His Third Wife

“What’s he been saying about Dax Thomas?”

“That reporter?”

“Yeah. Jamison been saying anything about him?”

“What about him? What would he say about him?”

“Everyone’s seen the news,” Keet said. “You know. Has he mentioned who killed him?”

“Do you know who killed him?” I asked.

“Don’t play with me, bitch! What did he say?” Keet’s eyes cut my face cold to let me know what was at stake. It was the look he’d give one of his girls on the street. I looked at the glove compartment without moving one of my pupils from his eyes.

“He didn’t say anything! Didn’t tell me anything.”

“You sure?”

“I don’t know anything,” I said again.

Keet cut and cut and cut with his eyes.

I took every slice hard, but I didn’t let on that I knew anything because I didn’t know anything. Since that night Dax died, every inch of rope Jamison had given me had burned to nothing. He’d told me nothing. He was moving around like I wasn’t even there. Looking around me. Past me. Through me. In his empty eyes I almost saw Keet. Keet in Jamison. It was like I’d left one gangster to be with another gangster, only the second gangster didn’t even know that he was gangster. Or did he?

When Val entered the back door of the house, Jamison was washed, shaved, and standing in the kitchen drinking a cup of freshly squeezed orange juice that had come compliments of his mother. He hadn’t yet decided what he was going to say to Val, but he started anyway.

“My mother saw you.”

Val hadn’t expected that Jamison would be out of bed. She tried to rush past him to get upstairs, but he kept talking.

“You were in a car around the corner?” he added.

“No.” This flimsy answer was all she could divine in response to the direct accusation in her new husband’s tone.

“So, she didn’t see you in a car?” Jamison formed his question in a new way that gave Val little extra time to come up with something more explanatory.

“No. It wasn’t me. I was walking.”

“Walking?” Jamison looked Val over—she was wearing jogging pants, a tank top and flip-flops. Her darkening nipples were pressing through her shirt.

Val looked down at her flip-flops and nipples, too. She needed something better to say.

“It was just an old friend,” she offered. “I was walking and I saw him and we talked for a second.”

“Really?”

“Really. Is that a problem?”

“Well, a friend comes to knock on your door, not sit around the corner in a car,” Jamison said, sounding like a father who’d caught his teenage daughter sneaking into her window after a night out partying.

“It was too early for him to come in,” Val said, and she, too, was beginning to sound as if she was caught in the father/teenage-daughter scenario. Somehow that stung her nerves like a whip against her back. She felt she could hear Mrs. Taylor upstairs in her room laughing.

“Too early?” Jamison repeated the response as weakly as it had come off. “Do I look like a fool to you?”

“Well, do I look like a kid to you? Have to answer to you when I’m coming and going?” Val asked.

“Yes, I guess you do. Running around here with your breasts out, pregnant, jumping in cars with other niggas. Yes, you do,” Jamison said.

“So, now I was with another nigga? You don’t even sound right saying that word.”