Real Wifeys: Get Money (25 page)

“I came to get my keys,” I said, ignoring her opening arms.

Her smile faded. “Harriet, don’t be that way,” she said.

I just shook my head and held out my hand. “I just want to go home. Can I have my keys?”

“No, you’re going to talk to me. I am your mother and I deserve your respect at all times, Harriet Lee Jordan.”

Lord knows it had been a long-ass night between meeting Detective Dick in the motel and getting released from jail this morning. I had touched on every possible emotion a person could deal with. A bitch was tired and on the edge. Not a good combo for peacemaking.

Then again, maybe it was time to do like Martin and pull out my little notebook with the list of people I needed to check and get to getting with my parents.

“You know what I deserved, Ma? I deserved parents who had my back. Who looked out for me. Who protected me,” I told her, stabbing a finger at my chest with each point made. I knew my eyes blazed with anger because I felt it burning in my stomach.

“Don’t you dare judge us because we chose not to follow you to jail when you know damn well we raised you better than do
anything
to get yourself arrested,” my mother fired back. “Just like we raised you not to drop out of college, not to become a stripper, not to shack up with some man who eventually goes to jail for his role in a rape. Don’t judge us, Harriet. Don’t you do it!”

I looked at her like she was mad crazy and I didn’t give a fuck how it looked. “Don’t judge!!!! I spent my whole life being judged by you two. You had a child and not a lump of clay that you could mold into whatever you wanted and then toss outside when I didn’t turn out to be what you thought was nice and pretty and presentable.”

“Calm down, Harriet.” I looked up at my father suddenly standing there.

“Calm down. Calm down,” I repeated. “You two have no clue what I been through and I really don’t think you care.”

“Anything that you have been through that is too much for you to bear was of your own doing,” my father said.

My fight left me just like that. Like somebody untied a balloon and released the air until it deflated. My soul was deflated.

“I got arrested because that detective was a dirty cop blackmailing me into having sex with him and I put a stop to it. The charges were dropped this morning,” I told him, meeting his hard stare. “See, you didn’t do a damn thing to protect me last night. I told you I was afraid that he was going to hurt me and not even take me to jail. I begged you . . .
I begged you
to be there for me. And you let me down.”

My mother reached for me and I brushed her hands away. “Why didn’t you tell us?” she asked.

“What did you do that he was blackmailing you?” my father asked.

I just held out my hand and didn’t even look at them. I ain’t had shit else to say. Any thoughts I had about sharing my memories of being molested disappeared with a quickness. I was sure my father would find a way to blame it all on me.

“Give her the keys,” my father said before turning to walk back into the house.

Boy, that shit right there fucked me up and good. I was relieved when my mother finally pulled my keys from her pocket and pressed them into my hand before she kissed my cheek. I just wanted to get away from there, go home, wash my ass, and climb under the covers for the rest of the day. Fuck it.

I turned and walked down the steps just as Sophie parked her gold Volvo in front of Mr. Alvarez’s house. I saw him sitting in the passenger seat.
Well, he ain’t dead.
I thought, moving toward my Jag and watching as he used a cane to get out the car.

I was about to climb into my whip but I turned. “Hi Sophie,” I said, with a little wave.

She gave me a stiff smile back.
Bitch.

“Are you okay, Mr. Alvarez?” I called out to him, sounding sweet and fake as hell.

He stopped in his tracks and turned to look over his shoulder at me. “Just an accident while I was cleaning some fish last night,” he lied.

“Oh,” I said, sounding like I didn’t give a fuck and meaning it as I turned and climbed into my car.

Hmm. He didn’t tell that I tortured his no-good ass. The same way he knew I had yet to tell the secret of his molestation all them years ago. I knew the secrets Mr. Alvarez and I shared were still just between us.

For now. I was far from done with his ass.

It’s amazing how every so often you get tested to just how much shit your plate can hold. And just when I thought mine was already full of enough shit, I walked into the air-conditioned lobby of the Twelve50 and saw Goldie at the concierge’s desk.

For one, that bitch was looking like new money in a formfitting stretch denim dress that I recognized from Neiman Marcus. I’d even tried it on and decided against it just last month.

Me? I looked just like I ran for my life, confronted my molester, got arrested, and slept in my clothes all night. Not the way I wanted to confront my enemy that I ain’t seen in over a year. I started to back out the door and regroup, but she turned and saw me.

In the moment, I had to decide how this was going to go down. Was I going to cuss her out, beat her ass, reveal my hate and need to make her pay? Fake it? What should I do? Because I knew this one moment would define everything I been gunning for over the last year. Everything I did was with the thought in the back of my mind that this person now walking up to me had to pay. Did I let that shit go now? Did I trust her now? Did I say, “
Thank you for helping me
”? Or did I say, “
You know what, you owe me that and more
”?

What the fuck should I do?

Goldie was a bold bitch to walk up and stand before me like it was nothing, when the last we saw each other we were fighting like cats and dogs. A heated and violent moment after I caught my man eating her out. After I saw my friend and my man stabbing me in the back when I was in the building.

“I thought we needed to talk,” she said, removing these badass graduated shades. “But I know the first thing I need say—”

I held up my hand, because I had to remind myself that she didn’t know that I know she got the charges against me dropped. I had no need to be grateful and gracious to her ass in that moment. I needed to get on her level. Not be caught off guard and smelling like yesterday. No haps. “If you want to talk, we can. I just want to change and I’ll be back down,” I said.

And then I moved around her and continued on to the elevator lobby. I didn’t look back at her to see if she waited. I got on the elevator and rode up to my floor.

The choice was hers. If she wanted to talk so badly, then thirty minutes sitting her ass in the lobby—because she wasn’t being invited into my house—wasn’t going to kill her.

I focused on getting dressed. Getting ready. I didn’t think about her or what she wanted or what she expected from me. I got just as fly as she was, seeking her level. Letting her know, this wasn’t the same old Luscious she “saved” from my days stripping during the early afternoons at Club Naughty. That Luscious—lost and looking up to her like she was Oprah or some shit—was gone. Long fucking gone.

By the time I pulled the handle on the front door and made my way back downstairs, forty-five minutes had passed. Maybe she waited. Maybe she didn’t. Whatever. I didn’t know. But what I did know was I looked hella good.

I flatironed my hair until it was bone straight and shiny, falling to the middle of my back like black silk. Smoky eyes, contoured cheeks, glossy lips (completely overboard for daytime, but who cared?). Diamond studs, bracelets, dome rings, and cross (all gifts from Make$ that I hadn’t even thought twice about giving back). My body was just as tight and banging as hers, and the soft peach strapless dress I wore clung to every curve and pushed my breasts high (plus the color looked good on my dark complexion). I finished it off with a pair of sky-high gold Louboutins and plenty of my favorite perfume.

“Damn,” one of my male neighbors said when I stepped off the elevator in the lobby.

I smiled at him over my shoulder, and his blonde head was poking out the elevator and checking my walk-away. “Good?” I asked.

“Hell yeah,” he said.

I gave him a wink and continued strutting through the elevator lobby like I owned Twelve50. I saw the top of Goldie’s blond-streaked head buried behind a copy of
Essence
magazine as she sat in the lobby.
Wow, the bitch waited.

She looked up and eyed me from head to toe real quick before I slid into the leather club chair across from her and crossed my gleaming chocolate legs. “Okay, here I am. Talk.”

Goldie smiled (or smirked a little) as she closed the magazine and tucked it back into her python Gucci bag. “You know my time is valuable, and I waited an hour for you, because this is convo we really need to have.”

I didn’t say shit. I just looked at her.

“Messing with Make$ behind your back was fucked up,” Goldie started, using her shades to push her hair back off her face. “And I’m woman enough to apologize for that shit. It wasn’t worth it.”

My lips stayed pressed.

“After the shit that happened to me. . . .” She paused and looked down at her shoes as she pulled her hair from behind her back to over her shoulder.

I saw her shoulders rise with the deep breath she took. “After the rape, I ain’t had no choice but to sit the fuck back and see what I did to other people,” she admitted, finally looking back up at me.

Tears were in her eyes but she didn’t let them fall.

“I don’t know if you know, but I used some connections I have to get your charges dropped,” Goldie said, twisting the diamond watch on her wrist.

Damn, I should’ve wore my watch
, I thought, even though I kept my face blank.

“I did that because I felt like I owed you that,” she said.

I still didn’t know what to do with this new twist. My eyes squinted. I wished I knew what the fuck her angle was.

Goldie sat back in her chair and licked her lips, looking at me. Waiting on a reaction. Waiting on a thank-you?

For a year I’d been watching this bitch’s every move. I knew a lot about her, maybe even everything about her. Never once did I show my hand. Never once did I reveal that I was gunning for her. The very fact that she sat in the lobby of my apartment building, apologizing and sharing her sadness about her rape, let me know that I was successful in being that covert.

She had no clue I was gunning for her.

I couldn’t reveal that now. I couldn’t throw away the last year. I couldn’t forgive and forget.

“Thank you for getting the charges dropped,” I said, feeling the words damn near choke me.

Goldie smiled. “I just want you to know that it’s just between me and you. I’m not looking for shit in return. I just felt like it was the least I could do,” she said, rising to her feet and pulling her shades down to cover her eyes.

I nodded and forced myself to smile.

“’Bye, Luscious,” she said, moving around the chair.

My eyes squinted as I watched her.

Goldie turned suddenly and I quickly made my face blank again. “I know we’ll never be friends, but I hope we can get past the bullshit,” she said, before she turned back and walked across the lobby and out the door to get back to her Bentley, her Upper East Side penthouse apartment, and her fabulous fucking life.

Two Weeks Later

It took me every last second of the last two weeks to come to grips with all the shit that had happened to me. Two weeks of me waiting for Detective Dick to call and say that he still could get me locked up and to meet him to fuck it all away. Two weeks of not being altogether straight about Mr. Alvarez not calling the police on me for holding him hostage in his house, branding his sick ass, and then plunging a knife into his thigh. Two weeks to finally answer my mother’s calls.

And two weeks to finally figure out just what I wanted to do about Goldie.

I had just left the shooting range and was zooming toward home on the 1/9 when I picked up my phone and dialed my snitch. Her phone was off. Since the day before, I’d tried calling her and she didn’t answer. Now the phone was disconnected. I fought the urge to throw my phone out the car in frustration. “Damn.”

My eyes and ears in Goldie’s operation was MIA.

Last night I found out her apartment was empty—and had been empty for the last week.

Sighing, I called Missy’s number.

“What’s up, chick?” she said.

“Nothing much. My mind ran across Kerri and her sister. How they doing?” I asked.

A while back, I asked Missy to take me to meet Kerri and her sister. I surprised them all by pressing a couple grand into Kerri’s hand. It was a little bit of the money I took from Make$’s safe-deposit box, and at the time I wished I had more to give her.

What Missy didn’t know was that when Kerri’s older sister Shani told me she wanted to make Goldie pay for what she did to her sister, I eventually talked her into using her banging body and good looks to interview to be one of the new Goldie’s Girls video vixens . . . my Trojan Horse.

My snitch was the vengeful sister of the young woman Goldie betrayed. That shit made it all the sweeter for me.

But now she was gone.

“I haven’t seen her or talked to them in so long,” Missy said.

I steered my car onto the next exit ramp and pulled off on the side of the road.

“Once I found out her dumb ass was working for Goldie after what that bitch did to her sister I was too through with her. No way. You feel me? No fuckin’ way. Goldie couldn’t
give
me money. I’d be like nah, I’m good, bitch. Keep it movin’.”

I rolled my eyes. Yes, we all hated Goldie. She wasn’t shit. I hoped she ate shit and died. Yadda, yadda, yadda. I wasn’t in the mood for an “I hate Goldie” gabfest. My mind was on making moves.