Trip Wire_ A Cook County Mystery - Charlotte Carter [63]
He looked away from me.
“Didn’t he fight you at first? What? Did you have a gun?”
He nodded. “It was the one he got for protection. But he promised Mia he’d get rid of it. He never did, though. He gave it to me to hide for him.”
So Wilt also had a little taste of poetic justice before he died.
“How could you do it, Cliff? How’d you get yourself to kill him? He was our friend.”
He began to weep again. “I know that. I know that. I just wanted him to tell me where Alvin Flowers was. I had to make him tell me.”
“He wouldn’t, though.”
“No.”
“And then it fell apart even more, right? When Mia came back unexpectedly.”
“Yes. I don’t know what happened. Maybe she forgot something. Maybe the class was canceled. But she walked in on it, started screaming. I had to shut her up. Before I knew what was happening, she was dead.”
“So then you had no choice. You had to go through with it and kill Wilton.”
“That’s right. I had to.”
I heard the insistent rapping at the front door then.
“Beat it, Jordan!” Cliff screamed. “Go home like I told you.”
“Cassandra? You okay in there?”
It was Sim.
Cliff was faster than I. He snatched a chef’s knife from the drainboard and then grabbed me up. “Don’t touch that door, Sandy.”
“Why? You afraid of what he’ll do to you?”
“I don’t give a shit about that. I hope he kills me.”
“I hope he does too,” I said. It just came out of my mouth automatically. A second later, I knew I didn’t mean it. “Let’s end this now, Cliff,” I said. “I’m letting Sim in here. And you’re not going to do anything to stop me. Or are you? Are you going to hurt me, Cliff? Cut me up like you did them? What was all that shit about loving me and taking care of me and brown babies? All bullshit, right?”
“It wasn’t, it wasn’t. I never bullshitted with you. Don’t you think I realized we didn’t have long? I just wanted to be with you for a while. I wanted to show you, even if Wilt didn’t see you for who you are, I did. Even if he didn’t love you . . . I did.”
Sim was pummeling the door now, kicking at it, grunting. Cliff made a crazed rush forward and threw it open.
But Sim was no longer there. Uncle Woody was. His camel hair coat parted like a theater curtain on the black heft of a sawed-off shotgun, which was leveled at Cliff’s heart.
Cliff gave me one last backward glance, and then raised the knife and stepped toward Woody, delivering himself.
The blast took Cliff’s arm off at the shoulder.
I dropped right where I was. Just fell on my ass, screaming out his name.
Once again, I had a friend’s blood on my shoes. Only this time I could take no refuge in memories from happier times in the past. Nothing existed now but the present moment.
CHAPTER TEN
VALENTINE’S DAY, 1969
Spirit-killing cold in Chicago. But I was warm enough. Ivy had given me a sheepskin coat for Christmas. Some Christmas it had been: Ivy, Woody, and me around that underdecorated tree, a tar baby angel watching o’er us as we opened presents in our bathrobes. I’d never been happier to see the holidays come and go.
I held on to Owen’s arm as we made our way along Clark Street. We were still friends, thank God. Maybe even closer than we used to be. But somehow we didn’t feel the need to talk as much as we used to when we were together.
Owen’s coat, I kept telling him, really wasn’t warm enough for Chicago winter. He didn’t seem to care that much. He wasn’t even wearing a hat. I guess the whiskey kept him warm, and besides that, he was always happy when he saw old Mae West movies. That’s how we’d spent Valentine’s Day, seeing the double feature at the Clark. I had no sweetheart and neither did he, so why not?
The commune murders and the August 4 debacle were still very much with me. A couple of pieces of the puzzle were still missing, and might remain that way forever.
I knew, for example, that the man who’d tied me up in the apartment had been Paul Yancy, the white member of August 4. He’d posed as a cop, taken the bomb shelter key. More than likely he was the one who drilled into Oscar Mobley’s safe and took all that