As the Wicked Watch(98)

I got up to go, but when I reached the door, I turned around and looked at her and fired off a rebuke of my own. “You’d better search your conscience, lady, if you have one.”

I bolted out the door, seething over the very real possibility that this self-appointed, self-righteous, fiery community activist and so-called women’s advocate may very well have known about two men preying on underage girls. She might not have known the extent, but at the very least, she knew it was perverse. That Red Moley story was so random, it was as if her guilt unmuzzled her against her will. Now that she’d been called out for it, instead of seeking redemption, she’d taken a hard-line stance. Could it be that she loved Brent and his deceased mother to the point that she’d betray her own conscience? I thought back to Commissioner Clark’s revelations about Louise Robinson. Little did he know, he’d barely scratched the surface.

*

My work in Englewood far from finished, I turned down 71st Street and made a quick right onto Peoria to Yvonne and Manny’s. There were two cars parked out front, possibly belonging to customers of theirs. I admired their hustle and hoped they wouldn’t regard my dropping by as a bold intrusion.

“Who is it?” said a muffled voice behind the door.

“Yvonne? It’s Jordan Manning.”

The door flung open, and the concerned look on Yvonne’s face reminded me of what I must look like. It was one thing for Yvonne to have heard the report, but another to be one of the few people who had actually seen me face-to-face.

“Are you okay?” she stood back and sized me up. “What are you doing out and about?”

“No . . . I mean, yes. Physically, I’m fine. But, Yvonne, I need answers.”

“Sure.” She nodded. “Come on in. Follow me.”

She led me through the kitchen, where a woman was sitting under a hair dryer and a young girl was mixing color over the sink. Baby Imani was content in her high chair, mesmerized by what I caught at a glance was Sesame Street.

“Don’t worry about that right now,” she told the girl. “Watch Imani for me. I’ll be downstairs.”

“How much longer for the dryer?” the girl asked.

“Give it twenty minutes.”

Halfway down the steps, Yvonne called out, “Manny! I’m coming down!”

“Okay, come on! I’m by myself!”

“I’m not!” Yvonne said. “Jordan’s here.”

Manny, sweeping up hair from his last customer, stopped what he was doing. He turned around, broom in hand, and dropped his head. “Sister, I’m sorry,” he said, appearing genuinely remorseful. “You and that brother who got stabbed . . . that shoulda never happened.”

“Thank you for saying that,” I said.

“I don’t think it was random,” he said.

“Neither do I. What do you know?”

“Let’s go in here and sit down,” he said.

Manny arranged three of the waiting room chairs in a semicircle. “I hope you don’t think I had anything to do with that.” His eyes were full of regret, a far cry from the hard stare he had given me the first time we met.

“What do you want to tell me?” I asked.

“Actually, we want to show you something,” said Yvonne. She pulled a photo album off the shelf behind her, unmoored an image from one of its pages, and handed it to me. The photo was of a man and a girl I recognized as Masey. She was sitting on the man’s lap with her legs crossed, her arm slung around his shoulders. The man’s arm was wound behind her body, his hand resting on half her bottom.

“That’s Terrence,” Yvonne said.

The photo eliminated any shred of doubt in my mind that Terrence was having an inappropriate relationship with Masey.

“You’ve had this all along?” I asked.

“No, I found it in the plastic pumpkin Masey used to keep her nail polish in. I was looking through it two nights ago and found it in an envelope at the bottom,” Yvonne said. “I stuck it in the album for safekeeping.”

Masey was keeping it hidden.

“This picture . . . it didn’t come as a shock to you, though, did it?” I asked.

Yvonne dropped her head in her hands and started to weep. “I got caught up.”

“Caught up how?”

“Being her best friend instead of her big cousin. Instead of looking out for her,” she said.

It occurred to me then that Yvonne and Masey’s relationship reminded me of mine and Stephanie’s, except that Stephanie fulfilled her role as big cousin. Yvonne really wanted Masey to see her as the cool cousin, the big sister you could tell anything to, the vault.

“I wanted to be supportive of her dreams, you know?” Yvonne continued. “I wanted to believe . . . that he was legit.”

“You never heard any of the rumors floating around about Terrence? You, Manny?”

Both were silent.

“Yvonne, you told me yourself he was from New Mexico. He was in trouble there all the time.”

“Hell, I’ve been in trouble,” Manny interjected.

“I’m well aware,” I said. “But the kind of trouble he got into in New Mexico is not usually something you do once and never again.”

“I get it,” Manny said.