I really wanted to spend some time with Bianca. But, then I thought about it. Maybe it was for the best—for now.
I guessed I was being delusional to think Jade would welcome me with open arms. To think, I’d been planning to ask her if she knew Romero’s blood type or if she knew Bianca’s blood type; that was suicidal. She would have become suspicious and wanted to know why I wanted to know. I hated to think it, but I was glad I missed that bullet. I didn’t want anyone to know I had doubts about the paternity.
I knew with the advances in DNA you could even tell the paternity of a child while you were pregnant, but I’d decided not to get the test, so here I was. Back where I started.
Chapter Sixteen
“Great show!” Zara Pickett, the executive producer, said as we walked off the temporary set at Wolfgang Puck’s Spago restaurant in Beverly Hills for our last show of the season. We had already shot six weeks’ worth of unscripted shows and were already slated for a second season. We wouldn’t shoot for another six months, and I figured I’d have the baby while we were on break, before we began to shoot our next season.
Most of the shows had been shot at Haviland’s mini-mansion in Hollywood Hills and our office in Santa Monica. We had been getting a lot of press because of the show, as well. Women in Business had been featured in Ebony, Jet, Black Enterprise, and other, smaller magazines; plus, we were scheduled to be showcased in Essence and Oprah in the next six months.
I took off my mic, and made it to the bathroom in time to upchuck my breakfast of a vegetarian omelet. Although I wasn’t really showing yet, I was going into my twenty-sixth week of pregnancy and still had morning sickness. I didn’t have it as often as I did before though. Maybe that was why I didn’t really look pregnant. My obstetrics doctor, Gail Henderson, told me I needed to gain more weight. I was on a regimen of strong prenatal vitamins and extra iron pills. Once a week, I was given an iron shot in the hip.
In an earlier shot this week the cameramen had followed me in my quest to find missing baby Kyle, who we renamed Tara. We reenacted the case to protect the privacy of the family members and the people involved. Also, because of the confidentiality clause for minors, we could not show the actual child.
The white actors who played the parents, two professional lawyers, were devastated and almost, but not quite, captured the pathos of parents of a missing child. Fortunately, I was able to track the toddler down with the nanny and her undocumented immigrant husband from Nigeria.
I showed how I backtracked to the last few places the nanny was seen, checked where she’d last used her debit card, and found her hiding out in a Marriot Hotel. The baby actress was unharmed, and it gave the audience a good example of the behind-the-scenes things done for missing children. The actors simulated how the missing children division of LAPD arrested the nanny and the husband and how the baby was safely returned to her relieved yet stressed-out parents.
Next, the cameramen had also followed Chica on a bounty hunting quest, where she’d found a skinhead defendant named Snake who’d jumped bail. Chica, who was as tough as nails, wrestled down her defendant as easily as any man.
But our tracking expertise wasn’t what fired up the viewership. No, what made the Nielsen ratings needle sing was Haviland. The audience was more interested in that crazy fool and how she dogged out her man. Judging from the ratings, the audience loved the drama. Talk about a train wreck of a relationship.
I tried to lie back and relax on one of the two love seats provided in our trailer. Chica came in after me and put her hand on my forehead to see if I was feeling okay.
“You looked flushed, mija.”
“I may need your help, Chica,” I said. Chica was a hotspur—a loose cannon—and I knew she’d handle this.
“Shoot.”
“I have someone trying to blackmail me.”
“Say what?” Chica started cursing in Ricky Ricardo Spanish.
“Calm down, Chica. I’ll tell you about it later. At least I have good news.”
“Yeah, that was good about you and your mom, the boys, and your sister having such a nice reunion. Have you talked to your sister?”
“Every week. We’re getting closer. She’s a sweetheart.”
“Do you think you would want to add your family reunion on the show?”
“No, I’m too private. I don’t know how Keyshia Cole did it with how her family was always showing out.”
“I loved how she had so much love for Frankie and her family members,” Chica objected. “It made me respect Keyshia as a human being. I didn’t just see her as a celebrity.”
“That part was all right. But the world loves to see how ignorant some of our families are.” I shook my head. I washed my hands up and down together. “Thanks but no thanks! Not to play the slavery card, but what can you expect when you take people away from their culture, and sell them away from their family members like they did the Africans? It’s a wonder we’re not more dysfunctional than we are. For real, though, we are still feeling the effects of posttraumatic slavery disorder in a lot of our families. Sometimes I think maybe we are just doing the best we can do.”
Chica looked down and softly touched my stomach. “I see you’re showing a little bit.” She looked pleased to know I hadn’t terminated the pregnancy. “Look at my little niece or nephew.”
I glanced down. “Oh, this little pudge?” I blushed, brushing it off. I’d been wearing loose dark tops and jackets to cover up the pregnancy. I wasn’t exactly ready to announce it on the show.
“So Romero left you his house?” Chica remarked in a desultory manner.
Shirley and she were the only ones I’d told about my windfall. I nodded. “I moved in last weekend.”
“Mija, I would have helped you. Why didn’t you tell me? You know you don’t need to be lifting with the baby and all.”
“I really didn’t have much to take. Just Ben, my clothes, and my laptop. His place is already furnished.” Sometimes I found myself still talking about Romero in the present tense.
I glanced up to see Haviland standing in the doorway. I put my fingers to my lips for Chica to hush when I saw big-mouth Haviland floating up behind her into the trailer we all shared. I could see she was trying to ear hustle. She had a penchant for always showing up at the last minute so she could get into our conversation. Chica and I both worked with criminals and we often discussed our cases without including Haviland, whose wedding planning clientele included the A list of Beverly Hills actors and actresses.
“Hey, girlfriend,” Haviland said, both hands waving in the air, painting word pictures as they usually did. “I swear, I’m PMSing again, and I’m afraid I’ll kill Trevor. If he whines one more time to me, ‘Hav, baby, what did I do?’ I’m going to let him have it.” She missed her calling as a comedienne, and was able to do a good impression of Trevor, too.
Haviland flopped down on the other love seat the production company had in our trailer which acted as our dressing room.
I got up and went and sat in front of the dressing room vanity mirror. I stuck a piece of tissue in a jar of cold cream. “TMI,” I said, wiping off my makeup. “You’re giving too much information again, Haviland.”
“I know. Did I give up too much of our business when I talked about our sex life?”
“Yes, you did.” Sometimes I can be too blunt.
“Well, stop me.”
“I tried. Didn’t you see me take my finger and cut my throat, telling you to shut up?”
“I guess I’m just being anal again. I can’t stop once I get started. I know I’m such a control freak. Trevor drives me crazy with how slow he is and just how he does things. Besides, this is helping his acting career and I’m the one who pitched the show. He says I’m acting too ‘hoity-toity’ now. Can you believe that?”
“No, you’re just OCD,” I teased. “And, just like anyone with an obsessive-compulsive disorder, you like everything in its place. You over clean. I’ve seen you even wash your plant leaves. You
can’t control people, places, or things. Lighten up on Trevor. He’s a good guy.”
Chica jumped in, changing the subject. “Have you told her yet?” She lifted her eyebrow and glanced down at my stomach. I knew she was referring to my pregnancy.
“Told me what?” Haviland’s nose quivered with curiosity.
I shook my head. “Not now.”
“Pretty please, tell me.” Haviland jumped off the love seat. “You two are keeping secrets from me again?”
“You know you can’t hold water with your big mouth,” I quipped. I wasn’t being mean. This was the God’s truth. Haviland couldn’t hold a secret if it meant it would save her own life. I was beginning to accept this about Haviland as one of her weaknesses. Although I didn’t trust her as far as I could see her, I was beginning to like her a little more. She was moving from the frenemy scale to the low end of the friendship continuum, if there was such a thing.
“I swear on my dead mother’s grave I won’t say anything.” Haviland licked her index finger and pointed it up to the ceiling.
Really, Haviland? I thought. You only knew your biological mother a month before she died from AIDS and now you’re always swearing on her grave. I didn’t say anything though. I know Haviland is a trip.
“See. I never told anyone when you went out the country. By the way, you never told me what happened while you were gone either. I’m tired of how you and Chica are always talking in some secret language that is not Spanish either because I know that ish.”
“We grew up together,” Chica said in our defense. “That’s our version of pig Latin and Spanglish.”
“What are you not telling me then?”
I started not to tell her but something in me said, what the heck? “I’m pregnant, now.” I blurted it out. I added the “now,” as if I were a kid saying in a dare, “Now there.”
Haviland started jumping up and down, screaming in excitement. “OMG. Why didn’t you tell me? I’ll be the best godmother in the world.” She threw her arms around me in a claustrophobic hug.
She continued. “Girl, you got chutzpah.” Haviland—who spoke Spanish, French, and Japanese fluently, as her adoptive family traveled world-wide while she was growing up—always dropped Yiddish words in her conversation since she’d been raised around Jewish grandparents. “I don’t think I could ever have a baby. Let alone be a single mother. I’m too selfish. But you’ll be the best mother in the world, I just know it.”
I peeled her arms from around me, feeling embarrassed, but, at the same time, somehow happy she was so excited.
“Tell me about that book deal you’ve gotten with Simon & Schuster because of the show,” I said, changing the subject. “You generally can’t hold a secret, but I see you held that close to your vest.” I gave her a piercing look, since I’d seen the information online on a blog. Oddly, Haviland didn’t share that tidbit of information with me or Chica.
Haviland calmed down and started using her hands again. “It’s going to be a memoir about my life as a child actor. You have more of a story to tell than me, Z, but you’re so private.
“Well, anyhow, how about the Essence article they’re doing on all three of us regarding the show?” Haviland reminded me. “They’re going to do a beautiful photo shoot. To me, that’s win-win. I’m not trying to hog the spotlight. I think we’ve all benefited.”
Who is the “we” in this case? I wondered. “True. Look, I’m happy for you,” I conceded.
“This is for all of us. We’re all going to make money. ”
“Well, I’m glad we’re through shooting for this season. I’m planning on taking the rest of this time off for my maternity leave.”
“How far are you?” Haviland asked.
“I’m just going into my sixth month.”
“You’re not even showing.” She gently touched my stomach.
Suddenly the baby gave a strong kick and Haviland withdrew her hand.
She let out a yelp. “What was that?”
“That’s the baby kicking—silly. Haven’t you ever felt—”
“Zipporah Saldano, Can we speak to you?” A voice interrupted our conversation.
I glanced up. Two suits framed the doorway to our trailer. One officer was black and one was white. I always knew the law, even when they didn’t wear uniforms. “Who are you?”
“LAPD. I’m Detective Steve Mitchell. This is Detective Lionel Patterson. We’d like to take you down to the morgue to see if you can identify a body.”
My heart started pounding immediately. Was this Mayhem’s body? Oh, Lord, no! As much as I declared to my mother I didn’t care what happened to my brother, I couldn’t bear the thought of anything happening to him. I hadn’t heard from him since he went to Rio almost three months ago. He’d been gone with no word. Was he safe? Was he even alive?
Chapter Seventeen
On the drive to the city morgue, I got a text message:
We are going to move on this. We want $500,000 dollars by the end of the week. We mean business.
I thought about how Mayhem said that he’d paid the two agents off. And what if it wasn’t Agent Braggs and Agent Jerry Stamper? Then who could it be?
A second text came in:
Meet us at Universal Studios at the brand new 5 Towers on Saturday at 3:00 P.M. Bring the money in unmarked bills.
Who is the us? I wondered. Today was Wednesday.
On the ride I was reminded of how I was swooped up from the Academy Awards by the two crooked Feds when they’d set up Mayhem’s kidnapping. What was going on?
The Los Angeles County Department of the Coroner is located north of downtown L.A. on Mission Road.
As they drove, I wondered if these two detectives were in cahoots with the crooked federal agents responsible for Mayhem’s kidnapping. Did these detectives know I had left Tank’s sawed-off head in the Santa Monica park? Were they the ones with the video of me dropping off the basket? The video also included the opening of the basket, which showed Tank’s head.
If anything, were they the ones who murdered Tank? Had the blackmailer(s) dropped the dime on me? My heart was beating erratically. Was it my brother’s body in the morgue? I hadn’t heard back from him. Was he safe? Did he go to Rio alone?
The unmarked car finally stopped. When we went inside the building, I suddenly felt the icy fingers of death touch me in my soul. Now I was coming face-to-face with the lie I told when I was rushing to Rio.
“Why am I here?” I asked, trying to sound innocent. I tried to keep my face straight, and hide my fear. I was scared to death. Did they know I knew about the decapitated head?
“We have an unidentified decedent who we think you can identify,” Detective Mitchell said.
My heart palpitated. I felt like I was walking through a tomb as I trudged through the cold corridors. I guessed I was in a tomb.
We walked inside the coroner’s examining room, and they took me to a large walk-in refrigerator that stored other bodies. They pulled the sheet back on a headless, handless, and footless body. I gasped.
“Do you know who this is?”
“No.”
“We don’t believe you.”
“Why?”
“We had an anonymous tip that you might know who beheaded this person.”
Just seeing the corpse, it almost made me regurgitate again. Tank used to remind me of the late actor Michael Clarke Duncan. This body was that of a big male, about six feet six. I could see the bullet hole in his left bicep so that was the identifying mark for me, but I acted like I’d never seen him before. Even his feet were missing, but I guessed that was the way they gave proof that the hit was done. Who put the hit out on Tank?
I’d observed that when I went and got the information as to where his sister lived, who had the boys, in order to help get my nephews out of L.A. One side of me was relieved that it wasn’t Mayhem. But the other side was grieved but happy that they had found Tank’s body.
Now where was his head? His hands? His feet? I
remembered seeing on NCIS that the cartels paid a hit man to do a job and the hit man would have to cut off the feet as proof of delivering the job, and cut off the hands to hide the fingerprints. I don’t know what the cutting off of the head was to signify. I wondered.
They say the dead don’t lie. I could hear Tank’s voice mocking me: “I deserve to have my head with my body.”
“What?”
I took a deep breath. “No, I don’t know who he is.”
“Well, we want to put you in a lineup. We have someone who says otherwise.”
From there I was taken over to Parker Center.
Chapter Eighteen
I’d never been in jail before, but it had to rank as one of the worst experiences I’d ever lived through. They claimed I was identified in the lineup as one of the last to be seen with Tank, aka Andre Clinton, so here I was arrested and thrown in jail with what I considered little or no probable cause. I had no idea what the charges were going to be against me, or how long I’d be incarcerated.
We were squeezed, almost like sardines, in a holding pen, which was about twenty by twenty. The smells were so rank, so rancid, I tried to breathe the air through an imaginary little O in my mouth to cut down on the strength of the smell. In between every other breath, I tried to ease oxygen out of one nostril, and then the other. It wasn’t working though.
I was surrounded by prostitutes, boosters, murderers, and younger women who had probably gotten caught up carrying drugs for their boyfriends. One Amazonian woman named Big Red swaggered around the cell, very stud-like, pants sagging, as if she owned the place. She was at least six feet two. She had the cinderblock face of a man, broad shoulders like a linebacker, and feet that were at least a size thirteen. She wore red dreadlocks, which hung down her back.
“Hey.” Big Red came over and stood over me, sniffing like a dog in heat, on the prowl, but also ready to attack.
L.A. Blues III Page 9