Crime of Passion (Marcus Douglas 1)

“I could tell them that I'm putting together a pictorial memorial to her and ask them to send me their memories of her.”

“That's a great idea, Carmen.”

“I was thinking about doing that anyway,” Carmen said sadly. “I was going to use some of the pictures my father has of her.”

“Do you know who her toys were?” Marcus asked.

“I think I remember some of their names, but I'm not sure. I'm not sure of anything about Dez anymore.”

“Whatever you can remember would be helpful. You know, Carmen, if you had been here, you could have been a big help in the investigation a year ago. Did you ever talk to the police?”

“No.” Carmen sat back in her chair and exhaled deeply. Thinking that maybe if she hadn't left right after the funeral, the police would have talked to her. Maybe they would have looked into all the things Marcus had suggested. She took a sip of her Bacardi and gazed out the window. “I just love the view from here,” she said sensing the need to back herself off.

“Yes, the view is spectacular,” Marcus said looking at Carmen. But the spectacular beauty here is you, Carmen. He wanted to say, but didn't. “On a clear night you can see as far as Stone Mountain.”

“I used to come here to think,” Carmen said to him. “I'd sit here for hours, drinking cokes and looking out at the city. This is the first time I've come here since I first left Atlanta. The skyline's changed a lot in ten years. I'd almost forgotten what a beautiful city this is.”

“Why did you leave?”

Carmen looked away from Marcus. “I needed to get away from here,” she said, playing with her napkin. Then she at looked at him. “To be honest with you, Marcus, I had a big fight with my mother.”

“Over what?”

“It's a very long story. Nineteen years long, to tell the truth. So to make a long story short, she was very hard on us. It wasn't abuse. She didn't beat us any more than she needed to or any thing like that. And now that I'm older I can see that she was just trying to give her daughters all the advantages that she never did. But at the time, she seemed like the meanest woman in the world. So as I got older the more we'd bump heads.”

“I'll bet the two of you are a lot alike?”

“That's me, Dominique's baby,” Carmen said playfully. “I thought that was my name for the longest time. When you meet her, you'll see. I look just like her. Same eyes, same smile, complexion, hair, all from her.”

“Nothing from daddy?”

“I got my father's height and his wonderful disposition,” Carmen smiled brightly.

“You got along with your father a lot better.”

“How could you tell?”

“The way your face lit up when you mentioned him,” Marcus said and smiled at Carmen.

“We were daddy’s girls. He was our sanctuary from mom.”

“So what did you and Dominique fall out about?”

“In my quest to do everything she told me I couldn't I started hanging out.”

“Dominique doesn't seem like the type to let you do a group of hanging out.”

“She didn't. But me and Dez had it down to a science. By the time we got to high school, my mother stopped picking us up and driving us everywhere. But that was only after daddy told her she was embarrassing us. Anyway, we were involved in every extracurricular activity there was. And that gave us a reason to be out the house.”

“What'd you do with that new found freedom?”

“Get high. Me and my boyfriend, I had a thing for thugs back then, we smoked a lot of weed, drank a lot of rum,” she said raising her glass. “Sniffed a little coke sometimes. We went everywhere together. My mother couldn't stand him.” Carmen looked at Marcus for a second or two before continuing. “So one Friday night were hanging out, I was in college at Spellman, living on campus when this happened. That night we didn't have any weed. So my boyfriend says I know this guy, a friend of his Uncle and he always got weed. So we go to this guy's house and we're sitting around listening to music and getting high. As soon as we leave the police arrest us.”

“What for?”

“Turns out the guy sells weed. So we go to jail and I call my mother. Well of course you know she loses it. She said I oughta leave you there, it will teach you a lesson. And she did. I spent the weekend in jail. I called my father at work on Monday and he came and got me out. She never told him or Dez where I was. After that, things got worst between us, so I dropped out and moved to New York.”

“That was kinda cold. Her leaving you in jail I mean,” Marcus said quickly.