Читать книгу Gonna Lay Down My Burdens - Mary Monroe - Страница 10

Times had changed. From watching almost every episode of America’s Most Wanted, Unsolved Mysteries, and Cops, and from reading too many true-crime books, I knew that criminals didn’t have a leg to stand on anymore. Something I had supported whole-heartedly.

Until now.

I didn’t tell Desiree, and I had a hard time believing it myself, but I didn’t think we would make it to California—or even out of the state of Alabama, for that matter. I didn’t even think we would make it to my apartment after we left the house Desiree had shared with Chester for the past seven years. But at least we would try. All that mattered to me was staying out of jail no matter what it took, and the longer we remained free the better. Even with my confused state of mind, I believed that there was a slim chance we would get away with murder. There was a chance that people might believe that Chester had fallen or that someone else had attacked him. Being a policeman who had helped put dozens of criminals in jail, he had made a lot of enemies over the years. Even his ex-wife had threatened him a few times all the way from Texas. At the time, another suspect didn’t seem that farfetched, but it seemed too weak and I wasn’t willing to rely on it.

The bloody weight was in my purse, where it would remain until I figured out what to do with it. We had passed a lot of Dumpsters and bushes. I had thought about tossing the murder weapon out the window of my car, and it would have been the smart thing to do. But nothing we had done so far could be called smart.

The rain had stopped; traffic was light, but my mind was not on driving. I went down the same street twice and sideswiped an abandoned car in an alley. I finally pulled over to the side of Patterson Street and placed my head on the steering wheel.

“Let me drive,” Desiree said, pulling my arm off the steering wheel.

I lifted my head and told her, “I’m all right.”

“You’re not all right. You’re in no shape to drive. You want to kill us, too?” Desiree didn’t wait for me to respond. She flung open the passenger’s door and hopped out of the car. Before she even made it around to the driver’s side, I slid from under the wheel onto the passenger’s seat.

With Desiree driving like somebody being chased by the devil, we arrived at my apartment in less than five minutes, a fraction of the time it normally took from where she had taken over the wheel.

This was one night I didn’t like having nosy neighbors.

As soon as we parked the car in front of my building, lights went on in the apartment below mine and a pair of shiny, catlike eyes appeared in the front window. Jimmie Lee Cross, the busybody middle-aged homosexual who lived in the apartment, kept a chair in front of that window. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw that old queen hold up a pair of glasses to his eyes as he boldly watched every move we made. Curtains moved at the window in the house across the street, and a large, beefy red face appeared.

“I thought you said this was a nice neighborhood,” Desiree said thoughtfully.

“It is a nice neighborhood full of nice, nosy people. Nothing gets past this hawkeyed bunch. We don’t even have to lock our doors around here,” I announced proudly.

We took the stairs to my second-floor apartment. Because I had left all of the gifts I had received at my bridal shower on my living room floor, I had locked my front door when I left to go pick up Desiree.

“The police hardly ever have to come out here.” As soon as I said that, I lowered my head and started fumbling with my purse, trying to locate my house keys. I was one step away from being delirious. I thought I heard a car alarm go off. I knew that my mind was playing tricks on me, but I still panicked and dropped my purse. The weight inside made a tremendous noise when it hit the concrete landing. Desiree lifted the purse.

“You—you got blood on your shoe,” she whispered and pointed to my feet.

I gasped and hopped like I had just stepped on a piece of hot coal. As careful as I had been, I had still stepped in Chester’s blood. The rim on my right house shoe looked like somebody had taken a dark-red crayon and outlined it. “Shit!” There was not much light coming from the streetlights or the lights on the outside of my building. I couldn’t really tell if I had tracked an incriminating trail of bloody footprints when I turned around and looked down at the steps. It felt like an invisible noose had wound itself around my neck and was getting tighter by the minute.

“It’s all right. You probably left the rest of the blood on the lawn at Chester’s house,” Desiree assured me.

“What about my car? The pedals, the floor mat. What if I left blood in my car?” I wailed, looking toward my car, parked on the street where I planned to leave it. I wiped the soles of my house shoes on the thorny welcome mat in front of my apartment door.

“We don’t have time to worry about that now. We need to get inside and figure out what we are going to do.” Desiree opened my purse and rooted around in it. She let out a short, muffled scream when she pulled the bloody weight halfway out. She dropped it back into my purse immediately. With her eyes closed, she found my keys at the bottom of my purse. I slid off my house shoe and clutched it, standing on one foot against the building while Desiree fumbled with the key to unlock the door.

Even though I lived in a quiet and crime-free neighborhood, I usually left my lights on when I went out at night. As soon as we got inside, Desiree ran around clicking off lights. The only ones she left on were the lamp on the end table next to the telephone in my living room and a lamp in my bedroom.

“Carmen, did you mean what you said about going with me?” she asked, whirling around to face me as I stood rooted in my spot like a tree.

Finally, and with a great deal of effort, I sat down hard on my sofa and started rubbing the back of my head, unable to face the picture of Jesus on the wall looking down on me. The back of my head was aching more than any other part of my body. Chester had gripped my hair just that hard.

“I would not have said it if I didn’t mean it,” I told Desiree. I jumped up as fast as I had sat down, and headed toward my kitchen with Desiree behind me still holding my purse. I flipped on the light and fished the murder weapon out of my purse. I wrapped it in a handful of paper towels. Then I returned it to my purse. “We can throw it in some bushes or something. My shoe and that jacket you have on, too.”

Desiree stared at my purse, then my face, and then she jerked her head in a nodding motion. There was blood on the cuff of her windbreaker, but I didn’t know if it was hers or Chester’s.

She nodded again and frowned at the sleeve of her windbreaker as she spoke. “It’s not too late, you know. We can still call this in, tell them what really happened and pray they go easy on us. My aunt Nadine scalded my uncle to death when I was nine, and she got off by pleading self-defense,” Desiree told me, peeling off the windbreaker, then the one-sleeved blouse that Chester had ripped. Rolling them into a tight ball, she slid both into a plastic grocery bag she’d snatched off the counter.

“Is that the same aunt nobody would hire because of her past and she ended up working the streets turning ten-dollar tricks?”

“Yeah. Aunt Nadine,” she replied, staring grimly at the plastic bag dangling in her hand as she leaned her hip against the sink.

“And last year she jumped out of a window in Brooklyn and broke her neck?” I was way too jumpy to relax. I didn’t want to sit down, and I knew that if I stretched out on the sofa or on my bed, I might not be able to get back up. I stood in front of my stove, shifting my weight from one foot to the other.

“Well, Aunt Nadine had been depressed for years, you know,” Desiree muttered.

“So much for her getting off. Just think how much better her life would have been if nobody ever knew she killed your uncle.”

Desiree sighed and nodded. “You better hurry up and get your shit packed before we go on the lam.”

Trying to decide what to take with me was something I didn’t know how to approach. I’d never been “on the lam” before. Desiree had not taken anything from Chester’s house other than what she had on her back and in her purse. She had already packed what was important to her in the two suitcases she had stored in my bedroom closet on the floor below my color-coded designer suits.

“I can’t take both my suitcases,” she announced, moving toward me. “It’d be too much trouble. Where’s that travel bag you won at the church raffle last year?”

“That’s what I was planning to use,” I wailed.

“You got another small bag?”

“I don’t know. My sister left a lot of her stuff here when she got married and moved to Nigeria. I’ll look through it and see.”

Desiree followed me to my bedroom, where she dragged her two suitcases out of the closet and hauled them into the living room. I pulled the black-leather travel bag that I had won at church from the top shelf of my closet and placed it on the bed. I unzipped it and stood up looking around the room. I slid into the Nikes I had left on the floor by the side of my bed, but I planned to pack a second pair. Without thinking I bounced from drawer to drawer, pulling out jeans, comfortable blouses, sensible underwear. I had enough makeup in my purse, so a half-used container of Arid Extra Dry and a fresh bottle of Lubriderm lotion were the only things I took from the bathroom.

“There’s that commuter bus at five in the morning. Thank God we don’t know anybody who rides that bus. Not that many people ride it on a Saturday anyway. It’ll get us to Mobile, where we can connect with a Greyhound,” Desiree said, peeking into my room.

My mouth dropped open so wide, I could feel the night air coming in through my cracked window all the way to the back of my tongue. “Greyhound? How far do you think we’ll get on a Greyhound bus?”

“I know you hadn’t planned on hopping on a plane.” Desiree wailed like a wounded raccoon and looked like one with her blackened eyes and swollen lips.

“I hadn’t planned on any of this,” I said thoughtfully. Until now I had not even considered what mode of transportation we were going to use to leave the state. “We have enough money for a plane ticket.”

“We don’t have that much money between us. What we have is not enough for us to pay for two spur-of-the-moment tickets to California and have enough left over to last us until…until we get out of this mess. And if we fly we’ll be leaving a paper trail. You have to show a picture ID when you fly these days. Everything will go into their computers—shit. And don’t even think about driving your car.”

“I don’t have that many miles on it. It would make it to California,” I said.

Desiree shook her head and snapped, “Are you out of your mind? The highways are full of patrolmen lying in wait. Like spiders. If we go, we go by bus.” I could tell by Desiree’s tone of voice she was determined to do things her way, even though the heaviest part of our crime was on my shoulders. “We’re catching a bus,” she said with resignation.

“All the way to California from here?”

“We have to get to Mobile first. Didn’t I just tell you that? We don’t have a Greyhound station here. After we leave Mobile we’ll have to transfer left and right, and it will still take us three and a half days to get to California.” Desiree sighed and patted her chest before she fanned her face with her hand. There was so much sweat on her forehead, her hair was plastered to her flesh.

“Well…what about the train?”

“What about it?”

“Wouldn’t we get to California faster on a train?” I asked, blinking stupidly.

“It would be about the same as a bus. I know because that’s how my sister went to California.” Desiree blinked and managed a weak smile. “Since we have a little time to kill, we better get some rest because we’re going to need it.”

As soon as Desiree left my bedroom, I sat down hard on the bed and exhaled. A picture on my nightstand caught my attention. I had to blink hard to hold back my tears. It was a framed eight-by-ten glossy picture in color that had been taken at Rocco’s, our favorite local bar. In the picture, standing next to me, was Desiree grinning so hard her eyes looked like slits. Her mouth was stretched open so wide; she looked like she had twice as many teeth as me. She had on a red jumpsuit she had made herself. That was the happiest I had seen her in a long time. Standing behind Desiree was Chester, looking straight into the camera with a crooked sneer on his face. His long arm was wrapped around my shoulder when it should have been around Desiree’s. That Chester. He was one complicated man. Directly in front of me was Burl Tupper, another enigma, the man I had agreed to marry. Burl was almost as light as Desiree, and his curly black hair framed the top of his plump, round face like a dark cloud. Everybody liked Burl’s large gray eyes and the dimples in his cheeks. That’s what had initially attracted me to him in the first place.

It brought tears to my eyes when I realized just how much the three people sharing the picture with me had impacted my life. Burl especially.

I focused my attention on Burl’s image. Through warm and unexpected tears I stared at the huge, shiny silver wheelchair he occupied. His thick, useless legs were hidden inside a pair of baggy designer jeans.

As expensive, fancy, and comfortable as the wheelchair looked, it was the prison that I had sent him to for life.