“Orange juice. I’ve stopped drinking.”
“Congratulations.” I handed it back. “How long has it been?”
He looked away. “Three days. Since I got your message.”
“I called Uncle Henry on Wednesday, Perris. I didn’t call you until yesterday.”
He turned up his cup, trying to play it off. “One day, three days. What does it matter?”
“Look, I didn’t come out in the cold to talk black history or architecture or your journey to sobriety, for that matter. I want to know why you took Keith’s files and what’s going on with you and Paul Taft.”
At the mention of Taft’s name, Perris started looking around as if the FBI agent were going to jump out from between the parked cars. “Why don’t we sit in my car and talk?” he suggested, hustling me over to his Beemer, which was parked a few yards away, facing the bank. He looked around again before unlocking my door and opening it for me.
“So, what’s the deal?” I said, once we were inside. “Why are you so nervous?”
Perris got in the driver’s seat and sat for a few minutes, breathing deeply. “I prayed for years that I’d never have to do this,” he muttered as he started the car and turned on the heater.
“Do what? Stop being such a drama king, Perris, and just spit it out!”
Just then, my cell phone rang. It was Billie. “I just finished talking to Robert Merritt,” she said excitedly. “You’re gonna trip when you hear what he had to say!”
“I’m in the middle of something right now. Can I call you back in five, ten minutes?”
“Sure. I’ve gotta make a few phone calls anyway. But be sure and call me back.”
I broke the connection and returned my attention to Perris, who had switched the radio to an oldies station and was idly humming along with a group the DJ identified as The Undisputed Truth. “So?”
He stopped humming and took another breath. “Okay. Remember how I used to talk with Keith about gangs, back when you first started bringing him around?”
The question caught me off guard. “Sure. You said Keith’s knowledge could help your work on the streets.”
“The spring before he was—” He stopped himself and started again, head down this time. “That spring, Keith had started researching the Black Freedom Militia.”
I waved a hand in front of his face. “Earth to Perris! I was working with him, remember?”
“You were working on the data end of the study,” he reminded me. “Keith wanted to go into the field, do some primary research, something I had urged him not to do.”
Despite the heater, Perris’s words made the air in the car turn cold. The Undisputed Truth was singing something about truth being in the eyes, but Perris refused to look in mine. “Keith never told me that.”
But Perris wasn’t listening to me or the radio. His attention was drawn to the activity inside the bank. “The department had started its own investigation of the BFM. Keith nosing around had the potential to get in the way. Plus I didn’t want him blowing my cover, in case we ran into each other at one of their meetings.”
“You worked undercover?” So Taft hadn’t been lying about that.
“In the beginning, I didn’t tell you because of the nature of the assignment,” he replied, his voice flat. “And later, when I thought I should, Keith made me promise not to. He was afraid you’d try and stop him.”
“Stop him?” I grabbed his arm. “From doing what?”
“Just let me get this out, okay?” he said, his voice growing thick as he carefully disengaged my grip. “I was already inside the organization, had gotten pretty close to Cinque Lewis and his girlfriend—”
“Sojourner Truth.”
He nodded. “My assignment was to destabilize the BFM from within, which I was doing by feeding Truth information about Lewis’s infidelity.
“Keith showed up at an orientation meeting right after I had talked to her, asking his standard set of research questions. But she was so angry about what I’d been telling her, she started spilling her guts to Keith about the inner circle of Lewis’s advisors and the drugs they were dealing.”
I’d heard part of this story before when I’d interviewed Sojourner Truth in connection with Lewis’s murder, and even before that when Cinque Lewis began to threaten Keith and our family if he published his findings. But the spin Perris was putting on the story gave it a different, more ominous feeling.
“Keith came to me,” Perris was saying, “concerned for the children in the BFM’s after-school programs, and asked me what should he do. I told him he had to get the hell away from the BFM, that they were too volatile, but he said he wanted to stay and help us get as much information on the organization as possible. To help those kids, you know?”
Perris’s words sent a deeper chill down my spine and set off a war in my mind. One part of me couldn’t believe Keith could be so foolish, while the other part knew it was exactly what my headstrong, idealistic husband would do. But in addition to the argument raging inside my head, there was one voice I could not ignore, which was screaming: He put you and your baby in jeopardy!
I covered my ears to drown out the noise in my head. “You’re lying to me, Perris! You talked Keith into this. I know how you are!”
My brother shook his head rhythmically, eyes shut tight. “I wish it was different, Char, but Keith insisted on helping us. He said he wanted to put all that data he’d been collecting to use in the real world.”
That, too, sounded like something Keith would say. As the tears slid down my face and my throat closed up, I could see my father inside the bank, saying something to Aubrey and his frat brother that made them laugh. I opened my handbag and felt around for my inhaler, my Altoids tin, anything to stop the feeling that I was going to choke to death inside this car. I found instead my yellow marble from Dr. P’s office. “You did this to Keith. You caused his and Erica’s deaths as surely as if you pulled the trigger yourself!”
“Oh, God, Char, please don’t say that! When Lewis and his gang came after Keith, we all tried to protect your family.”
“We who? You and Burt Rivers?”
“Uncle Henry, too.”
“You’re saying my godfather knew Keith was working with you?”
“He was our captain and C.O. of Southwest,” Perris reminded me. “He authorized the operation in conjunction with PDID. How do you think your family got around-the-clock protection so quickly?”
I stared at the smiling faces of Aubrey and his frat brothers inside the bank in disbelief.
Smiling faces tell lies, The Undisputed Truth sang to me. And I’ve got proof.
What was the proof? I’d read bits and pieces of the PDID files on the BFM years before. They were largely the report of a police informant placed inside the organization. But I hadn’t put it together then, nor when I met Sojourner Truth and her adopted son, Cinque Lewis’s brother Peyton, years later and she’d told me about a brother named Q-Dog pulling her coat about her man sleeping with another woman in the BFM. No wonder Perris took Keith’s files, and Uncle Henry was so intent on my cutting Perris some slack, and Burt was advising me on what Keith would want me to do. They’d all been in it together—Burt Rivers, Henry Youngblood, and, at the center of it all, my brother, the Dark Prince, Mr. Q-Psi-Phi ’til the day I die.
But now I felt like the one who was dying, and Perris was to blame. “You were the informant in those files! You were Q-Dog!”
He nodded slowly, his face contorted with pain. “Since we Omegas called each other Q-dogs, I figured Quincy Dash wouldn’t be a hard name to remember.”
I slapped him, all my strength behind the blow. “So that’s why everyone’s been covering for your sorry ass!” I slapped him again. “All these years!” And again. “You sorry motherfucker!”
“I was only doing my job, Char!” Fending me off, Perris grabbed my sleeve, but I yanked my arm away, sending the yellow marble I’d been clutching flying. As I felt around the floor of the car my ar
m brushed against my holstered gun.
It would take so little effort to keep reaching back, to pull out that gun and blow him away.
To watch his brains splatter all over the driver’s seat of his shiny Beemer, the way Keith’s were splattered in my driveway.
So easy.
As if he’d read my mind, Perris let go of my arm. “I wouldn’t blame you if you wanted to kill me, Char.” He stared at the happy people inside the bank, tears streaming down his face. “I wanted to kill myself, many times, after seeing what their deaths did to you. It’s why I had to leave the department. I just couldn’t take it anymore.”
I picked up the marble and held onto it for dear life. The voices inside my head were screaming so loud I couldn’t stand it. “Just tell me what happened.”
He pressed his palm over one eye as if to stop the flow of tears. “The day they—that day, I was on my way over to your house to work my shift, when Lewis waylaid me at the cover apartment the department had set me up with. Someone had tipped him off that I was a cop. He shot me as I was getting into my car. Otherwise, I would have been there at your house that day. I could have stopped him, Char. I would have gladly taken those bullets to stop Lewis!”
My brother’s tearful confession reminded me of how, after Keith and Erica’s murders, he would come to my house, drunk and crying. And I’d thought it was because of sympathy for me or reliving what had happened to him the day they died.
Now I knew. It was both, and more. “Who else knows about this besides Uncle Henry and Burt?”
Perris gulped as he scanned the crowd in the brightly lit bank. “I told Mom right after it happened.”
No surprise there, my little voice reminded me. Those two are thick as thieves.
“She told me to try and let it go, go on with my life and not burden you with things that would only hurt you even worse than Keith and Erica’s deaths.”
That sounded like my mother—doing her part to keep up appearances, even if it meant watching her daughter suffer not knowing the truth, or her son, who knew the truth all too well. And it also explained why she was so outraged when I joined the department shortly after Keith’s death, why she and Perris had been sniping at me about quitting from Day One.
I smiled bitterly. “So my dear darling mother has been lying to me for almost thirteen years.”
One lie calls for another and another, I could hear my grandmama Cile say.
“Not lying, Char. Just selectively editing the truth down to what you could handle.”
“That should have been my choice to make, not hers, or yours!”
“We couldn’t do it, not as fragile as you were!”
“I haven’t been fragile for the entire thirteen years, Perris! Did you tell Daddy, too?”
“I haven’t, but Mom or Uncle Henry might have.”
Even if my mother didn’t have the nerve to do it, Uncle Henry would have certainly confided in his best friend. Which meant Grandmama Cile probably knew, too. Was I the only one in our family who’d been left in the dark?
The possibility made me replay conversations with my family about Keith or about my being on the department—scores of them over the years, over countless barbecues and card games and Justice Family Film Nights. Was Matt Justice’s love and concern for me genuine, or was it all to cover the Dark Prince’s trail? How long had he and my mother been smiling in my face, and stabbing me in the back with their lies and half-truths? Now something my grandmother said about Perris and my mother taking those files, just last week at a card game with my father and Uncle Syl, came back to me, its meaning suddenly crystal clear.
“Why they want to dig up the past?” she’d said. “You go diggin’ in the past, all you gon’ get is dirty.”
I fished some more antacids from the Altoids tin to fight back the waves of rage and nausea threatening to drown me. “Are you okay, Char?” Perris asked.
As if he cared. “How does Taft fit into all of this?”
“The FBI was investigating the BFM the same time as the LAPD. Taft was the Bureau’s plant inside the organization. When he found out I was working undercover, too, he tried to get me removed from the case. Then, after I got shot and Lewis disappeared, he transferred to Birmingham.”
“And you never spoke to him again?”
He shrugged. “Not until he started calling me recently, trying to locate Sojourner Truth and Peyton.”
“For what?”
“He wouldn’t say, but he threatened to tell you the whole story if I didn’t help him.”
“Which is why you took Keith’s files, to keep me from figuring it out on my own.”
He nodded. “Up until Taft showed up, I had just tried to put the whole mess out of my mind. But it was hard. I was so bitter about how nobody backed me up the day I got shot.”
And had used that bitterness, in his law practice, to become one of the biggest thorns in L.A. law enforcement’s side. But he’d paid a heavy price, too. In the reflected light of the reception, I could see the scar over my brother’s eye, the one from the car accident he’d had while driving under the influence, one of the countless ways he’d tried to “put the whole mess out of his mind.”
Perris saw me staring and fingered the scar on his cheek. “I deserved this and every other bad thing that has happened in my life, for letting Keith take such a foolish risk, for not coming clean to you. If I had, maybe together we could have made him stop.”
“Don’t you dare!” If I had to sit here another minute I was going to throw up. I grabbed my handbag, got out of the car, and walked angrily toward the bank. “Don’t you dare put this on me, Perris! You’re the one who let Keith get himself killed!”
“I’m sorry, Char,” he called after me. “I wasn’t trying to say—”
“Stay the hell away from me, Perris!”
Inside, Aubrey was talking to Uncle Syl and my mother, who had her back to the door. If I could have stabbed her between the shoulder blades at that moment, I would have. “Let’s get the fuck out of here,” I muttered to Aubrey.
“Language, young lady!” my mother warned, glancing around to see who had heard me.
Uncle Syl did, and frowned at the expression on my face. “Why are you hatting up so soon, Baby Girl?”
“I’ve heard enough bullshit for one night!” I snapped, glad to see my mother cringe.
Aubrey had moved to my side and put a supportive hand on my back. “Char’s had a long week. So, if you’ll excuse us, I’ve promised her a fabulous dinner at Campanile.”
“I’m not in the mood for all that pomp and circumstance!”
“Me, either,” he whispered in my ear as he steered me toward the door. “Let’s just get you out of here.”
Aubrey called ahead and ordered takeout from his favorite Italian restaurant. On the way there, I told him about Perris, surprising myself that I didn’t cry once in the retelling.
Although sympathetic, Aubrey was not surprised at all. “All that trash Perris and your mom were talking about how you’d handle closing up your house, and the way they were sneaking around the day they found those files let me know something wasn’t right.”
“Well, I wish you had said something!”
“I told you what they were doing!” he snapped back. “How was I supposed to know what kind of games they were playing or what they’d done?”
I massaged my forehead, trying to will away the headache that had my head throbbing. “You’re right. I’m sorry—I just can’t believe my family would do something like this to me.”
Aubrey stopped the car in front of the restaurant. “The trip of it is, I don’t think they meant to harm you, Char. In their minds, they probably thought they were protecting you.”
“That’s the same line of BS my brother was trying to sell me! You shouldn’t need protection from the truth.”
Aubrey raised his hands. “Hey, don’t shoot the messenger! I’m just trying to show you the other side.”
“I’m tired of seeing
the other side. I need someone to see my side!”
“That’s what I was trying to do!” Aubrey snapped, slamming the car door and stalking inside to get our food.
After eleven, after we’d had dinner and way too much red wine, Aubrey snaked an arm around me in bed and drew my hips close. “I know you’re hurting, Char,” he whispered, “but you’ve got to try and let it go. Don’t spend another thirteen years grieving over something you couldn’t have controlled in the first place.”
I nodded, but I didn’t believe a word of what he was saying. I knew Keith would have listened to me, would have stopped messing around with Lewis and the BFM, if I had asked him to. Wouldn’t he?
Aubrey hugged me close and kissed the back of my neck. I moved his hand higher, demonstrating how I wanted him to knead my breast, almost as if he could reach through my bones and massage my cold, dead heart back to life. After a few moments, I felt him harden behind me and pull his hand away. “This isn’t right, Char,” he muttered. “You don’t need me pushing up on you right now.”
“Baby.” I turned over and reached down, felt Aubrey shudder beneath my probing hand. “That’s exactly what I need.”
What I did that night was wrong; I know it was. I used Aubrey’s body to work out my pain, accepted and returned his thrusts as if they were driving something evil out of my soul. Was I trying to dispel the pain, or the anger behind the memory of all those nights of lovemaking with Keith? I didn’t know, and at that moment I didn’t care. All I wanted that night was to know that somebody loved me, and as I touched and was touched, bit and was bitten, rode and was ridden into a babbling, tearful release, I knew without a doubt that Keith was dead and gone out of my life forever, along with Perris and my whole family, people who’d betrayed my love and trust to suit their own ends. It was only later, after we’d exhausted ourselves and Aubrey had rolled over and gone to sleep and I’d slipped out of bed to return Billie’s call, that it occurred to me that maybe I’d just driven my lover out of my life as well.
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Strange Bedfellows v5 Page 23
