Body Of Truth Page 2

  “My brother Jonathan. I just called him. He should be here in about an hour.”

  “Which one is that?” Joanna had three brothers, all taciturn, somber-faced men, all cops in one form or another. The lot of them gave her the willies. Dealing with cops was like dealing with doctors: both had delusions of grandeur. Doctors thought they were GOD; cops thought they were THE LAW. Of the two she preferred doctors. Doctors didn’t carry guns.

  “The baby.”

  Dana shook her head. The way she spoke made him sound like some angelic cherub, when from what she remembered of “the baby” he was six-foot-three, rock-solid and mean. Joanna claimed his lousy disposition came from being the youngest and always having to prove himself. Dana thought he was just plain crazy. While other cops were doing their damndest to get transferred out of the Forty-Fourth precinct, he’d transferred in. If that didn’t speak for a profound lack of judgment, she didn’t know what did.

  Joanna must have read her thoughts from her expression, because she added. “I know. He’s arrogant, he’s a pain in the ass, but he’s my brother. I’m stuck with him.”

  Dana snorted. “I know what you mean. Sometimes I could gladly take a bat to Tim, but then they’d get me for child abuse.”

  Joanna laughed. “Some kid. He’s a foot taller than you are.”

  “And still growing. I’ve got the food bills to prove it.”

  Joanna shifted in her seat. “Why do you want to know who’s picking me up?”

  Dana lifted her shoulders. “I was going to pick up something for dinner from across the street. Tim’s leaving tonight to spend the week with the family of one of his friends. They’re heading down to Florida and I hate cooking just for me.” She gestured over her shoulder toward the door with her thumb. “Why don’t you come with me? We can hang out in more comfortable surroundings until he shows up.”

  “Sounds like a plan. This chair and my back do not get along.”

  Dana helped Joanna gather her things and tape an unnecessary note on the glass outer door of the office. Dana had already told Ray about the party in the hopes he’d pass that information on to whoever came for Joanna that night.

  As they crossed the street, Dana hid a smile. She only hoped the women assembled inside the Italian restaurant didn’t send Joanna into premature labor when they yelled, “Surprise!” Joanna had worked for At-Home for twelve years in one capacity or another and was one of the few supervisors the nurses respected. Over thirty women had responded to the invitation saying they were coming, but the number who turned up could actually be higher.

  Fiorello’s had been selected as the party spot for three reasons: the food was divine, it was large enough to seat fifty diners in the front room, and its tinted glass allowed diners to look out but not passersby to look in. Dana pulled open the door to let Joanna enter ahead of her. A second later, a roar of “Surprise” hit them like a wave.

  Joanna staggered back a step, but Dana pushed her forward. “Surprise,” Dana echoed.

  Joanna pursed her lips and sent Dana an evil glare. “I’m going to get you for this later.”

  Dana stuck out her tongue. “Promises, promises.”

  A couple of the nurses rushed forward to help Joanna into a white wicker chair at the center of the room, decorated with pink and blue ribbons. Dana took a seat at one of the tables. She’d served as chief organizer of the event, but being one of the few childless women present, she had no gruesome childbirth stories to share, no tales of late night feedings or lactation woes. She had raised her brother alone for the past six years, but it wasn’t the same. So she was content to remain on the perimeter and let the moms have their day.

  Joanna said her brother would come for her, but it was her husband Ray who walked in the door a half-hour later to collect her. Although Ray was tall, handsome and a doctor, the product of a privileged upbringing—every mother’s wet dream for her female offspring—Dana had never liked him. Something about him seemed disingenuous, too slick, though she couldn’t say what. She also did her best to disguise her dislike, as expressing it would only form a rift between her and Joanna. Joanna might be clueless, but Dana was certain Ray knew, and made her pay for it at every opportunity.

  “Good evening, ladies,” he said, letting the door close on its own steam behind him.

  The other women greeted him warmly with jokes and laughter and demands that he make sure to take care of their friend during her maternity leave. Dana got up and busied herself getting Joanna’s things together to take them out to Ray’s SUV. She didn’t look up until she noticed him standing in front of her.

  He smiled one of his slick smiles. “Don’t worry about all this. I’ll get it.”

  She forced a smile to her lips. “It’s no problem.” She hefted the bag she’d packed against her hip. “I’ll take this stuff out to the car. Is it open?” She didn’t wait for his answer before starting toward the door. She made it outside to the Navigator parked at the curb before she felt Ray come up beside her.

  He beeped the trunk open. “What did I ever do to make you hate me?”

  Dana shoved her bag into the back seat a little more forcefully than necessary. “I don’t hate you.” She stepped back and glanced at Ray. The smugness of his expression told her he didn’t believe her. “Look, Joanna had a hard time with her first husband. I hope she doesn’t have to go through that again.” She turned to walk away from him.

  He pulled her back with a hand on her upper arm. “I love my wife, Dana. I’m adopting her kids. We’re about to have another one together. What more do you want from me?”

  She bit her lip, contemplating him, their situation. She didn’t doubt the sincerity in his softly spoken words. But she wondered why he cared enough to try to change her mind about him. And what could she answer him? What did she want from him? She shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “Then cut me some slack, huh, Dana?”

  She sighed. Refusing would serve no purpose except to be contentious. “I think I can manage that. As long as you make sure Joanna doesn’t go into labor while I’m gone. I want to be here when the baby’s born.”

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  Finally, Dana let go a hint of a smile. They went back inside to finish packing up the truck.

  Later that night, after Tim had gone, Dana sat alone in the white rocker she kept on her enclosed front porch and sipped from a glass of Chablis. She liked nights like these: quiet, sultry, when the wind that rattled her screens brought the scents of summer to her nose and stirred tendrils of her hair. Nights like these she felt a world away from the area in which she worked. She felt at peace with her life and what little she’d been able to accomplish with it.

  Her father had disappeared almost the moment her mother had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Her mother had held on for another ten years, becoming, in the end, almost totally dependent on her daughter. It had taken her an extra year to finish her nursing degree while working full time as a clerk in the bursar’s office at Lehman College where she studied. She’d accepted the job with At-Home Health because it was the first one offered. The base pay alone afforded her the opportunity to save for a real house instead of the apartment in Co-op City where she’d lived since childhood.

  What she had now belonged only to her, her and Tim. She’d managed to eke out a decent life for them. She’d survived what life had thrown at her and flourished. She was a survivor, always a survivor, never a victim. Life didn’t get her down.

  But tonight was different. Thoughts of Wesley Evans intruded on her solitude. Thoughts of Wesley and the obvious comparison to her own brother. Neither teenager had really known their father and both had lost their mothers at an early age. But while Tim was getting ready to start Cornell in the fall, Wesley was headed for a life of crime, jail or worse. A scant ten miles separated their homes but their lives were worlds apart.

  She thought of the Robert Frost poem. “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood.” She was grateful she coul
d offer Timothy the right one.

  “I won’t be seeing you next week,” Dana told Nadine Evans the following morning.

  Nadine pouted. “Why not?”

  “I’ll be taking a much needed vacation. I’m leaving after my shift tonight.” God willing, anyway. Her bags were in the trunk of the car, which hopefully hadn’t been vandalized. Tonight she planned to eat freshly caught fish instead of frozen fish sticks. And have a piña colada. She had to have at least one piña colada before she went to bed that nigh t.

  Nadine’s frown deepened. “I hope they don’t keep sending that girl that comes on weekends. I think she steals from me.”

  Dana paused in her task of repacking her supplies into her bag. Anything worth stealing that had ever been in this apartment had either been pawned or left to rot away its value. Nadine was trying to guilt her for leaving her in someone else’s care, but Nadine wasn’t a heavy enough hitter in that department to faze Dana.

  Dana zipped her bag closed. “I’ll see you when I get back.”

  “If I’m still here.”

  Dana sighed. So maybe Nadine wasn’t so bad at this after all. Dana patted her meaty shoulder. “You’ll be fine. And behave yourself while I’m gone. You know I’ll hear all about what you’ve been doing with yourself when I get back.”

  Nadine rolled her eyes. “I’ll try.”

  Dana left the bedroom and walked out to the living room where the home health attendant was watching BET on the tube. Dana said nothing, but let herself out of the apartment. As she walked down the stairs to the first floor she saw a man standing outside the building, leaning against one of the faux pillars that decorated the building. Or rather, she saw a man-child, Wesley Evans, who had obviously skipped school again.

  Wesley’s head swiveled around as she opened the door. He frowned, probably figuring she’d give him more of her usual harangue. Not this time. She figured if she got on his case when he didn’t do right by his grandmother she ought to be equally appreciative when he did.

  He shifted, standing a bit straighter. “How’s my granny?”

  “Better. You must have gotten her to cut back on the juice.”

  He shrugged. “I heard what you said. I’m not stupid.”

  “I never said I thought you were stupid. I know how hard it is to get someone to stick to a diet they don’t want to follow.” Especially when you were the child and the grown-up ought to know better. “Thank you.”

  He shrugged again, shoving his hands in his front pockets, and she suspected her simple words of praise embarrassed him. Dana shook her head. She knew plenty of kids like him, all hard edges on the outside, needy and scared on the inside—scared most of all of showing they needed anything. Again, she wondered how differently he might have turned out if life had dealt him a better hand of cards or he better understood how to play the ones he had.

  Sighing, Dana focused on his face, but he’d already turned away to watch the street where a black Oldsmobile with tinted windows rolled down the block. DMX blasted from the souped up automobile, drawing the attention of early morning passersby. The car moved with such deliberateness as to suggest its occupants were looking for a non-existent parking space . . . or cruising for trouble.

  Dana stepped farther out of the building to stand beside Wesley. The young man seemed not to notice her, his attention taken up by the trajectory of the car. “You could do something else.”

  Only after the car turned right onto Sheridan Avenue did he look at her. His expression was distracted. “What?”

  “You’re graduating from high school. You could get a decent job. Maybe something civil service. Get your grandmother out of here. Go to college at night.” It was how Dana had survived after her mother passed.

  His face contorted in a mask of anger. “What do you know about it, lady? You ain’t never been poor. You ain’t never had nothing. You ain’t never had it that all that stood between you and the street was you. So don’t talk to me about getting no job. I put food on the table, so you got no right to judge me.”

  She didn’t try to argue with him. He saw her now, not as she had been, barely older than he, charged with the care of her younger brother and no clear idea how to manage. He only saw the woman, who today could pay to live in a nice house and afford most of what her heart desired. Given that, she understood his outrage, especially considering the tiny bit of vulnerability he’d just shown her. He’d want to back her off, but she didn’t back down. “You could start your own business. Don’t tell me living in this place eats up all of the money you’ve made. Sell T-shirts. Anything where you don’t have to watch the block to make sure someone isn’t gunning for you.”

  Wesley leaned down so that his face was almost in hers. “Yeah, well if they come for me, I’ma stand up like a man, not go running like some punk. Anybody wants me, I’m right here.”

  He spoke in a quiet voice, his words made more chilling by his tone. One thing Dana had never felt was that her life was so hopeless that dying was as viable an option as living. “Who will take care of your grandmother then?”

  He straightened away from her, but she could tell she’d gotten to him just a little. “That was low, lady. That was—” His words were cut off by the squeal of tires coming from a car rounding the corner. Wesley’s head snapped up and his body stiffened. “Get inside.”

  Alarm prickled at her nerve endings as she watched the same car head down the street, much faster this time. No one needed to tell her that the car’s driver and occupants were up to no good. She fumbled to get the door open, and doing so, she turned to pull him inside with her. She didn’t want to find out if he’d do what he said he would. “Come on, Wesley,” she pleaded, grabbing at his arm.

  “Get inside.” He shoved at her, a backhanded swat that caught her in the solar plexus, winding her. She gasped for air, watching the car speed closer to them. As if in slow motion, the rear driver’s side window rolled down and the barrel of a gun appeared in the window.

  For a split second, she contemplated the unreality of her situation, the beauty of the cloudless day marred by the ugliness of the black gun pointed at her and the murderous intentions of the man who held it. She inhaled and air whooshed back into her lungs. She lunged forward, grabbing hold of Wesley’s arm. “Come on,” she shouted. Yanking as hard as she could, she drew him toward her.

  But she froze as a bullet whizzed past her ear to shatter the glass door behind her. And then her shoulder was on fire. The force of her own momentum threw her backward, through the front door. She landed on her back, still clutching Wesley’s arm in a death grip. He bounced down of top of her, pushing her backward along the floor, his weight as dead as his eyes staring back at her. Her head snapped back, making contact with broken glass and a concrete floor covered in a thin layer of vinyl tile. As blinding pain and terrifying darkness claimed her, Dana’s last thought was that she wasn’t going to be getting on any airplane any time soon.

  Two

  Jonathan Stone pulled up behind one of three squad cars blocking the alley behind Mario’s Pizza off Vandall Avenue. Earlier that morning, some poor bum looking for cans to redeem had been rifling through the trash when one of the trash cans produced an unexpected bounty: a woman’s naked body.

  Jonathan and his partner, Mari Velez, had taken the call an hour ago, while they were investigating a homicide on the other side of the Bronx, ironically across the street from the cemetery on Webster Avenue. The Bronx might not be the murder capital of the North America, but today it was holding its own.

  Jonathan cut the engine and rubbed the back of his neck. It was barely ten o’clock and already the heat topped ninety degrees. For the second year in a row, New York had been treated to a frigid winter followed by an equally brutal, humid summer. Jonathan took one last gulp of air-conditioned air and cut the engine.

  “Here we go again,” Mari said, nodding toward the crowd assembled at the scene—a smattering of uniforms keeping the curious at bay; a couple of detectives he
recognized from his time at the 44 talking with the uniform sarge, a few crime-scene techs combing the back of the alleyway. The same old, same old. Mari got out of the car, humming the tune to Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood.

  Jonathan retrieved his jacket from the back seat and followed her. He’d inherited Mari when she’d come to the station two years ago. None of the other guys had wanted to partner with her, first because she was a woman, second because she didn’t take any shit from them and third because she didn’t put out.

  After that they’d dismissed her as the most incomprehensible and most hated woman of all: a dyke. Jonathan didn’t know if that was true or not and didn’t care. Mari was a good cop. She did her job and didn’t complain about having to do it. That’s all he needed to know about her. One of these days, if he ever wanted to really piss her off, he’d ask her.

  He pinned his badge to his jacket lapel as he ducked under the police tape cordoning off the alley and crossed to where the two detectives he knew from the 44 stood. He’d never bothered to analyze the peculiar cop practice of nicknaming everyone, but he admitted he wasn’t immune either. This pair he’d dubbed Mutt and Jeff, as the younger lanky one resembled a taller, fairer, more obnoxious Jeff Goldblum, and the older one, a Yaphet Kotto look-alike sans the cheesy Afro wig, sported a pot belly Buddha would have admired.

  “What have you got?” He directed his question at Mutt, a.k.a. Ken Patterson, who, along with the bigger gut, possessed the greater brain power.

  Patterson adjusted his belt over his ample waist. “Some old rummy finds the body of a white female stuffed in a trash can back in the alley. He pulls off the lid and there she is. Nearly scared the guy to death.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Back of one of the squads.” He nodded toward the building. “We’re still waiting on the owner to show up. Lives in Larchmont and doesn’t usually come in for another hour.”