15
My cousin Evie owed me a favor. In fact, she owed me several favors. I was her personal lawyer, and I hadn’t charged her for any of the years of legal advice, and so I did not hesitate to call her. Evie was a sergeant with the New York City Police Department. I knew I needed some help, and I knew from Marcus’s warning to me, he wasn’t going to give me the kind of help that I needed.
“Okay, so what do you need today?” Evie asked me after she answered her telephone.
I explained to her that I thought that Chester’s murder was somehow related to Lamarr’s death.
“I need your help,” I said. “Whatever information you can give me about Chester Jackson’s murder—maybe that can help me.”
“You’re lucky we’re related,” Evie replied. “What sort of information are you looking for?”
“Anything and everything.”
Evie laughed. “Well, why not ask for the moon? Hold on. I’ll be back.”
Seven minutes later (I timed her), she got back on the telephone. “Sorry. It’s crazy here today,” said Evie, although she didn’t sound sorry. She sounded harried. I’d often wondered why Evie went into law enforcement. She had grown up a card-carrying vegetarian pacifist. It was still a shock to me whenever I saw her with a gun. “I was born to do this,” she’d told our surprised family after disclosing her career choice. She’d been right. She was one of the finest of New York’s finest. Her various accolades and citations attested to that.
“Okay, I’ve got the police report ... your boss paid him a visit around seven that evening ... left about forty minutes later ... according to the chauffeur. The chauffeur took the deceased to dinner at around nine to some restaurant. . . Patsy’s over on Fifty-second and First, I think. He ate alone, according to the chauffeur. Left the restaurant around ten fifteen. Also alone. Chauffeur took him home. Said good night. The chauffeur went home ... that’s the last person to see him alive ... other than the murderer, of course. Wife was out of town ... butler had night off ... all very convenient, if you ask me.”
“What’s convenient?” I asked. Evie had lapsed into copspeak.
“Well, this guy Chester sounds like he was very rarely alone ... And during the time that he was alone, he gets offed ... I mean, murdered. Whoever did this knew enough about Chester to know the best time to do the deed.”
“What else do you have?” I asked.
“No sign of forced entry, and the chauffeur got the feeling that Mr. Jackson was expecting somebody. He left the light on downstairs. They found him clothed only in his trousers ... Apparently, he was in the bedroom when all this went down. Hmm, now this is interesting ... The toxologist found some barbituates in his blood.”
“He was drugged?”
“Looks like it,” Evie replied. “Okay, what else do we have here? Wife found him the next morning ... looks like she has an airtight alibi ... She’d just come back from Chicago ... got in around seven ... got home around nine. Rush hour is a bitch! ... I don’t see anything else here... .”
“Yeah, but ...”
“Look, Jasmine, I’d love to help you out some more, but I gotta go. I’m due downtown for a court hearing... .”
“Thanks, Evie.” I knew she was busy, but she had come through. The information about being drugged was interesting.
“Later,” she said, hanging up the telephone before I had a chance to respond.
After I spoke with Evie, I took a cab to 160-5 East Sixty-seventh Street. The home of the late Chester Jackson. I was going to pay the widow, Sherrie, a little visit. I wasn’t sure how I was going to get past the front door, but I was working on it during my taxi ride from the precinct to High Society Hill, what Lamarr had christened Chester’s tony neighborhood.
Chester’s block was bordered by Park Avenue on one end and Lexington Avenue at the other. You could just smell the money as you walked down the short block, lined on both sides with brownstones and gaslights. The trees were full with thick green leaves, and the abundance of window boxes, filled with colorful, but always tasteful, flowers, only added to my sense that I was walking in a gold-framed painting that should be hanging in a museum somewhere.
I watched as nannies pushed strollers carefully down the street. Wives, girlfriends, all looking good, even the ones in casual running gear, made their way to and from these expensive homes. There was even a dog walker walking four white poodles, whose dog collars probably cost more than my monthly rent, thrown into the mix. Everyone on the street seemed to belong there. They walked with an air of entitlement. To live here meant they have either worked very hard, or someone in their past history worked very hard, or they got lucky and made a lot of money, or they married someone with a lot of money.
The taxi stopped in front of a brownstone in the middle of the block. Chester had bought the brownstone a few months before our relationship ended, and I was intimately aware of all of its features. The ballroom on the third floor. The floor-to-ceiling windows that faced out on a small terraced garden, complete with antique statues. The curved stairway that led from the living room to the second floor. The marble floors, which dated back to the original owners in the late 1800s. The six bedrooms, three fireplaces, and antique wood-burning stove in the kitchen. I had encouraged him to purchase the brownstone, with the hope that one day it would be our home. Although I was strictly an uptown girl, as in Harlem uptown, I was not averse to moving to Park Avenue. Three months after Chester moved in, I got my eviction notice on the fax machine.
I paid the cabdriver and walked quickly up the front stairs, which led to the first floor. The windows on the second floor were open, and white lace curtains danced in the warm breeze, which signaled that June’s warm days were soon to give way to the stifling hot days of New York in July. I reached the front door and was momentarily taken aback by the two brass knockers shaped like lions’ heads. What the hell was I doing here? I asked myself again. There was no way on God’s green earth that Sherrie would talk to me. You’ve got nothing to lose, said the voice of reason that sometimes occupies my head. The voice, a far more cynical one, that occupied the other part of my head asked, What about your pride? This was the woman who came between you and Chester. This was the woman who had had a gleam of triumph when she snagged away from me what we both thought at one time was a good catch. But she’d come to learn what I’d learned shortly after our breakup: Chester was the booby prize. Still, even though she no longer viewed me as a threat, I’m sure she had no love for me, and this had to be just about the worst time to talk to the bereaved Mrs. Jackson, or Mrs. Jackson I, as Dahlia referred to her.
Shut up, I said to the dueling voices and grabbed a brass handle that protruded from one of the lions’ mouths and rapped on the door loud enough to rouse the dead, or anybody inside the brownstone. Almost immediately, as if on cue, the door opened just enough to reveal an elderly black gentleman dressed in a dark suit. He looked as if he was pushing eighty, and I thought to myself that he should be somewhere collecting Social Security and not answering someone’s door.
“May I help you?” he asked in a neutral tone. His head was cocked slightly to the side, and his eyes raked over me, with an open curiosity.
“My name is Jasmine Spain,” I said, my back stiffening at his dismissive stare. “I’m a colleague of Mr. Jackson. I’m here to pay my condolences to Mrs. Jackson.”
At the mention of Chester’s name, the old man nodded his head. “I see,” he replied, not moving from the doorway. “That’s quite nice of you, ma’am. However, Mrs. Jackson is indisposed.”
Another person, one with tact perhaps, would have thanked the butler and turned around and let the matter drop. But I was not that person. I knew Sherrie was not somewhere inside her beautiful house, crying about the demise of her husband. After everything he’d done to her, I couldn’t say that I blamed her. I knew also as time passed, any hope of getting information from Sherrie would greatly decrease. Sherrie’s relatives lived in Illinois, and I suspected that she would be paying them a visit as soon as she got her affairs in order. New York was in many ways like a small town when it came to gossip among the black bourgeoisie, a group in which Sherrie’s membership was assured, and I knew Sherrie would have to lay low for a while to get away from the tongues, malicious or sympathetic. My guess was that she was going to hotfoot it out of town as soon as she could.
“Please tell Mrs. Jackson that I’m here and I need to speak with her,” I said, staring right back at the butler. “It’s very important.”
The butler’s left eyebrow raised slightly as he repeated, “Ma’am, Mrs. Jackson is indisposed. She is not taking any visitors.”
“Look,” I replied, “I won’t take up too much of Mrs. Jackson’s time. Just tell her I’m here. If she doesn’t want to see me, I’ll leave.”
“Let her in, Simon.”
I heard Sherrie’s voice somewhere behind the door.
Simon, the butler, opened the door wider to reveal Sherrie standing off to the side. She had obviously heard our exchange. Simon looked over at Sherrie, concern shadowing his otherwise placid expression.
“Are you quite sure, ma’am?” he asked Sherrie.
Sherrie nodded her head and looked at me. “I’m quite sure that I can handle this.”
Simon turned and walked away, without further comment. From his tight, pursed lips, I could tell that he did not approve of my presence at the home, but he held his peace.
“Come in,” said Sherrie. Her voice was dull, and her eyes expressionless. No anger. No sorrow. No curiosity. Nothing. She was dressed in a long purple dress. In her hand she held a glass filled with a clear liquid, which smelled like rum. I noticed that there was no ice in the glass.
I followed Sherrie through the foyer, with its marble walls and floor, into a sitting room. The sitting room had red wallpaper with flecks of gold, which glinted from the light of the ornate chandelier hanging overhead. There was a red velvet couch, with two red and gold chairs with velvet cushions placed in front of the couch. There was a deep golden-colored rug in the middle of the floor. The place looked like a bordello.
Sherrie sat on the couch and sipped her drink. Her eyes never left my face. I sat in one of the chairs facing the couch.
Not one to mince words, Sherrie asked, “Now what the hell do you want?”
I used to think that Sherrie was a beautiful woman. Tall and slender, like a golden willow, with dark eyes and jet-black hair, which provided a contrast to her complexion. Her thick hair, which she usually wore in loose curls tumbling around her shoulders, was now twisted and pinned at the top of her head. Her eyes looked tired, and there were fine lines of strain around her eyes and her lips.
“I need some information about Chester’s death,” I replied.
“What sort of information?” she asked as she continued sipping her drink.
“I need to find out if you know who might have killed Chester.”
Her laugh was immediate. Hard and brittle, like the woman in question. “A lot of folks wanted that bastard dead. Hell, I’m one of them.”
This provided me with an opening for one of the questions I wanted to ask Sherrie. “Did you kill him?”
Sherrie stopped laughing.
“No,” she said. “I didn’t kill him. But I wish I knew who did. I’d give him a medal.”
So much for the grieving widow. “Any ideas on who the medal’s recipient might be?”
I watched as Sherrie put her index finger in her glass and stirred her drink slowly. She stared at me for a few seconds before she spoke. “I don’t like you, Jasmine Spain. I don’t like women like you. Women who think they have all the answers.”
“If I had all the answers, Sherrie, I wouldn’t be here.”
“Yeah, well, welcome to the real world, Miss Spain.”
I didn’t know whether to attribute the hot spite in her words to her feelings about me in general, the death of her husband, or the drink she was sipping on.
“You were the person who found Chester?” There was no delicate way to ask that question, and since she already seemed pissed at me, I figured I’d go for it.
She nodded her head. “Yes, indeed. I was the one who found him.”
She sounded as if she were bragging about a latest accomplishment.
“I was in Chicago for a few days, I needed to get away. I caught the red-eye. Found my husband had gotten his just desserts. I’m only sorry that I couldn’t congratulate whoever had the balls to do what should have been done a long time ago. By the way, I used the same limo driver I always use, and I already gave his name to the police. He picked me up at LaGuardia and dropped me here, in case you want to check.”
She was cold-blooded. I can’t say that I was shocked. Chester had humiliated a long line of folk, including me, and it wasn’t hard to understand the desire for revenge.
“I know you aren’t crying too many tears about Chester,” said Sherrie. “He screwed you over but good.”
“Just like he screwed you over, Sherrie.” I knew that I was being petty, but it was all I could do not to add, “Right back at ya, babe.”
“Yeah, that’s why I let you in here, Jasmine Spain. You’ve been through the same stuff I’m going through. I guess you could call us sisters, now that we’ve both been burned by the same fire.”
We’ve both been burned, I thought, but I would be damned if I allowed myself to become scarred and jaded like the woman sitting on the couch in front of me. Plus, I didn’t subscribe to that old saying “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”
“What are you up to, Jasmine Spain?” asked Sherrie, interrupting my thoughts. “Why the hell would you care what happened to Chester? Especially after what he did to you? You planning on playing detective in addition to playing lawyer?”
“I think that whoever killed Chester might have something to do with Lamarr Henry’s death.”
“You mean the junkie?”
I wanted to slap the taste out of her mouth. Instead, I said as calmly as I could manage, “Lamarr was not a junkie, Sherrie. He’d been clean for years.”
“Looks like he had a relapse,” said Sherrie, her eyes narrow and, I thought, hateful. “That’s what Raymond thinks.”
Raymond? What was Raymond doing talking to Sherrie? Raymond made no secret of his dislike of Sherrie. “A waste of space and energy,” he had referred to her on more than one occasion. “After you get past the looks, there’s nothing but a mercenary there,” was Raymond’s summation of Sherrie’s character.
“Raymond talked to you about Lamarr?” I asked.
“Relax, girlfriend,” said Sherrie. “Raymond called me before Chester’s funeral, asking questions about Chester. He was wondering if there was any connection between Chester and Lamarr. I told him that Chester didn’t hang out with junkies.”
“Only other women.” The words escaped before I had a chance to rein them in, but I wasn’t sorry. Even when I saw the pain cross Sherrie’s eyes, I was unrepentant. Lamarr had exceeded every expectation that society had placed on him. He had been to hell, and he had survived. He had spent the last ten years of his life winning the fight against those expectations, and to have this woman sum my friend up as a junkie was more than I was going to tolerate, even if it meant that I wasn’t going to get any answers.
“I deserve that,” said Sherrie, her voice small.
Damn straight, you do, I thought.
“What about Irmalee?” I asked. “Any connection that you can think of between Irmalee and Chester, other than her being his secretary?”
“You mean besides the fact that he was sleeping with her?”
“Yes,” I continued, undaunted. If Sherrie expected me to feel sorry for her because Chester did to her what she and Chester so willingly and so easily did to me, then she would be disappointed. “Besides the fact that he was sleeping with her.”
“I can tell you this,” said Sherrie, sipping her drink again. “Chester dumped Miss Secretary, and she wasn’t happy about it. She was threatening to file sexual harassment charges against him.”
Now I was surprised. “I heard that the relationship was consensual.”
“Yeah, well, hell hath no fury and all of that other mess,” replied Sherrie. “And I can tell you something else, Jasmine Spain, Wallace Barker was in on the whole thing. He was helping Irmalee. If you ask me, this whole sexual harassment thing was his idea. Irmalee didn’t have the brain power to think that up.”
Things were not adding up. Wallace and Irmalee? According to Dahlia, Wallace had buried the hatchet. He had forgiven, even if he hadn’t forgotten, Chester’s betrayal. Hell, he was at Chester’s funeral.
“Interview’s over, Jasmine Spain,” said Sherrie, standing up. “I don’t know anything else that could help you.”
I stood up, glad to go. I was nowhere closer to finding out what had happened to Lamarr, but I had had enough of Sherrie Jackson. One thing was certain, however; it was time to pay Wallace a visit.
“Thanks for your help,” I said to Sherrie, feeling anything but thankful. “What are you going to do now?”
“I’m going to leave New York,” she said. “And I’m going to spend Chester’s money.”
“Where will you go?” I asked, more out of politeness than any real interest.
“I don’t know,” Sherrie replied. “Someplace warm, with palm trees, white sand, where the piña coladas come with charming young men who earn their living by lying to you.”
I guess that ruled out Chicago. I let myself out, glad to be free from Sherrie’s company.