Where to Choose

by Penny Mickelbury

  And she listened with a growing apprehension as Grayce, with surprisingly few interruptions from the other three, recalled in pre­cise detail their encounters with the police, beginning with Grayce’s discovery of the first victim early one morning as she was leaving home for her tai chi class: Mrs. Asmara, a native of Ethiopia, beaten about the head and face and lying in the dew-covered grass. Mrs. As­mara who remained in the hospital in a coma.

  “Since that first morning, nobody from the police has called or visited. Nobody has asked what, if anything, we’ve seen or heard or know. And the last time I went to them, the bastards got surly with me! Wanted to know how it happened that I found the body! And that’s why I wouldn’t talk to them about Sadie. That’s why we told that reporter everything and now they’ve got the nerve to threaten us with some obstruction charge! Like we haven’t been begging them to listen to what we have to say.”

  Carole Ann sat up straight. “What reporter, Ma?”

  “Jennifer Johnson from BLAK,” Roberta answered.

  “I told you about her, C.A.”

  “You’ve talked to her again?” Carole Ann didn’t try to hide her disapproval.

  “She’s going to help us,” Angie offered.

  “She’s the only one who will,” Grayce added, and then, “I cer­tainly hope she can. At least she’s trying.”

  So was Carole Ann, and it took her the better part of a week to as­certain that her mother’s version of events was correct, down to and including her final snort of derision. Not that she had doubted any of them; not really. She just understood that the ordinary citizen’s view of the internal workings of the criminal justice system had been formu­lated by television network programming and therefore was often faulty. It was no truer that the police and the courts were on top of every situation every minute of every day than it was that mis­takes and errors in the system were either aberrations or manifes­tations of evil. C.A. knew that cops and judges and lawyers were like human beings everywhere, and that they made mistakes.

  But even allowing for the enormous challenge of policing a city larger than some states, with more than nine million inhabitants, and for the possibility of mistakes, there was no excusing the Los Angeles Police Department’s handling of the crimes at the Jacaranda Estates. And Carole Ann had made excuses—for herself and for the LAPD.

  For herself, she reasoned that it had been many years since she’d personally performed the footwork of the criminal defense attor­ney—walking the hallways and checking the filed documents at the police department and the corrections department and the court­house. But she knew that paperwork was required, whether in D.C. or L.A., and she knew where to find that paperwork. She checked every possible and available public record, including the calls for po­lice response on the dates of the Jacaranda Estates incidents and the calls for an ambulance. She found and talked to the paramedics who rushed Fatima Asmara to the hospital, and she visited the woman at the Charles Drew Medical Center and looked down on her tiny, close-to-dead body. She talked to the harried resident in charge of Mrs. Asmara’s case, who, when he understood that Carole Ann was an attorney (she’d been quick to say that she wasn’t Mrs. Asmara’s attorney), shrugged and readily offered the information that no police officer had wondered in person or via phone whether the victim had regained consciousness—or would.

  Carole Ann looked for ways to excuse the LAPD, for there had to exist some credible reason for the absence of an investigation into the crimes committed at Jacaranda Estates. She talked to the desk sergeant, the watch commander, even the lieutenant over the patrol division, and not one of them even claimed knowledge of a months- long pattern of criminal activity at Jacaranda Estates, to say noth­ing of knowledge of a task force investigation. And she’d left four messages for the officer who’d first responded to Grayce’s call when she’d found Mrs. Asmara. Left the four messages when she could never locate the officer—Howard MacDougall was his name—in person, on or off shift. And Officer MacDougall had not returned a single one of her calls. Just as he had never returned Grayce’s calls.

  She spent an entire day reintroducing herself to her old neighbor­hood. She walked every inch of Jacaranda Estates, up and down every street, surprising herself along the way by how much she re­membered about who had lived in which house, which of the kids in a family she had played with and which had been the friends of her four-years-older brother. She was even more surprised to discover that the world beyond Jacaranda’s borders had become, in the ter­minology of the cultural demographers, “upscale.”

  The north end of Jacaranda always had been called “the business end” because the adjacent streets were home to the small busi­nesses that had catered to Jacaranda residents: A shoe repair shop and a dry cleaners; a barber shop and beauty parlor; vegetable, fruit, and meat markets; a sweet shop cum soda fountain; a diner where the short order cook could rustle up an order of burritos as easily as a burger and fries.

  Similar services still were offered on the business end, but in markedly different environments. There now was a bagel shop and a French market and a Starbucks, a Ben & Jerry’s ice cream store, a Barnes & Noble book emporium, and two chain grocery stores. There were boutiques, bazaars, and salons. There were Italian, French, and vegetarian restaurants—and not a single place that served a burger or a burrito. And the reason for such an extraor­dinary transformation existed on the south or “home end” of Jacaranda. What once had been modestly priced California and Mediterranean-style homes on double-wide lots now were mid-to-high six-figure “exclusives” for the upwardly mobile. Carole Ann had to work to keep from gaping open-mouthed at the architec­turally altered and landscaped vista before her. Most of the houses now were concealed by privacy walls in front, and she imagined that most of them also now had pools and guest houses in back.

  She walked back to the business end and stopped at the first coffee shop she encountered, not the stylized chain store but a warm, snuggly, bistro-looking place called the Espresso Express. She really wanted a drink of the alcoholic variety, but coffee would be more conducive to rational thought. And she needed clarity to reconcile disparate realities: Jacaranda Estates was an island of mid-Americana melting pot sur­rounded by creeping affluence. So. Where did the creeps on the playground come from?

  She swallowed her pride along with a hot sip of latte, reached for her cell phone, and dialed information for the number of radio sta­tion BLAK. She had, she realized with a nod to Jake, drastically changed her attitude toward the media.

  Carole Ann lay flat on her back, eyes closed, limbs spread and mo­tionless. Her breath came deeply and rapidly, the steady rise and fall of her chest the only sign of life.

  “Damn, you’re good, C.A. Really and truly good. I mean that. And I claim full responsibility for your prowess.”

  Carole Ann opened her eyes, tried to sit up, groaned, and fell back into a prone position. “If I’m so good, Robbie, why am I lying here dying?” She opened her eyes again, focused them, and fixed Robert Cho Lee with her infamous stare. He laughed at her and his image multiplied and reflected off the mirrored walls of the studio, and many Robert Cho Lees laughed at her.

  “You’re dying because you were trying to kill me, that’s why!” He continued to laugh as he retied his waist-length ponytail on top of his head and adjusted his jacket and belt. “You threw me so hard that last time my teeth rattled. I responded with a perfectly accept­able defensive maneuver.”

  “You tried to kill me, Robbie, damn you,” Carole Ann muttered, accepting the hand extended to her and rising slowly to her feet. She adjusted her jacket and belt and bowed humbly to her most worthy opponent, then grinned and hugged him tightly. “You gotta teach me that move, Robbie. I swear I never saw it coming.”

  “Thank you, oh most worthy opponent,” Robbie said with a re­turn bow and a grin of his own. “And you weren’t supposed to see it coming. That is the sole purpose of that maneuver. Surprise.”

  “But how do you defend agai
nst it?” Carole Ann asked, catching multiple reflections of herself in the mirrors that lined two facing walls of the studio.

  “You don’t,” he answered, the smile gone. “You’re not supposed to get up after that one. And you didn’t even receive the full treat­ment.”

  Carole Ann looked steadily at him. Playtime obviously was over for the day. “So you really were trying to kill me.” It was not a ques­tion and he did not respond. “If you’d really felt threatened, I’d re­ally be dead,” she said, and again he did not respond. “So, is that your only killer move, or do you have a full arsenal?”

  An hour and a half later, Carole Ann could barely move. They sat facing each other on the gray carpeted floor, reflecting themselves and each other in the mirrors. She was as sore as when she had taken her first karate lesson—taught by Robbie—more than twenty years earlier. She was sore in spirit as well, for Robbie had ex­plained, between lethal kicks, punches, and throws, that he had de­vised the moves to protect himself from the gang thugs that proliferated in his neighborhood, including those who were paying customers in his studio. She had heaved a big sigh of relief when Robbie, before she could ask, explained that he did not teach his custom creations to his gang customers, but used them solely to pro­tect himself in class. The gang-bangers, it seemed, didn’t under­stand or embrace the concept of respect for one’s worthy opponent on the mat. They understood power and pain only, and Robbie had needed to devise moves to protect himself in class. The gang-banger students tried to inflict damage.

  “But why teach them at all, Robbie?”

  “They’re the bulk of my business, C.A. Not too many people from Westwood and Hollywood and Silver Lake drive to east L.A. for karate and tai chi and yoga these days. I had to open a second studio on Sepulveda, near the 405, just to accommodate my long-term clients, who’re scared to death to come here.” He shook his head ruefully at the truth beneath the truth of his words.

  “Here” was a warehouse owned by his maternal grandfather in which Robbie Lee had opened his Eastern Arts Studio while still a student at USC. Those were the days before there was a yoga studio on every corner in L.A., before karate and tai chi had spread so far from their roots in the Asian community.

  Carole Ann looked slowly around the room, rubbing her hands gently across the carpet. The studio was a beautiful and functional room. The two walls of mirrors were bracketed on both ends by sec­tions of fold-away bleachers, and Carole Ann imagined that Robbie held martial arts tournaments and demonstrations here. The ceil­ing had been lowered, and stylish light fixtures with wide chrome shades, perhaps two dozen of them, hung down like stalagmites. There was a water cooler near the door, above which glowed a red exit sign. The place looked not only stylish but prosperous. A far cry from the old days and her first karate lesson, on rubber mats on a hardwood floor.

  In those days, Carole Ann Gibson and Robbie Lee were a couple. They’d begun dating as high school juniors and had continued into college, Robbie at USC, Carole Ann across the city at UCLA. Not only were they lovers, they were best friends. Soul and spirit mates. It made perfect sense to Carole Ann that Robbie, a business major, thought that opening his own business—a karate and self-defense school—was a perfect means of learning the text­book lessons of B school. She’d signed up and brought along enough sorority sisters, dorm mates, and classmates to fill Robbie’s first class.

  She had never minded, indeed, had barely noticed that she was two inches taller than he, and certainly she’d never understood the issue made of Robbie’s ethnicity. Like his height, it was not some­thing she noticed until others called attention to it. But Robbie had noticed it. Every day of his life somebody somewhere reminded him that he looked “different” or “funny.” What Carole Ann found ex­ceedingly handsome, the outside world found odd or strange or dif­ferent: Robbie’s father was Black, his mother Chinese. To Carole Ann that meant dinner at Robbie’s was her opportunity to eat real Chinese food. It meant a true understanding of Chi­nese New Year, which in L.A. was reduced to a few colorful seconds on the evening news. It meant learning enough words in Chinese— words she learned from Robbie’s father—to make a proper greeting to Robbie’s mother’s mother. It meant an extension of the life at Jacaranda Estates, and it served as living confirmation of the belief that people, especially Colored people, could only benefit by sharing and understanding each other’s differences. To Robbie it had meant constantly proving or defending himself.

  It had helped, of course, that the spirit of sharing and under­standing had pervaded the larger culture for a few bright and shin­ing moments in the 1960s and 1970s, and had lasted long enough to make such a success of Robbie’s karate school that he quit business school to run his ever-expanding business. And now the pendulum was swinging—where?

  “So, does this mark a return to the good old days when hoodlums engaged in hand-to-hand combat instead of mowing down entire blocks with machine-gun fire?”

  Humor returned to Robbie’s face briefly, then his eyes clouded again. “I’m not sure what’s up with those clowns, C.A. I hear bits and pieces. Something about the Mexicans and Indians reclaiming their land from the Anglos. And from the Chinese and the Blacks and anybody else who ain’t Mexican or Indian.” Robbie shrugged and shook his head again. “And it’s not like you can disagree with the concept. After all, the land was stolen from them. My problems begin with what happens to all the people they want to send pack­ing. My mother may be first generation, but there are thousands of other Chinese who were in L.A. when the first Anglo murdered the first Mexican and the first Indian. What are they supposed to do? And what about people like your mom and her pals over at Jacaranda—”

  Carole Ann snapped to attention so hard and fast she gave her­self whiplash. “My mom? What’s my mother got to do with it?” “Jacaranda Estates is one of the places the brothers in the barrio claim belongs to them. Something about some Mexican dude own­ing the land and being swindled by some Black dude.”

  “That’s a lie!” Carole Ann jumped to her feet, and to the defense of Arthur Jennings, the cofounder of Jacaranda Estates. “You know that, Robbie'! You know how Jacaranda Estates came to be!”

  “I know, I know, I know,” he said swiftly, attempting to calm her. “I remember the entire story. I’m just telling you what these dudes are saying, C.A. You know how common it is these days for people to rewrite history to suit themselves. Like, Black folks loved slavery, like the Holocaust didn’t happen, like Nixon was a patriot and a saint.”

  “OK, Robbie. I hear you. But what are they saying about Jacar­anda Estates? Tell me.”

  “The boys from the barrio say they’re taking it back.”

  Carole Ann recalled the faces of the young men she had encoun­tered on the playground: young Mexican men. Mean and angry and violent. She recalled her mother’s accounts of the vandalism and the violence and the suddenness of the onset and the apparent lack of a reason for any of it. And she realized suddenly and awfully that all of the victims, of property damage or of personal attack, were ei­ther Black or white. Or, more significantly, that none of the victims was Mexican. A shudder coursed through her body. This was insanity. Madness. A group of young Mexican-American men waging a war of attrition against every non-Mexican in Los Angeles and her home turf was going to be a battle site? “How are they planning to reclaim their lost land, Robbie? Have you heard anything?”

  “You’re not taking this seriously, C.A.! They’re a bunch of loud-mouthed punks who—wait a minute! Is your mom OK? And the others, her pals?”

  “They’re not OK at all, Robbie! They’re terrified. They’re under siege,” and she outlined in broad stroke recent events, the lawyer in her preventing her from telling all she knew, but she did mention her puzzlement about the origin of the playground thugs and wondered if he had any ideas about who they were and why they’d staked out the playground at Jacaranda.

  He was shaking his head back and forth, his ponytail flipping in wide arcs like the real thi
ng. “What you’re telling me is too bizarre to believe. Why hasn’t there been any mention of this on TV or in the newspaper?”

  Carole Ann responded with a snarl. “Seems like the only reporter in town who thinks it’s a story is Jennifer Johnson from BLAK.”

  “I almost never listen to the radio,” Robbie said.

  “Apparently nobody in LA listens to the radio! She keeps doing these stories and nothing happens. It’s like the information just falls into a black hole somewhere in outer space.”

  Robbie shook his head again, making his ponytail dance. “I can’t believe your mom has never said a word about all this.”

  “You’ve talked to my mother, Robbie?”

  “Of course I’ve talked to your mother, CA,” he said slowly, as if speaking to someone in need of language assistance. “Every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday morning.”

  “My mother takes tai chi from you?”

  “And yoga from my wife, at our Sepulveda studio. You got a problem with that?”

  She grabbed his arm and held on until he relaxed. “Of course not, Robbie, I just didn’t know. She didn’t tell me. I wonder why?”

  “Because I thought you were still angry with him.”

  “Ma, why on earth would I be angry with Robbie Lee?”

  “Because he dumped you,” Grayce said matter-of-factly, and Carole Ann winced at the decades old memory.

  They were juniors in college and not seeing much of each other. Carole Ann was living on campus that year and the trek between Cal and UCLA was a pain, and Robbie had all he could manage between school and his growing business. And then he met Millie Wolf and fell instantly and completely in love. He’d come to Carole Ann immediately, contrite and remorseful and totally surprised by his change of heart.