Читать книгу Gonna Lay Down My Burdens - Mary Monroe - Страница 9

“Put that telephone down. Who are you calling?” I yelled at Desiree.

“We have to get help for Chester,” Desiree hollered, then lowered her voice to a whimper. “I’m calling the police.” Her eyes looked like they were about to pop right out of the sockets as she gripped the back of the sofa with one hand. I knocked the telephone out of her hand and it landed on the floor between Chester’s feet.

“Get out of the way,” I yelled. I pushed Desiree to the side and leaned over Chester. A pool of blood had formed around his head and shoulders. The pool was getting wider by the second, saturating all of his hair in front and seeping into his ears and nose. His lips looked like they had been smeared with the same plum-colored lipstick Desiree had on. “Chester, get up,” I managed, wringing my hands so hard they became numb. “Chester, I am not playing with you. Get up, please,” I begged, not touching him. I hopped out of the way to keep from getting his blood on my flimsy house shoes. I looked down at the floor, squinting my eyes at the bloody weight that I had used to kill Chester. It was one of those silver steel weights, the kind people use to do a few arm curls as a warm-up before a real workout. The weight was already shiny, but the blood made it shine even more. Then I looked at my hands. Even though my hands were clean and dry, I wiped them roughly on the sides of my jeans. “Chester, this is not funny!” I touched his side with the toe of my shoe and he still did not move.

“We have to call the police,” Desiree wailed, looking toward the telephone.

“And tell them what? That we just killed a policeman?” I yelled over my shoulder.

“We? You are the one who hit him,” Desiree squawked, waving her arms, shaking her head.

I gave her an incredulous look. “I was trying to keep him off of you!” I reminded her. “What was I supposed to do? I didn’t want to come over here in the first place. If you hadn’t called me, I wouldn’t be here.”

“Well I didn’t tell you to hit him. And in the head? With that piece of steel? You of all people should know better than to hit him on his soft spot.”

“It—it was—self-defense,” I stuttered. “You saw everything. He’d already hit us both,” I replied quickly, in a defensive voice, smoothing back my wild hair. I felt like a rag doll somebody had stuck pins in.

Desiree leaned down to pick up the telephone, but I slapped it out of her hand again. “Didn’t I tell you to leave that telephone alone?”

“We have to do something, Carmen. The longer we wait, the worse it’s going to look.” Her lips quivered and then, with her head bobbing, she blurted, “We’ll say he fell.” Her eyes blinked frantically. Her mouth was still moving, but no words were coming out.

“And how will we explain your fucked-up face?” I asked, rotating my neck, my arms, and my eyes.

“Nobody has to know he hit me. Nobody has to know you came over here. I swear to God I won’t tell,” Desiree replied, shaking her head so hard, snot splashed out of her nose onto my chest.

“Regina knows,” I said calmly, shaking my head to keep it from ringing.

“What?”

“Will you calm down?” I told her, holding my hand in front of her tear-stained face.

“What all does Regina know?” Desiree asked in a low, hollow voice.

“Nothing. Uh…I mean, all I told her was that you and Chester were having a problem and that I was on my way to help you.”

“Oh, that’s great,” Desiree yelled, flapping her arms like something getting ready to fly. “That was a smart thing for you to do. That bigmouth bitch will blow everything. Why did you call her?” Desiree roared, stomping her foot so hard the pictures on the wall rattled.

“I didn’t call her. She called me right after I talked to you,” I snapped. I shook my head, hoping it would help me organize my thoughts, but there was too much going on up there and it was too late, anyway. Everything seemed to blend together into one big ball of confusion.

“I can’t go to jail,” Desiree muttered pacing back and forth. “I’ll go crazy in some jail. I’ll die.”

“I can’t go to jail, either.” I was surprised at how calm I sounded. Inside, I felt as raggedy as a bowl of sauerkraut.

“If you hadn’t been so busy yip-yapping with Regina you could have made it over here before Chester got back and I’d be on my way to California by now.” Desiree sighed and blinked, her eyes shifting from side to side. Just trying to follow her eyes made me dizzy.

“You can still go.”

Desiree gave me a blank look. “What?”

I leaned toward her and whispered, “Nobody knows what happened here tonight. You can still go to California.”

Desiree let out a restrained chuckle and then gave me an incredulous look. “Well, with me gone and Chester stretched out on the floor with a knot the size of a shot glass on his head, it won’t take them long to put two and two together!” she blasted. Her voice suddenly softened. “I wouldn’t feel right knowing you were in jail.”

“Oh, I’m not going to jail either,” I said through clenched teeth. I put my arm around her shoulder. I didn’t even realize what I was saying. The words slid out of my mouth like a serpent. “I’m going with you.”

“Wh—what?”

I sniffed and said firmly, “If you still want to go to California, you can go. But I’m going with you.”

Desiree pulled away from me and moved back a few steps. “What about your wedding?”

I shrugged. Marrying Burl Tupper was suddenly the last thing on my mind.

“If you go, I am going with you,” I said firmly before I let out a breath that was so deep my chest hurt. Staying out of jail was all I could think about now. It even overshadowed Chester’s death. Missing out on my own wedding paled in comparison.

“Do you realize what you’re saying, girl? When they find Chester, and if we run, it won’t take them but a minute to figure out we had something to do with all this. I told you that already. You’re talking crazy, girl,” Desiree said, shaking two fingers in my face.

A feeling of extreme anxiety consumed me. I couldn’t tell Desiree then, but Chester’s murder was not the only crime I wanted to put behind me. Running away from the burdens that I had carried like a yoke around my shoulders for so many years seemed like the best way out for me. The only way out for me. A warm feeling crossed my face as my thoughts continued to roam. By running away, I could finally lay all of my burdens to rest at the same time. A wide smile I could not control took over my face.

Puzzled over my odd behavior, Desiree frowned at me. “Carmen, are you having a nervous breakdown?” she asked gently.

I shook the smile off my face and gave her a serious look, my lips forming a tight line.

“I’m all right,” I told her, barely moving my lips.

Desiree shrugged and cleared her throat. “You’d be willing to leave Burl? Even if they don’t figure out we did this, what about Burl? You’re supposed to marry him tomorrow. Don’t you love Burl?”

I sighed and bleated like a lamb, “I guess I do. But Burl got along all right before he met me; he’ll get along all right without me,” I said thoughtfully.

Desiree just stood there staring at me with eyes that had started to swell and darken even more.

“Say something!” I barked, stomping my foot.

“We’d better hurry and get up out of here.” Desiree motioned with her hand for me to follow her.

Once we made it back to the kitchen, she snatched a yellow nylon windbreaker off the back of the chair she had been sitting in when I arrived.

“Do you have any money?” I asked. “I have about three hundred I pulled from the ATM on my way home from work.”

“I closed out my savings account yesterday. It wasn’t much. A little over five hundred. I got that, and about a thousand in emergency money we keep in the house,” Desiree announced, buttoning her jacket. “Oh, that nigger was slicker than a politician. I found out he emptied our joint savings account this morning.” I followed Desiree back to the living room where she dropped to the floor and started rooting through Chester’s pants pockets.

“What are you doing?” I asked, pulling her up.

“He got paid today. He keeps two, three hundred on him all the time. Besides, he must have some of the money he took from our account on him.”

“Well, we can’t take his money, too. It…it wouldn’t be right.”

Desiree gasped in horror and then gave me a look of extreme bewilderment. “Right? Well, it’s a little late for you—us—to be thinking about what’s right.” Desiree slapped my hand and it stung like a bee. I didn’t try to stop her when she squatted over Chester again and removed a wad of bills from his wallet.

“Only a hundred,” she mumbled, flipping through the bills before stuffing them into her bra.

With my head bowed I asked, “Other than me, who else knows about your sister Colleen living in San Francisco?”

“Nobody. As far as I know, she didn’t keep in touch with anybody after she left here.”

“Who else has a key to this house?”

“Chester’s mama and daddy, but they don’t come around that much. His mama never did like me. That old heifer! Besides, they went to Birmingham for the weekend.”

“So nobody would be looking for Chester for a while? What about his boys, Duke and Nick and Perry…and…that detective Clyde?”

Desiree shrugged her shoulders. She was leaning on the back of the sofa, looking like an old woman. She was only a few months older than me. “Those dogs all went fishing this evening for the whole weekend. Chester stayed behind so he could—go with me to your wedding.”

“Shit. When he doesn’t show up for work on Monday, his goddamn cop buddies will be snooping around here,” I mumbled. My agitation had doubled, and I could not hide it. I couldn’t stop wringing my hands and shifting my weight from one foot to the other.

“He had planned to take Monday and Tuesday off to go fishing in Mobile Bay. Nobody will miss him for a while,” Desiree said firmly. “Carmen, I am scared as hell,” Desiree muttered, wringing her hands, too.

I nodded, again looking at the bloody weight that had slain Chester. It was hard to believe that such a small item was capable of taking a man’s life. Even though it was only a five-pound weight and not a sword or a gun, he was still dead.

“We have to think this thing through. If we call the cops now, they might buy our story and they might not. Do you want to take that chance?” I said sharply.

“What are our options?” Desiree asked, her voice hard and demanding.

“Options? We don’t have any options,” I snarled, giving her the most incredulous look I could manage.

She dismissed my hot look with a casual wave of her hand, glaring back at me out of the corner of her eye. “Aw, shuck it! If we stay here and call this in and if they don’t buy our story…that he fell…somebody goes to jail.”

“Yeah. Somebody goes to jail.”

“But even if we leave, once they do find him, they will come looking for us anyway.”

I nodded. “They will.”

I was aching all over. I was tired. All I wanted to do was lie down in my own apartment and take a long nap. And that’s just what I would have been doing if Desiree had not called me to come pick her up. If I had not been stupid enough to go.

“When they find us, we’ll go to jail anyway,” she mumbled, her voice cracking.

“If they find us,” I said firmly.

The thought of never seeing my family again, or at least not seeing them for a very long time, made my head swim. I couldn’t imagine the pain Mama would go through just over my sudden disappearance. She used to cry when I was late getting home from school. Daddy, with the weak heart he was convinced he had, would finally have an excuse to have the heart attack he had been predicting for twenty years. But as much as I loved my family, my freedom seemed more important at the time.

Without warning, Desiree hugged me so hard I couldn’t breathe. After a few seconds I pulled away from her and said, “Let’s get the hell up out of here.”