Hanging on a String Page 18

  “I think that whoever killed Chester might have something to do with Lamarr Henry’s death.”

  “You mean the junkie?”

  I wanted to slap the taste out of her mouth. Instead, I said as calmly as I could manage, “Lamarr was not a junkie, Sherrie. He’d been clean for years.”

  “Looks like he had a relapse,” said Sherrie, her eyes narrow and, I thought, hateful. “That’s what Raymond thinks.”

  Raymond? What was Raymond doing talking to Sherrie? Raymond made no secret of his dislike of Sherrie. “A waste of space and energy,” he had referred to her on more than one occasion. “After you get past the looks, there’s nothing but a mercenary there,” was Raymond’s summation of Sherrie’s character.

  “Raymond talked to you about Lamarr?” I asked.

  “Relax, girlfriend,” said Sherrie. “Raymond called me before Chester’s funeral, asking questions about Chester. He was wondering if there was any connection between Chester and Lamarr. I told him that Chester didn’t hang out with junkies.”

  “Only other women.” The words escaped before I had a chance to rein them in, but I wasn’t sorry. Even when I saw the pain cross Sherrie’s eyes, I was unrepentant. Lamarr had exceeded every expectation that society had placed on him. He had been to hell, and he had survived. He had spent the last ten years of his life winning the fight against those expectations, and to have this woman sum my friend up as a junkie was more than I was going to tolerate, even if it meant that I wasn’t going to get any answers.

  “I deserve that,” said Sherrie, her voice small.

  Damn straight, you do, I thought.

  “What about Irmalee?” I asked. “Any connection that you can think of between Irmalee and Chester, other than her being his secretary?”

  “You mean besides the fact that he was sleeping with her?”

  “Yes,” I continued, undaunted. If Sherrie expected me to feel sorry for her because Chester did to her what she and Chester so willingly and so easily did to me, then she would be disappointed. “Besides the fact that he was sleeping with her.”

  “I can tell you this,” said Sherrie, sipping her drink again. “Chester dumped Miss Secretary, and she wasn’t happy about it. She was threatening to file sexual harassment charges against him.”

  Now I was surprised. “I heard that the relationship was consensual.”

  “Yeah, well, hell hath no fury and all of that other mess,” replied Sherrie. “And I can tell you something else, Jasmine Spain, Wallace Barker was in on the whole thing. He was helping Irmalee. If you ask me, this whole sexual harassment thing was his idea. Irmalee didn’t have the brain power to think that up.”

  Things were not adding up. Wallace and Irmalee? According to Dahlia, Wallace had buried the hatchet. He had forgiven, even if he hadn’t forgotten, Chester’s betrayal. Hell, he was at Chester’s funeral.

  “Interview’s over, Jasmine Spain,” said Sherrie, standing up. “I don’t know anything else that could help you.”

  I stood up, glad to go. I was nowhere closer to finding out what had happened to Lamarr, but I had had enough of Sherrie Jackson. One thing was certain, however; it was time to pay Wallace a visit.

  “Thanks for your help,” I said to Sherrie, feeling anything but thankful. “What are you going to do now?”

  “I’m going to leave New York,” she said. “And I’m going to spend Chester’s money.”

  “Where will you go?” I asked, more out of politeness than any real interest.

  “I don’t know,” Sherrie replied. “Someplace warm, with palm trees, white sand, where the piña coladas come with charming young men who earn their living by lying to you.”

  I guess that ruled out Chicago. I let myself out, glad to be free from Sherrie’s company.

  16

  The next morning I called Dahlia and arranged to meet her outside Wallace’s office in Brooklyn Heights. Dahlia and Wallace were good friends from their days back at Yale, and I knew I was going to need Dahlia’s help if I wanted Wallace to open up. Wallace wasn’t one of my favorite people. He was born with a bitter taste in his mouth, and he wasn’t afraid to let everyone know about it. Getting mixed up with Chester hadn’t helped Wallace’s general bad disposition, but Chester couldn’t be blamed for Wallace’s bleak outlook on life. That was something that occurred while Wallace was in his mama’s womb, I suspected. The only person I knew who actually liked Wallace was Dahlia. I always figured that her attraction to Wallace was the same sort of attraction she felt for wounded animals.

  The subway ride to Brooklyn Heights took a little under forty minutes. As I rode the train, I wondered what Wallace was going to say. I knew he was going to be defensive about Chester. After all, Chester’s betrayal had not only cost Wallace his wife and his thriving law practice, but it had made Wallace look like a fool. The scandal had provided plenty of discussion among Wallace’s friends and business associates.

  I planned to ask Wallace about the sexual harassment suit, and about his impressions of Irmalee. They made an interesting pair, Irmalee and Wallace. Both had trusted Chester, to their own detriment, and both were people whose outlook on life was bleak at best and downright harsh at worst. As perfect as they were together in temperament, I couldn’t help but wonder if her association with the unhappy Wallace Barker had gotten Irmalee killed.

  Dahlia was waiting for me in front of the office building where Wallace now worked. Wallace’s office building was nondescript, on a street filled with other nondescript office buildings, whose only purpose in life, I surmised, was to block out the sun. The buildings were either grey, brown, or somewhere in between those two shades, and they all had seen much better days. The sidewalk was filled with vendors selling food, trinkets, newspapers, and sweaters from a Latin American country. It was just past nine o’clock, and I could see harried-looking employees rushing in and out of the buildings. Wallace’s building was located near the state courthouse, and I guessed that many of the harried-looking people I saw were lawyers. This was a far different address from the Madison Avenue office that Wallace once shared with Chester.

  Dahlia was dressed in a long, flowing yellow sundress, with some strappy kind of sandals, which looked as if they were held together by twine, and her dreadlocks were twisted and pinned on top of her head, held in place by a red, yellow, and green clip. In short, she looked beautiful, as she always did, except this time she was not only beautiful, but she was worried. She started talking to me as soon as she saw me making my way toward her.

  “Jasmine, you can’t believe that Wallace has anything to do with what happened to Chester.” No “hello, how are you?” Straight to the point.

  “I don’t know,” I replied after I gave her a quick kiss on the cheek. “But I surely intend to find out.”

  Dahlia shook her head. “There’s absolutely no way that Wallace had anything to do with Chester’s death.”

  “Even after everything Chester did to him?”

  “Especially after everything Chester did to him,” replied Dahlia. “Chester did his dirt almost two years ago. Wallace has gone on and tried to rebuild his life. He let all that mess between him and Chester go. Wallace is in a good space right now. He’d forgiven Chester. He told me that he decided there was no need to hold on to that bad energy. What’s done is done.”

  “What if I told you that Wallace was helping Chester’s secretary in a sexual harassment lawsuit against Chester?”

  I watched as Dahlia waged an internal battle between her natural inclination to believe the best about anybody she cared for and her common sense that sometimes folk are capable of doing stuff you wouldn’t dream they could do, not in several lifetimes. Dahlia had a soft spot for Wallace. I didn’t understand it, but she saw something in Wallace that nobody else I knew, including his ex-wife, ever saw: a soul worth redeeming, no matter how bitter and spiteful the words that crossed his lips frequently.

  “He told me that he’d buried the hatchet,” said Dahlia.

 
“Maybe he meant that he buried the hatchet in Chester.”

  I immediately regetted my flip response when I saw Dahlia’s reaction to my words. She was hurt by them. Dahlia was in a tough situation, one I did not envy. She was good friends with one person who suspected another of her friends of murder. Friend number one, meaning me, had no business cracking jokes.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean it like it came out.”

  She immediately forgave me. I have always felt that her forgiving nature is one of her best features. “I know you didn’t mean anything, Jasmine. I’m just surprised that Wallace was involved in any lawsuit against Chester. He never mentioned it to me.”

  “Dahlia, I need your help with Wallace, but if you’re not up to it, that’s okay. I know how much you care for him.”

  Dahlia sighed. “It’s because I care for him that I’m here. Girlfriend, I love you like a sister, but I know that you can be a barracuda when you’re trying to get information.”

  She knew my weaknesses and loved me in spite of them. That was another one of Dahlia’s character traits that I admired.

  “It’s not like I’m out for blood, Dahlia,” I said, only slightly wounded by her assessment of my information-gathering techniques. “I just want to ask a few questions.”

  I thought I heard her mutter something about my inability to ask just a few questions, but I wasn’t sure, so I let it pass for now. But I was going to have to talk to Miss Dahlia at some point about her “barracuda” comment. I had no idea she knew me so well.

  I followed Dahlia into Wallace’s office building. Wallace’s office was located on the fourteenth floor, which was actually the thirteenth floor, but the owners of the building must have been superstitious, hence, defying logic and common sense, the thirteenth floor had become the fourteenth floor.

  After stopping on almost every floor, the elevator shuddered and opened on the fourteenth floor. The carpet in the office hallway was a muddy brown color, with dark stains, about whose origin I didn’t want to hazard a guess, and the walls, which were probably once white, a long time ago, had settled into a grimy yellow sheen. Wallace’s office was located at the far end of the hallway. I had not called Wallace to inform him of my imminent arrival. I didn’t want to give him a chance to avoid me. Instead, I hoped that Wallace’s well-known aversion to early morning conferences—as this was the best time for him to write his briefs—still held true.

  We stopped at a heavy wooden door, with WALLACE BARKER, ESQ. painted in large black letters in the center. Dahlia opened the door and walked inside ahead of me. She had visited Wallace’s new digs several times, and she was familiar with the lay of the land. I followed her, feeling ill at ease, as I always felt when I was going into a situation with which I was not entirely familiar.

  There was a young woman, who didn’t look older than sixteen, sitting at a receptionist’s desk. There were three doors to her immediate right. One door carried the nameplate W. BARKER, ESQ., and the other two doors had no nameplates to distinguish them. All three of the doors were closed. The room in which the receptionist sat was small and seemed more cramped because of all of the furniture that had been placed there. In addition to the receptionist’s desk, there was a large grey leather couch, a grey and white leather love seat, and several chairs. There were also stacks of magazines falling out of magazine racks and four very large rubber plants placed around the room.

  “Hey, Esperanza, is he in yet?” Dahlia walked over to the desk where the very young-looking Esperanza sat.

  Esperanza peered at both of us over the rim of her glasses as if we were the last two people she wanted to see this particular morning. It was too early to be quite so harried and outdone, but then again, I did not work with Wallace, and as my mother always said, “Don’t criticize somebody until you’ve walked in their shoes and on their road.”

  Esperanza sighed and nodded her head. “He’s in.”

  Esperanza was obviously not the vocal type.

  “We’d like to see Mr. Barker,” I said, getting annoyed the longer I sat there watching Esperanza watching us.

  “Do you have an appointment?” asked Esperanza.

  “Well, no, we don’t,” said Dahlia, using her “let’s be reasonable” voice. “But we’re friends of Wallace’s, and we’d like to see him.”

  “I know who you are,” said Esperanza, with a cocked eyebrow, “but I don’t know who she is.”

  It was bad enough that this teenager was acting as if we were encyclopedia salesmen trying to get her money from her, but when she referred to me as if I were not in the room, that was too much for this “barracuda” to deal with.

  I walked over to the desk, beside Dahlia.

  “Look,” I said, “my name is Jasmine Spain. Now, are you going to call Wallace out here, or do I have to go right past your rude behind to his office myself?”

  Esperanza backed down immediately, and I saw that my initial feelings about her were accurate. She was a bully. I had met enough bullies in my life, both inside and out of the courtroom, to know that most bullies were cowards, and when you called them out, they usually had a come to Jesus moment.

  She picked up the telephone, her eyes never leaving my face; then she pressed one long brown finger, with a blue and gold painted nail, down on the buzzer.

  “Wallace,” she said. “You better get out here before I have to hurt somebody.”

  We stared each other down like kids during a recess fight until Wallace emerged from his office.

  “What are you two doing here?” Wallace asked.

  Wallace looked as if he hadn’t slept for the past two days. I could put a whole lot of luggage in the bags under his eyes. His clothes looked crumpled and unkempt, and it was obvious that it was time for a shave.

  “Wallace, you look just terrible,” said Dahlia, her eyes round and concerned.

  “I feel terrible, Dahlia,” he replied, his voice a little softer now that he was speaking directly to Dahlia.

  “Wallace, you want me to call the po-lice?” asked Esperanza. “Just say the word, and I’ll call the po-po to get these heifers out of here.”

  “Really,” said Dahlia. “Is that necessary? There’s a lot of bad karma floating around you, Esperanza.”

  The situation was getting out of hand. We had been in Wallace’s office all this time, and now we were talking about karma and how bad Wallace looked.

  “Wallace, we need to talk to you about Chester,” I said.

  At the mention of Chester’s name, I watched his shoulders sag as if someone had taken the air out of a balloon. His face looked like a poster for defeat. I looked well. Inevitably, if you hung with Chester, you, too, would have that look on your face. Once again, I tried not to think ill of the dead, but Chester had a lot in common with the devil, I was convinced.

  “Come in my office,” said Wallace.

  Wallace’s office was like his receptionist’s office, crowded with leather furniture. But unlike his receptionist’s office, Wallace’s office was filled with papers everywhere. Falling off his desk, on the floor, on the chairs, and on the sofa. In short, chaos reigned.

  “Don’t mind Esperanza,” he said as he closed the door behind us. “She’s very protective of me.”

  I strongly suspected that I had just met the next Mrs. Wallace Barker. I wondered briefly if New York State allowed conjugal visits; then I turned my attention to more immediate matters.

  “Wallace,” I said, as I removed some papers from the nearest chair and placed them on his desk, “were you helping Chester’s secretary to sue him for sexual harassment?”

  Dahlia shot me a look that clearly said “barracuda.”

  “Yes,” he said, his shoulders shaking as if he were sobbing, but there were no tears in his eyes. “God help me, I may have gotten that poor woman killed.”

  Bingo. I had thought that it was going to take the art of persistent interrogation to break Wallace down to get to this point, but all it took was one question. Either my po
wers as a gifted interrogator were increasing, or guilt was eating at Wallace, and he needed to talk about it. Whatever, I was grateful that at least now I might actually be on to something.

  “What do you mean?” I asked, leaning forward in the chair.

  Dahlia sat down in the chair next to me and said, “If this is too painful for you to talk about, we can talk about it when you feel better.”

  Now it was my turn to shoot the dagger looks. This was not the reason why I’d brought Dahlia along. I’d brought her along to soften him up, to help him get over his natural defensive character. I didn’t bring Dahlia over to help him shut up.

  Wallace walked around his desk and sat down on his chair. He closed his eyes for a moment, and then he said, “I want to talk about it, Dahlia. I need to talk about it.”

  Despite his agitated state, Wallace’s voice was flat and unemotional. He spoke in the same tone of voice he might use when reciting names from a telephone directory.

  “Irmalee told me that she was worried about her own safety, right after Chester died. She said that the day before Chester died, Raymond had come to see her about the lawsuit.”

  I should have known that Raymond knew about the lawsuit.

  “Was a lawsuit actually filed?” I asked, forgetting the cardinal rule not to interrupt a witness when he’s giving you information.

  “No,” replied Wallace. “Everything was drafted and set to go, but Irmalee started getting nervous, and she told me to hold off from filing the complaint. Raymond and Chester both knew the complaint was coming, and Raymond was worried. Chester didn’t appear too nervous; he had beaten that charge once before, and at that particular time, Raymond was his attorney.”

  I broke the rule again. As far as I knew, Raymond only had met Chester when he’d applied for the position with B&J. I knew in the past two years no one had filed sexual harassment charges against Chester; that information was too hot to keep quiet for too long.