CHAPTER THIRTEEN
When they realized who had just walked into that detention center, they took him into a back office where he waited for only a few minutes for the police commissioner himself to arrive.
It wasn’t everyday that a Carrington walked into their facility asking for the release of a serious felony suspect, and when the police chief and colonel couldn’t give him any satisfaction, he asked to see Ollie, as he called him.
And as quickly as the phone call was made, it seemed that Oliver Norman, the commissioner, was walking in.
After a very brief meeting with the colonel in charge, the commissioner was then handed a folder and escorted to the same room that housed their distinguished visitor.
The first thing Oliver noticed was the appearance of their visitor.
Smartly dressed in a well-tailored black suit, a knee-length black coat, a white shawl around his neck, a pair of pristine Oxfords on his feet, and a pair of leather gloves to protect from the chilly night air dangling casually in his hands, Grayson Carrington did not look the part of a man who would even know a serious felon.
But Oliver stepped into the room ready to gladhand and place nice. “Hello Grayson,” he said jovially as Grayson stood up and the two men shook hands. Then they both sat down beside each other.
“I haven’t seen you in a month of Sundays,” Oliver said. “And your rare night out on the town has been disturbed I see.”
“Why would you think so?” Grayson asked sarcastically. “Don’t you know I simply adore visiting detention centers in the greater Baltimore area?”
The commissioner laughed out loud. He and Grayson went way back.
Then he opened the folder. “Let’s see what we have here.
” He looked at the photo held in place by a paper clip.
“Not bad for a mugshot.” Then he looked at the name.
“Jameesha Latoya Morgan. A temp worker.” He glanced at Grayson.
Why the hell would he be fooling around with a temp worker?
Then he kept reading. “Thirty-one years old.”
Grayson was surprised that he had guessed her age almost to the year. But Oliver had a different thought. “Kind of old for your type, isn’t she? I thought you only fooled around with twenty-somethings.”
“I only fool around with those who gives me the least amount of trouble and who demands the least amount of my time,” Grayson fired back. “Twenty-somethings usually fit the bill.”
“Yet here you are, in a detention center this time of night, fooling around with Jameesha. She sounds like plenty of trouble to me pal.”
Grayson stared at the commissioner. Most in his circles were elitist. Even he would probably be classified that way because it was the only circles he knew. But he’d never known Ollie to be racist. Yet he was beginning to sound like one. But needed the asshole’s help. “Where is she?” he asked him.
“She’s been booked already.”
“Bring her here.”
“Now come on, Grayson. You know that’s highly irregular.”
“Bring her here,” Grayson said again.
“You’re trying to get me fired? We don’t operate that way.”
“You’re the Commish. Who’s going to fire you?”
Oliver had to smile again. He had an answer for everything! He leaned over and pressed the button on the desk phone. “Bring Jameesha . . I mean,” he said as he looked at the name in the folder again. “Bring Jameesha Latoya Morgan into room eight.”
“Yes sir,” the colonel on the other end of the call said.
Oliver ended the call. “You owe me one,” Oliver said and meant it.
But Grayson didn’t respond. He made it his life’s work to owe no man anything, and that included Oliver Norman.
“So what’s the deal?” Oliver asked him.
“What do you mean? What deal?”
“What’s with you and this girl?” Then he smiled again. “I’ve never known you to be down with the swirl.”
Grayson didn’t respond. He could never understand how so many acquaintances thought they knew him so well when they didn’t know him at all.
When Oliver was reminded, by Grayson’s silence alone, that he never was the type to play along, he got down to business too. “So what exactly do you want from us? Her bail hasn’t even been set yet.”
“I don’t want bail,” said Grayson. “I want the charges dropped.”
Oliver was shocked. “Dropped? Oh come on, Grayson! It’s no longer aiding and abetting an armed robbery. Which is bad enough. But a man has been murdered! There’s no way she’s walking from that.”
Grayson looked at Oliver. He didn’t know the state of the victim. “He died?”
“He succumbed to his injuries and passed away, yes. Which means your little girlfriend is looking at a murder charge on top of everything else. There’s no way we can drop a murder charge.”
“She didn’t murder anyone.”
“How do you know that? You wasn’t in that store and I wasn’t either.”
“What about the footage from the store’s cameras?”
“There are none,” Oliver declared. “That’s why they robbed the place. They knew there weren’t any working cameras in that rathole.”
Grayson exhaled. He could only imagine how devastated Latoya was going to be when she heard the news.
And then there was a knock, the door was opened, and Toya walked in.
Grayson’s heart dropped as soon as he laid eyes on her. He could see the pain and confusion and terror all over her deep-toned, dark-brown face.
She looked at the wrong side of the room when she first walked in.
Then she saw the commissioner, whom she didn’t know, and then she saw Mr. Carrington.
The man she phoned. The man she was certain wasn’t going to show up because he hardly said a word to her.
But there he was. Sitting in that room in his fancy dress, looking like the last place on earth he expected to be was in some dingy detention center on her behalf.
On her behalf.
That was the part that choked her up. He came on her behalf. And she couldn’t help it. She hurried to him with emotions welling up inside of her.
Grayson couldn’t help it either. He stood on his feet when her emotions overtook her and she began running to him. And when her small body fell against his big body, and she wrapped her arms around him as tightly as she could, he wrapped his arms around her too.
He knew Oliver couldn’t believe it. He couldn’t believe it either! But this girl, this woman, meant something to him. She mattered to him.
When they stopped embracing, she helped herself to his neatly folded handkerchief in his suit coat pocket and blew her nose.
And it was that little gesture alone that made Grayson understand why she mattered to him.
She didn’t stand on propriety or what was expected of her.
She didn’t change because she was in one setting or a different one.
She was always the same. She stood on who she was not where she was or who was around her.
She was Jameesha Latoya. Nothing more. Nothing less.
She’d never know how much Grayson admired that.
When Toya had wiped her nose and her tears, she looked at the clothes Grayson wore. Then she looked at him. He was well-shaven, no more bloodshot eyes, and his hair was pristinely done. “You fix up really well,” she said to him.
He laughed. “Coming from you, I consider that a compliment.”
She wanted to smile, but her circumstances and what she witnessed earlier that night was too traumatic. Grayson realized it, too, and his smile dissipated.
“Sit down,” he said as he moved aside and assisted her into his chair.
Oliver was blown away by the entire scene.
Grayson Carrington was a hard-driving, uncompromising man.
He didn’t give a damn about anybody was always his impression of him.
But yet he was being so gentle with this hood rat?
He was coddling this criminal? It was so out of character that Oliver wondered just what the attraction was.
She had a gorgeous face, and her body was topnotch, he noticed as he looked down at her body.
But all of that could be said for Grayson’s current girlfriend and all of his prior ones too.
And none of them had the baggage that babe was carrying when Grayson made it clear that he only fooled with women who would make no demands on his person or his time.
When by virtue of the crimes she was facing, she was making demands on both. What was going on here?
“Latoya, this is Oliver Norman.”
“Hello,” Oliver said with a nod of his head.
“He’s the police commissioner.”
“The commissioner?” Toya was surprised. “You’re the top man.”
Oliver nodded. “That’s correct.”
“You can help me then? Because I didn’t aid and abet anybody with anything. I didn’t know Bam was gonna rob that store. I didn’t even know he had a gun. He told me he needed a ride to the gas station to pick up some beer.”
Grayson placed his hand on Latoya’s lower back. “Slow down,” he said to her.
“I’m sorry but they locked me up when I didn’t do anything.”
“You drove the getaway car,” Oliver said. “Now that’s a fact.”
“He forced me too!”
The sincerity in her voice pained Grayson.
“He put that gun to my head and told me I had to get him away from there. He told me to take him back to my mama house.”
“Why would he want to go there?” Oliver asked her.
“Because he lived there with my mama and my baby sister and her kids. He was shacking up with my baby sister.”
Hood rat just like he said, Oliver thought. “Well, Miss Morgan, I’m here to tell you right now that your story doesn’t hold water. You went in with him, and even after he killed that store clerk, you came out with him.”
“Killed him?” Toya was floored. “He died?”
Oliver nodded. “Yes. And Florida law is clear. During the commission of a crime, such as a store robbery, and a murder occurs, you will be prosecuted for that murder even if you didn’t pull the trigger.”
Toya’s heart dropped. They were going to prosecute her for murder? She looked at Grayson.
Grayson could see the anguish all over her face. And it upset him. “I need to talk with the state’s attorney,” he said to Oliver. “Get her on the phone.”
“I called her when I got the call. But I’m going to tell you right now, Grayson, she’s of the same mind as I.
She’s up for reelection and she’s behind in the polls.
Her hands are tied when you’re talking murder.
There’s nothing she can do. There’s nothing she will do.
She’s already made that crystal clear too. ”
Toya felt strange, as if it wasn’t her anymore but some character in a movie she was watching.
She couldn’t even think about it. She couldn’t even focus on it.
Her main focus was on the fact that Mr. Carrington’s first name was Grayson, of all names, rather than on what she had to face in front of her.
She felt that way because that commissioner, and apparently the state’s attorney too, was firm.
She didn’t stand a chance in hell of ever getting out of jail.
Once that poor store clerk died, it was taken out of everybody’s hands except for a jury.
A jury that would be more than happy to view her as some nobody crook who deserved to be found guilty of everything she was being accused of.
For her to walk free, they would have to find compassion in their hearts for her and overlook what the state’s attorney will say is overwhelming evidence of her guilt.
And when did anybody ever have compassion on her?
But when Grayson pressed his hand into her lower back, as if he was reminding her that he was by her side, and that she not alone anymore, she did feel a momentary sense of relief that somebody at least was in her corner. That somebody might even believe her.
But for how long? Especially now that he knew the whole story with every negative spin that commissioner spoon-fed him. How long could he stand by somebody with her kind of baggage?
But then he said something Toya was not expecting him to say.
“Get her back on the phone,” Grayson said to Oliver. “Tell her I want to make a deal.”
Toya and Oliver both looked at him. “And what deal could that possibly be, Grayson?” Oliver asked him.
“Tell her if she drop those charges against Jameesha Morgan, then I’ll guarantee she’ll be reelected.”
The commissioner sat up straight. So did Toya. But for two very different reasons.
For Toya, it was the fact that he would go all-out like that for her.
But for Oliver, it was all about the guarantee.
“The only way she could be guaranteed to win,” he said to Grayson, “is if your father, our still beloved former governor, the most beloved man in this state, was to come out in complete and total support of her candidacy. That’s the only way.
And everybody knows it would have to be something monumental to get Sebastian Carrington to throw his name, his reputation, his everything behind anybody. Especially a democrat.”
Grayson looked Oliver dead in the eyes. “Get her on the phone,” he said again.
Oliver was floored. But he hurried to get her on the phone.
Toya, however, was still reeling from the fact that the father of the man who took time out of his busy schedule to come and see about her used to be the governor of Maryland!
What manner of man did she have on her hands?
And why would he be so willing to help her and promise the top prosecutor that his father would put it all on the line for her too? Regular dudes just didn’t do all this.
She stared unblinkingly at Grayson.