Baby Brother's Blues

by Pearl Cleage

  She hadn’t heard anything else from Precious since she received a very formal letter withdrawing Mandeville Maids from the peace precinct, but she knew it was only a matter of time. There was no way it would be over until Precious had forced Lee to resign or Lee could force Precious to back off. These pictures of Kwame and his lover were her best defense. Nobody who wanted to be mayor of Atlanta could afford this kind of scandal. By the time she needed to use them, these pictures would be worth their weight in gold.

  Suddenly, less than two minutes after he went inside, barely long enough for her to record the activity, the door literally burst open and Kwame came running out of the building like it was on fire. Lee grabbed her camera. Through the eye of the telephoto lens, his face was a mask of terror. She kept clicking as he jumped into his car and sped away without closing the building’s outside door behind him.

  Once the sound of Kwame’s fast retreat faded away, the street was silent. There were no other residents in the building and the other warehouses in the area were still awaiting the kiss of gentrification to bring them back to life. It appeared there was no one else around but Lee. She sat for several minutes to be sure, and to guard against what she regarded as the very remote possibility of Kwame’s return. The way he had left, like a bat out of hell, she didn’t think he was coming back anytime soon.

  Ten minutes seemed long enough to wait. Lee got out quietly, her camera around her neck and her police-issue magnum in her hand, walked into the building and up the stairs to Kwame’s apartment. That door was open, too. What the hell was going on? Lee’s cop radar was sounding the alarm and she cocked her gun quietly and held it at the ready position as she stepped into the space. Nothing seemed amiss in the living area. The television was on and there was a light coming from what she assumed was the kitchen. She walked slowly, silently, toward the doorway.

  Still hearing nothing, she stepped quickly into the lighted room, which was indeed the kitchen. It had a stove, a refrigerator, and a half-eaten carton of shrimp fried rice on the counter. The only problem was, it also had a dead body lying in the middle of the floor. Shot in the head. Clean. She leaned down to take a look. From the looks of the body, it had happened within the last hour. Two hours, tops. But she would have heard gunshots if Kwame was the murderer and she had heard nothing but the roar of his engine as he hauled ass. She stood up and looked around. The possibilities were endless, but all she knew for sure was that somebody had left a body in Kwame Hargrove’s love nest and she was the only witness who could place him at the crime scene. She holstered her weapon and reached for her camera. She didn’t need her telephoto lens for this one. If she got any closer, she’d have to kiss the body.

  A few blocks away, back at home, Kwame awakened Aretha like a man on fire and made love like someone who never will again.

  58

  Blue was on the phone when Regina walked in the front door and tossed her keys on the table with the mail. He smiled and held out his arm to her. Exhausted, she walked into his embrace, wrapped her arms around his waist, and took a deep breath. Blue smelled like lemon and she closed her eyes and leaned against him. Thank God for you, she thought, her cheek against his chest. Thank God for you.

  And a voice that seemed to come from inside her own head, but sounded exactly like her husband’s rumbling baritone, replied, And for you, my love. Thank God for you.

  She opened her eyes, but Blue was still engaged in his conversation. He couldn’t have murmured such an endearment without thoroughly confusing whoever was on the other end. Telepathy, she thought. I must be getting better at sending and receiving. Abbie had told her this would happen and Regina wished she could call her now and apologize for ever doubting that it would. She owed Abbie so many thank yous for so many things, but now was not the time for thank yous. Now was the time for rest and care and healing.

  “Thanks for keeping me informed, Lieutenant,” Blue said. “Call me at any time.”

  He clicked off the call and put the phone down so he could give Regina a real welcome-home hug. She hugged him back, realizing he must have been on the phone with the D.C. police.

  “Any news?” she said as he drew her down beside him on the big white sofa in front of the window. It was just after sunset and they could see their neighbors going about their evening routines, but Regina paid no attention. She needed to hear that warrants had been issued, arrests had been made, justice was being done.

  “They’ve got a couple of guys in custody for another robbery two blocks away. They think it might be them.”

  Regina’s heart beat a little faster and she unconsciously folded her arms protectively across her belly. “When will they know?”

  “They’re faxing down mug shots for Abbie to take a look at. They’re hoping she can identify them informally. If she thinks these are the guys, they’ll put them in a lineup and see if she can pick them out.”

  “How’s she going to do that from here?”

  “She’ll have to go back to D.C.,” Blue said gently.

  Regina shook her head. “You know she can’t do that. She won’t even come out of the apartment.”

  “That’s why they’re sending the pictures. To give her a little more time.”

  Regina looked at Blue like he had taken leave of his senses. She had spent all afternoon with a frightened, damaged creature that bore little resemblance to her vibrant, beautiful aunt. When they went to D.C. immediately after the break in, the police had already taken Abbie to the emergency room. The young woman doctor who met them at the hospital said there had been no rape, but the young thieves had both urinated and masturbated on Abbie after they tied her naked to the antique four-poster where Regina’s mother had been born. After that, they trashed the house, took what they could carry, and left her there, still bound. One of her students came by and found her the next afternoon.

  At the hospital, Abbie had refused a sedative and asked that no visitors be allowed except Blue and Regina. Although Peachy had flown up with them from Savannah, she refused to see him or to fly back with him on the same plane. Reluctantly agreeing to her wishes, he had driven back to Atlanta with General and moved into Blue’s apartment on Lawton Street. Abbie had put up no resistance to Regina’s plan to take her back to Atlanta, but had drawn the line at staying at the house, as she always did when she visited. This was not a visit, she insisted quietly. At that point, Blue offered her the unoccupied apartment downstairs from Aretha’s studio and told her she could stay there as long as she liked. Abbie had thanked him, gone inside, and shut the door.

  She barely tolerated Regina’s daily attempts to visit and the meals she delivered in covered dishes went untouched while fresh fruit withered in the bowl. Peachy’s presence upstairs at Blue’s place, where he waited anxiously for a chance to see Abbie, to hold her, to console her, she ignored completely. Urging her to talk about her ordeal had earned Regina an invitation to leave and not come back unless she promised to never, ever speak of it again. Regina, terrified of the pain she saw in Abbie’s eyes, promised. There was no way that promise left space for her to go knocking on the door with some mug shots or, worse, proposing a trip back to the scene of the crime to see the suspects live and in the flesh, separated from Abbie only by a pane of one-way glass.

  This is a nightmare, Regina thought, her eyes filling up with tears. “She can’t do it, Blue. It will kill her.”

  “Come here, baby,” he said, reaching out and gathering her in close.

  She clung to him, afraid that she was right and Abbie would not survive. Blue rocked her in his arms and she let him, thinking to herself that this would never have happened in West End. She knew her husband made sure women were safe and children were cared for and old people could walk in peace. What she wanted to know was why this neighborhood was the exception, not the rule.

  “You okay?” Blue said gently.

  “It feels different when it happens to somebody you love,” she whispered.

  Blue kissed the top of her hea
d. “Everybody’s somebody’s somebody.”

  “How come you know that and nobody else seems to?”

  “I used to be the emperor. I have to know it.”

  She smiled a little at the easy way he said it, like saying I used to live on Willis Mill Road. “Do you really remember how it feels to be free?”

  “I don’t have to remember it,” he said. “I’m still free.”

  Outside the window, the big Lincoln pulled up and General got out. Regina watched him coming up the walk and looked at Blue.

  “General and I are just going to have a drink,” he said quickly, answering the question she hadn’t asked out loud. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  She was relieved. This was not a night she wanted to spend alone.

  Blue put his hand on her belly. “Don’t worry.”

  She covered his hand with her own. “Why? Because it’s bad for the baby?”

  “Because it’s bad for you,” he said, and kissed her gently. “And you know I don’t allow that.”

  59

  On the phone, Captain Kilgore had said it was routine, but Kwame felt like he was trapped in a bad episode of a TV cop show. The police had, of course, questioned him when he called to report finding the body on a routine check of his property. He told them he had been having a problem with squatters since the loft wasn’t his primary residence and no, he explained, he’d never seen the victim before.

  They seemed to buy it, and one of the detectives told him it was always a problem with areas that are gentrifying. Kwame had explained that he used the place off and on as a studio since it was hard for him to work at home with a small child. He went on to say that he hadn’t needed it as often lately since his daughter was not in day care and, he supposed, that was why the guy was able to use the place without Kwame knowing about it. He had even joked with the cop about being lucky to have had such a neat squatter since nothing much was out of place and nothing stolen. The captain agreed, took his phone number in case they needed him, and that was that.

  For the next three days, he picked up Joyce Ann at school. He made love to his wife. He conferred with his mother about campaign strategies and accompanied Bob Watson to a luncheon with a potential client. From the outside, he looked like an ambitious young man just hitting his stride, but in the back of Kwame’s mind was the expression on Baby Brother’s face when he’d found him lying there on the kitchen floor, dead, dead, dead. He shuddered every time he thought about it. Who could have killed him and why?

  Kwame scanned the paper nervously every morning and watched the local news every night, but a shoot-out at the courthouse dominated the media and there was only one small item about a homeless man’s body being found in a newly gentrified area near downtown. He hoped that would be the end of it. He was afraid his name would have to appear in any major news coverage of the crime and that wasn’t how he wanted Aretha to hear about his loft.

  On the way to Captain Kilgore’s office, he tried to calm down, telling himself it was probably just routine. She had said she had a few follow-up questions about the murder and could he drop by her office around six? He had agreed immediately, of course, and spent the rest of the morning and half the afternoon worrying about what questions she might have for him. He had met her once before at a function he attended with his mother and he knew Precious admired the captain’s ideas on domestic violence prevention. He hoped the association would make her move sympathetic to his current predicament. If worse came to worst, at least she would understand his desire for discretion.

  By the time he arrived at police headquarters, he had a sudden premonition that he was about to be arrested. Beyond that, his mind went blank. He couldn’t remember what he had told the first investigator. He couldn’t remember exactly how Captain Kilgore sounded on the telephone. He couldn’t imagine what it was like to be arrested for murder. The possibilities were too awful to imagine. He forced himself to enter the building and ask for directions to her office.

  When he tapped on her door and she opened it, Captain Kilgore’s appearance was reassuring. She was not wearing a uniform and, to Kwame’s panicky eyes, looked more like a hip social worker than a cop.

  “I appreciate you taking the time to come down, Mr. Hargrove,” she said, offering him a chair and taking a seat behind her desk. The space was small and impersonal. He wondered if this was an interrogation room like the ones on TV, where there is always weeping and denial, sometimes violence, and then confession.

  “No problem,” he said, deciding not to mention Precious unless she did. “Have you found out anything else about the guy?”

  “I was hoping that’s where you might be able to be of some assistance.”

  The knot in his stomach tightened a little. “I already gave… the other officer… a statement.”

  “The story about the squatter?”

  He didn’t like the way she called it a story, but he nodded. “That’s right.”

  “You stated that you’d never seen the deceased before he somehow ended up on your kitchen floor?”

  “Yes.”

  She looked at him and frowned slightly. “Mr. Hargrove, we’ll get along a lot better if you tell me the truth.”

  “I… I am telling you the truth.” He wondering suddenly if he was being taped.

  “Well, if that’s your story,” she said, reaching into her pocket to produce a stack of snapshots that she slid across the table in his direction. “How do you explain these?”

  On top of the stack was a photo of Kwame and Baby Brother standing at the front door of the loft the first time they’d gone there. The knot in his stomach tightened a little more. If this one was on the top, what kinds of pictures were next? Kwame couldn’t make himself pick them up to see.

  As if on cue, Captain Kilgore leaned over and spread the photos out like a deck of cards. There he was at the loft that first night. There they were sitting in the car together. There he was picking up Wes in front of Montre’s. And there was that dead, dead body lying on his kitchen floor. He stared at the photographs, aghast; speechless; terrified.

  “Mr. Hargrove?”

  He looked up into her eyes, a frightened man, out of options. “Yes?”

  “I’m a busy woman, so I’m going to try and minimize the bullshit in our exchange.”

  The profanity startled him. He felt like he was going to throw up, but Captain Kilgore didn’t seem to notice. She reached out, picked up the photographs, and slipped them back into her pocket. He wondered if they were going to handcuff him now and take him to jail.

  “I understand,” he whispered.

  “Your squatter story doesn’t really make much sense, but you’re a respectable guy with a beautiful family and a famous mother, not to mention friends in high places. The victim is a small-time hood with a record dating back to his overprivileged adolescence. He’s also an army deserter who abandoned his unit in Iraq and was known to frequent Club Baltimore, which is where he met you.”

  She looked at Kwame without a shred of pity for his predicament. She didn’t look like a kindly social worker anymore. She looked like a pissed-off police officer interrogating a sweating perpetrator.

  “Are you with me so far, Mr. Hargrove? Would you like some water or something?”

  “Yes,” he croaked. “Thank you.”

  She handed him a small bottle of tepid water from a neat row on her bookshelf. He opened it and drank gratefully. The water felt good going down. His mouth had been dry as cotton.

  “The way I see it, you and Mr. Jamerson had set up a love nest, and when things went wrong, you shot him.” She shrugged. “Classic lovers’ quarrel. Where’d you stash the gun?”

  “I didn’t kill him!” Kwame’s voice was a muted cry of anguish. “You’ve got to believe me! I didn’t kill him!”

  She looked at him. “Well, maybe you did and maybe you didn’t, but these pictures, plus my testimony of how you came flying out of the crime scene that night like a bat out of hell right before I discove
red the body, is going to make it hard to convince anybody that you didn’t have a little something to do with it.”

  Kwame felt like she had kicked him in the stomach. “What do you mean?”

  Her eyes narrowed a little like she was running out of patience and her voice was harsh, commanding. “I mean if you don’t want to be arrested for the murder of your little boyfriend, you better get yourself together and listen to what I have to say.”

  Kwame took a deep breath. “I’m listening.”

  “Your mother has some information that could be damaging to me, personally and professionally.”

  “Leave my mother out of this,” Kwame said quickly, as if he was in any position to make demands.

  “I’m not the one who put her in it,” Lee snapped. “You did, and now you’re the one who’s going to get her out.”

  Kwame swallowed hard. “What kind of information?”

  “That’s none of your business,” Lee said. “The point is, I want her promise—in writing—that she will never pursue a case against me for any crimes she imagines I committed.”

  “I can’t ask her to do that.” Kwame’s head was spinning.

  “I think you can, Mr. Hargrove, and do you know why?”

  He didn’t know anything anymore. All he wanted to do was go home, crawl into bed, and hope it would all go away. “Why?”

  “Because if she doesn’t, I’ll be forced to do my duty as a police officer and file a report about this whole thing.”

  She paused to let her words sink in. “That fool at the courthouse bought you a few days’ reprieve from the media and the department. If nobody comes forward, the victim’s sister will come to claim his body and you’ll be home free. But all that can change.”

  He knew what that meant. “How long have you been watching me?”