Homemade Sin by Mary Kay Andrews

Author:Mary Kay Andrews
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

19

THE CAR PHONE RANG as I was leaving the Varsity.

“Callahan? Does it cost extra to call you in your car?” Ruby’s voice was hesitant, apologetic.

“Don’t worry about it as long as it’s business,” I said. “What’s up? Are you and Jackie finished already?”

“My goodness, yes,” Ruby laughed. “These new folks got a little bitty baby, and the woman, she keep that house ’bout as tidy as you please. Me and Jackie want to know do you have something else for us to do?”

A thought struck me. “Tell you what. Jackie can go on over to Mrs. Tobin’s condo in Ansley Park. That’s Edna’s job, but it won’t take Jackie but an hour or two. How’d you like to do some detecting work with me?”

She hesitated. “It ain’t nothin’ dangerous, is it? Because I’ve got my Missionary Circle at seven tonight and it’s my turn to give the devotion.”

Ruby Edwards is the sweetest, churchiest woman, black or white, I’ve ever met. She supports her husband, who retired on disability from the railroad, and her daughter and three small children on her House Mouse paycheck with never a word of complaint. When she’s not working for us or doing for her family, she’s at the tiny Pentecostal church across the street from her house.

“No, it’s not especially dangerous,” I said. “But I need to talk to a black teenager who lives in Grady Homes and I’m afraid it might look suspicious for me to be sitting outside her house by myself waiting for her to come home. I don’t want to look like a cop and scare her.”

Ruby laughed merrily. “Way I look in this raggedy old housedress today, I’ll fit right in over at that housing project. I can have Jackie drop me at the MARTA train and you could pick me up at the Georgia State station. Would that be all right?”

When I saw the dingy yellow brick mass of Grady Memorial Hospital looming to the right, I knew we were near Grady Homes. The proximity of the housing project to one of the largest public hospitals in the country was serendipitous. Victims of the frequent shootings, stabbings, and drug overdoses could crawl, if necessary, to the emergency room a scant few blocks away.

A cluster of men, boys some of them, stood huddled around the door of the Family Superette on Bell Street, laughing and sipping from crumpled brown paper bags. It was two-thirty on a Thursday afternoon. I guess these guys hadn’t heard the latest figures claiming that unemployment was a thing of the past in Atlanta.

Ruby tsk-tsked at the sight. “Shame on them,” she said. “Got nothing better to do than drink their lives away.”

I swung a hard right into the red brick maze of the housing project and slowed down, looking for Susie Battles’s apartment. Both sides of Bell were lined with parked cars. I drummed the steering wheel in frustration. Looking in the rearview mirror I saw a car pull out of a parking slot four cars behind me.

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