A Motive for Murder Read online

  Auntie Lil did not like to rise before 10 A.M. and usually consumed four cups of strong black coffee before she attempted communication with other human beings. Thus she was annoyed the following morning when her doorbell rang at eleven. She had not even finished her third cup of coffee and should have been busy slathering a bagel with cream cheese. A visitor would disrupt her routine. Even worse, she might have to share.

  “Who is it?” she shouted into the intercom. Auntie Lil did not trust telecommunications devices. She bellowed into any receiver, no matter how state-of-the-art.

  “Mattie Jones,” a modulated voice replied. “Fatima Jones is my niece.”

  Auntie Lil admired the economy of the answer. She was also curious as to why the aunt of the Metro’s most promising young ballerina would want to see her. She knew that Fatima’s mother had been missing on the streets for years and that the identity of her father had never been clear. But despite the fact that she had helped underwrite Fatima Jones’s dance scholarship, Auntie Lil had never met the woman responsible for Fatima’s upbringing. She buzzed her in eagerly.

  When she opened the door, a stout black woman with hair cut close to her rounded head stood before her. She was wearing a neatly pressed red suit that Auntie Lil’s practiced eye pegged as homesewn. It was a good job, too. The finishing work was beautiful and the tailored lines took pounds off the woman’s frame. Mattie Jones held a black pocketbook in front of her nervously, as if shielding herself from possible violence. Auntie Lil noted with approval that Mattie wore sensible black flats instead of the crippling high heels that sillier women preferred. She noted with even more approval that Mattie Jones also held a bakery bag in her hands.

  “Thank you for agreeing to see me,” the visitor said politely, holding out the white paper bag. “I brought us some fresh doughnuts so we could talk over coffee. That is, if you’d care to invite me in.” She had a clear, rich voice. Auntie Lil wondered if she was a singer.

  “Of course,” Auntie Lil said. “I would be delighted. I have followed Fatima’s career carefully over the past few years. You have done a beautiful job of raising the child.”

  “Fatima raised herself,” Mattie said, trundling her big frame into Auntie Lil’s apartment. She stopped in astonishment at the cluttered glory of what lay before her: rooms full of fabrics, furniture, mementos, photographs, and the cherished debris of eight decades of robust living. “My goodness,” she said with admiration. “What a colorful home you have.”

  Auntie Lil thought the comment remarkably tactful. She couldn’t have put it better herself.

  “My nephew Theodore thinks I’m messy,” Auntie Lil explained as she swept two contrasting bolts of cloth from the white sofa and dumped a pile of remnants into a chair. “But I know where everything is. I can put my hands on anything within seconds. Just ask.”

  “How about putting your hands on some coffee?” Mattie suggested with a musical laugh. When she smiled, she revealed a gap between her two front teeth that made her look jolly and benign. But Auntie Lil knew that anyone capable of successfully rescuing a parentless child in New York City could not possibly be benign.

  Auntie Lil fetched the pot of coffee and considered offering her guest one of her trademark Bloody Mary’s. But since it wasn’t even noon, a rare burst of discretion won out and she settled for coffee alone.

  “First of all, I would like to thank you for what you have done for Fatima,” Mattie said. She slipped her shoes off with a groan and wiggled her toes as she munched on a cinnamon-cake doughnut.

  Auntie Lil could not decide between white powdered sugar or coconut. She compromised by choosing both, holding one in each hand and taking alternate bites of each.

  “You’re quite welcome,” Auntie Lil replied, her mouth full. “I’m sure the friend who bequeathed me his fortune would be delighted to see how much of his money’s worth he has gotten out of Fatima.”

  “She’s a special child,” Mattie agreed. “But I didn’t just mean the scholarship money. I also want to thank you for standing up for Fatima at the board meeting and for making sure she got the role after all.”

  “Who told you I stood up for Fatima?” Auntie Lil asked.

  Mattie hesitated, her discomfort obvious.

  “O am not a big believer in board confidentiality,” Auntie Lil promised. “I won’t tell anyone and I don’t really care. I’m just curious.”

  “Calvin Swanson,” Mattie admitted. “He’s a maintenance man at the theater.”

  Yes, we shared a cab uptown one night He’s a nice man.” Auntie Lil did not add that Calvin had denied knowing Fatima Jones and her aunt. She understood why he had been cautious. But she did wonder if he had lied about anything else.

  “Calvin keeps an eye on Fatíma for me,” Mattie explained. “We go to the same church. Church of Good Shepherd up in Harlem. Our gospel choir is famous.”

  “Yes, I know the church,” Auntie Lil said. “You attract quite a lot of Scandinavian and German tourists each Sunday.”

  Mattie nodded. “More blondes than you’d find in Sweden, it seems like some weeks.” She laughed and the musical notes filled the living room.

  “What made you come to see me today?” Auntie Lil asked. “Fatima is doing well in rehearsal, isn’t she? I understand she takes over the role of Clara starting tomorrow.”

  “Yes, she knew the role already,” Mattie said. “Played it last year in Philadelphia for a special NAACP performance. It’s just a matter of adapting to Mr. Martinez’s style. She’s doing just fine. There’s been a lot of excitement about her, I know. People protesting and calling other people names.” She bobbed her head apologetically. “It’s not the way I like to do things, but people feel strongly about what they believe in and I think folks have a right to stand up for what they care about.”

  “I couldn’t agree more,” Auntie Lil said.

  “But I’m not here about Fatima. She is just as calm as a baby sleeping through a storm about all this. I’m here about another friend of mine.”

  “Oh?” Auntie Lil stopped with a coconut covered doughnut inches from her lips.

  “The Reverend Ben Hampton,” Mattie explained. “He’s been arrested by the police.”

  “You and the Reverend Hampton are friends?” Auntie Lil asked. “Is he the pastor of Good Shepherd?”

  Mattie shook her head. “No. He has his own church and it’s a little too too for me, if you know what I mean. But I know him from my work with schoolchildren in Harlem. I help tutor and his people work with the kids, too. He’s a good man, Miss Hubbert. I know he hollers a lot for the cameras and says some things that white people don’t want to hear. But he’s no fool and he’s not a man who believes in violence. He didn’t kill that boy’s father. They say they have proof, but I have the proof he didn’t right here.” She tapped a fist over her heart and scrutinized Auntie Lil. “He has no one to help him. That’s the funny thing about this all. If anyone else had been arrested unfairly, the Reverend would be out on the streets making sure justice was done. But he can’t be out on the streets because they have locked him up and they want an awful lot of money for his bail. An awful lot.”

  “What’s an awful lot?” Auntie Lil asked.

  “It’s a million dollars, but the bail bondsman needs just one hundred thousand to take it on. Ben’s church is trying, but they don’t have that kind of money. Their building is already mortgaged. And he needs a good lawyer, too. He keeps spouting about how he’s going to represent himself, but you know what they say.”

  “A man who represents himself has a fool for a client and an idiot for a lawyer?” Auntie Lil said.

  Mattie nodded. “He wouldn’t do the right things to protect himself,” she explained. “He’d be making a speech when he ought to be making a motion. He’s been arrested lots of times, mostly for disturbing the peace, when running his mouth didn’t harm him much. But this is murder.”

  “I understand,” Auntie Lil said. “And you want me to put up the money for this?�
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  Mattie nodded. “I know it’s a lot to ask. And I can’t give you much more than my word that you won’t lose any of it in the end.”

  Auntie Lil needed to think about it for only a moment. A woman who had raised a discarded child, kept her from drugs, nurtured a dream, and then made that dream possible was a woman who could be trusted. Still, it might look bad given her position on the board. And Theodore would throw a fit.

  “I wouldn’t expect you to do it if there wasn’t something in it for you,” Mattie added, as if she could sense Auntie Lil’s hesitation.

  “Indeed?” Auntie Lil asked.

  “Calvin told me you were looking into who murdered that boy’s father,” Mattie explained. “If you help bail out the Reverend and can find him a good lawyer, I promise you that he will talk to you about the murder. He knows things, he says.”

  “What things?” Auntie Lil asked.

  “Things he won’t tell the police,” Mattie said. He doesn’t like the police. He’s hardheaded that way. Doesn’t understand that they have their jobs to do.”

  “But he’ll talk to me?” Auntie Lil was skeptical.

  “He says he will.”

  That made the decision easy. She had plenty of money. But only one opportunity to talk to the Reverend Ben Hampton.

  It took nearly twenty-four hours to get Ben Hampton released from custody. Not even Auntie Lil’s high-priced lawyer, Hamilton Prescott, could make the wheels turn faster. At first Prescott had been reluctant to take on the high-profile case, but when Auntie Lil appealed to his sense of fair play—and promised to find another lawyer should the case come to trial—he agreed to oversee obtaining Hampton’s release on bail.

  Given his initial resistance, Auntie Lil was bemused to see her reticent lawyer beaming in front of television cameras the next day, his hand on Ben Hampton’s elbow as he steered him through the courtroom’s hallways to freedom. The phone call she had been expecting came two hours later.

  “Miss Hubbert?” Mattie Jones said in her flawless voice. “We can send someone to pick you up now if you’re ready to talk to Ben.”

  “I’m ready,” Auntie Lil told her. Theodore would be angry she had left him out of the loop, but it served him right. Once again he had disappeared for half a day—as had Herbert—and she was irritated at being excluded from their plans.

  She was wearing a bright red pants suit for the meeting with Hampton. The color had been chosen carefully. Red made her feel powerful and she would need considerable self-confidence to match wits with the Reverend Ben Hampton.

  It did not surprise her that the Reverend had a chauffeured limousine at his beck and call. Nor did it surprise her when the car drew up in front of a magnificent restored mansion in the section of Harlem known as Sugar Hill. At the turn of the century, the street had been home to New York City’s finest houses, stately homes that fell into disrepair decades later. The real-estate boom in the seventies had brought many back to life when affluent blacks repaired them to their former grandeur. Ben Hampton’s was one of the finest examples of Victorian architecture she had ever seen. She passed through an elaborate wrought-iron gate and up wide wooden stairs to a massive oak door inset with a huge fan-shaped wedge of stained glass. Perhaps his church actually owned the home, she thought to herself. This was almost too much for a man who claimed to be of the cloth.

  A neatly dressed teenage girl ushered Auntie Lil into a high-ceilinged parlor with red velvet drapes exactly the color of her suit. Ben Hampton sat in a leather armchair pulled up next to a small fire. To her surprise, Hamilton Prescott sat beside him. The men—so different in race, temperament, and dress—were sharing a smoke and glasses of brandy. The show of brotherhood was touching but not touching enough to stop Auntie Lil from pointedly glaring at the cigars. Both men obediently ground out their stogies and rose to their feet.

  “My thanks for your financial support,” Reverend Hampton said smoothly, with a formal bow. He extended a huge hand and grasped hers firmly. He was so physically immense that she wondered if he had been a prizefighter or football player in his youth. Up close, his shock of pure white hair looked even more startling. It rose straight from his scalp like a patch of albino lawn left too long in the sun.

  “I trust Mr. Prescott has been of service to you?” Auntie Lil said, casting an amused glance at her straitlaced lawyer. Prescott paused with the brandy glass halfway to his lips, as if he had just been caught by a teacher doing something naughty.

  “It’s a most interesting case,” Prescott said defensively. “Far more interesting than my usual cases. Except for you, Lillian, my clients can be downright boring.”

  “I can imagine.” She settled herself on a brocade sofa the color of autumn leaves and accepted Hampton’s offer of a drink. The man who brought her an extra spicy Bloody Mary at Hampton’s request was dressed casually in sports slacks and a neatly pressed golf shirt. His manner was polite without being the least bit deferential. Hampton’s casual thanks to the man told her that he was not a servant but, more likely, a member of the congregation helping to guard him.

  “I thought it might be best to stay,” Prescott explained. “What the Reverend has to tell you impacts on his defense. I’d like to hear it again. If you don’t mind, of course.”

  “No. I don’t mind at all,” Auntie Lil said, turning to her host. “Mattie Jones told me you had evidence you didn’t want to share with the police?”

  Ben Hampton laughed with a snorting glee that sounded like a buffalo sneezing. “It’s not that I didn’t try to explain it to them,” he said. “It’s that the police don’t believe me. You see, what I have to tell them sounds like excuses because they have already made up their minds about me. But I know what the truth is, and the truth is that I did not kill that boy’s father. But I might have seen who did.”

  “Can you explain?” Auntie Lil sipped her Bloody Mary. It was perfect. She sighed in contentment. Her drink was strong, her life interesting and her health remarkably good. What more could anyone ask?

  “I can, but first I want your word that you will agree to stand by me when I hold a press conference later today about the injustice of my arrest.” Hampton settled back in his arm chair and folded his elegant hands over his ample tummy, waiting for her reply.

  “I can’t possibly do that,” Auntie Lil said firmly. “I do not believe that this condition was part of our original deal.”

  “Miss Jones may have failed to mention it,” Hampton said smoothly, “since she is not as experienced as I am in these things. But your presence as a member of the Metro’s board would add credibility and help erase part of the stain of shame the board created when it refused to let that most talented young lady, Fatima Jones, dance.” He gazed confidently at Auntie Lil.

  But Auntie Lil was not a pushover and she particularly disliked last-minute surprises. Especially when she had just spent $125,000 of her own money on bail and a legal retainer in keeping up her end of the bargain. “Mr. Hampton,” she said quietly, “you must forgive me. I am an old lady and certainly I am not as experienced as you at using the media to my advantage. But I do hope you will acknowledge a few facts before you insist on this last-minute condition.”

  Hamilton Prescott squirmed uneasily in his leather chair. Unlike Ben Hampton, he knew Auntie Lil.

  “Number one,” she said, “I put a great deal of my own money on the line on the proviso that you would talk to me. But I did not agree to put up either my name or my face. Number two, as a board member of the Metropolitan Ballet, I can neither endorse your innocence nor proclaim your guilt at this time. Especially since I have been asked by the board to look into the murder in an official capacity. Number three, I underwrite over five hundred thousand dollars’ worth of minority scholarships in this city each year and I will not be made to feel guilty about my contributions to racial equality. I am perfectly satisfied with my soul. It is yours I have come to evaluate.”

  The Reverend’s eyes grew wider during this speech, but hi
s expression did not change. When she was done, he threw his head back and roared with laughter. He wiped his eyes and took a sip of brandy, shaking his head. “I can see I will put nothing over on you,” he admitted. “I may as well not try.”

  “You would be wise to make me your ally,” Auntie Lil agreed, “if I choose to make you mine. I can help you gain much badly needed legitimacy if what you are interested in is a long-term career in city government.”

  The Reverend cocked his head and scrutinized her. “You’re offering me a spot on the Metropolitan’s board?” he guessed.

  Auntie Lil shook her head. “That is not within my power. But certainly, if I so choose, I can propose your candidacy in the future. This would underscore our intention to address the concerns of minority artists within the company. That is, if I leave today convinced that you are a man of your word and a man of honor.”

  The Reverend tapped the floor with a foot as he considered how best to proceed. “Okay. I’ll keep my end of the original bargain.”

  “How delightful,” Auntie Lil murmured, sipping her drink.

  “The police believe I murdered Bobby Morgan for several reasons,” Hampton explained. “As near as I can tell from the not-so-subtle hints of the detectives who questioned me, the rear doors to backstage are left unlocked during performances because of fire regulations. Both doors lead into an alley not twenty feet away from where I was standing with my protesters. The protest dispersed about an hour after the performance started, once the media had left.”

  Of course, Auntie Lil thought. Why bother protesting if it didn’t translate into a couple inches on the front page?

  Hampton continued. “Most of my people left right away. They have families, jobs that start early in the morning, children who need their homework supervised, mouths to feed, long subway rides. You understand?”

  “Certainly,” she said. “The working class. I was a member of it myself for sixty years, my good man. I inherited this money only last year.”