Trip Wire A Cook County Mystery

CHAPTER ONE MONDAY "Hey, Cassandra," Wilton said in that sleepy voice of his. "Huh?" I said. "How much you bet me?" "About what?" "I bet you and me are the onliest niggers in Chicago know every song on the Creedence Clearwater album." "No bet. I know we are." We fell out laughing. Truth to tell, I had nothing against Creedence and neither did Wilton. But our friend and roommate Dan Zuni, a beautiful Pueblo Indian kid with a mane of coal black hair and the slim-hipped build of a female fashion model, had a psychotic thing for them. Night and day he had Creedence on the record player in his bedroom. Once in a while I had to beg for mercy. He was always nice enough to give it a rest when I complained, but a couple of hours later "Suzie Q" would be blasting again. Wilton had me laughing so hard my ribs ached. But that wasn't such a tough assignment. I was stonedwe both wereand just about everything was funny. We lay side by side on the floor of my room, only a couple of feet away from the new space heater my uncle Woody had paid for. Winter in Chicago is nothing to trifle with. You might think you know about our winters because of that record Lou Rawls had where he referred to the wind whipping off Lake Michigan as the Hawk. Don't kid yourself. You don't know. At night my room was like the north face of Everest. But I was low on cash, so Woody sprang for the heater, despite his being none too pleased with me these days. Uncle Woody loved me, no question. But I had recently left home, moved out of the spacious high-rise apartment in Hyde Park where I had lived with him and my aunt Ivy since I was eleven years old. They were pretty pissed about it. Maybe it wouldn't have been such an affront if I'd taken a nice studio apartment in a respectable South Side development like Lake Meadows. Maybe they'd have been able to write it off as an understandable step toward independence. That's not what I did, though, when I left home. I moved all the way up to the North Side, to a rambling apartment with sloping floors and niggardly steam heat, where I had anywhere from three to seven roommates, depending on who was sleeping at a lover's apartment, who was hitchhiking to California, or who was back home in Indiana for some holiday. At the moment we were without any pet critters, though it was just about time for one of our number to find another stray kitten or take in an orphaned parakeet. Woody and Ivy Lisle are my de facto parents. My mother, Haddy Perry, left me in my grandmother's care when I was eight, and she's been in the wind ever since. The years with Grandma Perry were brief but hideous. To put it mildly, we never hit it off. And, in a masterpiece of understatement, let me say I was not a happy child. As I get older, I try not to blame her so much for her part in my misery. The best I can figure, she and my mother had never been the greatest of pals, and as soon as Mom was of age, she cut herself loose from home and hearth. Then, at just the time in the old lady's life when child rearing should have been far behind her, she got saddled with a needy youngsterthat would be mesubject to bouts of depression, panic, and rage. Like her husband before her, Grandma was called home, in the Negro parlance, at a fairly young age. My guess is, she had had it up to here and was good and ready to go. At any rate, that's when her younger sister Ivy took me in. As for my biological father? You tell me. My family history is lousy with secrets, vague explanations that don't hold water, and outright lies. The storyCarter, Charlotte is the author of 'Trip Wire A Cook County Mystery', published 2005 under ISBN 9780345447692 and ISBN 0345447697.