Chapter 27
It was nearly two AM when Marcus came and knocked on the window of Jimmy’s house, rousing them from sleep.
Yolanda and Jimmy came out onto the porch to find a victorious Marcus along with their attorney, David. Standing on the street, David relayed that Mrs. Jenkins had positively identified the body from the giant freezer on the boat as Anitra Jenkins.
David and the forensic pathologist had argued with the Richmond and Napa County police over who had jurisdiction and would take the corpse. Finally, the law enforcement agencies had agreed that the independent pathologist could accompany the local coroner and participate in the autopsy.
A Polaroid photograph slid out from the Manila folder that David held.
It was a photo of a photo. In the picture, a foot in a sneaker peeked out from beneath a sheet. A woman’s gold sneaker, made even shinier because it was covered by a sparkling sheen of ice. Not just the shoe, but the foot and ankle as well.
David scooped up the picture and slid it back into the file, covering the shoe, the sheen, the ice, the light. But Yolanda could still see the sinister glistening in her mind’s eye.
* * *
By the time Marcus and David left, Yolanda was sitting huddled on the steps of Jimmy’s house, shivering, her arms wrapped around her knees. The bag with her kanji book and gun and her FBI credentials was pressed between her knees and her chest.
None of this is news, she told herself. You knew she was in there dead when you left the cabin. You knew she was probably dead when you heard the deposition. You knew she had most likely been murdered when the coffin came up empty.
But that shoe. That foot. That ankle. That ice. They brought it all home to Yolanda. In a freezer. Like a caught fish or a slab of meat. Not human. It turned her stomach. Her teeth began to chatter.
“Baby, don’t worry,” Jimmy murmured. “Everything’s out in the open now. They can’t act like it didn’t happen.”
Even when he sat down beside her and wrapped his arms around her, even in her fleece-lined jacket, she continued to shake.
“Let me get you something warmer,” he said and went back into the house, leaving her on the cement steps. His wooden porch might have been more comfortable, but it could have been bugged. A listening device could fit between the slats of the railings. In contrast, the cement steps below were unbroken slabs of concrete, surrounded by nothing but grass.
“Yolanda, what’s going on, love?” he asked, after he had bundled her in his sleeping bag. He wrapped it around her shoulders like an oversized mink stole.
“I can’t talk about it,” she murmured, shaking her head. “It’s just—I can’t.”
“Baby,” Jimmy said. “You can tell me.” He wrapped his arms around her in the bulky green nylon bag.
“I can’t. I can’t tell anyone.” Her throat was tight. She could barely get the words out.
“I swear I won’t tell. It’ll just be between you and me.”
Yolanda shook her head again.
“I saw how upset you were when you saw the photo. Have you . . . have you seen someone before who was . . .”
“It’s something that I did,” Yolanda barely managed to push the words out. “I got on the wrong side of something.”
He stopped short. “Did you kill somebody?” he asked, his half-joking voice betraying a bit of unease.
“God no,” she said, her voice nearly cracking.
“Whatever it is, I can handle it. You have to tell me.” He slid his hand under the sleeping bag so that he could put his arm around her.
“I shouldn’t have even said this much,” she spoke in a choked whisper.
“Baby, you can’t keep this bottled up inside you.”
“I’m sorry I even mentioned it.”
“Mentioned it?” Jimmy’s frustration was rising. “Yolanda, baby. It’s me you’re talking to. Your lover. The man who loves you. I love you, Yolanda.”
She could feel her eyes welling up, but she held the tears in check. “Don’t say that,” she struggled to take a breath through an airway constricted with tears. “You don’t even know me. You don’t know what I’ve done.”
“Whatever it is, we’ll work it out,” he said. “And don’t act like you don’t love me back, woman. I know you do. Whatever this is, I got you, girl. I got you.”
Like her father, when she was five. She had climbed up a tree, and gotten too high. “I got you,” her dad had said. She had trust-fallen into his arms.
“I do love you, Jimmy,” she whispered, then tried to clear her throat. “Which is why I can’t lie to you anymore.” She turned to him suddenly, eyes glistening. “Do you give me your word you won’t tell, not until we figure it out?”
“You have my word, baby.” He was all eyes and open hands.
“Your word?”
“Yes,” he said. “Now just tell me what’s going on.”
“I’m . . .” Yolanda struggled to figure out where to begin. “I’ve never been involved in an organization like RBG before. I didn’t know how it would be. I’ve changed since I got involved with RBG. You can tell that I’ve changed, right?”
“Of course I can tell. What are you trying to say? That you were a Republican before you got into RBG?” He laughed. “I know you were a corporate lawyer.”
“Not a corporate lawyer,” she opened her mouth but nothing came out at first. She took a deep breath and willed herself to pronounce the words. They came out as a whisper, a hiss of air. “An FBI lawyer. I work for the FBI, Jimmy.”
As his hands went slack, she began to speak faster, to get it all out before those two brown hands disappeared for good. “They sent me to RBG on a special assignment. Because I went to Cartwright. Because I’m young and black. But I wasn’t trained for this.”
“The FBI? You work for the FBI?” he said as he withdrew his hands from her.
“I just got out of the FBI academy last year. I was working on a case in New Jersey as a lawyer, when they pulled me to do this assignment. I didn’t know—”
“You planted the bugs,” he said slowly, leaning his body away from hers.
“Yes,” she breathed, resisting the urge to babble excuses.
“You came and found me at the track. You flirted with me.”
“No!” she said. How could he believe that? “Baby, I had no idea. If I had known you were part of RBG I would never have flirted with you. You weren’t in the file. I wouldn’t have mixed business with—”
“What the fuck?” Slowly, he pulled away and stood up.
“Jimmy,” she pleaded. “I do love you. Why would I tell you this if I didn’t love you?”
“You’ve been spying on us?” he demanded. “How the hell am I supposed to know what to believe, Yolanda? Every fucking word is suspect. Every. Fucking. Word.” Unconsciously, he wiped his hands on his thighs, as if to clean her off of him. Her father had made the same gesture once, long ago, when leaving a woman’s house.
Inside her, the whirlwind of conversation, of pleading for understanding, screeched to a halt. What would have been her words became something snipped off like hair or nail clippings. They fell to the floor and lay inert.
“My mistake,” she said, as she stood and gathered her purse, letting the sleeping bag slide off her shoulders. “Please don’t tell the folks at RBG. I won’t be back.”
“What would I tell them? That I’ve been fucking a spy?”
“I’m sorry, Jimmy. I’ll be turning in my resignation to the FBI tomorrow. I’ll just disappear.” Suddenly, she leaped up off the stairs and ran down the block. She didn’t look back to see if he had tried to follow, but it didn’t matter. She had always been faster.