Triptych (31 page)

“What time was this?”

“Around five o’clock.”

Will glanced at his watch, but the digital clock on the TV told him the actual time. “So, to your knowledge, she’s been gone about five hours?”

“Are you going to tell me I need to wait another day before it matters?”

“I wouldn’t drive all the way down here to tell you that, Ms. Allison. I would just call you on the phone.”

“You think she’s just another black girl run off with a man, but I’m telling you, I know that girl.”

“She wasn’t in school today,” Will reminded her.

The old woman looked down. Will saw that her hands were like claws in her lap, arthritis twisting them into unusable lumps. “She was suspended for back-talking a teacher.”

“Cedric, too?”

“This is turning adversarial,” she noted, but she still kept talking. “I don’t get around very easily, especially since they took my Vioxx away. Their mother has been incarcerated for more than half of Cedric’s life. She’s a heroin addict, just like Aleesha Monroe. The only difference is that my Glory got caught.”

Will knew better than to interrupt.

“I laid down the law with Glory. Stayed up nights, followed her whenever she left the house. I was that child’s
skin,
I was so close to her. She hated every minute of it-still hates me now-but I was her mother and that’s what I was going to do. Same with them.” With difficulty, she lifted a hand, indicating the closed bedroom door. Will saw a shadow move underneath and guessed that Cedric was listening.

Eleanor continued, “Glory pretty much let those two run wild. She didn’t care what they did so long as she didn’t get into trouble and could still keep putting that needle in her veins.” The woman sighed, lost in her own memories. “Jasmine’s as wild as Glory was, and I can’t keep up with her. It took me five minutes to walk to that doorway tonight to see what Cedric was running on about.”

Will wanted to say that he was sorry, but knew she would only correct him, remind him that her condition, the miserable way she must have spent her life trying to do the right thing while the walls fell in around her, was not his fault.

Eleanor told him, “Cedric was a baby when Glory lost custody.” She managed to lean forward. “He’s a smart boy, Mr. Trent. A smart boy with a future if I can keep him out of this mess long enough for him to grow.” She pressed her lips together. “There’s something he’s not telling me. He loves his sister and she loves him-loves him like a mother because that’s what she had to be when Glory was busy shooting that trash into her system.” She paused. “I think I have more influence on him. And there’s no denying Jasmine loves him. She doesn’t want him mixed up in the life around here, the thugs and the gang bangers and the hoodlums. She embraces it, but she knows her baby brother can do better.”

Will asked, “Has Jasmine run away before?”

“Twice, but always because there was a fight. We didn’t fight yesterday. We haven’t fought all week, for a change. Jasmine wasn’t angry with me, or at least no more angry than any teenager is at the person in charge.”

“Does she have a boyfriend?”

“Boy? He’s fifteen years older than she is.”

“What’s his name?”

“Luther Morrison. He lives on Basil Avenue, about three miles from here, in the Manderley Arms. I already called him. He says she’s not there.” She explained, “Each time she ran away before, I called him. Both times he told me she was there. Luther pretends that he believes Jasmine is seventeen, but he knows that child’s age just as sure as I’m sitting here and he’ll do anything I say to keep me from calling the cops on him.”

Will had to ask, “Why haven’t you called the police on him? She’s thirteen, he’s almost thirty. That’s statutory rape.”

“Because I learned with her mother that a girl who’s set on destroying herself will not be stopped. If I get this one arrested, she’ll just go to the next one, and he’ll be even worse than this Morrison, if that’s possible.”

“Gran?” Cedric asked. He was still in the bedroom, peeking around the edge of the door. “I finished cleaning the room.”

“Come here, child.” She reached out her arm for him and he came. She told Will, “I called the police as soon as I realized Jasmine was missing. I’m sure you can guess their response.”

“They told you to give it twenty-four hours, maybe forty-eight if they know she’s run away before.”

“Correct.”

Will addressed his words to Cedric. “You sounded pretty upset when you called me. Can you tell me why?”

Cedric looked at his grandmother, then back at Will. His shoulders went up into a shrug.

The old woman stirred, reaching into the front pocket of her house-dress. “Walk Mr. Trent out and check the mail for me, baby. Mr. Trent?” Will struggled to get out of the chair. “Thank you for your concern.”

“Please don’t bother,” he said, noticing that she was trying to stand. “I’ll let you know what I find out.” He reached out to shake her hand, remembering at the last moment that the arthritis would make it too painful. She grabbed his hand before he could stop her, and he was surprised by the intensity of her grip. “Please,” she begged. “Please find her, Mr. Trent.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, knowing that she was proud and that it took everything she had to ask him for help.

He followed Cedric down the stairs and out into the parking lot. The overhead lights cast a strange glow over everything and Will realized that it was only a few hours past the time that Aleesha Monroe had been murdered on Sunday night. Cedric walked to the grassy area by the mailboxes where Jasmine had jumped him this morning.

Will watched the boy slip his key into the lock, waiting until he’d retrieved the mail to tell him, “This is serious, Cedric.”

“I know.”

“You’ve got to tell me what you know about Jasmine. Why did she tell you not to talk to the cops?”

“She said y’all are bad.”

That was a sentiment shared by pretty much everyone within a five-mile radius. “Tell me what happened on Sunday.”

“Nothing.”

“That’s not going to work this time, Cedric. Jasmine’s gone, and you heard your granny in there. I know you were listening at the door. I saw your shadow underneath.”

Cedric licked his lips, sorting through the mail.

Will knelt down in front of him, put both his hands on Cedric’s shoulders. “Tell me.”

“There was a man,” Cedric finally admitted his grammar improved now that his guard was down. “He paid Jazz some money to make a phone call. That’s all.”

“What kind of phone call?”

“To the police. To say Leesha was being hurt.”

Will looked over his shoulder at the pay phone. The booth was dark, the overhead light busted out. “He told her to call from the pay phone?”

Cedric nodded. “Didn’t make no sense. She could’a used her cell. Everybody knows y’all can’t trace a cell.”

“Did he pay her?” Will guessed.

“Twenty bucks,” Cedric admitted. “And then he gave her a dime for the phone.”

Will dropped his hands and sat back on his heels. “What’s that phone cost, about fifty cents?”

“Yeah,” Cedric answered. “Jazz told him that a dime don’t buy shit, and then he got all nervous and gave her two quarters.”

Will wondered what the odds were that they’d find two quarters in the coin box that had the murderers fingerprints on them. Then he wondered if it was Aleesha’s murderer who had paid the girl to make the call. Why would the killer pay someone to report his own crime?

Will asked, “Did you recognize the man?”

The boy went back to shuffling the mail in his hands.

“Do you think you’d remember him if you saw a picture of him?”

“He was white,” Cedric said. “I didn’t see him too good. I was over here.”

Will turned back to the phone booth. The lights around the parking lot and the mailboxes were strong enough to blind a grown man, but none of them would have illuminated the pay phone.

He asked Cedric, “What do you think happened?”

He didn’t answer right away. Instead, he started shuffling the mail again. “She always told me before,” he said. “When she was going off with Luther, she always told me so I wouldn’t worry.”

“After Jasmine made the call, which way did the man go when he left?”

Cedric pointed up the street toward the exit.

“He didn’t have a car?”

“Don’t know,” the boy admitted. “We was out here on our way to Freddy’s, and then he hollered us over. Jazz told me to go on see Freddy, but I stayed around to make sure she was okay.”

Will wondered at the girl going up to a strange man in the dark. Maybe she was heading down that wrong path faster than her grandmother thought.

He asked, “Where’s Freddy’s?”

Cedric pointed across the street to another building.

“Did Jasmine go with you after she made the call?”

“After, yeah.”

“And the man left up the street, toward the main road?”

Cedric nodded, chewing his bottom lip like he had more to say. Will gave him some time, and eventually, the boy said, “Jazz say she heard screaming in the stairs. Leesha was yelling.”

“What was she yelling?”

“Jazz don’t know. She was just yelling like she was being hurt, but she done that before, you know? Leesha takes up men sometimes and they kind of mean, but she say she don’t mind.”

“Cedric,” Will said, putting his hands back on the boy’s shoulders. “I need you to be straight with me now. Did Jasmine see who was hurting Aleesha? Did anyone talk to her, say anything to her?”

Cedric shook his head. “She told me she didn’t see nothing, didn’t hear nothing.”

“”Was she saying it like she did today, where if you thought about it awhile, you might think that what she was really saying was that maybe she
did hear
something, but she just wasn’t going to tell anybody?“

“No,” Cedric insisted. “She would’a told me.”

Will didn’t know if that was true or not. Jasmine wanted to protect her brother. She wouldn’t have told him something that might put him in danger.

Cedric reached into his pocket and took out a twenty-dollar bill. “This is what she wanted,” he told Will. “I took the money he gave her for making the phone call. That’s why she was chasing me.” He was trying to give Will the money.

“Hold on to it for me,” Will said, knowing he couldn’t do anything with the bill. “Jasmine didn’t leave because you took the money, Cedric. You know that, right?”

The boy shrugged, and the mail slipped from his hands. Will bent down to help pick it up. From the colors, he gathered they were mostly bills with about ten pieces of junk mail thrown in. Will probably had the same limited-time offers waiting for him back home.

He looked up at the mailboxes. “Cedric?”

“Yeah?”

“Did Aleesha have a mailbox here?”

“Yeah,” Cedric answered, pointing to one of the higher boxes.

Will stood, making note of the number. “Let’s get you back inside, okay?”

“I’m all right.”

“I need to check something in Aleesha’s apartment. Let me walk you up.”

Cedric was slow going up the stairs. He used his key to get into his grandmother’s apartment, but didn’t go inside. Instead, he watched Will continue up to Aleesha Monroe’s place. Will felt the boy’s silent disapproval burning into his back:
Where are you going? You promised you’d help.

Will still had the key in his vest pocket from earlier. He slipped it into the lock and turned it to the side, hearing the bolt engage. He tried the knob but the door did not open. Will was the first person to admit- at least to himself-that he had trouble with left and right, and God knows it got worse when he was tired, but even he had opened enough locks to know which direction to turn a key in order to open it. He slid the key back into the lock and tried the other way, hearing the bolt click again. This time, the door opened.

The apartment still had that same feel to it, like something bad had happened. He stood in the doorway with only the light from the hall illuminating the room. Will saw a drop of blood on the floor and knelt beside it. Without thinking, he put his fingers to the drop to check whether or not it was dry.

His fingers came back clean, but Will hadn’t noticed the drop the first time he had come into the apartment. He flipped on the lights, thinking about the lock. This morning, Jasmine and Cedric had been making a racket when Will was locking the door. Michael and Will had run down the stairs at full speed. Maybe Will hadn’t locked the door all the way. He’d certainly been in a hurry.

But Will remembered locking that door, hearing the bolt catch.

He checked the apartment, making sure nothing was missing. Because of his reading problem, Will doubted he had a photographic memory, but he could memorize scenes. He remembered where things went and he knew when they were out of place.

Still, something was off. The room just
felt
different.

The junk drawer looked the same, the ring of keys still tucked into the corner under a couple of store receipts. Will checked through them until he found a smaller key like the one Cedric had. Every cop who came into this building had to pass those mailboxes. Will had, too, though, and he hadn’t asked if Monroe had any mail. Then again, Will wasn’t the lead detective on the case. With Michael on leave, the inimitable Leo Donnelly was now in charge.

Will made sure to lock the door, checking it twice before heading back down the stairs. As with every other surface in the Homes, the mailboxes were sprayed with graffiti, and Will identified Aleesha’s by the obscene drawing that pointed up to it. He slid in the key and turned the lock with some difficulty. He found the problem when the door swung open. The small compartment was packed with mail. Will took out the envelopes in clumps, noting the colors and the bright logos adorning the outsides. There was a plain white envelope in with the rest. A bulge was in the bottom corner, and he felt it with his fingers, guessing something metal was inside. From the shape, he thought it might be a cross. Someone had addressed the envelope by hand in a looping cursive that Will could not begin to decipher.

He looked at his watch, really looked at it like he never did, until he could make out the time. It was almost midnight. Angie would probably be getting home from work soon.