Hold Me in Contempt (30 page)

“Don't call me that,” I said. “And if all of this is true and the only way out is death, then where is your father? Is he dead? Because the detectives said he's—”

“My father was a favorite. The bosses took a liking to him. He was so smart, and they figured if they sent him to medical school, he'd somehow magically make all their dirty asses Ivory soft and clean. Then they could enjoy their wealth and shit on the up-and-up—move to Fifth Avenue. Eat at the Russian Tea Room. They put so many men like my father through school. Only to bring them out and set them up and steal from them for the rest of their lives. All their clinics—all of it—that was their enterprise. My father had no choice.”

“Your great-grandfather? Your father? What about you? You have a choice?”

“They called me everything from Chalky to Leprechaun—I was never anything more to them than an Irish nigger,” he said. “My skin is too dark for them.” He laughed. “Isn't that funny? Most people see me as white—call me white boy—but to them, the obvious traces of my past were too much to just call me Irish. I wasn't going to be anything but a street dealer for them.”

I knew better than to call King a liar about that. If he was telling the truth about the mob and his family's connection to it, he would be set out to do whatever the heads told him to do. Most mob families operated like a caste system. Your vocation, relationships, and connections were dictated by rules and orders that you hardly knew about. That was true in any crime family. If King's lineage went as far back in the mob as he said, they would have some rank, some solid ties, but that meant nothing in the history of an operation that had its roots in the early 1800s in New York City, when many Irish immigrants were indentured servants and some were just street beggars. Soon, the poorest of the poor in the city united and got organized. They made profit by bullying business owners. Soon they became the business owners. And some bought their way out of the mob.

“When the cops came down on my father, we lost everything. They took everything from us. And then the brothers took what was left,” King said. “And what they couldn't take, they moved onto me. My father's debt became mine. That's how it works. A father's debt becomes his son's debt.”

“That doesn't make any sense. You're rich, King. I've seen it myself. You live in the Clocktower penthouse; you drive a Bentley. You don't exactly look like someone who's struggling under the oppression of the Irish mob. Come on.”

“You don't understand—the richer I am, the richer they are. They only care that I'm not broke. You make money, they make money—that's the rule. Anything that might interrupt that is cut.” He leveled his hand to signal cutting something off.

“Vonn?” I said delicately. “Yellow?”

He nodded.

I looked back out to the street. A police car zoomed past with its siren screaming. The black pavement was slick and shining from a fast night shower. I thought of Monique.

“Vonn was my boy. My friend. I grew up with him,” King said, getting up from the couch. “I kept telling him not to fucking talk to the cops. They were just testing him. Trying to see if he'd snitch. Half of those cops are dirty. They're in the organization.”

He came over to me and looked into my eyes intensely. “I can't do this shit anymore. I got to get out. That's why I'm moving to Manhattan. Get more money. Get the fuck out of here.”

“And go where?” I asked. “The DA's already on to you. Building a case against you as we speak,” I said. “He smells blood. He wants you. To put you away.”

“You want to put me away?” he asked.

“It's not my choice,” I said. “It's my job.” I backed away from him.

“You always have a choice.”

“A choice about what? All of this stuff you said aside, you're still a drug dealer—you sell drugs to people. It ruins their lives. I've seen it. I know. It ruined mine,” I said. “I choose not to support anything that can do that. Not to anyone.”

King tried to reach for me, but I pushed him back.

“Kim . . .  ​I can't . . .  ​I . . .  ,” he tried, then just stopped and looked at me, with everything he couldn't say in his eyes.

“No!” I shouted. “You can't!”

“I—”

“Don't say it,” I begged, knowing what the thing he was about to say would require from me and what that would mean to everything I was.

“Tell me you don't feel it, too,” King dared me.

“I can't do that. I can't. You're a—”

“A drug dealer,” he said. “And I love you.”

“No! No!” I started walking toward the door, but King followed and grabbed my hand. “Stop it! Let me go!”

“I love you, Queen. You don't have to say it back, but I want you to know that. I love you.”

He wrapped his arms around my waist, but I kept my back to him.

“I just met you. I don't even know you,” I said, afraid to look at him.

“That doesn't change how I feel. What happened. I've never been like that with anyone,” he said. “I was myself. Just me. It was like I was alone but really with someone for the first time when I was with you. I never wanted you to leave me.”

He wrapped his arms tighter around my waist and kissed my shoulder.

“It was just sex,” I whispered, but I felt the heat from his lips spread down my side and weaken my knees. “That was all. It didn't mean anything.”

He kept kissing me and I was growing weaker. Soon tears were in my eyes and my breathing became labored.

“No, King!” I begged. “I can't. I don't want to do this.”

He stopped kissing me and whispered softly in my ear, “Do what?”

I looked up toward the door and answered, “I don't want to love you. I don't want to get hurt. Not again.”

I pulled myself free and walked to the door, wiping my tears. “You have to go! That's it. I have to stop this now. This isn't who I am. I am an attorney and I can't do this.” I undid two locks and held my hand over the third. I could feel King breathing behind me. “You understand?” I said, undoing the third and fourth and fifth locks just as quickly as the first two. “You just have to leave,” I added, putting my hands on the sixth lock. “Okay?”

“I'll understand if you can undo that last lock,” King said. “If you can, then I'll know you don't feel the same for me and I'll leave. But I want to say one last thing to you.”

“What?”

“I need you to look at me.”

I kept my right hand on the lock and turned around to look at King. “What?”

“I did have someone get some information on you. I did know who you were. But, like I said, it wasn't until after that first night we spent together. I told myself exactly what you just said—there's no way we could be together—but then, the more I thought about it, the more I knew that there's no way we can't be together. I'm not afraid of anything. I wasn't built that way. But in this short time I've known you, I know I'm afraid to lose you. I can walk away from all of this, but I can't walk away from you. I'm not going to.”

I didn't know I'd let go of the sixth lock until my arms were around King's neck. My lips were going toward his. He was holding me up against the door, the door that wouldn't open that night. That lock would stay locked.

Chapter 12

T
he next morning, I rolled out of bed on the same side as always. I took the same morning shower. Brushed my teeth with the same pink toothbrush and whitening toothpaste. Put on my same work clothes and walked out into what I was expecting to be the same world. But when I set foot on the sidewalk, the cracking city concrete I'd been walking on all my life, I knew nothing was the same. I was different. My New York was different. And it was all because of the terrible secret I had inside of me.

As I drove the rental car into Brooklyn early in the morning, the world looked so fake. People and stoplights, buildings and cars were orbiting me like those rolling images in the old Fisher-Price Music Box TVs. Everything was moving along exactly as it should, without question or confusion. Like fire ants building a new colony. And there I was in the middle of it all, not knowing what direction I was supposed to go in, what I was supposed to be doing, filled with questions and confusion. I was off course. And it was frightening because I didn't want to be in the music box pretending anymore. I didn't want to be a fire ant. Doing all the same stuff and walking along like things were going to just somehow get better if I worked a little harder and pushed through. How many years had I done that? What had that gotten me?

Lying on King's chest in my bed the night before, I kept thinking that nothing was better before him. I'd escaped Harlem. I'd become an attorney—a top prosecutor—but I was still struggling. Hurting. And doing it alone. And here was this man, the most unlikely candidate, whom I felt drawn to like my tongue to the sweet slush on the bottom of a twenty-five-cent Italian ice on a hot July afternoon, saying he loved me and didn't want to be without me, and for every wit inside of me I knew he was telling the truth. That was just without question. Without confusion.

I rolled over and looked at King. I whispered in his ear as he slept, “I love you, King.”

He didn't move, but seconds later he whispered, “I love you, Queen.”

I started kissing his chest, and then I sat up and made love to him.

When I awoke, he was gone.

After I returned the rental car, I took the train back into Manhattan and got off a few blocks from work. I was headed toward the office from a different direction than usual, but somehow I fell right in line with the same people I always saw walking to work. The interesting thing about morning commutes in New York is that even in a city so packed with humans, if you left your doorstep at the same time each day, you wandered into your day with the same people—the dog walker with the three poodles and one overly sophisticated Afghan, the man talking on his cell phone while padding through moving traffic and always looking like he was about to get hit, the blonde whose long hair was wet even in the winter, the black nanny with the white twins in the stroller. You never waved though, or acknowledged one another. In New York, that would be rude and crazy. You raise your nose into the wind and mind your damn business.

We were a moving mass of colors too muted for the spring around us—office-friendly grays and browns, navy blues and black. There was an occasional yellow blouse or pink sweater, but mostly we were so uniform, it was hard to know where I started and the next person began.

I wanted to stop walking, to turn around and go in a different direction. Or just stand there and scream. Tell them all to just try something different. Or let me.

And then I saw it. Something different in the crowd. Right in the middle of everything, a glimpse of red. At first it was just a sliver moving between two shades of gray, but then it got bigger and seemed brighter, and there was something about the way it moved, something so familiar, that I started skipping around people to catch more of it.

Soon, the slivers in front of me turned into a red hoodie pulled up over a head that I could tell from the gait belonged to a woman. She was a little taller than me, much thinner, but she walked like me, with her shoulders back and her head tilted to the left like she was thinking about something.

I kept pulling myself through the crowd to see more of her. I excused myself as I passed between couples and reached past people's shoulders, trying to get a hold of the red sweatshirt, but it was always just beyond my reach.

“Wait!” I called out to her back. “Please wait!”

People around me looked sideways, not wanting to commit too much attention to my outburst—New Yorkers not wanting to get involved.

I called out once more before lunging forward over the shoulder of a woman holding a cup of steaming coffee.

“Shit!” the woman cried after the hot coffee sprayed over her arm and chest.

“I'm sorry! Oh no!” I said, stopping to help the woman, while looking over my shoulder to see the red drift away from me.

“Sorry? Watch where you're going! Shit! I just got this shit out of the dry cleaner!” She used a napkin she'd been holding in her other hand to try to wipe up the spill. “Now I'm going to be late!”

“I'm sorry. I thought I saw someone I knew. Someone I haven't seen in a long time.”

She gave me a customary New York eye roll. “Whatever,” she said, walking away. “Just watch where you're going.”

When she was gone, I looked up ahead and took a few steps to see if I could find the hoodie again but there were just too many people rushing by. I tried to convince myself to stop and head to the office. I told myself it couldn't have been her anyway. There was no way. Not in Manhattan. Why would my mother be there?

I decided to turn around and go to the office but as soon as I took a step in the opposite direction, I bumped into someone else.