A Killer's Kiss

by William Lashner

  “That’s the one,” he said. “And whatever you do, on fear of your life, don’t scratch it.”

  I parked next to the Camaro. Derek climbed out of my car, and so did I.

  “What now?” I said.

  “Get in,” he said, pulling open the Camaro’s passenger door.

  “I only want to talk to him, Derek. The hell with all this cloak-and-dagger stuff. What about a phone call or something?”

  “You said you just got out of the Roundhouse, right?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “And you think they been following you.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And they might be following you now.”

  “Okay, I get you. I’ll get in the Camaro.”

  I was about to slide into the front seat when Derek leaned down and pulled a lever, which collapsed the front seat forward. “In the back, bo.”

  “I’m the client.”

  “The detective is always in front. That’s the first thing they teach you in detective school.”

  “You haven’t gone to detective school.”

  “What does that matter?”

  I thought about that for a moment and then climbed into the back. Derek released the seat, slid into it, and closed the door. Together we waited. And waited. Waited until I saw the belt buckle of a giant in the side window. Then the giant leaned down to look in the car. Huge shoulders, tattooed arms, porkpie hat.

  Antoine.

  “You don’t follow no hint, now, do you?” said Antoine before he opened the door and climbed into the car. He turned around and leaned menacingly over the bucket seat. “What the blazes I tell you, mon?”

  “To leave it alone,” I said. “But I can’t, not anymore. I need to talk to Jamison.”

  “You were being followed, for sure.”

  “I figured.”

  “Same Johnny Crow who came to Barnabas’s place. What he want?”

  “He wants me. Wants to slam me in jail for the rest of my life.”

  “And that is our problem why?”

  “Because I still owe Derek money.”

  “He’s got a point there,” said Derek. “He does owe me money. More after today.”

  “I been given the all-okay for you to see that bwoy. And I got something myself I need be telling him, too. But no calls, no numbers. We’ll meet him in person. I’ll take you.”

  “You will? That’s actually nice of you, Antoine.”

  “Nothing nice about it,” said Antoine, turning around to face forward.

  “Remember our arrangement?” said Derek. “Forty an hour?”

  “It was thirty.”

  “It was, but not no more. This be dangerous now, running from cops, dealing with fugitives. I’ve had to jack the rates. Forty an hour.”

  “Okay.”

  “Plus expenses.”

  “Right.”

  “Well, Antoine here, right now he’s the expense.”

  “I get the feeling this is going to be a costly trip. Where are we going?”

  “You hungry, mon?” said Antoine.

  “Not really.”

  “It don’t matter,” he said as he fired the ignition. “You still buying the breakfast. I know a wan irie place. You like grits?”

  “No.”

  “You’ll be liking these.”

  It was a long drive for a plate of grits, but Antoine was right. I did like them, lighter than I would expect, thick with butter. And I liked the biscuits with gravy and the spiced stewed apples that went along with my two eggs over. The place was narrow and old, built of stone, with open ductwork on the ceiling, steam sweating off the windows, and hot sauce on the tables. There were four of us sitting at a small booth with a rickety Formica table between us, the table laden with plates smeared with grease and filled with our breakfasts.

  The waitress in her maroon apron ambled over with a pot. “You boys want more coffee?”

  “Sure we do,” said Derek. “Hey, this place is famous, isn’t it?”

  “Didn’t you see the sign outside?”

  “I did, yes, but just because the sign says it, don’t mean it’s so.”

  “Look around,” she said, pointing at the photographs that ringed the diner. “We get politicians here, singers, movie stars.”

  “And now, best of all, you got Derek,” he said.

  “Who is Derek?”

  “You’re talking to him.”

  “Now, ain’t that special?” said the waitress as she poured coffee into one of the purple plastic coffee cups. “Tell the Post to hold the presses.”

  “You want to take my picture, put it up with the others?” said Derek. “I’ll sign it and everything.”

  “Your face is going to have to stay right where it is, honey,” she said. “We can’t be scaring the customers’ appetites. You boys need anything else, just give me a holler.”

  “She wants me,” said Derek after the waitress had left.

  Antoine shook his head and turned to Jamison, who was sitting quietly beside him. “When you coming back, bwoy?”

  “Don’t know,” said Jamison. He was dressed in baggy jeans and a T-shirt, more skateboarder than gangster. In the bright lights of the Florida Avenue Grill, he seemed younger than I had remembered. “My aunt’s been bugging me to come down and live with her for a while. And I didn’t like the cops sniffing for me like that.”

  “Take your time,” said Antoine, “but J.T. wanted me a tell you them dues is up.”

  “I’m not paying my dues, me having to run like that.”

  “He says you still under his right arm, so you got to still be paying.”

  “Hell if I’m paying. Tell him I’m out. My aunt wants to put me in the school down here. Says it’s a pretty good school, they got computers and stuff.”

  “J.T. don’t want to hear about school.”

  “I knew something like this was going down. That’s why I met you here and not at my aunt’s house.” He balled up a napkin, threw it atop his eggs, stood. “You’re a message boy now, Antoine? After all the crap you been blowing out your ass, that’s what you become? Well, here’s a message back to J.T. Tell him I’m out. Tell him if I’m paying dues, I’m paying them local, and he’ll have to fight through the protection I got wrapped down here to get to me.”

  “Well, lookie this,” said Antoine, a smile breaking out. “Bwoy’s all grown up. Sit down and finish them eggs. Victor’s got some questions.”

  “What are you going to tell J.T.?”

  “I’ll tell him what you say. That you off to school and giving up the business. Don’t make a liar of me, now, or it won’t be J.T. you be worrying about.”

  Jamison bobbed his head a bit and then sat down again. He took the napkin off his food, shoveled a forkful of eggs into his mouth. “All right,” he said to me, “what the hell do you want to know?”

  “Remember the woman whose picture I showed you? The one who you said was buying heroin from you?”

  “Course I remember. That’s the reason I was chased down to here in the first place.”

  “So the question I have, Jamison, is this. Do you have any idea who she was buying it for?”

  He looked at me for a moment, then down at his eggs.

  “Go ahead and tell the mon,” said Antoine.

  “Another one of my customers,” said Jamison. “A pretty boy with a ferocious habit. Whenever she came, she bought some for him and paid what he owed. We would sell him on credit whatever he wanted, because she was always good for it.”

  “Do you have a name?” I said.

  “We called him Sweets,” said Jamison, “because of the way he looked, but that wasn’t his real name.”

  “What was his real name?”

  “Terry,” said Jamison. “His name was Terry.”

  32

  We were back on the road, Antoine and Derek and I, heading farther south on I-95 in that blue Camaro, driving deep into Julia’s past. What was going on was so obvious I should have f
igured it out before. It wasn’t like she hadn’t been telling me over and over what she was doing and why. She was begging me to understand, but I guess I was so blinded by my own lost love that I hadn’t been able to see hers.

  Terry. As in Terrence. You should have seen him then, she had said. He was Romeo in his bones, she had said. Now all I had to do was find him.

  We were still about thirty miles from where we were headed, just rounding Fredericksburg, when my phone rang. It was noisy in the Camaro—a car built for speed, not comfort—so I pressed the phone hard into my ear.

  “Victor, where are you?”

  It took me a moment, within the din of the backseat, to identify the voice, but finally I did. Sims.

  “What do you want?” I said.

  “We need to talk.”

  “I think I’ve talked enough. You’ve had me down to the Roundhouse three times. Next time you want to chat, bring a warrant.”

  “That can be arranged, I assure you,” said Sims. “But maybe we should talk in an unofficial capacity. Where are you?”

  “You tell me. You’re following me, aren’t you?”

  “I was, until you arranged to lose me. Not the most innocent of actions. You are the chief suspect in a murder case. And I must say the evidence is lining up quite neatly against you.”

  “I’m being framed.”

  “Yes, you’ve told us. By Mr. Swift, who I don’t think could frame a poster, better yet a cookie as smart as you. But I could be convinced to see it your way, Victor. I could turn my attentions in another direction. I am more flexible than you might imagine.”

  “Oh, I doubt that. I think this—” I stopped talking. “What is best is—” I stopped talking again.

  “Victor, you’re breaking up.”

  “Am I? That’s a shame because—”

  “Remember that I told you not to leave town.”

  “I remember.”

  “There will be costs if you have discarded my advice.”

  “I’ll be in touch,” I said. Then I hung up. Then I turned off the phone.

  “Who was that?” said Derek.

  “Johnny Crow,” I said. “How much longer?”

  “About twenty minutes now,” said Antoine. “Then we have to ask.”

  “Won’t be a problem,” I said. “Everyone knows where the high school is.”

  Just north of Ashland, Virginia, after we had left the interstate, Antoine pulled us into a convenience store. The Sav-A-Minit. Which looked amazingly like a Git-n-Go, or a Loaf ’N Jug, or an XtraMart, not to mention the famous K collection of the Kuik-E-Mart, the Kum & Go, and the Kwik Trip. They must pay people to come up with names for these things, but they don’t pay them enough. What they should call them is the Over-Priced, or the Beer ’N Bellies, or the ever popular Krap-to-Go.

  “Let me get out,” I said. “I’ll ask.”

  “Nah, mon, I take care of this,” said Antoine. “You-all want anything?”

  “We-all?” said Derek.

  “Need to be speaking the patois down here, you want a be getting anywhere.”

  “I wouldn’t worry about the patois, I was you.”

  “You don’t think I can fit into this cracker town, mon?”

  “Hardly.”

  “Just be giving me some money,” said Antoine.

  “Are you rehearsing your lines?” said Derek. “What, you going to rob the Sav-A-Minit, get away with a buck and a half?”

  “Be quiet, Derek,” I said as I pulled out my wallet and handed Antoine a twenty.

  “Back in flash,” said Antoine as he climbed out of the Camaro.

  “They’re going to be chasing him with pitchforks and torches,” said Derek.

  “You ever been out of Philly, Derek?”

  “I got a cousin in Chicago.”

  “You visit him?”

  “Why would I want to do something like that?”

  “You should maybe travel a bit, see the world, broaden your horizons.”

  “My horizons, they broad enough.”

  “I don’t think so. Things aren’t what you might imagine outside of the city. People are pretty much okay all over.”

  “For you, maybe, with your suit and all.”

  “If that’s what you think, then get one of your own. Probably cost less than those sneakers.”

  “Yours, maybe. But nah, man, can you see me in a rig like that?”

  “Sure. Why not?”

  “Because I got style,” he said.

  Antoine came ambling out of the Sav-A-Minit without pitchforks and torches in his wake. He held a plastic bag loaded down with cans and junk. He climbed into the Camaro and tossed a Coke to me in the backseat and another to Derek.

  “We need a keep going straight and then turn to the right,” he said. “It not so hard. John Paul Jones High School. Strange territory, hey, Derek?”

  “I got my degree,” said Derek as he popped open his can. “Still, I didn’t need to show up every day to know they wasn’t nothing there they could teach me. So what we doing in a high school, bo?”

  “Not we,” I said. “Just me. I’ll take care of it from here on in. You guys can head out to the park or something. I’ll call you when I need you.”

  “What are you going to be doing?”

  “First I thought I’d pee, seeing as sitting in the back of this car has near ruptured my bladder,” I said. “Then I’m going to start a discussion about Shakespeare.”

  33

  “You just can’t wander the halls of a high school willy-nilly anymore,” said Mrs. Larrup, vice principal for discipline at John Paul Jones.

  When she had discovered me in the hallway on my way to the library without a pass, she hauled me off to her office. It made me feel seventeen again. And with her short gray hair and meaty forearms, Mrs. Larrup had my full attention.

  “I don’t care if you are a lawyer,” she said. “In fact, that’s a strike against you in my book.”

  “You’ve had a bad experience, I expect.”

  “More than one lawyer has tried to tell me how to do my job. Let’s see them handle fifteen hundred teenagers and their dramas.”

  “Which is precisely why I’m here. I represent a student.”

  She pulled back at that, her lips setting into two sharp lines of discontent.

  “A former student,” I said. “One who only has wonderful memories of John Paul Jones High School and the sterling faculty and administration that work here.”

  “Really,” she said, brightening considerably.

  “Yes. Her name is Julia Denniston, but that’s her married name. As a student she was Julia Crenshaw. She graduated about twelve or thirteen years ago.”

  “I remember Ms. Crenshaw,” she said. “How could I forget, after what happened?”

  “What are we talking about? What happened, exactly?”

  “Oh, I’m sorry, Mr. Carl, I’m not at liberty to disclose these things.”

  “That’s all right, I’ll just ask Julia. What I’ve come for, actually, is to find someone else. A classmate, I believe. He was in the school play with her. Do you remember when they performed Romeo and Juliet?”

  “Oh, yes,” she said, with a heavy sigh. “That was it. A disaster.”

  “Really?”

  “Sometimes, in the midst of great challenges, our students rise to the occasion. And sometimes, I’m sorry to say, they do not.”

  “I’m looking for the student who played Romeo. His name was Terrence, I believe.”

  “Terrence Tipton.”

  “Yes, that’s it. Terrence Tipton. Do you have any idea where he might be?”

  “No. None.”

  “Does his family still live around here?”

  “I don’t know. He had a brother who went through here before him, but Terry was the last of the Tiptons in this school, which was a relief, actually.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. Franklin Tipton was just your basic troublemaker, problems with his studies, fights, drinking, t
he usual hardhead who is just putting in time. But Terry was a—” She stopped her reverie, looked at me with the steely gaze one gives to a student about to pick up a week’s detention, or to a lawyer asking one question too many. “I don’t think there is anything more I should say, especially since, by your own admission, you don’t represent Mr. Tipton.”

  “You’re right, and you’re being quite prudent. The drama teacher who put on Julia’s play, is she still around?”

  “That was Mr. Mayhew’s production. His only one, thankfully. He retired a few years ago.”

  “Do you know where he lives?”

  “I’m not prepared to disclose that.”

  “That’s fine, ma’am. Thank you for your time.”

  “You’re going to find him and talk to him anyway.”

  “That’s right.”

  “I’ll tell him you’re coming. You know, we’re very proud of our alumni. We have state senators, authors. One of our students played for a few years in the NBA. How is Julia doing?”

  “Not so well,” I said.

  “It was a disaster,” said Jeremiah Mayhew. “I should never have gone ahead with it. I always hated that play. Too tricky.”

  “What do you mean, tricky?” I said.

  “If I had to do Shakespeare, I would have done Henry IV, Part One. The fight at the end, big cheers when Prince Hal rams Hotspur through with his sword. Blood and gore and victory, that’s what the people want. But Mrs. Pincer had already decided on Romeo and Juliet. The booklets had been ordered and construction on the scenery begun. And so Romeo and Juliet it was.”

  “Then what went wrong?”

  “Everything,” he said. “Every damn thing. A play like that, with a romance at the core, it all depends on the chemistry. You got to have chemistry. And you can’t fake it. It’s either there or it’s not. And with those two we had it. But when you get down to it, last thing you want with kids like that is chemistry. What else could you expect but trouble?”

  Jeremiah Mayhew was not what I expected of a drama teacher. He was burly and bald, he wore a T-shirt and shorts and sneakers with his sanitary socks pulled high. I was surprised there wasn’t a whistle around his neck, and I suppose he was, too. He had been the football coach at John Paul Jones High School and a health teacher at the time of Julia’s Romeo and Juliet. But he’d acted a bit in college, had made that known to the principal, and so when Mrs. Pincer, the regular drama teacher, took ill, he was recruited to take over the spring production.