10. Vice Blackwell #2
A knock was heard on my office door before Mace stepped inside. He closed it behind him and looked from me to Sam’s phone sitting on the desk.
The look on his face told me that he knew I knew.
I leaned back in my chair and watched him take the seat across from me. For several seconds, neither one of us spoke. Mace kept his expression controlled, but his jaw was tight enough to tell me he was preparing himself for whatever he thought was coming.
I slid Sam’s phone across the desk.
“You could’ve told me,” I said.
His eyes dropped to the screen before returning to mine. “How much you read?”
“Enough.”
He looked away and rubbed both hands across his face. “Fuck.”
“That’s all you gotta say?”
“I mean… What you want me to say?”
“The truth would be a good place to start.”
Mace leaned back in the chair and stared toward the door. I’d seen him face men holding guns without blinking, but right now, he looked like he wanted to be somewhere else.
“We were together,” he finally said.
“I figured that part out.”
“For almost two years.”
That was longer than I expected.
I sat here trying to imagine how many times I’d been in the same room with them during those two years without realizing what was happening. “Why the fuck you didn’t tell me?”
His eyes came back to mine. “It wasn’t that simple.”
“What wasn’t simple about it?”
“Everything.” Mace let out a frustrated breath and leaned forward. “Sam wasn’t ready for everybody to know.”
“I ain’t everybody.”
“I know.”
His expression intensified. “Vice, this wasn’t about not trusting you. He just wasn’t ready to deal with people looking at him different. His mama. The family. Everybody around us. You know how these niggas talk, and Sam didn’t want his whole life turning into a fucking discussion.”
I thought about my aunt and the family members who always had an opinion about something that didn’t involve them. Sam had grown up hearing the same things the rest of us did. Men were expected to move a certain way, and anything outside of that became everybody’s business.
I could understand why he’d been nervous.
That didn’t mean I liked being kept in the dark.
“What about you?”
“What about me?”
“You ain’t care what people thought?”
Mace gave a humorless laugh. “I stopped caring a long time ago, but Sam didn’t.”
“So you hid because he asked you to.”
“I hid because I loved him.” Mace looked down at his hands before continuing. “If keeping that shit between us made it easier for him, that’s what I was gonna do. I ain’t need anybody else knowing what we had for it to be real.”
I sat there quietly, watching him struggle to keep the grief from taking over his face.
For the first time since Sam died, Mace wasn’t pretending he’d only lost a friend.
“I knew something was wrong with you,” I said. “I just thought…”
“You thought I had something to do with what happened.” It wasn’t a question and I knew it.
“Shit, I didn’t know what to think.”
Mace slowly nodded. “I get it.”
“And you acting nervous about the phone didn’t help.”
“You think I wanted you going through pictures and messages that were only supposed to be between us?”
“No…”
“I knew you’d find out eventually. I just wasn’t ready for this shit.” His voice cracked before he cleared his throat. “That phone is all I got left of him that nobody else shared.”
There it was… The pain he’d been carrying alone while everybody else grieved openly.
My aunt had been able to cry over her son. I’d been able to bury my cousin and promise revenge. Mace had stood beside us pretending his loss didn’t cut deeper than friendship because nobody knew he’d lost the man he loved.
That shit couldn’t have been easy.
“I don’t give a fuck who you love,” I told him. “Never did.”
“I know.”
“You should’ve known you could tell me.”
Mace looked at me for a second before nodding. “I know… I was just trying to protect him. He didn’t want nobody to know.”
Neither one of us spoke for a while. There was still too much sitting between us, but anger didn’t feel as important now that I understood why he’d been hiding.
I looked down at Sam’s phone. “Did you know what he was investigating?”
Mace’s expression changed as he answered with, “I knew he was looking into something, but he wouldn’t tell me everything.”
“You expect me to believe that?”
“You just read our messages. Did it look like Sam told me everything?”
I couldn’t argue with that. Half their conversations were Sam getting irritated because Mace shut down or Mace telling him they’d talk later.
“What did he tell you?”
Mace leaned back and stared toward the ceiling like he was deciding where to begin.
“A few weeks before he died, he started asking weird questions to his mama about your mama. At first, I thought he was doing it because he heard something from your aunt. Then he started digging through old records and looking for people who knew her before she got sick.”
“What kind of records?”
“Medical. Property. Some police shit from back then.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. He just said something didn’t add up, but he never told me what.”
“You expect me to believe you were sleeping beside the nigga and never asked any questions?”
“Of course I asked.” Mace’s frustration rose with every word. “He kept saying he needed proof before he brought it to you. I told him to leave it alone until he knew what he was getting into.”
The warning on Sam’s phone came back to me.
You need to leave this alone.
Sam hadn’t listened to Mace. He hadn’t listened to whoever sent that message either.
“Did he mention my father?” Mace hesitated and that was enough to make me sit up straighter. “What?”
“He asked me whether you ever had me to try to find him.”
“When?”
“About a week before he got shot.”
“And what you tell him?”
“The truth. That you have but I didn’t know anything more than you did.”
I stared at him. “Why didn’t you tell me this before?”
“Sam made me promise not to say anything until he knew for sure.”
“He dead now, Mace.”
His face hardened.
“You think I don’t know that?” The anger in his voice filled the office, but underneath it was something heavier. Guilt. “I could’ve followed him that night.”
“You didn’t know where he was going.”
“I knew he was meeting somebody.”
That was new and it pissed me clean the fuck off that he hadn’t said that sooner.
“Man, why the fuck—” I stopped myself from going off. “Who was he going to meet?”
“He didn’t say.
“So, you let him go meet somebody after he got threatened?”
“I ain’t know about the message.” Mace’s voice got loud before he caught himself. “He told me he had to talk to somebody and would call me when he was done. That was it.”
“Well, did he call?”
Mace looked away, shaking his head as he whispered, “No.”
The room got quiet again.
I understood the weight of that unanswered call now. Mace had probably spent every day since Sam died wondering whether following him, pushing harder or refusing to let him leave could’ve changed anything.
I don’t think it would have.
The people who killed Sam had already decided he knew too much. So, whether it happened that day or another day, I think his time was coming.
“I need everything you remember,” I said. “Every question he asked, every place he went, every name he mentioned.”
“I’ve been trying to put it together.”
“Think harder and do that… No more hiding shit from me.”
Mace’s eyes met mine. “I ain’t hiding nothing else.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah.”
I watched him for a few seconds before nodding.
“A’ight.” He stood, but before he reached the door, I stopped him. “Mace.”
He looked back.
“You could’ve told me. I promised I wouldn’t have looked at either one of you different.”
“I know that now…”
I hated that he hadn’t known it then.
Mace opened the door and walked out, leaving me alone with Sam’s phone and more questions than I had before.
The man had spent his final weeks digging through my mother’s past and looking for the father I’d never known. Somewhere along the way, he’d uncovered enough to scare somebody into warning him, following him to Grady and putting bullets in him before he could tell me what he found.
I picked up his phone and looked at the picture of him and my aunt again. Sam had died trying to bring me the truth, and whatever it was, I was going to finish what he started.