Dying in the Dark by Valerie Wilson Wesley Read Free Book Online Page B

you help me out? Please?” I pulled out the stops on the “please,” my eyes begging him to recall the many funerals we'd shared.
    “Well, I guess it won't do no harm for you to look and see who signed the register, but hardly nobody came. You can't take it with you though,” he added as if I might try to steal it. “I'll leave it on my desk in my office, and you can look at it there. It's my property now since the boy is dead. I guess I can show it to you.”
    “That will be very helpful, Mr. Morgan. Thank you so much.” I hugged him awkwardly, inhaling as I did so an odd mixture of breath mints and formaldehyde. He nodded toward the Rose Chapel. I settledinto a dark corner of the last row, folded my hands piously in my lap, and watched things unfold.
    They buried the boy in a cheap pine coffin, which I knew from personal experience was the bottom of Morgan's line. The coffin was open; he'd been stabbed through the heart, not the face, and Morgan had probably done a good job of fixing him up, as good a job as anybody can do on a dead body. I knew that from experience, too. Liston and his woman sat in the first row. His arm had slipped from her shoulder and was casually draped on the back of the seat as if they were waiting for cheeseburgers in a greasy luncheonette.
    A child's piercing cries broke the silence in the room and drew everybody's attention to the back of the chapel. A young woman holding a wailing baby on her hip entered, accompanied by two young men who walked beside her like bodyguards. Cecil hadn't mentioned a child, but I assumed the baby was his. The woman, little more than a child herself, still carried the weight of her pregnancy, and her shiny gray suit and diaphanous blouse, both obviously bought when she was twenty pounds lighter, did little to hide it.
    “Ooh this is bad! This is bad! This is so bad!” the girl kept repeating to nobody in particular.
    “He dead and gone now, Cristal. There ain't nothing you can do now. Nothing you can do!” This bit of stage-whispered wisdom came from the shorter of the men. He wasn't as tall as Brent Liston, but looked a younger version of him—same powerful chest and shoulders, same bullying strut.
    “Hey, Pik, there go his dad,” said the other kid, who was thin with a delicate face that contrasted with the tough-guy clothes he wore.He grinned inappropriately, and I noticed that his teeth were perfectly straight and lacked the gold and diamonds that usually distinguish the dental work of wannabe gangstas. I knew from the money I've spent on my son's mouth that teeth like that don't come cheap. I was struck, too, by the boy's use of the word “dad.” It was what I called my father when I was a kid, and he spoke the word as if it carried good memories. It made me think that he wasn't as tough as he wanted folks to think. Pik, the Liston look-alike, had enough thug in him for both of them.
    “That big dude is his old man, right, DeeEss?” said Pik, whose mouth was lit up like a chandelier.
    “Yeah.”
    “Cecil used to say he looked like his mama, but I think he looks kind of like his daddy. He fine,” said the girl, her voice deep and dreamy. Cristal had a small pointed face and long thick hair haphazardly caught up in a metallic scrunchie. She wasn't pretty in the conventional sense of the word, but carried herself with a hoochie-mama swagger that probably appealed to teenage boys. It was troubling that my son found her attractive, but then again, I've never been a teenage boy. Pik's name was stenciled onto his black leather jacket and I realized I'd seen it painted in red letters on the facades of half a dozen buildings in the city.
    “Who that woman? His moms?” Pik asked.
    “Somebody killed his moms,” said DeeEss.
    Brent Liston turned and stared at the three teenagers as they sat down in the row behind him. His gaze seemed to frighten the girl, and she pulled her baby close as if protecting him. Her fear was puzzling. Why did she think