Chapter 18
Dante
Dante opened the car door and glanced cagily around him before stepping onto the broken concrete sidewalk. Nothing looked out of sorts. It was the same old drab D.C. neighborhood of his childhood. The same small two-story houses were in various states of disrepair, from crumbling brick to torn panels of siding to broken windows with black trash bags taped over the missing windowpanes. The lawns were more dirt and rubble than grass. At the end of the block was the same streetlamp with its innards exposed, showing a tangled mass of disgorged wires resembling multicolored intestines. A pair of wilted Converse sneakers dangled from one of the phone wires overhead and the same four dudes leaned against the buckling wire fence as they played a game of craps on the sidewalk, blocking the path of all those who walked by. Well, Dante could reluctantly admit that they probably weren’t the same dudes from his childhood, but they might as well have been.
“Same broke mofos,” Dante mumbled derisively. “Same piss-poor houses.”
Though prosperity had come to other parts of D.C. with gentrification by young hipsters who had moved into the city in the past decade, that prosperity had not arrived here. Nothing had changed in this neighborhood—in this far from glamorous enclave in Ward 8.
He shut the car door behind him and raised his hoodie to cover his head as he made his way to the house nestled near the end of the block.
He had moved into his mother’s old home a little more than a month ago after kicking out the renters and bouncing from hotel to hotel for a few weeks before that. He hadn’t returned to his condo. He was too scared to do it, unsure whether he would find another group of thugs waiting around to put a bullet in his head. He hadn’t returned to the law firm, either, making vague excuses about his recovery and needing more surgeries.
“We’re deeply sorry for what’s happened to you, Dante, but . . . you’ve been away for two months,” one of the partners had explained. “We’re going to need some medical records to explain your absence . . . for legal purposes, of course.”
“Like a doctor’s note?” Dante had snapped. “I was shot, Edgar! I didn’t get the flu. Hell, it was on the local evening news. I could send you a goddamn TV clip!”
“Please don’t be flippant,” the old man had grumbled. “We believe that you were shot! Dear God, who would lie about something like that? But we need insurance document copies . . . X-rays . . . something to explain why you’ve been gone for so long . . . why you’re still gone! You understand, don’t you?”
Dante had seethed silently on the other end of the phone line, wanting to unleash a curse-filled tirade against his boss. He wanted to tell Edgar that his hair plugs looked ridiculous and that he hated his puffy, marshmallow-like face. He wanted to tell Edgar that Edgar’s young trophy wife had confessed the same when she had sneaked off with Dante to give him head in one of the filing closets during the law firm’s Christmas party last year. But he didn’t tell Edgar any of this. Instead, he had counted to ten and said, “Sure, I’ll get something to you in a few days.”
“Wonderful!” Edgar had exclaimed.
But Dante hadn’t sent him the documents. In fact, he hadn’t spoken to anyone at his law offices—or anyone at all—in quite a while.
The last phone call he had made was to Detective Morris about the investigation.
“She’s still after me,” Dante had explained to the detective.
“She? She who, Mr. Turner?”
“The woman who tried to have me murdered! She had some guys waiting for me at my place! I need a police guard, someone to watch me twenty-four-seven to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
“I’m . . . I’m sorry, but I’m not following you, Mr. Turner. What woman?”
“I told you . . . the bitch who’s trying to kill me! Her name is Renee Upton and she’s pissed off that I dumped her and wouldn’t take her to Barbados or some shit, so now she wants to take me out permanently. She tried it in the parking garage in July and it didn’t work. She won’t give up until I’m dead.”
“Because you wouldn’t take her to Barbados?” the detective had drawled.
“And because I dumped her!” Dante had explained, annoyed to have to keep repeating himself. The phone line had gone silent on the other end, and Dante had wondered if the detective was still there. “Hello? Did you hear me? I said she tried to kill me!”
“Yeah, I heard you, Mr. Turner,” the detective had said with a loud sigh. “Look, are you sure it was this woman who shot you in the parking garage and not some . . . someone else? Maybe someone else might be involved.”
“Detective, I saw her. She shot me. She ran. I’d swear on it!”
When his pronouncement was met by more silence, he had grumbled impatiently. “If you need her address, I can give it to you. I want her arrested and I want protection until she’s taken care of . . . until she’s behind bars.”
“All right,” the detective answered grudgingly. “I’ll follow up and get back to you.”
“Get back to me? But what about the police protection?” Dante had shouted into the phone. “I need someone to watch my back!”
“I can’t promise you that, but I can tell you that I’m taking this allegation very seriously. I’ll follow up on it. You just sit tight.”
But the police still hadn’t made an arrest, which left Dante dumbfounded and filled with impotent rage. He had given them her address. He had practically pointed a neon arrow in Renee’s direction, but nothing had happened. The detective had called him last week to tell him they couldn’t find her.
“She wasn’t at her home and her mother said she hasn’t seen her in days.”
“And you just took Mavis’s word on that? That old bitch is lying! She knows where she is!”
“But we can’t prove that, Mr. Turner.”
“So you’re telling me Renee’s just going to get away with this? She tried to kill me twice and she’s free to walk the streets?”
“No, I’m telling you that we’ll keep pursuing her until we find her or . . . until we get a better lead,” the detective had said.
“What better lead?”
“I mean you stay in touch just in case you remember anything else that may help us in the investigation.”
“What else? I told you everything I know!”
“Well, maybe when you think about it some more, when you think more carefully, you might remember that night a little differently,” the detective had said cryptically. “Other people had a reason to hurt you, Mr. Turner. Someone else might be involved in this.”
“Who the hell else would be involved?”
“I don’t know . . . business associates. Maybe even one of your brothers. Evan Murdoch seemed like a promising lead.”
Dante had squinted. “Evan?”
Evan had threatened him, but he didn’t believe for a second that his pussy brother was actually capable of murder.
“Look, I’m just speculating, but, again, you get back to me if you remember things differently.”
* * *
As Dante now strode on the cracked cement outside the home of his childhood, he shoved his hand into one of the pockets of his hoodie. He squeezed the paper bag filled with pill bottles that rattled rhythmically with each step he took and he almost exhaled with relief.
Dante’s world had been turned completely upside down. He could no longer go to his condo. He could no longer go back to work. He couldn’t comfortably show his face in public for fear of being spotted by someone who meant him harm, but at least he had his Oxy—his painkillers. The pain had subsided a while ago, but his need to feel the numbing sensation that came each time he swallowed those pills still hadn’t gone away. It made him forget his unspent fury and sense of helplessness at his situation. He would gulp down two or three or four at a time with a glass of O.J., fall back into one of his mother’s old, musky recliners, stare at the television, and let the world float away. He’d finally drift off to sleep with visions of carnage and revenge dancing in his head.
I’m coming for you, Renee, he would think with a satisfied smile as he nodded off, you heartless bitch! And you’re next on my list, Evan. You thought you could take my rightful place as head of the family and cast me out? You’ve got another think coming, motherfucka! And don’t think I forgot you either, Leila, or you, Paulette. You bitches will get your justice due one day, too!
In his dreams, he would dole out punishments to all of them like they were Halloween treats, dropping off one poison candied apple after another. He would pay them back for how they had wronged him and make them suffer worse than he had. But those fantasies faded as soon as he was awake. In the real world, Dante was absolutely powerless. He was a pill-popping addict cowering in his mother’s run-down home. And he had no idea how he could bridge the gap between his revenge fantasies and reality.
He reached up and threw open his mother’s wrought-iron gate, wincing at the loud squeak it made. He bounded up the concrete steps, then looked up and paused.
A young woman of eighteen or so stood on his front porch, leaning against one of the wooden posts, wearing a tight leather jacket and equally tight jeans. She didn’t scramble off the porch when she saw him. She looked like she had been waiting for him this whole time.
He had seen this young woman before, lounging near his car, walking past the house. It was hard to miss her with her bright purple braids streaming down her back. He had worried that she had been following him, but he had pushed those worries aside as paranoia.
She’s not following you but just happens to live in the neighborhood, he had told himself.
She was curious as to who had moved into Mary Turner’s old place. Besides, Renee didn’t know he had lived in this neighborhood more than a decade ago. There was no way she could have tracked him down here.
But now, staring at the girl in front of him, he wondered if he had been wrong.
“You Dante?” the girl called out, tossing her long braids over her shoulder, pushing herself away from the porch post. She walked toward the wooden stairs and stood in front of him, blocking his path.
He shoved his hand into the hoodie’s other pocket where a Glock 19 Gen 3 sat with a full magazine. He had bought it soon after he figured out Renee had put a hit out on him. It was small enough to carry without detection, but big enough to pack a punch, according to the gun dealer who had recommended it to him. He carried it with him at all times now.
“Who wants to know?” he called back to her, wrapping his hand around the grip and putting his finger on the trigger, ready to pull out the gun at a moment’s notice.
“Kiana Lacey,” she said, strolling down the steps toward him, bouncing on the treads of her scuffed tennis shoes. “But everybody around here calls me Kiki.”
She gave a charming smile that made her face go from unassuming to pretty—but Dante wasn’t fooled. He didn’t know who this girl was and he didn’t trust her. And unless she could give him a good reason for why she was standing in front of him, keeping him from getting to his front door, he might put a bullet in her.
She stopped a foot away from him. “You never heard of me?”
“No,” he answered succinctly.
The girl’s smile fell. “Daaaaaamn!” she exhaled then sucked her teeth. “I thought Grandma told you about me. She said she did!”
Dante slowly shook his head in bemusement. “What the fuck are you talking about? I don’t know your grandmother, kid.”
“Oh, yes, you do!”
“Look, I can assure you that I don’t, Kiki,” he snarled with a curl in his lip. “So if you could get the hell off my property, I would appreciate it.”
“I ain’t goin’ nowhere!” He watched as she defiantly crossed her arms over her chest. “My grandmother’s name was Mary Turner and you knew her. She lived here!”
Dante paused. “Did you . . . did you say Mary Turner?”
“Yep, she was my grandma!”
He shook his head again. “That’s impossible! Mary Turner didn’t have any grandchildren. She was my mother and she only had one kid—me! And I don’t have any goddamn kids!”
She sucked her teeth again. “Yeah, well, I wouldn’t be too sure about that.”
His hand loosened on the gun’s grip. “What?”
She took another step toward him. The smile was back. She stared up at him unflinchingly with caramel-colored eyes. “Wassup, Daddy?”
* * *
Dante watched as Kiana or Kiki walked casually around his kitchen, opening cabinets and slamming them shut, like she had done it dozens of times before. She then bent down and threw open the door to his refrigerator, shoved around a jar of mayonnaise and a jar of pickles on one of the metal shelves, and sighed dejectedly.
“Shit,” she muttered under her breath before giving him a withering glance over her shoulder, “ain’t you got any food in here?”
He didn’t respond but instead raised his beer bottle to his lips and took a long drink.
She pulled out the jar of mayo and a plastic bag filled with a few slices of American cheese and slammed them both on the counter.
Dante remembered it all now. His mother had told him that he had fathered a child a long time ago, but he hadn’t believed her.
“Michelle Lacey came ’round here with a little baby, Dante,” his mother had told him over the phone during his first semester at Rutgers University when he was eighteen years old. “She says it’s yours.”
But Dante had dismissed Michelle’s claims. She had dated quite a few guys that winter, when they had hooked up. She even had a reputation on their block for being ready and willing for whatever guy showed her the barest amount of interest. Dante wasn’t surprised that she claimed the baby was his, considering he was the only dude in their neighborhood who was going to college—on a full scholarship, no less. Of course, Michelle would want to latch onto the one guy with some potential, who seemed like he was going somewhere! But Dante wasn’t having it.
“It’s not mine! She’s full of it,” he had told his mother, shouting over the music his roommate had been playing in their dorm room.
“But it is yours, honey,” his mother had insisted. “It gotta be!”
“Why? Just because she told you it was? Come on, Ma! Don’t be gullible.”
“No, it’s just . . . I can see it . . . in the . . . in the eyes. I think she’s yours.”
He hadn’t known what she had meant at the time: “I can see it in the eyes.” But he knew now what his mother had meant. Kiki had the same eyes as his father, George Murdoch. Terrence was the only other person who had inherited that trait from their father. Now it looked like there was another.
“Why are you staring?” Kiki asked as she pulled out a loaf of bread and began to make a sandwich.
“No reason,” Dante said, adjusting in his chair at the kitchen table and leaning back. “You just look like someone I know.”
“My mom used to say I looked a lot like you.” Kiki slathered one of the bread slices with mayo. “Grandma said it, too.” She paused to gaze at him. “I can’t see it, though.”
“How is your mother?” Dante asked politely, drinking more beer.
“Dead,” Kiki blurted out, slapping her cheese onto her sandwich. “One of her hustler boyfriends killed her. He got high one day and stabbed her. Did it about a year ago. I never liked that motherfucka. Told her he was a piece of shit, but she didn’t listen,” she sneered, throwing the two bread slices together and cutting them in half with a butter knife.
Dante winced. “I’m sorry to hear that.”
He watched as she shrugged and bit into her sandwich. “It’s okay. She wasn’t much of a mother anyway. By the end, she was a junkie, too—and I fuckin’ hate junkies.”
Dante reached for his pill bottle in his hoodie pocket and lowered his eyes.
“So you still working as a lawyer?” Kiki asked between munches.
“No, I’m on a . . . uh, break for now.”
“Is that why you moved back here? Grandma told me before she died that you lived in some nice place out in Virginia. I was surprised to see you up in here.”
Dante raised an eyebrow. “My mother told you a lot about me, didn’t she?”
But she didn’t tell me anything about you, Dante thought.
His mother had carried on a relationship with this young girl seemingly for years and had never mentioned it to him. Then again, she hadn’t told him who his real father was until the week before she died. His mother was accustomed to keeping secrets.
Kiki nodded at his question and took another bite. “Yeah, she told me that you were divorced . . . that you didn’t have any other kids . . . that you didn’t want me,” she said, glaring at him again.
He pursed his lips. For the first time in his life, Dante felt an inkling of guilt. He could remember how much it had hurt to be rejected by his father. It pained him to now realize that he had done the same to his own daughter.
“Look, uh . . . Kiki,” he began feebly, “when your mother got pregnant—”
“I hate it when people say ‘she got pregnant’! Like she got a cold. What the fuck is that about?”
“I . . . well, I . . . I was a teenager when it . . . uh, happened,” he continued, ignoring her sarcasm. “I was very young.”
“Like every other dude around here ain’t a daddy by nineteen,” Kiki said dryly between chews.
“But your mother and I weren’t that serious. I wouldn’t even call us boyfriend and girlfriend. We were just—”
“Save it.” Kiki held up her hand, stopping him. “Just save it. I don’t wanna hear it.” She finished the last of her sandwich and wiped the crumbs off her palms. “I didn’t come here for some story or excuses. I came here to ask if I could stay with you.”
Dante’s mouth fell open. “You want to live here with . . . with me?”
She nodded. “I was staying with my girl at her place a few blocks from here, but she got two kids. Her baby screams all day and all night and her man is messed up! He keeps trying to push up on me. He told me I couldn’t keep living there for free. He said either I had to pay rent or fuck him. And I don’t have no money, so . . .” She raised her empty hands.
When Dante continued to stare at her blankly, she pushed herself away from the counter and sucked her teeth.
“Look, I wouldn’t be here long, just until I got myself situated. I know Grandma has that other room. I could stay there. You wouldn’t even know I was here.”
Kiki really wanted to live with him. Even though he felt guilt for deserting her, he didn’t feel enough to want to share his mother’s home with her. She may have been his daughter, but no one else knew that. How would it look to let some teenage girl move in with him? And what if she stumbled upon the secret stash of prescription pills he kept locked away in the bathroom cabinets and found out about his addiction? What if Renee discovered that he was living here? Would it put Kiki at risk?
“You . . . you barely know me, Kiki. I barely know you.”
“So you’re saying I can’t live here?”
“What I’m saying is—”
“Dammit, I knew you were gonna say no! You never helped me out before, why the hell should you start now, right?” She then turned on her heel and strode toward the kitchen entrance. Dante watched helplessly as she stormed down the hall toward his front door.
He grimaced. “Kiki! Kiki, wait!”
“Fuck you!” she barked before swinging the front door open and slamming it shut behind her.