Casanegra

by Blair Underwood

  “Where’s that tape?”

  “My safe. Sealed envelope. Probably be a court officer here next week when I break the seal. Reenie used to always say she would leave all her money to her church. I guess we’ll see.”

  “Church?” I didn’t remember Serena attending church when I knew her; but then again, it’s not like she would have invited me to Sunday brunch at God’s house.

  “Oh, yeah—Reenie caught the Holy Ghost after Shareef got shot.” He said his friend’s name quietly, as if out of reverence. “Neither one of us ain’t been right since.”

  I followed Biggs’s gaze to the photograph of the three of them posing in front of the car as children. Serena stood between the two boys, her head resting on Shareef’s shoulder. I almost couldn’t make myself ask the next question.

  “No offense, man, but I’ve got to ask: Where were you when Serena died?” I couldn’t guess at what Biggs’s motive might be—like he said, her death put him out of a job—but if I was investigating Serena’s murder, I had to get used to asking.

  Biggs’s eyes rested on mine. “OK, Columbo: Cops said it happened about nine. I was here, working late. I took calls, and I can give you a list of the people I talked to. What about you, Hardwick?” His stare didn’t flinch. “Were you at home chilling with your girl?”

  The question carried more weight than it should have. “Wish I had been,” I said. Maybe Serena could have been my girl, except that she was lying on a slab at the coroner’s office. Probably with my DNA all over her. I was well and truly fucked.

  Suddenly, Biggs coughed out a plume of smoke, half-laughing. “I feel you, man. What gets me, Five-O shows up here with a hard-on for a prettyboy like you. Don’t even make itlook like they’re trying, do they?”

  Devon Biggs wasn’t the most observant brother in the world. If he had been, he might have noticed the way my lips snaked into a hard smile, might have wondered why my first and second knuckles were flat and scarred. He might have wondered just what I did that kept my stomach hard and ridged, my shoulders wide. But he didn’t, and probably never realized how much I wanted to reach across his desk and slap the gold out of his teeth. Even if it was true that he’d tried to smooth my way with the homicide guys, Devon Biggs had gotten on my next-to-last nerve.

  “Just tell me the best place to find M.C. Glazer,” I said. My smile was ice.

  Biggs studied me, his glassy eyes sharpening. “You’re serious, ain’t you?”

  “Like you said, you’ll see.”

  “You must not have a radio. Anybody with ears knows about M.C. Glazer’s CD release party at Club Magique.”

  “When?”

  He blew a ragged smoke ring at me. “Tonight, prettyboy.”

  Dad always says God gives you clear signs when you’re on the right path.

  That day, I almost believed it.

  Some things are meant to be done man-to-man, not on the telephone. I knew I was a coward the minute I flipped open my cell and began dialing the number for Hope Rehabilitation Center instead of driving out to see Dad.

  There are people who take pleasure in spreading bad news, so it was possible Dad already knew about my trip to Hollywood division. But that wasn’t the only reason I couldn’t face him. And it wasn’t even because it was already three in the afternoon, and I needed a solid plan on how to talk to one of the best-guarded icons in hip-hop without getting mired in east-west traffic on the 10.

  No, it was worse: I was about to back out on my word. I had told him he had a way out of hell, and now I was about to say he should hang with the devil and the damned a little while longer—which, to his mind, would mean forever. I was backing out, just like he expected me to.

  The nurse I regularly flirted with, Marcela, was happy to patch the call through to Dad’s room and even hold the phone up to his ear. She promised to let me know if he wrote any messages for me on the pad. My investment in Marcela bore fruit that day.

  “OK, Tennyson, I’m putting him on,” she chirped.

  Dead silence, except for a low buzzing sound on the line.

  The first time I tried to speak, my throat only growled. Dad has always had that kind of impact on me. He was my best ally—a top-notch investigator back in the day, and he still had active contacts in LAPD—but I couldn’t ask for his help.

  “Hey, Dad,” I said, once I’d coughed and found my voice again.

  Silence. Not even in a growl in return.

  I was alone in a car that was hot from sitting in the sun, parked at an expired meter in Beverly Hills where only passing strangers could see me. When the tears came, I let them flow freely for the first time since I had heard about Serena’s death. If I had known I was going to choose that moment to cry, I would never have called my father. In all my life, I had never seen Richard Allen Hardwick shed a tear.

  The phone’s silence roared at me.

  “Listen, man…” I said, shocked at how difficult it was to mold words from my boiling breath. “I know I, uh…promised I’d get you out of there. And Iwill. You have my word. But I can’t do it until next week. Something’s come up, and I have some work to do. The money really will help us out.” Dad had always known when I was lying, and all the acting classes in Hollywood wouldn’t change that. “I’m sorry, man. I really wanted to—”

  I heard a sound and waited with a pounding heart. Maybe there would be some absolution.Don’t worry about it, Tennyson. I’ll know you’ll do what you can when you get back, son.

  But the next voice I heard was Marcela’s, a whisper. “Tennyson? I’m sorry. He turned away from the phone.” She sounded embarrassed. “Do you want me to…?”

  “No, that’s all right, beautiful,” I said. Speaking sweet words to a woman lifted some of the weight from my heart. “Let him be.”

  In a strange way, that conversation with Dad was liberating.

  Going to prison for a murder I hadn’t committed could hardly be worse.

  SIX

  M.C. GLAZER ROSE TO RAP STARDOMin the wake of Dr. Dre, Ice-T, Ice Cube, and Snoop. He and Tupac borrowed a few pages from each other’s books, except that Glaze spent most of his teenage years behind bars instead of at a performing arts school, he never had ’Pac’s poet’s heart, and—most important—he lived to tell his tales. No one has ever taken a poll, but I would bet most rap fans would rather have lost Glazer that night in Vegas. He was at the MGM Grand sitting right behind ’Pac the night Tyson trashed a punching bag named Bruce Seldon in 109 seconds. He was on the outs with Suge Knight, too. A slight blink of fate might have put M.C. Glazer in the path of the bullet that stole Tupac. But we don’t choose who lives and who dies. Dad would say that’s God’s call. Sometimes, I wonder if Dad’s got it upside down.

  It took me only a few minutes at an internet café on Vineland to bring the picture into better focus, and Devon Biggs’s claims made more sense with each hit on the search engine. M.C. Glazer had been arrested for attempted murder when he was only fourteen, and he’d just been warming up. You name it, he’d been charged with it. Sexual battery. Assault with a deadly weapon. Trafficking. Statutory rape—that put my teeth on edge. When he was twenty-two and already a burgeoning superstar, he was arrested for having sex with a fourteen-year-old girl. The case went away when her family withdrew the charges, probably after they bought themselves a new house with the payoff they sold their daughter’s soul for. The more I learned about M.C. Glazer, the less I liked him.

  But rap fans had canonized him. Every trip through lockup’s revolving door sold M.C. Glazer another mountain of CDs. After diversifying his exploding assets into a fashion line and turning himself into a megaproducer—hey, you know the story—M.C. Glazer hadn’t been arrested in at least six years. But I’m not a big believer in miraculous recoveries. Money doesn’t fix a person who’s broken. Money just entices people to accept your eccentricities and makes your tracks easier to hide. Cool James had it right: Man made the money; money never made the man.

  M.C. Glazer was worth talking to,
and fast. I just had to figure out how.

  I couldn’t expect to walk into CopKilla Records and gain an audience the way I just had with a king stripped of his kingdom like Devon Biggs. And getting inside Club Magique on the night of an M.C. Glazer release party wouldn’t be any easier than scoring a ticket to a White House garden party—not unless I was willing to go to my list of former clients, and I wouldn’t do that. Even if I could convince the club’s management to hire me as a bouncer, I’d never get the job by nightfall.

  I would have to go Hollywood on this one.

  When it comes to Making It in Hollywood—whether you’re an actor, an agent, a writer, you-name-it—everyone in the business knows there’s no such thing as The Way. Anyone who’s selling The Way is a liar. If you don’t have access to the big auditions or the premiere after-parties, you have to engineer your own way to meet people in power. It can happen in the restroom. Or an elevator. Or a parking lot. I knew a guy who sold a script delivering pizzas in Hollywood Hills. And an actress who got her first real break singing telegrams around Universal Studios. Hardly any two stories are alike.

  If I wanted into this party, I had to find someone else with access. I didn’t have time to research who M.C. Glazer’s bodyguards were to see if I could find a buddy of a buddy. Bodyguards are low-profile by definition—the good ones, anyway.

  But if it was a rap party, there would be hoochies.Lots of hoochies, many of them top-dollar. Now, let me give you some of Tennyson Hardwick’s Hoochology 101:Hoochie is not a word I use lightly. I’m not talking about the sisters with dreams of video-dancer stardom, the college students and single mothers training their asses off to compete in the industry. I’m not even talking about the strippers doing what they think they need to so they can keep the lights on—although trust me, some strippers are straight-up hoochies, too. Dancers, strippers, and prostitutes may look like hoochies to the untrained eye, but those sisters are selling a fantasy.

  But real-life hoochies have boughtinto the fantasy—they see themselves as a walking set of buttocks, breasts, and orifices—and their only aspiration is to use their bodies to con as many men as they can out of as much as they can get, before they pass their sell-by date. Some hoochies are paid with cash, and others are paid with dinner at Spago, diamonds, backup singing gigs on videos, or invitations to the bomb parties. You know what I’m talking about. It takes one to know one? Maybe so. But even when I was working seven nights a week, I never lost sight of the difference between fantasy and reality. One reason I quit was that I knew I was walking too close to that line.

  I’ve met a lot of hoochies. And if there was a Hoochie Convention at Club Magique that night, the only person to talk to was the Convention Planner herself. I hadn’t dialed that telephone number in five years, and the last time I’d called, I told the woman at the other end of the line that she would never hear from me again. But maybe she was a prophetess, because her slow, Serbian-accented rasp laid it all out:You’ll be back, Tennyson. You don’t have anywhere else to go.

  And in the end, she was right.

  After all this time, I was crawling home to Mother.

  The pager number still worked. Mother’s procedure was this: no direct calls. Given the nature of her business, she operates with buffers to keep under the radar. You dial Mother’s pager number, and then you wait for her to call you back. I didn’t want to use my cell, so I bought a throwaway Nokia Tracfone at a Best Buy in Culver City. More money than I could spare, but I needed to take precautions to keep from getting in more trouble. It was not a time to be sloppy.

  Back in the day, Mother’s organization returned a call within five minutes. This time, my new cell hadn’t rung in twenty. I wondered if the number was so ancient that I had lost track of her. I also thought that might be for the best, considering.

  I decided to drive back home to wait, since I wanted to pack a small bag with essentials for a couple of nights, in case I had to make a trip. I felt a surge of paranoia, just like Ray Liotta inGoodFellas, expecting cars to follow me, peering skyward every time I heard a ghettobird chopping the air overhead. I drove past my house a couple of times, and as far as I could tell, no one was watching it.

  I threw together a sandwich on stale bread while I packed, and it helped. I had been too nervous about Len and the police to eat the hot dog I bought for myself at lunchtime, and I realized my blood sugar had flatlined.

  I was wondering how long it would take to drive to Canada when my new cell rang. A woman’s voice, but younger than Mother’s.“Da?” she said. Serbian.

  “I need to talk to Mother.”

  A brief pause. “Name?”

  “Tell her it’s Ten.”

  The voice clicked away, the line dead. Mother’s operation never had been much for employee relations, always emphasizing customer service instead. I hadn’t spoken to Mother yet, and the wordemployee was already in my mind. I sighed.If you know what’s good for you, you’d better hope Mother doesn’t call.

  Then, of course, she did.

  Her voice was girlish, no small feat for a woman who must be past seventy.“Ten! Very long time, no? I see you on my television. Very nice-smelling underarms, eh? But to us, you always smell nice. Your friends still ask for you. One last week, only.” That was Mother—always closing.

  “You’re the only friend I called to talk to, Mother.”

  Shetsk-tsked, muttering in Serbian. “This is a pity. Your voice is sad, Ten. Now I am sad, too.”

  “I’m sad because a friend of mine died.”

  “A friend I know?” Suddenly, Mother sounded wary.

  “No, Mother. I met her before I knew you. A woman I cared about.”

  “And I knew nothing of this woman?”

  “Nothing at all.”

  She breathed, full of relief. “Then why do you call?”

  “I need a favor.”

  “You know I am not in business for favors.” So much for sentimentality. There was a time I brought Mother a lot of money. During those days, she used to sip too much Smirnoff and tell me teary stories of her flight from Subotica into Hungary after her husband was killed during the Kosovo War. We almostwere friends. Almost.

  “Hear me out, Mother. Please.” She was silent, so I went on. “There’s a hip-hop party at Club Magique tonight. I’m sure you’ve heard. It’s all over the radio.”

  She laughed, a wicked rumble. “Yes, I hear.”

  Her laughter gave me hope. At least she wasn’t in one of her evil moods. “I need to get inside, but I’m not on the guest list. So I’m offering my services as a bodyguard. In case you can think of anyone who needs special attention.”

  “Your friends in need of special attention, they are not at Club Magique.”

  I wasn’t irritated with Mother for pushing, but I was irritated with myself for the part of me that was realizing how much easier it would be to get out of town with a few thousand dollars for a night’s work. “We can have this conversation my way, Mother, or we can saypozdrav.” One of the Serbian words I had learned—good-bye.I’m fluent in Spanish, and I can get by in French. I also know enough Japanese and Serbian to raise eyebrows. A good memory is useful for more than memorizing lines. Languages are my hobby; they come easy to me.

  Shetsk-tsked again. “Such a choirboy now, eh? This is a tragedy. I know of no one in need of…special attention. The club takes good care.” A throaty chuckle. “I know you are a very clever boy, but I worry about that lovely face. The bouncers, they are like mountains.”

  “It’s a favor, Mother. I just need someone to get me in the door.”

  It took her a long time to answer. “And what does Mother get for this favor?”

  “One of your girls needs protection, you know how to reach me. No charge.”

  I used to make her money, and now I was promising a different set of skills; one almost as high as the ones she’d marketed in the past. But not quite. And for whatever reason, Mother was happiest when her employees worked with their clothes off. />
  Again, she muttered to herself in Serbian. “No, no. This is not enough. You will come to see me. We talk face to face. I accept nothing less.” Mother knew she would be more convincing in person. She thought I would be too weak to say no if she had an enticing client and a ridiculous fee waiting for me—and maybe she was right.

  My mouth was dry, and something stirred in the deepest pit of my stomach that felt like a glimmer of arousal. The sensation alarmed me, but I had run out of choices. “I don’t have time today. I’ll come this week.”If I can keep my ass out of jail.

  “Tomorrow,” she insisted.

  I closed my eyes, cursing silently. “Tomorrow.”

  “Tsk.You say this like Mother would hurt you. How could I, silly boy, when you are so dear to me? You know this. And also, you should know something of this word you speak,pozdrav: You speak it to mean good-bye. But it is also a greeting—like you say,hello. So good-bye is not good-bye, eh?”

  “It never is, Mother. Not with you.”

  Again, she laughed. She sounded like she had just won Lotto. “You will go to Club Magique at ten o’clock. There, you will meet Honey.”

  “How will I know her?”

  “You will not, but this is no worry. She will know you.”

  Mother was wrong: I pegged Honey on sight. I couldn’t have missed her if I’d been blindfolded.

  Some people don’t have any common sense. That’s what I thought when I saw a young woman walking naked on the curb outside Club Magique, smoking a cigarette like she was in her own living room. Oh, she didn’tknow she was naked—after all, she was wearing stilettos and what looked like a minidress made entirely of chain mail. But as I got closer, I saw that the chains were really bandoliers—loaded with Glazers, no doubt. Her silicone breasts could not be caged, so her business was poking out all over. The rows of shiny copper bullets couldn’t do much to cover this girl’s double-Ds and their dark nipples pointing skyward, the V-shape of her closely trimmed pubic hair, or the dimpled ham hocks otherwise known as her ass. The girl was naked. On a public street.