Dead Cold Mysteries Box Set #4: Books 13-16 (A Dead Cold Box Set), Blake Banner [story read aloud .txt] 📗

The face on that head was a surprisingly cheerful, happy one. It was the kind of smiling face you’d expect to find on a garden gnome. As he was led through the steel door into the interrogation room, he regarded us with large, round eyes and smiled with an expressive mouth. The guard led him to the table and cuffed his wrists to a steel ring at the center.

“If he gives you any trouble, we’re right outside.”

We thanked him and he left. I said, “Hi, Lenny, I’m Detective John Stone of the NYPD, and this is my partner, Detective Carmen Dehan.”

Lenny grinned at Dehan and then at me.

“Hi, it’s nice to have visitors. Not many people come to see me. I ain’t got family. Though my mom told me once I have cousins in Brazil, but I never met them. And my friends, well…” He laughed. “You can imagine my friends ain’t real keen to come and see me in prison.”

I nodded. “Sure.”

His face became a little more serious. “But the truth is, I don’t got a lot of friends, or maybe any, really. So it’s nice to have visitors.”

That thought made him smile again. Dehan sat back in her chair with a small frown on her brow, like she had decided to shelve all her questions and just study him for a bit. I offered him a smile that said I might be his friend and said, “Well, Lenny, you realize we’re here on business.”

“Oh, sure, I know that. They told me you wanted to ask me some questions. I don’t got a problem with that.”

“Thank you. You remember Helena?”

He repressed a smile and his eyes went wide. There was real amusement in his expression. “Man, I don’t want to… I really don’t like those guys who’s always boastin’, ‘Oh, man! I been with so many women, I screwed this bitch and that bitch!’ I hate that.” He leaned forward, a look of delight on his face. “But I have to tell you the truth. A man like me, I was the man, you know? It ain’t no exaggeration, couple of years or more maybe, I was with a different woman every night. Now, you do the math, that’s like maybe a thousand women. I swear to you some of them I never knew and never saw again. Bro’, it’s like a blur. I ain’t proud of that. I don’t think that’s a good thing, like some of these dudes in here. But you come to me now and you ask me, say, ‘Do you remember Helena?’ I gotta be honest with you. Just by the name, like that, I have no idea who Helena is. You gotta be more specific.”

I studied his face, searching for signs that he was playing some wiseass game. I didn’t find any. My impression was that he was being honest. I nodded.

“Sure, I understand. Do you remember at one time, about four and a half years ago, shortly before you were arrested, you had literary aspirations? You were doing a creative writing course.”

“We got a group goin’ here in the prison. I got some positive reviews in the prison magazine. ‘Real, believable and immediate.’ I don’t know what he meant by ‘immediate’, but it was nice to read. You know?”

“Sure, I can imagine. Do you remember your teacher on that creative writing course? She was a famous novelist…”

His face lit up. “Oh, man! Helena! Well, sure! If you had just said, your writing teacher! Sure, I remember her. She was…” He smiled, shook his head and gazed at the wall. “She was like…” He raised the fingers of his manacled hand. “Wait, I am going to try to express this. ‘She was a ray of light in the darkness of my life.’”

He looked at Dehan to see what she thought of that. Then he looked at me.

“I think, if I had not been arrested, I would have left my life of crime anyway, just because of Helena. She made me see myself in a different way. She taught me, not just to be curious about words, but to have different expectations about myself.” He leaned forward, his eyes wide with wonder. “If I use different words in my head, if I speak differently in my own mind, I can be different! That is magic, man!”

I nodded. “That’s something.”

He planted a big smile on the right side of his face and there was real humor in his eyes. “That’s why they call it a spell. When you think that a letter is a symbol that makes a noise in your mind, you realize spelling is magic. She taught me that, man. She was somethin’ special, I’ll tell you.”

Dehan spoke for the first time. “You a good student?”

“Sure, who wouldn’t be with a teacher like that, right?”

“She punctual? Always there for class on time?”

“No, man, she was always there before class. She’d be there half an hour before class started, always.”

“Yeah? That’s nice, diligent. So, Lenny, how close did you and Helena get?”

He frowned at her, but without hostility. “I don’t really understand your question, Detective Dehan. Are you asking me if we was lovers?”

“Would you have liked to be?”

His face creased up and he started to laugh. It made him look like a fat, laughing Buddha.

“Oh! She was hot! No doubt! She was more than hot. She was beautiful! Inside and out. Any guy who got between the sheets with her was one lucky man. But she was strictly off limits, know what I’m sayin’?  She made that real clear.” He laughed again. “I remember,” he said, “somebody described a woman to me one time as having a sign nailed to her forehead that said, ‘fuck off. I’m married.’ Helena was like that. Her husband must have been