Alibi II Read online

  “Think we should speak to any of the neighbors? You never know, maybe someone saw something,” said Merva, knowing that even if someone did see something, nine times out of ten, they wouldn’t be willing to offer any information to the police.

  “I saw something,” said an old man a few houses down sitting on his porch.

  “Really, what’s your name, sir?” asked Tommy as he pulled out his pen and pad and walked down the steps over to where the man was sitting on his porch.

  “Clarence Wilson,” the man said, not caring about the thugs that were terrorizing the neighborhood. He wasn’t afraid and would be damned if he would be.

  “It was a silver Oldsmobile. It came through here last night just a little after seven o’clock. I was going in the house when I noticed the car moving slower than a turtle, then it got…I’d say…maybe twenty, twenty-five feet from their house and the driver just started firing. I hurried up and got out the way and got in the house and next thing I heard the gunfire stopped and the car took off speeding down the block.”

  “Were you able to see the driver or the tag number of the vehicle, sir?” asked Merva.

  “No, I didn’t see the driver. I had to get in the house and get out the way, I told you, but it was a silver Olds, I saw that much,” Mr. Clarence said, for sure knowing that much was true.

  “Do you know the make, sir, or the year of the car?”

  “Well, I think it might have been an Oldsmobile, but I couldn’t tell you the year. It wasn’t new,” added Mr. Clarence, as if that was all he could remember.

  “Here you go, sir, here’s my card. If you can think of anything at all, please call the number right here,” said Tommy, making sure the older gentleman knew how to reach him if he thought of anything else.

  “Do you know if Beverly’s gonna make it? I saw the paramedics taking her body out the house last night.”

  “We don’t know yet, sir. We’re gonna be stopping by the hospital to speak with some of the family members that were inside at the time of the drive-by,” said Merva. “We’re hoping that maybe one of the family members inside can give us a little assistance in helping catch the perpetrator.

  “Oh, okay, that sounds good,” said Mr. Clarence.

  “If you want call that number on the card, we’ll let you know and we’ll keep you posted.”

  “Well thank you so much, I sure do appreciate it,” said Mr. Clarence. “I hope you find whoever did this and get ’em off the streets.”

  “That’s what we’re here to do,” said Tommy as he and Merva walked back to the car.

  “Let’s pay a visit to Mrs. Robertson’s and then stop by Jefferson and check on the victim,” said Merva, as if it sounded like a plan.

  “And I’ll have central search this silver Oldsmobile, see if anything pops up. We might get a lead.”

  “That’s a long shot without the tag,” commented Merva.

  “Yeah, but you never know,” said Tommy.

  “Yeah, you never know,” said Merva as she walked down the street, checking out the neighborhood.

  The two of them cut through the park to West Philadelphia where Mrs. Robertson lived. An SPCA van was parked outside to rescue Boots. The detectives in the homicide unit had called for them to take away her now-homeless pet.

  “Hey, kitty, kitty,” squeaked Merva.

  “You serious?” Tommy asked, as they made their way inside the building and up to the fifth floor where Mrs. Robertson’s body had been found in her doorway. A white tape outline showed the exact position of Mrs. Robertson’s body, which had just been removed from the crime scene before they got there.

  Detectives and police officers combed the older woman’s apartment. Tommy walked in, careful not to disturb the crime scene.

  “Watch it, Delgado, that’s where her cat was sitting,” said Detective Monahan.

  “It’s a doorway, Monahan, I have to walk through like everybody else,” answered Delgado, wanting to tell him to take a hike.

  “Look at all this blood,” Merva said, staring at the floor as if she hadn’t seen that much blood in her life.

  “Come on, what you waiting for?” asked Tommy, wondering why she was so hesitant.

  For Merva, the hardest thing about her job was the crime scenes. It was something that she couldn’t get used to no matter how many times she investigated them. The blood, the bodies, and the smell of it left her nauseated and light-headed; it always did. Merva stepped over the puddles of blood in the same footprints as Tommy. She walked past him and into the apartment and looked into the kitchen, then the living room. She had on gloves and a pair of investigating tweezers to pick things up and she was always careful not to disturb anything that might be considered evidence. She knew that there was nothing worse than contaminated evidence.

  “What’s this?” asked Tommy, still at the door in the hallway, next to the blood, next to where the body was. He picked up a tiny piece of orange tiger lily petal with his tweezers. He held it up to Merva’s face.

  “I don’t know,” she said, examining the piece of petal before Tommy placed it in a small bag.

  “Well, I’ll tell you by dinnertime,” said Tommy, lifting his eyebrow as if he were Inspector Gadget.

  “Okay, let me know,” said Merva. She walked back toward the living room, as Tommy bent back down and scoured the floor for evidence.

  “I got something!” shouted Merva, as if she had found a missing link to the universe.

  Tommy quickly stood up and moved to stand next to her in the living room. She faced the far right wall, where some pictures were sitting on a shelf next to several basketball trophies, with award plaques hanging neatly on the wall behind them.

  “You see what I see?” asked Merva as she read the plaques on the wall, looked at the pictures, and read the endorsements on the trophies.

  “Fuck me, I didn’t even pay attention to the old man,” said Tommy as he read, mumbling to himself. “In recognition of fine sportsmanship, this certifies that Lance Robertson is West Philadelphia High…Oh, shit!”

  “Lance Robertson,” they said simultaneously as they stared at each other. “Bernard Guess,” they said, again simultaneously. “The Somerset murders.”

  “He was one of the burglars.”

  “Yeah, him and the Jeremy Tyler guy. They climbed a tree and went through the bathroom window to rob the guys inside,” added Merva.

  “Fuck, this shit ain’t over,” said Tommy as he pulled out his book, looking back at his notes. “Oh, shit, Twenty-third and Susquehanna, 2234 N. Twenty-third Street, drive-by, gunshot victim down at Jefferson, guess who?” said Tommy, looking at Merva and trying to figure out why he hadn’t put the pieces together long before now.

  “Who?”

  “Beverly Guess? Bet your ass that’s Nard’s house, or his family house, and Beverly Guess is a relative, and we’re talking payback time, big-time, from the looks of it,” Tommy said, looking around.

  “Shit, you’re right! Why the hell didn’t I see it sooner?” she asked the air. “This shit ain’t over, Tommy, this case isn’t settled.”

  “Oh, no, it’s not over at all, and by the looks of it, we’re just getting started.”

  “Come on, let’s get over to the hospital, see if we can speak to the gunshot victim,” said Merva, like Deputy Dog, ready for action.

  “Ross, her gunshot wound is to the head,” said Tommy. “I don’t think she’s going to be up for questioning today.”

  “You never know, it’s worth a shot.”

  “Yeah, you never know,” said Tommy, stepping over Monahan as he followed her out the door.

  North Philly

  12:30 p.m.

  Dizzy walked in from the outside. He slowly made his way down a hallway, down a flight of stairs, and into the back room of the basement.

  “It’s colder than Jack Frost’s ass,” alerted Dizzy as he closed the door behind him. Simon always made him use pay phones outside.

  “What happened to the boy?”
r />   “DeSimone came through, the boy made off like a one-eyed leprechaun with a pot of gold.” Dizzy smiled as he gave his old-timer cohort five like it was 1973. “He got three to eight years, eligible for parole in about eighteen months. Plus DeSimone said his uncle’s friend is head of the parole board, so the kid’s out of there in a year and half. You can’t beat that with a magic stick.”

  “What about the kid’s mother?”

  “Aww, naw, they saying she’s not going to make it.”

  “Damn shame,” said Simon, shaking his head. “You know, when we was coming up, wasn’t no innocent like it is today, no women, no children. Shit made sense, common sense, and you only did what you had to do to survive. And the fight…shit, the fight was for the power. We fought the system for equality and justice. Shit…we stood up for Martin, but we got down with Malcolm.”

  “Give me some,” said Dizzy, holding his hand out for a soul brother five before Simon continued.

  “Shit, today…I don’t know, man…I don’t know. Seem like all the shit we was fighting for don’t mean nothing.”

  “Only thing mean something is that green. Times are changing, man, its 1986, and 1987 ’bout to ring in. Right now, it’s every man for their self. Did I tell you I seen Chester?”

  “Chester, Chester who?”

  “You remember Chester, the nigga so black he look blue,” joked Dizzy. “He used to run the numbers for Mimms down the bottom off of Girard Avenue.”

  “Oh, yeah, whatever happened to him?”

  “Man, I saw him the other day out Southwest Philly on Fifty-fourth and Hadfield, man, oh, man, the boy was smoked out of his mind.”

  “Freebasing?”

  “I think he smoking that other shit. What do they call it again?”

  “Crack?”

  “Yeah, that crack shit everybody running around here like wild banshees with,” said Dizzy, as if crack were definitely something different from freebasing. He was sure as sure could be. “He scared the shit out of me, came up from behind me, I turned around, and I swear to God I thought he was about to rob me, until his beady little eyes recognized who I was.” Dizzy paused to catch his breath, looking at Simon as if the shit wasn’t funny. “Then once this joker realized who he was about to rob”—Simon laughed harder as Dizzy continued—“he asked me for a couple of dollars, said his car was broke down around the corner.”

  “You give it to him?” asked Simon, cocking his head to look at Dizzy over his Gazelle eyeglass frames. Simon had to see this answer.

  “You damn right, I gave it to him, you know…I just wanted to get away from him. The nigga looked scary to me, man, he was high out his fucking mind.”

  “You, not you, Dizzy.” Simon laughed, glad to hear somebody had finally shaken up the big guy. “I know you ain’t go in your tight-ass pockets for no god damn Chester.”

  “You should have seen him. Man, I went in my pocket so fast, I couldn’t get that nigga away from me quick enough,” Dizzy responded, laughing with his friend.

  Simon was quiet for a minute, thinking of Nard, who had stayed true for him and never said his name, and now he was facing time in a Pennsylvania state penitentiary for it. Simon wasn’t a fool, prison time was prison time. At least the kid only had a few years to do. Nard was still just a kid, though, just turned twenty-one. Simon knew how the mind worked inside and how rough prison life could be. Everybody was well aware that Simon admired Nard for being the soldier that he was; the boy could have brought him a lot of trouble, a lot of heat. But he didn’t. Simon would never forget it. “Where you say they taking him?”

  “Prentice said up Graterford,” responded Dizzy, still thinking about the ghost of Chester he had bumped into the other day.

  “I’ll make a few calls over to Graterford, have them on the lookout for him, make sure the boy be all right.” Simon had more favors owed to him inside the penitentiary than he did out on the streets, so calling in a favor or two for Nard wouldn’t be a problem. “And Chester’s on drugs, huh?”

  “That ain’t no drugs. That crack shit they running in them streets is something else. I don’t know; I got a bad feeling.”

  “What you mean?”

  “The people when they high off that shit, it’s like they forget,” said Dizzy, staring off into space.

  “Forget what?”

  “Forget they people, man. They not right,” he said, still enchanted at his first encounter with a true crackhead. “Listen to me, Simon, that crack shit, that’s some other shit for real. Who the fuck would put water on they cocaine? Let alone mix that shit with some baking soda, who could have thought of that? And they cook that shit in test tubes, I heard,” said Dizzy, still serving kilos of fish scale. “I’m telling you this shit right here is gonna change the game, in a real bad way.”

  “Man, come on, can’t nothing be worse than heroin, the way these fools need a fix.”

  “It’s different, this crack shit is different. Chester looked like…I don’t know, his eyes, I could see right through him, and you know what?”

  “What?”

  “He didn’t have no soul. It was like he was a zombie. He was there but then he wasn’t there. Watch, this crack thing, it’s gonna be big. Personally, I think it’s already some kind of epidemic, just like that show said…umm…what was it, oh yeah, 48 Hours on Crack Street. I’m telling you, Simon, this might be the end.”

  “Be what end?” questioned Simon, as if it couldn’t be that serious.

  “The end for these niggas out here who smoke that shit.”

  Temple Hospital

  2:30 p.m.

  Beverly lay still, her eyes shut, her body limp, as she was still unconscious after having suffered the head injury. It was by God’s grace that the bullet had merely grazed the back side of her head. However, the impact was a shock and hit her hard enough to cause a severe concussion. The neurosurgeon couldn’t guarantee when she’d wake, and if she did, if she’d be a hundred percent. He claimed nothing except that the surgery to remove the bullet from her shoulder blade had gone well. The rest, according to him, was up to God’s mercy, but his part was done. The doctor had performed his job with skill, rushing her into the operating room and draining fluids from her brain and stopping the blood from the wound to the back of her head. Uncle Ray Ray sat next to Beverly watching The Young and the Restless, every now and then rubbing her arm and her hand.

  Uncle Ray Ray picked up the business card from the side table next to the hospital bed. He looked at the card: Detective Thomas Delgado. He looked at the card again and the number. The detective’s extension was 127. I should play that number, he thought to himself, wishing there was more information he could have offered them. They seemed real concerned about finding the person who did the drive-by. And they even seemed to believe that they would catch the person or persons responsible. They spent an hour talking to Uncle Ray Ray. He told them everything that happened, how he was on his way into the kitchen to talk with his son Chris when the first bullet pierced the window. He told them how he ducked down on the floor and how his niece was hit. After they spoke with Uncle Ray Ray, they spoke with the attending physician and got an update on Beverly’s injuries and prognosis, but he wouldn’t know the extent of the injuries until she regained consciousness.

  “So that’s Bernard Guess’s mother and great-uncle,” said Merva, putting the family tree together and connecting the dots.

  “You thinking what I’m thinking?” asked Tommy.

  “I don’t know, but if you’re thinking what I’m thinking, this case is definitely not over.”

  “The captain’s not going to like this. It’s going to keep the Somerset murder case in the news,” noted Tommy.

  “The captain, try the chief. The last thing he wants, I’m sure, is to even hear the name Somerset, right about now,” said Merva, shaking her head.

  “Hey, Mr. Guess,” said Tyrone, walking through the door.

  “Oh, Lord, here comes weasel,” mumbled Ray, easing over to an
unconscious Beverly. “Wherever did you get this nigga from, I don’t know. It really beats the hell out of me,” he said, still whispering in her ear.

  “I’m sorry; you say something, Mr. Guess?” asked Tyrone, smiling politely.

  “Umm…no, I said, I’m glad you visitin’, I can get a sandwich and some tea,” said Beverly’s uncle, just as crazy as always, raising his voice when he said the word “tea.”

  “What’s the doctor’s saying? Is she doing better?” asked Tyrone, full of hope.

  It was at that moment that Ray actually had a soft spot, a gentle moment, an epiphany of sorts, and he could see Tyrone’s love and care for Beverly, clearly see it.

  “Naw, son, I’m sorry, the doctor said she’s still unconscious. I just been sitting here hoping she’d wake up. The bullet grazed the back of her head, but it didn’t do no damage. They took the bullet out her shoulder. The doctor said she might not be able to lift her arm over her head no more and she might have some nerve damage but he won’t know that until she wakes up.”

  “Well, when she gonna do that?” asked Tyrone, wishing Beverly would come on.

  “I don’t know, son. I don’t know,” said Uncle Ray as he looked at his niece. “The world is really changing. Back when I was coming up, nothing like this ever happened. Wasn’t nobody even thinking of a gun. I wonder where they getting them from?” Uncle Ray asked Tyrone, looking at him.

  “I guess they selling them, that’s what everybody says. The government sells them and illegal guns end up in our communities.”

  “I wish they would stop,” said Uncle Ray. “I really wish they would stop.” Uncle Ray Ray let go of Beverly’s hand, having had his fingers intertwined with hers. “I’m going to the cafeteria and get a cup of coffee…I mean tea,” said Ray, “You want something while I’m down there?”