Page 36 of His Third Wife

“I would. I should. But I can’t,” Keet said, coming up close to me. “See, my heart is broken. My baby left me and I can’t seem to get over her.”

“I never was your baby. You’re your only baby.”

Keet looked down at my stomach. “Am I my only baby?”

“Don’t do that,” I said. “This has nothing to do with you.”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m thinking, if we do that math, we might be able to add old Keet’s name to the equation. Should we call Maury?”

“We broke up a long time before I got pregnant,” I said. “This is Jamison’s baby, so let go of whatever shit you’re trying to cook up.”

“Wrong. We never broke up. You disappeared. And even then, we weren’t thr

ough.” Keet’s eyes moved from my eyes to my lips and then peeled my shirt open. I felt him ingest me. Learn something I knew but didn’t want him to know. “Were we?” he whispered.

I’d been dating Keet for three months before I’d realized who he really was. There were always girls around him. Calling. Stopping by his place. He claimed they were just friends. But they weren’t just any girls. I knew some of them. Faces from night clubs. Bars. Double dates with basketball players. I started thinking he was a player. Was cheating on me probably. Just like all the other men. But Keet kept trying to reassure me. Telling me I was his only woman and every dime he had, even from his low-paying job, was going to keep me happy. And that money seemed to go far. Too far. He had a fifteenth-floor three-bedroom apartment in Brookhaven Square and a garage full of cars he switched in and out of weekly, though his primary car was a silver Maserati. It was unreal. And it was obvious something wasn’t adding up. But I wanted to believe my dream was coming true. I didn’t have to work. I had all the money I needed. He was talking about knocking me up. Then a little girl, she looked like seventeen years old, was Asian, Filipino or something, showed up at the apartment one night with no shoes on. Blood was running down the inside of one leg from underneath a royal blue miniskirt. She was crying hysterically. No purse. No keys. She was looking for someone she kept calling, “Daddy!” Saying she didn’t know where else to go. Someone had taken everything she had. Raped her. She needed “Daddy.” I was telling her I didn’t know what she was talking about when Keet came charging down the hallway. He grabbed the girl by her hair and dragged her toward the elevator. “Close the fucking door,” he’d yelled at me. “Don’t let anybody in my spot.” I didn’t have to ask Keet what I was seeing. I’d been out there in the streets long enough to know.

“What do you want from me?” I asked in the bathroom. We’d been in there more than ten minutes and I knew Jamison was wondering what was taking me so long at that point.

“There you go with that same question again. Let me ask you this: what do you think I want?”

“I’m not giving you any money.”

Keet laughed so loud I was sure anyone standing outside the bathroom could hear him.

“Money? You think I want money? From you? Nah, baby, you got Daddy all wrong.” His voice was slithering then, and I remembered everything I’d felt that day when I’d met Jamison at the strip club. For a long time I’d pretended that I didn’t know what was happening. How a cop could have so much money. So much control over so many people in the street. But you can only play dumb for so long. Soon, Keet had me in the middle of everything. I was meeting his girls. Taking them shopping. Making them feel good before he put them out on the street. It made me feel powerful. Like one of those mob wives on television. It was stupid, but I was falling for it. Our lovemaking became so intense. I convinced myself that we were our own mafia. All we had was each other and a whole bunch of clichés that went against whatever little piece of self I had left. But then Keet showed me what that really meant. The next time a girl showed up at our front door, this time asking for me, he stomped her into the ground and when she cried for someone to call the police, he laughed and dialed 911 himself. I realized then that I had to get out. It was only a matter of time before I’d be the girl on the floor. But I had nowhere to go. No money. Nothing. That was how I’d ended up at Magic City looking for a job. That was when I’d met Jamison.

“So, if you don’t want money, what is it?” I asked Keet. “Why are you here? What’s up with you lying to Jamison? Pretending you stutter?”

“You li-li-like that right?” Keet snickered. “That’s my acting skill. I took an improv class at Dad’s Garage. You’d be surprised how a simple stutter disarms people. Learned that in my class.”

“And I must’ve missed that you went to Howard Law,” I said when someone knocked on the door. We stood there quiet for a second, but then we heard the person sigh and then walk away.

“There’s a lot about me you missed. So much that it had me thinking, maybe I misrepresented myself. Maybe I didn’t show you who I am,” he said. “How does a man like Jamison—and not to take anything away from Mr. Mayor—take a woman away from a man like me? Like from right underneath me.”

“He didn’t steal me. I left.”

“And I just kept thinking about it, and thinking about it,” Keet went on as if I hadn’t said anything. “And I realized that if that brother got what I had, then I want what he has. Everything.”

“That’s crazy. What you want to be mayor?”

“Yes. And I don’t think that’s crazy at all. You heard Jessie Jackson and Obama and all those other motherfuckers. All I have to do is dream. Believe and I can achieve. Right?”

“You’re a pimp, Keet.”

“People change.” Keet smirked. “No, really. Look, it’s simple. I don’t want to hurt you. And I ain’t trying to be nobody’s baby daddy. I just need you to keep an eye on things for me.”

“An eye?”

“Yeah. Let old Keet know what’s going on in the mayor’s head. If you hear some things. Some information . . .”

“What kind of information?”

There was another knock at the door.

“Val, you in there?” Jamison called from outside the bathroom.

“Yes,” I said in a stare-off with Keet.

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