What help? Nell hadn’t understood then, didn’t understand now.
She called Veronica, got no answer.
“Veronica? Nell. Lee Ann tells me you spoke. I really need to talk to you about that. It’s . . . it’s an emergency, Veronica.” Too dramatic?
Maybe, but also too late to take it back.
Two or three minutes passed, Nell staring at the boxes on her sheet of paper. She rose, looked out the window, saw the cruiser in her driveway, Timmy’s arm out the window. That reminded her of Joe Don. She tried Norah again, without success. What had Johnny told her about the universe, that everything was speeding away from everything else? She felt it happening now; a lot of those big, abstract things he’d liked to talk about turned out to apply in the tiny universe of the human heart. What would he say to that idea? Nell would have given a lot to know. He’d left so little behind. She tried to picture his face and could not.
Almost without knowing what she was doing, Nell opened the closet, unstacked boxes until she came to the one lettered unc. She pulled it out, looked inside, found what she had before: her old art notebooks, research for her unwritten thesis, introductory geology
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textbook, souvenirs that didn’t bring back any important memories and the photo album full of pictures of Johnny, all ruined by Bernardine. She flipped through, saw his blurred smile here, what might have been his torso, so lean and strong from the pool, there. This was stupid: she knew what she was doing, all right—running for help to a dead man. Nell began repacking everything, and as she did, her gaze fell on an old computer sitting at the back of the closet.
Her old computer, dating to her undergraduate days: an IBM
desktop that now looked not much different from something invented by Edison. But not just her computer: in that last summer in Belle Ville, she’d been sharing it with Johnny.
Where’s his computer? You
squirreled that away, didn’t you?
Nell dragged the computer out of the closet, keyboard and mouse trailing behind, swept away cobwebs, blew off dust. An old Post-it note that had hung on the side of the computer all those years drifted to the floor. She recognized her own handwriting, somewhat different, the letters fuller than now, everything more spacious:
wine and cheese Tues. 7:30—
invitation to a party now completely forgotten.
Nell plugged in the computer, hit a key. Nothing happened. She tried several other keys, the mouse, a button, another button. Nothing. “Come on,” she said, and gave the thing a little tap, followed by a harder one. The computer beeped and the screen flickered to life.
She saw some icons, scanned them, their labels mostly meaningless now—lease 1.doc, cat copy courbet, Q&A 3.doc, jbletters.doc.
jbletters.doc? Nell clicked on that. A letter appeared.
Dear Mr. Bastien,
I am very disappointed by your
The computer beeped and the screen went dark. Nell tried her routine again, hitting keys, the mouse, different buttons, slapping the box itself, not hard, then harder. No response. She unplugged, replugged, went through the routine once more. Nothing. She yelled at the thing, fought off the urge to throw it through the window.
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Nell rose, went to the window, looked down. Timmy was standing in front of the cruiser now, buffing the headlights with a cloth. Nell opened the window. “Timmy?”
His head snapped up. “Ma’am?” His hand went to his belt. “Everything all right?”
“How are you with computers?”
“Computers?”
“Are you good with them?”
“Honestly? Couldn’t say real good, no. Not yet, anyhow.”
“Not yet?”
“I’m taking level-three computer tech at night school,” Timmy said. “BVCC. But I don’t graduate till November.”
“Mind coming in for a minute?” Nell said.
“In the house?”
“I need some computer help.”
Timmy thought that over. “Is the door locked?”
“No. Just come in.”
“It should be, ma’am.”
“Well,” said Nell. “It isn’t.”
“Wow,” said Timmy.
“What’s this?”
“A computer,” Nell said.
Timmy knelt in front of it. The desk phone rang. Nell picked it up.
“Hello?”
“Veronica Rice calling. I got your message.”
Nell glanced at Timmy. He was examining the back of the computer. She stepped into the hall, the cord dragging behind her.
“Thanks for calling me back,” she said.
“You said it was an emergency.”
“Lee Ann Bonner is dead. Alvin DuPree killed her.”
Pause. “I’m sorry to hear that.”
“He’s on the run.”
A longer pause. “Is that a warning?”
“Warning?”
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“Are you saying he’s coming here?” Veronica said.
“No,” Nell said. “Why would he do that?”
Silence.
“I need to talk to you, Veronica. Can you—” She was about to ask Veronica to come over, but with the cruiser in the driveway, and Timmy? “Can we meet somewhere? Now?”
Silence. Just when Nell had decided that no answer was coming, that she had only a second or two to find the magic words, Veronica said, “And let the chips fall wherever they may?”
Nell felt a moment of dread; it turned out to be a real physical feeling, located inside her, on the border between chest and stomach.
But there were things she had to know, that she couldn’t live without knowing, leaving only one answer. “Yes.”
“Because that’s where the problems always start,” Veronica said.
“You mean racial problems? This has nothing to do with that.”
Veronica made a little sound, part laugh, part snort. “You know where I live?” she said.
“Timmy?” Nell said.
He’d opened up the back of the computer, was gazing inside. “Timmy?”
He looked up quickly, as though startled. “Ma’am?”
“I’m going to lie down for a while.”
“Okay,” said Timmy. “Have a nice rest.”
Nell walked along the hall, opened and closed her bedroom door—louder than necessary—then continued down the stairs and into the garage from the kitchen exit. She got in her car, hit the garage remote, backed out, hit the remote again. Turning on to the street, she glanced up at the office window, didn’t see Timmy. She drove away.
Nell knew where
Veronica lived—in the nice part of the East Side, several blocks north of the high-water mark, just above Penniman Street. She parked in front of Veronica’s house, white with violet trim, and pressed a button by the door. Chimes sounded inside; a
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long time since she’d heard door chimes. She also heard a dog barking ferociously in the house next door. Glancing over, she saw an old man in a round African hat sitting on the porch, a puppy on his lap.
The puppy’s eyes were on Nell; the old man stared straight ahead.
Veronica’s door opened. She wore a dress that matched the trim of the house, and seemed to have gone to some trouble with her appearance; Nell hoped it was because she was on her way to somewhere nice after this visit. “Come in,” she said.
Nell went in, her first time inside Veronica’s house. Spotless, comfortable, a little dark; a signed photograph of Martin Luther King stood on a table in the front hall. Veronica led her past it, into a small sitting room with brown furniture and a cream-colored wall-to-wall carpet. Black-and-white photographs hung on the wall, all of them scenes of Belle Ville before the flood.
“I love the photos,” Nell said.
“Bobby took them.”
“He did?”
“It was his hobby,” Veronica said.
How had she not known that? The pictures were really good; the one of the Fourth Street Baptist Church, now destroyed, with a thoughtful-looking girl in a party dress going up the stairs, was as good as anything in the museum’s collection.
“Something to drink?” Veronica said. “Coke? Iced tea?”
“I’m all right, thanks,” Nell said.
Veronica nodded. Maybe accepting a drink would have been the way to go; Nell felt off balance, as though in another country, which was crazy: this was her town and she’d been around black people all her life, considered a few of the black women at the museum her friends. They sat on easy chairs angled toward each other.
“Ms. Bonner is dead?” Veronica said.
“Yes.”
“I turned on the news. They didn’t say anything.”
“I’m sure they’ll have the story soon,” Nell said. “Maybe the delay has something to do with the search for DuPree.”
Eyes focused on some point beyond Nell, Veronica said, “He’s the real killer this time?”
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“I practically saw it happen.” Nell described the scene in Lee Ann’s condo; and as she did, Veronica’s gaze shifted slightly and met hers.
When Nell came to the end, Veronica said, “I’m glad you weren’t harmed.”
“Thank you,” Nell said. “I was supposed to meet Lee Ann for lunch. I think she was going to tell me whatever it was you told her.”
“Why is that, if you don’t mind me asking?” Veronica said.
“Why do I think she planned to tell me?”
Veronica nodded, a slow movement, almost grave; and there was a deep gravity about this woman: to shift her against her will off some position she’d taken would be almost impossible.
“Because,” Nell said, “I could hear it in her voice.” Veronica’s face remained impassive. “And she seemed to think the little visit you and I had at the school played a role in your decision to talk to her. She said it was productive. Meaning she was grateful to me.”
Another slow nod.
“So whatever you told her about the tape, I’d like to hear, too,”
Nell said.
“The tape?”
“How it got in Bobby’s locker,” Nell said. “The whole story, I guess, from where you sit.”
“From where I sit.” The way Veronica said that seemed to imply some huge distance between them. “Truth is I didn’t speak a word about the tape, except for I had nothing to say on that subject.”
“Then what did you tell her?”
“That Bobby’s death was an accident.”
“Of course it was,” Nell said. “He died saving the baby—everyone knows that.”
“There’s everyone,” Veronica said, “and then there’s the power structure. To satisfy my mind, I hired a private detective out of Houston.”
Nell was bewildered. “To do what?”
“To make sure Bobby really died—” She went silent, her eyes moistening; then her face changed—Nell caught a look of self-disgust—her eyes dried up and she continued: “To make sure Bobby really died the way they said.”
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“But the picture was in the
Guardian.
”
Veronica gestured at the photos on the wall. “Anything can be done with pictures—Bobby taught me that.”
All at once the room felt airless; the edges of everything went yellow. Nell tried to grasp the implications of what she’d just heard.
“Lee Ann believed Bobby might have been murdered?” she said.
“She’s—she was a smart lady,” Veronica said.
“But—” Nell stopped herself. Had she read some poll result seeming to show that blacks had a more conspiratorial worldview than whites? Nell wasn’t sure, but the thought came to her:
You need to be
blacker now.
“What did the detective find?” she said.
“No foul play,” said Veronica. “He satisfied my mind.”
“I’d like something to drink now,” Nell said. “Water, if it’s no trouble.”
“No trouble,” Veronica said. She rose, quite easily for such a big woman, and left the room. Nell got up, too, breathed deeply; the yellow edging faded away. She took a closer look at the girl in the party dress and noticed something she hadn’t before—a man’s face in one of the church windows. For some reason, the sight chilled her.
She went into the hall, followed sounds of running water to the kitchen. Veronica stood at the sink, filling a pitcher. “The fact that you believed Bobby might have been murdered means you know someone who had a motive, doesn’t it?” Nell said.
Veronica lost her grip on the pitcher: startled by Nell’s sudden appearance? . . . or by what she’d said? The pitcher fell and smashed in the sink. Veronica didn’t move. The water ran.
“Who?” Nell said. “Who had a motive?”
Veronica was silent.
“I have to know, Veronica. It’s about the tape, isn’t it?”
Veronica went still. Somehow she’d cut the palm of her hand. Not badly: she didn’t seem to notice the thin red trickle. “Why should I say anything?” she said.
“Because it’s all going to come out now,” Nell said.
“It never does,” said Veronica. Now she became aware of the cut. She frowned at it, held her palm under the water for a moment, then shut off the tap. The bleeding stopped. It was very quiet in the kitchen.
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A conspiratorial kind of quiet. “You can tell yourself that’s the reason,” Nell said. “But what if the truth is you’re covering up something Bobby did, something bad?”
Veronica turned on her, so fast Nell took a step back, afraid that Veronica was about to attack her. “Bobby did nothing bad,” she said, her voice shaking. “Nothin’.”
“Then who did?” Nell said.
Veronica’s head tilted back a little. Nell knew the answer right then.
“My husband?” she said.
Veronica nodded, a tiny motion, almost imperceptible.
“What happened?” Nell said.
“Chips fall wherever they may?” Veronica said.
“They’re falling right now,” said Nell. What could be more obvious? Chips falling and falling, a blizzard.
“It was like insurance,” Veronica said. “We take insurance wherever we can find it in this life.”
Who did? Black people, or everybody in general? Nell didn’t risk the question.
Veronica gazed down at her hand; Nell saw she still wore her wedding ring. “One night,” she said. “After work on the late shift. Bobby’s sitting in his car, the old blue Chevy, in that lot between One Marigot and where that ribs place was back then. Pouring rain, the ribs place is closed, everything dark. Out the back of One Marigot comes Clay Jarreau.”