Knife Edge (A Dead Cold Mystery Book 27) by Blake Banner (most inspirational books of all time .TXT) 📗

KNIFE EDGE

Copyright © 2021 by Blake Banner

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One

“I wish,” she said, “it was as easy as just being color-blind. But the problem isn’t really that the color of our skin is different. It isn’t even a question of race. It’s much deeper than that. And however hard the Mitchells tried, at the end of the day, they were the mighty white intellectuals, and Leroy was a black orphan they were trying to rescue. They tried not to see it that way, but that was the way Leroy saw it.”

She paused and gazed down at her Styrofoam cup on the Formica interrogation-room table. It was a sad gaze in a beautiful face. She turned the cup around several times, like she was trying to find some redeeming feature about it, but knew she wouldn’t. In the end it was just a white Styrofoam cup full of black coffee.

“I guess that sounds selfish and ungrateful to you, but to a lot of black people, charity and help is like the final insult.” She raised large, black eyes to look at me. “White people brought us to this condition, now they want to tell us, ‘You will never make it alone, you need white men to achieve anything.’” She paused again and returned her gaze to the cup. “I didn’t see it that way. I don’t. I was grateful, especially to Emma Mitchell. She took Leroy into her family, into her home, like he was her own child. At least, she tried real hard to make it seem that way. Though he never really believed it. Trust was hard for him.”

“What made it hard for him to trust, Sonia?”

She thought about it. “I should start from the beginning,”

“I’d be grateful. I am not familiar with this case.”

She sighed and sagged back in her chair. She thought for a moment and said, “My sister, Cherise, she got involved with this man. I say man for want of a better word. Earl Brown, he was no good,” she darted me a glance, “like so many men, I am afraid to say. He always had a bottle in his hand, beer, whiskey, whatever. And in the other hand he always had a joint. What he never had was a steady job, and if ever he got one, he made damn sure it didn’t last. He was a bad man, but we didn’t realize how bad he was until it was too late.”

“What happened?”

“She had two children by him, Leroy and Shevron. Like I said, he was never at work. He was at home all the time, watching TV, drinking and smoking weed. So it was she had to go out to work to feed the family and keep a roof over their heads.” She paused to stare at the wall. “Eight years they went on like that. I told her, more times than I can remember, ‘You have got to get rid of that man, Cherise! You have got to be free of that man!’ But she never listened. Women can be just as stupid as men sometimes. She made excuses for him, justified him, and supported that evil parasite right to the end.”

She paused again and took a deep breath. “One day, I remember it like it was just yesterday: 14th May, 2010, she come home early from work because she didn’t feel well. She was sick. She opened the door, the front door of the house, it opened right onto the living room from the street, and she sees Leroy sitting in the armchair watching his daddy rape his little sister Shevron. She’s only six years old, and that bastard was there raping her. Well, it turned out later, he’d been doing that for years, to both of the kids.”

“So what did your sister do?”

“What did she do? What would you do? What would I do? What would anybody do? She dropped her bag and ran for the kitchen. She grabbed the kitchen knife and ran at him, screaming like a wild thing. They had an almighty fight.”

She shook her head. Her bottom lip curled in and tears balanced on her eyelids, then spilled onto her cheek.

“It’s ten years ago, maybe more, but it feels like it was just this morning. There was a big fight. A real big fight. Little Shevron tried to protect her mother, and that bastard killed her for it, hit her so hard he broke her neck. Then, it seems, Cherise stabbed Earl in the back with the kitchen knife. Should have killed him, but somehow he took it from her and stabbed her several times in the