Danny knew there would be trouble even before he went inside his house. There were three strange cars parked in front at the curb. One he recognized as Clarence’s, Vinny’s study partner. The others he did not know.
Danny walked inside his home and found Vinny and three other people in the living room. There was Clarence, of course, and a woman, a black girl about Vinny’s age, who had long braids that stopped at her shoulders. The last person was a black man who looked younger than the rest. He wore glasses and sported an African hat made of Kinte cloth.
But what held Danny’s attention was not these people or the table filled with empty bottles of beer. It wasn’t even Vinny herself, who was sitting between the two men dressed in a skirt so short that he wondered how she kept anything hidden. Danny was struck by the mood of them all—the nature of the evening. There were no books on the table. It looked like a date, a date in his house.
“Wha’sup?” said Danny as he entered.
Clarence immediately turned his frame away from Vinny. He was so transparent that Danny found him harmless. The girl with the braids said hello as Vinny got up to greet him. The man in the hat said nothing. He just looked at Danny with a distinct anger in his eyes.
“We just stopped here after school for a minute and a party kinda started,” said Vinny. “Oh, this is LaRisa and Roger.” She pointed to the two people on the sofa. “You know Clarence.”
“Hey, man,” said Clarence.
Danny was getting a disturbing picture. Two pretty black women and two black men all from law school, just hanging out and who knew what could happen. But he knew Vinny wasn’t dumb or evil enough to do anything right here in their house. No, she was still in denial about what was happening between them.
“Do you talk, brother?” Danny asked Roger, who still hadn’t said anything.
“Yeah,” said Roger, and there was a nastiness in his voice. “We gotta get going, Vinny.”
The others agreed and hustled to the door over Vinny’s protests. When they were gone, she turned back to Danny.
“What is it with you?” she asked.
“All I did was come home,” said Danny. “You threw the party.”
“What you did was come in here and glare at my friends until they became uncomfortable.”
“That Roger brother, I suppose I made him sit there and give me the evil eye.”
“Well, I know he was acting funny. He’s got issues with white people,” said Vinny.
“Then he should stay the fuck out of their houses.”
Danny took off his coat and went into the bedroom. He wasn’t surprised when Vinny came in the room behind him.
“I live here, too, you know,” she began. “I should be able to have some friends over if I want.”
“What if I brought over some white racist cop who sat on your sofa and looked at you like you stole something from him? Would you like that?”
“You don’t have any white friends,” said Vinny. “And you know, maybe that’s the problem.”
Danny was silent a moment. He didn’t want to walk through the door that had just been opened, but he had to. He thought of Gordon and his incessant prodding over this very issue.
“What does that mean?” he asked.
“It don’t—doesn’t mean anything,” she corrected herself. “I’m sorry.”
And now he wanted to push her, make her tell him why she’d said that, why she’d said the same thing to him that Gordon had said. But that didn’t bother him nearly as much as the way she corrected her English just now. The fact that she cared about speaking properly when it was just the two of them terrified him.
“You tryin’ to say that I need to stick with my own kind or somethin’?” asked Danny.
“Can we just drop it?” said Vinny.
“No. I want to know why you said that.”
“Look,” said Vinny. “I just wanted to hang out with my friends, with people who can help me with my career. If I’m going to make it, I have to associate with different people than I’m used to. Maybe you should, too.”
“That’s Renitta talking,” said Danny. Vinny was beginning to think of herself as outgrowing him, of their way of speaking as somehow wrong.
“Are you trying to say I don’t have a mind of my own?” Vinny jutted out one of her hips toward him, a gesture that was meant as aggressive, but which came off as sexy, making it worse than intended.
Danny was looking at this woman he loved and thinking about the killer, a man who was disposing of human beings because of their color. Was that any different from what was happening to him right now? His color and Vinny’s had been part of the attraction, but also part of the problem. Vinny’s suggestion that his color was something of a hindrance was awful, sickening and it hurt just as bad as anything he’d ever experienced growing up. But he was not going to allow that to stop him from making an attempt to make things right.
“Who’s it gonna be, Vinny, me or them?” asked Danny.
“You talking about my family?”
“I’m talking about all of it. Family, school, career. Where do I fit in?”
“I don’t see a choice to be made,” said Vinny.
“I chose you over my family,” Danny said. “Do you think anyone likes the idea of me and you together? I didn’t have to even think about it. I chose you and to hell with all of them. I figured I don’t sleep with them and share with them the way I do with you, so I couldn’t give a shit how they feel. I owe my favor to you because I know you’ve given up just as much for me, or have you?”
“Don’t make me do this now,” she said.
“We don’t get to choose where shit finds us, Vinny. I’m not going to leave here until I know how you feel.”
She looked Danny straight in the eyes. Vinny was not one to falter under pressure. She’d taken all the shit the streets had to offer. She was not going to be afraid of a situation like this.
“I don’t know,” she said finally, and Danny felt the room shift under his feet for a moment. “Maybe we both should think about it. Take a break from each other.”
“A break?” said Danny. “What the hell does that mean?”
“It means I stay with Ivory for a while. Since your mother passed you’ve been hard to live with. God knows I feel bad for you, but life eventually goes on, for all of us. I don’t need the space. You do.” She was still looking Danny in the eyes, unwavering, but it was only making him want her more.
There were a lot of things he wanted to say, ranging from anger to some smart-ass response. In the end, silence was the only thing that seemed appropriate. It stated his hurt, anger, and shock all at once, and it allowed Vinny to make a graceful exit from the room.
Danny stood for a second, not moving. Then he sat down and took off his shoes. And silently, he thought that maybe Gordon was right. Maybe he did hate what he was just a little bit.
Danny returned to the SCU the next day to find an urgent message from Fiona on his desk. It read simply: MUST SEE YOU—JUST YOU! He started to tell Erik, but thought better of it. Fiona was not the secretive type, so if she wanted just him to come, she probably had a good reason.
Danny slipped away and was soon back in Fiona’s office. She was at her desk drinking from a small plastic cup.
“Hey,” said Danny, bounding into the room. “We got something new on the killer, I hope.”
“There’s whiskey in this cup,” said Fiona calmly.
“Okay,” said Danny. “Why are you drinking at the job in the daytime?”
“You might wanna have one,” she said.
“I’ll pass,” said Danny. “Are you okay, Fiona. You’re making me nervous about being here.”
“You remember that kid Jacob, the pain in the ass? I made him read over some old autopsy files. It was really just a way to get him out of my hair. Jacob is an asshole, but he’s smart, real smart. So, earlier today, he came to me all excited. And he has a file in his hand—your mother’s file…”
Danny was rocked by this simple statement. This was a woman who worked with dead people who were killed violently each day and she was unnerved. His mind immediately filled with images of his worst suspicions. And before she said her next words, he knew what they would be.
“—something wasn’t right about the way she died. I shouldn’t have been so damned nosy, so fucking professional,” said Fiona.
“The fall didn’t kill her, did it?” asked Danny grimly. He was looking off at the far wall, seeing the faces of his parents. His mother tumbling down the stairs and his father shoving her.
“No,” said Fiona. “She was probably already dead before she took that fall.”
“What was it, then?”
“She took an overdose of medicine. The report showed that there was organ damage conducive to a drug overdose, but the doctor who did the case conveniently buried it in the file.”
“Who was the doctor?”
“Tim Lester. Old-timer. Retired and conveniently moved out of town.”
“Dr. Lester was friend of my father from the old days,” said Danny. “They did a lot of cases together.” Danny’s face took on an even more alarmed look as the evidence mounted.
“I’m sorry,” said Fiona. “I know you got a lot of shit going on right now, but I found out yesterday and I beat myself up all night. Me, I wouldn’t want to know, but I know you.”
“You’re right,” said Danny. “I’m too stupid to leave it alone. Thanks.”
Danny hugged Fiona more out of grief than gratitude. She held on to him, patted his back like a mother, and whispered that she was sorry again.
Danny moved to the door of the lab and his feet felt as if they weighed a ton, as if the earth was holding on to them, not wanting him to go.
Danny walked out of the lab and into the hallway. He’d been in the space a hundred times but now it seemed like a different dimension. His worst fears had been realized. He saw the image of his mother again, falling, and he was filled with frightening questions about how it had happened.
Danny started to run, the surge of motion mirroring the churning emotions in his heart. In his tortured mind, he was already seeing himself in a confrontation, trying to find out why his father covered up his mother’s suicide.