Murder with Fried Chicken and Waffles (Mahalia Watkins Soul Food Mystery) (24 page)

 

“I
don’t want to go into details over the phone. I’d really rather discuss it in person,” I say. I’m on the phone with Detective Hutchins, trying to convince him to come by the restaurant tonight. I left a message for him earlier, but he’s just getting back to me now, and it’s nearly seven thirty already.

“Ms. Watkins, I can’t drop everything and head over to Sweet Tea because you have a hunch or think you’ve found a new clue. This isn’t an episode of
Scooby-Doo
.” I’ve asked him to call me Halia, but I’ve noticed he reverts to calling me Ms. Watkins when he’s annoyed with me or thinks I’m wasting his time.

“Very funny, Detective. I assure you it will be well worth your time. We have my spare ribs on special tonight . . . rubbed in my own seasoning, then cooked low and slow . . . the meat falls right off the bone.”

I only hear silence on the other end of the phone.

“Did I mention we also have an orange Creamsicle cake tonight?”

He breaks his silence. “What time?”

“In about a half hour?”

“Fine. I’ll stop by on the way home.”

“You may want to bring some backup, Detective,” I say before I hear a
click
on the other end of the phone. I’m not sure if he didn’t hear me, or if he got every word and just didn’t bother responding to what he probably deems as my hysterical antics before he disconnected.

When I hang up the phone, I fill two pitchers with iced tea and take them to a table in the back of the restaurant.

“Wavonne, can you get some glasses for the table? Four please.” I set the two pitchers of tea on a table: one with unsweetened tea and one with sweetened tea.

“Four?” Wavonne asks. “You said you were expecting Régine and her friend . . . and Detective Hutchins. Countin’ you and me, won’t we need five glasses . . . and a bigger table?”

“Wavonne, I think Detective Hutchins and I can handle this on our own.”

“You can set a place for me now, Halia, or I can pull up a chair and squeeze in when they get here. It’s your choice.”

I let out a sigh. “Well, then help me move this table over.” I don’t have the time or energy to argue with Wavonne, and God knows the girl’s going to do what’s she’s going to do regardless.

“So what’s goin’ on, Halia? Why are we hostin’ the detective and Régine? I know you got somethin’ up your sleeve.”

“You’ll find out when they get here, Wavonne.”

“Why can’t you tell me now?”

“Because some things need to be handled with kid gloves . . . some things need to be done carefully. And let’s face it, Wavonne, tact is not your strong suit.”

“You must think Régine knows somethin’ . . . either that or you think she did it. And who’s this friend of hers?”

“All in due time.”

I walk away from Wavonne toward the kitchen before she can question me further. I doubt any of my invited guests will be in the mood for dinner after our discussion this evening, but we have a restaurant full of other customers to feed, so I make a check on tonight’s special, my slow-cooked spare ribs. Laura is pulling them out of the oven as I come through the kitchen door, and the air is fragrant with the sweet smell of tender pork. I buy it from a local farm in Hanover, Maryland, that breeds Hereford pigs with Black pigs (yes, there are different breeds of pigs . . . who knew?).

Before we cook the ribs, we rub them with a mix of brown sugar, paprika . . . some garlic, salt, and black pepper, and a hint of cayenne pepper to give them a little kick. Then we cook them on low heat for hours. The result is ribs so tender they make you want to slap your momma. Before we serve them, they get a quick brush of my apple cider vinegar-based barbecue sauce followed by a light coating of my sweet brown sugar sauce. This gives them a tangy sweet flavor that might just make you want to slap your momma a second time.

“They look pretty good, don’t they?” Laura asks.

“Pretty good? They look delicious. I’m sure they’ll go fast.”

“Hopefully your guests will enjoy them.”

“Honestly, I’m not sure they’ll be eating. We’ll see.”

“Really? What do you have planned?” As Laura asks this, I see Wavonne make her way into the kitchen and saunter over toward us, clearly hoping to overhear our conversation and see if she can get any details about how the evening may unfold.

“I’m still trying to figure that out myself, Laura. I’d rather not go into details.”

“I’m assuming this has something to do with Marcus?”

“I’ll neither confirm nor deny,” I say with a smile.

“Okay. I won’t press, but are you okay? You seem anxious.”

“I’m just trying to figure out how to play my hand tonight. I think I’ve figured out what I want to say, but now I’m thinking a visual aid would be helpful.”

“Visual aid?” Laura asks.

“Yes. A wig. If I could just get my hands on a wig before they all get here, that would be perfect.”

“Halia, this is PG County. There’s a wig store on every corner,” Wavonne interjects.

“There’s not enough time for that.”

“Well . . . you could go with a more readily obtainable resource,” Laura says and points her eyes toward the top of Wavonne’s head. My gaze follows, and when Wavonne notices two sets of eyes staring at her bangs, it only takes a moment for her to register what Laura and I are thinking.

“Oh,
hail
no,” she says. “You ain’t takin’ my wig!”

I look at her with eager eyes.

“Don’t look at me that way, Halia. This is
gen-u-whine
synthetic hair. I paid forty-nine dollars and ninety-nine cents for this at Lolita’s Lavish Locks.” She starts backing away from me as I approach her.

“Come on, Wavonne. I assure you it’s for a good cause. I’ll get it back to you as good as new.”

“The answer is
no
.”

“Hand it over, Wavonne.” I’m starting to lose patience. “Don’t make me snatch it off your head.”

I continue to approach her, and she puts her hands on her head and presses down on the wig, backing away from me more quickly now.

“No. You can’t make me.” I guess she realizes I mean business because she darts out of the kitchen to the dining room with me following her.

“No, no, no, no!” she yells, running through a restaurant full of customers with her head down and her hands on her wig.

“You get back here, Wavonne!” I call behind her. I’m not proud of this, but I chase after her with my customers looking on. Both of us are “healthy” girls, if you know what I mean, and between the two of us running through Sweet Tea . . . well, let’s just say bowls of Jell-O have jiggled less.

Wavonne bolts toward the ladies’ room and runs inside.

When I reach the restroom door, I catch my breath and try the handle. She’s locked the door. I’m about to call out to her, but I remind myself to keep my voice down. It’s bad enough that I just chased a waitress clutching her wig for dear life through my own restaurant. I certainly don’t need to be screaming to said waitress through the bathroom door.

I knock softly. “Wavonne, honey, open the door,” I say in a low voice.

“No!”

“Wavonne, I think you know what’s at stake here.” I’m just loud enough for only her to hear me. “You’re the cops’ number-one suspect in this whole dog and pony show. Going wigless for an hour or two seems a small price to pay if it helps clear your name.”

I hear only silence from the other side of the door before she speaks. “You really think you can get the police off my ass?”

“Yes . . . yes, I do.”

“Really?”

“Yes, Wavonne, really. I’m sure of it.”

Once again, she’s quiet on the other side of the door.

“Let me borrow the wig, Wavonne, and I’ll buy you a new, better one.”

“A
new
one?”

“Yes.”

“With European hair?”

“Yes, Wavonne. With European hair.”

Silence yet again for a moment or two before the door opens just wide enough for Wavonne to stick her arm out, wig in hand, from the other side of the door.

 

“H
ello,” I say as Régine and Cherise step inside the restaurant. “I have a table all set for you.” I motion for them to follow me. They are all smiles until we reach the table, and they see Detective Hutchins already seated.

“I think you’ve met Detective Hutchins,” I say to Régine as he stands to greet them.

“Yes. We . . . we
talked
after Marcus’s death. This is my friend Cherise.” Régine is plainly rattled by seeing Detective Hutchins. “I didn’t realize you would be here,” she adds, first looking at Detective Hutchins then at me for an explanation.

Rather than explain Detective Hutchins’s presence, I ask the girls to take a seat. As they sit down, I slide into a chair across from them, next to Detective Hutchins. “Can I pour you a glass of tea?” I ask. “We have unsweetened and sweetened.”

“Either is fine,” Cherise says as they both eye me and the detective curiously.

I pour glasses of tea all around, and while I’m topping off my own glass, Wavonne appears at the table wearing one of my napkins as a scarf. “What up, ya’ll?” she says to Régine and Cherise and sits down next to them. “You don’t mind if I join you, do you?”

The girls don’t answer Wavonne’s question. Instead Régine asks, “This wasn’t a simple dinner invitation to enjoy your cuisine, was it?”

“No.” I take a deep breath. “I wanted you to come here to tell me and Detective Hutchins what really happened the night Marcus was killed.”

“I’m not sure what you mean, Halia.”

“I think you do, Régine.”

Both Régine and Cherise remain silent so I decide to try to get things rolling. “You know, Régine, all along some things about you just didn’t add up.”

“Once again, Halia, I’m not sure what you mean.”

“She means she thinks you’re a phony baloney,” Wavonne pipes in.

“I mean,” I say, eyeing Wavonne with a look that says
Leave the talking to me,
“that the more I investigated you, the more I thought something . . .
several
things about you were not quite . . . shall we say,
authentic
.”

“Like what?”

“Where to begin?” I ask and pause for a moment. “You told me that you’ve been a hairdresser for more than ten years, but what you did to my hair last week says otherwise.”

“You ain’t lyin’,” Wavonne declares. “I’ve seen sistahs on hot ghetto mess with better dos.”

Everyone at the table does what I often do when it comes to Wavonne—we ignore her.

“And your name,
Régine
. It didn’t occur to me until Wavonne and I borrowed names from
Living Single
ourselves during a certain delicate situation last week when—”

“What didn’t occur to you?” Detective Hutchins interrupts.

“It’s common knowledge that new parents are notorious for naming their kids after popular television characters, and Régine didn’t become a popular name for babies until
Living Single
premiered in 1993. In fact, it was fairly uncommon before then,” I say to Detective Hutchins before turning back to Régine. “Now, you’re holding up pretty well, but I’m quite certain you were born well before 1993. So, while it’s possible that Régine is your real name, it’s not likely.”

“That proves nothing.”

“It sure doesn’t. But that’s not all. I noticed your Jimmy Choo bag sitting on the counter at your station the day you were cutting my hair and remembered what Wavonne told Detective Hutchins about it when he first questioned us and asked what we knew about you.”

Régine looks at the bag next to her and instinctively grabs the handles.

“You can thank Wavonne for noticing that it’s from last year.
Last year
—meaning Marcus couldn’t have bought it for you. You had only been dating Marcus for a few months before he died. You didn’t even know Marcus last year. So, if he didn’t buy it for you, someone else did . . . or maybe you bought it yourself. But where would an incompetent hairdresser get the money for a two-thousand-dollar purse? That didn’t make sense either unless it was from, say, a former life when you weren’t a hairdresser—perhaps you bought it back when you were gainfully employed in a more lucrative profession. . . say, a hedge fund manager?”

With my last comment, there is a discernible change in the expression on Régine’s face. I see a look in her eyes that says,
How the hell did you know that?

“Yeah, I didn’t figure that one out until later. When you were cutting my hair, you said Marcus’s work was over your head. But, at the same time, you were spouting off words like
commodities, exchange traded funds,
and
margin calls
—not words used very often by hairdressers . . . or by anyone for that matter. . .
anyone
not schooled in the workings of the financial investment world, that is.

“You see, Régine, things about you were just not making sense. Two plus two did not equal four. But you had a rock-solid alibi—you were filmed coming into your apartment building before Marcus was killed, and you didn’t leave until long after he was dead, so I let my suspicions about you go. Until recently, nothing I learned about you proved you killed Marcus anyway.

“Maybe I’m a little slow on the uptake, but I was having trouble putting it all together until . . .
until
I ran into you and Cherise at Starbucks. When I was chatting with the two of you, I suddenly remembered where I saw Cherise before, and it wasn’t at Sweet Tea. Actually, I remembered where I saw both of you,
together,
before.”

“And where was that?” Cherise asks.

“In the family photos on display at the home of a Mrs. Audrey Whitlock in Hyattsville. You,” I say in Régine’s direction, “didn’t have the heavy makeup or the flashy clothes on, but it was you . . . you and Cherise posing with your mother, the woman Marcus scammed out of her home of forty years. A home that maybe you could have helped her keep, Régine, if the world of high finance hadn’t collapsed, but no such luck after your layoff.”

Régine’s eyes continue to widen, and her jaw drops.

“Don’t look so surprised,” I say. “I probably would have figured out you’re sisters anyway. The resemblance is uncanny. And it just took a few Internet searches to uncover your real identity once I concluded your last name is really Whitlock. It wasn’t long before I found your real first name,
Denise
.” I pause. “Denise Whitlock, a former big shot at a hedge fund firm who was laid off last year.”

“None of that proves anything,” Régine, who is unmistakably shaken, responds.

“No, it doesn’t. But this does.” I lift Wavonne’s wig from the seat next to me.

“What’s that?” Cherise asks.

“Funny you should ask, Cherise. Would you mind putting it on for me?”

Perplexed, Cherise stares blankly at me for a moment before responding. “Yes. I would mind.”

I’m not sure what to do. I can’t very well force a wig on her head.

Cherise continues to look at me. All is quiet and no one moves until Wavonne speaks. “I gave up my wig, and I’m sittin’ here with my nappy hair hidden under a dinner napkin, so, mind or
no mind,
you’re puttin’ that damn wig on your head.”

Wavonne grabs the wig from my hand, gets up from the table, and gruffly places it on Cherise’s head. As Heather learned earlier in the week, Wavonne can be intimidating when she wants to be. Cherise knows better than to resist.

“Now, look at that,” I say to Cherise. “With that wig on, you and Régine almost look like twins. Yep, with that wig on you could have easily passed for Régine on grainy security camera footage as you walked into her building at twelve twenty-one a.m. the night Marcus was killed.”

“This is ridiculous,” Cherise says, pulling the wig from her head before getting up from the table. Régine is about to join her when Detective Hutchins rises himself. “I suggest you two ladies return to your seats,” he says sternly.

“It’s okay, Cherise,” Régine says to her, gesturing for Cherise to sit back down. “None of this means anything. You looking like me with a wig on proves
nothing
. No jury in the world is going to reach a verdict that all black women look alike.”

“Maybe so,” I say. “So what if Marcus scammed your elderly mother out of her home. So what if Cherise looks remarkably similar to you in the right wig . . . at least similar enough to pass for you on low-quality black-and-white security camera video. Those things alone don’t prove anything.”

“Those things
alone?
” Detective Hutchins asks.

“You said it yourself,” Régine says before I can respond to Detective Hutchins’s question. “Even if it was Cherise, and I’m not saying it was, who appears on the video, no one will be able to tell for sure that it wasn’t me—particularly not anyone on a jury. So I guess we’re done here.”

“That would be true, Régine, or should I call you Denise?” I ask, even though I don’t expect or get an answer. “If it wasn’t for one small hiccup in your plan.”

“Hiccup?” Wavonne asks.

“When
you
were entering
your
apartment building,” I say to Régine, doing the air quotes thing with my fingers as I say the words
you
and
your
. “Perhaps
you,
and by
you
I mean Cherise, were texting or just surfing the Internet on your phone for the weather for all we know. My guess is you planned to have Cherise doing something on her phone as she walked in, so she had an excuse to keep her head down, making it even harder to discern that it wasn’t actually you.”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

I don’t answer her question. Instead I ask, “Would you do something for me? That tea I poured you earlier—it’s unsweetened. How about you add some sweetener to it.” I hand her a little pink packet.

Régine eyes me cautiously. “I prefer the yellow,” she says with attitude, declines my offer, and grabs another packet from the ceramic container on the table. She rips it open, pours the contents in her glass, and stirs the tea with her spoon.

“Funny how, just like when I saw you sign your credit card slip at Starbucks earlier today, you used your left hand to stir your tea, but when
you
were walking into your apartment building the night Marcus was killed . . . and I didn’t notice this until I viewed the security footage a second time, you were typing on your phone with your right hand, the same hand Cherise used at Starbucks to stir her coffee.”

“Oooh,
girl,
put a fork in you, ’cause you
is done!
” Wavonne says from across the table.

Régine’s eyes go blank and her face freezes up. The rest of us are silent as sweat begins to form on her brow. She looks intently at me and then down at the table. Then her gaze seems to go off past all of us toward . . . toward nothing in particular.

“We never intended to kill him,” she says, still not looking at any of us.

“Denise, no!” Cherise says.

“No. We are not the bad guys here, Cherise!” Régine says, raising her voice. “We never planned to kill him. We only wanted to get enough money out of him to keep our mother in her house. I did a little research on him and figured out what sort of girl he was attracted to. It wasn’t hard to transition myself into his type. All I needed were some tight flashy clothes, too much makeup, and a good push-up bra. I became Régine Alves and quickly formulated a plan to meet Marcus. I dated that monster for months, and all I managed to get out of him was some clothes and cheap jewelry that were barely worth a few hundred bucks.”

“Not enough to pay off a mortgage,” I say.

“Certainly not. We needed to think bigger. We needed access to bank accounts and brokerage funds . . . and we needed to search his house and see if there was anything of real value to take . . .
real
jewelry or stashes of cash. I tried to do it while he was asleep on a few occasions, but he would notice me get out of bed, and that sister of his is often up half the night milling about.”

“So you and Cherise decided to do your search the night you were here with Marcus and the others?”

“Marcus and I didn’t normally spend Saturday nights together, so I knew I could duck out early and have some time to search the house before he or Jacqueline got home. I knew Marcus would be the last to leave, and Jacqueline would stay at least as long as business was being discussed.”

“You have a key to Marcus’s place?”

“No. I unlocked the basement door when I was there the night before, and I’ve watched Marcus disarm the alarm. I know the code.”

“Why not just send Cherise to the house while you were here with Marcus?”

“If I happened to get caught . . . if Marcus or Jacqueline came home while I was still there, I could have made something up to explain it—that I was there to surprise Marcus or something. Cherise would have just been a burglar to them. Besides, I knew the layout of the house and could be in and out quickly. But, if I did find anything to steal, I needed Cherise to pose as me on the security cameras at my building, so I wouldn’t be a robbery suspect.

“Like I said, all we wanted to do was get access to his accounts and see if he had any stashes of cash or expensive jewelry. . . anything that would help our mother keep her home.”

“And you found?”

“What she found was that Marcus was one broke-assed mother—”

“Shut it, Wavonne!” I say before Régine continues.