Casanegra

by Blair Underwood

  Los Angeles is a city of polarities. Baldwin Village is also five miles from Beverly Hills, but that kind of wealth is a universe away to its residents. That’s what statistics show. Let a statistician know where you’re from and what your parents had, and that’s the greatest predictor of what your life will be. You’re from The Jungle? No father in the home? Get used to food stamps and government cheese.

  April had used Intelius.com to ferret out Tyra Johnston’s home address. Most white faces have vanished by the time you get to this part of town. The Jungle. Ask city planners, and they’ll say the area was nicknamed “The Jungle” because of the eucalyptus trees planted to give it a tropical look. Believe that if you want, but I don’t buy it. Dad told me stories of white cops sniggering that rooftops in the Crenshaw district should be painted with house numbers to help track “jungle bunnies” fleeing patrol cars.

  Serena had gone to the moon. When I saw her sister’s street, I realized exactly how far from home she had flown.

  I had expected to find Tyra in one of the neatly manicured homes that still persist despite poverty, where longtime homeowners struggle to hang on to the memory of better times. I was wrong. The apartment building that matched the address in April’s notebook made the drab complex we had just seen behind the alley look like a Maui condo. Everything about the building was weary; from paint so chipped that the naked cement blocks showed through to an elevator that didn’t come when we called for it.

  Tyra’s apartment was listed as 3C, which meant we climbed two flights of stairs in the courtyard while wary residents watched our ascent and assumed we were cops or social workers. A boy who looked like he was fourteen sat atop an overturned water drum on the ground below, surveying his kingdom up and down the street, clearly at work rather than play. The bassline of loud reggaeton vibrated through a window as we climbed upstairs.

  “Lifestyles of the Sisters of the Rich and Famous,”April said.

  “I noticed.”

  I knocked on the door to 3C, preparing myself to see Serena again.

  Tyra Johnston was about two inches taller than her big sister, which was easy to overlook because their faces were nearly identical. She was even wearing hair extensions nearly the same deep burgundy color Serena had been wearing. I could see why the shopkeeper confused them, but I wasn’t fooled by Serena’s face at the door. Tyra’s life-hardened eyes couldn’t have been more different from her sister’s.

  “I already told you motherfuckers everything I got to say,” she said.

  Charming.

  Tyra was as colorful as I remembered from Serena’s party. She had knocked a tray of finger foods out of a waiter’s hand because she claimed he’d ignored her. When someone on the club’s staff tried to calm her, she cussed him out. I had never seen Serena look as angry as when she yanked her sister aside and whispered fiercely in her ear. I’d hung close, just in case it turned into the fight it looked like it was going to be. It hadn’t. Still, I was on Serena’s arm at a lot of parties after that night, and I never saw her sister again.

  “Tyra?” I said. “I don’t know if you remember me, but we met a few years ago. I’m Tennyson Hardwick.”

  “Police?” she said, resigned. Like me, she was tired of talking to cops.

  “No. I’m a friend of Serena’s.”

  “And I’m a reporter for theL.A. Times,” April said, nudging a shoulder past me to show Tyra her press badge. “We’d like to talk to you.”

  I had hoped April would let me gauge Tyra’s mood before we mentioned she was a reporter. But Tyra’s face lit up. “How much?”

  “Excuse me?” April said.

  “You’re about to ask some nosy shit that ain’t none of your business,” Tyra said, arms crossed. “And I’m about to get paid.”

  April tried to suppress her sigh of irritation. “TheTimes doesn’t pay for stories, Ms. Johnston.”

  Tyra’s door was about to slam shut when I braced it open with my foot. I flashed Tyra a grin. “Under the circumstances, I feel moved to offer a personal donation,” I said. I flipped open my wallet and emptied it, pulling out four twenties. “Well?”

  Tyra snatched the money, and I felt the pinch.Damn. I should have offered her half as much, I realized. She might have gone for it, and I’d be forty dollars less broke.

  “Where’s the photographer at? Where’s the video camera?” Tyra said.

  “We can definitely get a photographer here. No problem,” April said. She gave me a hesitant glance, then fumbled inside her purse for her cell phone. “We wanted to talk to you about what happened to Serena. It’s so awful…” Her voice faded as she began dialing. She held up one finger to us, apologizing as someone picked up.

  April had her story. I hoped I would find what I needed, too.

  “I’m so sorry about Serena,” I said. I cradled Tyra’s hand with both of mine, watching her eyes carefully for her reaction. Grief? Regret? Guilt? Tyra rested the weight of her hand inside mine, but her eyes didn’t change, as if she hadn’t heard me.

  “I thought more reporters would’ve come by now—but it’s just cops. Like I have to explain my every movement. All in my business, asking questions.”

  “Most people don’t know Serena had a sister,” April said, hanging up her phone.

  Tyra’s face turned sour. “That’s how she wanted it. You coming in?”

  The inside of her apartment looked much better than the exterior. The living room was bigger than I would have thought, with enough space for a large faux black leather sofa wrapped around her wall and a plasma TV mounted across from it. Her matching black bookshelf was crammed with DVDs and dozens of paperback novels. The room’s off-white carpet was plush and spotless. But, like Serena’s house, the room struck me as bare.

  “They’re still tripping about that restraining order,” Tyra said. “That wasfour years ago. We moved beyond it.”

  “Restraining order?” April said, her notebook ready.

  “We got into some drama and slapped each other a few times. I shoulda got a restraining order againsther. Like I’m gonna go all the way to Hollywood Hills to mess with her. Please. She’s living like a queen in her castle and won’t let nobody come near her. I don’t gotta’ prove myself tonobody —especially not her.” Tyra’s eyes might have looked angry except for all her hurt.

  “April is a reporter,” I reminded Tyra.

  She cut her eyes at me. “So? I ain’t ashamed of nothing I’ve done. I bet Serena can’t say the same thing.”

  “Serena can’t say anything,” I said.

  Tyra looked up at me with the strangest combination of emotions I’ve ever seen; if a director had asked me to produce it, I wouldn’t have known where to start. Annoyance. Pity. Indifference. Sadness. They all splashed across her face like a school of neon tetras. “You’re beat up. I remember you now,” she said. “Just as fine as you can be! Serena could always get anybody she wanted.”

  “So…” April said. “You and Serena didn’t get along?”

  “Like I just said—and like I just told the police—we put that behind us.”

  “But you weren’t close,” I said.

  “If we was close, I guess I’d be living in her house. I guess she’da helped me do something withmy music. Serena went her way, I went mine. She can’t tell me how to act the way she tries to tell everybody else. All she cares about is her image. You can write that down.” Tyra hadn’t said a single kind word about her sister, I noticed, yet she hardly ever referred to Serena in past tense. Was that her way of keeping Serena alive?

  I gave April a look as she scribbled her notes, but she pretended not to see me. I hoped April would use discretion when she decided what to print in the newspaper, but Serena wasn’t her friend. To April, Serena was just a story.

  And Serena wasn’t here to give her side.

  “Can you think of anyone who wanted to kill her?” I said. I was itching to ask Tyra what the hell she’d been doing so close to that alley only hours before her sister�
�s body was found, but I’d learned my lesson from M.C. Glazer.Take it slow.

  Tyra shook her head, and she seemed to shiver. “The first thing I thought was, well, maybe she went back to turning tricks. Even though she had all that money, maybe she still needed to get her freak on.”

  My face went hot. “What do you mean?”

  Tyra gave me a heavy-lidded smile. She seemed to relish my surprise. “Oh, you didn’t know? That’s right. She don’t talk about that in Hollywood, huh?”

  A ho by any other name is still a ho.She was like M.C. Glazer all over again.

  Tyra folded her arms, ready to make a declaration. “Serena let every boy in junior high fuck her for free before Shareef taught her how to do it for money. Why pull trains in the locker room when high school boys pay ten dollars a pop?”

  Her words were so ugly, they blotted out everything else in the room. I wanted to tell April it was time to go, but I couldn’t. If this was true, it might be relevant to Serena’s death. If it wasn’t true, it told me a lot about Tyra. Either way, I had to hear.

  “You’re saying she was a prostitute?” April said. “When did that start, and how long did it continue?”

  I didn’t know what Tyra was talking about, but I didn’t like the turn in conversation; not with a reporter present. “Tyra, if you tell her it’s off the record, she won’t put it in the paper,” I said.

  “Let her print it,” Tyra said, shrugging. “I don’t care.”

  So, it was settled. For the next hour, as we sat on Tyra’s faux black leather couch, I heard sordid, heartbreaking details from Serena’s childhood that I wished I could have heard in a moment of private commiseration with Serena herself. Instead, I had to hear from a sister boiling with so much resentment that every disclosure sounded like an indictment. As I listened, I realized that the story was too awful to be anything but true.

  Tyra and Serena were raised by a single mother roughly six blocks from where she now lived. Their mother, Regina Johnston, had training as a secretary, but bounced from job to job because of a battle with alcohol she sometimes overcame for months at a time. In the end she lost, was killed driving drunk after both girls were grown. The sisters considered her parenting such a poor example that they had vowed never to have children of their own. During the early part of their childhood, the girls were best friends. They were mature beyond their years from taking care of themselves when their mother refused to get out of bed, making threats to end her own life. They learned to rely on each other in a way Regina Johnston could not be relied upon.

  Their mother was a regular Saturday-night clubgoer, and one day she brought home a man she’d met there. She called him Big Ray, and soon, frequent visits became a constant presence. He was living with them before long. As far as Tyra and Serena could tell, the main thing their mother had in common with Big Ray was that they both liked to drink, argue, and watch TV. But Big Ray always had money to spend on them for furniture, for clothes—and even a 1980 Impala he bought their mother for cash.

  His only job was answering his pager and ducking out of the house. It was only when they saw him and their mother cutting up bricks of marijuana on the kitchen table one night that they realized he was a drug dealer. All their friends had said so, but the girls hadn’t believed it. Within six months, he’d moved them into a three-bedroom house big enough for each girl to have her own room for the first time. Despite the constant arguing and a few broken glasses to accompany late-night shouting, life felt good. He spent freely on them when their mother asked, but he wasn’t trying to be anyone’s father.

  On their new street, Serena and Tyra met the two boys: Shareef Pinkney and Devon Biggs. Tyra found the boys nerdy and too talkative—and she preferred jumping rope with the girls on the street—but Serena and the boys quickly became inseparable. They always played games of make-believe. Often, they sat inside the parked Impala and pretended they were taking long road trips together, with Serena at the wheel.

  Serena’s breasts had developed by the time she was twelve, and at the same time Tyra noticed a change in Big Ray. He had rarely talked to them before, except in passing. But now he slipped Serena gifts of Bubble Yum or Now N’ Laters from the corner store. Tyra got nothing. Big Ray began sneaking into Serena’s room. Tyra could tell by the way Serena started mouthing off at their mother that she felt a sense of power from the special visits. And she never lost her taste for it.

  Then, the really bad times started.

  At thirteen, Serena got pregnant. She kept her secret until it was almost too late for an abortion. But she did get one. Big Ray arranged it without her mother’s knowledge. But Serena told when she woke up bleeding in the middle of the night and thought she was dying.

  Regina Johnston refused to believe that Big Ray was the father. Her first reaction was to slap Serena hard enough to black her eye. But after seven days, Regina accepted the truth and threw him out—except that it wasn’t her house. Big Ray showed up with some hard-looking men from his crew, all Black P Stone gangbangers, and tossed their belongings into the street while everyone watched. The only thing in Regina Johnston’s name was the Impala. For nearly a month, with the trunk stuffed with clothes and dishes, the three of them lived in the car.

  Serena stopped playing games of make-believe after that.

  Soon, Tyra heard a rumor that her sister was having sex with any boy who would meet her after school in the boys’ locker room, which a careless janitor was leaving unlocked. When Tyra went to investigate, she found three ninth-grade boys waiting—and she could hear her sister’s voice echoing against the walls—so she knew it was true. Serena became notorious at Audubon Junior High for allowing boys to run trains on her. Because they looked so much alike, Tyra found herself in fights trying to defend her name. Tyra always expected Serena to get pregnant again, but somehow she never did. Later, a doctor told Serena she might never conceive because she’d had her abortion so young.

  By the time Serena was fourteen, she was stashing money in an empty Jiffy peanut butter jar under her bed. Serena swore Tyra to secrecy and then boasted that Shareef had “hooked her up” so they could all get rich. Shareef had orchestrated a network of high school boys from two different schools who would pay to have sex with her, and Devon converted his backyard shed to a makeshift lair with an old foldaway bed. Serena said she had already made a hundred dollars ina week. She, Shareef, and Devon divided the money into thirds.

  They all knew what they were saving the money for: Shareef had a quick mind and a gift for poetry, so he could be a rapper like his heroes, Run-DMC. With the money they earned with their sex-for-pay game, Shareef selling nickel bags after school, and Devon’s knack for sound equipment, they bought a second-hand Tascam mixer that was just good enough for Shareef to record his first CD by the time he was sixteen.

  The sound was terrible, so their CD circulated only in the local house party scene, but one of the songs on Shareef’s first CD was “Coming to Get Mine.” Three years later, with a professional studio and a label’s investment, that single helped his first real album reach sales of a million copies. And up until the day that first hit CD was released, Shareef, Devon, and Serena were still in the sex business. While he was a business student at USC, Devon sometimes introduced his “Nubian Princess” to rich white kids for two hundred dollars a night.

  But Shareef kept his word to Serena. Once Shareef was earning money from his music, he hired Serena as a dancer. She didn’t have dance training, but after a couple of years of touring, Shareef let her take the microphone and lay down her own rap tracks on his CD.

  Afrodite was born.

  “And she hasn’t given a damn about anybody else ever since,” Tyra finished.

  I wanted to wash out my ears. I had just heard the story of a little girl so desperate for a father figure that she’d had sex with her mother’s boyfriend, and Tyra had made it sound as if Serena had schemed to destroy their family. It was as if Tyra was still a little girl herself, blaming Serena for taki
ng their toys away.

  My stomach churned. Tyra could have been telling my own story.

  April’s bearded, disheveled photographer arrived. He suggested a prop for his photo, so Tyra went on talking while she held an unframed photo of her and Serena as young children close to her face; identical twins in pigtails and toothless grins. But the adult Tyra’s pose looked wrong. I’ve seen those photos in the newspaper after tragedies, with relatives’ faces weighted with raw shock and sadness. As the photographer’s bulb flashed, her eyes seemed to glint with something more like triumph.

  Maybe Tyra was just happy to be the famous one for a change.

  Or, maybe she had hated Serena enough to kill her.

  While April huddled with her photographer near the doorway, I crossed my leg so that my knee rested gently against Tyra. I had seen her eyes eating me up. Once upon a time I had belonged to Serena, so to her I was a prize.

  “How did you hear about Serena?” I asked her quietly.

  She leaned closer, making sure I had a view of the soft cleavage exposed above her tight-fitting tank top. I hadn’t noticed her chest until then. “Cops showed up knocking around noon, soon as I got home. One minute it’s, ‘Your sister’s dead,’ and the next thing, it’s ‘What’s your alibi?’”

  “What did you tell them?”

  “I haven’t seen Serena in four months, that’s what. And if it happened Monday night, I was with my girlfriends at Mackey’s. Happy hour’s at six and the music starts at nine, so we were there till midnight. A shitload of people saw me there.” While she spoke, she slipped a bold hand to my leg, above the knee. Her fingers fluttered. I almost flinched, but I caught myself. I wanted her to stay in a talkative mood.