Darker Than Any Shadow

Chapter Eleven

I found Rico at the edge of Piedmont Park. He was hard to miss in his baggy shorts and Converse, topped with a black tee-shirt, dark eyes hidden behind opaque shades. He faced the far end of the park, where the grass edged into verdant stands of trees. Beyond that, Midtown flared skyward, as if it too had sprung from the fertile earth and climbed toward the yellow sun, which was burning as hot and steady as a stove eye.

He didn’t react when I sat down next to him and handed him a Krispy Kreme doughnut, still warm and oozing glaze. I passed him one of the iced coffees too. His was black, but mine was spiked with a shot of glaze and cut with cream.

He took it without looking at me. “How’d you find me?”

“Where else would you be?”

This corner of the park had been our frequent hangout after my mom died, the summer one year ago I’d practically lived at his place and drank too much wine and cried every day. I told him he’d saved my life. I kept looking for opportunities to pay him back.

“Adam said you didn’t get back until four a.m.”

“Yeah.”

“You were supposed to call me.”

“Yeah. Sorry.”

I let the apology sit there for a while. Usually silence was companionable between us, but this one had sharp places, like a barbed wire fence.

I threw that morning’s Journal-Constitution down between us and poked at the photograph on the front page, a shot of Lex’s body being loaded into an ambulance. “The AJC says it’s officially a homicide now. And you’re officially a person of interest. Whatever that means.”

“It has no meaning. It’s cop words.”

The heat agitated the tension between us. “Look, I know about the shoes. I know they had blood on them, and that for some ungodly reason I cannot possibly understand, you went into a police interview wearing them.”

Rico continued to stare. “Adam told you.”

“He’s worried.”

Rico shook his head. “Don’t look at me like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like you think I killed Lex.”

I almost choked on my coffee. “Damn it, Rico, I know you didn’t kill anybody!”

But he had the look of a deep secret coming up, a secret that hadn’t seen the light of day yet.

“I can’t tell you all of it,” he finally said.

My stomach went cold. Then that heady disconnect, right before the bad news comes, as if you can’t even be present in your own body to hear it.

I steeled myself for whatever was about to come. “Go ahead.”

“Lex and I got in a fight right before he died.”

“What kind of fight?”

“The kind where my fist bloodies his mouth up.”

I started shaking. “Rico!”

“Don’t start. Listen first.”

I closed my mouth. He continued.

“I decided to go to the parking lot and sit a while, drink some Courvoisier I had under the seat. Clear my head.”

I pictured the parking lot, the streetlights’ glow, the Chevy Tahoe with the tinted windows. Nobody would have seen him in there.

“Go on.”

“I’d been there maybe ten minutes when Lex comes out, talking on his phone.”

Right after he’d been talking to me, right after Jackson had thrown him out, literally.

“Lex put the phone away, pulled out a cigarette. Trey came out after a while and had a brief conversation, but he only stayed a minute, then Lex was alone again. I got up to go inside, and he got in my face. Started talking nonsense about missing money, how he’d heard I hadn’t been persuaded to keep him on the team yet, how it would be a shame if I got kicked off the team too, if that missing money showed up in my possession.”

So Jackson had been right. Lex had taken the money. And he’d planned to use it to frame Rico.

“And then what happened?”

Rico shrugged. “I punched him. Not real hard either, just enough to snap his head around and split his lip. Some of the blood got on my shoe, but I didn’t notice. I went inside, did the poems, and then the fire broke out. Didn’t see the damn blood until I was in the interview with that detective. And once that DNA test comes back—”

“All it will prove is exactly what you told me.”

“That’s not what the cops will think.”

“Doesn’t matter. They need means, motive, and opportunity, all three. That fire started while you were on stage, six minutes into your set. Whoever murdered Lex also set the fire, which meant that the killing happened right before the alarm went off, while you were under spotlights surrounded by a hundred witnesses.”

“The fire could have been an accident. Somebody tosses a cigarette in the trashcan, it smolders for a while—”

“Bullshit. You’re talking coincidence. And when there’s a body on the ground, there’s no such thing as coincidence.”

Rico didn’t argue. He knew I was right. Everything adds up around a corpse. But I knew he was right too. There’s circumstantial evidence. And then there’s blood on your shoes.

I pulled the lid off my coffee and fished out an ice cube. “So let’s ask the next logical question. If you didn’t do it, who did?”

Rico leveled a look at me over his sunglasses. “You got ideas about that?”

I sucked on the ice cubes, and told him about the scene in the hallway, including Jackson’s anger, the phone call from the “lady friend,” and Lex’s smug threats. Do you really want to play it this way, Jackson? Really?

“You told the cops this?”

“They already knew most of it.”

“Right. That’s exactly what they want you to think.”

Suddenly he was aligning me with the APD, like I’d chosen sides. I gave up. There was no talking sense with him when he started on one of his diatribes. Then it hit me.

“Wait a minute, why’d you go in anyway? You weren’t being arrested. Unless they had paper, you didn’t have to go. You know that, you’re always bellowing about The Man and our Constitutional rights.”

A shrug, eyes still veiled behind the sunglasses. “So?”

“So why’d you even hang around, Rico? Why didn’t you get the hell out of Dodge the second you cleared the restaurant?”

He shrugged again. And then I understood.

“You’re covering for someone.”

He didn’t deny it. But he did take his sunglasses off and rub his eyes. I saw exhaustion there, but also a resolute firmness.

“Tai, baby, what do you want me to do? Tell you everything? So that you’re then legally compelled to go tell your law-and-order boyfriend, who will have to—as required by his law-and-order brain—tell the cops?”

“I want you to stay out of jail, that’s what I want!”

“I did. And I will.”

“It’s Cricket, isn’t it? She and Lex were having an affair, and now you’re all knight-in-shining-armor to protect her.”

Rico looked at me like I’d lost my mind. “You’re not serious.”

“I’m dead serious! He was staying at their house! She—”

“The answer is no. Look, a poetry group is tight. It has to be. Sometimes things happen, it’s true. But not those two. No way, no how.”

“Like you’d notice. You’re a guy.”

“Drop it, baby girl. Wrong tree.”

I let the question go for the time being, but I knew I was onto something. I remembered Lex’s taunts, Jackson’s anger, Cricket’s emotional discombobulation. Something had been up with her long before fire and murder mucked up the evening. And whatever it was, she and Lex and Jackson were all in it together. And now Rico was too.

He took another sip of coffee. “They know what killed him yet?”

“The paper says they haven’t found the murder weapon, and I’m assuming they did the usual and checked the dumpster and the hedges and the parking lot.”

“Knife’s probably in the sewer now. Or the river. The Chattahoochee is probably clogged with bloody knives this time of year.”

He had a point. Atlanta was the second most crime-ridden city in the US, but the majority of the incidents were property crimes, not homicide. During the summer, however, things burned. Things combusted. Things snapped.

“It takes deep hatred to stick a knife in somebody’s heart,” I said.

“Can’t say the boy didn’t have it coming.”

There was an angry edge to his words, and something else too—satisfaction. I pulled his head around so I could look him in the eye. “So Lex was trying to frame you. Was he blackmailing you too?”

“Trey been teaching you that bullshit detector trick?”

“Stop changing the subject. Did Lex have something on you?”

Rico jammed his sunglasses back on. “No.”

“Nothing?”

“Nothing. Lex was causing trouble because it was the last card he had to play to stay on the team. That’s the whole story.”

“You could have gone to the cops, you know.”

“Now you sound like Trey. The cops would love for me to drop a motive in their lap. Less work, more time at the snack machine.”

“I meant before the murder, when it was only blackmail.”

“There was no blackmail because I didn’t do anything he could blackmail me with! I told you, Lex was a team problem. We were going to handle him as a team.”

“What about Vigil? The almost-felon with a taste for switchblades? Now there’s somebody with a motive, losing his place on the team to some newbie who winds up dead at the debut party.”

“Except that Vigil wasn’t there last night.”

I pulled Trey’s diagram up in my mind. “He could have come in the back way, through the parking lot. Gone right into the bathroom without ever coming into the main room.”

“Could have, might have, would have—the cops don’t give a shit. They got me, at the scene, with a motive, and blood on my shoes. I’m looking like O. J. Simpson to them.”

“If you’d only—”

“Don’t you have a bunch of rednecks to gun up? Something else to do besides mess with my life?”

Now I was angry too. “Hey, you’re the one put Trey on red alert. You asked us—”

“I asked Trey. Not you.”

“We’re a package deal.”

“Then I’m returning the package.”

I glared at him. He glared back. Fifteen years held us together, strong glue. I’d known him when he was a chubby mathlete with pastel oxford shirts buttoned to his chin. And he’d stuck with me through too many unwise follies of the uncouth variety. Bickering was old hat with us, maybe even affection. But there was something behind the words this time, something sharp.

I lowered my voice. “Bitching at each other isn’t helping.”

His expression softened. “Damn straight. But this isn’t your problem.”

“You made it my problem when you sicced Trey on the situation because you thought something might happen. Because—guess what?—something happened.” I put my hand on his shoulder. “Rico, you are my best friend. But this isn’t about you anymore. I’m in it now, Trey too. And I love you like a house on fire, but you don’t get to call all the shots.”

I rubbed his arm, massive as a tree branch. He turned and took my shoulders in his hands, gently but firmly.

“I did not kill Lex Anderson.”

“I know you didn’t. But you’re hiding something, something besides a fight in the parking lot and bloody shoes, and I want to know what it is.”

He shook his head. “I can’t tell you.”

“I won’t tell Trey.”

“It’s not Trey I’m worried about, it’s those guys downtown.”

“I’ll plead the fifth.”

“You can only do that to avoid incriminating yourself. If the cops ask you questions about me, you have to answer them, or they’ll throw your ass in jail.”

“But—”

“I’m serious!” He stood up, wearily, as if his bones ached. “I swear to God, Teresa Ann Randolph, I love you too, but you need to drop this particular bone, okay?”

“But—”

“No buts.” He reached in his pocket and pulled out his keys. “I gotta go get Adam. I told Cricket we’d help clean up the restaurant later. I’ll call you, okay?”

“Yeah. Just like last night.”

He sighed and headed back to his car. I watched his retreating back for a while, then drank my coffee and ate my doughnut. And then I reached deep into my tote bag, pulled out a lipstick case, and fished out the tissue-wrapped Winston Light. My emergency cigarette. I scrounged the lighter up from the depths too, flicked it once, and lit up.

Trey loathed cigarette smoke. I’d almost entirely given up the habit, one hundred percent around him anyway. But there were times. This was one.

A mother with her baby wrapped in a rainbow-hued sling shot me a dirty look as she passed. Whatever. The smog alert that morning was orange, which meant that she and her progeny were sucking in dangerous lungfuls of ground-level ozone for which I was blameless.

I blew a plume of smoke at the sun, riding lower now, but still flat yellow and relentless. Once again I was in a situation where nobody wanted to give me any answers. Once again I was forced to resort to my own devices.

I sucked in another sweet hit of nicotine. So much for rehabilitation.