A Meeting In The Ladies' Room

by Anita Doreen Diggs

  Mama folded her arms across her chest. “Nobody is gonna run me outta my own house.”

  “I can’t leave her here alone,” I said.

  Keith shook his head. “The situation will just be a daily nuisance for your mother but you are in real danger. I won’t allow you to stay here.” He paused with his hand on the door handle. “Are you ready, Mrs. Blue?”

  “Yes.”

  Mama and I hugged each other and then Keith opened the door. I clutched the keys to my hiding place in my palm.

  Paul looked dazed, and although he held my hand tightly, neither of us was in the mood for conversation.

  The only thought which swirled through my mind on the way downtown was that I’d buy a gun and kill myself before allowing anyone to lock me in a jail cell again.

  My hideout was a three-story brownstone near Houston Street. When the driver parked in front of it, I asked, “Which floor am I going to?”

  He laughed. “This whole building is Mr. Williams’s place. You can live in any room you want.”

  I dragged my tired body up the steps. My life in Harlem was on hold. This new home in Greenwich Village was only temporary. What was going to become of me?

  It was an elegant, twelve-room residence with high ceilings, decorative molding, hardwood floors, huge French windows, and a back garden. There was a grand piano in the first-floor living room with a four-foot stack of Keith’s autobiography, Winner, standing next to it, a round wooden table with four chairs in the huge, eat-in kitchen, and a fully furnished bedroom on the second floor. Otherwise, the place was bare.

  Was this where Keith brought his one-night stands? It certainly seemed that way. I couldn’t help laughing at Keith’s setup, and the sound echoed off the bare walls.

  Paul had been following me around the place without saying a word. Now he asked, “What is so funny?”

  “Look around,” I replied. “I think this is Keith’s booty barn. There is a plush bed for the dirty deed, a table to allow her a cup of coffee in the morning, and she can tinkle the piano keys while Keith gets her coat out of the closet. He probably tucks a copy of Winner into her hopeful hands before hustling her out to the limousine. Then he goes to see his real girlfriend.”

  “Boy, talk about jumping to conclusions,” Paul chuckled. “Actually, this place is a tax write-off for Keith. When you’ve got that much money, it’s hard to find ways to shield it from the IRS.”

  After we explored the brownstone, Paul sat down at the kitchen table and lapsed into silence once more. Was he worried that I’d jump bail and he’d lose his home?

  I decided to check my home voicemail. There were thirty-two messages on my home phone but aside from Alyssa, Pam Silberstein, and Elaine, not one of them was from anyone I knew. Every one of the major talk shows, magazines, newspapers, and wire services had telephoned, seeking an interview and offering staggering amounts of money.

  I went back downstairs to the kitchen. Paul was still sitting and staring into space.

  “I need to buy something new to wear,” I told him. “Will you walk out with me?”

  He got up without saying a word and we went back out into the street.

  Greenwich Village used to be a community of writers, musicians, painters, and other creative types. Now it was home to young, white, corporate professionals—the high cost of rent had driven the artists over the bridge into Brooklyn.

  This neighborhood still had a little charm left. It was full of nooks, crannies, side streets, coffeehouses, clothing boutiques, and several places that sold vintage albums and used books that I made a mental note to explore when things settled down a little.

  After walking five blocks, we found a supermarket and a cheap clothing outlet. I bought a toothbrush, toothpaste, bread, bacon, cheese, crackers, eggs, orange juice, a pack of panties, a new sweat suit, and a pair of pajamas.

  As we carried my packages back up the steps, I remembered something.

  “Paul, I have a little chore to take care of and I think you should stay outside so you can truthfully say later that you don’t know anything about it.”

  “Jackie, I’m sorry I left you alone for so long to deal with all this, but I’m here now and I’m not going anywhere until this is all over. What is it that you’re going to do?”

  I told him how anxious Detective Gilchrist was to get his hands on my Filofax the night I was arrested. He had probably cursed that poor rookie cop out by now for allowing it back into my hands. That meant he was going to serve me with a subpoena to get it back. The organizer had to go.

  My hands shook as I turned the keys. I locked the door carefully behind us and searched the kitchen drawers until I found a box of matches.

  As Paul watched nervously, I burned every single page of my Filofax and watched all the negative comments I had made about Annabelle and Craig, along with my obsessive scribblings about Victor, go swirling down the toilet.

  I leaned on the sink and cried.

  “Jackie, you’re exhausted. Why don’t you clean yourself up and take a nap. I’m going to the office and handle some stuff but I’ll be back later, okay?”

  After Paul left, I bathed and washed my hair with soap. Then I climbed into Keith’s bed and went to sleep.

  The phone woke me up. I looked at my watch. It was five o’clock! I had slept the whole day away!

  There was a pretty French phone, white with pink roses swirling around it, on Keith’s nightstand. I lifted the receiver. “Hello?”

  It was Mama. “Are you all right?” I asked.

  “I’m fine, honey.” She sounded like her old sprightly self. What was going on?

  “Well, you certainly sound happy.”

  “Me and Elvira are gonna be on TV tonight. I made them reporters wait right in the living room while I put on my good black dress. I used some of the makeup you left here. Is that all right?”

  “Mama, I don’t care about the makeup. Why didn’t you talk to them on the street?”

  “It was Keith’s idea to let ’em in. I showed them your baby pictures, the awards you got for spelling in elementary school, and your college diploma.”

  Oh, Mother of God.

  “Mama, is Keith still there? I need to talk to him.”

  “He left a few minutes ago . . . said he was going to see you. Jackie, he is such a nice man. Don’t let him get away, okay?”

  This was surreal. Here I was getting closer and closer to the electric chair and Mama was still trying to get me married. “Mama, I am not thinking about Keith in any kind of romantic way. All I want him to do is get me out of this mess as soon as possible.”

  “A woman can do both, can’t she?”

  “Mama, please tell me you didn’t give Keith the impression that I’m interested in him.”

  “Don’t you think he is handsome?”

  “Of course, but that isn’t the point. Will you answer my question?”

  “Calm down baby, you getting’ all upset for nuthin’. No, I did not tell Keith you’re interested in him. A lady never shows her cards first.”

  I heard a snicker in the background.

  “Who is that?”

  “Elvira.”

  “Who else is there?”

  “Nobody. Keith chased them all out of here before he left. Me and him got along real good.”

  “I’m glad, Mama.” No matter what she had said or done, it was good to hear her sounding happy again.

  “I think he likes you, Jackie.”

  “Please stop.”

  “All right, but he promised me that you ain’t going back to jail. He said it the way a man talks about a woman he’s interested in.”

  Keith was just keeping a worried mother from giving in to despair, but why should I burst her bubble? She was going to need all the confidence she had now and a whole lot more before this was over.

  “Sure, Mama,” I said gently.

  “Is Paul still there with you? What kind of place you stayin’ in? When can I come see you?”

  The
questions stumbled over themselves.

  “Paul left but he is coming back. I’ll ask Keith about you coming here and call you in the morning.”

  “All right. I love you, baby.”

  “I love you, too, Mama.”

  There wasn’t anything else to do, so I curled up with a copy of Keith’s life story.

  Keith Williams was born the youngest of two children to Otis and Eleanor Williams on December 29, 1952, in Buffalo, New York. His father, a plumber, died of a heart attack when Keith was ten and his mother went to work as a cafeteria cook at the local high school. Keith’s sister, Dolores, was sixteen at the time. She started babysitting, Keith got a paper route, and the family managed to survive. Dolores disliked school from day one but Keith loved it. Since it was clear that Keith was a scholar and a leader, the two females doted on his every whim. He was the bravest, smartest, best-looking boy in the whole world as far as they were concerned. He felt like the world was his for the taking, and failure never entered his mind.

  The only blot in his perfect teenaged life was the fact that at the age of sixteen, he had gone joyriding in a stolen car to prove his manhood to the other boys. “I didn’t get caught but for a long time I was scared that the police were going to come banging on our door,” he said.

  He was valedictorian and voted most likely to succeed in his high school class, and then it was off to Howard University as a scholarship student. He majored in American history. As an undergraduate, Keith noticed that the law and medical students were stars in the girls’ eyes on campus. He decided to go to Howard Law School and picked criminal law because of injustice in the system.

  After graduation, he spent five years with one firm. He became their brightest and most publicized attorney. He started his own firm and his star never stopped rising.

  I did some quick calculations. If he was born in 1952, that meant he had just passed his forty-fifth birthday.

  According to the book jacket, Keith owned a home in the Hamptons. There was no mention of the brownstone that was my hiding place.

  I, on the other hand, was homeless and scared. Why did some people lead effortlessly charmed lives while others sank slowly no matter how hard they tried to stay afloat?

  Throughout the book, it was clear that Keith felt more of an emotional attachment to his sister than he did to his mother. He wanted to marry someday and have children and said, “The woman I marry must be smart, beautiful, passionate about her people, and committed to building her own business and earning her own money.”

  I had to snort at that. This combination of Coretta Scott King, Dorothy Dandridge, and Berry Gordy-in-a-skirt did not exist, which meant that deep down inside, he didn’t really want to get married at all.

  I kept on reading, wondering how long I was supposed to stay hidden inside this beautiful dungeon before someone came to check on me.

  I was just beginning a section about the trial that made him famous, when I heard noise. I dropped Winner and flew down the stairs. Keith and his driver were huffing and puffing through the front door, pushing boxes in front of them.

  “What’s all this?” I asked.

  “The police were finished when I went to check on your apartment. I thought you might like a few of your things,” Keith replied. “Somehow I ended up packing up almost every item in your apartment. There are three more boxes in the car. Tell Paul to get down here and help me.”

  I hugged him gratefully. A gal needs her ornaments and knickknacks before she can settle down.

  “Paul went to work. He’s coming back later.”

  “Well, everything is here except the furniture,” he laughed. “By the way, I couldn’t find any computer disks. Since you’re in the writing business, I thought that was kind of strange.” He cocked his head to the side and waited for me to answer.

  “I have lots of disks. They are all on the computer hutch in a couple of organizers. Right above my laptop computer. Did you bring that?”

  “The police must have them,” Keith replied.

  “Oh, no!” I plunked myself down on the bottom step. I just couldn’t take any more.

  “Is there anything incriminating on the hard drive or the disks?” Keith asked.

  How many disks had I lost? At least two dozen. My whole publishing career, the work of many aspiring writers, partial screenplays that I’d started trying my hand at, plus all my personal correspondence. Worse, the hard drive on my computer would lead them straight into the swirl of obsessive e-mails that I had sent to Victor over the past year.

  I wasn’t in any mood to talk about that.

  “Never mind,” he said. “We’ll talk about the case tomorrow.”

  Keith and his driver went out and came back in twice as I sat there feeling like I had been stripped naked.

  Finally, they were done and seven boxes sat in the middle of Keith’s polished wood living room floor. “Well, that’s everything,” he said.

  “Did they take my paper files, too?”

  “Yes, there wasn’t a slip of paper in that apartment.” Keith sat down beside me. “Have you eaten today?”

  “Just some cheese and crackers.”

  “There are some nice restaurants a few blocks from here.”

  “I’m not really hungry, but maybe Paul and I will go out somewhere when he gets back.”

  He stood up. “Paul is in your corner, Jackie.”

  “I know.”

  He ruffled my hair and smiled. “I’ll see you tomorrow morning.”

  Paul brought several cartons of Chinese food with him—fried rice, moo goo gai pan, orange chicken, lo mein, egg rolls, plus bottled water and cans of soda—it all arrived just in time for the six o’clock news. Since the only television was in the upstairs bedroom, we carried everything up there and made small talk while I laid everything out, using the dresser as a serving table. We piled our plates high and sat on separate sides of the bed to eat. The food was fresh and tasty, but it started going down like lumps of clay after Paul found the remote and switched on the TV set.

  The story of my arrest and upcoming trial was the lead on all the newscasts. I couldn’t believe it. Surely there was something far more newsworthy to report on—weren’t there people at war or starving somewhere on the globe?

  My mug shot peered back at us from the screen. The media-created biography—Hell’s Kitchen girl escapes her background and becomes a publishing executive only to fall back into the gutter from whence she’d come—was repeated with such regularity that I knew if I didn’t stop watching, I’d begin to accept it as truth.

  I was about to turn it off when Mama and Elvira appeared on the screen.

  They looked good. Mama was wearing a square-necked, long-sleeved black dress which she saved for special occasions. A string of pearls that I had given her last Christmas was around her neck and the matching earrings in her ears. She was too vain to appear in public in her natural gray hair so she wore a black wig. Elvira’s beige suit hung on her thin frame. She wasn’t wearing any jewelry but her short gray hair was brushed to the side. Mama had shared my makeup with her. They both looked very dignified.

  The evolution of Jacqueline Naomi Blue unfolded. Mama talked about what a wonderful child I had been—“she never gave me a lick of trouble”—how we didn’t have much money but she made sure I always looked nice—“when I didn’t have money for new shoes, I slicked up her old ones with Vaseline and made ’em shine”—the way I studied hard and made good grades—“her teachers loved her.” The reporter cut to still photos of me as a baby, toddler, girl, and young woman the whole time Mama was talking.

  Finally, the conversation turned to Annabelle’s death.

  “Why do you think your daughter has been charged with murder?”

  “She was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  “Do you think that race plays a part in all this?”

  Mama paused. “Probably does, but money got somethin’ to do with all this, too. They wouldn’t have rushed Jackie int
o jail so fast if she was rich.”

  “But your daughter has the best criminal defense attorney that money can buy.”

  Elvira jumped in, with a look of righteous indignation on her face. “Keith Williams is working for free. If he wasn’t in this case, that poor girl would be so far under a jailhouse right now, nobody would ever get her out. What y’all need to do is leave her alone and find out who the real killer is.”

  Mama had the last word. She held up my second grade school picture (the one with my two front teeth missing) and spoke directly into the camera. “Jackie is not a criminal. If anybody out there knows anything that can help her, please call Keith Williams right now.” It was over and as I clicked off the TV, it occurred to me that Mama and Elvira looked younger and had a lot more energy than I’d ever thought to see in them again. My troubles had given them some excitement and a reason to live.

  Paul rubbed his forehead. “This is all so unbelievable.”

  I had lost my appetite a long time ago. Now I sprawled flat on my back across the bed. “I don’t know how much more of it I can stand.”

  “I’m sorry all this is happening to you, Jackie. Unfortunately, it’s going to get a whole lot worse before it gets better.”

  “I know.”

  He lay down beside me and took my hand. “Don’t worry, I’m here for you.”

  I put my head on his chest. “Paul, you’re such a good friend. I still can’t believe you’ve risked your home to set me free.”

  He took a deep breath. “Jackie, I didn’t put my house up because we’re friends. I did it because I’m in love with you.”

  So, that was the reason he’d been silent all day. He was building up the courage to say what he’d been feeling for the past few years.

  “Paul, I . . .”

  “No. I’ve got to get this out. I’m tired of walking around pretending to be the good, loyal buddy.” He took a deep breath. “Here it is, plain and simple, baby—I want to be your man.”

  I hugged him around the waist and then looked up to meet his eyes. “Paul, I can’t let you make that kind of promise to me right now. I may be going to prison.”