Hanging on a String Read online

  “The one and only. May I come in?”

  His voice had an almost musical quality to it. He sounded as if he was from the South, but I couldn’t place his accent.

  “Yes,” I responded in what I hoped was my cool, courtroom-ready lawyer voice. I stood up.

  He wasn’t anything like I had expected, although I wasn’t sure exactly what it was I had been expecting. He was tall and solidly built, with broad shoulders. He looked as if he’d spent a lot of time in the gym, but he didn’t have that “I’ve pumped a little too much iron” look. He had a smooth brown complexion that brought into contrast his eyes, which, even then I had to admit, were really quite extraordinary. They were the color of light amber and were fringed with long lashes. I couldn’t stop staring at him. It was as if a bell of recognition rang inside my head. He seemed familiar, like someone I’d met before, but I couldn’t place him.

  “Have we met before?” I asked him.

  He smiled, and the color of his eyes darkened slightly.

  “I saw you years ago, but I’m certain you didn’t see me. You were in your own world.”

  I felt an inexplicable flare of attraction. It was immediate and hot.

  “I watched you in court,” he continued. “I have to say, I was impressed.”

  “Thank you,” I said warily, wondering when this occurred. Then it struck me: he’d remembered me years later. I felt a flush of pleasure, which I quickly pushed away. This man was here on serious business. I needed to focus.

  “It’s called mysterious mint tea, and the lady who sold it to me swears you’ll think you’ve died and gone to heaven when you drink it.” He held out the cup of tea.

  I stood there like a complete idiot, mesmerized by the smell of mint tea, his deep voice, and his laughing amber eyes. Recovering quickly, I took the cup, murmured a quick thank-you.

  “No sugar and no milk,” he said, with an easy smile. “I remembered.”

  I didn’t know a lot about detectives, but something told me his direct gaze went somewhere beyond professional interest. Clutching the cup of tea, I retreated to the safety of the seat behind my desk.

  “Please have a seat,” I said as I sat down, hoping the hot tea would calm my nerves. A lot had happened in the past twenty-four hours, and obviously, my emotional state was not as steady as it would otherwise have been.

  He sat down, and I noticed that he was wearing jeans, which fit him like a glove. Completing the ensemble was a crisp white shirt and a black blazer. He had a good-natured expression on his face and a disconcerting way of staring directly into my eyes when he spoke. He looked as if he were about to take a pleasant walk through Central Park, not grill me about Chester’s murder, as I knew he was about to do.

  Still, I could sense this was a man that people enjoyed being around, a man at ease with himself and with his surroundings. After dealing with people who postured for a living, this was a refreshing change.

  “I like what you’ve done with your office,” he said, still staring directly at me.

  There was something vaguely intimate about his words.

  I cleared my throat and took a sip of mint tea. It was delicious.

  “Detective, I’m extremely busy... .”

  “Right,” he said, still looking at me, with a wide smile. “I’m sure you’re very busy—high-powered lawyer that I’m sure you are.”

  I didn’t expect such a good-natured response. Most folk, when faced with the efficient, businesslike, and, yes, downright ill-mannered Jasmine Spain, reacted in one of either two ways: with anger or immediate compliance. Instead, Detective Claremont was smiling at me as if I’d just paid him a compliment.

  “I’ll try not to take up too much of your time.” His eyes scanned my office, taking in my various diplomas. “Wow, did you go to Columbia?”

  “Yes, Detective Claremont, I went to Columbia. As I said, Detective, I don’t mean to be rude, but I am extremely busy.” I wanted to get away from him, and I also wanted to kiss him. I was horrified that my thoughts had veered in such a carnal direction. I needed to get away from this man. I needed to breathe. I took another sip of my mint tea.

  Although the smile left his face, I got the distinct impression that he was amused by me—which was not the impression that I usually liked to give folks.

  “I was told that you were working on a case with Mr. Jackson,” said Detective Claremont.

  “That’s correct,” I replied.

  “Why don’t you tell me a little about the case? Isn’t this the police brutality case that’s been all over the news, the one about the kid from Morehouse College?”

  “If you’re referring to the Daniel Brown case, yes, Mr. Jackson and I were working together on the case.”

  “Tough case. I actually used to work in the same precinct as Lucius Pileski.”

  I didn’t know where this was leading. From the expression on his face, I could see that he didn’t care for my client, and on that point, we were in agreement. Still, I wondered what our defense of Officer Pileski had to do with Chester’s death, if anything.

  Marcus Claremont got to the point. “It’s my understanding that Daniel’s mother threatened Mr. Jackson in court a few days ago.”

  I thought back to Mariah Brown’s outburst. Your end will be bitter.

  “I wouldn’t call it a threat, Detective Claremont,” I replied cautiously. “The woman was upset. Under the circumstances, it was understandable.”

  Why was I defending this woman? For all I knew, it might have been a threat, but I didn’t think she had anything to do with Chester’s death, and I wanted to make that clear. I think, somewhere deep down inside, I felt bad for representing the man who had hurt Mariah’s son. I had defended many unpopular clients, but in my heart, I thought that Lucius Pileski was capable of doing exactly what the New York City Police Department and Mariah Brown had accused him of doing—assaulting an innocent young man based solely on the color of his skin.

  “As I understand it,” said Detective Claremont, “it was a direct threat.”

  I didn’t want to engage him in a debate. “What does Mariah Brown have to do with anything? Is she a suspect?”

  “I wouldn’t call her a suspect,” he said, “but we’ve been trying to find her to talk with her. Thus far, we’ve been unsuccessful. Her son hasn’t seen her since yesterday morning.”

  “Is that unusual?”

  “Her son seems to think it is. He’s worried about her.”

  I thought about Daniel Brown, a son any mother would be proud to call her own. From his second birthday, it had just been Daniel and his mother. He excelled at school, attended church regularly, and was extremely close to and protective of his mother. He’d been through a lot since his encounter with Pileski. His mother had been there every step of the way, and I knew if she was missing, what little was holding Daniel’s world together would come apart.

  “Okay, so what does Mariah Brown have to do with this?” I asked again.

  “I’m not sure, Miss Spain. I wanted to find out what you thought about her. You say she was upset. Do you know if Mr. Jackson took her threats seriously?”

  “We have a different definition of threats, Detective, but if you’re asking whether Chester was worried about Mrs. Brown’s outbursts, I can tell you that in all the time I knew him, Chester was never intimidated by anyone, and I’m sure that held true for Mrs. Brown.”

  Detective Claremont digested those words, then asked some more general questions about the case and about B&J’s practice. I answered them all and prayed for a swift ending to the interview. All this talk about Chester was making the hairs on the back of my neck stand at attention. Finally, after about half an hour, Detective Claremont stood up, and I struggled to hide my relief. Apparently, I was unsuccessful.

  “It wasn’t that bad was it?” the detective asked, smiling and extending his hand.

  I stood and shook his hand. “No offense, Detective Claremont,” I said, “but I’m glad it’s over.”


  “Maybe we’ll meet under different circumstances, Miss Spain,” he said, his hands holding mine in a firm grasp, “and it’ll be far more pleasant.”

  I considered his statement for a brief moment, wondering if he was flirting with me. I’d been out of the dating pool for so long, I wasn’t quite sure. I had the very disturbing feeling that my completely unsuitable attraction might be a mutual thing.

  I pulled my hands from his.

  “If that’s all, Detective Claremont,” I said in a chilly voice, which I hoped would cool any burgeoning ardor.

  “It is for now, Miss Spain,” he said.

  His statement was like a promise of delicious things to come. Stop it, I chided myself. Your imagination and your overactive hormones are leading you down a path you don’t need to travel.

  “I may have a few more questions,” he continued.

  I knew without a doubt that this man was not finished with me. This was merely an appetizer in what was apparently a three-course meal. “You know where to find me.”

  He smiled. “If anything comes to mind, Miss Spain, please give me a call.”

  5

  By two o’clock that afternoon, I longed for a drink. The phone had been ringing incessantly on the one day that my secretary, Hernanda, decided to call in sick. Reporters were calling. Friends whom I hadn’t heard from in a while decided to call to either chat, offer murmured and unhelpful comments about the violent times we live in, or fulfill their morbid curiosity. Even worse, I’d had to cancel my eleven o’clock hearing because I’d been so busy dealing with Chester’s caseload as well as my own.

  Raymond had stopped by earlier for a brief conversation. He was clearly distracted, and I got the impression something other than Chester’s death was occupying his thoughts.

  “Have you started going through Chester’s files?” he asked.

  “Not all of them,” I replied honestly. “I’m still going through my own pile, but by later this afternoon, I should be able to turn my attention back to his files. I checked with docketing, and his calendar is clear, at least for the next three days.”

  “Nothing in court?” asked Raymond, clearly surprised.

  “No,” I said, “according to docketing, last week he decided to cancel his appointments through the end of the week.”

  “Maybe he was planning to take a vacation,” said Raymond, “but he never mentioned it to me. I’ll have to check with his secretary.”

  I knew that would be a waste of time. “I don’t think he was planning a vacation, at least he never mentioned anything to me. I’d think that if he was going away from the office for a couple of days, he would have told me, considering that the Pileski trial is two weeks away.”

  Taking on that distracted, almost vacant look again, Raymond said cryptically, “Yeah, well, Chester always was secretive.”

  Chester wasn’t the only one that was secretive. I knew that Raymond wasn’t giving me all the information he had about Chester’s files. He also wasn’t telling me what he was looking for, and the whole needle in the haystack thing wasn’t working for me. I suspected that whatever Raymond was seeking might have ultimately gotten Chester killed, but I couldn’t be sure if this was just my overactive imagination. Could Raymond have had something to do with Chester’s murder? I shook those terrible thoughts out of my head. Raymond was no murderer. Still, after spending hours poring through files, not knowing what I was looking for, my patience, which was never strong to begin with, was wearing very thin.

  “Raymond, what am I looking for?”

  “I don’t know exactly,” he replied. “Just make sure that his files are in order ... but if there’s anything unusual that you find, let me know right away.”

  I knew he was lying.

  “Unusual?” I asked. “That’s not being very specific.”

  “Use that brain that God gave you, Jasmine,” he replied in a voice more curt than I thought was necessary. “You’ve got a whole lot of common sense. If something doesn’t smell right, let me know.”

  He left my office, still distracted and a bit more agitated than he’d been before arriving. Well, I thought as I watched him walk away, welcome to my world. I turned my attention back to the files.

  If I’d intended to get any work done that day, I was mistaken. When the phones were not ringing, there was someone knocking at my door. There was a steady stream of associates and secretaries in and out of my office who wanted to talk about Chester’s murder or to speculate about what was going to happen to his cases now that he was gone. The secretaries all came into my office clearly upset, talking about Chester and his wonderful attributes. I have often wondered why the dead, even when they are undisputably evil, often take on kinder and gentler attributes after their departure to the hereafter.

  Was this the same Chester who had yelled, cursed, and snarled at the secretaries when his good looks didn’t get him whatever it was he desired at a particular moment? Was this the same Chester who had insisted that all of the secretaries address him by his last name? The same Chester who had fired his most recent paralegal for the unpardonable sin of misspelling a client’s name and not having the good sense to feel bad about it?

  The associates who came to my office also mourned his loss, but a good percentage of them seemed more intrigued about who would inherit his formidable caseload or, more to the point, his clients. I was disheartened, but not surprised. Although the world is full of many good, decent, caring people who happen to be lawyers, I had come across my fair share of sociopaths with a briefcase, who answered to the title attorney at law. Nevertheless, I admonished the associates, none of whom were as senior as me on the food chain, and who therefore had to take it, that a bright and promising life had been taken, Chester’s caseload be damned. As much as I’d personally disliked Chester, I found the casual callousness with which these people treated his death as another reason I probably should have bypassed law school when I’d had the chance. The Peace Corps started to look more and more appealing to me.

  The telephone rang, and I answered it automatically. Immediately, I regretted my actions. It was my mother.

  “Jasmine, how could you let Thea and Reese stay with you?” she said, without any greeting.

  I took a deep breath and counted to ten. I knew what was coming.

  “Her place is with her husband,” my mother continued.

  “What did you want me to do, Mom? Kick them out on the street?”

  My mother sighed loudly over the phone—a long suffering sigh—then she said, “One divorce in this family is more than enough, Jasmine. You need to talk some sense into her, not harbor her and her child like fugitives in that apartment of yours.”

  I truly love my mother, but there were days when I had to work hard to remember that.

  “Mom, have you talked to Thea?”

  My mother sighed again. “I’ve been trying to talk some sense into her all day, but she won’t listen to me.”

  “Did she tell you about Brooks?” I asked. I didn’t want to betray my sister’s confidences.

  “Yes, she told me some madness about another woman.”

  Now it was my turn to sigh. I could not believe that my mother, as feisty as she was in her own marriage, was going to start singing some “stand by your man no matter what he’s done” craziness.

  “Mom, please do not tell me all men do this and—”

  She cut me off. “You know me better than that. If that is what Brooks did, well, then he made his bed, so to speak, and he’s got to lie down in it without his wife. But I don’t believe that Brooks is that kind of man.”

  “Thea feels pretty strongly that he cheated on her.”

  “Hmph! She hasn’t even talked to him. She doesn’t know what he’s done, if anything!”

  “How do you know all this?” I asked, although I was fairly certain I knew the answer.

  “Brooks called me. He’s beside himself with worry! He tried calling her on her cell phone, and she won’t answer. It was Reese
who called him this morning to tell his father where they were. Can you imagine Reese having to do this? I don’t know what’s gotten into your sister. I would have expected this from ...”

  She stopped her sentence abruptly when she remembered that she was speaking to me.

  I won’t lie and say my mother’s words didn’t hurt. I was used to them, but they still hurt. I tried to remind myself that sometimes her mouth got a little ahead of her brain, but Lord knows, the unspoken words felt like a slap in the face. It wasn’t as if I sold crack on a street corner, I wanted to yell at my mother. I’m a lawyer. A respectable member of society. Just because I didn’t follow the life you mapped for me doesn’t make me a failure. But this was a battle I’d have to wait another time to fight.

  “I’ve got to go, Mom. I’m really busy this morning.”

  “But what about Thea?” she asked, undeterred.

  “Whatever she decides, she’ll be just fine,” I said, and in my heart I knew that I was right about this. My sister was going to be fine. “And I’ll support any decision she makes.”

  “Jasmine, listen ... talk to her—”

  “I’ve got to go, Mom,” I said, before placing the telephone in the cradle.

  I remembered a time, many years ago, when I was a little girl. I was tired, and we were in church. We’d gone to my grandmother’s Baptist church in Georgia. Unlike the efficient (quick) Episcopal services I was used to, we were in our third hour of worship, and the end was nowhere in sight. I remember laying my head on my mother’s lap—I must have been around seven years old—and she’d stroked my hair. I felt safe that day. Safe and loved by my mother. I was glad for that memory. It reassured me that there was love there. Even when my mother’s words hurt, there was still some love in there.

  Several hours after my mother’s telephone call, I was knee-deep in Chester’s files. A quick knock on my door announced the arrival of Lamarr, the head of the mail room and my all-around helpmate. He was one of the few people in the firm whom I considered to be a friend. I had enlisted his aid in obtaining all of Chester’s files, which were now placed on my floor, my chairs, and in every other available space in my office.