His Third Wife

by Grace Octavia

  “Why didn’t you let her?”

  Jamison looked at Kerry. “Because I hadn’t told you yet.”

  Kerry laughed off his intimacy. “So you felt no way about telling me about Val’s child, and even marrying her, and I’m supposed to believe you’ve been holding out on this because you hadn’t told me?”

  “I didn’t want you to have to question again how much I loved you when we were married,” Jamison said. “I didn’t want to put you through that again.”

  “How do you know what I went through?”

  “I don’t know and I’ll never know. But I’ve thought about it. And I think you must’ve wondered if I was lying to you. If I ever really loved you.”

  “I know you loved me.”

  “And that what I did in Los Angeles meant I loved you less. That it undermined it.”

  “No sense talking about it now,” Kerry said.

  “Why not?”

  Kerry looked at the creamer on the counter beside the half-full carafe. “You ready for me to take you home?”

  Jamison exhaled and shook his head. “Fine. Sure.”

  “I need to call my mother to tell her to wait to bring Tyrian back.”

  “Why is it so bad if he sees me here? I’m his father. I think it’s healthy.”

  “Let’s not do this. Look, I’m going to call my mother, and then let’s go.” Kerry walked out of the room so quickly she forgot her cell phone and had to call her mother from the house phone in her bedroom. Thirjane withheld her judgment and suggested that Tyrian stay at her house.

  “Just don’t be stupid. You’ve been doing so well,” she said to her daughter, knowing Kerry wasn’t listening.

  “Sure, Mama,” Kerry agreed. “Don’t worry. I’m taking him home now.”

  When Kerry got back to the kitchen, Jamison was standing in the middle of the floor with his cell phone to his ear and his hand over his mouth. He looked worried, shocked, disoriented. Kerry’s mind went to his mother.

  “What’s wrong?” Kerry asked.

  “I just saw him last night, man. He was at the wake,” Jamison said to whoever was on the phone. “He said he was going to call me on Monday. He was fine. He—It doesn’t make sense. He wasn’t like that!”

  “What is it?” Kerry asked.

  “Are they sure it’s him?”

  Jamison listened some more and then hung up the phone. He looked like he wanted to scream, or maybe he was screaming but Kerry couldn’t hear it.

  “What?”

  “Ras. He’s dead.”

  “What?” Kerry almost snickered.

  “That was his lawyer. They found his body in his grandmother’s basement. He shot himself. In the head.”

  “No. That doesn’t—”

  “This don’t make sense, man!” Jamison started pacing the room. “No sense. He was—he was fine.”

  “Suicide? That’s not like Glenn. He’s not like that. Was he depressed?”

  “Depressed? No. I just talked to him. He thought he was like the next Malcolm X. He wasn’t depressed. Never. That wasn’t him,” Jamison said.

  “I know.”

  “Suicide? No! It can’t be. He wasn’t—he—! No, man! No!” Jamison’s pacing led him to a wall that he tried to push out of his way. “He wasn’t—This ain’t right. Suicide? No, Ras! Not like that.”

  “I’m with you,” Kerry agreed. “It’s not like him. You think”—she looked at him before choosing her next words with caution—“something happened to him?”

  Jamison kept pushing his wall. It seemed like everything was behind it.

  “They did this. They did this! They did this to him!” He pushed away from the wall and turned to the center of the room with a grimace.

  “Who?”

  “Give me your keys?”

  “Who? My keys? Why?”

  “They did this. I know it,” Jamison said.

  “They who?”

  “I need your keys.”

  “You’re not thinking straight,” Kerry said. “I’m not giving you my keys.”

  “I can’t let them get away with this. He was my friend. They killed him. I know it.”

  “They who? No, Jamison,” Kerry said, trying to hold Jamison back from her keys on the counter. “You just left your mother’s funeral. You’re upset. You’re not thinking straight.”

  “No, I’m clear. I’m very clear. I know what I have to do,” Jamison said. “I have to stop playing fair. No one’s playing fair.”

  “Fine. If you know who killed Ras, let’s call the police. Let’s try to—”

  “The police won’t do anything. They are the police,” Jamison explained, wrestling past Kerry and grabbing the keys.

  “Don’t do this,” Kerry said. “I swear, it’ll all work itself out. You just have to be patient. Something is about to happen. I can’t tell you what, but it’s happening.” Kerry tried to keep Jamison from the door. “If you go out there and get yourself in trouble, I can’t help you.”

  “I don’t need your help, Kerry,” Jamison said. “I don’t need anyone’s help.”

  Jamison purposefully pushed Kerry to the floor to get out of the front door. He slammed it open and left it swinging behind him.

  “Think of your son! Don’t do anything stupid!” Kerry cried, trying to get up to catch up with him. By the time she made it to the front door, her car was heading up the driveway. She ran into the kitchen and grabbed her cell phone.

  “He’s gone,” she said. “He has my car. I don’t know where he’s going, but it’s not good. We have to move now! We have to do something!”

  “Calm down,” the person said. “I’ll find him. Don’t worry.”

  “Hurry. Just hurry, Leaf. Please hurry.”

  Jamison parked Kerry’s car around the corner from the Rainforest. He’d stopped at his house to get the gun from his nightstand. He thought to change out of the gray suit he’d worn all day since his mother’s funeral, but decided against it. Every familiar car was parked outside the old house with the fraternity bar in the basement. The silver Maserati was up on the grass.

  Jamison pulled the gun out and held it behind his back with his hand on the trigger. The lock was off.

  He descended the steps into the Rainforest. Kicked the door open and held the gun out in front of him.

  No one was in the main room. The usual young bartender was standing guard wearing a fraternity T-shirt. He dropped a towel and a glass he was holding when he saw Jamison. Raised his hands and backed away from the bar.

  “How many people back there?” Jamison asked lowly, shifting his eyes from the back hallway, where the doors leading to the bathroom and bedroom were shrouded in a blackness he couldn’t see through.

  “Three,” the boy said nervously. “I don’t want trouble. I’m in school. My father’s—”

  “Get out of here!” Jamison charged. “Get the fuck out of here.”

  The boy backed out of the bar with his hands up, facing Jamison. He started running as soon as he hit the basement steps.

  Jamison thought he heard something coming from the corner where the old papier-mâché palm tree was now leaning against a wall. He pointed the gun at it and found nothing but dusty green leaves.

  He crisscrossed slowly down the hallway with his gun pointed out, listening for footsteps or voices, anything behind or in front of him as he penetrated the darkness.

  At the door to the bedroom where Dax had been held weeks ago, he heard men laughing heartily, talking in tones of victory.

  “Militant X turned to straight bitch when he saw that steel. Begging for his life. What am I supposed to do with that?”

  While Jamison had been waking from the original wrath that engulfed him when he’d heard the news about his friend’s death and he was finally seeing where he was going and what he was doing with clear eyes, this bragging brought the vehemence back—and with more register.

  Jamison took a deep breath and kicked the door open. There were two loud bangs as his shoe hit the
wood and the door swung open wide to hit the wall inside the room.

  The men inside stood fast. One tried to hide. Two went for their guns. But Jamison’s barrel was in perfect position to commit to the swiftest action.

  “Don’t fucking move,” he hollered. “Nobody fucking move!”

  Six hands went up. Under the dim light Jamison saw Emmit, Keet, and Scoot. Keet was in a black hooded sweatshirt with his badge at his waist. Scoot and Emmit were in suits with their shirts unbuttoned halfway down, ties missing.

  Jamison stepped deeper into the room, ordered everyone against a wall.

  “Calm down, son. Think about what you’re doing,” Emmit tried in the wise voice he’d always summoned in Jamison’s presence.

  “Shut the fuck up,” Jamison said, waving the gun to signal for the men to get in line on the wall.

  “What are you going to do? Kill us all?” Keet said, and he was almost laughing, but still moving.

  “That’s the plan,” Jamison said, closing the door behind him with his loose hand.

  “We can work this out. Figure this out. If you tell us what you need,” Scoot said.

  “I want the truth. Before I kill all of you, I want the fucking truth,” Jamison said.

  “What truth, son?”

  “I’m not your son, Emmit. You stop calling me that. Just tell me who killed Ras, which one of you did it?”

  Scoot looked at Keet from his place against the wall.

  “What the fuck? I killed him,” Keet said. “I don’t care. I ain’t scared of this nigga and his gun. Because he ain’t gonna use it. Are you? Come on. We can play this game and line up, but you ain’t gonna shoot nobody. Too far from the SWATS for that. Right, Mr. Mayor?”

  Keet laughed to settle his point, but Jamison raised the gun to his forehead and so much anger, so much weight from those days kept his moistening finger on the trigger. And he was about to pull it.

  “I told you, you had to expect this,” Emmit said. “That you had to be ready. You wanted to play, and here you are. This is what everything you wanted looks like from the inside. Ain’t pretty, is it?”

  Jamison moved the barrel to Emmit’s forehead.

  “I never wanted to play anything. Any games,” he said.

  “Can’t have one without the other. What, you think those superheroes you read about in history books never got their hands dirty?”

  “For money?” Jamison asked. “For kickbacks from a program you know isn’t going to help anyone get rich but the corporations on top who already have all of the money anyway?”

  “I’m wiped out. Retirement money is gone. Clara and these medical bills. What was I supposed to do?”

  “Do right. That’s what you were supposed to do,” Jamison said.

  “How’s that working for you?”

  “I’m not the one standing against the wall with a gun pointed at my head.”

  “So, you think this is going to solve something? Stop something?” Emmit asked. “You think you’re the first super-nigga to try to stand up against the machine. Well, you ain’t the first and you ain’t the last. You kill us and we’re dead and you’re in jail and guess what, Cade’s just moving on to the next deal. That’s all.”

  “But it doesn’t make any sense. All of this over a deal? Over WorkCorps? Ras had nothing to do with that. Why kill him? Over this?”

  “More niggas, more money. How were those white boys going to get a bunch of niggas to sign up for WorkCorps if you two were giving out scholarships in the ’hood like reparations? Everyone goes to college, no one goes to work. One less nigga to scrub toilets.”

  “No, no, man!” Tears Jamison hid behind his mission blurred his vision.

  “He was cutting in on the profits. About to speak to the news about WorkCorps. Too much work was behind it. Couldn’t risk it,” Emmit said.

  “How much?” Jamison asked. “How much were each of you going to get?”

  “Five million each,” Emmit said. “Five million each and more on the other side.”

  Keet and Scoot saw Jamison loosening his grip in his anguish. They silently organized a plan with side eyes based upon who was closest to the door.

  “He didn’t have to die. He was just trying to do right,” Jamison cried, unknowingly lowering his gun.

  Scoot took this as an opening and rushed to the door as Keet charged Jamison, but before Scoot could open the door, a boom came from the other side and the wood banged into his face before a line of men with guns drawn stormed the room with military precision shouting, “GBI! GBI!”

  The four men in the room were quickly outnumbered, even Jamison, who was still holding his gun out in shock.

  At the back of the line filing in was Leaf with a Georgia Bureau of Investigation badge on his shirt pocket, a gun held confidently in his hand. The other agents subdued Keet, Scoot, and Emmit, but Leaf stepped toward Jamison.

  “Give me the gun,” Leaf said. “It’s fine. I know everything.”

  “What? What are you doing here?” Jamison asked.

  “I’m a state agent. Just give me the gun,” Leaf said, pointing at his badge.

  “I was just trying to find out who killed my friend,” Jamison said.

  “I know. Give me the gun, man. I can help you.”

  And then, as Jamison slowly lowered his loaded firearm, his undercover assistant stepped in and removed the weapon.

  The scene at the police station was like something out of a movie. Cade and all of his underlings tied to the WorkCorps plot handcuffed to chairs in different interrogation rooms. Big names. And small names.

  All sat stunned when agents walked in with the chief of police in handcuffs.

  Clara Lindsey sat in the waiting area with Countess beside her making phone calls to everyone she knew to get Emmit out of jail.

  “Agents had been watching you since you got into office. We knew you were clean, but we needed your connections to make some footing for the bust. We knew it was only a matter of time before Cade got his hands on you.” Leaf had explained this in different ways to Jamison over cups of bad coffee in one of the interrogation rooms. His entire demeanor changed as he unveiled all of the evidence he’d collected. “When Cade showed up at the funeral this morning, I knew we had him. Now all we need is your statement. We can put him away for a long time.”

  Jamison allowed the agents to record his statement about what Cade had said to him at the cemetery and everything that had gone down with Keet and Emmit. When he tried to confess his part in Dax’s murder, Leaf signaled for the officer holding the recorder to stop the tape. He thanked Jamison for his time.

  “I’m free to go?” Jamison asked.

  “Agents will probably contact you in the morning, but you need to go home now,” Leaf said. “Get some sleep. Call your lawyer.”

  “Okay,” Jamison said. “So, what’s going to happen to the other guys? You sure you have a case against them? Got everything you need?”

  “It’s a done deal,” Leaf shared. “Funny thing is we thought we’d still need to push some of them to confess to Dax’s murder, but once one broke, they all started singing.”

  “Who broke first?” Jamison asked.

  “You’d be surprised. The hardest one. Keet Neales,” Leaf revealed before telling Jamison that it was Keet who pulled in Governor Cade and every other name he knew in a tirade once he’d gotten into the interrogation room. Keet said if he was going down, everyone was going down with him. He told them about the five million he’d been promised to see the WorkCorps thing through, even how much money Cade claimed they’d lose if Ras and his program got a contract at the same time. He said his profits would be cut in half. That’s when he ordered the hit on Ras.

  Leaf went to open the door to let Jamison out of the tiny room.

  “I can’t believe all of this,” Jamison said. “Who would’ve thought politics could be so ugly. So criminal.”

  “This isn’t the worst case,” Leaf said solemnly. “This isn’t the last case.”
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  “And you,” Jamison went on, “I never would’ve thought you were an undercover agent.”

  “I’m good at what I do,” Leaf joked.

  “You were a good assistant, too,” Jamison said. “A good friend.”

  Leaf and Jamison shared a laugh.

  “Let me know if you ever want to switch careers,” Jamison said as Leaf opened the door.

  “I sure will.”

  Jamison found Kerry stepping in worried circles in the hallway. She jumped into his arms like someone who’d feared the worst.

  “Oh my God!” she said. “I thought you were going to get yourself killed. You okay? Everything okay?”

  “Yes, woman, I’m fine,” Jamison said, embracing her.

  “I was just thinking about Tyrian and your mother—this would’ve been too much for him.” Kerry started crying and Jamison rubbed her back to reassure her.

  “I’m fine. I’m right here,” he said. “Not going anywhere.”

  “I know. I know.”

  “And what about you?” Jamison looked into Kerry’s eyes. “You knew about this the whole time? How could you keep this from me?”

  “I found out about Leaf early on so he had to tell me what was going on and he said it was best if you didn’t know. Then he could protect you,” Kerry explained. “You understand? I wasn’t trying to betray you. I would never do that. I just wanted to protect you.”

  “I know,” Jamison said.

  One of the agents who’d been assigned to drive Jamison home stood at the end of the hallway.

  “You need a ride?” Jamison asked Kerry.

  “I’m fine. They brought my car here. I can take you home.”

  “I’m okay. Don’t think I’ll be going home for a while.”

  “Where are you going?” Kerry asked.

  “Over to the Westin probably. You know my office has a room on standby there.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’ll see you tomorrow,” Jamison said. He kissed Kerry on the forehead softly and ran to catch up with his ride.