Read Online If I Should Die by Grace F. Edwards - Free Book Online Page A

his lashes against my palm?
    “Whatever I’m doing,” I said, “I’ll clue you when the game’s over, okay?”
    Friends, close friends especially, seem to have a knack for stepping on my last damn nerve.
    Deborah saw this and made a big show of looking at her watch.
    “For heaven’s sakes, where does the hour go? Have to get back, girl. I’ll call as soon as I’ve dug up something. Remember what I said … be careful.”
    I watched her walk away and I sat a few minutes longer trying to collect my thoughts.
     … Shake my booty. What did she expect? I came by it naturally enough. Not too many people can brag that their mother had been a dancer with Katherine Dunham’scompany. And Mom only quit when she married Dad.
    I opened my book again but the print on the page kept sliding away. I glanced at the cracked sidewalk and at the pigeons picking among the small patches of new grass poking through. No one strolled by and I wondered where all the people were, even though most honest folks were downtown, working at jobs they probably hated.
    I felt a slight twinge of depression. “Depression,” Mama once said, “is a condition that makes rich white women spend their days going from one store to another, accumulating things they’ll never use.”
    Well, I wasn’t rich or white but my AmEx card couldn’t tell the difference.
    Why not go shopping? a part of me said. You’ve got the rest of the afternoon free. Lord & Taylor is just an A train away. And while you’re strolling the neighborhood, there’s Saks.
    Another part of me, the practical and sensible part which I rarely acknowledged, brought me back to earth and my current status. I was a graduate student with no job, living at home with a musician father. His income was good but it wasn’t my income. Without my own funds to back up this plastic, having it in my pocket meant nothing. The practical side won out and I closed my book, which I wasn’t reading anyway, and headed for home.
    On the way, my thoughts drifted back to Gary Mark. Development directors are only as effective as their connection to money sources. Did he himself have money? How did he come to connect with the Chorus? Had he been very friendly with Erskin? Friendly with the director of the Chorus? And if he was as well off as he appeared to be, why hadn’t he had his damaged septum repaired? Most of the movie stars, models, and other rich cokeheads did.

    That evening, Tad was waiting in the Pepper Pot, a small, pleasantly lit Caribbean restaurant on Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard where the patrons could talk above a whisper without competing with those seated nearby.
    Our table near the window commanded a wide view of the avenue, and thanks to the break in the weather, street traffic was brisk. Teenagers, plugged into Walkmans, bobbed by to a private hip-hop beat. Vendors and hawkers were out, flashing by with mobile inventories of watches, socks, neckties, and scarves fluttering from their outstretched arms. “All items guaranteed,” they called. “Check it out. Money back if not satisfied.”
    I made my way to the table and Tad rose to pull my chair out. He was drinking Jamaican beer and ordered one for me.
    “Anything new?” he asked.
    If soft lighting did wonders for a woman, it did twice as much for this man who didn’t even need it. His eyes seemed deeper than ever and I wanted to touch the corners of his mouth to make certain the smile was real. My knees started feeling a little funny so I sat down quickly.
    “Nothing’s new,” I said. “Spoke to a librarian friend earlier today. She might have something for me in a few days. I’m trying to get a handle on the fund-raiser. He seemed like real money, but there was something else about him. Something hidden. And frightened.”
    “You saw him for two minutes and you figured all that out already?”
    I looked at him sharply. It was not his question so much as the tone that surprised and suddenly annoyed me. I was the one who