As the Wicked Watch(89)
“Let me see how I feel in an hour. It’s been a rough day. Call me before you leave, okay?”
He stared at the ground. When he looked back up, his smile had evaporated. “Why can’t you ever just say yes the first time? Huh? Why do you do that?”
“If I have to answer right now, it’ll be a hard no. Is that what you want?”
“A hard no,” he said, raising his right brow with a devilish grin. “The last time, I seem to remember you saying a good . . . hard . . . yes!”
I shook my head. “Wow, you went there? Okay. We’ll see. Call me.”
“Well, at least let me walk you to your car,” he said.
It was almost eight o’clock when I pulled out of the garage. The endorphins from the workout, even though I hadn’t put in my usual thirty minutes, kicked in, and I started to feel better, more clearheaded. I’d told Yvonne that I would call her back, but I assumed that wasn’t what she expected. After the brawl, Yvonne was searching her mind for what to do next, afraid her man could be on his way back to jail. Maybe she reached out to me hoping for some advice, but I didn’t have any answers for her. If Terrence filed a complaint and the police had arrested Manny, she would have called back. Or Joey would have called to let me know by now. That much I was certain of. So I decided to hedge my bets and wait to hear from Joey.
I turned on the radio in the middle of Lauryn Hill’s “Killing Me Softly,” and my shoulders, tightened by stress, relaxed. It wasn’t looking good for Thomas. All I could think about was taking a shower and settling into bed just as the city was coming alive. Groups of friends walked vibrantly down Restaurant Row, while others congregated on the sidewalk waiting for a table at a new high-end diner. No longer in my twenties, I couldn’t be further from that energy. Jockeying for a reservation or mapping out which bars to hit on the weekend didn’t appeal to me as much as it used to. Dinner at home or at one of my girls’ places with a couple bottles of wine, laughing and talking as loudly as we wanted to without worrying about someone overhearing us and calling a gossip columnist to spill the beans on the lady from the news, made for a much more pleasurable evening. But tonight, it would be just me and my salad watching the evening news, then lights out.
I pulled into the driveway, reached into my console, and grabbed the key fob, my golden ticket home, easing into the garage. Lauryn sang me up the spiral drive, and I turned up the volume as the song climaxed and cruised to the eighth-floor landing. Then my moment of Zen was shattered—someone had parked in my space again.
“Fuck! This cannot be happening! What the hell is wrong with people?”
I pounded on the steering wheel as I drove past the gray sedan, eyeballing the Illinois license plate JLV 5491. My head throbbed and my face grew hot with anger. This time, I decided, I was going to file a complaint with the board, and, in fact, would compose a letter and email it tonight.
“This is ridiculous! I cannot believe this shit!”
I fumed all the way down the driveway back to street level to access the roof.
Thank God it’s not raining or snowing.
As I exited the garage, I caught a glimpse of Bass having an animated conversation with someone at the guard’s desk. Bass talked to everybody. It was his favorite way to pass the time on the night shift.
On the deck, as I feared, nearly all the spaces closest to the door accessing the stairwell had been taken, and I had to park in the farthest corner away. I turned down the radio just in time to hear my phone ringing. It was Joey.
“Hello?” I answered, sounding angrier than I meant to.
“Hi, what’s wrong with you?” he said.
“I’m sorry,” I said, turning off the engine. “Someone parked in my space again tonight. This is the second time in a week! Pisses me off! Excuse the rant. Did you get my message?”
“Yeah, I did. So these two guys came to blows? How bad was it?”
“Yvonne told me Manny was on top of Terrence beating him in the face and head, so pretty bad.”
“What set him off?” Joey asked.
“Yvonne confronted Manny about letting Terrence off the hook when he acted like he barely knew Masey after she disappeared. That obviously was a lie, because he’d bought her an expensive jacket and took her and some of her friends on a photo shoot.”
“What? A photo shoot?”
“Yeah, I didn’t tell you. This guy passes himself off as connected in the entertainment world. Music, fashion, you name it. Manny called him and asked him to stop by. Terrence thought it was about some money he owed him, but Manny asked him if he did something to Masey. When Terrence acted nonchalant, Manny flipped out on him. Yvonne said Terrence threatened to call the police.”
“He ain’t gonna call the police, Jordan. If he did, they would ask what happened and his dealings with Masey would come out. What’s a thirty-year-old man doing hanging with a bunch of teenage girls and buying them clothes and shit? Manny should’ve beat his ass for that alone. A man who just got off parole wouldn’t risk going back to prison if he didn’t think this guy hadn’t done something.”
“Or maybe he just has a short fuse,” I said. “He did go to jail for battery.”
“Well, now you know why I told you to stay from over there. It’s dangerous, Jordan,” he said. “Guys like Bankhead disgust me. I’ll find him.”