“No.”
“Could you maybe like, you know, hook me up?”
“Hook you up with who?”
“Blasé. You all tight with him and everything.” She waited a moment before saying, “IQ.”
An article had appeared in The Scene magazine titled:
IQ
ISAIAH QUINTABE IS UNLICENSED AND UNDAGROUND.
The article recounted a number of neighborhood cases but the one that made the tabloids was the simplest to solve. It involved the R&B singer Blasé. During a party someone had stolen his camera, which contained a video of him bent over an ironing board getting pounded from behind by his live-in keyboard player. If the tape got out there’d be more than a scandal. Blasé promoted himself as a heterosexual sex symbol. The cover art on his last album, Can I Witness to Your Thickness, showed Blasé in a thong and priest’s collar leading a choir composed of three women in crazy blond wigs and shorty choir robes, their backsides bulging like babies were in there. Blasé received a note that said: My demands will soon follow. Obey them or your transgressions will be revealed and your career will be over.
“The language,” Isaiah said. “Your transgressions will be revealed. It’s biblical. Were any of your guests religious?”
“Heavens no,” Blasé said. He took a deep breath. “But my mother is.”
Blasé’s mother was a fundamentalist Baptist from a small town in Georgia. When Isaiah confronted her, she told him she was going to use Blasé’s camera to take video of the rose garden and got the surprise of her life. After resting and drinking tea made from Valerian root she decided to blackmail her son into abandoning his life of sin and iniquity.
“I am who I am, Mother,” Blasé said. “But if I can’t accept myself, there’s no reason you should.”
Blasé was grateful to Isaiah for bringing him to that moment but Isaiah didn’t know what he’d done besides read a note. Blasé came out on The Shonda Simmons Show. His record sales suffered but the people who bought them also bought the sex tape available online for $39.95, half the profits going to his mother’s church.
“I need Blasé to help me with my career,” Deronda said. “He might be gay but he’s a celebrity and all I need is a leg up. I mean like, once I’m circulatin’ in that uppa level and the shot callers can check out my style up close and personal? I’m off to the big time.”
Isaiah could feel Deronda looking at him, waiting for him to say it’s only a matter of time or don’t give up or some other such nonsense, but he kept his eyes glued to the MacBook. Deronda sulked, this time not pretending. “I shoulda been gone from here a long time ago, much star quality as I got,” she said. “I’m an up-and-comer, you know what I’m sayin’? I was born to be a celebrity. I should have the spotlight all over me.”
“Spotlight all over you—for what?” Isaiah said.
“What do you mean for what? That Kardashian girl’s booty could fit inside my booty and you talking about for what. You know she made thirty million last year?”
Isaiah knew other girls who felt that way. Somehow believing a big booty was like owning real estate or having a college degree, something you could put on a job application.
Alejandro came bobbing and pecking his way out of the hall making little buck-buck sounds and giving Deronda the beady red eye. Alarmed, Deronda lifted her feet off the floor. “You let that thing just walk around in here?” she said.
“You leave him alone he’ll leave you alone,” Isaiah said.
Isaiah got Alejandro and a recipe for arroz con pollo as payment from Mrs. Marquez. Isaiah didn’t like cleaning up the chicken shit but the floor didn’t hold a stain and he felt bad about leaving the bird in the garage all day. The other morning he forgot to close the bedroom door and Alejandro roosted on the closet bar and crapped all over his clothes.
“Come on, Isaiah, help me out,” Deronda said. “All I need is a leg up.”
“A leg up is not what I do.”
“You wrong, Isaiah.”
“I’m wrong every day,” Isaiah said. He closed his laptop, grabbed the car keys and collapsible baton, put on the Harvard cap, and stood up.
“You taking me somewhere?” Deronda said.
“Uh-huh. I’m taking you home.”
Boyd parked his truck in the same place as yesterday. He was really nervous but felt ready. Everything he needed was in the lizard-green bowling bag on the seat beside him. Duct tape, rubber gloves, and a boning knife sharp enough to cut see-through slices off a mushy tomato. Also in the bag, a big blue sponge and a water bottle filled with his homemade chloroform.