Ten

“It could very well have been a Good Samaritan, Ms. Anderson. Though I will admit that does not make much sense. The tip line is anonymous. They could have just called themselves.”

Aubrey was on his futon, looking at printouts of evidence from the case. His studio wasn’t much—the futon, plus a desk and kitchen alcove with a tiny bathroom off it—but it was clean. I had to give him that. After I’d left M&Ms the night before, I’d called to update him on what he’d missed, and we agreed to meet bright and early the next morning. For once I was on time.

“Maybe someone really hated Junior but didn’t trust the cops,” I said from the corner Aubrey called a kitchen. I grabbed a bottle of Arrowhead from his fridge. “Not even for an anonymous tip. Of course, that doesn’t explain the whole paying Regina thing.”

“Someone clearly wanted us to turn Junior in,” Aubrey said.

But who? And why? I moved back into the main room and sat down next to Aubrey. He jumped up and took a seat in the office chair by his desk, where I noticed the envelope with the license application. It wasn’t opened. “Okay, what’s going on Aubrey? You’re acting weird. Well, weirder than normal.”

He looked surprised. I kept on him. “You’ve avoided my calls. Now you’re acting like you don’t want to even be in the same room as me. If you don’t want to work with me anymore, just say so.”

“Pardon me, Ms. Anderson?”

Was he really playing dumb?

I motioned to the unopened envelope. “You haven’t even opened the license application.”

“What application, Ms. Anderson?”

“We talked about this. Making things official, having a real partnership. Don’t you remember?”

“Yes, but … ” He trailed off. For the first time since I’d known him, he looked embarrassed. “I assumed you were discussing dating each other.”

I let this sink in. “You thought I was hitting on you? So what did you think was in that envelope? Oh my God. You thought I’d written you the world’s longest love letter. Eighteen pages filled with hearts and Dayna Anderson-Adams-Parker in cursive. I have a boyfriend, Aubrey.”

Men.

I laughed. Just a bit. Then a lot. He had the nerve to look hurt, like he was offended I’d rejected his rejection of me.

“I obviously misread your intentions,” he said.

“Obviously.” I wiped my eye. “Now that we’ve established neither of us wants to date each other, can we get back to the case?”

He looked relieved. “I suggest we drive by Ms. Jones’s house. Maybe she will be home.”

“Let’s go.” I still had Regina’s address in my phone from our little outing to Wheelhouse. I wiped the final tear and got up, grabbing the PI application as we left. “I will say this, though. The next time a woman does express her undying true love, maybe handle it better. At least don’t be so obvious you’re avoiding her.”

“I will definitely keep that in mind, Ms. Anderson.”

Aubrey was quiet our entire drive over, busying himself completing the application. Regina’s neighborhood was quiet and well tended, featuring small one-story houses with ample green grass between the front door and street. When we pulled up in front of her place, a lone older woman picked up trash a few houses up. All the action seemed centered a few doors down, where a jumble of cars were concentrated around one house.

Aubrey looked up just as another car joined the pack. A woman got out looking somber and holding a casserole dish. “Someone must have passed away,” Aubrey said.

“Must be Junior’s grandmother’s house. Regina mentioned she lived on the same block.”

“Perhaps we should stop by if we cannot reach Ms. Jones.”

I’d kept a running tab of places I’d never take Aubrey. The movies. The strip club. Into the general vicinity of my parents. I mentally added “home of a grieving family” to that list.

“Perhaps … ” I said.

Regina’s driveway didn’t have a car in it but then I wasn’t expecting one. Not so much because I didn’t expect her to be there—more because it was probably impounded as a crime scene since Junior took it from Palm Springs. I parked, blocking her driveway, and we both got out.

We walked up the stairs, opened the black metal screen door, rang the bell, and waited. When that didn’t work, we knocked. Both garnered the same result. Nothing. The door remained closed. Aubrey watched as I went to a window, got on my tippy-toes, and pressed my face against it to double check.

“She’s long gone. She knows better than to come back here,” a voice called out.

I recognized it—the voice of that one woman in every neighborhood who has too much time on her hands and therefore knows everyone’s business. Back home, that woman was my mother. Thanks to her, news in my Augusta neighborhood traveled faster than a video compilation of cute dogs.

I turned and smiled. Nosy Neighbor’s black-don’t-crack age put her at around fifty-five, which meant in actual years she was at least seventy-two. The only giveaway was the crown of gray-black hair pulled in a bun at the nape of her neck. She was skinny, probably from all the walking, with smooth brown skin the color of cardboard. If she were to be cast in a movie, she … wouldn’t be cast at all because, hello, she was black and a woman over fifty.

She held one of those mechanical grabbers in her left hand and a trash bag in her right. Having two decades of up-close experience with the neighborhood gossip, I knew exactly how to play the situation. I sure wasn’t going to pretend like I was a friend. Nosy Neighbor would know that she’d never seen my car.

“Hi! We’re actually investigators and believe Regina might have some information that might help us. I’m Dayna, but everyone calls me Day.”

“Ruth Reid. Everyone calls me Mama Ruth.”

The last name was the same as Junior’s. Could it be? I decided to assume, regardless of what it made of you and me. “I’m so sorry to hear about your grandson, Javon.”

Mama Ruth nodded her thanks. She must have slipped out her house for a walk.

“It’s all that girl’s fault,” she said, waving her trash bag in the general direction of Regina’s place. “I’ve been calling the police. They won’t call me back. I know that girl called the cops on my grandson. There’s a special place in you-know-where for those who helped get him killed. Regina and all the rest.”

I just nodded. No need to mention we were part of “all the rest.”

Aubrey, however, spoke up. “Ms. Ruth, I am Aubrey S. Adams-Parker. We have reason to believe that Mr. Reid—”

It took everything not to cover his mouth with my hand. I interrupted with a quickness, throwing him a look. “We have reason to believe that Javon got a bad rap. In fact, that’s why we came by. We wanted to ask Regina some follow-up questions because her story didn’t check out.”

Mama Ruth nodded. “I can’t believe people would think Javon could so something like this …” She paused and I was ready to dismiss it as classic Grandma-in-denial-her-grandson-is-a-sociopath. Then she continued on. “Something like this on his own. Someone put him up to this. Probably Regina.”

Someone put Junior up to this? I tested out the theory. It felt good in my hands, especially when you factored in the “Good Samaritan” who’d wanted Junior out of the way.

“I know the boy ain’t a saint,” she continued. “Doesn’t mean I loved him any less. He stayed with me sometimes, had this hiding spot he thought I didn’t know about in the shed. I went out to check it and that’s where I found the money and the phone.”

“Did you give this information to the police?” Aubrey asked. I was too surprised to talk.

“I tried. None of them want to call me back, like I said. I’m about to throw the lot of it away.”

“We’d be happy to take a look at it.” I glanced over at Aubrey, who nodded.

She left her tools on the sidewalk and we followed her back to her house. We could hear the voices inside. I noted she ignored the front door like an email from a Nigerian prince and walked directly to the back. The shed wasn’t much to look at but at that moment it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. Within seconds, Mama Ruth had opened Junior’s hiding place—a makeshift hole below a broken piece of tile on the floor.

There was indeed a cell phone and a wad of cash, all hundreds, at least two inches thick. There was also a Black Tail magazine, showing a back shot of a woman squatting in nothing more than heels and a headband. I ignored it, too focused on wondering if the phone still had any prints. Aubrey, however, did not. I hadn’t pegged him for a dirty magazine type of guy.

“Is this Junior’s phone?” I asked, but I already knew the answer. He hadn’t seemed the type to have a pink flower phone case, and the police had made it clear that he’d stolen Lyla’s personal cell phone.

“Don’t think so. Doubt the money is his either.” Mama Ruth grabbed the phone. It was dirty as all get-out. She wiped it off on her T-shirt.

Bye-bye prints.

I was about to say something when Aubrey handed the magazine to me without a word. Inside was a piece of paper and on it someone—I guessed Junior—had written a date, time, address, and the word “anonymous.”

I’d been eating, sleeping, and drinking Lyla Davis’s murder investigation for almost two weeks. I knew the details better than I knew my social security number. It was the day, time, and location of Lyla’s death.

“Mama Ruth, can we take this?”

She just nodded.

Once back in the car, we each threw out theories like yesterday’s trash. “So someone tells Lyla to meet them at the ATM, where they send someone to kill her,” I said. “And that same person uses us to ensure that the guy is apprehended.”

“How did they know Mr. Reid would not turn on them?” Aubrey asked.

“Junior was adamant he wasn’t going back to jail. He told Regina. Even tweeted it right before he died. Maybe the person knew the same thing. Figured Javon would get killed. Or, in this case, kill himself. The only thing I don’t understand is why would someone put a hit on someone as well-loved as Lyla? Even J. Chris liked her.”

“All types of people have secret lives, Ms. Anderson.”

“What about the ‘anonymous’? You think they wanted it to look like a botched robbery? Which it did.” I pulled up outside of Emme’s building.

“This is not the police station,” Aubrey said.

“Correct. It’s Emme’s. You’ve been here before.”

“I thought we were taking the evidence to the police.”

“We will. I just want Emme to look at the phone first.” It was clear from Aubrey’s look that he didn’t approve. At all.

Emme ran out her door as I continued my plea to Aubrey. “Just give us the time it takes to drive to the police station. Once we give the phone to them we’ll never see it again. If someone’s out there thinking they got away with murder, partly because of us, I want to know who it is. The phone might be the key to finding them.”

Call me old-fashioned, but I preferred my “accessories” to be necklaces, not to murder. I also felt silly that I’d been proud of myself, thinking I might actually be good at this, when someone had been pulling my strings like a puppet. Maybe my mama was right. I’d been lucky with the Haley Joseph case.

“I will give you and Ms. Abrams five minutes,” Aubrey said. “It will begin now.”

Yay! “I’d make a joke about kissing you but you’d think I was in love with you again.”

He didn’t laugh, just stared at me as Emme jumped in the backseat. I’d texted her the details when we left Mama Ruth’s house so she was prepared. Looking solemn, she glanced at Aubrey as she put on her seat belt. “This is a horrible idea, IMO.” In my opinion.

“Save it.” I pulled out to head to the police station downtown. “He’s letting us check the phone.”

Emme smiled and pulled on a pair of rubber gloves. “In that case, where is it?”

I handed it to her. It was in a resealable plastic sandwich bag with illustrated snowmen and candy canes on it. She gave me a look. “Professional.”

“It was all Mama Ruth had at her house. I charged it on the way here but it’s passcode protected. Don’t you have something that can break it?”

Emme nodded. “It can take a while, though.”

Aubrey spoke. “You have four minutes, thirty seconds.” He was seriously keeping track.

“Hopefully not longer than four minutes and twenty-nine seconds,” I said.

Emme checked something on her phone, then pressed a few buttons on Lyla’s phone. “Done,” she said. “It was her birthday.”

Of course it was. I should’ve checked that first. Saved myself the gas. “Let me see!”

Aubrey literally put his hands in his ears like a child. Hear no evil and all that. We were stuck in traffic, so I turned around as Emme showed me the screen. It consisted of the standard-issue iPhone apps and Gmail. That was it.

What self-respecting woman in her twenties had an iPhone with no extra apps? It wasn’t like the Stocks app let you filter your selfies to the point where you looked like your very own Madame Tussaud’s wax figure. “Scroll to the next screen,” I said, then tacked on a please at the end like my Mama always told me to. “Please.”

“Isn’t one.” She swiped as proof. Sure enough, the screen remained the same.

I felt as confused as I’d been in Calculus senior year before my mom let me drop the class. There had to be a good reason for this. “Maybe Junior deleted them.”

“He’d have to know the password. And why not just wipe the phone completely?”

“Three minutes,” Aubrey said. He really wasn’t helping.

“Let’s just check her Gmail then.” I glanced at the phone again. It listed 5,257 unchecked messages. Great.

Traffic started moving, so Emme sat back. It took her thirty seconds for her to talk. I counted. Aubrey did too. “Hmmph,” she finally said.

Someone saying “hmmph” was never a good thing. It was right up there with the word “interesting.” At that point, I just pulled over, Aubrey-the-human-countdown-clock be darned. Emme leaned forward and showed me what had her so perplexed. The inbox was empty. “Where are all the messages?” The Gmail app notification claimed there were thousands.

“Maybe Lyla had more than one account,” Emme said. She tapped the icon in the upper left corner. The email address was a Viv3000. Emme clicked the down arrow, and the list of available Gmail accounts popped up. There was indeed another one listed.

AnaniMissBlog@gmail.com

“Time’s up,” Aubrey said.