Casanegra

by Blair Underwood

“What did she say?”

  “Who says I have to tell you?”

  I ground my teeth together, silent. April was right: I couldn’t control Chela, or what happened to her. I was in over my head. If Chela wanted me to drop her off at Mother’s, fine. At least Lorenzo and DeFranco wouldn’t get to her there.

  Chela slurped the last of her macchiato. “She said your money is waiting.”

  “I only get that money if I bring you back.”

  Chela shrugged. “Then that’s what you should’ve done.”

  “Maybe. But it’s not what I did.”

  “So what’s your deal, anyway? You’re gonna treat me nice and cook for me and send me back out so you can get a cut instead of Mother?”

  “Is that what Mother said?”

  “No. Mother said you used to work for her, but you quit.” Chela saidyou quit as if it made me either weak or stupid, or maybe both.

  “That’s true. I quit.”

  “Why?”

  A shining moment for genuine rapport. I wished I had a profound answer ready. “Having sex for a living didn’t feel good to me.”

  Chela chuckled. “That’s your problem. Your head’s all wrong.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “With a trick, you’re just fucking. It’s a piece of equipment, and you’re at a job. And you have to be smart, not like those skanks on the street. You find somebody like Mother, who can get you the celebrities and big money. I’m not a druggie, I never bareback, and I’ve got Norplant. What’s the big deal?”

  “Well, maybe my head is all wrong, but it seems like more than that.”

  “Only if you trip about it.”

  “I’m still tripping about things I did when I was your age I didn’t know I would trip about. And I was a grown man, twenty-five, before I went to Mother. If Mother makes you happy, then wait three years. She’ll still be here—Mother will outlive all of us. See if you’ve changed your mind. What’s the difference?”

  “Only a few hundred thousand dollars. What’s the difference if Idon’t wait?”

  “If you don’t wait, you don’t have a chance to change your mind. You’ll be with Mother without ever knowing what else is out there.”

  Chela laughed a bitter laugh at me, like a cough. “Oh, Iknow what’s out there.”

  “You know what was out there before,” I said. “This is now.”

  “Oh, really?” Chela said. “You mean like yesterday, when I was hiding from police all day in a tiny room with nothing to eat and trying not to pee? Thanks, but no thanks.”

  I hardly knew Chela, but I can’t remember anyone’s words gutting me quite so badly, except for Dad’s—and I had that to look forward to next. I blinked, but I didn’t have a comeback. Chela was right. I couldn’t offer her an alternative.

  “Look…we can research…” I began.

  “Here’s what’s up, Ten…” Chela said, as if she were the one with twenty years’ more life experience. She stretched her arm across the seat, her wrist dangling behind me on my headrest. “Mother said you’re a good guy. For real. She said I can trust you. But that world you live in—with that house and all that great stuff—that’s not the real world. I had no mother, no father. I stopped wetting the bed when I was eight, and that’s when I had to start cleaning Nana’s pissy sheets. She was too poor for a doctor, or for the right medicine, and she would have died out on the street if it wasn’t for me. So my life started out shitty, and I got to see how it looks at the shitty end. I knew pretty quick that foster care wasn’t gonna work out for me, so I had to let that go. Then came Mother.”

  There, Chela paused. I glanced at her. She was blinking rapidly, but her voice was still breezy when she went on. “Now I’ve got a nice house. I’ve got my own room. And all I have to do is fuck a few guys here and there—and most of them are hotties or rich anyway—and I’ve got thousands of dollars in the bank.Twenty thousand.”

  She should have had more than that. Mother was taking more than her fair share. “That’s a lot of money,” I said anyway.

  “No, see, if I told my friend Desiree back at school in Minneapolis that I had five hundred dollars in the bank, she would say, ‘Hey, girl, that’s a lot of money.’ But I’m fourteen years old, and I havetwenty thousand dollars.”

  I wanted to run Mother down with my car. “Mother said you werefifteen.”

  “Fourteen and a half,” Chela clarified, which only sounded worse. “The point is, am I supposed to be happy making minimum wage working a French fryer? Which, by the way—do you know how bad that is for your skin? Or am I supposed to go live with people who get money to take care of kids nobody wants and maybe have to fuck my new daddy and brothers for free?”

  My throat constricted. “I know terrible things can happen in foster care, but kids also find loving families,” I said. “Things are different when you have an advocate—someone to look out for you.”

  “I know what an advocate is.”

  “I figured that. And please don’t use that language around me.” I couldn’t help myself. Chela had an angel’s face, and the wordfuck from her mouth was sacrilege.

  “What language?”

  “The word that begins with F,” I said. “Don’t use it around me.”

  Chela stared at me, dumbfounded. Then, she laughed. “You are hilarious.”

  “You’re a smart girl, Chela, but school bored you to death,” I said. “I bet you were too advanced for your classes, so you thought you hated it. But what if you just never had the right classes? What if you weregood at school? There are plenty of jobs you could get where you can earn good money. Mother isn’t the only one who pays.”

  “Oh, you mean like in a hundred years, when I got out of college?”

  “What’s the rush?”

  “Where the hell am I supposed to live?”

  “That’s the part we have to figure out.”

  “Yeah, no shit. That’s the parteverybody has to figure out,” Chela said. Then she grinned. “Am I allowed to say ‘shit’?”

  “Yes. But not around my father.”

  “I know how to act around old people. Nana didn’t raise me in the gutter.”

  I laughed. Chela was smart and somehow funny despite all she’d been through, and I liked her—a lot. That realization stung me so hard that my laugh faded.I can’t even take care of myself. How can I do anything for her?

  “Your dad’s sick?” Chela said.

  I nodded.

  “Did he break his hip?” she said.

  “No. Why?”

  “Because I heard that when old people break their hips, they only live for six months. Not all the time, but, like a lot of them. I was trying to tell if he was…dying.”

  “He had a stroke. He has a bad heart,” I said. “Yes, maybe he doesn’t have much time.”

  Aloud, the words felt less powerful than they did when I buried them in the foggy, forbidden regions of my mind. Stripped of their mystery and intrigue, those words were just a phrase in need of special handling. It was sad and final, but I could feel some of the killing weight seeping out of the idea, my brain resorting it.

  “When Nana broke her hip, she passed three months later, in her sleep,” Chela said softly. “I was kind of glad for her. She was hurting all the time. You know?”

  “I know.” I imagined how pissed I would be if I was in Dad’s place. He had spent his entire career upholding the law, and now his body was a prison. Until now, I had been afraid to think the words:Dad is dying. I’d known since his heart attack forced him to leave his job and I started counting the minutes before he would end up lying in a bed all day. Dad needed his job to live.

  I was the least of Dad’s problems. I was still attaching expectations to him as his son even while his body’s organs struggled to hold on. My thoughts of moving him into my house were selfish, in a way; an opportunity for me to finally demonstrate to Dad that I was a man after all. Now, I couldn’t even do that.

  I had no father anymore, not really. Ther
e was no moreus, no morewe. The man who had raised me was consumed by his own dying. We were each fighting our worst battles alone. He might die first, or I might.

  One of us might die today.

  “I think I might get arrested, Dad.”

  I’d asked Chela to wait in the lounge while I talked to my father alone in his room. Two sets of commercials passed before I finally blurted it out in the middle ofJudge Joe Brown, right before the ruling.

  Dad’s eyes mooned to three times their normal size. His left arm patted the mattress beside him, searching for the remote. I would have helped him, but he only got mad when I tried to do things for him, so I stayed in my chair and waited. He finally turned off the TV. A curtain of silence swallowed us.

  Dad blinked and went wide-eyed again, waiting.

  “I ran into an old friend of mine Monday. A rapper and actress named Afrodite.”

  Dad was already nodding. He knew Afrodite’s name, had to know she’d been murdered. Dad didn’t miss the nightly news. If it were possible, his eyes got wider.

  “Her real name was Serena Johnston, and I cared about her…”

  Dad listened, rapt. He seemed all right through the first part of the story—even my visit to M.C. Glazer’s house had no noticeable impact on him—but when I got to Jenk’s death, his eyes closed tight. He looked like a funeral corpse, but one in pain, as if the mortician had decided not to sugarcoat the whole business.

  I plowed through to the end. By then, my breath was scalding my throat. “So that’s it, man,” I said. “I’m stuck in the middle, and I’m just waiting to get locked up.”

  Dad opened his eyes lifted his left hand, which was trembling violently. He pointed toward his night-table. “P-p…pad,” he said. He had to repeat it twice more before I understood. His shaking hand rattled me; seeing weeks of painstaking progress set back in an instant jammed my thoughts. I handed Dad his pad and the black marker he used to write messages. He scrawled two words, all capitals, and I had no problem reading them despite the craggy lines:

  DID YOU

  The two words were followed by an indecipherable squiggle that I finally recognized as my father’s attempt to make a question mark.

  Hurt burned my stomach, but I ignored it. He had a right to ask. I would, too. “Dad…” I said. I leaned closer to him and held his bony hand, absorbing his tremors until he was still. I knew he wanted to pull his hand away—Dad wasn’t one for physical displays—but I held on. “I know I’m not what you wanted me to be. Iknow that. I have messed up, I have embarrassed you, I have made you wonder where I came from because I’m not you, and I’m not the person my mother was.”

  Dad looked away, at the ceiling. Some widowers remarry right away because they need to be with someone, but Dad had stayed devoted to his dead wife. It was one more thing that separated us; he had known Evelyn Patricia Rutledge Hardwick—high school English teacher, church pianist, and community activist—and I had not.

  “I did not kill Serena. And I did not kill Detective Jenkins. Maybe I’ve lied to you too many times to expect you to believe me, but it’s the truth. I’m not a killer. I swear it on my mother. On her soul.”

  Dad’s fingers suddenly tightened so hard across mine that they hurt. I tried to tug away, but couldn’t. His eyes spat fire at me. “D-don’t…you…dare…” For the first time in ages, I understood him with no problem.

  “I would never swear on Mom’s soul if I was lying, Daddy. I didn’t do it.” I’d been there only a half-hour, and I sounded like I was eight years old again.

  Dad started breathing quickly, sucking air through his nostrils, and I was alarmed. Was he having another heart attack? I was reaching for the nurse’s call button when Dad’s clawlike hand stopped me. Then, he picked up his marker again. He scrawled more rapidly this time, and as a result the writing was nearly illegible. I struggled with the letters, until slowly they came into focus:SET UP .

  “You’re saying…Iwas set up?” I said, to be sure I understood. He nodded rapidly, his breathing still excited. He puffed out a breath, and I realized he was trying to speak. I leaned over him, listening. “What is it?”

  “Ge-get…Marrrrr…cel…la…” he said. His tongue worked painstakingly, slowly.

  “Dad, are you OK?” I reached for the call button again, but he shook his head, pointing toward the doorway instead.

  “Mar…cel…la,” he said. “Lunch.”

  He didn’t want me to call the duty nurse; he wanted me to find Marcela instead.

  I bolted from my chair, running to the doorway.Please, God, don’t let him be having a heart attack. If something happened to Dad because of me, I would never forgive myself. I nearly skidded on the slick linoleum as I sped past the confab of three young nurses at the nurse’s station and ran toward the cafeteria at the far end of the building. Their remote laughter followed me.

  Like most institutional cafeterias, the narrow room smelled unappetizing, like sour steam and overcooked vegetables, just like at my junior high school. The smell almost gagged me, an old reflex. There were two or three patients in wheelchairs at the tables. I almost missed Marcela because she was sitting in a corner, behind a potted bird-of-paradise plant. Her face was hidden in a paperback copy of Gabriel García Marquez’sLove in the Time of Cholera while her fork stirred a wilted Caesar’s salad.

  When she saw me, a shadow passed across her face. “Your father?”

  I only had to nod, and Marcela was up and on my heels. She hurried to Dad’s room with me, but her face was calm as she leaned over Dad’s bed. He was still conscious, and he smiled when he saw her, so I relaxed.

  “What is it, Captain?” Marcela said. “Your son can’t turn on the TV for you?”

  Dad chuckled, and I was so amazed that I almost didn’t recognize the sound. Garbled whispers came from Dad’s throat, and Marcela leaned so close to his mouth that her ear nearly rested against it. She listened, nodding. He spoke for a long time, in a code only Marcela could understand.

  “Write this number down,” Marcela said to me, and recited a string of ten digits.

  Quickly, I scribbled the numbers on Dad’s pad. “Whose number is this?”

  Marcela didn’t answer right away, concentrating on Dad’s fevered whispers. She nodded. Her thick eyebrows merged with concern as she stared at me.

  “It’s the number of a detective, a friend of your father’s. Hal…” She paused, and Dad whispered again. “Hal Dol…inski, I think.” Dad nodded, smiling, and his torrent of whispers began again. Finally, Marcela straightened and picked up the phone. “I’ll make this call. I’ll be your father’s voice. Then you can talk to the detective.”

  I was confused, but Marcela wasn’t. Her fingers flew on the phone’s keypad. In all the time Dad had been here, I’d never had any luck getting an outside line, but apparently she knew the trick. While the line rang, Marcela covered the receiver to explain: “I make calls for your father. Like with the insurance company.”

  “Bless you,” I said. I don’t use that phrase often, but it felt right. I’d gotten a message about a problem with Dad’s insurance, but I never called back.

  “My brother works for the L.A. County Sheriff’s Office. I…” Marcela cut herself off, her voice snapping to businesslike precision: “Hello, this is Marcela Ruiz calling on behalf of Captain Richard Hardwick. Is this Detective Dolinski?”

  A pause as the man verified who he was. “Hello, Detective. I understand there has been a problem involving Captain Hardwick’s son. The captain is right here with me, and he asked me to call you. He wants you to tell his son about…” When she faltered, my father gestured for her again. More whispers.

  “Sir, he wants you to tell his son about Richard Jenkins,” she finished.

  “Robert Jenkins,” I corrected, and Marcela repeated Jenk’s name.

  “Please hold for Captain Hardwick’s son,” Marcela said, and gave me the phone.

  The transaction had me feeling dazed, my heart pounding. I felt like part of Doro
thy’s entourage arriving in the Emerald City, granted an audience with the Great and Powerful Oz. “Hello?”

  “You’ve stepped in a great big steaming pile of shit now—huh, kid?” a man said. I heard commotion in the background. A restaurant? Maybe he was on a cell phone. The voice sounded familiar, but the background noise made it hard to place.

  “Do you know what’s going on, Detective? I sure don’t.”

  “Got a pretty good idea,” the voice said, and I nailed him: He had been present at my interrogation, the man whose face I thought I knew. Hal.Uncle Hal, I’d called him, just as all of Dad’s friends were Uncle this or Uncle that. I hadn’t seen him since I was twelve or thirteen. He used to windsurf when Dad took me to cookouts on the beach, and I’d always thought his sunburned chest was impossibly broad. He was much smaller now. Much older. “How’s Preach taking it?”

  “I just told him, and the first thing he did was ask his nurse to call you.”

  “Figures,” Hal Dolinski said, and he sighed. “How’s he doing otherwise? I haven’t seen him in a while…”

  “He’s good,” I said, the quickest answer. “What’s going on?”

  “If you say you heard any of this from me, I’ll call you a liar under oath.”

  “Go on.”

  The man sighed again. Despite his friendship with Dad, hereally didn’t want to talk to me. As of now, he had put his job at risk. “Robert Jenkins, aka our current Fallen Hero, was just a gangbanger with a badge. End of story. Lieutenant Nelson told you he’s been under investigation for six months, but it’s more like five years. Nothing sticks. I was in IAG when we first got wind of him. Every time we got close, brass intervened and tried to make it go away. Preach knows all about it. Jenkins was Hollywood division before he got run over to South Bureau.”

  I glanced at my father, who was watching me closely, eager to know what Dolinski was saying. His breathing had slowed to normal. I noticed a red button for the phone’s speaker. “Can I put you on speakerphone? Dad’s right here,” I said.

  “Yeah, yeah, I guess so,” Dolinski said reluctantly. “Anything for Preach. Just watch who listens.”