Darkness Descending

by Penny Mickelbury

  DARKNESS DESCENDING

  A MIMI PATTERSON/GIANNA MAGLIONE MYSTERY

  By

  Penny Mickelbury

  Darkness Descending

  A Mimi Patterson/Gianna Maglione Mystery

  Copyright 2004 by Penny Mickelbury

  Cover design by Peggy Ann Blow

  CHAPTER ONE

  It was too damn hot for there not to be any air conditioning in the club. True, it was located in a piece-of-shit building in an ugly-ass part of town, but just because it looked like the third world didn’t mean it had to act like the third world. The cheap bitch who owned the joint sure as hell made enough money to pay for air conditioning. The three nights it was open—Thursday, Friday and Saturday—the place was packed to the rafters and the line to get in stretched around the corner, even in winter. The fire department sign held the club’s capacity to 250 at a time, but twice that number was the norm. Figure that maybe a thousand people routinely rotated through between its opening at 10:00 p.m. and closing at 4:00 a.m., at ten bucks a head, three nights a week: That’s thirty grand a week, not counting the three-to-five bucks a pop for water, soda, beer or wine. Yet, on a mid-September night in Washington, D.C., which is still the middle of summer in this part of the South, two fans are supposed to keep a thousand bumpin’ bitches cool? Granted, they were industrial fans the size of jet engines and with that much power. Still.

  Tosh shook herself like her dog did after a swim in the Potomac, hoping to slough off the wave of negativity that all of a sudden enveloped her. Why was she trippin’ about some damn fans? She knew better than to allow external shit to affect her, yet here she was, tripping, not because Dee Fucking Phillips didn’t have enough class to install air conditioning in her night club but because Dee Fucking Phillips had her night club in such shitty part of town. Tosh got pissed off every time she came over here, which, in truth, was really what was chewing on her ass: That she was coming so here frequently because of Lili. It was easier to be mad that she couldn’t park her Benz on the street in this neighborhood than to admit that some bitch had got her nose wide open enough to drive the thing through.

  She stopped walking down the dark, litter-strewn sidewalk, took a deep breath, and lit a joint. She always felt better when she got down to the real truth of a thing, and the truth was, in this case, two different and separate things: Where she was, and what she was feeling. She hated having to come to this part of town in order to be who and what she was, but her Tosh self didn’t fit in across town where she lived and worked, and neither of her selves was ready to be in love with Lili—or with anybody, for that matter. Talk about unexpected complications! Tosh hit the joint hard and deep and held the hot smoke in her lungs for a long, long moment, shutting off her senses to her surroundings. It wouldn’t take much to induce her to turn around and backtrack the three blocks she’d just walked, get back on the damn subway, ride back to where her car was parked, get in it, and go home. But she’d promised Lili that she’d come tonight. Well, she promised she’d come either Friday or Saturday and Tosh had other plans for tomorrow. Anyway, The Snatch was as good a place to release the pressures of the week as any. She felt the buzz, exhaled the smoke, and resumed her trek.

  As usual, the line to get into The Snatch snaked around the corner, the people in it too hot to fidget and shift from foot to foot. So they just stood there, waiting for the door to open. Hot and heavy night air hung over this part of D.C. like dirty sheets. Funny, Tosh thought, how much difference environment made. Just a few miles away, in Georgetown, say, or Dupont Circle or Foggy Bottom, the same air would feel lazy or languid, but here, far enough south and east from upscale to be considered ghetto, it was just nasty-ass hot. Even the moon looked bedraggled. Did they know, the night air and the moon, that they weren’t overlooking stately town houses and boutiques and bistros?

  Tosh ran her eyes over the scenery as she walked: Tight, sagging row houses and past-their-use warehouses lined the block on one side of the street, The Snatch anchoring the northwest corner. Opposite, a snaggle-tooth array of weedy vacant lots alternated with a liquor store, a Chinese fried chicken carry-out, a store front Holy Roller church, and a no-name gas station that doubled as a betting parlor. Yet, a mere three blocks away, the Green Line Metro station was a beacon of light and a ready escape into any other reality. “Don’t even think about it,” she said to herself. Think about Lili.

  “Whattup, Dog?”

  Tosh shook hands with Darlene the Dangerous, the bouncer at The Snatch, surprised, as always, at the sweet gentleness of her voice. Darlene was a massive woman, six feet tall and built like a boxer—not much fat and whole lot of power. She had a pretty face, surprisingly light brown eyes, and a deceptively mild demeanor. She always wore Washington Redskins warm-ups with Kobe Bryant Adidas high tops, and alternated professional sports team hats—baseball caps in warm weather, knit skull caps in cold. Tonight she wore a Los Angeles Lakers cap turned sideways. “You got ‘em lined up early tonight, Darlene.”

  “Yeah, but least it ain’t rainin’ yet. How come you here so early?”

  “I’m right on time,” Tosh said, checking her watch, then pointing its face toward Darlene. “Show starts in less than five minutes.”

  “Yeah,” Darlene said, “it does, but it ain’t the show you want. Lili dances the second show tonight.”

  “Bullshit!”

  “For real,” Darlene said. “Dee made the change this morning. You didn’t get the word, I guess.”

  “Fuck that!” All the irritation Tosh had worked to banish resurfaced in an instant. “Ain’t that a bitch! And it’s supposed to rain, too?”

  “Be cool, Dog. Don’t let this shit disturb your peace. Besides, we need the rain,” Darlene said peacefully, and inched aside so Tosh could enter: Lili’s orders despite Dee Phillips’s orders to the contrary.

  “Hey! How come she gets to go in ahead of us?” somebody in the line yelled, sounding more hot than heated, but still instigating a chorus of complaint.

  “‘Cause it’s my fuckin’ door,” Darlene replied sweetly and coolly, and silencing the complainants. Tosh gave Darlene the half-smoked joint as thanks, promised to bring her a beer, and slipped inside.

  Reality looked different inside The Snatch. It was industrial space without pretensions toward anything else, but there was nothing raggedy and dirty about it. The brick walls were shellacked to a high gloss, the floor smooth concrete. The furnishings were stainless steel, including suspended pole lamps and the sixty-foot bar. One end of the room had a raised ceiling. A steel spiral staircase led up to a cozy loft-like space above the main floor, and a pole fed down directly to the bar. From midnight to one, and again from two to three, The Snatch Dancers slid up and down the pole and danced on the bar and generally made it worth the trip to this shitty-ass neighborhood, because these were no beat up, broke-down junkie hos shaking their asses for a fix. The Snatch Dancers were some super-fine bitches who were professional dancers. Eight of them, two each Black, white, Latina and Asian, alternated shifts. Something for everybody. Tosh had to give it up to Dee on that tip: She knew how to attract a crowd. Bar dancers for women, in a women’s bar, no men allowed, not even queens. Dee didn’t like men, period. And something else she did really right was that there were six, six-stall bathrooms in the place. No standing in line to pee. There was a bathroom in each corner of the room and two upstairs, and they were clean. No shooting up and no fucking allowed. That’s what the upstairs loft was for. You could almost forgive the lack of air conditioning, if not the neighborhood.

  Tosh gave up the ten dollar entry fee to the Moms Mabley look-alike just inside the door, then stood against the wall, watching and listening—and calming down. Darlene was right; she was her
e now. Might as well enjoy herself. The place was jam-packed, the music was heavy and pulsing and writhing bodies blended with the beat. Jade, the DJ, was on the mark early tonight. Just then, the music and the lights and the mood shifted and the bar became the focus. Or, more accurately, the pole from the bar to the ceiling became the focus as the pin-point spotlight followed the first dancer down. Tosh moved in the opposite direction of the crowd, to the other end of the bar. No point in watching if Lili wasn’t dancing.

  “’S up, Dog?” she heard in her ear, and turned to find Tree Davis towering over her, grinning like she was trying to introduce her lips to her eyebrows.

  “It’s all about you, TD,” Tosh said, shaking hands with the collegiate hoop star. “But it won’t be for long, you keep blowing off curfew. Kinda late for you to be out hanging, isn’t it?”

  “Fuck that shit! It’s a night for celebrating! You know my homies just won the championship, right? I ain’t sittin’ up in no dorm, not tonight. No, sir buddy.”

  “Then have a brew on me, TD,” Tosh said, high-fiving the baby-faced six-and-a-half foot WNBA-star to be. She’d forgotten that the women’s championship game was played earlier in the evening but she knew that Tree was from somewhere in the mid-West, ergo, the women’s basketball team from out there must have won the championship. Tosh had zero interest in basketball. She turned toward the bar and raised her hand. Four of the bartenders now worked the other end, busy because of the crowd attracted by dancers, but two still worked the back end, including Tosh’s favorite. “Hey, Aimee. You get any finer, I’m gon’ have to marry you.”

  “You talk any more shit, I’m gon’ have to let you,” Aimee said, and leaned across the bar into the kiss Tosh offered her. “And I don’t mind if Lili joins us,” she said, licking her lips.

  Tosh licked her own at the thought. Two of the finest femmes she knew getting it on together? Yeah, she could get down with that, even if most of her AG pals couldn’t. Their loss. “You need to get me four brews and quit fucking with my head,” she said to the bartender.

  Aimee licked her lips again and reached behind her to get the beers, two in each hand. Tosh gave her a twenty, told her to keep the change, got another kiss, and began to enjoy herself. She gave Tree a beer and picked up two of them. “Be right back. Gotta take these to Darlene.”

  “Tell Darlene to give me my motherfuckin’ money!”

  Tosh shook her head. Darlene was a notoriously unlucky gambler, the kind who’d bet on whether or not the sun would rise in the east and set in the west on a particular day and so had no problem getting people to bet with her. She pushed through the throng at the bar to the front door. The crowd outside surged forward when she opened the door, and retreated when Darlene told them back the fuck up.

  “Thanks, bro,” Darlene said, then scowled when Tosh delivered Tree’s message. Tell that overgrown bitch I said suck my dick.”

  Tosh was still laughing when she got back to Tree and her beer, and laughed even harder at the girl’s reaction. “It’s not that she won’t pay you, it’s just that she owes a lot of people ahead of you.”

  “So, what’re you sayin’?” Tree demanded.

  “That you either shouldn’t take bets with Darlene, or you shouldn’t need the money,” Tosh said, digging her cell phone out of her pocket. She flipped it open and punched a number. She squeezed the phone to her ear and held her other hand over the other ear so she could hear. “I’m here,” she said when Lili answered on the other end, and shut the phone, angry at herself for sounding angry on the phone. She hadn’t wanted to do that, blame Lili for Dee’s actions.

  “Hey! Hey! Look at that! I love that shit!” Tree was punching her on the shoulder and pointing to the menage a trois taking place on top of the bar under the fierce control of a Madonna look-alike with a whip. “How much you think it’d cost me to get that Asian bitch to wrap her legs around my face like that?”

  “They’re not hookers, Tree, they’re dancers. I keep telling you that.”

  “Bullshit. For the right dollars, I betcha any of ‘em could be had.”

  Tosh looked up at her to be certain she was serious. “You need to stop making bad bets, Bro. I’m telling you, those bitches are dancers. Actors. That’s just a job, what they’re doing up there. They get paid to do it and y’all stick twenty dollar bills in their snatches, so they earn more in an hour that most folks do in a week.”

  “Bullshit,” Tree said again, sounding a little less convinced.

  But Tosh knew what she was talking about and in that moment, her proof appeared. Lili wrapped her arms around Tosh’s neck, pressed into her body, and kissed her. Long, slow, deep. Tosh was subliminally aware of the buzz going on around them. She heard Tree’s awed, “Damn, Dog!” Heard several other voices identify Lili as one of the dancers. Heard Renee offer “to get up in the middle of that!” But her focus was on how Lili felt that close to her. Then the spell was broken.

  “You know I don’t want you on the floor until after your set.”

  They broke apart to see Dee Phillips standing in front of them, dressed to kill, disapproval etched in her face, and even at five-eight, Tosh wasn’t looking at her eye-to- eye. This was her first up-close-and-personal encounter with the club owner, and she now understood Lili’s expressed dislike of the woman. “Whattup, Dee?” Tosh said, trying for polite, and pretending she didn’t have to look up to do it.

  Dee ignored her. “You need to get back upstairs, Lili.”

  Tosh felt Lili stiffen in her arms. “In a minute, Dee. I need to talk to Tosh”

  Dee squared her shoulders. “Maybe you didn’t hear me,” she said, and it wasn’t a question. Tosh let Lili go and squared off herself, assessing whether the larger woman’s bulk connoted strength or weakness. She needn’t have worried.

  “Maybe you didn’t hear me,” Lili said evenly, and Tosh realized how little she knew about this woman. “I said I need a minute. Either I get it or you get another dancer for the next set because I’m out the door. Your choice.”

  Dee’s eyes narrowed slightly and shifted from Lili to Tosh. Then she turned and stalked away, solid and square, a concrete block in motion. Tosh realized that she’d been holding her breath and let it out in a whoosh. “Damn, Baby. You backed her up pretty good.”

  Lili flicked her hand. Dee already was a memory. “Tosh, I’m really sorry about tonight. Everything’s a mess. Dee changed the schedule and I didn’t know it until I got home from shopping, plus, I can’t see you tonight. My sister called just before I left home. They had to rush my Mama to the hospital. I’m going over there soon as my set’s over, and I don’t know what time I’ll get home.”

  Irritation surged. Tosh tamped it back down. “What happened?”

  Lili shivered. “She was having trouble breathing.”

  “What hospital’s she in?” Tosh asked.

  “Georgetown,” Lili said, eyes widening in surprise. “Why?”

  “‘Cause maybe I’ll see you there later on,” Tosh said.

  Lili gave her a strange look, then kissed her again before hurrying away. Tosh struggled to settle and clarify her emotions as she watched Lili disappear into the crowd. She’d surprised herself with the hospital question, shocked herself with the reason for it, and stunned herself with the knowledge that she’d meant it. She really did want to be with Lili at such a crucial time. And that really did worry her. Scared her, too. This was dangerous territory. Much too dangerous.

  “What?” Tosh said. Tree was talking to her. “Say what?”

  “Can you get your bitch to hook me up with that Asian bitch?”

  The flash of irritation that had arisen a moment ago was back and Tosh opened her mouth to tear into the big girl, but on the heels of the irritation was the realization that anything she said to Tree would be a waste of breath. She was a nineteen-year-old kid from somewhere deep in Illinois or Michigan. What did she know? “No, Dude, Lili don’t know the Asian bitch. They just work together, they ain’t homies,” Tosh sai
d, and turned away without a trace of remorse for the lie she’d just told.

  “Where you goin’?” Tree asked.

  “To pee,” Tosh said, draining her beer and heading for the toilet in the corner, back near Dee’s office. That one never was crowded, probably because of the well-known danger of dropping drawers so close to Dee Phillips, who, despite her external panache, had a major reputation as a pussy pouncer, and who scored more often than not. She dressed full designer and got her hair styled every week, had plenty of money, not to mention a new Bentley. Yeah, she got all the pussy she could handle, but not much love. That’s the thing that Lili had put on Tosh’s mind that she didn’t want there: The difference between love and lust and how one felt so much better than the other. And not the one Tosh always had preferred.

  She pushed open the bathroom door and realized why she was here, and it wasn’t to pee. The bathrooms in The Snatch were soundproofed. You went in and closed the door and the only music was some quiet jazz coming from speakers concealed in the ceiling along with the lighting. Like Dee thought that using the toilet should be a peaceful experience. Tosh sighed as the bathroom door shut out the din from the club and, with the deafening silence, a week’s worth of fatigue settled down on her as she realized she could have stayed at home this evening; that she’d rather be at home where she could be in bed, asleep. As the silence enfolded her, she realized that’s where her other self wanted to be—at home, where it was clean and peaceful and quiet, inside and outside. “Shit.

  “What’d you say?”

  Tosh looked up, startled, and realized that three other women were in the bathroom, two at the sinks and one, in military fatigues, just emerging from one of the stalls.

  “Just talking to myself,” Tosh said. “Sorry.”

  “You don’t dig the dancing girls?” one of the women asked Tosh, and the way she asked, along with the look she gave, made Tosh bristle.