Cross Justice (14 page)

“I’m beginning to see why you wanted to leave this place,” I said.

“Oh, your grandfather saw to that,” she said.

“What was he like?” I asked. “Reggie.”

“Huh,” Nana Mama said, as if she didn’t want to talk about him, but then she did. “He was not like anyone I’d ever met before. A charmer, I’ll give him that. He could sweet-talk like it was his second language, and the way he told you about his adventures at sea made you want to listen forever. He swept me off my feet with those stories. And he was handsome, and a good dancer, and he made a lot of money, by Starksville standards.”

“But?”

Nana Mama sighed. “But he was away five, six months a year. I’m sure he caroused outside our marriage when he was in foreign ports because he wasn’t shy about doing it when he came home. Got to the point where all we did was fight. He didn’t mind drinking while we fought, and he didn’t mind using his fists either. I decided one day that, despite my marriage vows, that wasn’t the life I wanted, or deserved. So I divorced Reggie and got enough money out of it to go on up to Washington and start all over. All in all, it was the best move I’ve ever made.”

She fell silent then for a few moments. “You saw Reggie’s grave?”

“He’s with his parents,” I said.

“Always liked Alexander and Gloria. They treated me kind, and they loved your father, especially Alexander.”

“I was named after him,” I said.

“You were.”

“He was a blacksmith.”

“The best around these parts. Never wanted for work.” She sighed again, said, “I need to take a nap.”

“I know the feeling,” I said, putting the car in gear.

We rolled back toward Loupe Street and the bungalow with the car windows down. Along the way, we passed Rashawn Turnbull’s house. There was a gleaming, cream-colored Cadillac Escalade parked out front.

I spotted three people on the porch. A tall man with iron-gray hair wearing a blue suit and a blond, sharply dressed woman in her fifties were engaged in a furious argument with a sandy-haired younger woman in cutoff shorts and a red T-shirt.

The younger woman sounded drunk when she shrieked: “That’s bullshit! You never gave a shit about him alive! Leave my house and stay the hell out of my life!”

BREE AND I
waited almost an hour, had lunch, and made sure that Nana Mama had gone to take her nap before returning to Rashawn Turnbull’s house.

“So that was definitely Cece?” Bree asked when I pulled in where the Escalade had been parked.

“Sure fit the description,” I said, getting out.

We went up on the porch. A trash can had been turned over and was surrounded by broken beer bottles and old pizza boxes. Inside, a television blared the music from one of the Star Wars movies, Darth Vader’s theme.

I knocked, got no answer. I knocked again, much harder.

“Go the fuck away!” a woman screamed. “I never want to see you again!”

I yelled, “Mrs. Turnbull? Could you come to the door, please?”

Glass smashed inside before the television went quiet. Then the ratty yellow curtain on the near window was pulled aside.
Rashawn’s mother peered blearily at us through the screen. You could tell at a glance that she’d been beautiful once, but now her hair was the color and consistency of loose straw, her yellowed teeth were ground down, and her skin was sallow.

Her sunken, rheumy hazel eyes drifted when she asked, “Fuck are you?”

“My name’s Alex Cross,” I said. “This is my wife, Bree.”

Cece lifted a cigarette, took a drag with contempt, said, “I don’t go for none of that Jehovah’s shit, so get your ass off my porch.”

Bree said, “We’re police detectives.”

Rashawn Turnbull’s mother squinted at us, said, “I know all the cops in Starksville and for three towns around, and I don’t know either of you two.”

“We’re from Washington, DC,” I said. “We work homicide up there, and I used to be with the FBI.”

“Then what are you doing here?”

I hesitated, then told her. “We’re looking into your son’s case.”

“What for?”

“Because my cousin is Stefan Tate.”

You’d have thought I punched her. Her head snapped back and then shot forward in rage. She hissed, “That evil sonofabitch is gonna die for what he did. And I am going to be there to see it happen. Now get off my porch before I find my granddad’s shotgun.”

The curtain fluttered shut.

“Mrs. Turnbull!” I yelled. “We do not work for Stefan. If my cousin killed your boy, I’ll be sitting right there beside you when they execute him. I told Stefan the same thing. We work for only one person. Your son. Period.”

There was no answer, and for a moment I thought she might indeed have gone in search of her granddad’s shotgun.

Bree called out, “Cece, will you please talk to us? I promise you we have no ax to grind. We just want to help.”

There was no answer for several beats.

Then a pitiful voice said, “There’s no helping this, or me, or Rashawn, or Stefan. No one can change any of it.”

“No, we can’t change what’s happened,” I said. “But we can make sure the right person suffers for the horrible things that were done to your boy. Please, I promise you we won’t take up much of your time.”

A few moments later, a bolt was thrown, and the door creaked inward.

IN THE COURSE
of my career, I have entered the homes of many grieving mothers and witnessed my share of shrines erected in mourning for a lost child. But I’d never seen anything quite like this.

Broken furniture. Broken liquor bottles. Shattered plates and mugs. The small living area was a complete shambles except for an oval coffee table that featured a green marble urn surrounded by a collection of framed photographs of Rashawn from infancy on up.

The older pictures all looked like yearly school portraits. In every one, Rashawn was grinning magnetically. Seriously, you did not want to take your eyes off that boy’s smile.

Around the entire edge of the table and surrounding the pictures like the spokes on a medicine wheel, there were toys, everything from an air-soft pistol to action figures, stuffed animals, and Matchbox cars. The only things on the table that looked like they hadn’t belonged to Rashawn were
a half-empty bottle of Smirnoff vodka, two blackened glass pipes, a small butane torch, and a baggie of some white substance.

On the wall hung a sixty-inch flat-screen. It was split horizontally into two feeds. The lower one was playing
The Empire Strikes Back,
the volume turned down low. The upper one showed home videos of Rashawn as a young boy, four, maybe five. He was wearing a cape and jumping around swinging a toy lightsaber.

“He liked Star Wars a lot,” Bree said sympathetically.

Cece rubbed at her nose, sniffed, and curled the corners of her lips up in the direction of a smile. “He’d watch those movies over and over again. Like they were new every time. Sometimes we’d watch them together. He knew all the lines. I mean, all of them. Who can do that?”

“A very smart boy,” I said.

“He was that,” she said, putting out her cigarette. She scratched her arm and looked longingly at the pipes and the drugs.

“Tell us about Stefan Tate,” I said.

Cece hardened, said, “He’s a sadist and a cold-blooded killer.”

“Did you think he was a sadist before Rashawn died?”

“Who broadcasts they’re a sadist?” she asked.

“Good point,” I said. “But you had no warning?”

“If I’d had a warning, he wouldn’t have spent a second with my boy,” Cece said, going around the couch and almost reaching for one of the pipes. Then she seemed to realize the drugs were sitting there in the open and pushed the baggie under a teddy bear.

She lit another cigarette. We asked her about Rashawn and
Stefan, and she corroborated what my cousin had told us: that they’d met at school and took an instant liking to each other, that Stefan had become a big brother/father figure to the boy, and that something had happened in the days before Rashawn’s death that made him want to sever his relationship with my cousin.

“Stefan says he doesn’t know what was behind it,” I said.

Cece took a drag, nodded to the urn, and said bitterly, “He came on to Rashawn, and Rashawn rejected him.”

“Rashawn told you that?” I asked.

“I’m just reading into the way Rashawn acted the last time I saw him.”

“Which was like what?” Bree asked.

“Like he’d seen something to be scared about,” Cece said, looking at the screen where Luke Skywalker was preparing to fight his father. “I’ve asked myself a million times since why I didn’t push Rashawn to tell me that morning. But I was late for an AA meeting. And trying to stay sober. And trying to do the right thing.”

She paused, and then a shudder went through her, and she choked and wept. “My last memory of my little boy is him staring into his cereal bowl like he was seeing things in the milk. Oh God!”

Cece snatched up the pipe, dug out the baggie, and with shaking hands tried to load whatever it was she meant to smoke. Bree came around to her and put her hand on her arm. She said in a soothing tone, “That’s not gonna help.”

Rashawn’s mother yanked her arm away, turned her back on Bree, protecting the pipe, and sneered, “It’s the only thing that does.”

I said, “Are you planning to go to the courthouse tomorrow?”

Cece snatched up the small butane torch and backed away to the other side of the table, glaring at us.

“You not going to start in on that, are you?” she demanded. “I already heard an earful on that today.”

She lit the torch and stared greedily at the pipe bowl as she sucked and laid the flame. She took a whole lungful, held it, then rocked her head back and exhaled long and slow. I thought she was going to black out, but she just blinked stupidly at us a few times and then set the pipe down.

“Someone talked to you about being in court tomorrow?” I asked quietly.

The anger had left her, replaced by scorn.

“Harold and Virginia, dear Moms and Pops,” she said, plopping into a chair with a broken seat. She began doing imitations of a proper Southern belle and a deep-voiced man. “‘Straighten up for the trial, Cece. You wouldn’t want to be seen like this.’ ‘You’ve got to do it in honor of your dear Rashawn, Cynthia Claire.’”

She leaned over, grabbed the vodka bottle, took a belt, and went off on a tirade. “The fucking hypocrites. All caring and such, now that he’s dead. Alive, they were ashamed of his blood!”

Cece hugged her knees and shook her head violently. “They still don’t give a shit. Only things those two are concerned about is their money and their precious image in the community.”

Deepening her voice, she said, “‘Don’t want to have Cece do any more damage than has already been done. We must do everything we can to minimize our association with the little dead mulatto. With God’s blessing, none of our posh friends down on Hilton Head will hear a word of it.’”

She took another swig of vodka and stewed there as if she were alone for almost a minute before hanging her head and saying, “I don’t go to court tomorrow, it’s like
I’m
ashamed of him, ashamed to be his mother, isn’t it?”

Bree said, “If you don’t go, you’re saying you’ve given up on him, that he doesn’t matter to you anymore.”

“But he does matter.” Cece sobbed. “Rashawn was everything to me. The one good and decent thing I ever did in my whole life. And look what happened to him! My God, look what happened to him!”

Bree went over and put her arms around the woman’s heaving shoulders. “I know it seems impossible, but you’ve got to be strong now.”

“I don’t have that kind of strength.” Cece moaned. “I never have. It’s the story of my life.”

“Until today,” Bree said, rubbing her back. “The new story of your life is that you hit rock bottom today, Cece. You hit rock bottom, and from the depths of your despair, you asked for help. And when you did, Rashawn’s spirit reached out, took your hand, and gave you the strength to go into that courtroom tomorrow morning clear-eyed and sober, because only you can be his representative at the trial. Only his mother can stand there for him and make sure justice prevails.”

Head still down, straw hair still hanging, Cece tensed up as if to fight again. Then she shuddered long and slow. And as it died out, something seemed to fall away inside the dead boy’s mother. Cece sagged against Bree, and slept.

Bree glanced over, whispered, “I’ll stay with her. All night if I have to.”

Raw emotion welled in my throat.

“You okay with it?” she asked.

I smiled, said hoarsely, “More than okay.”

“Then why are you upset?”

“I’m not. What you did there with her was … just …”

“What?”

“I have never been more proud to call you my wife, Bree Stone.”

THE MANSION HAD
been modeled after a villa on the Amalfi Coast and it had once been a grand place. Now it was showing its age. The grounds weren’t as well tended as they had been. The front gate and door needed paint. Much of the brickwork required pointing. And who knew when the windows had last gotten a proper cleaning?

Coco knew all about the house’s many deficiencies and needs. He just had to look around the bedroom he was in to get upset. The silk wallpaper was separated at the seams in many places and curling back yellow. Scratches and dings showed on almost all the furniture. And the Oriental rugs were starting to look dingy.

Coco refused to dwell on any of it. He chose to ignore what had to be done to the house, just as he had chosen to ignore the
Palm Beach Post
’s story on Ruth Abrams’s death.

Instead, he accessorized the three outfits laid out on a kingsize bed. He loved to accessorize. It calmed him as much as cross-dressing did.

For the past hour, ever since he’d read that the police were calling Ruth’s death a homicide, Coco had been adjusting the look of each ensemble using items from a large box of estate jewelry.