Blackman's Coffin by Mark de Castrique

she saw it. The figure walked closer but remained dark. Nakayla winked at me.
    “I see you met Jenny.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Cut the act and put your tongue back in your mouth. The good news is she lives down the hall from Tikima, the bad news is she has a girlfriend.”
    “Her loss.”
    “Yeah. And Jamie Foxx is picking me up for dinner.” Nakayla walked past me and pushed the elevator button.
    We stepped out on the fourth floor and the guise of a hospital replaced that of the grand hotel. Long narrow hallways spread out along three wings. Brown doors broke the white walls like a computer-generated repetition and I thought of the veterans who had lived and died behind them. These corridors held ghosts in search of both mind and body.
    “We’re all the way at the end,” Nakayla said. “You’ll get your exercise.”
    She unlocked the apartment door and I left the bare bones hospital behind. The first thing that caught my eye was the granite surface on the kitchen counters. They separated the open room into two areas—the compact, efficient kitchen and an ell-shaped living/dining area that wrapped around it. To my left was a small leather sofa, a green upholstered reading chair with a stack of books beside it, and a sensibly sized flat-screen television sitting on a middle shelf in a stack of filled bookshelves. Farther in the room to the right, the dining space held a circular table with four hard-backed chairs. The top of the table was covered with files, notebooks, and envelopes. I noticed two books in the center: the disguised journal and a book about Thomas Wolfe. A hallway led down to what I expected to be a bath and bedroom.
    The apartment was cozy with a mix of folk art from Africa and Appalachia. An intricately carved djembe drum sat in a corner by the bookshelf. Above it, a dulcimer hung on the wall. The place was more laid-back than I would have expected Tikima’s home to be.
    “You cleaned up the mess left by the burglars?” I asked.
    Nakayla looked around the apartment as if seeing it for the first time. “I couldn’t bear to see her things thrown about. They also dumped out all her drawers in the bedroom and pulled the mattress off the box springs.”
    I walked to the table and picked up the journal in Elmore Leonard’s dust jacket. “And you think this is what they wanted?”
    “Nothing else she has is new or unusual.” Nakayla stepped behind the kitchen counter. “You want something to drink? Coffee? There’s root beer in the fridge.”
    “Root beer sounds good. Haven’t had it since I was a kid.” I glanced over the files and note cards. “What about these papers?”
    “Tikima had left them on the table. She’d spread out work from the office there. I didn’t see anything to connect with the journal.”
    “Does she have a computer here?”
    Nakayla bent over to retrieve a bottle of root beer from the refrigerator’s inside door. “Back in the bedroom. I let the police go through it when she first disappeared. No unusual emails or websites.” She set a brown bottle on the counter. “You want a glass with ice?”
    “No. Just pop the cap.” I thought for a second. “Did you check the computer after yesterday’s break-in?”
    “I didn’t think about it. The computer was about the only thing left undisturbed.” She slid the root beer across the counter.
    “There’s the possibility the ransacking of the apartment was a decoy,” I said. “The real object could have been to delete something incriminating from the computer’s hard drive.”
    Nakayla bit her lower lip. “Damn. I didn’t even turn it on.” She looked like she was about to cry.
    “Probably nothing. I’ll read the journal while you see if you notice anything different on her computer.”
    “Okay and I can watch for Peters from the bedroom window.”
    I nodded, and then took a gulp of the root beer. The taste was sweet and strong, the heavy carbonation burning my throat like a shot of whiskey. I took