by Weber, Carl
“Yes, I was there for it,” I confirmed, “but like I said, it was just a misunderstanding. It wasn’t anything to kill someone over.”
“What was the fight about?” the female cop asked.
Dammit. I was getting sick of this. “Um, I don’t know. I didn’t really see the whole thing,” I lied.
“I see,” she said, narrowing her eyes like she didn’t believe me. “Well, do you think he’s capable of murder?”
I straightened my shoulders and spoke confidently. “No, I don’t think he’s capable of murder. The man’s a New York City fireman. He saves lives; he doesn’t end them. Just because Ben argued with Daryl doesn’t mean he murdered him.”
The female detective gave me a skeptical look. “No, it doesn’t necessarily mean that, but I think we all can agree that Ben Wilkins didn’t like Mr. Graham. And who knows more about setting a fire than a fireman, right?”
I opened my mouth but then realized that she was trying to put words in it, so I closed it and thought for a second before I spoke. “Look, all I know is that Ben Wilkins is a good, decent man. He’s a 9/11 hero and the one who put out the fire so it didn’t spread. I think everyone in this building owes him a debt of gratitude. If you need to know anything else about his situation with Daryl, I think you should talk to him.”
“We already did,” she said. “Somehow he doesn’t seem to remember the details of his disagreement with Mr. Graham. But don’t worry. We’re going to get to the bottom of this.”
Krystal
38
The morning after Daryl’s death, I woke up in pain. Everything hurt—my head, my back, and of course, my heart. I still couldn’t believe that he was dead, and I didn’t want to believe what I’d suspected and what the cops had confirmed the night before: Daryl was murdered.
I was grateful to be in the bed alone as I lay there with tears flowing freely down my face. Slim had gone out as soon as the sun came up, saying he had things to take care of before he headed back down to Virginia. I usually hated it when he was away, but this time I was looking forward to having a few days apart, both to mourn Daryl’s loss and to give Slim a chance to cool off. He’d been in a pissy mood ever since they dragged us down to the police station for that group interview last night. They didn’t interview us individually, and the questions weren’t even that deep, but being in such close proximity to the law was enough to have Slim on edge. If he saw me crying over Daryl now, he just might kick my ass.
As you can imagine, Slim wasn’t exactly heartbroken over Daryl’s death. He probably figured that with Daryl out of the way, he had nothing left to worry about when it came to me. The truth was that even before the fire he had nothing to worry about. As long as Slim kept providing me with those little blue boxes, I would be his for life. It wasn’t really a question of me loving Slim or Daryl better because cocaine was my one true love.
I sat up and stretched, then headed over to my dresser to get something to numb the pain. The familiar blue box was there waiting for me, and I felt instantly more relaxed at the sight of it. I scooped up some of the white powder in my fingernail, placed it underneath my nose, and inhaled. A pleasurable chill raced through my body and put a smile on my face. What a great way to start off the day.
I heard my phone chirp on my night table, so I took one more hit and went to pick it up. It was a text from my father.
hey sweetie. just checking in on you.
I’d sent him a quick text the night before to tell him about the fire and Daryl’s death, but I guess he hadn’t had a chance to answer until now.
I texted back: yeah daddy. I’m good. everything okay on your end?
i’m fine. just enjoying the sun.
At least the sun was shining in his life. There was nothing but doom and gloom this way. I really was glad to hear that my dad was doing well.
wish i could be there. I was fishing for an invite. I would love to get out of this place for a while.
so do I, but this is no place for you right now. and i’m way too hot.
i understand.
It took a while for his next text to come through, and for a minute I thought maybe our conversation was done. Then I read his next text and wished he had ended the conversation.
so how’s Connie holding up?
Just the mention of her name sent me back to the dresser for another hit. I hated when he asked about that bitch. I thought about not responding at all but thought better of it. I had no idea where my father was. The last thing I wanted to do was piss him off and have him stop communicating altogether.
I sent him another text, cursing Connie the whole time. Why the fuck did he care how she was?
she’s mourning daryl, daddy. let it go.
It took a while before he replied. I think he hated Daryl as much as I hated Connie.
He finally sent this back: She’ll get over him.
I doubt it.
He had no idea the hold Daryl could have on a woman. He obviously didn’t want to argue the point with me, though, because he quickly sent back a good-bye.
love you. gotta go.
I stared at the screen, hoping I hadn’t pissed him off too much. I was about to text an apology when I was startled by a loud knock at my door.
“Who the hell is pounding at my door like you the damn po-po or something?” I said as I went to check the peephole. Putting my eye to the door, I realized there was a good reason why they were pounding like the damn po-po—because they were!
I took a step back from the door and put my hand over my chest like it might slow down my racing heart. My eyes darted around the living room, checking every table and chair to make sure Slim hadn’t left anything lying around that would get us into trouble. The cops knocked again, which made me jump.
“Uh, who is it?” I called through the door.
“Ms. Mack, it’s Detectives Thomas and Anderson. We spoke briefly last night. We’d like to ask you a few more questions.”
I considered refusing to open the door, but that thought disappeared quickly. The best way to draw the attention of the cops would be to piss them off, and I did not need any more headaches in my life right now.
I slipped my cell phone into the pocket of my sweatpants and opened the door just a crack.
“Yes?” I asked.
He flashed his badge, although there was no need. I definitely recognized him from the night before. “I’m sorry to bother you so early in the morning, but we’d like to talk to you some more about Daryl Graham and the circumstances surrounding his death.”
“I thought we answered all your questions last night.”
“You did, but some new information has come to our attention, and we’d like to clear it up without dragging you back down to the station.”
There was no denying the threat implied by his tone. If I didn’t cooperate now, they were going to bring me back to the precinct. Considering how much coke I had in my system at the moment, I really didn’t want to be in a building filled with cops. “What do you want me to do?”
He glanced down at the chain on my door and said, “For starters, you could invite us in so I can explain. This really won’t take long at all.”
I sighed in defeat as I unlatched the door to let them in. Slim was going to kill me later if he found out I’d let them in without a warrant, but shit, what choice did I have? Besides, in some little corner of my heart, I wanted to help them punish Daryl’s killer.
“Thank you,” the detective said as he and his partner came in. I closed the door and offered them a seat, but they both declined.
“Is your boyfriend Slim around?” the female cop asked as she searched the room with her eyes.
“No, he’s at work. Why?”
“Just wondering.” She picked up a picture off an end table and showed it to her partner. “This you and your mom?” she asked.
“Yeah, she died a few years ago,” I answered, wishing I could tell that bitch to put down my mother’s picture.
Th
e male detective got in on the small talk act. “Oh, sorry to hear that,” he said. “You look like her. She was pretty.”
“Thanks.” I gave him a half smile, wishing I could tell them to hurry up and get to the point.
“So you said your boyfriend’s at work. What kind of work does he do?” the female cop asked.
I gave her the answer I always used when someone asked about Slim. “He’s self-employed.”
She stopped poking around my shit and sat down next to me on the sofa. “Doing what?”
“Is this why you’re here? To harass me about my boyfriend’s profession?” A nervous laugh escaped my lips. The female detective stared at me intensely without a word. If she was trying to make me more nervous, it was sure as hell working.
“What, do you think we killed Daryl or something?”
That put a smug smile on her face, like she’d accomplished her goal of making me paranoid. Stupid-ass cop was on a power trip.
“No,” she said. “To be honest, I think you loved him—as much as someone like you can love another human being.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” I looked up at her partner, expecting him to check her, but he only stood there.
“I think you know exactly what I mean.” She gave me a knowing look that made me very uncomfortable. “By the way, what’s that on your lip?”
“Huh?”
She pointed at my mouth. “Right there. The white powder on your lip.”
“There’s nothing on my lip.” I quickly wiped my mouth on my sleeve. There was no doubt in my mind that both of them knew exactly what the white powder was.
“Not anymore there isn’t. I think you got it all now,” the male cop said as he sat down on the other side of me. At least he didn’t sound sarcastic like his partner. I hated cops in general, but I decided he was the lesser of two evils.
“Why are you really here?” I asked the male detective.
Even though I’d turned my back on her, it was the female cop who laughed out loud and answered me. “I was asking myself the same thing.” She stood up from the couch and said, “Let’s get the hell outta here, Thomas. You know I don’t do well with junkies. I’ve got a good mind to lock her ass up for possession.”
I felt beads of sweat break out on my forehead as my heart rate skyrocketed. What the hell was going on here? Had they really come by to talk about Daryl or was this about drugs? With the coke that I’d already snorted that morning, I was having trouble focusing my thoughts to figure out how I was going to talk my way out of this. As it turned out, I didn’t have to, because the male detective got a text that distracted them both.
“Shit, what else can go wrong?” he said after he read the text.
“What’s up?” his partner asked.
“That’s the M.E. office. The family’s already down at the morgue, trying to claim the body. They must have some pull, because they’re about to throw him on the table, then turn him over. If we want a thorough autopsy, we gotta slow them down, because it looks like they’re planning on cremating the body.”
His partner screwed up her face, making her even uglier than she already was. “Let me make a call to my contact at the M.E.’s office. See if I can slow them down long enough for us to get there. I’ll meet you at the car.” She threw a glance in my direction as she went to the door. “Now you know why I send my kids to private school, Thomas. With a teacher like her as a role model, the kids have no chance but to fail.”
After she left, her partner turned to me and shrugged. “She used to work vice. She can spot an addict a mile away.”
“Well, there aren’t any addicts around here.” I straightened my back and tried to sound indignant, but it must not have been convincing because he shook his head and chuckled.
“Look, let’s just get to the point, okay? I didn’t come here to waste my time.”
I folded my arms and clamped my mouth shut.
“Krystal, we’ve interviewed quite a few people from the building, and more than one of them said they heard you saying that you know who really killed Mr. Graham.”
“I have my suspicions.”
“Are those suspicions based on fact, or are they fantasies brought on by the cocaine you sniffed before we arrived?”
I was getting sick of these cops harassing me about my habit when they should have been focused on a murder. “Dammit, did you come here to hassle me or to find out who killed Daryl?”
“I’m twenty years homicide, not vice. I’m here to solve a murder.”
“All right, then,” I said, thinking he was done.
“But I will not be made a fool of,” he added. “If you commit a crime in front of my face, I will arrest you. Fair enough?” He gave me such a serious look that I knew, nice guy or not, he was not to be fucked with.
“Okay. You wanna know who killed Daryl?”
He pulled out a pad to take notes and looked at me expectantly.
“It was my stepmother. Connie Mack.”
He lowered his notepad without writing a thing. “Are you jerking my chain?”
“Hell no. Who’d you think I was gonna say? My boyfriend Slim?” I laughed, but when I glanced in his direction, I was met with cold eyes that shut me up.
“Hey, I know what you think of Slim,” I said. “Your partner wasn’t exactly subtle about her feelings. Slim didn’t do it, though. Connie did. Shoot, I would have thought you guys were already looking at her. I mean, isn’t it obvious? Once a murderer always a murderer.”
He cocked his head to the side like he had no clue what I was talking about. “We’ve run a check on every person in this building. She’s never had as much as a traffic ticket.”
I sucked my teeth. “That’s only because no one would listen to me six years ago when I told them she killed my mother. And now look what’s happened. She’s fucking Daryl, and he dies exactly the same way my mother did. I’d call that suspicious, wouldn’t you, Detective?”
You should have seen the look on his face. He was so confused that I could have knocked him in the head, taken his gun and badge, and he wouldn’t have even noticed.
“How come this is the first I’m hearing about this? Why didn’t you say anything last night?”
“Uh, you mean aside from the fact that she was sitting right there in the room with me? I mean, no offense, Detective, but I wasn’t about to speak up in front of a room full of people. In case you haven’t noticed, folks around this neighborhood aren’t too fond of speaking to the police.”
Instead of being insulted, he softened his face and said, “I understand. But you’re talking to me now because you really loved Daryl and you want his killer brought to justice, right?”
Damn, this guy was good. Just like that, I was no longer mad at him. In fact, I was close to tears as I admitted, “Yeah, I loved him.”
He patted my hand. “I’ll take a look at your claims about Connie Mack, but you do understand I’m gonna need a little more to go on than your word, right?”
“Wait right here,” I said, then jumped up and ran into my bedroom. I brought back a scrapbook full of newspaper clippings about my mother’s death and handed it to him. As he flipped through the pages, I asked, “How many suicides do you know that involved a fire?”
That was not a rhetorical question. I took a brief pause, allowing him to reply, but he didn’t. He couldn’t. I could tell by the look on his face that he’d never dealt with a suicide by fire in his entire twenty-year career.
He looked at me with sympathy in his eyes, but I could tell he still wasn’t entirely convinced. “You bring up an interesting similarity, but these articles say your mother was also found to have very high doses of prescription drugs in her system.”
I rolled my eyes and spat, “Drugs that Connie probably force-fed to her before she set the fire!”
He stood up from the couch, and I figured that was the end of it. He was going to write me off as paranoid just like all the other cops did when my mother died, and fat-as
s Connie was going to get away with murder again. At least that’s what I thought until he asked, “Do you mind if I take these articles with me?”
“Does this mean you’re going to look into it?” I asked.
He hesitated for a minute like he was still trying to decide, and then he said, “I can promise you that my partner and I are going to leave no stone unturned in this investigation. First thing I’m going to do when I get back to the station is see if I can get my hands on the files from your mother’s death.”
I had to grip the sides of the cushion to stop myself from jumping off the couch and shouting, “Hallelujah!”
“Thank you. Thank you so much. That’s exactly what I needed to hear.” I wiped happy tears off my face.
He headed to the door and then turned to look at me one last time before he left. “You know, Krystal, I think you might wanna get yourself into a program.”
A fresh wave of tears streamed down my cheeks. “That was the last thing Daryl said to me too.”
“Then maybe Daryl Graham was smarter than any of us will ever know.”
Connie
39
When I heard a knock on my door, I was already on my fourth bottle of Febreze. I’d been spraying it everywhere, hoping to get rid of the smell of smoke that lingered. The spray was masking the odor, but it wasn’t enough to get rid of it. The smoke had settled into my couch, in the carpet, in the walls. If I couldn’t get rid of it soon, I didn’t know what I was going to do. I sure couldn’t live in an apartment where the smell would be a constant reminder of the nightmare I’d been through.
I set down the Febreze and went to the door. Without checking the peephole, I flung open the door and said, “Detectives, come on in. I’ve been expecting you.” It was Thomas and Anderson, the two lead detectives I’d met the night before when they took us to the precinct. It was supposedly so they could ask questions about the fire, but it turned out to be little more than a free fried chicken dinner. I sure hoped they were more serious about investigating Daryl’s death today.
