Split Black /#Wattys 2021

Chapter Five

CHAPTER FIVE

"Ready?" Elizabeth Ascot, known to family and friends as Lizzie, leaned over John with a gorgeous, Glamour-worthy smile.

"Yeah," he said.

John had met her when he'd had to interview her, along with another model/makeup artist and a Norfolk photographer during the Barber Rapist case over a year ago. He'd been smitten at first sight—who wouldn't be? She stood nearly as tall as he did, and with that smile and those amber-hazel eyes, framed by short, forest-brown curls, certainly she'd had much better offers. But she seemed to really care for him.

When she got behind his wheelchair and pushed him out into the hallway, nurses and patients, both male and female, followed Lizzie down the hall with their eyes. She was still planning on taking him into her apartment once he got released from rehab, despite the vocal opposition of John's mother.

John had tried to keep it casual before this, sure that as soon as he thought about getting serious, she'd end up jetting back to New York for work. Some of their dates—and nights—had made that a painful thought.

She pushed him to the main entrance of Sheltering Arms Rehab Hospital, where she'd left her Honda illegally parked. After helping him into the passenger seat, she popped the trunk and wrestled the hospital wheelchair into it.

"Lizzie, you're not supposed to take that."

She glanced over and raised an eyebrow. "We'll be right back. Unless you've got other ideas."

"Think you'd have to do most of the work, at this point." John couldn't help but grin.

Lizzie fired up the ignition. "Fine with me," she said with a come-hither smile. "Now, where are we going, again?"

It was Sunday, the one day John didn't spend hours trying to get back on his feet. "Solomon James's house. He was a squadmate of mine, just retired. I want to follow up with him on a lead in the Pride shooting." He thought for a minute. "And maybe mine."

Solly's eighty-six-year-old mother used a wheelchair, and John saw when they pulled up outside that he already had a ramp. Solly came to the door as Liz was getting John settled into the chair.

"Robin!" he said, holding his front door open. "They let you out already? You don't look yellow to me."

News apparently traveled. John had suffered a setback a few weeks back, when an antibiotic had given him hepatitis and he'd gotten jaundiced. For a week or so he'd looked like he had a really deep, yellowish suntan.

"Just on an afternoon pass," said John, as Lizzie wheeled him up the ramp and through the front door. "Thank God that hepatitis thing is over. I won't be drinking anything alcoholic for a while, though. This is my girlfriend, Lizzie Ascot, giving me a break from that place. I was going stir crazy."

Lizzie wheeled him into a living room crammed with mismatched furniture. She pushed John next to an overstuffed easy chair and shook hands with Solly while Solly goggled at her.

"I'd keep this one if I were you, Johnny. Let me go put some coffee on. My wife took my mother out shopping."

He brought out cream and sugar and, a few minutes later, handed them each a steaming mug. "It's nothing gourmet, but it will do," he said, blowing steam from his own mug. "So, your first trip out of the hospital, and you call me? How come?"

"I just wanted to hear what happened with that lead I was working on, the one Arlene gave you before you left. Cabbage Clay."

Solly lowered himself to an afghan-covered couch, sipping coffee. Lizzie sat in the overstuffed chair next to John. "Cabbage Clay. Hampton PD was great," Solly said. "Gave me a pile of names and places, possible contacts to check out. I tried to get Mike Little to go with me, but they wouldn't give him the assignment. So, it was just me and any Hampton officer I could beg, borrow, or steal. I drove my ass off all over the East End, Newport News, and the beach. Then the captain goes, 'Whatever you don't get by your retirement date, that's it.' And I'm like, 'What?' You can't give me a couple more days?' And this is coming from upstairs."

"What the hell?" said John.

"I don't know." Solly shrugged. "So, I hit my retirement date, and here I am. And, you know, Marjorie's been looking forward to me being done, chomping at the bit to go visit her sister in the Outer Banks." He put his coffee down on a cluttered coffee table, got up, and crossed the room to a small secretary in the corner. He opened a drawer and fished through the contents. "Didn't mean I couldn't stop off at the park at Buckroe and follow up with some of this on my own time, though."

He walked back over and handed John a folded slip of yellow paper. John unfolded it to find an ad from the yellow pages. It was for an escort service, Elegance.

"A young lady I interviewed gave me that, said this is Cabbage Clay these days," said Solly. "A couple of days after that, the Bridge-Tunnel Police fished her out of the Chesapeake Bay halfway across. Several drivers witnessed her stop in the middle of the Bridge-Tunnel and jump. It's been ruled a suicide."

                                                                                       ***

On the ground floor of Richmond Police Academy, in the atrium, a line of somber portraits stood permanent watch. Twenty-three oil paintings of Richmond PD officers killed in the line of duty since the inception of the department.

John didn't tell Lizzie why he wanted her to stop there, or why he didn't want her to come in with him. He simply told her he had business there that would only take a few minutes, and asked her to hold the door for him.

He wheeled himself to the wall of portraits. Before this summer, there had been only one detective on the wall. Now there were two.

An artist had been commissioned, but there hadn't quite been time yet to complete a painted portrait of Detective Sergeant William H. Pride. Pride's official photo hung there instead. He stood beside the flag in his dress blues, his photo at the end of a line of slain police officers dating back to the 1920's.

John could not really remember what it felt like to have almost joined him there. Most of that night was still a blank, and the psychologist the department had sent to visit him said it probably always would be. He only knew what it felt like now, to sit here staring at the flat, shiny likeness of the first person who had really believed in him in the department, and quite possibly the last one, too.

He had seen enough dead bodies already to start to question his Southern Baptist upbringing. Nothing he had seen had hinted at an afterlife.

He only knew that the man in the portrait had deserved much, much better.

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