Song of Solomon (21 page)

“Shay . . .” Neil had planned to pay the bill using a credit card, but as he watched Shaylynn take quick footsteps down the walkway, he pulled out a one hundred dollar bill and laid it on the table. The cost of his pork tenderloin and her duck breast meals, combined with the desserts, came to less than seventy dollars, but he didn't have time to get change. The waiter probably deserved the extra tip just for not throwing them out for their minor disturbance.

He grabbed his jacket as he made his exit, and when he called her name again in pursuit, Shaylynn stopped and turned, waiting for him to catch up with her. Neil slipped his arm around her waist and changed her direction, leading her to the walkway where clientele sometimes strolled before or after eating to take in the sights. Neither of them spoke until they were a good distance away from the restaurant, unable to clearly hear any voices from the patrons, but still within earshot of the music that floated through the atmosphere.

“Please.” Neil pointed toward an iron bench, and Shaylynn sat without resistance. Her face was expressionless when he sat with her and reclaimed her hand. “Maybe I'm going about this all the wrong way,” he started. “Charge it to my head. I'm an old man, and I've been out of the game for a while.” He saw a slight smile tug at Shaylynn's lips that caused him to wonder out loud. “Is that it? Is our fifteen-year age difference a factor here?”

Shaylynn sighed, closed her eyes, and shook her head from side to side, giving Neil the impression that she thought he was oblivious. “You're not an old man by any definition. You're attractive, you're a lot of fun to be around, you're smart, strong, talented, and from everything that I can gather, you're sensitive and romantic. You're all those things, and you're also a man who worships God. You could have any woman you want.”

“Apparently not,” Neil said with a dry laugh.

“I promise . . . it's not you.”

“Then what is it?” Neil could hear the desperation in his own voice.

Shaylynn seemed to struggle to find the right words, but he knew in the end she chose to be honest. Neil guessed that she thought he deserved that much. “My heart's not available, Solomon. I know that sounds farfetched to you and to the rest of the world, but it's the truth. My heart is not available to anyone else because I still love Emmett. I would think that you, of all people, would understand.” Fresh tears were appearing and making their way down Shaylynn's cheeks. “I mean, you're trying to make it seem like I'm being so unreasonable. I saw the way you were looking at Emmett's photo in my house yesterday when you dropped by. It's like you think I'm crazy for having it there, but Val told me that you have a picture of you and Dwayne hanging in your room, and he's been gone much longer than Emmett. Why is it okay for you, but not for me?”

“Nothing's wrong with you having a picture of Emmett in your house, Shay. I don't think you're crazy for that, and I never intended to give the impression that I did. It wasn't the photo that I found odd; it was the flowers. I was just trying to put the pieces together: the flowers were violets . . . the song that had you crying the other night mentioned violets. I was just trying to make sense of it all. I just couldn't—”

“It means forever,” Shaylynn broke in.

Not understanding, Neil asked, “What means forever?”

“The song. That was our song,” she explained.

“When violets turn red and when roses turn blue, I'll be still in love with you. Those words meant that no matter what, even if the impossible or the unthinkable happened, our love would never change.”

When she went on to share the story of how Emmett had proposed to her in a field of violets and how the flowers on her mantel were the same flowers she'd held at his funeral seven years earlier, misery crept upon Neil. He felt as though he was fighting a losing battle and running short on the strength to continue.

They quieted as another couple strolled by hand in hand, taking in the beauty of Canoe restaurant's landscape. Even the darkness of the nighttime couldn't hide its majesty. During his and Shaylynn's conversation, Neil had tuned out the music in the background, but now he heard it clearly and was familiar with the song that played. It was Bill Withers's 1985 hit single, “You Just Can't Smile It Away.” Neil leaned his back against the bench and joined in the lyrics, not knowing whether he was singing the song to comfort himself or to send one last pitch to Shaylynn. Either way, it seemed to have worked.

As he continued singing, Neil found reassurance in the feel of Shaylynn's head as she rested it on his shoulder, and in the sudden recall that just a few minutes ago, for the first time, she'd called him Solomon.

Growing up, CJ had often heard his mother say that phone calls that came in the middle of the night or in the wee hours of the morning could be nothing but trouble. Whether that was indeed the case would probably forever lie in each asked person's opinion, but tonight, it rang true in the Loather home. CJ sat straight up in his bed with the phone pressed to his ear.

The sound of the telephone combined with his sharp movement stirred Theresa, and she sat up with him. “What is it, honey?”

“Nothing.” He responded with the half truth after placing the caller on hold and while peeling back the covers and slipping his feet in his slippers.

“Are you sure, CJ? Where are you going?”

“I'm just going in the living room so I won't disturb you. Go on back to sleep, baby. Everything's fine. It's a business call.” He knew Theresa would assume that it was one of the church members calling for prayer, or one of the many young men that he mentored, needing a listening ear. Those were the only types of calls that filtered into their household at hours such as this one. CJ watched as Theresa lay back down, although she never took her eyes off of him.

When the pastor stepped into the living room, he looked at the clock on the wall. It was two in the morning, an ungodly time to call anyone if it weren't an emergency. But he had told his former force mate, Victor Cross, to call him immediately if any information was discovered. CJ had had to be very careful about who he selected to entrust with this unauthorized assignment. He could get into a great deal of trouble if it were discovered that he'd used contacts he'd made as a public servant for a personal investigation into the life of the late Mayor Emmett Ford. Not only could CJ be publicly bashed for his part, but everybody he brought in on the assignment was at risk of losing their credibility, their jobs, or both. That was the major reason that he chose not to call any of his old buddies who still worked with the Dekalb County police force. It was just too risky.

CJ had spent a day in prayer prior to making the call. He didn't exactly get God's blessing to do what he did, but CJ did feel that in some way, the Lord was offering some grace and guidance so that he made choices that wouldn't scar him for life. Perhaps God was merciful, knowing that Pastor Loather's heart was in the right place.

CJ decided on the independent firm of Kris-Cross, P.I., which was run by the investigative team of Kristoff Nain and Victor Cross, two Jamaican-born cousins who had migrated to Atlanta when they entered college. Both men had worked with CJ on the force for several years before establishing their own private practice. In fact, as a rookie, Victor had shadowed CJ, learning most of what he knew about the business and about Jesus Christ from the preacher/ investigator. Although they both eventually branched out to answer their respective callings, the men never lost touch, and CJ knew that if there were anyone he could trust with a mission such as this, it was Victor.

With the call still on hold, CJ walked into the kitchen and splashed his face with cold water over the sink. He could almost hear Theresa scolding him for using the dish towel to dry his face. Now that he was fully awake and confident that he was coherent enough not to misinterpret what his friend was saying, CJ released the call and said, “Okay, I'm sorry, Vic. I had to get somewhere where I could speak freely.”

“No problem, mon,” Victor said.

That famed Jamaican saying generally tickled CJ, but his mind was too cluttered for it to even calculate its usual humor. “I think I misheard you the first time, so start over from the beginning with what you were telling me before, and talk slower. You know that accent of yours kicks into overdrive when you talk fast.”

“This has nothing to do with my accent, CJ. You heard me right the first time,” Victor assured. “It didn't take me and Kris no time to get the information that we gathered. Everything was too easy to confiscate and validate for this case to have gone cold. If you ask me, it looks like officials in Milwaukee might be fully aware of who killed their mayor, but if they reveal it, it will blow Emmett Ford right out of the water.”

“But that's the part that doesn't make sense. If the truth would make Ford look bad, why wouldn't they just go ahead and tell it?” CJ thought of how elated Neil would be to get this news. “I mean, wasn't the mayoral race divided down color lines? Black folks voted for him, but most white folks didn't, right? Wasn't the general consensus that the whole campaign had a lot of race issues surrounding it? Seems to me like if this were so, and Ford wasn't on the up and up, authorities in Milwaukee would be all too happy to expose it so that the dark cloud of racism, which no doubt still looms in the minds of some, could be cleared once and for all.”

Victor agreed. “If that were the case, it would only make sense, right? But look here: that whole race fire didn't start burning until
after
his death, and I think the match was lit intentionally just to make the general population lose sight of the real issue.”

“How so?”

“Think about it,” Victor said. “If the election were really divided down racial lines, Emmett Ford never would have won. In Milwaukee, Whites only outnumber Blacks by about five percent, but white
voters
outnumber black
voters
by a much wider margin. If a substantial number of white folks hadn't voted for Ford, he wouldn't have stood a chance.”

“What was the voter turnout on that day?” CJ asked. “If the white community was overconfident that their candidate would win, maybe they didn't go to the polls to vote as they should have, thinking their guy was a shoo-in.”

“I see you haven't lost that analytical ability to rationalize—that annoying gift that you were so famous for on the force.” The chuckle that followed was brief. Then Victor added, “Actually, you make a good point, but it's not one that Kris and I hadn't already considered and checked out. Milwaukee had an almost eighty-five percent voter turnout for that race. Emmett Ford won fair and square, but it wasn't on the African American vote alone. Given the statistics, it couldn't have been.”

“And you say this info was easy to gather?” CJ scratched his chin, feeling the investigator inside of him rising.

“Yeah, mon. Think about it. Kris and I got this information in twenty-four hours and without doing a full-scale investigation. There's no way on God's green earth that this case should have been so hard to crack that seven years later, it's still unsolved. Unless the investigators in Milwaukee are a pack of idiots, somebody ought to be behind bars, sitting on death row. There was so much evidence, including an eyewitness who heard the single gunshot and saw a man running from the area where the crime took place. Take my word for it when I tell you that there is no way that a real, honest to goodness effort was put forth to make an arrest in this case.”

CJ walked from the living room to his home office and sat in the chair behind his desk, running a hand over his head. This was almost too much to grasp at this hour of the morning. When he contacted Victor, CJ had all but assured the man that he wouldn't find anything. The investigation was really just to prove to Neil that Emmett's slate was clean. And after telling him so with the proof of an investigator's report, CJ planned to convince his friend to go after Shaylynn's heart like a man, and not like some hungry vulture, swooping down to feast on the remains of the woman's broken heart and taking advantage of her vulnerability. But the news CJ was receiving was backfiring, and it made him regret his decision to go against his better judgment, not to mention what he knew was God's direction.

“So are you saying that Ford's death wasn't race-related in any manner?” CJ knew the answer before he asked the question.

“Honestly, I don't think racism had one iota to do with this man's murder. Emmett Ford was the Barack Obama of Milwaukee. He had his haters, no doubt, but people were ready for a change, and he had way more people for him than against him. This wasn't a black/white thing. White folks loved Ford just as much as black people did, and he had mad support across the board during his bid for office.

“And here's the kicker: if you listen to the description that the eyewitness gave the police when he was questioned seven years ago, it'll make you throw the whole deck of race cards away. Mind you, this is a description that never made the news.

“I can't give you the eyewitness's name because I don't even have it to give. We used connections to put word on the street in the area where Ford was shot that we were looking for any possible witnesses. After weeding out all of the fakers and shakers, too many facts lined up for this John Doe not to be telling the truth. And it was obvious that he was scared as a rabbit when he was talking to me.”

“But you're sure he was on the up and up?” CJ asked.

“Yeah, I'm sure. He even remembered the name of one of the detectives that he gave his story to. And guess what? That detective was found dead the same day he took the eyewitness report. His car veered off the road somehow and smashed into a tree, and he was found slumped over his steering wheel with fatal head injuries.”

“You don't think the accident killed him?”

“I can't say one way or the other. Apparently the injuries were consistent with the impact, but the timing of it all is a bit too ironic for me. Our John Doe must have thought the same, since he never spat a word of what he saw to another soul.”

“Well, how did you get him to tell you what he wouldn't tell the media?”

Victor chuckled. “Because the love of money is the root of all evil. You know as well as I know that if you set the right price, you can buy just about any information that you need.”

“You paid him?” CJ couldn't believe the lengths that his old chum had gone to just to help him out.

“Don't get misty-eyed,” Victor said. “Save the tears for when you receive the bill and see how many zeros are in the bottom line.”

CJ wanted to protest, but he couldn't. He'd asked for the service, and the resulting bill was probably God's way of punishing him for his disobedience.

“Let me read you what this guy told the police,” Victor said. “The description is a bit sketchy, but it was enough for me to get a good handle on the likelihood of the killer's ethnicity, and the police should have too. The man admitted that it was nighttime and no clear facial features of the killer could be seen, but the man he spotted fleeing the scene was described as wearing an oversized T-shirt and extremely baggy jeans that he was holding up at the waist with his hands as he escaped.

He was dark in complexion, approximately six feet tall, one hundred eighty pounds, wearing a baseball cap, and he made his escape in an early model Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme with large, expensive wheels. Not stereotyping our brothers, CJ, but I'm inclined to believe that this was a black man.”

Nodding in silent agreement, CJ said, “So what are you really trying to say about the reason behind this murder, Vic?”

“I'm saying he lived a double life that led to a single death. There was the Emmett Ford who was the doting husband and do-gooder that spearheaded organizations that offered mentoring for kids and launched efforts to clean up the drugs from inner-city neighborhoods, but then there was the Emmett Ford that left a paper trail of conclusive evidence proving that in his early years of politics, and even during the time that he ran for the office of mayor, he went on frequent excursions masked as business trips, where he paid everything in cash—cash that was never withdrawn from his own accounts.”

CJ grimaced. “What did he do on these so-called business trips?”

“Illegal gambling, drug laundering, prostitution. . . you name it. If he campaigned against it, he took part in it. I'm telling you, his marriage notwithstanding, this man bought women like we buy suits. I can't judge him on whether or not he loved his wife as much as you tell me that she loved and still loves him. I'm sure the other women meant nothing more to him than a lay, and he meant nothing more to them than a dollar. But he wasn't even close to being a one-woman man, and if his widow knew that, her tears would dry up like an Arizona desert.”

“No doubt,” CJ said. It would be all that he'd have to tell Neil in order for his friend to get the chance he wanted with Shaylynn.

“The operation that he was a part of was big, CJ. Huge,” Victor went on. “We didn't find out names of who were, or maybe still are in it, but I'm guessing that the names on the membership roll would blow our minds. That's why they didn't divulge the information that would blow Ford out of the water, because it would blow them out too. We believe that Ford was a puppet for politicians long before he ran for any high offices. As a matter of fact, his rise to success in government was likely based on the backs he'd scratched while he climbed up the political ladder.”

CJ was getting a headache from the overload. This was far worse than he thought. “So you've drawn an early conclusion that Emmett was a crook, and what? His death was the result of some kind of illegal dealing that went bad?”

“Not exactly, but you're on the right track,” Victor said. “My early conclusion is that Ford, at one time, was a crook.
Was
,” Victor stressed. “The slanderous paper trail stops right about the time he won the election. The new trail he leaves behind, the one that begins just weeks before his murder, shows something entirely different: no trips, no drug laundering, no gambling, no call girls. We find that he starts being a lot more hands-on in his clean-up organizations, and get this, CJ: he becomes a regular churchgoer. At the church he attended, it's noted on the books . . . the day he joined, the day he confessed Christ, the dates he paid tithe—”