me if I was on shift.”

  “Why?”

  Bernard raised an eyebrow. “My guess, because I’m tall and black, just like most of the gang members in this neighborhood.”

  “Ah.”

  “Anyway, we got calls from here almost every day, so I was sent here a lot. And I used to do some foot patrol here as well, just to get to know the place better. I know some of these guys back from when they were little kids. I caught Brandon running away from a little store once—he stole some Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. And Michael’s mother was a prostitute on Northwood Drive.”

  “I get it,” Hannah said, but Bernard felt like she didn’t. He had seen energetic little eight-year-old boys grow up to be young men who peddled drugs and killed each other. He had once f
ound a six-year-old girl called Chloe cowering in the corner of the kitchen under a table after she watched Daddy beat Mommy bloody. Years later, he had been called to the crime scene where fifteen-year-old Chloe had been shot in the head. Hannah was young and, as a rising star on the force, had been promoted quickly to detective. She didn’t spend long as a patrol cop. There were things she couldn’t really understand.

  He decided to change the subject. “Did you ever get your fortune told?” he asked Hannah.

  “Once,” she said. “At a music festival. But I think the woman who read my fortune was just stoned.”

  “Why, what did she say?”

  “Oh, mostly rubbish. She said I’m protected by an ancient spirit, and that I’ll have a difficult path ahead of me. And she got my name wrong twice. Did you ever get your fortune told?”

  “No,” Bernard said. “I don’t believe in any of it.”

  “I don’t believe it either,” Hannah said. “I just did it for laughs.”

  They drove in silence until they got to Jacqueline Mune’s home. Just as Bernard was about to park the car, his phone rang. He didn’t recognize the number.

  “Hello?” he answered the call.

  “Hey, is this Detective Gladwin?”

  “Yeah.”

  “My name is Malik. I’m the guy you gave the card to, ten minutes ago.”

  “Okay, what is it, Malik?”

  “Can you meet me at the corner of Appleton and Grant? There’s a bus stop there…”

  “Sure,” Bernard said. “I’ll be there in five minutes.”

  “What is it?” Hannah asked as he turned the car around.

  “One of our gang members wants to talk.”

  As they got closer to the bus stop, Bernard noticed him waiting for them, leaning on the bus stop sign. Malik kept glancing around, as if worried he might be spotted. Bernard parked the car and got out. He didn’t have to look down to meet Malik’s stare; the young man was almost as tall as him, his hair cropped in a buzz-cut, his eyes large, jutting out slightly. He was the one that had looked familiar to Bernard. He had taken off his bandanna and was wringing it with his hands restlessly.

  “You wanted to talk?” Bernard said.

  “Yeah, Mrs. Mune, what… what happened to her?”

  “You first,” Bernard said. “How do you know her?”

  “Everyone knows her around here, man,” Malik said. “People go to her for readings, and medicine, and spells…”

  “What sort of medicine?” Bernard asked.

  “Just herbs and oils, man, everything’s legit. She was a good woman. She was nice, invited everyone in.”

  “Did you go to her?”

  “Sure.” Malik shrugged. He put a hand in his pocket. Bernard tensed, felt Hannah do the same, but Malik simply pulled out a small pouch that was tied with a cord to his belt. It was similar to the pouch that Jacqueline had worn around her throat. “She sold me this.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s a mojo bag,” Malik said. “It just has some herbs in it, and I think maybe she cast a spell on it, I don’t know. It’s supposed to keep me safe.”

  “Does it work?”

  Malik shrugged. “Still here, ain’t I?”

  “Did you see her often?” Bernard asked.

  “I don’t know.” Malik shrugged. “Every three or four months, I guess. I went with my girlfriend once. She was pregnant, and Mrs. Mune said it was a boy. But then my girlfriend decided to get an abortion, so I don’t know if she was right. And I got some oil to help me sleep better at night. It seemed to work. She was a nice lady. She’d always let me in, although I never called first, and she remembered my name.”

  “When was the last time you saw her?” Hannah asked.

  “Two weeks ago,” Malik said.

  “Why did you go there?”

  “I didn’t, man. She came to see me. Saw me walking down the street and came over to talk.”

  “What did she want?” Bernard asked.

  “A gun.”

  Chapter Three

  “A gun?” Bernard echoed.

  “Yeah,” Malik said. “She said she wanted to protect herself.” He looked at Bernard, his eyes drooping. “I told her I could help, I swear I did. I would have taken care of the problem—it’s what I do best. But she said it was probably nothing, and she just wanted to feel a little safer.”

  “Did she tell you if it was someone specific she was worried about, or why she wanted to protect herself?”

  “No, man. Look, if I knew who it was, I would have handled it. But she didn’t say, she just said that she needed it for self-defense.”

  Bernard thought it over. “How long has she been living here?” he asked.

  “As long as I can remember,” Malik said. “I think she was here when I was born.”

  “And in all this time she never needed a gun before.”

  “I guess not.”

  “And did you get her a gun?”

  Malik raised an eyebrow. “That’s illegal,” he said. “I don’t break the law, man.”

  Bernard took a deep breath. “To your knowledge, did she acquire a gun at some point?”

  “Yeah, she did. A Ruger LC9s.”

  “Did she know how to use it?”

  “Someone may have taught her,” Malik said.

  “And that’s it?”

  “Yeah. Never heard from her since. I wanted to pop by, ask her if anyone was still bothering her… but I didn’t.”

  “You’re quite forthcoming,” Bernard said. “Why?”

  “Look, man, don’t go making me into a snitch. A very nice woman died for no reason at all. If it was gang-related, or if it was the Hasidic Panthers, you wouldn’t hear me talking. It would have been handled without your damn help. But this isn’t the case. So do what you need to do, and get the guy who did it.”

  Bernard nodded. “Say… do you have a brother? I seem to remember a guy like you from several years back. Anthony?”

  Malik nodded, his face blank. “My brother’s name was Anthony.”

  “Was?”

  “He’s dead.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry.” Bernard remembered a serious, aggressive young man. He couldn’t have been more than sixteen when Bernard had met him. “How did he die?”

  “Shot.”

  “Did we catch the person who killed him?” Bernard asked.

  Malik snorted. “Like I told you, we don’t need your help. It was dealt with. You go and look for Mrs. Mune’s killer.” He turned around and walked away.

  A woman stood on Jacqueline Mune’s doorstep, screaming at Officers Noel Lloyd and Kate Anthony, who were securing the crime scene. Hannah leaped out of the car and hurried towards the woman as soon as Bernard parked. Bernard quickly joined her. He knew who the woman was the moment he saw her face. The family resemblance was uncanny, and quite disturbing. For a moment, he almost felt as if the victim herself had gotten up, changed out of her bloody clothing, and left the house. She was Jacqueline’s daughter, the one he had seen in the photograph in the house. He could see the same nose and mouth, the same strong chin. Her hair was long and loose, though unlike her mother’s, it was coal black. And her dark brown eyes were full of life. And anger.

  “Won’t you tell me what happened?” she shrieked. “I have a right to know, I—”

  “Ma’am,” Hannah said in a loud voice. “Excuse me. I’m Detective Hannah Shor. Who are you?”

  The woman glared at her. “I’m Sophia Thompson. This is my mother’s home! What’s wrong? Why won’t they let me in? Is my mother all right? What—”

  “Ma’am, would you please follow us?” Hannah said. “I’ll answer all your questions, but maybe we should talk somewhere a bit more—”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” Sophia said vehemently. “Where is my mother?”

  “Is your mother Jacqueline Mune?” Hannah asked.

  “Yes.”

  “When was the last time you saw her?”

  “Yesterday. Why?�
�� Her eyes widened. “Is she okay? What happened?”

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Thompson,” Bernard said. “Your mother is dead.”

  All the fire faded from her face as her shoulders sagged. “Dead?” she whispered. “How? How did that happen?”

  “I’m afraid she was attacked this morning,” Bernard said.

  “By whom?”

  “We’re still looking into it, Mrs. Thompson,” Bernard said. “I know this is very difficult to process, and I’m really very sorry, but would you mind answering some questions? It would really help in tracking your mother’s killer.”

  She stared at him. He waited patiently, his heart panging, as it always did when he had to break the bad news. If there was one reason to leave this job, it wasn’t the hours, or the violence in the street, or the futility of the endless struggle with crime. It was this. The duty of letting someone know that a vital part of their life was gone.

  Still she said nothing, her face frozen in a mask of shock, her eyes glazing over.

  “Mrs. Thompson?” Bernard asked softly.

  She shook her head and began walking away, staring at the ground. She did it slowly, as if the crushing weight of the news bogged her down.

  “Go inside,” Bernard told Hannah. “See if Matt found the gun. I’ll try to get some answers from her.”

  Hannah nodded, and Bernard began walking after Sophia Thompson. He caught up to her quickly and matched his pace with hers, saying nothing. It was approaching noon, and the sun was quite pleasant. Someone watching from a distance might have thought they were a couple, out for a midday stroll. Though if he watched closely, he’d notice the tears in the woman’s eyes, or how her lips quivered, or the way Bernard kept glancing at her, trying to gauge whether now was the time to talk.

  Finally she halted, looking around her. “My mother loved living here,” she said.

  “It’s a…” Bernard sought a reasonable lie. “Quaint neighborhood.”

  “It’s a shithole. I nearly got raped twice, growing up here. Coming home from school, I’d walk in the middle of the street, in the middle of the damn road, because that kept me away from all the alleys and doorways, where addicts and gangbangers could be lurking. One of my best childhood friends is dead now—heroin overdose. Another one is in jail.”