Black Lace

  But Drake especially liked driving around on sunny Saturday afternoons like today. Sometimes he’d stop and talk to folks waiting for the Dexter bus, or stop and say hey to a bunch of brothers hooping in one of the city’s parks. He’d also been known to stop and buy a chicken or a rib dinner from a storefront church selling the food to raise money. Invariably his arrival would bring on a stunned silence, and then all hell would break loose as the kitchen ladies fluttered and tried to feed him like a prodigal son. So far, none of these close encounters had ever shown up in the paper, and for him, that was the best part because the interactions were between him and the citizens, and had nothing to do with the newspapers at all.

  Drake pulled into the tiny lot behind Clyde’s Barbershop and sat there a moment to look around. The old neighborhood was still hanging on. There were a few more boarded-up buildings, but there were also a few formerly boarded-up places that now held new small businesses. Drake was determined to make the neighborhoods part of the city’s renewal. Past administrations had focused on reviving downtown. He thought that was okay, but the neighborhoods needed to be revitalized if Detroit was to have any chance of regaining its stride.

  His arrival at Clyde’s was greeted with applause, signifying, and back-thumping hugs from the regulars. Clyde Miller, the owner, had been cutting Drake’s hair since Drake’s mother moved the family to the east side when he was nine. Clyde was no longer the player he’d been back then. Over the years, the fast-living hustler life had been replaced by the strict life of diabetes. Clyde’s once string-bean frame now resembled a ham hock.

  Seeing Drake, he came out from behind his chair. His light brown face peppered by freckles held a wide smile. He gave Drake a big hug. “How you doing, boy. Ain’t seen you in so long thought maybe you had put us down.”

  “Never,” Drake promised. “How are you?”

  “Not bad. Still trying to get the forty-eight-year-old wife to let me trade up to two twenty-four-year-olds, but she ain’t buying it.”

  The six customers laughed. Everybody knew Clyde’s fiery wife Glenda, and that if there was any trading to be done more than likely it would be Clyde’s fifty-two-year-old self being exchanged for two twenty-six-year-olds. Drake shook everybody’s hand then took his seat to wait his turn.

  In any other shop he could probably have pulled rank and been the next person in the chair, but at Clyde’s it had always been First Come, or Wait Your Turn, just like the sign said on the wall. Clyde didn’t care if you were President of the United States, or the mayor of Detroit, for that matter.

  Duke Givens, the other barber, and Clyde’s brother-in-law, asked Drake over the balding brown head of his customer, “How’s that pretty mama of yours?”

  Drake picked up a sports magazine, one of many spread out on the rickety table in front of the old comfortable couch he was seated on. “She’s doing just fine. I talked to her this morning.”

  “Tell her I said hello.”

  “Will do.”

  Duke, a widower, had been trying to hit on Drake’s mama for the past ten years, but Mavis Randolph wasn’t feeling him. Even though she was sixty-three now, Mavis could still make the men of her generation walk into trees when she passed by. Duke was one of the ones with a permanent knot on his forehead.

  While Drake waited his turn to sit under Clyde’s clippers, he leafed through the magazines and added his two cents to the myriad conversations in the shop that touched on everything from what the Detroit Tigers needed to do to having a winning baseball season to what was wrong with the fools in Lansing, the state capital, and in Washington. Drake found himself laughing more than a few times as the opinionated Clyde verbally got into it with the “I voted for the President” Duke.

  By the time the freshly cut Drake drove away from Clyde’s, his spirit had been renewed. He also had more than enough time to go home, take a shower, and hook up with Lacy.

  Just thinking about her made him smile. In his mind’s eye he could see the sexy little twists and the expressive eyes. The sweetness of her kiss came back too. He couldn’t wait to show her off at Gran’s party because he knew his grandmother, Eleanor, and the rest of the Vachon family would like her. His mother wanted to meet Lacy too. Although he’d tried to tell Mavis that a dinner date in no way meant wedding, he was certain she was already picking out names for her new grandchildren.

  Lacy was dressed. She wasn’t one of those women who spent years deciding what to wear. A pair of black linen pants, a dark purple linen twin set, and her short-heeled black mules had done the trick. She looked at herself in her mirror and was pleased by what it reflected. She hadn’t always embraced herself, as the psychobabble folks called it. As a teenager, she’d wanted to have her mother’s voluptuous curves instead of the skinny B cup body she’d been given. Now at the age of thirty-two she’d long ago made peace with her lack of bosoms, as her grandmother used to say. Her body was her body, and it was serving her well. She turned in the mirror and looked at the fit of her pants. She thought she had a pretty good butt, too.

  The buzzer rang. Lacy strode confidently to the intercom. “Who’s there?”

  “Hey, baby.”

  “Hey,” she said softly. “Come on up.”

  He knocked on her door a few minutes later, and when she opened it, their eyes met, and then their lips.

  “Missed you,” he whispered.

  Seeing stars, Lacy murmured, “Missed you, too.”

  Drake could see that the kiss had shaken her a little bit, and he liked that. “You look nice. Purple is the color on the Vachon crest.”

  Lacy closed the door and wondered if the kiss had affected her hearing. “What crest?”

  “Our family crest.”

  “You’re talking about the crests you can by for 29.99 in the magazines?”

  He laughed. “No. My family has a real crest. It has two dragons with their necks entwined. One purple, the other gold.”

  “What do the dragons represent?”

  “My really great-grandfather, Galen Vachon, and his wife Hester.”

  Lacy was impressed. “I love that.” She’d never heard of such a thing before. “How far can you trace your people back?”

  “France. Seventeen hundreds.”

  Lacy stared. She studied his handsome face. Then she gave him a look. “You made this up, right?”

  He shook his head. “Nope.” He raised his hand. “Scout’s honor. I was an Eagle Scout, you know.”

  She smiled. “No, I didn’t know. Altar boy too, I’ll bet.”

  “Yep. St. Mattie’s on Woodward.”

  Lacy found him so interesting. “So this dragon great-grandfather came from France?”

  “His father did. Galen was born in Louisiana.”

  “Okay. I’ll bite. You can tell me all about this family of yours over dinner.”

  “I’m not making this up.”

  “Whatever you say, Mr. Mayor.” Lacy grabbed her purse and keys. “I’m so interested that I’m going to let you ride in my new car.”

  Drake, being a Vachon said, “But—I brought my Mustang.”

  Lacy just looked at him. “Please. Once you see my mother’s birthday present, you’re going to take that ’Stang back to the dealer.”

  Drake drawled, “Them’s pretty strong words, ma’am.”

  She tossed back, “And I got the horses to back ’em up, Your Honor.” She beckoned a coy finger. “Come with me.”

  As she locked up her place and led Drake back down the hall to the elevator, he watched the swing of her behind in the black pants and knew he’d follow that sweet walk anywhere.

  The garage was underground. They walked for a few moments, then Lacy pointed like Vanna White at her new car.

  Drake’s jaw dropped. “Damn!” He couldn’t decide where to look first. “I apologize.” Mesmerized, he took a slow walk around her Crossfire while the pleased Lacy looked on. “I saw one of these at the Auto Show back in January. Your mother bought this?”

  “Yep. She
drives a Porsche Boxster, so she’s into speed.”

  Drake shook his head. He couldn’t wait to meet her. “And it’s a stick?”

  “Only thing I drive. My mother calls it my only walk on the wild side.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “My mother is a true creative person. She takes risks, isn’t afraid of anything this side of the Lord, but I was a real timid child. For a while, there, I was afraid of anything that lived outside the house.”

  Her bittersweet smile hit Drake dead in the heart. “You’re certainly not timid now.”

  “No, but I’m not as flamboyant or as open as mama thinks I could be.”

  “When did the timid girl turn into the Lacy you are now?”

  “Around the year I turned nine, when she forced me to be a Girl Scout. Hated it, at first. Hated the leader, the other girls, and then we went to camp.”

  “Thought you didn’t like the outdoors,” he said, watching her with a smile.

  “I thought I didn’t either, but once I figured out that the leader wasn’t going to send me home no matter how hard I cried, and that if I didn’t participate in the activities the other girls in my cabin wouldn’t get their badges, and would probably hate me for life, I stopped being such a spoiled pain in the butt and actually started to enjoy myself. Scouts turned me around in so many ways. Shoot, by the time I was thirteen I was going hunting with my daddy. Had my own rifle too.”

  She took out her keys and hit the clicker to open the coupe’s locks.

  Drake said, “Can’t see you as a spoiled brat.”

  Lacy got behind the wheel. “Please. I was the only child of Valerie Garner Green. By the time I was seven years old, I’d been to Paris, Rio, and seen the pyramids. You couldn’t tell me a thing.”

  Laughing, he got in on his side. While buckling himself in, he checked out the silver satin interior. “Nice. It’s like a cockpit in here.”

  “It is nice, isn’t it? We’ll take a quick ride so you feel this smooth ride, then we’ll come back and pick up your Mustang.”

  She turned the key in the ignition and the engine roared to life. The garage door lifted, and Lacy threw the stick into reverse. Looking over at the mayor, she gave him a grin and headed for the exit. Once she was on the street, she told him, “You know, I wasn’t sure about this car when I first saw it, but then I said, ‘Why not? I have a new job in a new city. I’m having a whole new life. Maybe Mama’s right. Maybe it’s time to let the old, staid, Escort-driving, scientist Lacy go, and act like her for a change.’” Then she added, “But only to a point. I don’t think I’ll be dancing on table tops in Morocco like she did when I was thirteen.”

  “She dances on tables?”

  Lacy headed the car up Jefferson Avenue toward the freeway. The evening traffic was fairly light. “Yep, and this particular time it was with some man claiming to be a prince. He wanted her to marry him.”

  Drake chuckled.

  She looked his way for a moment, then went back to the traffic. “It’s funny now, but it wasn’t back then. I used to travel with her every summer. By the time I was fifteen, she was embarrassing me every time I turned around, or so I thought. I told Daddy about her and that prince the minute we got home.”

  “What’d he say?”

  “Told me, one, nobody liked a tattletale, and two, since I was so embarrassed by Mama, next summer he’d get me a job sorting mail in the post office where he worked.” Lacy laughed. “Shut me right up.”

  Drake joined in. “I’ll bet it did.”

  Lacy stopped at the red light in front of the IHOP owned by Anita Baker and said, “So, yes, I was a spoiled brat. Did your mother and sisters spoil you—you being the only boy?”

  “Hell, no.”

  They both laughed while she pulled away from the light.

  “My mother said I was not going to grow up and be cute and useless, as she called it, so I did dishes, ran the vacuum, and did my own laundry once I turned twelve. The only thing I can’t do is cook. After I burned up a few of her good pots, she wouldn’t let me anywhere near the stove.”

  When Lacy entered the tunnel leading to the freeway, she said, “Hang onto your seat. This baby can roll.”

  And she was right. She had the speedometer up to eighty in no time.

  Drake said, “You need to slow down, little girl. The papers will have a field day if we get a ticket.”

  Lacy knew he was right, but she kept the speed steady. They flew for a few minutes more, then she exited the freeway, turned around and headed back the way they’d come. Grinning, she looked over at Drake. “We’ll go back and get your car now.”

  Drake shook his head and said, “Thank you.”

  Keeping her eyes on the traffic, she asked, “Since you can’t cook, what are we eating?”

  “If you don’t slow down, we’ll be eating county food at the jail.”

  They were approaching downtown again, so Lacy eased back on the gas, took the transmission down to fifth and then down to third as they entered the tunnel to Jefferson. “Better?” she asked him.

  “Much,” he told her. A second later his phone rang and Drake cursed softly. Putting the phone to his ear, he said crisply, “Yeah.”

  Lacy focused her attention on driving.

  Drake said sharply, “When?…Okay. I’m not far. Be there in a few minutes…Okay.” He clicked off and told her grimly, “Two officers were shot about twenty minutes ago. One’s dead. I need to go see the family.”

  Lacy nodded tersely and drove back to her place. He directed her to where he’d parked the Mustang.

  Getting out, he told her, “I’ll call you later if it’s not too late. Sorry about dinner.”

  “Go do what you have to do. We can have dinner anytime.”

  He kissed her good-bye, got into his car and drove away. As his car disappeared from sight, Lacy sent up a prayer.

  Drake genuinely hated this part of his job. Three times in the past seven months he’d made the same, long grim walk down the bustling corridors of Detroit Receiving Hospital to where a grieving police officer’s family sat waiting. Unlike other mayoral duties, which grew easier with practice, this hadn’t. In fact, each incident seemed harder than the one before. As always, he was accompanied by his lady police chief, Cassandra Robinson. She found the task difficult as well.

  Drake asked, “What’s her husband’s name again?”

  The six-foot-two former Marine drill master dressed in her formal blue uniform answered, “Harold. Harold Carnegie. He and Mary have three kids.”

  Drake shook his head at the injustice. “How old?”

  “Sixteen, twelve, and eight. She’d been on the force ten years.”

  They found Mr. Carnegie seated outside the E.R. When he looked up at their approach, his eyes were red with grief. Drake stepped forward and offered his hand. “Mr. Carnegie.”

  The man nodded and stood. “Hello, Mayor Randolph…Chief Robinson. Appreciate you coming.”

  “We wanted to extend our condolences, and to let you how very sorry we all are for your loss,” Drake said sincerely.

  Carnegie, who appeared to be in his mid-forties, replied simply, “Thanks.

  The chief asked, “Is there anything the department can do?”

  He shook his head. “No. Her mother’s flying in tonight from Memphis to help with the arrangements. Her sergeant said he’d get all the paperwork for her insurance and everything to me as soon as he could.”

  “Well, let us know if we can help in any way.”

  He nodded.

  Drake saw the tall teenager standing by the wall watching them. The anger in the boy’s face seemed to compete with his grief. Drake walked over. “I’m Mayor Randolph. Sorry about your mother, son.”

  “I don’t want your sorrys.”

  His father said firmly, “Harold Jr., show some respect.”

  “For what?” the son tossed back angrily. “That crackhead didn’t show Mama no respect!” Then he added, “I hate this city.”
br />   “Your mother was trying to make a difference.”

  “Yeah, and look what it got her.”

  Drake could see the boy holding back his tears. “We’re very sorry.”

  The kid looked Drake in the eye and said, “You done your duty, so go on back downtown.”

  Harold Sr. turned on his son. “Stop it!”

  Chief Robinson told Harold Sr., “It’s okay. That’s his grief talking. We’ll be giving Mary a police escort at the funeral if that’s okay with your family.”

  Focused now on the chief, he told her, “She’d like that.”

  “Please don’t hesitate to call if you need our help.”

  He nodded.

  Drake said, “Again, we’re very sorry for your loss, Mr. Carnegie. Very sorry.”

  Carnegie looked at Drake. “She knew this might happen one day, and she was okay with it, even if we weren’t. She loved her job and she loved this city.” Then he put his head in his hands and said softly, “How am I going to live without her?”

  Chief Robinson placed a consoling hand on his shoulder. “Stay strong. We’ll find the shooter, don’t worry.”

  Harold Jr. said furiously, “It won’t bring her back, though, will it?”

  Drake shook his head, “No, son, it won’t.”

  Drake watched a lone tear slide down the boy’s face, a grim reminder that beneath all that anger was a grieving sixteen-year-old kid looking at burying his mother. “Your dad’s going to need you. Be there for him.”

  The kid locked gazes with Drake. “I know. You just find the person who shot her.”

  “We will.”

  The kid rolled his angry eyes. “Yeah, right.”

  A somber Drake shook Mr. Carnegie’s hand once again, then he and the chief left to see the family of Mary Carnegie’s partner, Leo Vasquez. Vasquez was still in surgery.

  Lena Vasquez was one of the city’s attorneys. Her father Ricardo had been a cop, but Drake knew that the family’s ties to the police department didn’t make their waiting or worrying any easier.

  Lena walked up and Drake gave her a strong hug. They’d been friends since high school. “How you doing?”