Blanche on the Lam: A Blanche White Mystery
Read Blanche on the Lam: A Blanche White Mystery Online
Authors: Barbara Neely
BLANCHE
ON THE LAM
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Copyright © 1992, 2014 Barbara Neely
All rights reserved.
No part of this book maybe reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
ISBN: 1941298389
ISBN 13: 9781941298381
Published by Brash Books, LLC
12120 State Line #253,
Leawood, Kansas 66209
Books by Barbara Neely
Blanche on the Lam
Blanche Among the Talented Tenth
Blanche Cleans Up
Blanche Passes Go
For my sister Vanessa
ONE
“H
ave you anything to say for yourself?” The judge gave Blanche a look that made her raise her handbag to her chest like a shield.
“Your Honor...I'm sorry...I...”
“Sorry? It most certainly is sorry! This is the fourth, I repeat, the fourth time you've been before this court on a bad-check charge. Perhaps some time in a jail cell will convince you to earn your money before you spend it, like the rest of us. Thirty days and restitution!”
“But, Your Honor...” Blanche's legs were suddenly weak. Her hands were freezing. Beads of sweat popped out on her nose. She wanted to tell the judge that a jail cell was cruel and unusual punishment for a person who panicked in slow elevators. She also wanted to ask him where the hell he got off, lying about her like that! This was her second, not her fourth charge. Furthermore, just as she'd done the last time, she would have made good on the checks even if she hadn't been summoned to court. Hadn't she already covered three of the five checks she'd written? And right here in her handbag she had the forty-two-fifty she still owed, plus fifty dollars for the fine—same as the judge had made her pay last time. But last time she'd had a judge with his mind already on the golf course. He'd hardly bothered to look at her. There'd been no talk of jail that time.
“Your Honor,” she began again.
The bang of the gavel was like a shot fired in the room. “Next case!”
“Come along.” The matron's hand was pale as plaster against the deep blackness of Blanche's upper arm. Blanche looked around the courtroom, but no one was interested enough to look back. She was already being replaced before the judge by a stooped, sad-faced white man with cut-up shoes and hands red as raw meat.
She was taken to an anteroom with metal tables and chairs that looked like every prison movie she'd ever seen. A dark blond, bullet-headed boy in jeans and cowboy boots sat on a long bench against the far wall. Sheriff Stillwell stood beside him, his short, bandy legs bowed beneath the weight of his belly. His right hand was on his pistol, his eyes were boring a hole in the opposite wall. Blanche tried to catch the boy's eye, to see and be seen by someone before they both disappeared into...She clutched her stomach and half-turned to the matron.
“I gotta use the toilet!”
The matron gave her an annoyed frown, looked at her watch, then pulled Blanche through another doorway that led onto the back corridor. Diagonally across the hall, between the staircase and the men's room, was a door marked
LADIES
.
A dingy skylight threw murky light down onto a cracked marble floor. A mottled basin and a toilet stall were crowded together in a space hardly large enough for the two women. Blanche entered the stall and padded the seat with toilet paper before sitting down to ease her bowels with as little noise as possible.
“I'll be right out in the hall,” the matron muttered in a disgusted tone.
Blanche put her elbows on her knees and fumed. Thoughts scurried in and out of her mind like mice in an abandoned kitchen. I shoulda known better, she told herself. She rocked back and forth on the commode. Shoulda known. She wound her arms tightly round her body, comforting herself in the same way she did her children. She closed her eyes and saw the judge
accusing her of being lower than snake shit. She opened her eyes, only to see where she was and where she was headed.
She knew she should be making a mental list of all she would need in jail that Durham County would surely not provide. She should be planning what she wanted her mother to tell the children. She should be convincing herself that she could and would survive the next thirty days. Instead, she raged at the judge for being an unfair dickbrain, and at herself for ignoring all the signs of trouble coming:
The way her hand had itched and throbbed at the same time as she'd stood in her kitchen reading the court summons; the way the glass she was drinking from just before she left the house for court had suddenly developed a crack while she held it to her lips. She'd ignored both events despite her claim that reading people and signs, and sizing up situations, were as much a part of her work as scrubbing floors and making beds. She threw her head back to keep the tears from falling and wished the most vain hope of all—the chance to rearrange her life so that she would not be in this situation.
Shoulda stayed in New York, she told herself; at least I made enough to cover my checks. And she could do a lot better there now that dotcom money was adding names to the list of New Yorkers with more money than anyone ought to have. But the day Taifa and Malik came home from school and told her about the man who'd tried to entice them into his van with the promise of a Run-DMC tape was the day Blanche knew they had to leave New York. She'd gathered her children and her belongings and headed for the relative safety of Farleigh, North Carolina, where she and the children had been born.
And this was what it had gotten her.
Why the hell hadn't she borrowed the money and paid it directly to the stores and utilities instead of writing those damned checks? Too proud, she remonstrated with herself. Still dreaming. Still hoping to find an employer willing to pay for a
full-service domestic instead of the bunch of so-called genteel Southern white women for whom she currently did day work. Most of them seemed to think she ought to be delighted to swab their toilets and trash cans for a pittance. Farleigh was not New York, or even Raleigh or Durham, and certainly not Chapel Hill, where there were plenty of professional and academic folks eager for good help. Farleigh was still a country town, for all its pretensions. The folks who lived here and had money, even the really wealthy ones, thought they were still living in slavery days, when a black woman was grateful for the chance to work indoors. Even at the going rate in Farleigh she'd found no black people in town who could afford her—not that working for black people ensured good treatment, sad to say.
Too proud. That was always her problem. The first time she'd been summoned to court about her checks she hadn't known what to expect and hadn't asked anyone. She didn't want to admit that she worked six days a week and still didn't make enough money to take care of herself and her children. Her low salary wasn't her fault, but it still made her feel like a fool, as if she'd fallen for some obvious con game.
“Hurry up in there, gal!”
The matron's gruff voice ripped away all pretext that time was standing still. Blanche cast about for something to hang on to, something that would help her get through what lay ahead. Had she been the woman her mother had raised her to be, she would have prayed. Instead, she decided to get a lawyer. Shoulda had a lawyer all along, she chided herself; not to have done so seemed stupid now. After all, she'd intended no crime. If four of her employers hadn't gone out of town without paying her, she'd have had enough money in the bank to cover the checks. She was smoothing down the skirt of her dress and still fighting off the desire to scream, and plead, and wallow in her fear, when an explosion of voices erupted in the hall.
The sounds of men shouting questions and the shuffling of feet came clearly over the transom. Blanche picked up her handbag and left the stall without flushing the commode. She stood listening as the noise in the corridor grew even louder. She eased the outer door open just a crack.
The matron was standing to the left of the door, almost in front of the men's room. She was facing down the hall, away from Blanche, toward a group of men with cameras, note pads, and microphones. They were circling someone Blanche couldn't see but who she was sure must be the county commissioner recently charged with accepting bribes.
She was positive he wouldn't get thirty days. A little bad publicity, and a lot of sympathy from people who might easily be in his position, was about all he'd get. She turned her head and looked at the stairs on the other side of the bathroom—stairs that led down to the outside, according to the
EXIT
sign above the stairwell.
Blanche opened the bathroom door just wide enough for her to slip into the hall. She crab-walked to the waiting stairs. The part of her that had been raised to believe in and obey the law was urging her to turn back before it was too late. But turning back was made impossible by the thought of thirty days of walls pressing closer, of living behind a door she couldn't open. She egged herself on with the thought of the commissioner getting off scot-free.
She ran down the stairs on tiptoe. She flattened as much of herself against the clammy green wall as she could, for a stout woman, and wished she could fade into it. One flight. Two flights. She could still hear reporters upstairs screaming questions in high-pitched voices. She concentrated on the door marked
EXIT
, ordering it to be unlocked, to not be surrounded by sheriff's deputies on the other side.
A great sob welled up in her chest at the sight of the dark underground parking lot she found when she pulled open the
heavy door. She didn't see anyone, but she knew better than to run. A running black person was still a target of suspicion in this town, even if the runner was a woman. She crouched quite low and, despite her forty years, zigzagged across the parking lot toward the opening, bright with outside light.
She was in back of the courthouse. She stepped out onto the pavement, straightened her dress, and walked quickly away from the courthouse and the few blocks of downtown stores. She moved with as much of an air of a woman going about serious business as she could muster—eyes straight ahead and a serious set to her mouth. Her ears strained for a siren or the sound of her name being called in a way that meant “Halt!” She fought the urge to look behind her or to look for streets that might take her to her neighborhood. Anybody who watched TV knew it was dumb to try to hide out at home. A young white woman with a small child gave her a curious look. Blanche hurried around the next corner. She knew she'd be less noticeable if she slowed down, but her legs wouldn't let her. Her brain had given them the “Run!” message and they were bent on following that order.