The Things We Do for Love, page 9
“Oh, please, sexy,” Angie said, her tongue playfully flitting between her teeth. “You and I both know I’m not interested in your money. I’d be interested in the dollars you can access through your friends on the ‘worldly’ side of the business.”
“Angie,” I said, pushing my chair back slowly, “you actually think you’re going to sit here and shake me down?” Not wanting a scene, I stood but resisted the urge to lean over the table and stare her down. “I’m going to the bathroom. While I do that, why don’t you say a prayer and realize you’re not making any sense? You’ve already told me you don’t have anything on me.” I knew those words had gone too far, could feel the rebellious, hotheaded spirit that Christ had helped me control coming back to run things. I had a figuratively loaded gun pointed at my head, but I had to call Angie out on this. At least I would know what I was up against.
She looked up at me with a smile loaded with false innocence. “Oh, did I say I had no dirt on you? I may have misspoken.”
Every muscle in my back coiled, tightening in preparation for what could come next.
“Oh, Jesse,” Angie said, waving lightheartedly and reaching beneath her chair and retrieving her purse. “Far as I know, you’re a model husband—this isn’t about you. You’re still a household name in some communities. If I had dirt on you, honey, I wouldn’t have a choice but to print it.”
Registering the candid ease with which Angie had said those words, a shiver danced up my spine as she reached the long fingers of her left hand into her purse. Refusing to break eye contact, I set my jaw, slid back into my seat, and realized she was still talking.
“. . . So maybe this is about you—I think you want Men with a Message to succeed, that you sincerely believe God is using all of you to spread the Gospel. I get that, I really do, and that’s why I’m going to leave money out of this.” She let a beat pass as she retrieved a slim stack of photos from her purse. “We have enough history, I just figure you deserve to see these first.” Like a victorious poker player, she gently laid the stack flat in front of me. “Go ahead and relieve yourself, don’t tarry on my account. You’ll want to be alone when you see those, anyway,” she continued, flicking her tongue with a familiar flourish. “I have more at home.”
The store’s background music—a special Ray Charles collection—as well as people’s surrounding voices and the whinny of the barista’s equipment dimmed slowly in my ears as I walked to the men’s room, the photos resting in the sweaty palm of my right hand. By the time I reached the door of the restroom, all sound had been sucked away; only my own breathing and footsteps accompanied me inside. My senses remained—the pungent smell of incense wormed its way up my nostrils—but my mind felt nearly vacuumed of all substance.
Feeling like Angie’s personal marionette, I plodded into the nearest bathroom stall and latched its door shut behind me. I still couldn’t quite fathom what was coming; days later, I would laugh at my innocent hope that all Angie had handed me were old shots from the handful of dates we’d had as kids.
In the first photo—which had the words “April ’96” scrawled on the back—two young brothers were embraced in a passionate kiss. Dispelling any doubt, the taller, bulkier brother had one hand wrapped around his lover’s waist.
In the next photo the two men were separated, but still holding hands, and the wider-lens shot indicated they were posing in front of a statue in Dupont Circle, one of DC’s historic bastions of upwardly mobile homosexuals. I had driven through Dupont Circle enough—even shopped in the area through the years, always with a young lady at my side, of course—to recognize the guys’ surroundings. Still, the width and breadth of the shot made it impossible to get a clear view of the two young men’s faces.
The third photo closed the loop for any inquiring mind. The lovers were seated on a bench, and this shot was close up, enough that you could recognize the clothing from the earlier pictures while determining whether these were folk you knew. The smaller man, a high-yellow brother with a head of dreadlocks, looked like any number of guys I’d passed on the street. The other man was exactly who I’d feared, despite the fact we’d squashed the question of his sexual preference years before. At the sight of Coleman’s face, I hit my knees, right there in the stall, and began praying for my brother in Christ. I didn’t know what to say, or what to do, but I had to start somewhere.
11
Dionne
You’ll have to pardon my French, but my fool friend Suzette was all the way in downtown DC, not far from the Logan Circle apartment where she’d spied on Adrian, Coleman’s supposed boyfriend, earlier in the month. As Suzette directed me to the address of a bar on Massachusetts Avenue, I had to grit my teeth to keep from scolding her for continuing this ridiculous surveillance. Although she sounded a little better, her speech was halting and uncertain, enough so that I held my tongue and just told her to be patient until I got there.
Suzette’s Buick was parked in a tiny lot just off the alleyway abutting the bar, a place called Therapy Café, which looked nicer than your average watering hole. When I found my friend, she was slumped against the Buick’s steering wheel, her face turned so that she could see me as I approached. Once I was a few steps away, she slowly extended her left arm and opened the door. “Hey” was all that escaped from her mouth, and she didn’t move another inch.
Leaning inside the car, I peeled back the shoulders of Suzette’s white cotton jacket and ran my hands over her neck and chest, making sure there were no serious wounds. Her labored breathing filling my ears, I stepped back but carefully placed a hand beneath my friend’s neck, refusing to gasp when I saw the puffy, darkening skin around her left eye. “What happened, honey? Where do you hurt?”
“We should just go,” Zette replied weakly, the look of a frightened child in her eyes as she drew into a ball. “He might come back,” she said, eyes darting to and fro as she balled the hem of her spaghetti strap dress between both fists.
I instinctively looked over each shoulder, scanning the lot and the alleyway to find we still had no company. I didn’t know if I was dealing with a serious threat or paranoid delusions. I pinned my gaze back to Suzette’s. “Zette, I need to know if I can move you or not. What happened?”
“I t-took a blow to my head. It was that monster’s fault . . . Oh God, Dionne,” she continued, weeping softly, “I can’t let Coleman find out about this.”
“We have bigger worries right now,” I replied, leaning into the car and sliding my hands underneath her arms. Suzette had two inches of height and thirty pounds on me, but I was determined to get her into my car. “I’m taking you to Howard’s emergency room.” The idea of a blow to the head was scary stuff—my mind raced with fears of internal bleeding or other damage.
“No!” She flailed at me suddenly, knocking me back. “I don’t want this reported. Just take me home!”
I’d be lying if I didn’t tell you that was enough to stir up this sister’s flesh. “Just take you home?” I pointed a finger toward her face, then retracted it. “Zette, you are not getting my help on your terms. I said you’re going to the hospital, and that’s where—”
“Dionne, please,” Suzette said, grasping my hands as if she were hanging off a cliff. “I don’t want to subject my kids, maybe not even Coleman, to what happened here. I—I should have stayed away from all this, minded my own business like you said.”
The thought of Suzette and Coleman’s precious little ones—Coleman Jr., Joseph, and Edith—amidst this developing soap opera brought tears to my eyes, and my righteous anger dimmed.
“One more thing,” Suzette said, still hanging on for dear life. “Can we please take my car home? You can leave yours here, no one will recognize it. I can’t have that man finding my Buick and running the plates. He might track me and Coleman down at home.”
I don’t think I could have been much more confused than my friend had me at that moment, but something told me it was time to make a deal and get going. “It’s a good thing for you I already took the day off work,” I said, trying to affect a light tone. “Let’s get you into the passenger seat.”
Once I had Suzette situated, I kept her talking as I strapped myself into her driver’s seat and quickly got comfortable with everything. As we first pulled out of the lot and into traffic, she was still tight-lipped, but as I drove in the direction of Howard Hospital—a cousin of mine was an ER nurse there and could help get Zette seen with as little fuss as possible—I got her talking about what had happened. As the story progressed, I understood more and more why she’d been so desperate to escape Therapy Café.
Suzette had grown weary of trying to catch Coleman in the act with this mysterious Adrian. The few times she had successfully followed him to Adrian’s apartment, she had emerged with suspicious behavior, but no hard evidence. While she’d used her charm and humor to pump the apartment staff for information on Adrian’s background and marital status, she’d never managed to get inside his place or actually see him interact with Coleman.
She decided that morning that it was time to stop dancing around the corners of her husband’s possible other life and confront this Adrian directly. What did she have to be ashamed or afraid of? Between Oprah’s many shows on the subject, the continued success of J.L. King’s books, and the few personal stories she’d heard from friends, she wasn’t the first wife placed in this painful situation. And if Coleman was guilty of what she suspected, he was the one who had to answer to God, not her.
Bolstered by this reasoning, Zette drove to Adrian’s building early that afternoon, then followed him when he walked over to Therapy about an hour later. Once she saw him enter through the front door, she pulled into the parking lot, checked her makeup and hair, and set out in hot pursuit.
Inside the café, which was just opening and taking on the first stirrings of lunch traffic, she took a seat at the bar, a couple of stools down from Adrian and two other men. Adrian, a tall, youthful brother with a willowy build and a short fade haircut, wore a conservative gray wool suit, much more traditional-looking than his more streetwise-looking companions, each of whom sported a sweat suit.
Sitting there within earshot of their conversation, Suzette nursed a vodka with orange juice—a violation of the promise she’d made Coleman to abstain from alcohol, but who cared when he was probably guilty of far worse—and noted that they sounded like three men having the usual surface-level, meaningless banter. The poor performance of the Washington Wizards, conflicting opinions of Marion Barry’s latest reincarnation, and arguments over which of several new movies was really worth checking out—nothing “gay” about the topics. That said, she noticed a palpable difference between Adrian’s tenor and his friends’—a softer vibe emanated from him, just enough to set off her “effeminate” monitor.
Suzette realized with surprise that she was disappointed—in her heart of hearts, she had still held out hope for Coleman, praying that Adrian would turn out to be so masculine, so undeniably manly, that she could drop this campaign of surveillance and suspicion. While she knew there were plenty of “undercover” brothers with hard-core shells, she had been prepared to grant Adrian the benefit of the doubt. However, the way the brother held his drink, the way he enunciated his words, and the way he habitually tossed off a high-pitched titter after every joke seemed to signal the worst. Ready to strike, Suzette moved over one seat, landing right next to her suspect.
As Suzette recounted the details of her dialogue with Adrian and his friends, she got more and more upset, but from what I picked up, she started by engaging the guys in harmless small talk. She asked for directions to a nearby clothing boutique and posed as if she were unfamiliar with downtown. After a few minutes, she got them talking about their favorite music, dropping hints about how much she was personally into gospel music. The other two men, one of whom wore an expensive-looking leather Nike sweat suit and towered over everyone else in the bar, laughed off her questions about when they had last been to a gospel concert, not to mention church.
Adrian, however, engaged her. “I like Yolanda Adams and Vickie Winans,” he said, turning over his shoulder and shrugging. “I’m pretty picky about gospel, though. I like artists who are really about ministry, you know? Music is just a racket for some of those jokers, they just front like they’re all pristine and pure, but their personal lives make yours and mine look like monks, you know?” He winked at Suzette, seemingly confident they were sharing a common joke.
It was easy to picture my girl’s reaction, though. She apparently took Adrian’s innocuous comment as a dare. “Well, you need to check out my favorite group,” she replied. “You heard of Men with a Message? They’re a hometown group, matter of fact. Most of them are from DC or PG County.”
“Hmm.” Adrian had rolled his eyes, drawing raised eyebrows and amused glances from his bigger friend, whom the others in the bar had referred to as “Earl.” Adrian turned all the way toward Suzette, opened his mouth to speak, then stopped himself. “Men with a Message, huh? I’ve heard of them, sort of a New Age version of the Winans or Commissioned?”
“That’s right.” Suzette’s right hand was balling into a fist; Adrian’s amused reaction felt like it had already confirmed her worst fears. She poured as much sugar as she could into her brittle smile. “They have some real talent in that group. I mean, Jesse Law used to be the man out there on the worldly stage, but now he’s serving the Lord.”
Suzette didn’t go into detail, but apparently Earl and the other brother had burst into laughter at the sound of my husband’s name, making the predictable jokes about my baby being yesterday’s news. Adrian, however, had looked at Zette with sincere curiosity. “Okay, maybe they got talent, but just about anyone with a contract has that. What really makes them so special?”
Suzette let it fly, gushing as blindly as she could. “Coleman Hill’s voice is just heaven-sent. When he sings, I feel God’s hand on me,” she said, slapping away the fact that these words were gospel truth before the emotional distance that had cropped up between her and Coleman in recent months. “That brother is going places.”
“Oh, he goes places all right, hmm.” As his trademark titter punctuated the smart remark, Adrian shifted in his seat. “Honey, you can trust me on this one. Mr. Coleman can sang his butt off, but there’s a lot of layers to that onion.”
It was really difficult to trust Suzette’s account after this point, which she went into once we were seated in a far corner of Howard Hospital’s ER. Adrian’s last remark had left her mind blank and rendered her deaf. She shoved him from his bar stool, kicked him in the groin more than once, and let loose a barrage of shouts and threats that she couldn’t quite recall. It wasn’t clear how long this lasted, but it sounded like everyone else around them was too shocked to step in.
At first.
At some point Earl in the leather sweat suit got involved. Suzette spoke of him coming at her swiftly and forcefully, the veins in his neck popping out and drops of spittle flying from his mouth. A fist cuffed her good in the eye, then she was aloft in the air, the muscular figure taking her into a bear hug and lifting her in one swift motion. She swung her purse violently, landing it against his temple. The impact forced him to drop her and she dashed outside, the clapping of his footsteps loud in her ears as he chased her toward her car. She had reached her door before he grabbed the back of her weave and yanked her toward him, at which point she swung hard toward his chest, lost her balance, and banged her head hard against the side of the Buick.
“Oh, Zette,” I said as she collapsed into my arms. Her black eye was covered with a pair of sunglasses, but it seemed a vain touch—given that her sobs were drawing more and more eyes to us. Rubbing her back and her arms, I quieted her slowly with a prayer, asking God to give her His peace that passeth understanding, to counsel her on the error of her ways, and asking He help her take this opportunity to confront Coleman directly instead of unpredictable, volatile strangers.
It looked, praise God, like I’d get to counsel her more deeply later.
Once my cousin Rita got us through an expedited registration process and placed Zette into an ER room, I explained again that we needed to keep her “underground.” Rita was understanding and said she could keep Suzette in the ER for a couple of hours at least; they would need that much time to do a CAT scan and a couple of other tests to assure she hadn’t sustained any internal bleeding or other damage.
With my girl in good hands, I waited until she was asleep comfortably in her bed and prayed anew as I walked to my car. Turning over the ignition of Suzette’s car, I toyed with calling Jesse, but decided to wait. Bringing my husband into this right now would only complicate matters further, and my Bible told me that as much as I trusted my husband to protect me when he was around, my ultimate hope for safeguarding lay in He to whom I could always appeal.
Stepping across the threshold into Therapy Café, I crossed my arms and scanned the bar as urgent steps propelled me forward. By now, the mingling afternoon crowd was at full blast. There were so many people around—most of them twenty- and thirty-something professional types—that trying to scan the place for someone fitting Suzette’s descriptions of Adrian or her attacker felt pointless. Instead, I took the sole free bar stool. When the bartender gestured for my order, I raised my voice to compensate for the crowd. “Where’s Earl?”
“Somebody say my name?” From a few stools down, a peanut-brown brother matching Suzette’s description sizewise leaned forward, his large, catlike eyes narrowing as they stared me down.
I slid off my stool and walked over to the brother, who was in fact wearing a leather sweat suit. “My name is Reverend Dionne Law,” I said, extending a hand that Earl may as well have crushed between boulders, his grip was so ridiculous. “I thought I should get your side of the story, before I go to the police.”
The truth of Suzette’s story radiated from Earl’s reaction. Taking a moment to register the concern on the face of the college-age girl seated next to him, who’d been happily flirting with him until my arrival, Earl flicked me an annoyed gaze. “I work here, all right.” It was a statement and a warning. “Let’s take this to the back office.”
“Angie,” I said, pushing my chair back slowly, “you actually think you’re going to sit here and shake me down?” Not wanting a scene, I stood but resisted the urge to lean over the table and stare her down. “I’m going to the bathroom. While I do that, why don’t you say a prayer and realize you’re not making any sense? You’ve already told me you don’t have anything on me.” I knew those words had gone too far, could feel the rebellious, hotheaded spirit that Christ had helped me control coming back to run things. I had a figuratively loaded gun pointed at my head, but I had to call Angie out on this. At least I would know what I was up against.
She looked up at me with a smile loaded with false innocence. “Oh, did I say I had no dirt on you? I may have misspoken.”
Every muscle in my back coiled, tightening in preparation for what could come next.
“Oh, Jesse,” Angie said, waving lightheartedly and reaching beneath her chair and retrieving her purse. “Far as I know, you’re a model husband—this isn’t about you. You’re still a household name in some communities. If I had dirt on you, honey, I wouldn’t have a choice but to print it.”
Registering the candid ease with which Angie had said those words, a shiver danced up my spine as she reached the long fingers of her left hand into her purse. Refusing to break eye contact, I set my jaw, slid back into my seat, and realized she was still talking.
“. . . So maybe this is about you—I think you want Men with a Message to succeed, that you sincerely believe God is using all of you to spread the Gospel. I get that, I really do, and that’s why I’m going to leave money out of this.” She let a beat pass as she retrieved a slim stack of photos from her purse. “We have enough history, I just figure you deserve to see these first.” Like a victorious poker player, she gently laid the stack flat in front of me. “Go ahead and relieve yourself, don’t tarry on my account. You’ll want to be alone when you see those, anyway,” she continued, flicking her tongue with a familiar flourish. “I have more at home.”
The store’s background music—a special Ray Charles collection—as well as people’s surrounding voices and the whinny of the barista’s equipment dimmed slowly in my ears as I walked to the men’s room, the photos resting in the sweaty palm of my right hand. By the time I reached the door of the restroom, all sound had been sucked away; only my own breathing and footsteps accompanied me inside. My senses remained—the pungent smell of incense wormed its way up my nostrils—but my mind felt nearly vacuumed of all substance.
Feeling like Angie’s personal marionette, I plodded into the nearest bathroom stall and latched its door shut behind me. I still couldn’t quite fathom what was coming; days later, I would laugh at my innocent hope that all Angie had handed me were old shots from the handful of dates we’d had as kids.
In the first photo—which had the words “April ’96” scrawled on the back—two young brothers were embraced in a passionate kiss. Dispelling any doubt, the taller, bulkier brother had one hand wrapped around his lover’s waist.
In the next photo the two men were separated, but still holding hands, and the wider-lens shot indicated they were posing in front of a statue in Dupont Circle, one of DC’s historic bastions of upwardly mobile homosexuals. I had driven through Dupont Circle enough—even shopped in the area through the years, always with a young lady at my side, of course—to recognize the guys’ surroundings. Still, the width and breadth of the shot made it impossible to get a clear view of the two young men’s faces.
The third photo closed the loop for any inquiring mind. The lovers were seated on a bench, and this shot was close up, enough that you could recognize the clothing from the earlier pictures while determining whether these were folk you knew. The smaller man, a high-yellow brother with a head of dreadlocks, looked like any number of guys I’d passed on the street. The other man was exactly who I’d feared, despite the fact we’d squashed the question of his sexual preference years before. At the sight of Coleman’s face, I hit my knees, right there in the stall, and began praying for my brother in Christ. I didn’t know what to say, or what to do, but I had to start somewhere.
11
Dionne
You’ll have to pardon my French, but my fool friend Suzette was all the way in downtown DC, not far from the Logan Circle apartment where she’d spied on Adrian, Coleman’s supposed boyfriend, earlier in the month. As Suzette directed me to the address of a bar on Massachusetts Avenue, I had to grit my teeth to keep from scolding her for continuing this ridiculous surveillance. Although she sounded a little better, her speech was halting and uncertain, enough so that I held my tongue and just told her to be patient until I got there.
Suzette’s Buick was parked in a tiny lot just off the alleyway abutting the bar, a place called Therapy Café, which looked nicer than your average watering hole. When I found my friend, she was slumped against the Buick’s steering wheel, her face turned so that she could see me as I approached. Once I was a few steps away, she slowly extended her left arm and opened the door. “Hey” was all that escaped from her mouth, and she didn’t move another inch.
Leaning inside the car, I peeled back the shoulders of Suzette’s white cotton jacket and ran my hands over her neck and chest, making sure there were no serious wounds. Her labored breathing filling my ears, I stepped back but carefully placed a hand beneath my friend’s neck, refusing to gasp when I saw the puffy, darkening skin around her left eye. “What happened, honey? Where do you hurt?”
“We should just go,” Zette replied weakly, the look of a frightened child in her eyes as she drew into a ball. “He might come back,” she said, eyes darting to and fro as she balled the hem of her spaghetti strap dress between both fists.
I instinctively looked over each shoulder, scanning the lot and the alleyway to find we still had no company. I didn’t know if I was dealing with a serious threat or paranoid delusions. I pinned my gaze back to Suzette’s. “Zette, I need to know if I can move you or not. What happened?”
“I t-took a blow to my head. It was that monster’s fault . . . Oh God, Dionne,” she continued, weeping softly, “I can’t let Coleman find out about this.”
“We have bigger worries right now,” I replied, leaning into the car and sliding my hands underneath her arms. Suzette had two inches of height and thirty pounds on me, but I was determined to get her into my car. “I’m taking you to Howard’s emergency room.” The idea of a blow to the head was scary stuff—my mind raced with fears of internal bleeding or other damage.
“No!” She flailed at me suddenly, knocking me back. “I don’t want this reported. Just take me home!”
I’d be lying if I didn’t tell you that was enough to stir up this sister’s flesh. “Just take you home?” I pointed a finger toward her face, then retracted it. “Zette, you are not getting my help on your terms. I said you’re going to the hospital, and that’s where—”
“Dionne, please,” Suzette said, grasping my hands as if she were hanging off a cliff. “I don’t want to subject my kids, maybe not even Coleman, to what happened here. I—I should have stayed away from all this, minded my own business like you said.”
The thought of Suzette and Coleman’s precious little ones—Coleman Jr., Joseph, and Edith—amidst this developing soap opera brought tears to my eyes, and my righteous anger dimmed.
“One more thing,” Suzette said, still hanging on for dear life. “Can we please take my car home? You can leave yours here, no one will recognize it. I can’t have that man finding my Buick and running the plates. He might track me and Coleman down at home.”
I don’t think I could have been much more confused than my friend had me at that moment, but something told me it was time to make a deal and get going. “It’s a good thing for you I already took the day off work,” I said, trying to affect a light tone. “Let’s get you into the passenger seat.”
Once I had Suzette situated, I kept her talking as I strapped myself into her driver’s seat and quickly got comfortable with everything. As we first pulled out of the lot and into traffic, she was still tight-lipped, but as I drove in the direction of Howard Hospital—a cousin of mine was an ER nurse there and could help get Zette seen with as little fuss as possible—I got her talking about what had happened. As the story progressed, I understood more and more why she’d been so desperate to escape Therapy Café.
Suzette had grown weary of trying to catch Coleman in the act with this mysterious Adrian. The few times she had successfully followed him to Adrian’s apartment, she had emerged with suspicious behavior, but no hard evidence. While she’d used her charm and humor to pump the apartment staff for information on Adrian’s background and marital status, she’d never managed to get inside his place or actually see him interact with Coleman.
She decided that morning that it was time to stop dancing around the corners of her husband’s possible other life and confront this Adrian directly. What did she have to be ashamed or afraid of? Between Oprah’s many shows on the subject, the continued success of J.L. King’s books, and the few personal stories she’d heard from friends, she wasn’t the first wife placed in this painful situation. And if Coleman was guilty of what she suspected, he was the one who had to answer to God, not her.
Bolstered by this reasoning, Zette drove to Adrian’s building early that afternoon, then followed him when he walked over to Therapy about an hour later. Once she saw him enter through the front door, she pulled into the parking lot, checked her makeup and hair, and set out in hot pursuit.
Inside the café, which was just opening and taking on the first stirrings of lunch traffic, she took a seat at the bar, a couple of stools down from Adrian and two other men. Adrian, a tall, youthful brother with a willowy build and a short fade haircut, wore a conservative gray wool suit, much more traditional-looking than his more streetwise-looking companions, each of whom sported a sweat suit.
Sitting there within earshot of their conversation, Suzette nursed a vodka with orange juice—a violation of the promise she’d made Coleman to abstain from alcohol, but who cared when he was probably guilty of far worse—and noted that they sounded like three men having the usual surface-level, meaningless banter. The poor performance of the Washington Wizards, conflicting opinions of Marion Barry’s latest reincarnation, and arguments over which of several new movies was really worth checking out—nothing “gay” about the topics. That said, she noticed a palpable difference between Adrian’s tenor and his friends’—a softer vibe emanated from him, just enough to set off her “effeminate” monitor.
Suzette realized with surprise that she was disappointed—in her heart of hearts, she had still held out hope for Coleman, praying that Adrian would turn out to be so masculine, so undeniably manly, that she could drop this campaign of surveillance and suspicion. While she knew there were plenty of “undercover” brothers with hard-core shells, she had been prepared to grant Adrian the benefit of the doubt. However, the way the brother held his drink, the way he enunciated his words, and the way he habitually tossed off a high-pitched titter after every joke seemed to signal the worst. Ready to strike, Suzette moved over one seat, landing right next to her suspect.
As Suzette recounted the details of her dialogue with Adrian and his friends, she got more and more upset, but from what I picked up, she started by engaging the guys in harmless small talk. She asked for directions to a nearby clothing boutique and posed as if she were unfamiliar with downtown. After a few minutes, she got them talking about their favorite music, dropping hints about how much she was personally into gospel music. The other two men, one of whom wore an expensive-looking leather Nike sweat suit and towered over everyone else in the bar, laughed off her questions about when they had last been to a gospel concert, not to mention church.
Adrian, however, engaged her. “I like Yolanda Adams and Vickie Winans,” he said, turning over his shoulder and shrugging. “I’m pretty picky about gospel, though. I like artists who are really about ministry, you know? Music is just a racket for some of those jokers, they just front like they’re all pristine and pure, but their personal lives make yours and mine look like monks, you know?” He winked at Suzette, seemingly confident they were sharing a common joke.
It was easy to picture my girl’s reaction, though. She apparently took Adrian’s innocuous comment as a dare. “Well, you need to check out my favorite group,” she replied. “You heard of Men with a Message? They’re a hometown group, matter of fact. Most of them are from DC or PG County.”
“Hmm.” Adrian had rolled his eyes, drawing raised eyebrows and amused glances from his bigger friend, whom the others in the bar had referred to as “Earl.” Adrian turned all the way toward Suzette, opened his mouth to speak, then stopped himself. “Men with a Message, huh? I’ve heard of them, sort of a New Age version of the Winans or Commissioned?”
“That’s right.” Suzette’s right hand was balling into a fist; Adrian’s amused reaction felt like it had already confirmed her worst fears. She poured as much sugar as she could into her brittle smile. “They have some real talent in that group. I mean, Jesse Law used to be the man out there on the worldly stage, but now he’s serving the Lord.”
Suzette didn’t go into detail, but apparently Earl and the other brother had burst into laughter at the sound of my husband’s name, making the predictable jokes about my baby being yesterday’s news. Adrian, however, had looked at Zette with sincere curiosity. “Okay, maybe they got talent, but just about anyone with a contract has that. What really makes them so special?”
Suzette let it fly, gushing as blindly as she could. “Coleman Hill’s voice is just heaven-sent. When he sings, I feel God’s hand on me,” she said, slapping away the fact that these words were gospel truth before the emotional distance that had cropped up between her and Coleman in recent months. “That brother is going places.”
“Oh, he goes places all right, hmm.” As his trademark titter punctuated the smart remark, Adrian shifted in his seat. “Honey, you can trust me on this one. Mr. Coleman can sang his butt off, but there’s a lot of layers to that onion.”
It was really difficult to trust Suzette’s account after this point, which she went into once we were seated in a far corner of Howard Hospital’s ER. Adrian’s last remark had left her mind blank and rendered her deaf. She shoved him from his bar stool, kicked him in the groin more than once, and let loose a barrage of shouts and threats that she couldn’t quite recall. It wasn’t clear how long this lasted, but it sounded like everyone else around them was too shocked to step in.
At first.
At some point Earl in the leather sweat suit got involved. Suzette spoke of him coming at her swiftly and forcefully, the veins in his neck popping out and drops of spittle flying from his mouth. A fist cuffed her good in the eye, then she was aloft in the air, the muscular figure taking her into a bear hug and lifting her in one swift motion. She swung her purse violently, landing it against his temple. The impact forced him to drop her and she dashed outside, the clapping of his footsteps loud in her ears as he chased her toward her car. She had reached her door before he grabbed the back of her weave and yanked her toward him, at which point she swung hard toward his chest, lost her balance, and banged her head hard against the side of the Buick.
“Oh, Zette,” I said as she collapsed into my arms. Her black eye was covered with a pair of sunglasses, but it seemed a vain touch—given that her sobs were drawing more and more eyes to us. Rubbing her back and her arms, I quieted her slowly with a prayer, asking God to give her His peace that passeth understanding, to counsel her on the error of her ways, and asking He help her take this opportunity to confront Coleman directly instead of unpredictable, volatile strangers.
It looked, praise God, like I’d get to counsel her more deeply later.
Once my cousin Rita got us through an expedited registration process and placed Zette into an ER room, I explained again that we needed to keep her “underground.” Rita was understanding and said she could keep Suzette in the ER for a couple of hours at least; they would need that much time to do a CAT scan and a couple of other tests to assure she hadn’t sustained any internal bleeding or other damage.
With my girl in good hands, I waited until she was asleep comfortably in her bed and prayed anew as I walked to my car. Turning over the ignition of Suzette’s car, I toyed with calling Jesse, but decided to wait. Bringing my husband into this right now would only complicate matters further, and my Bible told me that as much as I trusted my husband to protect me when he was around, my ultimate hope for safeguarding lay in He to whom I could always appeal.
Stepping across the threshold into Therapy Café, I crossed my arms and scanned the bar as urgent steps propelled me forward. By now, the mingling afternoon crowd was at full blast. There were so many people around—most of them twenty- and thirty-something professional types—that trying to scan the place for someone fitting Suzette’s descriptions of Adrian or her attacker felt pointless. Instead, I took the sole free bar stool. When the bartender gestured for my order, I raised my voice to compensate for the crowd. “Where’s Earl?”
“Somebody say my name?” From a few stools down, a peanut-brown brother matching Suzette’s description sizewise leaned forward, his large, catlike eyes narrowing as they stared me down.
I slid off my stool and walked over to the brother, who was in fact wearing a leather sweat suit. “My name is Reverend Dionne Law,” I said, extending a hand that Earl may as well have crushed between boulders, his grip was so ridiculous. “I thought I should get your side of the story, before I go to the police.”
The truth of Suzette’s story radiated from Earl’s reaction. Taking a moment to register the concern on the face of the college-age girl seated next to him, who’d been happily flirting with him until my arrival, Earl flicked me an annoyed gaze. “I work here, all right.” It was a statement and a warning. “Let’s take this to the back office.”
