Where to Choose

by Penny Mickelbury

  “This is Jennifer Johnson reporting from the Jacaranda Estates community in West L.A., where it appears that after almost forty years, the naysayers can finally say, ‘I told you so.’ In the late 1950s, a Black man and a Mexican man had a dream that Blacks and Mexicans could live together in peace and harmony. In 1959, fifty Black and Mexican families—twenty-five of each—moved into Jacaranda Estates. The first Anglo moved in in the mid-1980s. The first reported crime occurred six months ago and escalated into a pattern of vandalism that has included burglary and automobile theft. And there’s been a crime com­mitted within the boundaries of Jacaranda Estates practically every week since, including, in the last two months, the murder of two longtime residents—an elderly Black woman and an el­derly white woman. A third victim, another elderly Black woman, a native of Ethiopia, lies helpless in a coma. First ter­ror gripped the community, and then anger. Why? Because the police so far have identified no suspects, have made no arrests despite the belief by several long term residents, including four original members of the Jacaranda experiment, that the per­petrators are a group of young men who have taken over what once was a children’s playground within the community bound­aries. The police and several of those young men have con­firmed that the young men have not been questioned about the crimes, nor are they considered suspects. This report is the be­ginning of an ongoing investigation. We will keep you informed about events in what is still, forty years later, a unique living environment.”

  Weary. It was one of those words that carried the weight of the strug­gle of peoples and cultures. It was one of those words that conjured up images of invincible people standing firm in the face of unthink­able obstacles: Sojourner Truth and John Brown and Nat Turner and Harriet Tubman and Gandhi and Martin King and Mother Teresa. People who served as examples to others how not to get weary but to stand firm and persevere. People whose weariness should have killed them but for whom weariness became armor against evil.

  Carole Ann knew she was neither saint nor savior, but she was weary and she had reached the point of being willing to succumb to it. She didn’t know how the Harriet Tubmans and Mother Teresas kept going. Didn’t know why they kept going. Didn’t understand the motivation. That she had succeeded in securing federal-witness-protection- program status for Gloria Jenkins’s elderly, blind, sick mother was of little consequence to Carole Ann; she should have succeeded at that task. There was no good reason or possible excuse for failure. And yet she almost had failed. It had taken more than two weeks of asking, and then of begging; cajoling and wheedling; and when those tactics had not produced the desired results, she had resorted to bullying and threatening and demanding the return of past favors. And then she’d gotten nasty: Had threatened to open doors and let skeletons fall where they may. And only then did she get what she was after. But meanness shouldn’t have been necessary, wouldn’t have been necessary had the whole damn town not been blaming her for what happened.

  Goddammit! She was being treated like a pariah and she was the one whose husband had been murdered, the one who almost had lost her own life in pursuit of her husband’s killers. She wasn’t the bad guy, but people she’d known for more than fifteen years, people whose respect she’d earned, had re­fused to see her or to take her phone calls. They treated her as if she were something deadly and contagious. So she stalked them and threatened to rub up against them. She knew where they ate their power breakfasts and lunches and dinners; she knew which racquet and health clubs they belonged to; and she knew where many of them lived—they’d entertained her in their homes. When she threatened to infect them with whatever they thought she had, they gave her what she wanted. But the victory had cost more than she had to give, and when finally she reported to Jake and presented the signed, sealed document that meant anonymous freedom for the woman whose name never again would be Anna Mae Jenkins, his hasty thanks and change of subject wounded her.

  Not that Jake hadn’t been properly supportive and properly an­gered by her travail: He’d called her tormentors some names she’d never heard and had vowed to get even on her behalf the very moment the opportunity presented itself to him. And Carole Ann had no doubt that opportunity would arrive, but she didn’t want vengeance. She wanted her life back. She wanted to eat, to play, to sleep, to dream. To be who and how she was before she was a pariah. Before A1 was murdered. And here was Jake with another case for her, with yet another opportunity for her to see how far down the heap she’d fallen.

  “I don’t want to do another job for you, Jake.”

  “This one pays big time, C.A. This is no freebie.”

  “I don’t care. I don’t want to do it. I’m not going to do it. In fact, I’m going to see my mother. I leave Thursday.”

  Jake’s lips compressed into a tight line and his eyes became nar­row slits through which anger still managed to flash. “You can run but you can’t hide,” he intoned, and sat back in the huge chair that enveloped him, watching her through the half-open lids.

  “My mother needs me,” she said wearily. “She’s having some kind of difficulty with the police.”

  Jake snapped fully to attention. “Your mother is in trouble with the cops? Out in L.A.?”

  Carole Ann sighed heavily. “She may or may not be a material witness to a crime, but instead of sharing her information with the police, she chose to tell a reporter.” Carole Ann spit out the last six words with a distaste that curled her lips. “Why she would choose to talk to a reporter is beyond me.”

  “Oh, get over it, C.A.,” Jake said, but he chuckled as he said it, his anger and irritation riding in the backseat for the moment. “It was reporters who took the heat off your ass in the first place, making you a hero in the second place. In case you don’t remember,” he added dryly.

  She remembered. She’d always remember. How could she forget? For the better part of a month, every aspect and detail of her life— and of her husband’s death—had been picked apart and fed to a rav­enous public ready and willing to make a heroine of her, a cultural icon, if she had permitted it. Newspapers, radio, television—local, national, and international—told everybody who cared to know, and a few who didn’t, how she had discovered who killed her husband. And it was the media who snatched the blindfold off a justice system hesitant to bring down a wealthy, powerful man. A member of the United States House of Representatives. A man who just happened to be a murderer.

  “OK. So there’s such a thing as a decent reporter.”

  “Yeah,” he snarled at her, nasty back on the front seat, hands on the steering wheel. “Just like there’s such a thing as a decent lawyer or a decent cop.”

  Carole Ann stood up and began to pace. Jake’s office was perfect for it. It was smaller than the one she’d occupied in her days as a se­nior partner in a megabucks law firm, but just right for pacing. “I’m sorry, Jake. You don’t deserve this ugly stuff I’m tossing at you. You deserve my best, but I don’t have it to give. That’s why I’m leaving. I’ve got to get away. Please understand that. I can’t find or feel or see anything good inside me, Jake.”

  “But we see it, C.A. Your friends see who and what you really are.” She paced over to him and hugged him—hugged his head be­cause he was still seated—then paced back to the other side of the desk, missing his reaction to the spontaneous and extremely un­characteristic gesture.

  “You like me, Jake. I like you. That’s why we’re friends. But in that place where ‘like’ carries no weight, Jake, we also respect each other. I spent more than two weeks trying to talk to people I knew and respected and liked before I knew you existed, and those people treated me like dog shit, and I don’t have the words to tell you what that feels like.”

  He swung his chair around, stood, and crossed to her. He did not hug her but took her hands in his and looked into her eyes, remind­ing her that the power of his presence belied his physical size, for he had to look up at her to make eye contact. He squeezed her hands so tightly that she winced, and he immediate
ly relaxed his grip; re­laxed but did not release.

  “You frighten them, Carole Ann,” he said in a voice she’d never before heard from him. “You are their worst nightmare and their dream come true in one package.”

  She freed her hands and turned away. “You’re not making sense.”

  “You’ve got real power, C.A., because you’re free. They’re still chained to their damn silly little jobs pretending to be powerful. And not only do you have power, but you’re really, really rich. No matter how much money they earn, most of ’em still need to work those sixty-hour weeks to keep the bills paid. That’s what’s killin’ ’em. That’s what they hate. Not you. Not who you are, but what you represent.”

  “That doesn’t make it hurt any less, Jake.”

  “So you’re gonna walk away and let ’em win?”

  “I don’t give a damn about them! It’s me I care about and I’m try­ing not to lose anything else because if I lose another thing I won’t have anything left.” Carole Ann failed to control the hopelessness she felt.

  “You have everything, C.A.! You’re a wealthy woman—”

  “Aw, shit, Jake! If I give you all my money, can you bring back my husband? Can you restore my reputation? Can you buy me a defini­tion of myself?”

  He grinned. “The last part I can do for free. You’re my friend and my wife’s friend. You’re still A1 Crandall’s wife. And you’re still the best damn trial lawyer in this town. But if you insist on running home to your mama, at least tell me what it’s all about so I can help.”

  They both relaxed after that and she told him what she knew about her mother’s predicament, which wasn’t very much. In fact, that’s why she was flying home to Los Angeles. Her mother stead­fastly and stubbornly had refused to provide more than the sketchi­est of details about what she glibly referred to as “the hoodlum murders.” She wrote down for him her mother’s address and tele­phone number. “I’ll be with her until we start to drive each other crazy.” And she good-naturedly accepted his instructions—he called them suggestions—regarding her cellular telephone, her rental car, her credit cards, and her choice of accommodations should she and her mother come to a parting of the ways. Then she gave him a quick hug and headed toward the door.

  “Give Grace my love,” she said, one hand on the doorknob. Car­ole Ann had met Jake’s wife exactly twice but liked her enough to consider her a friend. “Tell her when I get back I’ll call the South­erners, invite them up, and we’ll have a seafood feast. At your house.” And she closed the door and was gone.

  Jake looked at the empty space vacated by Carole Ann for a long moment, then picked up the phone, but the Grayce on his mind was not his Grace. “I need to run a check,” he growled into the re­ceiver. “Grayce with a y Gibson,” and he read off the address Carole Ann had just written.

  Valerie and Tommy Griffin and Carole Ann sniffed appreciatively as they transferred aromatic and steaming food from shiny white carry-out cartons into heavy, multicolored serving bowls. Carole Ann was all but drooling. She’d desperately wanted food from Yangtze River, her favorite Chinese restaurant, for her last night in town; she just hadn’t wanted to put on clothes, to ride the elevator downstairs, to walk through the building lobby, to get into a car, to ride down to Chinatown to sit in a restaurant with several dozen other people in order to have this food. In short, she hadn’t wanted to disturb the progress of her descent into melancholia, so Tommy and Valerie generously and graciously had made the journey. Though not without sotto voce commentary from Tommy that made him sound too much like Jake for comfort.

  “You’re gonna have to snap out of this, C.A.,” he’d muttered to her as he closed the door to her apartment on his way out, guaran­teeing that he wouldn’t hear her response. She’d had time to im­prove her disposition while they were gone, and now they all were focused intently and totally on the food.

  “This one is especially for you,” Valerie said, lifting a carton with Chinese characters written in red on its top. “Mrs. Chang says it is ‘food for safe journey.’ Valerie laughed at her failed attempt to imitate the gentle cadence of the voice of the restaurant’s propri­etress. Or head chef. Or whatever she was. Carole Ann wasn’t cer­tain, though she was certain that the woman’s name was not Chang. She suspected that was a name acquired for the convenience of Americans, who, in defiance of the cultural mores of others, insist upon knowing the names of strangers. Mrs. Chang had prepared a special meal for her when A1 was killed—food for hope, she’d called it—and it had been a culinary masterpiece.

  “Sorry. I can’t wait,” she said, opening the top of the carton and reaching in with a pair of chopsticks to retrieve and sample Mrs. Chang’s culinary bon voyage. It was chicken and it was hot. It ignit­ed her taste buds and opened her sinus passages and then deposited a faint sweetness in the open places. “The woman is a genius,” she breathed, still chewing. “And so are you!” she ex­claimed happily as Tommy with- drew a six-pack of Tsing Tao beer from the final bag.

  By the time they got everything to the table, nobody was talking, and nobody spoke except to praise the food or to request a serving bowl, until they were on second helpings.

  “You sure you don’t want me to take you to the airport?” Tommy asked, slowing down to catch his breath. Tommy ate like what he was: A young, healthy male. Valerie called him a growing boy; and though he was twenty-six and six-foot-three and almost two hun­dred pounds, he was boy like in that he was sweet, gentle, playful and loving.

  “Positive, thanks. It’s a five-minute taxi ride.”

  “Yeah, but the taxi driver don’t love you like I do.” He crooned it to the tune of a thirty-year-old Motown hit by one of the guy groups and Valerie scrunched up her face like she’d caught the scent of something long dead. He took on a wounded look and she made to soothe him, the two of them giggling all the while like three-year-olds.

  Carole Ann enjoyed their banter through an overwhelming sad­ness. They were young and newly married and believed they had ages to love each other. Carole Ann knew differently, knew the joy could be ended in a moment and what would remain would be the memories of moments like this one; knew that having the memories was better than having nothing.

  Then she stopped that train of thought in its tracks. True, she no longer had Al, but she did have more than nothing. She had these wonderful and loving young people, and she had Jake and Grace Graham, and she had Cleo, formerly her secretary-cum-assistant at the law firm for ten years, and her husband, Billy, who now were friends; and her father-in-law, Dave Crandall, in Atlanta; and Lil Gailliard and her brother, Warren Forchette, in New Orleans. And she had her brother, Mitch, in Denver, and her mother and Roberta and Angelique and Luisa in Los Angeles. She had love all around her. And with the exception of her family, all of it from people who either were strangers or, at best, peripheral to her life before Al was murdered.

  She had defended Tommy against charges that he was a drug- dealing cop and he had repaid her by saving her life when she’d been in pursuit of Al’s murderers. Jake, still confined to a wheel­chair in those days, had sent Tommy to Louisiana to save her even though he should have been on patrol in southeast Washington. The D.C. police department fired him for dereliction of duty and he now worked for Jake.

  “Jake said to remind you—”

  “Tell Jake to leave me alone,” she growled in a weak imitation of the man himself, and Tommy and Valerie laughed. Then Tommy re­peated, no doubt verbatim, everything Jake told him to tell her, and she nodded dutifully, confirming that she already had done the things he’d instructed her to do here, and promising that she would follow orders once she arrived in Los Angeles.

  They cleaned up the aftermath of their feast, Tommy and Valerie agreeing to take home with them what little remained, home being a one-bedroom apartment six floors below Carole Ann’s penthouse in a high-rise building in the Foggy Bottom section of Washington, D.C. Carole Ann owned both apartments—and two others in the building—thanks to Al�
�s wise investment planning. A junior associ­ate in Al’s firm—funny how she still thought of it as Al’s firm, even though A1 was gone and so was the firm—had been renting the unit until he screamed at Carole Ann across the marble lobby of the building that she was responsible for the collapse of a venerable le­gal institution and the ruination of two men’s lives and careers. He’d actually called her “a castrating bitch,” and still managed to look surprised when she told him to pack his belongings and vacate her apartment. She now rented it to Tommy and Valerie, who hap­pily would check on her place and drive her car and water her plants in her absence.

  “I’ll send you a postcard from Muscle Beach,” she teased Tommy, an incorrigible gym rat, “and to you I’ll send photographs of the best stores on Rodeo Drive,” she said to Valerie, a shameless shopaholic. They hugged each other warmly, tightly, and Carole Ann closed the door wondering whether Jake was correct in his assessment—in his accusation—that she was running away from herself and her life in Washington, rather than merely making a return visit to her home­town to assist her mother.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Criminal behavior rarely made sense, Carole Ann mused, but she had enough experience with criminals and their behavior that she knew of­ten enough an excuse could be found, if not a reason, if one knew where to look. “Do you know if the Gang Task Force is in charge of the investigation?”

  Snorts of derision were expelled from the four women simultane­ously. “C.A., we’re not even sure there is an investigation,” her mother spat through her teeth.

  “There were two murders here, and an assault, and a definable pattern of vandalism. Of course there’s an investigation.” Carole Ann looked from one to the other of them, expecting confirmation and receiving instead four blank, almost hostile gazes. Then she re­alized that the looks they were giving her were old and familiar, the look that warned against repeating unacceptable speech or behav­ior. She raised a hand to request forbearance as she made a request: “Please tell me how you know for certain there’s no task force inves­tigation.”