Red and White

 

 

“Red and White”

by

Dale W Tice

Copyright DWT 2020

 

 

This story is a story of murder.  This is the story of a woman.  This is a story of a man.  This is a story of a small city in a small part of the world with big city problems.  This is the story of a man’s betrayal and the ultimate price he would pay for his crime.  This is that sort of story.  You know how it ends now let me tell you how it begins.

It begins in a bar with a man, a man who had a girlfriend, a red head named Rose but tonight he was alone in this bar, in this town on the coast of Mississippi called Ocean Springs. The town was a place where wealthy and progressive young Mississippians came to live and be near the ocean.  Living on the coast changed your perspective toward the state because no longer did you look north and south on your weekends but east and west.  New Orleans to Pensacola is where people of Ocean Springs looked when they planned their weekend getaways.  That is where his girlfriend was at this moment, or he thought, on a weekend getaway with her girlfriends. 

But see, nights get lonely for young wealthy men, and bars are places they go to find company and sometimes they find the wrong company.  Tonight this man would find a beautiful young blonde by the name of Daphne White, a young college student, who had just broken up with her boyfriend and to get revenge was looking for a man to take her home and have his way with her.  She felt this was the best way of getting back at her boyfriend for breaking up with her.  How that would go, we will not get into.  This is not their story.  This is Rose’s story and Mike’s story.  Yes, the man had a name and it was Mike.  And Daphne plays a role in their story, but she would have no clue until days later when the police would arrive at her door asking questions about her relationship to Mike, immediately after getting back with her boyfriend.  What a shame, I was hoping they would make it.  It looks like they would not. 

Anyway, that is not the story I want to write about.  It is Mike and Rose and the story of the murder that ends their relationship.  Rose, having canceled plans to go with her girlfriends to Pensacola and hang out on the beach for the weekend, had came over to Mike’s place to surprise him.  Mike had a nice home next to the beach.  He was a lawyer, doing fairly good, making a good paycheck.  He could afford the things he wanted.  He had the right kind of money to make the right kind of women interested in him, like slender red heads, and full-figured blondes.  Life was going good for Mike, twenty-nine years old and with a promising future.  Rose spent just a day on the beach, and she was already tired of the scene and bored with her friends, she said, but she knew Mike.  She knew his type of guy and she couldn’t get her mind off the idea of leaving him alone in Ocean Springs with casinos and women from all over the world looking for the right man to wrap their legs around and strangle every dollar they could out of him.  These are not my thought, but Rose’s so do not kill the messenger for the misogynist tone of this story.  Rose was a jealous woman and she had long term plans with Mike, and she knew leaving him there the whole weekend alone only opened up other possibilities for Mike and she wanted to make sure her plans were not messed by any beach slut and so she uber backed to Ocean Springs to surprise Mike.  Bad idea, Rose.   

When Rose pulled up at Mike’s place, she did not have to imagine long what had happened there.  It was midnight and Rose was about to pull into Mike’s drive but caught site of a car already parked there with lights on.  She pulled to the side of the road and hunched down in her car and then started to watch to figure out what was happening.  It was only a minute later that Mike’s front door opened and he was escorting a beautiful blonde out of his front door and to the car. He opened the door for her, kissed her passionately, then let her get into the car, and shut the door for her.  Rose was furious. She thought about making a scene right there but something more devious was forming in her mind and instead of running over to him and cussing on him and beating on him she told herself “if I can’t have him, I’m not going to let another woman have him.”  She watched the Uber pull off and Mike return to his house when she turned her own car back on and headed to the liquor store.  In the liquor store she finds the hardest bottle of red wine she could find and pays for it then heads back to Mike’s place. 

It was one a.m. when she got back to Mike’s place and she could tell he was still awake.  She heard his TV on and the baseball game he was watching was blaring out.  She heard the roar of the crowd and Mike’s scream.  “Come on Braves.  Dammit.”  She rang the doorbell.  She heard Mike grunt “who the hell can that be at this hour?”  Mike opened the door with a angry jerk to confront the person at his door and it took a moment for his eyes to register that it was Rose standing there.  “Rose,” he said.  “What are you doing here?” 

Rose forced a smile on her face to say “I thought I would surprise you with a visit.” 

“I thought you were in Pensacola?” 

“Can we have this discussion inside your house instead of standing in the threshold of your house,” Rose’s voice was almost ready to break into a shout when she said this but she kept he cool and wasn’t going ready to confront him. 

“Come on in,” Mike told her but was secretly thinking about the mess he left in his bedroom, but then he wouldn’t let her go in there to see his sheets and blankets and pillows thrown from one post of the bed to the other. 

Mike walked over to the kitchen bar and poured a glass of white wine in a glass then walked back over to the couch and set down to finish watching the baseball game. 

“Who is playing?” Rose asked him as she strolled aimlessly around the room just looking at pictures now.  She was fuming inside, yet Mike never suspected a thing as she went looking at the pictures on his wall and other details of the room. 

“Braves.  They been playing like shit all night but they have a couple men on base now so maybe they about to make a move,” Mike tells her as he keeps his eyes on the television set never turning to see what Rose was doing behind him. 

“What inning is it?” 

“Bottom of the nineth.  Braves losing by three.” 

Rose pauses to look in a mirror that happened to line hers vision up with the TV and Mike’s position in front of it.  She hears the crack of a bat and then Mike’s shout as another man gets on base and puts three on base. 

Rose turns around and walks over to where Mike is setting now and comes up behind him and she is ready to strangle him but instead she wrapped her arms around him and kissed him on the cheek.  “I missed you?” 

“I missed you to baby,” Mike taps her arm.  “Hang on baby, the game is almost over.” 

“Strike one,” the announcer says on the television set. 

Mike picks up his glass of wine and takes a sip then sets the glass back down. 

“What are you drinking?’

“That’s ball one,” the announcer says. 

“Chardonnay,” Mike tells her. 

“That’s the expensive French brand,” Rose points out. 

“You know me baby, I like the best things in life,” Mike says. 

“Ball two,” Rose hears from the television. 

“I didn’t think you liked white wine?” Rose asked him. 

Mike glanced up at her, trying to read her face before he heard “ball three,” and his attention turned back to the television set.  “I thought I would try me a blonde tonight,”  Mike said this and Rose looked down and saw the grin on Mike’s face. 

“Strike two,” the announcer said.

“Oh! come off it ump, that was obviously a ball,” Mike shouts. 

Rose pulls away from Mike now seething as he watches the TV set and she focuses in on the side of his head.  She glances up at the TV and the batter was adjusting his bat, wrapping his hands around the wood to get the grip that he liked and then he stepped back into the batter’s boy.  At this moment, Rose hand reached in her purse and she put her hand around the top of the bottle of wine and feeling the grip around it she pulled it back.  The batter now got into the stance he found comfortable and now drew the bat back and waited for the ball to be thrown while Rose pulled the wine bottle back as far as she could with her arm.  The pitch was thrown, and it was coming right down the middle.  Rose started her swing for the side of the head.   The batter eye registered the pitch coning down the strike zone and started to swing his bat and it caught the ball and the ball and Rose heard the sound of crack as the bottle of wine caught Mike across the side of the head sending him reeling to the side.  “It’s a home run,” the announcer said as Mike fell sideways onto the couch.  “It’s a base clearing, game winning home run,” the announcer shouted as the crowds of the stadium roared and Mike face fell against his couch then his body fell lopsided on to the floor. 

Rose heard the announcer still talking but she did not register what he was saying anymore as she stared down at Mike laying on the floor of his house with a big gashing wound on the side of his head.  “You can play in the sun with you little blonde but you cross a red head and you may end up dead,” Rose said out loud to him but Mike wasn’t able to hear her as he laid there on the floor, knocked out. 

Mike was not dead but when he came too he had a headache the size of liberty bell ringing in his head.  He woke on the floor when sunshine stirred him from his boozy ether and tried to remember what had happened.  He climbed up off the floor and stumbled to the kitchen and laid his head against the bar.  He felt the side of his head again and he touched it and felt a gauze or something on the side of it.  He then stumbled to the bathroom and there in front of the mirror as he washed his face, he saw the huge wound on the side of his head.  He now remembered Rose was there the night before and the blonde was there, and Braves were there.  “Did they win?’ he couldn’t remember. After washing his face and his mouth out he stumbled back to the kitchen and immediately went to fixing a cup of coffee.  As he waited for it to brew he set down on the bar and he held his face in his hands for a moment then he looked over at his phone that was laying on the bar beside the bottle of white wine.  He picked up the phone and saw, as soon as it awoke, a picture of him and the blonde girl.  He saw that the text came from Rose.  He knew that Rose knew everything.  “Well damn.  That is that,” was the extent of his grief.  He picked up his phone and threw it against the wall.  It crashed against the wall then fell behind the couch. 

Mike laid his head back down on the bar and waited for his coffee.  At least coffee had always treated him good, but he knew “women were going to be the death of me,” he said to himself and then coffeemaker begin to percolate.  All the hell he felt at that moment in his mind was hell he brought upon himself, by the choices he had made, he knew this for certain as he laid there with his head on his arm. Something wasn’t right though he thought as he said, “I might have brain damage,” and that was the last thing he said right before he fell over, once more, but this time he was dead. 

Two weeks later a sixteen-year-old blonde, with a fake i.d. that said she was twenty-one, was arrested for prostitution, petty theft, ID theft, use of another’s credit cards, and murder.  Mike had never realized that Daphne had taken his wallet before she left that night and ran up his credit card account and empty his banking account.  It would be a crime she would spend the next twenty years wishing she had never committed. 

Rose would never speak of Mike again.  She had returned to Pensacola that night with her friends who had been so drunk the night before they never even realized that she had left during the night.  They would all tell verify to the police that Rose was with them in Pensacola the night that Mike died.

A furniture mover found Mike’s phone when he moved the couch away from the wall.  When he saw it, he put it in his pocket, when he got off, he had the memory erased, and had the phone registered to his name. 

And that’s where this story ends.