Casanegra

by Blair Underwood

  His eyes went back to the TV. Dad liked to pretend his hearing was worse than it had been before the stroke, but he heard me. His index finger drummed the remote. When the next set of commercials came on, he reached for the pad beside his Bible.

  He scrawled something with his left hand and tossed the pad my way. It took me a while to make out the words, since his writing was worse than his slur. Unfortunately for him, the stroke had messed up his right side, and he wasn’t a lefty.

  Can’t afford,he’d said. A five-year-old’s scribble.

  “You let me figure out what I can afford.”

  Judge Judy ruled in favor of the plaintiff, and Dad changed the channel. Since he didn’t write me any other notes, it was settled. I didn’t know whether to be sad that he’d given in so easily or glad he was accepting my help.

  I felt neither. Pissed was more like it. The situation made me mad as hell.

  “OK, Dad, I’m out of here. I’ve got some calls to make.”

  His eyes never left the TV. We’re a Hallmark card, Dad and me.

  Still, I felt better leaving Hope Rehab Center than I had on any other visit. It wasn’t often that I got to do the right thing. It didn’t feel good, but it fit.

  Until I got to 5450 Gleason and saw two guys who couldn’t be anything except plainclothes LAPD waiting outside my door, I thought I was having a decent day.

  Here’s the thing about cops: I grew up around them. When my father had a barbecue or wanted to go to the beach, all the guys who came with their wives and kids were cops. In junior high, to make my dad happy, I joined the Future Police Officers’ Club. Hell, I got within two weeks of graduating from the police academy, but that’s another story from an earlier life. Maybe I didn’t really think I’d be driving around in a black-and-white one day—not on the good side of the mesh, anyway—but I know most cops are righteous. I’m not one of those people who secretly jabs cops the finger when one pulls up alongside me, and my foot doesn’t jam on the brakes when I see California Highway Patrol. Even after that run-in in ’99, when I could have been looking at a long stint behind bars on a bullshit beef, I’m not scared of cops.

  And Iknew the guys waiting there beside my cactus garden, or at least I knew their names. I’m good with names, a leftover skill from my former line of work. The tall, ruddy one was O’Keefe, who’d given such a heartfelt toast at Dad’s retirement dinner that I’d felt a sting in my throat, wishing I’d known the guy he was talking about—the guy you could come to with any problem, who always made time for you. The Latino guy with the mustache was called Arnaz, another man I’d met at the dinner, whose name I remembered because ofI Love Lucy —but believe me, with his stick-thin build and pockmarked face, he looked nothing like Desi. They were both detectives from Hollywood division, where my father had retired as captain after thirty-five years on the force. Practically family.

  O’Keefe and Arnaz met me with mournful eyes. I hadn’t run into either of these guys at Hope yet, so I figured they didn’t have the stomach to see my father. Coming to see me instead was the coward’s way out, but I didn’t blame them.

  “Hey, guys,” I said. We all shook hands.

  “Tennyson.” O’Keefe’s voice was hoarse, so he cleared his throat behind his fist. “How’s Preach?” That was Dad’s nickname. If my father hadn’t followed his calling into law enforcement, he would have been a minister. Maybe he always had been.

  “Just saw him. Still surly.” I stopped short of mentioning that I planned to move Dad in with me, since I wasn’t ready for even an unsteady stream of well-wishing cops knocking on my door. I decided to dress up my report with the promise of a happily-ever-after. “He seems to be getting better, though. Bit by bit.”

  Both of them thanked Mother Mary and the saints and mumbled excuses about why they hadn’t made it to see him yet. I reached for my keys to unlock the door, and they stepped aside for me, ready to follow me in. Technically, Iinvited them inside, they could say. I made it easy for the SOBs.

  “So…is Dad up for another commendation? Somebody naming a youth center after him?” I hoped no sarcasm bled into my voice. I’d already attended two functions on Dad’s behalf, and nothing made me feel like a bigger fraud.

  The look O’Keefe and Arnaz gave each other as we walked into my living room was my first hint that I’d screwed up. Cold, invisible talons squeezed my temples.

  If you don’t know already, here’s Rule Number One: Never invite a cop inside. Even if they ask with a winning smile, never say,Sure, officer, come on in. OrSure, officer, take a look inside my glove compartment, knock yourself out. Not unless they have a warrant. Unfair as it seems, you don’t win points for thinking you have nothing to hide. You never know what they’re searching for, and you might have something just like it. There is nothing more dangerous than a clear conscience.

  I watched the way their eyes studied my family room, and they weren’t admiring the décor or Dorothy Dandridge’s heart-stopping face. They weresniffing. O’Keefe’s eyes stayed rooted to the shirt I’d been wearing yesterday, left across my sofa. I could almost hear his brain’s neurons firing, making connections.

  “Hey, man, what’s this about?”

  “A body turned up on Sunset this morning,” O’Keefe said in a bland voice. “We think it might be someone you know.”

  “It’s probably on the news by now,” Arnaz said. “You watch the news, Tennyson?”

  “Not if I can help it. Who died?”

  While they stood there in a calculated silence considering their strategy, I felt myselfknow. It was like crashing toward a waterfall in a flimsy raft, with nowhere to go but a long, long way down.

  “A rapper.” O’Keefe saidrapper like most people would saycockroach. “You know a girl named Serena Johnston? She went by the name Afrodite.”

  Went by.Past tense.

  I didn’t say anything. Couldn’t have if I wanted to. There aren’t any good ways to hear about the death of someone you care about, someone you were intimate with so recently you could still smell her mix of sweat and jasmine on your skin, but this way was so wrong it was unholy. My ears rang.

  “Yeah, so she’s dead, Tennyson.” Arnaz might have been trying to sound gentle, but he missed by a mile. He whipped out a notepad. “When did you see her last?”

  “Serena’s…dead?” I felt confused, light-headed. Maybe I’d heard wrong.

  O’Keefe showed me a crime photo, and my heart cracked in two at the sight of it.

  Serena lay open-eyed on a sidewalk, her head nestled by a crumpled Coke can, a black plastic bag pulled across her shoulders like a shawl. Her skin was leeched of color, ashen and gray. Her beautiful lips, so recently loving, cradled bloodied teeth. I had to look away.

  I could hear her voice, so vivid she might have been standing behind me:It shouldn’t surprise me, but it does. There’s always somebody trying to pull you down.

  “Not a pretty sight,” O’Keefe said. “We found her in a plastic bag next to a Dumpster. Split skull. We’re guessing blunt trauma to the back of the head.” He pulled a small plastic baggie out of his coat pocket and dangled it in front of my nose. Inside, I saw my business card held captive. “This was all she had in her pocket.”

  “So you can see why we wanted to talk to you,” Arnaz said. “Could you tell us when you saw her last?”

  I was reeling, dizzy. Bad news and worse news, in the space of a minute. Serena was dead, and the police thought I was wrapped up in it somehow. I hadn’t seen Serena in five years, but a room full of people had seen us together the day she died. I felt the ringing in my ears stop, and everything snapped into clarity. I was in trouble.

  “I ran into her at Roscoe’s Monday, before noon. We exchanged cards.”

  “Which Roscoe’s?” Arnaz said, taking notes.

  “Hollywood.”

  “On Sunset?” Arnaz said, as if he didn’t pass Roscoe’s on Gower and Sunset a dozen times a day. As if there was another Roscoe’s in Hollywood. Instead of answering,
I only stared.

  O’Keefe gave me a crooked half-smile. “I’ve seen you in that commercial. You hanging with all the big rappers and movie stars now, Tennyson?”

  In my mind, I told these two guys to fuck off and get the hell out of my house. But instead, I heard myself speaking in a dutiful monotone. “We were friends before she hit it big. We knew each other a long time ago.”

  “And that’s it?” Arnaz said. “You ran into your old friend. ‘Hey, here’s my card.’ Then what?”

  “Then, nothing. She left, and I left.” My first lie, but discretion is a hard habit to break. Remembering Serena’s smile in her bedroom, then the horrible photo of her corpse and those bloody teeth, I felt sick to my stomach. “You guys need to go.”

  “Can we ask the nature of your relationship, Tennyson?” O’Keefe said.

  The thin line between love and hate is no joke—Dad’s only injuries on patrol were on domestic calls—so you don’t want to be the boyfriend or husband of a murdered woman. There’s no faster way to be anointed Number One Suspect.

  I met O’Keefe’s gaze squarely in the gray eyes beneath his hefty brow, trying to find the space where we were just two men talking, like we did at Dad’s retirement dinner—two people who loved someone in common.Hey man, back off. I know you have a job to do, but you just knocked the wind out of me. Give me some time. “She had some acting work for me. She was a friend who’d made it. I was proud of her. We were supposed to have dinner Friday. I guess I’ll never know the nature of our relationship.”

  It was more than I wanted to say, but the photo of Serena had knocked me off-balance, just as they’d intended. I don’t shed tears in front of anyone unless it’s for a part, but that day brought me the closest I’d come since I was ten. Only pure will kept my eyes dry. These were not people I could grieve with.

  Yeah, so she’s dead, Tennyson. Ho-hum. Another dead rapper out with the trash.

  Deadis a blunt, ugly word. Dad’s stroke was one kind of shock, but I’d been waiting for something to happen to him for years. Serena’s death cut harder and deeper. The world lost some of its sheen that day. Even the air tasted different; bitter and sour and heavy, a toxin I wished I didn’t have to bother breathing.

  O’Keefe backed down, giving me his card in a flash of white. “Call me in the morning, first thing. We need you to come in and talk to us. Maybe you know more than you think you do.” Being Preach Hardwick’s son won me that much courtesy, at least.

  “Every lead helps, Tennyson,” Arnaz said, winking.Just fucking with you, man.

  I nodded.

  O’Keefe squeezed my shoulder so hard that it hurt. “We’ll get the asshole who did this. Give our best to Preach.”

  I almost took back my lie right then. Almost told them what was none of their business about Serena and me. Like I said, I grew up around cops. They think lies are like roaches; they see one, and they’re convinced they’ll uncover a nest of them. Anything else you say is a waste of breath; I learned that from Dad. I wanted to tell the truth.

  But Serena was dead. Worse than dead: Somebody had killed her.

  All my words were gone.

  FOUR

  CALL IT PREMONITION,but I couldn’t sleep that first night. My mind was running through reels of old footage between me and Serena: the Four Seasons, the MTV Music Awards on South Beach, the Black Film Festival in Acapulco. Serena liked the beach, and so did I; swimming in the ocean is never the same twice. I thought of Serena’s nakedness, I won’t deny it, but mostly I remembered her smile. Sadness kept me up the first half of that night.

  The rest was bone-cold nerves. My heart was at a full gallop.

  Life was full of coincidences, but cops don’t believe in coincidence. If you’re close enough to something wrong, cops figure you’ve got wrong stuck to the soles of your shoes, so chances are, you’re guilty of something. They’ll pin this one on you for the ones you’ve dodged in the past.

  O’Keefe and Arnaz knew about ’99, and they probably thought I should have done time back then. Thought I’d only gotten off because my father was the precinct captain, one of the department’s favorite sons, and I can’t deny it. Everyone knows that. As bad as the trumped-up charge against me had sounded then, murder was something else. A murder conviction would end my life, whether fast or slow. There was no logic behind it, no sense, no reason, but a feeling of certainty sat in my stomach and kept me awake until dawn:They want me to be the one.

  Serena’s death was high-profile, which meant there was pressure to make an arrest soon. If I kept them waiting, they would send a cruiser, and I wasn’t about to ride in a police car back to Hollywood division. Never again. I had to control the chessboard, make the next move.

  The real murderer had an advantage, I realized: He knew what to expect. I didn’t even know what time Serena died. I didn’t know shit. The killer had shoved me into the path of an oncoming truck.Who are you, you bastard? Did you have it all planned out? Did you sit and think it through, hammering out every detail, making sure half a dozen people can say you were somewhere else when Serena died? Or did she just piss you off and make you lose your mind?

  I needed a lawyer. I should have started making calls as soon as the cops left.

  But I didn’t have lawyer money. A couple of high-profile female attorneys had sought my services in the past, but I couldn’t call them about this. I couldn’t call them, period. That was always my rule:They callyou. Except for Serena, who was my first paying customer, I never contacted clients directly—only through Mother.

  That was when the idea came to me, gentle and soothing as a hot oil massage: I could run. My passport was valid. The four hundred dollars I had in the bank wouldn’t last long, but I had a few thousand dollars I could get in cash advances on various pieces of plastic. I could vanish to Amsterdam. Or Mexico City. Or Cape Town. I could find a way. I just had to stay gone long enough for the murder to work itself out. I wasn’t under arrest. Running wasn’t even a crime yet. What made me think I had to hang around and get caught up in this shit?

  Then, I remembered Letitia Howard. In the fifth grade, she was the pigtailed brown-noser who sat behind me. Since our last names both began with H, Letitia Howard always ended up in project groups with me. We were at polar ends of the productivity scale. When I started my stalling—Why do we have to do this?—she always snapped off a list of reasons that whipped me into a sulking silence. Because the teacher said so. Because that’s the only way we’re going to learn. Because we’re supposed to. To this day, when I wrestle with questions ofWhy, I hear Letitia Howard’s mosquitolike voice lecturing me. Why couldn’t I run?

  Because running will make you look guilty, and that might send Dad to Glory for once and for good. Because you promised you would never shame him again. Because you promised him a place to live.

  Like I told Serena the last time I saw her—on what may have been the last day of her life—you don’t get to do what you want. You do what you have to do.

  Back in ’92, when Len’s boss at William Morris first signed me, I expected to be a different story. I fooled a producer into thinking I knew something about balling, so I won a regular role as a basketball coach-slash-spiritual-guide onMalibu Academy, that90210 knockoff about prep school kids. I was in nearly half the episodes, and the show lasted two seasons. I had it made. For a while, people recognized me on the street. Finally, my life fit in place the way I’d always thought it should.

  Like most actors who stumble into a good thing early, I thought that show was just a start. Instead, it’s been my high point.Academy was my longest stretch in front of a camera where I could actually emote rather than just playing Negro Number Three Wearing Tie. And Len never gave up on me.

  Len was just an assistant promoted from the mailroom back then, but I always treated him with respect. Only a fool is rude to assistants in a town run by twenty-somethings. But I liked the guy, too. His boss was a cokehead who got mean when he was high, so we built a friendship commiserating ab
out that. When Len jumped ship to CAA, then got himself a few partners and started a new agency, he invited me along. That’s Len. Maybe every agent has a charity case, and I’m his.

  Len and I had lunch every week back when he used to give me scripts for guest spots and made-for-cable knockoffs, and I was cocky enough to pass. I didn’t want to play thugs, pimps, or informants onHomicide —with The Face, who would cast me as a street thug anyway?—and I thought I could hold out for something better. During theAcademy days, when Len represented teen stars Dusty Michaels and Jenna Atchison, too, we traveled in a pack while photographers followed us to and from the Viper Room. Sometimes, I think Len keeps me around for nostalgia’s sake. Those were good days.

  I was supposed to have lunch with Len the day after the cops showed up at my front door and told me Serena Johnston was dead. Considering everything else that had just landed on my heart and soul, one lunch might not seem like a big deal. But as my bedroom filled with gray morning sunlight, I vowed that nothing was going to get in the way of my lunch with power agent Leonard Shemin.

  That’s why I always meditate in the mornings. There’s an answer waiting, if you’re willing to sit still long enough.

  Len, always punctual, beat me to the corner of Wilcox and DeLongpre Avenue, where I’d told him to meet me. He was easy to spot, since he was the only person in sight wearing a tailored suit—Hugo Boss, if I knew Len—on a street where the closest business was SOS Bail Bonds. Like most Hollywood agents, Len had been dressing like he owned a Fortune 500 company since he was still sleeping on his roommate’s sofa bed, pushing a cart in the William Morris mailroom.

  When Len saw me approaching, he outstretched his arms.What the fuck? “What are you doing to me, Tennyson?” Len said, once I was in earshot. “You drag me out here when I told you I’m at Lions Gate at two? They’re all the way in Santa Monica. And where’s the food on Wilcox? A taco stand?”