Six 2 One (Devil Barnett detective series Book 7) Read online

  CHAPTER ONE

  “BLACKS AND LATINOS THREATEN PUBLIC SAFETY”

  Wayman Anders scowled as he looked at the headline that he had decided to use on his newspaper.

  “This is horseshit, why can’t we just say what the hell we mean?” Anders said, frowning at his editor-in-chief Martin Harris, a mild-mannered, overweight bespectacled man in his late forties who routinely wore a vest and bow tie adorned by a cheap toupee.

  “We can’t say exactly what we want because of the legal implications,” Harris explained as gingerly as possible to his boss who glowered at him from the other side of his oversize 19th century oak desk.

  “The crime stats support the story, right?”

  “Only if we interpret them in a certain way, yes, but on the other hand…...”

  “What other hand?” Anders said, cutting his editor short. “Violence involving blacks and the Spanish is on the rise and it’s threatening our society. There are no two ways about it.”

  “But a headline that reads “Blacks and Latinos Threaten Public Safety” could be broadly construed as a hate headline. The civil liberties organizations will be all over us,” Harris countered.

  “We have a public interest mandate to report what everyone that matters is thinking. We are living in the times of a president who mirrors that view. Print it and let the chips fall where they may, meeting over,” Anders said arrogantly. “No balls. That’s what has brought this country to where it is now, on the brink of collapse…..” Anders muttered as he watched Harris turn and walk away, duck-like, from his office with his head hanging down.

  For the past eight years Anders felt he had had to bite his tongue and kiss the butt of every half-assed liberal who was too afraid to say what needed to be said for fear that they would be taken to task by legal entities supported by a democratic administration in Washington. Well those days were gone. The election of Donald Trump as president put the kibosh on that. Now Blacks, Latinos and Homos were fair game as they should be. What good was it being the publisher of the largest and most influential conservative newspaper in the most influential city in the world if you couldn’t say what needed to be said? Now that Obama was out of office there was no fear of federal reprisal for any fallout from what any article might provoke. He had been assured of that personally by the current attorney general.

  Anders dialled a number that was answered by his wife.

  “Joan, you need to pick Sarah and Josh up from the therapists. They should be ready by six. I’ll be about half an hour later than usual. And tell Delores to have dinner ready at 7:30,” he snapped.

  “You know Sarah doesn’t approve of me. You remember what happened last week when I picked them up” his wife answered.

  “I’ve spoken to her about her behaviour towards you.”

  “Wayman, Sarah hates me and has decided that she doesn’t want me in her life and there isn’t much either you or I can do about it. She resents me and goes out of her way to let me know that I am not her mother and that I never will be no matter how hard I try. Maybe she should go live with her mother’s family. They’ve asked for her on a number of occasions.”

  “You know as well as I do that is not going to happen. The court awarded me custody and that’s that. Besides, don’t tell me that you’d have my daughter living with a family of….” he blurted. Anders let the last part of his sentence drop away and took a few moments to breathe, then started talking again in what he considered a more moderate tone. “I don’t think so. What you need to do is stop being hysterical and listen to me. Everything will be fine, just do as I say. True, Sarah has some issues but, in a month, or two, it will all be fine. I’m working on something that will solve all our problems.”

  “Meaning?” asked Joan.

  “I’m sending her to a school where she will learn discipline. A church school with a dormitory where she can live on campus.”

  “And what about Josh? How will he cope?”

  “What about him? Just because he has Downs Syndrome doesn’t make him a defective idiot. The therapist says that he is making lots of progress and very soon will be able to take care of himself in an independent setting. Know what your trouble is Joan, it’s lack of faith,” he snapped defensively.

  “I have faith Wayman, sometimes I think that is all I have,” she murmured.

  “Yes, I know, but in what?”

  “Well I,” she stammered.

  Anders was really good at running rings around his wife whenever she had a heartfelt protest. And she knew that on some issues, especially issues as important as the ones they were facing, she should be more forthright but his charisma always seemed to overpower her.

  “Put your faith in me Joan and everything will work out,” Anders said haughtily.

  “But Sarah is such a...”

  “She is not going to have it her own way. Sarah is fifteen years old and living in my house, eating my food and wearing clothes I’ve paid for so she will damn well do what I say until she leaves and sets herself up as an independent person. Just pick them up from the therapists and come home.”

  Joan disconnected the call and sat back in her office chair. Her stomach was churning from the anxiety that conversations regarding her husband’s daughter had always caused.

  She would never bring herself to say this to Wayman, but she disliked Sarah at least as much as Sarah disliked her. Josh was a sweet boy, but Sarah was different. She had the stubbornness of her father and a nasty devil-may-care attitude. She had known before the marriage that there would be trouble between them, and she had even tried to warn Wayman. But he was insistent as always, thinking that time, along with his super direct macho approach to solving problems would overcome anything. Sometimes she felt like Wayman’s blinkered attitude was driving her crazy, despite her love for him.

  At least she had her job as manager of the art gallery to keep her sane. Wayman had agreed that she could keep her job and that she would not have to play the role of a full-time housewife and fake mother to his children when they married. Although it had only been three months into the marriage, some days it seems like an age. Especially when Sarah got into one of her “you’ll never replace my mother” moods. Still there were lots of benefits to the marriage. Wayman was rich and very politically powerful within certain conservative circles, which gave her a certain social status she had always longed for. One she would never have been able to achieve herself, having been raised in an orphanage. Wayman’s love for her was a gift beyond her dreams. He had been successful in making her feel secure for the first time in her life. Sure, she didn’t agree with a lot of his bigoted political attitudes, but she was careful not to confront him over them. She didn’t even bring them up, even though some of her closest friends growing up in the orphanage had been of a variety of ethnicities and sexual preferences, including Black, Latino and Native Americans, all of which he disliked. She had even had a secret sexual affair with Vikki, a black woman, for six months in her second year at college. They had kept in touch after graduation and still sent each other Christmas cards after more than fifteen years of not having seen each other face to face. But she was willing to overlook and accept Wayman’s attitudes because after all was said and done, Wayman’s positive attributes far outweighed his deficiencies. Even if they didn’t, she had convinced herself that they did. The most important thing was that he really loved her. She was sure of it and he had proved it by being adamant about not making her sign a pre-nuptial agreement before their marriage, which was surprising. His rationale was that their union was sacred and sanctioned by God and therefore his commitment to her was unbreakable. Though she had been
raised a Catholic, to please him she had even become a born-again Christian at his insistence.

  Joan sat in Dr. Rosen’s waiting room with Sarah on one side doing God knows what frantically on her cell phone, while she pretended to read a magazine and was really thinking about how to get through the evening without an incident that would spoil the whole night. Joan had discovered that it was usually best to avoid unnecessary conversation if possible. Words could only lead to sadness or worse.

  Dr. Rosen was the specialist therapist working with Downs Syndrome patients, helping them to live independently. Wayman had hired Dr. Rosen to have weekly developmental sessions with Josh. Because Sarah’s school was located around the corner from the doctor’s office, Wayman suggested that Joan take Josh there each week and meet Sarah there and bring them both home after the session. Wayman thought waiting together at the doctor’s would be good as a way for them to bond. He was wrong.

  The ride home from the Manhattan office to Westchester County was only a little more than an hour despite the rush hour traffic leaving the city. Timothy, the tall black stoic chauffeur with his smooth hairless features always reminded Joan of a cross between Chuck Berry and the native American Indian chief Sitting Bull. He could have been sixty or even more, but it was impossible to tell. Timothy, she learned, had been working for Waman’s family since he was a teenager. He almost never spoke unless he was spoken to. He didn’t even listen to the radio, he just remained silent and focused on the road ahead of him as he silently glided the Bentley smoothly through the traffic towards their Westchester residence near Mount Kisco.

  She could smell dinner as she entered the house. Delores the cook-cum- housekeeper had begun to work her magic in the kitchen. Joan promised herself that one day soon she would get around to asking Delores about some of the interesting Cuban recipes that she was so adept at making. She had decided that she would learn to make one of those dishes and present it at the next gallery potluck dinner which was a semi-annual event. Even though she knew she wasn’t especially creative, she did appreciate the gift of culinary artistry; something she learned to appreciate from working in the orphanage kitchen. There she had met some very talented black and Latina cooks who had always treated her with kindness and consideration.

  Pepe, Wayman’s prized Labrador jumped on her as soon as she reached the living room.“Hello darling,” Joan said, petting the dog’s head. She walked into the kitchen but was surprised to see that Delores wasn’t there. “Delores?” she called while walking the length of the kitchen.

  It wasn’t so much a specific sound that made her turn around, as it was a sudden feeling of doom. What she saw she couldn’t completely understand. Who was this strange woman standing in her kitchen? This black woman, not young but not old, dressed in a blue coverall, standing about ten feet from her and looking directly at her.

  “Yes, can I help you?” Joan said, in a tone tinged with both fear and arrogance.

  “Yes,” the woman said and raised her right arm in Joan’s direction.

  It was only then that Joan realized the woman was holding a gun with a long barrel. The “phuut” sound from the gun was the last thing Joan heard as the bullet pierced her right eye and exploded brain matter all over her modern pastel-coloured kitchen. One of the very same blue eyes, that Wayman Anders had so often said was the light of her beautiful soul, splashed into the top of the stainless steel sink and slid downwards towards the drain.

  CHAPTER TWO

  An intense heat had already started and it wasn’t even noon yet. Everything in Harlem was on the move. Businesses waking up with people, sounds and smells all mingled together to signal that Harlem was a place undergoing a dramatic change. The energy was moving in all different directions: new businesses moved in to replace old businesses, and older businesses struggled to find new beginnings in the midst of a place that had started a massive gentrification program. People who had started warehousing Harlem buildings back in the seventies and eighties when they were dirt cheap had now begun to cash in on their investments. Properties that had previously been bought for sixty or seventy thousand dollars and filled with one room apartments where some residents had lived for forty years or more, were now being renovated and turned into luxury apartments with rents of up to three thousand per month. Places with storefronts went for even more.

  For what seemed like the tenth time in the last hour I was fighting with the idea of giving up the business of private detection. Mostly because I thought that maybe if I did, I could somehow have more of a normal life. After all, I had the BeBop Tavern which was the business I had inherited from my father many years before when he had been killed in a holdup. Over the years I had built the business up and added a jazz nightclub on the premises which was doing well financially. So it made sense that I should give up the detective business. Why not? Didn’t I deserve a normal life like everybody else, maybe with a nice wife to welcome me home with a sweet honest kiss and a couple of kids to love and appreciate all the goodness in me that they could determine just from my loving and tender touch? Almost five years ago, I started telling myself that I was going to stick it out just one more year… but as time passed, one year rolled into the next and nothing changed.

  “My man, Devil Barnett, you still the man.”

  I looked up to the voice standing in my office doorway to see a professional small time crook named Randy Miller. The way Randy was dressed in a neatly tailored blue pinstriped suit, matching blue shirt and silk tie told me that business wasn’t bad. But even though his suit looked expensive Randy still had the dingy look of someone who had just got out of bed and dressed without washing his ass or brushing his teeth. This made sense because it matched his tarnished mentality. A few years ago, he had sold drugs in Harlem until some of my associates presented him with the choice of continuing his trade and becoming a eunuch or finding another hustle.

  “Hey Brother Dev, I don’t want to take up much of your time. I know you’re busy and everything, but I heard that you might be in the market for a new refrigeration unit. I got a friend who will give you a real good price, with all the paperwork for the warranties and everything.”

  These days Randy was a fence for stolen goods. He had built a reputation for knowing where to get almost anything at wholesale prices, and a lot of times for even less if his police contacts were in on the job. That was because part of his monthly income was derived from being a police snitch. A secret that he knew could get him killed quicker than the blink of an eye if I decided to let the right people know.

  He also knew about my past as a CIA assassin and that to me he was about as important as a bug that I would exterminate with no more thought than stepping on a cockroach. But, in the private detective game people like Randy were often useful to me because they had their ears to the ground and were trusted in the criminal world. Therefore, I kept in touch with Randy because there was no telling when he might know something that could be of value to me as an investigator. I had learned over the years that it was better to feed a rat and keep him coming back to his feeding ground than to chase him away. At least that way you would always know where he was and if you ever had to get rid of him you could do it in a way that would suit you.

  “I haven’t been in here for a few months. I see you made some changes to the place, it looks real nice. I heard you getting top class jazz acts in here too. I’m going to make sure you get some steady customers from my end, on the house too” Randy said as he looked back across his shoulder towards the inside of my bar restaurant.

  “OK go see Benny,” I told him.

  “Thanks Brother Dev,” Randy said flashing a grin and disappearing towards the back of the bar restaurant where Benny worked as the counterman at the sandwich bar.

  My watch read 10:46 am. It was still early and before the start of the lunchtime crowd. Since spring was in the air, I was feeling good. I stood up and walked out onto the sidewalk and looked up and down the street at the transformations that had been gentri
fying Harlem in recent years. Across the street a dilapidated building that had served as a shooting gallery for junkies just a couple of years ago, was now undergoing renovation. Next door stood a new Juice Bar called “Smooth-Ease” owned by two Pakistani brothers Yasim and Suhil. I decided to get a closer look at the building works and have myself a health drink made with carrots, pomegranate, apples and plum.

  “Hey Mr. Barnett!” Yasim greeted me as he looked up at me while wiping down one of his gleaming stainless steel machines. Yasim was a soccer fan so we started talking about who was probably going to win the next World Cup. They had lived in London for years so they were hopeful that England would not only make the World Cup finals but actually win it. I told him that he was dreaming and that my money was on Brazil. Not only because I had good Brazilian friends and had spent time in the country, but because I had seen street kids there do things with a soccer ball that could have only been described as magic.

  I placed my order and chatted about who was moving out and who was moving in as well as about some of the long-time residents who were being rehoused. Some who owned their apartments were overjoyed that they could get high prices and make staggering profits, whereas others protested that the changes were kicking them out of their neighbourhoods.

  I was in two minds about the issue because all my life while growing up in Harlem I had heard my father and uncles talk about owning the property where you lived as being the best investment a man could make. Fortunately for me, my father had bought the bar as well as a couple pieces of land in other parts of New York with my Uncle Beans, so when he died it all came to me. But others who were not as fortunate were having to leave Harlem for places they considered no man’s land, like Brooklyn and Staten Island and in some cases even New Jersey. Others decided to take their resettlement money and move to places unknown like North Carolina where New York money went a long way towards buying houses with four or five bedrooms and yard space that they could have never imagined living in.