Jack & Jill (Alex Cross 3)

CHAPTER

37

“SO DID YOU get to meet the royal couple yet?” Nana Mama asked when I entered her kitchen about four that afternoon.

She was making something in a big gray stewpot that smelled like the proverbial ambrosia. It was white bean soup, one of my favorites. Rosie the cat was prowling around on the counters, purring contentedly. Rosie in the kitchen.

At the same time Nana cooked at the counter, she was doing the crossword puzzle in the Washington Post. A book of her word jumbles was also out in view. So was No Stone Unturned—The Life and Times of Maggie Kuhn. Complicated woman, my grandmother.

“Did I meet who?” I pretended not to understand her crystal-clear and very pointed question to me. I was playing the game that the two of us have had going for many years, and probably will until death do us part somehow, sometime, someway.

“Meet whom, Dr. Cross. The President and Mrs. President, of course. The well-to-do white folks who live in the White House, looking down on the rest of us. Tom and Sally up in Camelot for the nineties.”

I smiled at her usual high-spirited and occasionally bittersweet banter. I looked in the fridge. “I didn’t come home for the third and fourth degree, you know. I’m going to make a sandwich from this brisket. It looks moist and tender. Or are looks deceiving?”

“Of course they are, but this brisket is moist and you could cut it with a soup spoon. Seems as if they work very short hours over at the White House, considering all that they have to do. Somehow, I suspected as much. But I could never prove it until now. So who did you meet?”

I couldn’t resist. I had been going to tell her this much any way. “I met and talked with the President this morning.”

“You met Tom?”

Nana pretended to take a punch in the manner of the heavyweight boxer George Foreman. She did a stumbling stutter-step back from the counter. She even cracked a tiny smile. “Well, tell me all about Tom, for heaven’s sake. And Sally. Does Sally wear a black pillbox hat inside the White House in the daytime?”

“I think that was Jacqueline Kennedy. Actually, I liked President Byrnes,” I said as I commenced making a thick brisket sandwich on fresh rye with bib lettuce, tomatoes, and a dab of mayonnaise, lots of pepper, a whisk of salt.

“You would. You like everybody unless they kill somebody,” Nana said as she began to slice up some more tomatoes. “Now that you’ve met Mr. President, you can get back on the Sojourner Truth School case. That’s very important to the people in this house. The Gray House. No black people care very much about the President and his problems anymore. Nor should they.”

“Is that a fact, Mrs. Farrakhan?” I said as I bit into my sandwich. Delicious, as promised. Cut it with a soup spoon, melts in the mouth.

“Should be a fact, if it isn’t. It’s close to a fact, anyway. I’ll admit that it’s a sad state of affairs, but it’s the sad state we all live in. Don’t you agree? You must.”

“You ever hear of mellowing with age?” I asked her. “Your brisket is terrific, by the way.”

“You ever hear of getting better, not getting older? You ever hear of taking care of one’s own kind? You ever hear about teeny-tiny, darling black children being murdered in our neighborhood, Alex, and nobody doing enough to make it stop? Of course the brisket is excellent. You see, I am getting better.”

I reached into my trouser pocket and took out the clasp and pin that the President had given me. “The President knew I had two children. He gave me these keepsakes for them.” I handed them over to Nana. She took them, and for once in her life, she was speechless.

“Tell them that these are from Tom and that he’s a fine man trying to do the right thing.”

I finished half of my overstuffed sandwich and took the remaining half with me out of the kitchen. If you can’t stand the heat and all that. “Thanks for the delicious sandwich, and the advice. In that order.”

“Where are you going now?” Nana called after me. She was winding up again. “We were talking about an important matter. Genocide against black people right here in Washington, our nation’s capital. They don’t care what happens in these neighborhoods, Alex. They is them, and them is white, and you’re collaborating with the enemy.”

“Actually, I’m going out to put in a few hours on the Truth School murder case,” I called back as I continued toward the front door, and blessed escape from the tirade. I couldn’t see Nana Mama anymore, but I could hear her voice trailing behind me like a banshee cry, or maybe the caw of a field crow.

“Alex has finally found his senses!” she exclaimed in a loud, shrill voice. “There’s hope after all. There’s hope. Oh, thank you, Black Lord in Heaven.”

The old goat can still get my goat, and I love her for it. I just don’t want to listen to her annoying rap sometimes.

I beeped the car horn of my old Porsche on the way out of the driveway. It’s our signal that everything is all right between us. From inside the house, I heard Nana call out: “Beep back at you!”

CHAPTER

38

I WAS BACK on the mean streets of inner Washington, the underside of the capital. I was a homicide detective again. I loved it with a strange passion, but there were times when I hated it with all my heart.

We were doing all that could humanly be done on both cases. I had set up surveillance on the Truth School during the day and also had day and night surveillance on Shanelle Green’s gravesite. Often psycho killers showed up at victims’ graves. They were ghouls, after all.