by Alex Abella
"Barbara, I urge you, don't say another word," said Clay, his face flushing a beet red.
"Why? What harm is there in it? It's a free country, isn't it? Freedom of religion is our first-amendment right."
"That's OK, Clay. I'm sure the lady would deny all this on the stand. Besides, I'm not the attorney, Ramón is. Just one thing, did it work?"
She stamped out her cigarette, gazed down at the Steuben glass ashtray. When she looked up again her eyes were an iridescent gray, pupils distended, as though a frightful scene of some kind had just played out on her memory's inner screen.
"Very well, I'm afraid. The man who was planning the takeover fell in his bathtub and cracked his skull. We were saved."
"Did Schnitzer pay Ramón for this?"
"I don't know if he ever knew how effective his attentions were. Barry did say he told Valdez to help himself to some bracelets. He gave him a discount card or some such."
I looked at Clay. He averted his eyes. "You've known all along, you son of a bitch."
"I didn't think it was material."
"Not material? That's the motivation for their going to the store. They weren't planning a robbery, they just wanted to get what was theirs back! That's not a special circs case and you know it. No way they could get the death penalty for that."
"That's if you can prove it," countered Clay.
"You unprincipled bastards."
"Why don't you just quit it, Mr. Morell. It doesn't matter what their intentions were, there was a bloodbath and my husband was killed."
"In the eyes of the law there is a difference between something that got out of hand and willful murder."
"You mean to say six people dead were all accidents?"
"It could very well be."
She put in her last bid.
"A quarter million, Mr. Morell. That's how much you will get. Two hundred fifty thousand dollars if you just walk away, right now."
I got up, pushed the table out.
"I am going, but you can keep your money. I have to sleep nights."
She smiled, almost sweetly. "All right, then, but watch the road. I hear there's a lot of bad drivers out there."
Was it she who had ordered the Crips to push me down the ravine? Or was she just waving her contempt before me like the cape before the bull?
"My policy has your name on it, lady. Don't be surprised if the cops come knocking at your door if I buy the farm on the freeway."
I walked away, crossing in front of Chuck, the waiter, who stood before a table, pad in hand. "Did I tell you about today's specials?"
If walking through a Hispanic barrio is a visit to an occupied territory, going into the black ghetto of Los Angeles is like stepping into a war zone where hand-to-hand combat has been dragging on for years. There's a stillness of the spirit that rises up to the blue dome of a cloudless sky, the chill that surges when the orange sun sets and the shootings start ringing in the night, homeboy squad cars full of gang members playing hip-hop music as loud as the speaker will blast, slipping in and out of alleys, sewer rats come up to claim the streets. Swarms of petty dealers gather around customers' cars, flashing rocks, pot and guns, while in the homes of the neighborhood, families huddle behind barred windows and try to drown out the curses, cries and shootings with a new prayer, the new ritual of the people, the ceremonial watching of the 27- inch stereophonic hi-fi television set and videocassette recorder showing the icons of sitcom land.
The heart of the ghetto was where Sergeant Porras had sent me, searching for the homeboys who'd tried to bump me down the Benedict Canyon grade.
"Go ahead," he dared, "make this duck walk." He handed me copies of the reports, laboriously extracting them from the pasteboard looseleaf binder. "You're such a hot dick, let's see if you figure out who wanted you dead."
I parked in front of the first location in the report, set in the middle of a long block of storefronts near the Long Beach Freeway. J-PAUL's said the sign, YOU BUY, WE FRY. It was the only establishment open at eleven in the morning. The other stores, a sundry collection of used-tire places, liquor stores and appliance shops, were still shuttered tight, as though the owners were expecting Nazi tanks to roll in at any moment and start firing.
The smell of catfish and cod frying in vats of bubbling brown fat laced the air as I pushed open the dusty front screen door. A young black woman with layers of corn rows dangling in front of her pitted face looked up from the chopping board where she was slicing green cabbage.
"Yeah?" she said disdainfully.
"I'm looking for Bernice Adams."
"Who are you?"
It was time to act official. I showed her my card quickly, then pocketed it just as fast.
"Private investigator appointed by the Los Angeles Superior Court."
She stopped chopping long enough to give me the kind of look usually accompanied by a shove and a curse.
"You mean you a detective, like on TV?"
"Something like that. Is Mrs. Adams in?"
"You be with the poh-lice?"
"No. I'm with the courts. Could I speak with Mrs. Adams?"
"Who be looking for me?"
A short, obese black woman with thick eyeglasses and rollers in her hair, wearing a green dress that showed three escalating layers of fat wrapped around her stout middle, came out of the back room. She slipped on a clean cook's apron, bringing the long sashes around the front. A row of gold bracelets jangled as she tied a butterfly knot.
"Girl, you deaf? Somebody asking for me?"
"It's this man, Auntie. He come from the police."
My cue to play smart and courteous. "From the Los Angeles Superior Court. Are you Mrs. Bernice Adams?"
"Yes, I am. Is Gerard in trouble again?"
She moved over to a counter and felt her way around, her fingertips skimming the surface of the salt and pepper shakers, the pot covers, kitchen knives, to find her bearings. Out of a bin she extracted a couple of long yellow rubber gloves, put them on and bumped her way to the sink.
"LaTona, that catfish's ready. You go take it out."
The girl laid down her knife and removed the basket with the frying pieces from the tub of oil, hooking it above the fryer to drip dry. Mrs. Adams dipped her gloved hand in a bucket in the sink and took out a still wriggling catfish. With her other hand she grabbed a cleaver nearby and in one measured thump chopped off its mustachioed head.
"You can come over here if you want, mister. I can't see too well in this light."
She chuckled at her private joke as she took a knife and split open the fish, its bloody black and blue innards spilling out on the chopping board.
I stood next to her, breathing in her dusky, violet-based perfume and the briny fumes of the eviscerated fish. She seemed wrapped in a layer of warmth and life, at ease in her own abundant skin.
"I don't know how many times I'm going to have to bail him out of troubles. I thought after you take him to Y.A. camp that he learn his lesson, but things don't go in that thick head, he don't want to listen none. I'll tell you right now, he ain't been home in two days."
"I'm not here for Gerard."
"You ain't? Then you should be! Somebody got to teach that boy a lesson and it sure ain't me. If only my poor sister was still alive, she'd whip him something good but I can't properly do that. Only thing I catch is catfish and that's because they in the bucket already, heh, heh."
"No, ma'am, I wanted to talk to you about Rusty Thompson."
Mrs. Adams shook her head disapprovingly.
"He don't know when he got it good either. What he do now, go steal some old lady's purse?"
"How well do you know him?"
"Rusty? He was Gerard's best friend for a while. I took him in after his folks got sent away for selling rock. He no longer here, though."
"When did he move out?"
"'Bout six months ago. He be bothering LaTona here and I wasn't gonna have none of that so I showed him the door is what I did."
LaTona tu
cked her head in between her shoulders and chopped the cabbage into even thinner slices, softly, to catch our conversation.
"What happened to him?" asked Mrs. Adams, rhythmically slicing and filleting.
"He died in a car accident."
"No!" I heard behind me.
LaTona put down her knife and ran crying from the room. Mrs. Adams gave a sigh and continued her work.
"I always afraid he come to no good, that boy. I'm sorry to hear that."
"When he died he had some religious objects in the car."
"Religious? What kind you talking about?"
"Voodoo dolls, necklaces, things like that."
"You mean that gris-gris stuff. Yeah, I recollect he be interested in all that, saying that was African gods, a black man's religion. Him and Junior was always talking about that."
"Junior? What's his full name?"
"Eric Howard, I believe. He be always at the Big Hole up on Vermont."
"Thank you very much. I'll be on my way."
"You do that."
I looked back as I walked out. Surrounded by the bloody carcasses of dozens of catfish, Mrs. Adams chopped on, even as tears unwanted rolled down her face.
The Hole was a drive-in coffee stand shaped like a giant doughnut, the apex of its diameter fifty feet above street level, an altogether unappetizing structure of lath and plaster a few blocks from the freeway. Ten miles down Vermont Avenue you could see the fog-wrapped Palos Verdes peninsula, but here the sun was warm and careless. A handful of BMWs, the crack dealer's vehicle of choice, were parked around the building.
I sat at the chipped Formica counter, two dozen brown eyes in black faces fixed on me. There are times in this business when you can't help but sound like a TV detective, asking the right question of the wrong people. I was just hoping that like in the movies the hero would live to see another day.
I asked the counterman if he knew Rusty.
"Sure do. Blood was always messing round here. Ain't seen him lately. You the police?"
"No, I'm from the courts. How well do you know him?"
"The brother, I've known him since he was ten. I tried to make him see the light but I cannot say I succeeded."
"Excuse me?"
"I'm a Jehovah's Witness. I asked Rusty to our meetings but he would rather hang around with them."
He gestured at a table of leather-jacketed observers.
"Drugs are our tribulation, mister, a sign that the end is near and we should prepare."
"Do you know if he believed in santería?"
"What's that?"
"An Afro-Cuban religion. It says African gods still visit us."
"And the Lord said, 'Thou Shalt Have No Other God But Me.' No, sir, I can't ... "
An elbow nudged my ribs. I turned to face a short, slim black man with freckled complexion and tightly curled nappy red hair, wearing several chains of gold on his all-black outfit. Two massive gentlemen, looking like tryouts for a Raiders linebacker position, flanked him.
"You looking for Rusty," he said.
His two sidekicks smiled a shade less than friendly.
"He's dead."
"I know. So what?"
"He tried to kill me and I want to know why."
Red turned to his guards, flashing a "poor idiot" smile.
"You with that Cuban motherfucker who iced the people at the store?"
"Yes."
"I knew Rusty couldn't do it. I told him, use a Mac 11, chop him up good, but that ofay say no, push you down the cliff. Shit, man, I said, shit man, that's bullsheet but he wanted you dead in an accident. Let me shake your hand, dude." He took my hand in his small, soft paw. "You one lucky motherfucker."
"What did this white guy look like?"
" 'Bout your height, green eyes, sandy hair. Oh, yeah, he had this birthmark, looked like a heart, left side his face."
I felt true terror the moment he said that, a shard of ice ripping my insides, my heart galloping in a red cloud of fear. I thought I would fall off the stool. I gripped the edge of the counter, took a breath.
"What's with you?" said Red.
"Nothing. Here." I took out my wallet, showed him a picture.
"This the man?"
"That be him. Who's the kid?"
In the picture my father grinned at the camera, clutching a very happy ten-year-old.
"That's me."
12
to this day I don't know how I spent that weekend. In fact, I can't even recall how I made it home from Compton. I suppose the fever I'd been struggling with finally broke and that I drenched my bedsheets with the gallons of perspiration that stream out of my body whenever I have a temperature. But on Monday I arose like Lazarus to greet a baby blue sky, jays chirping from the branches of the jacaranda outside our balcony. The ghost of the morning moon lingered over the green hills, casting a sad look at its blinding mate before hurling back into darkness.
How could it be, I asked myself. Can the spirit of my father ... C'mon, Charlie, knock it off. It's impossible. You're just under stress and Red didn't know what he was saying. The dead don't return. There are no wandering souls. You scattered Papá's ashes over the Atlantic almost twenty years ago. This is Los Angeles and the ghosts of the East don't surface in this desert. It's the stress. Forget it. Forget him. Forget.
For several days Lucinda had been gauging me for signs of the spell she thought I was under. Not that she was less affectionate. If anything, her concern increased over my affliction so that she practically overflowed with tenderness, bringing me café con leche in bed, arranging cut flowers throughout the apartment, leaving little notes hidden in the folds of my clothes telling me how much she loved me.
She always took pride in being a cunning lover and at that time she felt compelled to give me greater proof of her virtuosity. She found an inexhaustible supply of things to do with my cock and my mouth so that, after a warm bath and a cold shower, where we would scrub and finger-fuck each other, we'd rush to the bed, teasing and playing with every membrane, every orifice and follicle, joining body parts that no manual I knew had ever conceived of joining, experimenting in ways I had only shamefully fantasized before. I never knew my big toe and second toe would fit so easily into her dripping cunt or that a common everyday vegetable inserted up her ass, while I fucked her from the front, would cause such squeals of joy. I bound her and punished her with my leather belts, whipping her ass until it burned to the touch then sticking my cock in her mouth so that she, tied up to the bedposts and with her eyes covered by a blue silk scarf, would know only pain and penetration as her sensual contact and she would suck my dick like a babe a mother's tit, till I would be on the verge of coming, then I would stick it up her ass until I could delay it no longer then I would whip it out again and explode all over her beautiful blindfolded face, her pink tongue dashing to and fro, trying mightily to catch the white jism that oozed down.
At other times I would be her slave, compelled by strikes of flyswatter or clothes brush to run my tongue up and down every inch of her body, from her black-and-gold-flecked toenails to the roots of her henna-tinted hair; then she would slap me and pummel me till I would cry and then would push me down to the hollow between her legs, holding my head down with both her hands, guiding my tongue, like a darting hummingbird's, to the exact spot in her groove, I spreading open the labia so that her hard little clit would push its way out of the curly bush, demanding to be stroked and pinched and kissed and nibbled. Lucinda would wrap her legs around me, arch her body forward and press even harder, her pelvic bone a fist in my mouth, as she rubbed my lips raw and she would come in torrents of dense, briny juice four, five, six times in quick succession. She then would kick me away, my breath forced out of me and I'd go tumbling to the floor, only to crawl back next to her and ask for her forgiveness as she lay burning, eyes rolled white to all-seeing heaven above.
In essence Lucinda had become a kept woman, my mistress, housekeeper, confidante and counselor, my brown-skinned tropical Alb
ertine. Not that she minded. She positively bloomed under my lustful ministrations. She lost that boniness that made me think of a fashion model or an escaping Central American refugee, rounding out her hips and swelling her bosom so that when she disrobed, her two full tits would stand up unaided by bra or bustier, dark nipples proudly pointing forward. Paradoxically, the few extra pounds made her face even more angular, as the cheekbones fleshed out, making a permanent dimple that carried the eye delightfully down to the full fleshy lips. I opened charge accounts for her at Magnin's and Neiman's, bought her shoes on Melrose and Rodeo, had her hair done by José E. and her nails by Miss Julie, that is, I turned her into my own Galatea, a living poupeé whose only chore was to take care of my needs. She excelled to such a degree I had the feeling she had been waiting for someone like me to come her way and give her the final sheen she so desirously adopted as her own.
But in spite of our sexual transport, I can't say that I really loved her. Whenever I was away from her, her image would fade from my memory, her face and body not crossing my mind until I would turn the key in the keyhole and she would run to my arms with a kiss and a story, her perfume wrapped around us like a garland. Then I would look at her and I would again be surprised, like the tiger eyeing the ocelot, by her beauty and liveliness, as striking as the first moment I saw her.