“Yeah, that’s trickier. So, with VOIP you—”
“I’m going to shove this thing up your ass if you don’t use words that I can understand.”
“I thought I was.” He was being pouty again. “FaceTime, Skype, that’s delayed. There’s a program I loaded remotely through an app on her phone. It records any video calls that come in, but you have to wait for the call to be over before you can watch it.”
“How do I access it?”
He gently took the phone from her. He woke up the screen. He pointed to an app showing an old-timey gramophone. “Press this and it gives you a list. Press the video call you want to see, and it loads. But only after the call is finished.”
“What if I want to see a call that happened this morning?”
“Can’t help you. It wouldn’t be stored in her phone. All I can access is what’s already stored and what happens next, just like the laptop.” He offered, “I can show you some features on the tablet if you need me to.”
Christ, he was talking to her like she was his grandmother. “It works like a regular iPad?”
“Well, sure.”
“I’m good.” Angie started to get out of the van.
“I didn’t tell anybody,” Sam said. “About the other stuff I did for you.”
Angie stared at him. “So when Dale said he knew about the medical decryption software you gave me, he was just taking a wild-ass guess?”
Sam’s soul patch twitched.
Angie looked around the van. Dangling wires. Boxes of electronics. Computer monitors. Tablets. Laptops.
Sam asked, “Are you looking for something?”
“I’m just wondering what the inside of this van would look like if I shot you in the face.”
Sam stuttered out an uncomfortable laugh.
Angie took her gun out of her purse. She rested it on top of the iPad, her hand around the grip. Her finger pressed against the side of the trigger guard, the way she had been taught. Or maybe not. She looked down. Her finger was on the trigger.
“Lady, please.” Sam had stopped laughing. His hands were in the air. “I’m sorry, all right? Please don’t kill me. Please.”
“Think about how you feel right now the next time you’re about to put my business on the street.”
“I will. I promise.”
Angie shoved the gun back in her purse. She had gotten carried away. “Give me whatever you’re holding.”
He rummaged around in one of the bins and pulled out a bag of weed. “This is all I’ve got.”
Angie took the bag. She gathered up the electronics and climbed out of the van. Sam didn’t bother with the door. He streaked out of the parking lot before she could change her mind.
She got into her car. She carefully placed the iPad and the green phone on the seat beside her. She jammed her key into the ignition. The engine rumbled to life. The gears stripped.
Sam was Dale’s guy. She had almost shot the kid. Maybe. Who knew what the hell she had been thinking? Angie pulled the Glock out of her purse. She dropped the clip. She ejected the bullet from the chamber. It popped out like a jumping bean and disappeared under her seat. She did a visual to make sure the gun was unloaded. This would at least buy her some space before she pulled her gun the next time.
For right now, she had to get out of here.
Angie fought with the clutch and the shifter. The engine slipped into gear. She pulled out of the parking lot. She couldn’t decide which way to go. The green phone wouldn’t activate until Jo replied to a text. Angie had to assume Reuben was the only person who ever texted her. According to Laslo, he was in surgery all day. There was no telling when he would come out of anesthesia, but Angie knew the first thing he would do is check in with Jo. Or make her check in with him.
That left Sam’s iPad with the antennae jutting up from the back. Angie guessed that whatever shadow program Laslo had planted on Jo’s computer would yield very little to go on. Reuben wouldn’t let Jo leave for coffee without demanding proof of her actions. There was no way he wasn’t monitoring Jo’s e-mails and internet searches, too.
Which left this: Jo had a plan. She was up to something that involved Marcus Rippy. Angie had no doubt about that. The girl who had told Hemingway to fuck off at the Starbucks was a girl who was keeping secrets.
Josephine, not Jo.
That was the name she had given the barista.
Angie recognized the sign of a woman trying to reinvent herself. A million years ago when Angie was dropped off at the children’s home, she punched the first person who called her Angela instead of Angie.
Angela was what her pimp called her. Angie was what she called herself.
Reuben called his wife Jo. When Jo was alone, when she managed to pry open a tiny sliver of freedom, she called herself Josephine.
She was planning to get away, probably soon. Reuben would be back on Sunday. That gave Angie less than five days to figure out what her daughter was planning. She looked at her watch. Noon.
There was one source that she hadn’t yet tapped: LaDonna Rippy.
If you wanted to know shit about a woman, all you had to do was ask the woman who was pretending to be her friend.
TUESDAY—12:13 PM
Angie punched her brakes as she did the stop-and-start thing up Piedmont Road. Thanks to overdevelopment and geography, there wasn’t a time during the day anymore when the narrow street was not clogged. She pushed the gear into first. The shift was smooth now, thanks to a detour to a gas station.
She checked the green phone to see if Jo had responded to a text yet. No luck. There was always the iPad with the rabbit ears, but Angie assumed Reuben policed the laptop the same way he policed Jo’s life. She wouldn’t be stupid enough to leave anything incriminating on there.
Besides, Angie had learned her lesson about looking at other people’s personal files. Sara had thousands of photographs stored on her hard drive, all meticulously organized by date and location. Will and Sara at the beach. Will and Sara camping. Will and Sara climbing Stone Mountain. It was nauseating how happy Sara always looked—not just in the pictures with Will, but also in much older photos with her dead husband.
Angie wondered if Will had ever seen a picture of Jeffrey Tolliver. His balls would’ve disappeared inside of his body. Tolliver had been fucking gorgeous. Tall with dark wavy hair and a body your tongue could never get tired of. He’d played college ball at Auburn. He had been the chief of police. Just looking at him, you could tell he knew his way around a woman.
Angie had to admit, Sara Linton had good taste in cops.
Too bad she didn’t know when to keep her greedy hands off of them.
Angie ran a red light, crossing onto Tuxedo Road amid a symphony of horns. She let the car coast. LaDonna and Marcus Rippy’s mansion was at the end of a gently sloping hill. Where most of the houses had bushes or trees to block the view from the street, LaDonna had made sure the house stood out. A hideously large gold-plated R was on the closed gates. The logo was LaDonna’s design. She put it on everything, even the hand towels.
Angie pulled up to the gates. She pressed the intercom, gave her name, and waited for the long buzz. She had been to the house a handful of times before to get LaDonna to sign papers from Kip’s office. Marcus had his wife on every piece of his business, which was smart or stupid, depending on whether you were LaDonna or Marcus.
The engine rumbled as she snaked up the driveway. There was a dog barking somewhere. Probably the family husky that shit all over everything because no one bothered to take him out. Cars filled the motor court at the top of the driveway. Two Jags, a Bentley, a neon-yellow Maserati.
“Shit,” Angie mumbled. LaDonna was holding court.
Angie had already been announced at the gate, so there was no backing out now. She walked under the portico, past the monitoring room where a bored ex-cop took a catnap instead of watching live feed from the cameras around the estate. She knocked on the kitchen door. She waited.
The hous
e was shaped like a giant U around an Olympic-sized pool. Everything the family needed was on the grounds of the estate, which sounded fun until you realized that you could spend 24/7 on your own property and never see another person. Except for the help. There were dozens of them, all dressed in gray maid’s uniforms with white aprons, even though LaDonna had probably despised her uniform back when she was cleaning hotel rooms. Shit always rolls downhill.
Angie couldn’t tell if the servants didn’t speak English or if they were too afraid to talk. Like all the other times she had visited LaDonna before, the woman who opened the door didn’t say a word. She just tilted her head, indicating that Angie should follow her down a long hallway.
The decor gave a nod to LaDonna’s Greek heritage—statues and fountains and lots and lots of Greek keys up and down the walls. Just about everything was plated in gold. The faucets in the sinks were giant swans with wings for hot and cold. The chandeliers down the hallway were gold. Angie looked up at the fixtures. The arms were Rippy’s logo, curled R’s dripping with crystals that the sun hit like a laser. She had to look away to keep her retinas from burning. By the time the maid showed Angie into the nail salon, she was seeing spots.
“That you, girl?” LaDonna waved Angie over. Her fingernails were being painted bright red by a slim Asian woman. Four wives were soaking their feet in bath salts, four more Asian women doing their nails. Usher played on the radio. The TV was muted, tuned to ESPN.
LaDonna offered, “Grab a soak. My girl does a great pedicure.”
“No thanks.” Angie would rip out her nails before she let a stranger touch her feet. She didn’t understand the lives these women were living. LaDonna wasn’t book smart, but she was smart enough to know that she could be doing more than getting her nails buffed at one in the afternoon. Chantal Gordon had been a professional tennis player before she hung up her racket to have babies. Angelique Jones had been a doctor. Santee Chadwick had been her husband’s private banker, a vice president with Wells Fargo. Tisha Dupree was an idiot. This was the best she would ever do.
LaDonna said, “You got some papers for me to sign?”
“I need to ask you some questions.”
“This about that bitch in Vegas? That shit’s been handled.”
Angie waited for the laughter to die down. “No, it’s something else.”
“Sit down, girl. You look beat.”
Angie sat down. She let her purse drop to the floor. She felt beat. She didn’t know why. Basically, all she’d done all day was sit in one place or another. She asked, “Why isn’t Fig’s wife here?”
Chantal snorted. “Girl got her nose too high in the air to slum with us bitches.”
Tisha said, “She’s gonna trip if she doesn’t look down at some point.”
There was the inevitable awkward pause.
Angelique asked, “Is Jo in trouble?”
“I don’t know.” Angie studied LaDonna. The woman was waiting for something. If she’d been a cat, her tail would’ve been twitching. “Jo seems to keep to herself. Kip is worried that something is wrong. He wants her to be happy.”
“I’ve never had more than two words with her,” Santee said. “She’s too stuck-up for me.”
Angelique said, “It’s hard to interpret shyness in other people. They tend to come across as aloof.”
“She is aloof,” Chantal countered. “I asked her for coffee. I asked her to go shopping. Each time she says, ‘Let me check with Fig and I’ll get back to you.’” She shook her head. “That was six months ago. I’m still waiting.”
Tisha said, “I’ll go shopping with you.”
Chantal studied the job being done on her fingernails.
“She’s too thin.” Angelique was a doctor. She noticed these things. “I assumed she was stressed-out because of the move, putting Anthony into a new school. It’s a lot of responsibility moving a household that size.”
“Especially when your man won’t lift a finger,” Chantal said. “When Jameel and I moved here, that man packed one suitcase, and all he put in it was his shit. I asked him what I was supposed to do with his kid’s clothes and toys and the kitchen and the bathrooms and he just said, ‘I’m set, baby. You handle it.’”
There were noises of sympathy around the room. Angie didn’t see Chantal loading boxes into a rented U-Haul. She had probably paid Jameel back by hiring the most expensive movers she could find.
Santee said, “Jo married Fig young.”
“Who didn’t?” Chantal countered. “I was nineteen. La D was eighteen. Seems to me she married late.”
Angie looked at LaDonna. She was still watching, but she still wasn’t talking.
Santee said, “Jo has to be happy that Fig’s doing well. Marcus has really coached him up.”
Chantal said, “Jo doesn’t care much about basketball.”
There were not-so-fake gasps around the room.
“What does she care about?” Angie asked.
Tisha said, “She loves Anthony. Her life revolves around him.”
“And her mother,” Angelique said. “Unfortunately she’s in the early stages of congestive heart failure.”
“Maybe that’s why she keeps to herself,” Tisha said. “I lost my mother a few years ago. You don’t get over something like that. It just stays with you.”
Angelique told Angie, “Jo and Fig will be at the party Sunday night. La D and Marcus are hosting a blowout before the season starts. I can talk to her then if you want.”
“I’d appreciate that.” Angie looked at LaDonna again. Nothing good ever came out of the woman’s silence. Angie told her, “I heard you threw a nice party for Jo when she moved here.”
LaDonna blew on her freshly painted nails. She had a glint in her eye.
“You knew Jo before?” Angie tried to tread carefully. “Back in high school?”
LaDonna waved away the manicurist. “We didn’t go to the same school. She lived in the next town.”
Tisha said, “I didn’t know that.”
“How about church?”
“Yeah, I think she went to my church.”
Tisha opened her mouth, then closed it.
Angie waited. LaDonna never made anything easy. What she didn’t understand was that Angie didn’t care about her future at 110 Sports Management. All she cared about was Jo. She said, “Are we going to talk around the fact that Marcus used to date Jo Figaroa, or are you going to get real with me and tell me what’s going on?”
LaDonna’s lips were still pursed from blowing her nails. “I wouldn’t call holding hands and talking about Bible class dating.”
“What would you call it?”
“None of your God damn business.”
Santee said, “You want us to boot, girl?”
“Nah, we’re gonna take a walk to the pool.” LaDonna stood up. She shoved her feet into a pair of fuchsia stilettos. “Ostrich skin,” she told Angie. “My house heels. Custom made in Milan.”
“Take some sunblock,” Tisha said. “The sun’ll burn you up.”
LaDonna pinned the girl with her steely gaze. She told Angie, “This way.”
Angie wasn’t the type to follow. She walked shoulder to shoulder with LaDonna down the corridor. She looked down at the woman’s Italian shoes. Gold R’s were embroidered on the tips. Some threads had started to pull away. There was a tiny stain on the toe. The sight of the defects gave Angie the only sense of pleasure she’d had all day. LaDonna had always reminded her of what pimps called the bottom girl or the Mama in charge—an older whore who kept the girls in line through force or manipulation. She would comfort you or cut you, depending on what it took to keep you earning on the street.
LaDonna slipped on a pair of sunglasses. She pushed open the door. Outside was even hotter and brighter than Angie remembered. She took a breath of humid air. The smell from the nail polish was still in her nose.
LaDonna said, “Bitch, what’re you up to?”
Angie smiled, but only to piss her off. “I to
ld you. Kip is worried about Jo.”
“She ain’t my man’s type, if that’s what you’re getting at.” LaDonna shook her head to make her point. “Marcus likes a woman with some fight in her. Jo wouldn’t say boo to a ghost.”
“She’s under Fig’s thumb.”
“She’s under his fist.” LaDonna snorted at Angie’s surprise. “You think I don’t know what that looks like?” She laughed. “Marcus wouldn’t raise a hand to me, but my daddy, he’d get his belt and whoop the skin off my ass.” She pointed to Angie. “Jo’s got the same look my mama did every time she got beat down. Hell, not even when she was beat. He’d just look at her and she’d—” LaDonna hunched down and threw up her hands, but she didn’t have it in her to look afraid.
Angie asked, “Did you talk to Jo about this?”
“What would I say? ‘I know your man is hitting you. Why the fuck don’t you leave and take half his money?’ Hell, she knows that already. She’s known it for near ’bout ten damn years. And what has she done about it?” She walked over to a covered barbecue area. She took a bottle of water from the refrigerator. “It ain’t like it used to be. One picture, one video from an elevator, she’d get the world on her side.” LaDonna laughed. “Of course, you see how that plays, right? She’ll be all over TV and shit and people will feel sorry for her and then a week later, they’ll all be blaming her, saying, ‘Look here in the video where she ain’t yelling,’ and ‘Look here where she punches him in the chest,’ and ‘Why’d she make him mad like that?’ and ‘All she wants is his money.’”
Angie shook her head. “I can’t tell if you’re saying she should get out or if she’s better off staying.”
“I’m saying the girl ain’t got no backbone.”
“Backbones come at a price,” Angie said. “Fig would lose his contract if Jo let the world know what he was doing. There wouldn’t be any more money coming in.”
“Fuck the money.” She tossed Angie a bottle of water. “If Marcus tried that shit on me, ain’t enough gold in Fort Knox would keep me here. I still know how to clean a hotel room. Me and my kids would be living out of a box before I let them see me beat down like a dog.”