Chapter 25
John Coltrane blew smooth and easy through my stereo speakers as I sat cross-legged and barefoot on my living-room rug, a glass of red wine within reach on the coffee table, Dontell’s box, a footlocker-size plastic tub, gray-green, with matching lid, like oversize Tupperware, sitting in front of me. Mrs. Adkins had been reluctant to let me walk out of her house with it, until I swore an oath to return the box and all its contents to her the very moment I found out what happened to Dontell. Inside, things were stacked neatly—files, books, papers—and on top was a battered laptop, several generations old, and a scuffed cell phone with a cracked screen. I checked them both. They were long dead. It’d been four years since Dontell used them last. No power cords in the box. But I remembered I had a few spare ones in my junk drawer in the other room, left behinds from countless old phones and computers owned over the years. Maybe something would fit.
I dug through the drawer, batting aside old batteries, brittle rubber bands, rusted screws whose rightful place I had long forgotten. I pulled out a handful of old cords just as my bell rang, and I rushed to answer it.
“Who is it?”
“Me.” Eli. I buzzed him up and left the door open before going back to what I was doing.
He came in with a pizza box flooding the apartment with the aroma of hot cheese and spicy sausage. The first cord didn’t fit Dontell’s laptop. I looked up at Eli, smiled, tried a second.
“Hey. Pizza,” I said.
He walked over, leaned down to give me a kiss. “I figured you hadn’t stopped to eat, so . . . yep, pizza.” He sat the pizza box on the coffee table next to me, then eyed my wineglass. “Which’ll go good with that. What’s all this?”
“Dontell Adkins’s personal effects.” The second cord didn’t fit, either. I tossed it aside, tried another. “He was a kid who worked for Allen. Killed in a hit-and-run. Strangely, the second hit-and-run connected to her. The first involved a father and son who sued her for stealing the whole idea for her magazine.” I looked up at him. “Something starting to smell rotten to you?”
He eased down on the couch across from me after putting the pizza on the table between us. “Not necessarily. Hit-and-runs do happen. You thinking she ran them over?”
“I’m just saying it’s odd.” The third cord fit the laptop. “Hold on.” I moved over to the outlet, plugged in the laptop, and opened it. No cracks. The keys worked. I pressed the power button, and it began to boot up. “Ha!”
Eli joined me and peered over my shoulder as the computer slowly came to life.
“Now fingers crossed it’s not password protected . . .” But it was. I screeched, shoving the computer away from me in frustration. I had one more cord. If it fit the phone . . .
Eli picked up the computer. “Password might be something simple.”
I plugged the last cord into the phone. It fit. “Don’t move. Do not breathe.” I held my own breath, then plugged in the adapter. The phone lit up. “Please, no password.” The home screen popped up, so no password needed. I was in, and it felt as though I’d just won the lottery.
Eli was still fiddling with the laptop. “See if he put the password to this in there.”
I scrolled through Dontell’s contacts. “Eli, c’mon, nobody puts the password to their computer in another computer. That’d just be . . .” But there it was. Under lap pass. “What just happened?” Eli and I looked at each other. “Password. NEWYORKER3. All caps. Try it.”
Eli typed it in. It worked. Dontell’s laptop was open. “Why password protect the laptop but not the phone?”
I grabbed the laptop, snatched a slice of pizza from the box. “I don’t care. I’m just glad he did.”
“What do you think you’re going to find?”
I took a bite of pizza, sat the slice back in the box, and got to work. “I’ll let you know when I find it.”
* * *
There were video journal entries on the laptop, dozens of them. It looked like Dontell had documented every minute of his time with Strive, from his first day there to the day he told Allen to take her job and shove it, which was less than a week before his death. Each entry was date stamped; each one, archived. Dontell and Angela Dotson-Hughes would have gotten along like a house afire. Reesa Loudon was right. It looked like Dontell had planned on writing about his experiences at Strive. That wouldn’t have played well for Allen or Chandler, not with a new publication starting up, not following their lawsuit with the Peetses. A hit-and-run, the Peetses run off the road into a ditch. Both things an answer to Allen’s problem.
Eli slid in beside me, took a sip from my wineglass. “Okay then. Let’s see what this guy was about.”
The first file was dated October 19, 2017. Dontell, young, intense looking, squinting into the camera mounted in front of him, what looked like a bedroom as his backdrop.
“I’m on my way! Somebody’s actually going to pay me to write! Strive’s new, unproven, but I think it could really be something.” He pumped his fists. “And I’m in on the ground floor, baby.”
I closed the file. “God, were we ever that young and unjaded?”
Eli scoffed. “I wasn’t. You maybe.”
The next few files were more of the same. Dontell was over the moon, until January 3, 2018.
“We had to work sixteen hours today, but we don’t get overtime pay or time back. Is that even legal? What happened to labor laws? I have to look that up. Ms. Allen says we have to make sacrifices, but it’s only me and Reesa making them. We were in the office past midnight yesterday. Allen and Chandler left at six for some swanky gala. Why are we the only ones putting in the time?” Dontell looked haggard, less enthusiastic, and no wonder. He was being worked to near exhaustion.
I skimmed through the next few files, more of the same, before jumping forward to the last two videos he shot.
October 24, 2018. “I quit today! Allen didn’t like it, especially since Reesa quit last week. Can you believe she called me ungrateful? We’ll see about that. I got it all locked and loaded, people. I’m a slave set free from the yoke! Dues paid, son. I didn’t even wait for them to walk me out. Strolled out easy. Victory!”
The last file, October 28. The day he died. Dontell shot it while walking into Allen’s office, the shaky camera panning to catch the magazine’s name on the door, Dontell’s voice in the background. “Last time I step foot in this place. Picking up the letter today. I gave them no option. The pen is mightier than the sword for real. Next stop, revelation. Let’s see Vonda Allen handle what I’m about to throw down. Later.”
I closed the video folder, looked around on the laptop for more, but found nothing else about Strive or Allen. I logged off, checked the phone. The numbers in his contacts meant nothing to me. I stopped scrolling at the name Eric Mason. No service on Dontell’s phone, so I used mine to dial the number, but it was out of service. I tossed the phone down, stood to pace some.
“What’s this kid Adkins got to do with anything?”
“He could be a part of a pattern of deaths. He was in a position to damage Allen and her business, and now he’s dead. Sewell, Hewitt, thorns in her side, dead. Eric Mason is a long shot. Eric’s a common name. No guarantee he’s the guy we confronted the other night. But what if this Eric’s the same one in Dontell’s phone? What if he somehow holds Allen responsible for what happened to Dontell? That could play.”
Eli looked skeptical. “A bit of a reach. Besides, it’s been four years. That takes slow burn to a new level, don’t you think?” He reached into the pizza box and handed me another slice. “Take a break? Come back at it in the morning?”
“I should swing by the hospital. Check on things.” I read his look. “What?”
“It’s after eleven.”
I’d been at the box for hours without noticing it. “Oh.”
I thought of Dontell, so full of promise. A box of things was a poor accounting of a life barely lived. I thought of the Adkinses, too. Sad, old, alone. Everything was a word not nearly big enough to describe the enormity of what they’d lost.
I stared at the box of Dontell’s things. There was still stuff at the bottom of it that I hadn’t gotten to yet. “Another half hour.”