'I know you said that, Mr. Liberty. But there are a lot of ways we can go with this.'
Liberty moved back in time to that first terrible point of reference, the 'harmless hazing,' as the administration at his boarding school had called it when five of the boys on his floor told him he had to be their slave, to kneel, touch his head to the ground, and say 'Yes, massa,' no matter what they told him to do or when they told him to do it.
The boys didn't understand that five of them were not enough to force him to kneel. Nor ten of them, or indeed the whole school. When he refused and they piled on him in an attempt to lower him to his proper place so they could urinate on him, one got a broken nose that bled all over the room, another got a broken arm, and a third a fractured jaw. The other two escaped with bad cuts and bruises. And the whole community rose to expel him from their midst. No one had told the fourteen-year-old Liberty the rule. The rule was white boys could hurt him but he could not defend himself. The parents of the boys in question, the student council, and the town paper called for his dismissal despite an investigation that absolved him of any wrongdoing. And when he begged to go home to end the confrontation, the administration, for reasons of its own, and his mother, who didn't want him to turn out a bum, had refused to let him.
Liberty was a rich man now. He traveled first class, had the best of everything. People asked for his opinion, wanted him to go on television, took his picture wherever he went. But it seemed that nothing really had changed.
'You asked me every question a dozen different ways. I flew to Chicago and missed the play. If I had been there as I was supposed to be, my wife and friend would still be alive.' Liberty said it with no emotion, trying not to let go of his soul.
'But you were in the city. Your doorman and the driver of your car service said you got home around midnight. You knew where your wife was.' 'Yes, but I didn't leave the apartment. I'll have to live with that for the rest of my life. If I'd gone to get her, no one would have attacked her.' Liberty lowered his head, taking the blame for the situation.
'How do you know?' the Chinese cop asked.
Liberty turned his head to look at her. 'Would you take me on?' he asked bluntly.
'Is that why your friend had a heart attack?' Sanchez was the one to reply. .
'I don't understand the question.'
'Did your friend Tor take you on?' The Chinese woman was standing on the other side of him, watching him with the cold indifference of a sphinx.
'Me?' he'd replied, puzzled.
'Yes. Were you jealous of your friend's relationship with your wife and—?'
He shook his head. 'I didn't leave the apartment.'
'Why would anyone want to hurt your wife?'
'Why would anyone want to hurt anyone? Why would you want to hurt me?'
'We don't want to hurt you, sir. We just want to know what happened January sixth, the night your wife was murdered. Why don't you tell us. You know we're going to find out in the end anyway.'
Keys ground in one lock after another. Liberty had fallen asleep and was dreaming of Merrill, bleeding to death on the side of a mountain and himself struggling to bail her blood back inside of her body faster than it was pumping out. He could hear the police on the stairs and screamed as the apartment door burst open.
'What are you doing? What's going on here?'
No sound came out of his mouth. He was screaming in his mind.
'Hey! What's the matter with you? Can't you hear me?' It was the sandblasting voice of the crazy sister who wrapped her head twice its size. He took a deep breath, shuddering at his dream.
For a second she reminded him of his great-aunt Belle who'd been as tall as this woman, but big as an apartment building. That Belle had thought the world was all right until the civil rights movement came along in the sixties and personaliy stole her self-respect and set her back a few hundred years to a place nobody in his right mind would ever want to be, a sorry slave from another land. In Belle's world, color had been everywhere and color was fine. Color put no limits on the thing, was neither good nor bad, just was, sweet and bitter like birth and death. But the Movement took the sparkle, the highlights, the savor out of color, drained the nuance of the human palette in all its glory from Aunt Belle's life and made her Black.
'What's the matter wit you?' This Belle talked to him with a voice that streaked graffiti through sound waves.
Liberty saw that his computer power light was on, but the screen was blank. It had gone into hibernation. He must have been sleeping for a while. He hadn't finished the coffee the woman had made many hours ago. His mouth was dry. He couldn't remember the last time he'd eaten.
'Hey, man, I axed you a question. You got some kind of hearing problem?'
'No ma'am.'
She took a few threatening steps into the room. 'Then answer me when I talk wit you.'
'Is that one of your house rules?' Liberty asked.
'What you talking about?'
'Your house rules, remember?'
'Uh-uh.'
He raised a hand in peace. 'Never mind.'
She sucked in the side of her face, scowling. 'You some sorry bastard,' she said after a minute of staring at his hair.
'I'll agree with you there.'
'You got any pills? Marvin said you ain't got no pills.'
'I don't have any pills,' Liberty said.
She cocked her head. 'You gonna kill yourself?'
The woman moved in as if to protect him from himself. Now he could smell her. She didn't smell the way she looked or sounded. Smell was one of the first things he learned when he went to boarding school, how the rich smelled different from the poor. Clothes made the caste of a man, and so did smell. A person couldn't look good to the right people unless he smelled good to the right people, too. Very early on Liberty had learned how culture and color determined smell, and what one had to do about it.
Merrill had smelled like a field of berries. Raspberries and strawberries lived in her hair, in her skin. Liberty's stomach churned. This woman's chin jutted the way his sister's used to when she was defiant and knew she was in the wrong. And Belle didn't smell right. Something was wrong about her. Liberty had a sudden paranoid suspicion that she was a cop or an FBI agent, even a reporter, because she didn't exude any one of the heavy African spice potions of the sisters he knew. True homegirls went for deep and musky, earthy oil-based perfumes guaranteed to drop a brother in his tracks at a hundred paces. This girl smelled light and floral, with an undertone of orange peel.
He scratched his forehead. 'What do you do for a living?' he asked abruptly.
She glared at him, the chin advancing even further on the battlefield. 'None of your business.'
'Miss Belle, do you happen to be the dealer in this building the police are looking for?'
'I told you I don't got no shit. If you gotta have it, you can git outta here now. There's lotsa shit out there.' She pointed to the door.
Liberty shook his head. 'I never liked the stuff. It makes you stupid.'
She humphed through her nose.
'What's that mean?'
'Nothin'.'
'It means you don't believe me. Well, we're even,
then.' He punched a few buttons to shut his computer down and stood up, stretching.
'What you doin'?'
'I've invaded your privacy long enough. I know this has been a huge inconvenience. I apologize, and I'll be on my way.'
Belle hoisted the canvas bag she'd been carrying to the table. 'What for?'
He didn't answer.
'I axed you a question.' She opened the bag and started unpacking the lunch she'd brought.
