IQ(3)

“You don’t know what you missing,” Deronda said, “I be doing some crazy shit.”

Dear Mr. Quintabe.



My daughter dint come home for two weeks. I think she is gone with a man named Olen Waters who is to old for her. She need to be took away from him before its too late. Could you get her plese? I can pay not much.



Dear Mr. Quintabe



Two months ago my beautiful son Jerome was shot to death in his own bed. The police said they don’t have enough evidence to make an arrest even though everybody knows his wife Claudia was the one that pulled the trigger. I want to hire you, Mr. Quintabe. I want you to bring that bitch to justice.



The living room was cool and dim, soft bands of sunlight and shadow coming through the burglar bars, the place so clean there weren’t even dust motes in the air. Isaiah didn’t look up as Deronda padded barefoot out of the open kitchen and across the polished cement floor. It had come out differently than he’d anticipated but he liked it. Amorphous shapes of gray and green like a satellite map of the rain forest. Deronda plunked down on the sofa across from him and put her feet on the coffee table. Strewn across the glass were car keys, a cell phone, a Harvard cap, and the collapsible baton.

Deronda spotted a black box under the table. “What’s that thing?” she said, like she suspected a booby trap.

“Subwoofer and get your feet off of my coffee table.”

“Who went to Harvard?”

“Nobody.”

“Can I watch TV?”

“Do you see a TV?”

“You ain’t got no PlayStation?”

“No, I don’t have a PlayStation.”

“You need some more furniture.”

Aside from the burgundy leather sofa and armchair, there was the chrome and glass coffee table, a lacquered wicker ottoman, a cherry wood end table, and an antique-looking, long-necked reading lamp. That was it unless you counted the floor-to-ceiling bookcase that took up an entire wall. There was a huge collection of LPs and CDs lined up neat as bar codes and an elaborate stereo; Coltrane’s sax braying from the speakers, angry and hoarse.

“Can I put another record on?” Deronda said, wincing like she was listening to the garbage disposal.

“No.”

Isaiah kept his head down and read another email. Deronda was going to ask him something. He’d sensed it as soon as he let her in, looking at him like a baby daddy wasn’t all she needed. Passing on the sex had taken away her opening and now he could hear her cheeks squeaking on the sofa as she squirmed around trying to pick a moment. Maybe if he ignored her long enough she’d give up.

“Can I ask you something?” she said.

“No.”

“Could you maybe like, you know, hook me up?”

“Hook you up with who?”

“Blasé. You all tight with him and everything.” She waited a moment before saying, “IQ.”

An article had appeared in The Scene magazine titled:


IQ

ISAIAH QUINTABE IS UNLICENSED AND UNDAGROUND.



The article recounted a number of neighborhood cases but the one that made the tabloids was the simplest to solve. It involved the R&B singer Blasé. During a party someone had stolen his camera, which contained a video of him bent over an ironing board getting pounded from behind by his live-in keyboard player. If the tape got out there’d be more than a scandal. Blasé promoted himself as a heterosexual sex symbol. The cover art on his last album, Can I Witness to Your Thickness, showed Blasé in a thong and priest’s collar leading a choir composed of three women in crazy blond wigs and shorty choir robes, their backsides bulging like babies were in there. Blasé received a note that said: My demands will soon follow. Obey them or your transgressions will be revealed and your career will be over.

“The language,” Isaiah said. “Your transgressions will be revealed. It’s biblical. Were any of your guests religious?”

“Heavens no,” Blasé said. He took a deep breath. “But my mother is.”

Blasé’s mother was a fundamentalist Baptist from a small town in Georgia. When Isaiah confronted her, she told him she was going to use Blasé’s camera to take video of the rose garden and got the surprise of her life. After resting and drinking tea made from Valerian root she decided to blackmail her son into abandoning his life of sin and iniquity.

“I am who I am, Mother,” Blasé said. “But if I can’t accept myself, there’s no reason you should.”

Blasé was grateful to Isaiah for bringing him to that moment but Isaiah didn’t know what he’d done besides read a note. Blasé came out on The Shonda Simmons Show. His record sales suffered but the people who bought them also bought the sex tape available online for $39.95, half the profits going to his mother’s church.


“I need Blasé to help me with my career,” Deronda said. “He might be gay but he’s a celebrity and all I need is a leg up. I mean like, once I’m circulatin’ in that uppa level and the shot callers can check out my style up close and personal? I’m off to the big time.”

Isaiah could feel Deronda looking at him, waiting for him to say it’s only a matter of time or don’t give up or some other such nonsense, but he kept his eyes glued to the MacBook. Deronda sulked, this time not pretending. “I shoulda been gone from here a long time ago, much star quality as I got,” she said. “I’m an up-and-comer, you know what I’m sayin’? I was born to be a celebrity. I should have the spotlight all over me.”