“Mike?” he said, like he’d just encountered a total stranger. His voice resonated with fear. “I didn’t know… I didn’t know you’d be here.”
“It’s a good thing I am.” He smelled even worse than he looked. A gamy mixture of body odor, booze, dried vomit, and the unmistakable stench of fear.
Jim came up behind me. Frankie threw his arms as far around his father as they could go. He’s four inches shorter than I am, small, like my mother’s side of the family. Big Jim gathered him up like a rag doll and held him tight.
Frankie buried his face into Jim’s massive chest, pressing hard, digging deep to tap into that familiar well of comfort and closeness. A Pavlovian wave of relief rippled through his body as once again he let himself be wrapped in Daddy’s loving arms. It’s that primal physical contact between parent and child that says, As long as you are here with me, you are safe from harm. And when that touch finally came, Frankie’s emotional fabric split at the seams, and he began to sob. “Pop,” he said, “I am in such deep shit.”
Without letting go of Frankie, Jim turned toward me, and he became the second person that day to communicate with me in code. He spoke softly, so he wouldn’t disturb the boy inside the cocoon of safety. I could barely hear him over Frankie’s wailing, but I could read Jim’s lips. C.T.W. they said.
C.T.W. was something my mother had taught us before we even knew the other twenty-three letters of the alphabet. She had learned it from her father, and who knows how many generations had handed it down before him.
It is only used in times of family crisis. It is a rallying cry that says, No matter what your priorities, something else is now more important. Someone in the family needs your help. It’s not like 9-1-1, which means call the cops or call an ambulance. C.T.W. is, in fact, the opposite of 9-1-1. It means, Call no one. This is a family problem, and only family can solve it. Outsiders are the enemy.
“Frankie,” my father said into his ear. “Did you kill anybody?”
Frankie choked back a few last sobs and shook his head. “No.”
“Well, that’s good,” Jim said. “Because anything else can be fixed. Plus now your brother won’t have to be an accessory after the fact to murder. Next question, is this about gambling?”
“No,” Frankie said. “Well, partly… it’s a long story.”
Some families have heart disease or diabetes or hemophilia running rampant through their genes. The Lomaxes are afflicted with diarrhea of the mouth. We hemorrhage long stories. There seems to be no cure.
“Did you steal anything?” Jim asked. Frankie was not a thief, but there were times when his gambling addiction had led him to make some very stupid, not to mention illegal, choices.
“No. Yes. I don’t know.”
If Frankie were a homicide suspect, this would be a perfect time for the cops to grill him. The exhaustion gives the good guys an edge. But this was my brother. “Dad,” I said, “this kid needs sleep.” Then I turned to the kid. “Frankie, honest truth—you got any drugs or alcohol inside you?”
“Yeah, some of each.”
“Dad, let’s clean him up and put him to bed.”
“One last question. You’re shaking with fear. What are you afraid of?”
Frankie’s body rocked against Jim’s. This wasn’t fear. It was terror. He opened his mouth, but no human sounds came forth. Only puppy whimpers. Finally, he found his voice. “Someone has a contract out on me.”
“No one will come for you here,” Jim said. “If they do, Mike and I will kill them with our bare hands.”
“And if you try to leave,” I said to Frankie, “we’ll kill you.”
His body shook. Half a laugh, half a sob. But he knew he was safe. His family was there. To love him unconditionally. To support him without judgment, without recriminations. To protect him from any and all who might want to hurt him.
The Patriarch of the Lomax Clan has handed down the decree.
Frankie’s in trouble. C.T.W. Circle The Wagons.
CHAPTER 19
“Who’s got a contract out on you?” Jim asked, as we peeled Frankie’s clothes off and propped him up in the shower. No answer. We lathered him up with a bar of Angel’s gardenia soap, which was perfect, because he wasn’t really dirty; he just stank. I scrubbed him from head to waist, while Jim went to work on the lower half. At one point, Frankie said, “What the fuck, Dad. You some kind of a homo?”
Jim answered “No, but your shower buddies in prison will be.” I doubt if Frankie heard him. He was having enough trouble just standing upright.
We capped off the steaming hot shower with a fifteen-second blast of cold water, which shocked Frankie’s system awake long enough to get two Balance bars and a glass of milk in his belly. Jim spiked the milk with a Halcyon. “Sleep insurance,” Jim said.
“I’m not a doctor, “I said, “but I really doubt if he needs it.”
“It’s for me,” Jim said. “I’ll sleep better knowing he’s comatose.”
We tucked him into his old boyhood bed, which was conveniently located a short twelve feet away from the three-hundred-pound sentry who would guard him with his life. Jim owned an impressive collection of firearms, among them a Beretta, a Mauser, and a Glock. He also owned those two lethal bare hands. No mints on the pillow, but all in all, a pretty nice homecoming. The wagons were circled.
Jim dumped Frankie’s duffel bag on the foyer floor and went through it while I hung back in the dining room. If there were drugs or guns or body parts in the bag, I didn’t want to know about it. Just in case I ever had to testify.
After a few minutes, Jim yelled out, “Holy shit!” I braced myself. Then he yelled, “That crazy kid’s got Jimmy Hoffa in this bag.” Lomax humor. It never takes a holiday. Half a minute later, Jim called out again. “All clear. You can send in the cops now.”
I entered to find the floor littered with a pitiful potpourri of underwear, socks, shirts, and khakis that smelled more of mold and mildew than of Frankie. Duffel bag rot. There was a grungy toiletry kit that resembled one I had seen being used a few months ago by a gray-skinned homeless man in the men’s room at the bus terminal.
There were no telltale cocktail napkins or matchbooks from Vegas casinos, but there were several Wall Street Journals, the most recent of which was three days old. My brother had traded his gambling addiction for investing in the stock market, which I wasn’t sure was all that different.
“Whoever’s got a contract out on him, it’s not for the contents of this bag,” I said. “Unless you found something and you’re hiding it from me.”
“If I did, I wouldn’t tell you anyway, because then I’d be fucking up both my sons,” he said. “But I didn’t.”
Jim and I went back to the kitchen where he filled a large travel mug with black coffee. “Take it with you,” he said. “I’m not a doctor either, but nine out of ten truck drivers recommend this for those late-night road trips.”
“You’re amazing,” I said. “Your kids are forty-two and thirty-two, and you’re still fathering.”
“I slip one kid a Mickey and pump the other full of caffeine. You call that fathering?” He poured coffee for himself. “Weird, isn’t it?” he said, blowing on the cup and taking a gulp while it was still too hot to drink. “I’m trying to help one son catch a murderer and the other one from getting himself murdered.”
I let out a long, audible breath. A sigh, I guess, even though I don’t like to think of myself as a guy who sighs. “When Joanie and I were trying to get pregnant, we made so many plans for the kid’s future that we started to worry how old he’d be when he stopped needing us.”
“It never stops. There are times when I still need my Dad, and he’s been dead for twenty years.”
“Did I ever tell you that Joanie wanted to call our first son Lincoln?” I said. “Link Lomax. She said it sounded like a movie star. I thought it sounded more like one of those dancers at Chippendales. When she couldn’t get pregnant, she started calling him The Missing Lin
k.”
He too exhaled heavily. “You got another letter from her today, didn’t you?” he said. “It’s the 18th of the month.”
“Yeah. Letter Number Six. Special delivery from heaven. She said she still loves me and that I should give you and Andre big wet kisses for her.”
We had both gotten soaked when we showered Frankie. Jim squeezed a few drops of water from his shirt. “I’m already pretty fucking wet as it is,” he said. He took another Teamster-sized gulp of his coffee.
“Oh, yeah,” I said. “She also said, Make sure you tell your father not to drink so much coffee.”
“I’m only having half a cup,” he said. “I want to be able to sleep with one eye open tonight.”
We said good night and parted with mutual reminders to keep pagers and cell phones charged and at the ready. Jim said he’d let me know when and if Frankie said anything coherent.
I climbed into my Acura with my travel mug filled to the top and was dialing my cell phone before I made the first turn out of the driveway.
I had a date with a hooker and I was already an hour late.
CHAPTER 20
Coral C. Jones is a beautiful, big-assed, chocolate-brown woman in her mid-thirties. She is a product of the streets of Los Angeles, and the streets are where she learned to ply her trade. I have friends in Vice who have had official police business with Coral C. over the years. Although she has numerous frequent flyer points with LAPD, they say she plays the game well and is usually cooperative with the cops. But she can be a tough negotiator when the stakes are high.
I never worked Vice. I met Coral C. two years ago in my capacity as a homicide detective. Her eighteen-year-old brother Tyrell had a starring role in a Seven-Eleven security tape. It opened with a run-of-the-mill, late-night stickup, and ended with a dead cashier—an unlucky Pakistani named Noor. He was a recent immigrant who obviously never studied Convenience Store 101, where the first rule they teach you is “Give Them The Fucking Money, Stupid!”
It seemed to be an open-and-shut case. Despite the fact that we were working with badly lit black-and-white security footage, we were able to read the name “Ty” sewn on the front of the perp’s jacket. Within hours we had tracked down Tyrell Jones and booked him for murder.
Coral C. swore Ty was at home with her that night. It just happened to be a night she wasn’t working, she said. Some people will swear to anything to protect someone they love, and since Coral C. had helped raise her younger brother, she was as much a mother to him as a sibling. What was different about Coral C. was that she swore on a Bible that she pulled out of her purse. But the Seven-Eleven tape showed Tyrell pulling the trigger.
Tyrell insisted it wasn’t him. “Some dude stole my jacket to fuck me up,” was his defense. “You think I’d be dumb enough to rob a store wearing a jacket with my name on it?” This got a big laugh around the squad room. We’d seen a lot dumber.
The D.A. assured us that the jury would convict Tyrell in fifteen minutes, start-to-finish, and still have plenty of time for a coffee break. They probably would have.
Except for Coral C. She knew that Tyrell was innocent, and she knew how to work the system. She called a lieutenant in Narcotics who owed her a favor for some insider information she had coughed up that had led to a Page One drug bust. The Narc Loo called Kilcullen, who in turn asked me to invest another twenty-four to see if Tyrell’s bullshit impostor story held any water.
I gave it my best shot, something no cop would have done if Coral C. hadn’t been able to cash in that chit from Narcotics. And guess what? It turns out it wasn’t Tyrell in the video. It was a same-sized, same-color, same-age punk named Willie Washburn who not only wanted to fuck Tyrell up, but also wanted to fuck Tyrell’s girlfriend.
Washburn had stolen Tyrell’s jacket. He then pulled a cap down over his face, copied Tyrell’s walk and his mannerisms, and held up the Seven-Eleven. When the robbery went sour and Tyrell was arrested for murder, Washburn felt like he’d hit a grand slam. He’d be banging Ty’s girlfriend for the next fifteen to twenty. He would have gotten away with it, if he had worn different shoes.
The killer’s feet were only on camera for a split second as he ran out of the store, but I freeze framed them and realized I’d never seen shoes like them before. There were four jagged lines attached to the Nike Swoosh. When we zoomed in, we could see that the lines were actually the letter W inked twice into the shoes. It didn’t take long to find out that W.W. was the personal logo of Willie Washburn, who apparently had been dumb enough to rob a store wearing his signature shoes. Today he’s doing a solid twenty in San Quentin. As for Tyrell, he’s in his second year at a different state institution. UCLA.
On the day that Tyrell and Washburn traded places in the lockup, Coral C. came to thank me. “Without you,” she said without a trace of tough street girl in her voice, “I’d be just another black hooker screaming for justice, and nobody would listen to me, and my baby brother would be rotting in prison.”
Then she said those three little words. “I owe you.”
There is a tradition of reciprocity between cops and hookers. Sometimes a girl gets in a jam and needs a favor. And sometimes a guy needs his pipes cleaned. It’s a time-honored tradition that works out well for both parties.
I told Coral C., Thanks, but no thanks. I was happily married.
She put her hand on one hip and went into her Black Ho act. “Shit, White Boy, I don’t wanna marry you. I jes’ wanna thank you. I was gonna be sending you a Hallmark card, but I thought, Hell no, he’ll trash that and forget all about it in two minutes. But if I suck his cock, he’ll ’member that fo-ever.”
“Ms. Jones,” I said. “I’ll remember this forever. It’s not every day a grateful citizen stops by to express such deep appreciation. As for keeping your brother out of prison, I was as wrong as everyone else when I first saw that security tape. You’re the one who saved his life. I’m just glad I could help.”
Coral C.’s face softened. Her “you-can-fuck-me-anytime” body language morphed into the filled-with-gratitude loving sister. Her eyes welled up. She dropped the Ebonics. “Tell your wife I said she’s a lucky woman. God bless you, Mike.” She took my hand, leaned in, and kissed me gently on the cheek. And then she left the squad room. A lady.
And that was the last time I saw her. Until the night Joanie died. I was drunk. I dug out Coral C.’s number and called her. I told her I was ready to accept her offer. I wanted to spend the night with her. But first she had to agree to the ground rules.
I had never cheated on my wife, even in the last year of her illness, when our sex life was nothing more than a bittersweet memory. And now that she was dead I wanted to physically lose myself inside a woman. I wanted sex, but I didn’t want charity. I didn’t want payback for doing my job two years ago. I wanted a business arrangement. I wanted Coral C. to fuck my brains out and charge me for the privilege. Full retail price. No policeman’s discount.
She argued briefly, but she could tell I meant it. “I’m a fucking cop, and I’m laying down the law,” I said, drunk, belligerent, and hopelessly despondent. “Take it or leave it.”
She took it. A month later, when I read Joanie’s first letter from the grave, I gave Coral C. another call. Same deal. Since then we’ve spent the night together on the 18th of every month. Nobody knows about the arrangement. Not Terry, not even my father. It’s not that they’re judgmental. It’s just that I’ve got enough guilt about paying a hooker every month on the anniversary of my wife’s death. I don’t want to think about what anyone else would be thinking.
I had planned to meet Coral C. at midnight, but my long-winded father and my bubble-headed brother had screwed up my plans. I dialed her cell phone to tell her I’d be late.
She answered on the first ring. “Hello.”
“Hello,” I said. We never used names on the cell phone.
“You’re late. Should I start without you?” she said, laughing sexily.
“I have to cancel.�
� It was the voice inside my head talking, but the words came out of my mouth, and, through the magic of wireless technology, went straight to her ear.
“You breaking our date?” She sounded surprised. Not nearly as surprised as I was. “You working a night shift?”
“No,” I said, then added lamely, “family problems.”
“You got yourself a girlfriend, don’t you?” I could tell she was smiling.
“No way.”
“But you’re working on it.” She was enjoying this.
I didn’t answer. I wasn’t even sure I knew the answer.
“Hey, baby, I’m cool with it,” she said.
“How’s our college student doing?” I asked, changing the subject.
“Two As, two Bs, and he’s writing a sports column for the school paper. I might apply to college myself. Could you write me a reference?”
“Honey, I could write you a reference that would fog their glasses and get you a four-year scholarship.”
“You sure you wanna break this date? Sounds to me like you still got pussy on the brain.”
“I’ll get over it,” I said. We hung up, and for the rest of the ride home I tried to block the whole long day from my thoughts.
But every now and then the voice inside my head would say, “Don’t forget, you promised Big Jim you’d call Diana.”
CHAPTER 21
I made the trip back from Big Jim’s about three minutes shy of my personal-best door-to-door time. Speeding without fear of catching hell is one of the perks of being a cop. I turned into my driveway and automatically looked down at the clock on the dash.
Joanie had this little game she invented called Dashboard Poker. Whenever you get to your destination, you look at your car’s digital clock and make a poker hand out of the numbers. There’s no winning or losing, but a good hand means the stars are lining up in your favor. You’re not allowed to plot your arrival time. It has to be completely random.
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