Skip’s employer was still a mystery and Isaiah couldn’t get it out of his mind. He’d slouch in his armchair, mentally flipping the case over, upside down, and sideways while Ruffin, named after Marcus’s favorite singer, David Ruffin, chewed on his shoes and peed everywhere but on the pee pads. There was nothing else to do but go back to work.
Mr. Everwood had Alzheimer’s and couldn’t remember where he’d hidden fifteen thousand dollars in Krugerrands. Susan Paul’s ex was extorting her with a video they’d made in the privacy of their bedroom. Vandals vandalized the abortion clinic. They wrote BABY KILLERS and DEATH CAMP on the walls and made off with an aspirator, a suction apparatus, and a surgical chair.
Deronda’s friend Nona had a husband who beat her when he was drunk, which was almost every day. Isaiah paid for a bus ticket and brought Nona’s father, Earl, in from Bakersfield, where he worked for Union Pacific coupling and uncoupling freight cars and cabling them to the hoist. Earl met Nona’s husband coming out of the liquor store with a half gallon of Thunderbird. Earl beat him, stomped on his hands so he couldn’t hit Nona anymore, and drank the Thunderbird on the bus back to Bakersfield.
Nona, realizing her husband could still kick and bite, decided to move in with Deronda. Isaiah said he’d help. Nona was friends with Cherise and she volunteered Dodson. They used Dodson’s ten-year-old two-tone Lexus RS as a moving van, filling the backseat and trunk with Nona’s belongings and strapping a mattress to the roof. The car had a hundred and ten thousand miles on the odometer, was silent as a bank vault, and rolled over potholes like they were hopscotch lines on the sidewalk. Dodson drove with his neck pulled into his shoulders and held the steering wheel with one arm stuck straight out. Tupac rapped from the stereo. Isaiah sulked.
“I need new tires,” Dodson said. “You know what they cost for this car? Something to be said for public transportation. I might have to break down and buy me a bus pass. That’s okay, you don’t have to talk, it’s not like I crave your conversation, but just out of curiosity, did you forget to send me a thank-you card?”
“A thank-you card for what?” Isaiah said.
“For saving your life.”
“I don’t remember getting one from you.”
Isaiah went still. The key to the case was materializing like a Polaroid snapshot. Streaks and blurry colors forming. Tupac’s rapping was distracting. “Could you play something else, please?” Isaiah said.
“I could but I won’t,” Dodson said.
“Don’t you get tired of him?”
“No I don’t. All his albums? Must be two, three hundred songs and he recorded more than that. Yeah, Tupac was a songwriting fool. Remember Suge Knight and Death Row Records? Suge robbed the boy blind. Tupac sold millions of records and when he died he was damn near broke.”
“Suge got away with it?”
“He spent the money if that’s what you mean,” Dodson said. “But Tupac’s mama, Afeni, sued Suge, got control of the leftover songs. Was a bunch of ’em. Oh, check this out.”
Tupac rapped:
My homie told me once, don’t you trust them other suckers
they fought like they were your homies but they phony motherfuckers
“Yeah, Tupac should have took his own advice,” Dodson said. “You can’t trust nobody in the music biz. You don’t watch them muthafuckas every damn minute they’ll steal the vision right out your eyeballs.”
Isaiah squirmed in his seat. Lines were connecting on the Polaroid. A string of facts. A logic. The case-breaker. It was right there. Right fucking there.
Dodson hit the brakes so hard the mattress slid down over the windshield and a box of stuffed animals spilled into the front of the car.
“What?” Isaiah said, tossing a one-eyed koala bear over his shoulder.
“After Tupac died, Afeni used the leftover songs and put out seven more records,” Dodson said. “People called ’em R.I.P. albums, rest in peace. Made ’em seem like collectors’ items. Six of the records went platinum. Don Killuminati sold five million copies all by itself.” Dodson looked at Isaiah and said: “Tupac sold more records dead than he did when he was alive.”
“I knew that,” Isaiah said, snapping his fingers.