2
I went back to my office and shut the door. I tried to absorb what I’d learned, but I couldn’t quite wrap my mind around the news that Chester was dead. Maybe this was what they call shock, I reasoned. I picked up the telephone receiver, and before I could stop myself, I dialed my ex-husband’s number at the office. He answered on the first ring. He sounded either annoyed, distracted, or angry. I couldn’t tell.
“Trevor Vick speaking.”
In that split second between Trevor’s terse greeting and my response, I knew I had made a mistake. We had been divorced four years now, but I still thought of him first in times of crisis. One of the reasons I had married Trevor was his ability to be calm in the midst of drama. He was the kind of guy that would sit on an airplane during turbulent storms and read the airline magazines, while the rest of the passengers, including me, would be thinking about our next of kin and getting right with the Lord.
Trevor and I had gotten past most of the bitterness after our divorce, but we were not friends. Occasionally, I would get late-night calls from him, asking me where we went wrong (usually after he’d had a few drinks or had a particularly rough day). Since he still lived in the same neighborhood, I would see him from time to time, but it had been several months since we’d last talked to each other. The last time I saw him, he was walking hand in hand with a fabulous-looking woman—someone who belonged on the cover of a fashion magazine. Someone who was not me. Someone who was stylish, slim, and wasn’t wearing all black. Although I’d been the one to walk away from the marriage, it still hurt. Just a little bit. I was never good at reconciling myself to failure, and our marriage had been a failure of gigantic proportions. Looking back, I wasn’t sure why I called him that day, except I was still used to turning to him in times of trouble. He was, as the song goes, a hard habit to break. But I wasn’t doing my best to break it.
“It’s me,” I said hesitantly. We were divorced, and although it was still easy to lean on him in times of stress, being easy didn’t mean being right. I’d left my husband because he wasn’t the right man for me (in addition to the whole infidelity thing), and God knew, I needed to keep walking in a direction that was opposite from where he stood. I would have hung up the telephone, but I was sure he had caller ID.
“What’s wrong, Jasmine?”
I had heard this tone of voice before—the “what kind of trouble is Jasmine in now” tone.
“It’s nothing,” I said quickly, feeling foolish. “How are you?”
I was fairly certain that the last thing that Trevor wanted to talk about was an ex-boyfriend. I probably should’ve thought of this before dialing his number.
Trevor sighed. “I’m fine, Jasmine. But something’s wrong. I know you—”
I cut him off. Four years after our divorce decree became final, I realized that he’d earned the right to be free. He didn’t need to save me. Those days, if they ever existed, were long gone. I realized that emancipation came with a price. I couldn’t lean on my ex-husband anymore.
“Look, I gotta go,” I said. “Sorry I bothered you.”
“Jasmine ...”
I hung up the telephone receiver before he had a chance to say anything else. I felt like an idiot. Worse, I felt like a weak idiot. Chester’s death had hit me harder than I would have expected. I’m not a cold person. I’m not an unfeeling person, and as my ex-husband, several boyfriends, family, and friends can attest, I can be very emotional. But Chester and I had a bad history, and while I would never have wished death on him, I’m sure I’ve come close. With our acrimonious background (I had blocked out most memories of our long-ago pre-romance friendship), I would not have expected this feeling of overwhelming sadness—and truth be told, guilt. I hadn’t exactly been on good terms with Chester for years.
The telephone rang again, and I knew it was Trevor calling to make sure I was alright. I didn’t want to talk to him. I was embarrassed by my needy ex-wife display. I thought about calling my sister, but she and her brood were spending the week at my parents’ home in Martha’s Vineyard. I picked up the telephone receiver.
“Jasmine Spain. May I help you?”
“Good afternoon, Ms. Spain,” a deep, and surprisingly sultry, voice responded. “My name is Detective Marcus Claremont. I’m investigating the murder of Chester Jackson. Do you have a moment?”
The theme from Dragnet popped into my head. Although Detective Claremont’s voice sounded like it belonged to a late-night disk jockey, I didn’t want to talk to anyone about Chester’s murder. I hadn’t fully processed the fact that he was dead, and I wasn’t ready to have a conversation on that subject, at least not until I’d actually accepted it.
“I’m sorry, Detective Claremont, but this really is not a good time.”
There was a brief moment of silence; then the detective spoke. “Of course, I understand how busy you are, Ms. Spain, but I do need to talk with you.”
I fought hard to keep my patience in check. In my mind, the detective should have been out looking for whoever was responsible for Chester’s murder, not harassing law-abiding and extremely busy citizens, namely, me.
“I really don’t see how I can help you, Detective,” I replied, my voice reflecting the chill in my mood. “I just found out about Chester’s murder a few minutes ago. I don’t have any information.”
I heard a low, soft chuckle over the telephone and felt an unfamiliar fluttering at the base of my stomach. “Well, why don’t you let me be the judge of that?” he asked.
“I guess I can’t refuse to talk to you,” I grudgingly admitted.
“No, Ms. Spain,” he responded, apparently still in good humor, “you can’t. One way or the other, we’ll speak. If you prefer, you can always bring a lawyer with you.”
I bristled at this. Was the detective actually implying I was a suspect? “Detective, am I under suspicion?” I asked.
“No,” Detective Claremont replied. “It just seems you’re uncomfortable talking with me, and I thought maybe you might feel more comfortable with legal counsel at your side.”
“If I’m uncomfortable,” I said, between gritted teeth, “it’s because one of my colleagues has just been murdered.”
“I understand that, Ms. Spain.”
“Do you?” I asked, not bothering to conceal my sarcasm.
“I do,” he said. “When can we meet? Would tomorrow morning be convenient for you?”
“I have to be in court at eleven,” I replied.
“No problem. I can meet you at your office around eight.”
“Why don’t we just meet at the crack of dawn?” I asked, annoyed that I would have to come into the office so early. I usually don’t make it to the office before nine o’clock on a good day.
“Well,” Detective Claremont replied, “I could do that. But then I’d have to miss my morning jog in Riverside Park.”
“How nice for you,” I replied. “I would’ve thought that you’d get enough exercise chasing down criminals.”
I was rewarded for my sarcasm with another soft chuckle. “I’m always open to jogging partners,” he replied. “Care to join me?”
“I’ll see you at eight,” I snapped.
“Great. I’ll bring the coffee. How do you take it?”
“I don’t,” I responded. “I drink tea.”
“Any particular kind?”
I was fighting a losing battle with my impatience. “What difference does that make?”
“I’ve seen you in court, Ms. Spain,” the detective informed me. “It was a couple of years ago ... I have to say I really admired your ... spirit. I thought your tough demeanor was reserved for the courtroom. I guess I was wrong.”
“I guess you were,” I replied, hoping to get him off the phone as quickly as was humanly possible.
“So what kind of tea do you like, and how do you like it?”
I was exasperated, and I wanted to get off the telephone.
“Mint tea,” I replied. “No milk and no sugar.”
“See you at eight.”
I hung up the telephone, annoyed, and almost instantly, the telephone rang again.
“Jasmine Spain,” I said, praying it wasn’t the detective.
My prayers were answered. It was my best friend, Dahlia. “I just heard,” she said. She usually never bothered starting her telephone conversations with the generally accepted practice of saying hello. “It’s all over the news! I always knew Chester was heading for a fall, but damn, I didn’t think someone would actually go and kill him.”
Dahlia Wills and I had been best friends since our freshman year at Wellesley, where we roomed together. We both were from New York, but she was a Brooklyn girl, while I was strictly Manhattan. Back then, she thought I was a card-carrying member of the black bourgeoisie, and I thought she was just plain old odd. We were both wrong. Dahlia’s father had been a bus driver for MTA New York City Transit for thirty-five years, before he retired, and her mother still did hair at a beauty shop on Flatbush Avenue. I still enjoyed many Sunday dinners over at their house in Crown Heights. There was nothing remotely odd about my best friend. True, she marched to the beat of a different drummer, but to me, she was refreshing.
The Wills family was large, loud, and West Indian. Dahlia had four brothers and three sisters, and all the children still came home for Mrs. Wills’s famous Sunday dinners. I envied Dahlia those Sunday dinners—complete with curried chicken, rice and peas, political arguments, and family gossip, with Dahlia’s nieces and nephews running around wild and free. Our family dinners were usually spent with my mother telling me what she thought I could improve. My mother and I loved each other, but we knew how to get on each other’s nerves. I’m sure there were times my mother wondered if we were related.
“I called Trevor,” I told her.
“What?” Dahlia’s voice cracked through the receiver. “No. Tell me you didn’t just say what I thought you did.”
Chester’s death was apparently forgotten for the moment. I didn’t answer.
“Why?” Dahlia asked.
I sighed. “I just wanted to talk.”
“You could have called me,” Dahlia replied. “You could have called your sister. You could have called your dry cleaners. Anybody. Jasmine, honey, you’ve got to let go. It’s been like, what, three years since the divorce.”
“Four,” I said miserably. “It’s been four years.”
“Damn. Has it been that long?”
“Yes. Four years, three months, and fifteen days, but who’s counting?” I joked.
“Well, what did he have to say? I can’t imagine that he had anything supportive to say about the death of your ex-boyfriend. He never had much love for Chester, not even before you all started doing the horizontal tango,” Dahlia said.
Oh God. A vivid flashback of an X-rated nature, starring Chester and me, flashed in my mind. It had been a while since I’d thought of anything involving getting intimate with him. Betrayal tends to do that.
“I hung up before I had a chance to really get into it,” I replied.
“Well, it’s good to hear your common sense kicked in,” said Dahlia. “Jasmine, you divorced Trevor. He’s not a part of your life anymore. You need to move on. He has.”
That hurt. But she was right. Trevor had moved on. I couldn’t just pick up the phone and get his support. Even though I didn’t want the marriage, I didn’t want to let go of Trevor completely. I missed his friendship. We should have remained friends and skipped the whole marriage thing.
“Are you in the store?” I asked her. Dahlia was the proud owner of Dream Weaver, a bookstore/tea shop in Brooklyn.
“Where else would I be on a Tuesday afternoon?” Dahlia asked, with a chuckle.
“I’ll be over in about half an hour,” I said.
I took the Number 2 train to Brooklyn. Dahlia lived in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Park Slope, a few train stops away from her family. After college she had gone to work in an advertising agency. Five years later, she took a buyout and used the money to subsidize her dream of becoming a business owner. Her bookstore, Dream Weavers, had recently been featured in Black Enterprise, Essence, and New York Magazine. Dahlia was on her way.
Dahlia’s bookstore was in the business artery of Park Slope, a neighborhood that was fast losing the fight against becoming trendy. Antique stores and real estate offices vied for space with Korean delis, Haitian dry cleaners, and African street vendors. The tree-lined streets, with their majestic turn-of-the-century brownstones, gave the place an air of prosperity, with a little sprinkle of funky thrown in.
The first floor of Dahlia’s brownstone contained her bookstore/tea shop. She lived on the second floor, and Joel, Dahlia’s med school boyfriend, lived on the third floor. Joel wanted to live with Dahlia, and although she was way past in love with him, Dahlia had proclaimed her need for space. Despite her parents’ entreaties to legalize the union, Dahlia refused to alter her weird separate /together arrangement with Joel. It worked for them, and although I thought it was strange, I didn’t knock it. After all, they had been in a relationship now for over six years. My one and only serious relationship had ended up in a divorce court. Who was I to judge?
Dahlia was waiting for me by the front window of her bookstore. She gave me a hug as I walked into the spiced vanilla–scented bookstore, dodging the few customers milling around the store.
“Are you okay?” she asked. “You look like hell.”
I couldn’t help smiling at her. Dahlia did not believe in holding her tongue to spare feelings. She was a prime candidate of keeping it real. She wasn’t malicious, but she did believe in honesty. There had been a lot of people in school who’d kept their distance from Dahlia. She didn’t suffer fools lightly. She told people exactly what she thought about them and their actions, and her blunt nature could be disconcerting to some. I found her honesty refreshing. I was taught to hold my tongue, to be diplomatic, to be careful about whom I offended. Dahlia, on the other hand, was the kind of friend who didn’t tell you what you wanted to hear. She told you what you needed to hear.
“Addie, can you cover the register for me?” Dahlia called out to a small older woman fixing books over in the erotica section.
Addie was one of Dahlia’s many West Indian cousins. She was pushing seventy and had recently immigrated to New York from Jamaica. She had a thick Jamaican accent, and she loved looking at books with pictures of naked people.
“I got it, gal!” Addie called out.
Dahlia shook her head. “I swear Addie is always trying to get her freak on or something. Why is she reading those books? She must have a man on the side.”
We walked through the bookstore to the tearoom in the back. We sat, my best friend and I, facing each other across a table covered with a kente tablecloth. The table in the back was my favorite as it looked out over a garden planted with a profusion of flowers, all of the tropical variety. No roses or carnations here. Bird-of-paradise, hibiscus, and other brightly colored flowers, whose names I either did not know or could not pronounce, spilled over in Dahlia’s garden. How she got these flowers to flourish in the middle of Brooklyn was a mystery to me.
Dahlia’s dreadlocks were pulled away from her face and tied with a bright red, black, and green scarf to reveal a face with flawless brown skin without a stitch of make-up. Her features were all from the motherland. She looked like an African princess, complete with long, regal neck; high cheekbones; and large dark eyes, which seemed to swallow her whole face. Dahlia was one of those women who could wear anything and still be beautiful. Even this getup she now wore, a large, shapeless brown dress that looked as if it was made from a potato sack, did nothing to hide her beauty or her curves.
“I can’t believe Chester is dead,” I said, repeating the words that had been playing over and over in my head.
“Jasmine, what did I tell you about bad karma? I hate to talk ill of the recently deceased ... but Chester was heading for a fall. I just didn’t think it would be this kind of fall.”
I remained silent. What she said was true. The list of people whom Chester had caused pain or bad feeling was long and didn’t start with me. Still, I felt bad he had come to a hard ending. In the back of my mind somewhere, I must have hoped he would have an epiphany or find Jesus, or both, and realize that stepping all over folks was just not good for the well-being of his soul.
“You know,” said Dahlia, “I talked a lot about Chester. Said a lot of bad things about him. Didn’t like him. Especially after what he did to you. I may have even wished ill on him. But I never wanted anything like this to happen to him, and I know you didn’t, either. But, whatever anger you had toward Chester was justified. So you don’t go feeling guilty, girlfriend. He was not a nice person. But you didn’t cause this. Your wishes didn’t cause this, any more than my wishes caused it, or any of the countless other people that Chester backstabbed.” After she finished speaking, she muttered under her breath, “I’m sure the list is long.”
“We should never have dated,” I said. “We should have just stayed friends. All the bad stuff happened between us when we started dating.”
“Chester didn’t know the meaning of friendship,” said Dahlia. “You were a friend to him. He didn’t know anything about being a friend to you. Look at how he treated Wallace Barker.”
I wiped at my eyes as I thought about hapless Wallace. Wallace had been Chester’s roommate at Yale. He’d gotten Chester to join his firm, and according to Wallace, Chester stole his clients and also became a named respondent in Wallace’s divorce papers. Chester’s story was somewhat different. Wallace’s clients, said Chester, came without any urging on Chester’s part, and Wallace’s wife, well, that was just a figment of Wallace’s overactive imagination.
A few weeks ago, I’d seen Wallace in the firm’s reception area. He told me he’d come to visit with Chester. In light of his history with Chester, I’d been surprised, but I kept my thoughts to myself. Perhaps Wallace had decided to forgive and move on. I hear it’s good for the soul. I know that my habit of keeping a grudge past the time that I knew what the grudge was originally about bordered on the excessive.
“I saw Wallace at the office about two weeks ago. He was there to visit Chester. I assumed they’d kissed and made up,” I told Dahlia.
“Perhaps.” Dahlia was not forthcoming. There was something else behind her bland response, but I was going to have to wait until she decided to share with me whatever was clouding her eyes.
The sound of wind chimes signaled the arrival of another customer in the bookstore. Addie came over to where we were sitting and said, “I need some help, Dahlia. The cash register won’t open.”
“I’ll be right back, “ Dahlia said as she and Addie went to deal with the recalcitrant register.
I turned my thoughts back to Wallace. When I saw him in the office, I’d been taken aback. He had, however, remained uncharacteristically cool, as if there was nothing at all strange about him breaking bread with the man he credited with ruining his marriage and his career. I simply figured he’d forgiven Chester. Still, I’d thought it was odd, as I remembered the bitterness that engulfed Chester when he left Wallace’s firm. Wallace’s wife, Laura, had gone to school with me and Dahlia at Wellesley. She came from money, and we knew some of the same people. But while I was staging sit-ins on the main steps of the administration building against various societal injustices, Wallace’s wife was hitting the party circuit, looking for someone with a big bank account to marry. Our paths hardly crossed, and when they did, she was polite but distant. She was attractive, but I always wondered what Wallace saw in a woman who was so openly mercenary.
Dahlia came back in the tea shop and sat down at the table.
“Everything okay with the register?” I asked.
“It wasn’t the register,” she replied. “It’s Addie and her crazy self. Guess what she was reading up there at the register?”
“I’d rather not,” I laughed.
“Some book called Buck Wild: How To Please Your Man And Make Him Cry For More. Addie just turned seventy. Who the hell is she trying to please?”
“Girl, you and your crazy relatives,” I laughed. “I’m not mad at her. At least her juices are still flowing. I think mine have just dried up.”
“Someday your prince will come.” Dahlia smiled. “But until then, I’m sure Addie can give you some tips with her nasty self!”
Dahlia was constantly finding jobs for her relatives, or sending them to me for free legal advice.
Just as suddenly as my laughter came, it faded. I’d forgotten Chester’s death for a brief moment ... but reality soon intruded. I thought about Chester and all the people he had hurt. People like Wallace.
“How’s Wallace?” I asked.
“I think he’s getting it all back together,” replied Dahlia in a tone of voice that I knew meant more hope than substance. “He told me that he and Chester had a good, long conversation. I thought perhaps they’d bury the hatchet.”
When Chester had sent his good-bye fax to me, I’d wanted to kill him, or at least give him a good maiming. I wondered if Wallace had had any of those same urges.
“Do you think Wallace could have had anything to do with Chester’s murder?” I asked.
“Jasmine, Chester is dead,” Dahlia replied. “Let the police worry about who killed him. It isn’t your affair. And, no, Wallace may have his issues, but he’s no murderer.”
“What issues?” I asked. I’d heard that Wallace had hit the bottle pretty hard after his divorce, and there were rumors of cocaine use. I wondered if this was what Dahlia was talking about.
“Stay out of it, girlfriend,” said Dahlia. She had an annoying habit of reading my mind.
“Don’t worry about me,” I replied. “This is one situation that I do not intend to become involved in.”
Dahlia did not look convinced.