tell him that I wouldn’t turn him in, but he didn’t believe it. Every time I said it he yelled at me to stop lyin’.”
“Didn’t the upstairs neighbors hear all that shouting?” I asked.
“Mrs. Braughm lives by herself and she’s mostly deaf,” Jessa said. “After a while Hector got to drinking. He started slappin’
me again. And I don’t know how, but my clothes started comin’
off and we were doin’ it right there on the big sofa chair. I did everything he wanted me to. We fucked like goats.” Tremors went through her as she spoke. I couldn’t tell if it was pleasure or pain, passion or the desire to forget.
“What happened after that?” I asked her.
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“It was like we were together,” she said, amazed herself at the turn of events. “Things had been going bad for Hector.
The man he was looking for, Useless, had stolen something from the man he worked for.”
“What did he steal?”
“Money, I think. Hector never told me, but I’m pretty sure that it was money. Every time he’d talk to his boss on the phone or even just think about Useless, he’d get mad and start slappin’ me. And if I did just right, we’d end up rutting on the floor.”
“Did you try to run away?”
“I didn’t . . . I didn’t want to. I didn’t know where to go and there was something that made me want to stay close to Hector. He needed me.”
Sometimes in literature I’d come across the term
“After a while he’d leave me alone in the apartment. I cooked for him and I never blamed him for killin’ Tiny. I was the one who put Tiny in that position. I was the one that killed him.”
“But you didn’t,” I reminded her. “Tiny was gone when I got here.”
Jessa gave me a big smile, stood up, and came to put her arms around my neck. It was a sisterly hug, but all that talk about rutting on the floor had me thinking thoughts I knew were wrong.
“Why’d you come here?” I whispered into her dirty blond hair.
“I stayed at the YWCA for a few days after Hector was 270
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killed. I didn’t know where else to go. All I had was a few dollars.”
I walked her over to the stool that Useless had used.
“Tell me what happened to Hector,” I said.
“Somebody killed him,” she said, her eyes wide with the immensity of death. “They cut his throat while I was sleeping in the bed.”
“Who did?”
“I don’t know. All I know is that I thought I heard something and I called out his name. And then, when I came in, there he was.”
She began crying again and I couldn’t blame her. Even if she had killed him herself, it was something worth crying about. But I didn’t think she’d killed him. No. Hector had housed her, punished her, and had brutal sex with her in every position in every room in that apartment. They were perfect together.
“Who was Hector’s boss?”
“He never said,” Jessa uttered. “He never even said that the man he talked to on the phone was his boss. But I could tell.
Hector got respectful whenever he called.”
“Did you ever answer the phone when his boss called?”
“Once.”
“What did he say?”
“He asked who it was, and I told him that I was, I was Hector’s girlfriend.”
“An’ what’d he say?”
“He wanted Hector, but Hector was out. Then he told me to tell Hector to meet him at the yard at five thirty.”
“What did he sound like?” I asked.
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Jessa didn’t seem to understand the question.
“Was he a white man or a Negro?”
The white girl cocked her head to the side and bit her lower lip. “I don’t know,” she said. “There might have been a little southerner in there, but I couldn’t tell.”
