C H A P T E R • 20
There are people whose job it is to examine the dead, turn them over and turn out their pockets. That’s what I did when I was playing a cop in the movies. A reporter’s job is supposed to be a few steps removed.
Her closet looked like I would have imagined if had I stopped to think about the private side of Cecelia Miller all grown up. Her clothes were arranged neatly, dresses, slacks and skirts, blouses and jackets, each in their own territory. The shoes were mostly in their stacked boxes. I quickly opened the box tops and found only shoes, which was disappointing. That’s a place where I would have stashed a secret. I stood on the vanity stool, sweeping the space between the top of the closet and the ceiling, and found only dust and not much of it.
I wondered how she could afford the oils and lithographs in the sitting room in the back. They were exquisite. An assortment of masks was sprinkled across one sitting room wall and a carved stool from Mali sat next to the Duncan Pfife sofa. Another large metal sculpture, this one of an angel, stood guard in another corner. In fact, my friend’s space was filled with art and antiques.
I thought to myself, all conditioned things arise and pass away. I said out loud, “I love you, my sister.”
I sat down and I tried to think of someone to call for comfort and new energy. It was way too early in California and I hadn’t bothered with the New York crew in the three weeks since my father died, and now it would take too much to catch up. Then I smiled and called the floor nurse at Harlem Hospital.
“Baby! I needed you to call,” Obie said.”
He sounded like himself, only quieter.
“How are you?”
“Shot.”
“Don’t make jokes.”
“Sorry. My shoulder needs repairing. But they’re getting ready to do it. I could use a little company.”
“I’m at Cecelia’s. Can you have visitors later? Before the Apollo?”
“I can have anything I want. Why are you at Cecelia’s?”
“To see if I can find anything else she might have tucked away.”
“What have you found?”
“I just started. It’s a little overwhelming.”
“You grew up in one of those houses. Where did you hide things?”
I visualized it.
“Pearl?”
“Thank you, Obie. I’ll call you back.”
The cabinets in the dressing rooms of those houses are bird’s-eye maple and there was nothing of interest in any of them. I pulled out each of the drawers under the marble sink and kept pulling, remembering when I was hiding my junior high school secrets. Nothing. But I kept pulling and sure enough, on the back of one drawer in the place where I used to hide the key to my diary was taped a key.
It didn’t fit any of the drawers in Cecelia bedroom area. They were unlocked and I only tried them; I didn’t look in. I felt like I was intruding, but kept at it. I also tried the drawers in her sitting room space. They were also unlocked.
But under the window was a wooden Chinese trunk, carved with the contours of a journey, and it was locked. The key fit and I lifted the lid.
Inside, a manila envelope was labeled with her left-hand scrawl, “September to November 1990.” I pulled it out and found in it about a dozen sheets of paper.
The names of some of the companies inside were familiar. I found myself humming before I recognized many of the names included snatches of song titles or music makers: Louis Armstrong Associates, Handy & Son, Bottom Line Ltd., Satchmo & Co., Duke and Daughter, and simply Zing, Babylon and Louise. A dollar amount was written neatly next to each one. I love the imagination black people bring to our business, whatever our business is.
I put the envelope in my Black History Week bag.
Then I turned back to what was left.
Sitting at the bottom of the trunk was a Louise Vuitton speedy bag. When I lifted it, it was heavy and when I unzipped it, I discovered cash money neatly bundled in bank wrappers.
Twenty wrappers each bundled 100 dollar bills. I took out one bundle and counted bills at the corners. From the few I counted, I determined each bundle held 200 bills, for a pretty impressive $400,000. There were also bundles of twenties.
I realized I was holding my breath. This money was in Cecilia’s trunk in the Miller’s house. But it was not their money. How could it be? But it also was not mine. And now what? I couldn’t very well put it back in the trunk and I couldn’t very well put it back in the bank.
“Damn,” I said out loud.
“Who is it?” somebody shouted from downstairs.
I closed the trunk and took the bag of cash with me to the wall connecting the top floor of my house to the Miller’s house next door and opened the square of wainscoting on the wall. Ceel and I read that during prohibition, gangsters re-opened the space between two connected row houses to escape when the feds came in downstairs. It was the opening the builders had used to pass things back and forth when they were building the houses and then had closed up. When we tried opening the space in the party wall, the resulting disaster moved Daddy and Mrs. Miller to install a lintel beam and open a portal, which we used to our advantage over the years.
I put the stash of cash through the space in the wall against the large cabinet on the other side, closed the wainscoting, and went to see who was in the house.