by Nina Revoyr
Neither Jackie nor Lanier slept well the night Rebecca called Japan, and first thing the next morning, Jackie put in a call to the D.A.’s office. She told them what she was calling about and arranged a meeting for the following Monday. And so they had to sit tight until then.
Except Lanier couldn’t. The answers they’d found had engendered more questions, which kept him twisting in his sheets for two nights. Robert Thomas. How could he? A black cop, too. And why didn’t Paxton try to stop him?
By Friday afternoon, Lanier was jumpy and exhausted—too tired to work, too tense to fall sleep. And so he left work at five and drove up to Fairfax and knocked loudly on Jackie’s door.
“What’s up?” Jackie said when she answered, mouth still full of the burrito she’d been eating.
“I’m going to go talk to Thomas,” he announced. “You wanna come with me?”
“We shouldn’t,” Jackie said calmly, noting his red eyes, the pulsing veins in his forehead and neck. “I mean, we’ve got an appointment at the D.A.’s office next week. Trying to talk to him now might scare him off. It might even be illegal.”
“I don’t give a fuck. I want to speak to him. Now.”
Jackie knew she couldn’t talk him out of it. But maybe, if she went along, she could prevent him from doing anything stupid.
Fairfax, at that time, was clogged with commuters; it took them fifteen minutes to travel the mile and a half to Hollywood Boulevard. This too was full of cars, but they drove without comment until they reached the Hollywood Station. By sheer chance, they found a parking space across from the lot. They waited there until a little after seven, when Robert Thomas emerged in street clothes and walked to his car. Jackie reached for the door, but Lanier put his hand on her arm. They both felt the new weight of this gesture, but didn’t speak of it.
“Let’s follow him home,” he said. “I’d rather get him in private.”
Thomas drove a green Explorer, which was easy to keep sight of in the traffic. They followed him to Carthay Circle, where the Explorer turned into the driveway of a tidy one-story Spanish house. Lanier parked at the curb across the street. By this time, Thomas knew he’d been tailed; he slammed his door shut and stared down the driveway as Lanier and Jackie got out of the Taurus. Lanier crossed the street quickly, while Jackie lingered behind. She saw Thomas’s eyes widen as he recognized Lanier.
“Captain Thomas,” said Lanier, and his voice was sheer ice; the cop’s hello slid smoothly over it, unheard.
Lanier came to a stop, and the two men stood sizing each other up. Thomas was big, well-built, and Lanier wouldn’t necessarily take him in a fight. Jackie saw the bitter lines around his mouth, the narrowed, suspicious eyes, the tired but defiant set of his shoulders. This man gave her a totally different feeling from Paxton, who’d seemed very much like the schoolteacher he was. Paxton she’d trust with the welfare of a baby; this man she’d cross the street to get away from.
“It’s Lanier, right?” asked Thomas. “What are you doing here?” He looked from Lanier to Jackie and back again.
“I think you know,” replied Lanier, and when Thomas just stared, he added, “I talked to Oliver Paxton last weekend.”
“Oh, really?”
“You told me he moved back east. You didn’t say East Palo Alto.”
Thomas’s expression didn’t change, but he raised an eyebrow. “I must have made a mistake. How is Ollie? I haven’t seen him in, what, probably thirty years.”
“Well, that was lucky for you. He had some interesting things to say about you.”
Thomas looked at him, not speaking, not moving. Behind him, someone stirred at the window.
“He was with you in ’65, Bob. At Frank Sakai’s store. And this here is Frank’s granddaughter, Jackie.”
Lanier was staring at him, hard and hateful, and Jackie watched Thomas’s face. Over the last few days she’d wondered what he would do when he was confronted with the fact that his partner had finally spoken. She’d turned over in her mind the possibilities—would he deny it angrily? Get threatening and mean? Try somehow, self-righteously, to justify himself? But now, on the driveway, Thomas did none of these things. His shoulders dropped and loosened, and, amazingly, he started to laugh. “You’ve got some nerve, Lanier,” he said. “Coming to my house.”
Lanier fought to keep still. “I’m glad you think it’s funny,” he shot back. “We’ve got witnesses, and they don’t think it’s funny.”
“You couldn’t,” Thomas said. “There was nothing to see. Their word’s no better than mine, Lanier. Now please get off my property.”
“You’re going to stand there and tell me you had nothing to do with it?”
“I’m not telling you anything. There’s nothing to tell. Now please leave before I have to make you leave.” He turned and started walking toward the house.
“You’re caught, Bob,” Lanier called after him, voice drifting out of control. “You’re a murderer, Bob. How does it feel to have blood on your hands?”
Thomas turned around, slowly, and stepped back down the driveway. He looked as angry as Lanier now, and Jackie was scared—the age difference between the men had totally vanished. “Listen, you know-it-all fuck,” Thomas said. “You have no idea what it’s like to have people’s lives in your hands every day. You have no idea what it’s like to find an old lady whose guts are splattered all over her kitchen, or a man who’s been stabbed to death because he wouldn’t give up six bucks, or a little girl with a knife sticking out of her cunt. I know what it’s like, and even so, I don’t take it lightly when my job requires me to hurt someone. There’s a lot of animal punks out there who I’d like to see drawn and quartered. But to take them down personally is no small thing. No cop likes to hurt people, no decent one anyway. What happened to your friends, if a cop did do it, I’m sure it didn’t happen on purpose.” He stopped here and smiled again, an expression that chilled Jackie to the bone. “Not that it breaks my heart. At least it got them off the streets. Probably saved everyone a lot of trouble in the long run.”
Lanier moved before Jackie could stop him. He hit Thomas in the face with a hard right hook, and Thomas dropped to the ground with a thud. “You fucking bastard,” spat Lanier. “You murdering racist bastard.”
The front door opened now, and a middle-aged woman in a business suit came out and stood on the doorstep.
“James,” Jackie said, stepping closer, afraid to get in his way. Lanier floated up to the older man, and away again, trying to regain his control. “James, come on,” Jackie urged. “It’s not going to help us.” She grabbed his arm, which was rock-hard, veins bulging with blood. “Come on, let’s go. Let’s get out of here.”
Lanier let himself be dragged backwards down the driveway, but he kept his eyes on Thomas. “We’re going to get you, Thomas. No matter what you say. Your ass is going to jail.”
Thomas lay on the ground, hand on his jaw, blood trickling out of his mouth. “You’ve got no case, Lanier. I’m a thirty-five-year veteran. Whatever you’ve got will never stand up in court.”
Lanier drove blindly on the way back to Jackie’s. His earlier sadness and ambivalence had been supplanted by fury; he cursed and hit the dashboard several times. They both feared that what Thomas said was true—it was, essentially, his word against Paxton’s—and now they didn’t know what to do with themselves. And Lanier felt what he’d been feeling more and more these last few days—that he was somehow letting Curtis down again, which he’d done over and over up until the last moment he ever saw him. At the apartment, Jackie invited him in, but Lanier declined the offer. And so they separated, each left to fend for themselves with their anger, their dissatisfaction.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
JULY, 1946
ON CERTAIN evenings, the young man stayed in the store after the older man had left for the night. He told the older man that he had some work to do; he had to check accounts or the inventory. It wasn’t hard to convince him there was reason to stay. The place
was busy, shelves emptying as fast as they could stock them, new money in the neighborhood, from homeowners and companies, finding its way in through their doors. The young man was trustworthy—a devoted son, a veteran—and he knew the older man intended for him to take over the store one day.
A little after nine, there’d be a light rapping on the back door. He would always walk to the door slowly, delaying his pleasure. When he opened it, she would be standing in the shadows, smiling, and he would offer his hand and then wordlessly pull her inside. After he shut the door, they’d embrace, still silent. Then, she’d tell him what excuse she’d given her parents that night: she was at the movies with Constance, or working, or bowling with her girlfriends from school. He’d tease her—Would you like some popcorn, miss? I hear the feature is very good. And they’d look at each other, eyes ravenous for what was denied to them in daylight. He, to her, smelled of fresh earth and sun—and cardboard, and soap from the store. She smelled to him of wide-open plains, clean laundry, and a touch of perfume.
He was twenty-two then, and she was eighteen. They both still lived with their parents, and he took care of his mother, who’d been knocked flat by the loss of her husband and daughter. Her parents, so strict and religious, would never understand what she saw in this man; they’d borne down on her harder since her sister had fled up north the year before. But once, twice a week, they escaped them all and met in the closed, quiet store.
They walked, hand in hand, to the little office behind the counter where the older man kept all his records. There was a couch against the wall—the older man napped here regularly, and sometimes, during the rougher patches of his marriage, would stay here overnight. But now he was gone and the store was closed. The young woman sat down on the couch, and the young man in a chair, and they talked, caught up on their days. The young man smiled—he hadn’t noticed her when she lived here before; she’d been the pigtailed younger sister of a classmate. Now, she was the axis on which his entire existence spun. He couldn’t wait anymore and moved next to her, and they kissed each other long and deep. He lifted his hand to brush her cheek with his thumb, then smoothed her hair back with his fingers. She curved her hand around his neck and pulled him closer. He loved the feel of her body—the small breasts pushed up against him, her soft-but-hard shoulders, her hands that touched him everywhere at once. She unbuttoned his shirt and placed her hands on his chest, touched him through his pants. He moved under her blouse and then down to her skirt, unhooked, unzipped, unbuttoned. They worked between, through, and beneath each other’s clothes, never quite removing them all. He curled his body over hers, and she touched his black hair, ran her fingers down his now-moist back. He placed her hand between his legs and then said, “This is yours.”
She pulled him into her and said, “This is yours.”
They ran into each other on the street sometimes, when they were with their friends or parents, and it thrilled them both to pretend they hardly knew one another, and were only saying hello to be polite. On those occasions, he would have to look away from her, lest his smile or heightened color betray his love. They told no one—her girlfriends, she knew, would never approve, and he had no friends there in the Mesa anymore. He wondered if, given the chance, he’d tell his old friend Victor, but Victor was living in Watts now, and they hadn’t really talked in several years. He didn’t know if Victor would understand, anyway—he wasn’t sure that he even did. What he did know was that each night was like a generous gift; each sunset and sunrise so gorgeous and fresh it seemed the world was reinventing itself just for him. As he walked down the street he felt lighter, stronger, as if nothing could ever worry or defeat him. And she felt, for the first time, like she was no longer alone; like she’d finally found a home in the world. Instead of her daily routines growing tedious, interfering, she went about her tasks almost cheerfully. She polished silverware so hard and efficiently it was almost too bright to look at. He took a greater pride, all of a sudden, at setting up precise rows of soup cans and cereal boxes. Sometimes, to get him through the day, he went back to his locker in the office to look at the picture she’d given him of herself and a group of her friends at a bowling tournament the summer before. Then he went back out into the store and worked even harder. It was a wonderful and heady thing, now, to simply be alive; they both took joy in every moment. And the better and faster they completed their work, the sooner they could be with each other.
There were times they each felt bad about their secrecy. Her parents would come into the store to buy vegetables or milk, and he’d be overly solicitous—not out of guilt, exactly, but instead a kind of awkwardness. He was so close to them, so intimate, and they didn’t even know it. And she felt strange when her parents discussed her sister’s husband, of whom they didn’t approve, and who they felt had taken advantage of their hospitality. His mother started pressing him to find a suitable wife—she had candidates and it was time, she said, and it was hard for him to find reasons to put her off. She couldn’t understand why, suddenly, his spirits were so good. He cooked for her with no complaint, and mowed the lawn, whistling, and she was worried; she’d never seen him so light-hearted. Once, he saw the girl’s sister, his former classmate, when she was down for the holidays, and that was the only time he really thought about their difference in age—she was younger, in eighth grade when he’d been taken away to the camps. But her youth—her serious, burdened, but still undeniable youth—was part of what drew him to her. For four years, since the start of the war, he’d seen nothing but carnage, blood, and sorrow. And now he knew, and discovered in himself, something fresh and untouched, still capable of wonder.
They talked about taking a trip together to the mountains or up to the country, some place where the long and lazy days could luxuriously unfold and not be broken up into endless stretches where they didn’t see each other, and short stolen moments when they did. But he didn’t really want this—every place outside of the city, whether country, marsh, desert, or mountain, was, in his mind, the landscape of war—and neither of them could take time off anyway, let alone explain their absence to their families. So they contented themselves with their time in the store, windows open to the cool, quiet night. The anticipation they both felt on those days they’d arranged to meet—him bustling around the store, she walking quickly down the sidewalk at dusk—was more intoxicating and real than anything either of them ever felt before or after.
They met like this for nine, ten months, going on a year. And then one night in midsummer, lying, spent, on the couch, the young woman told the young man that a friend of hers had gotten engaged. She leaned against him lovingly, kissed him on the neck, and said she envied her friend—she wondered if they’d ever get married. The young man didn’t utter a word, but she felt his whole body stiffen, and she pulled away and looked at him, confused. Wouldn’t you marry me? she asked, and though she thought she meant in theory, she realized she wanted to know. Yes, he said. Yes, of course I would.
“But then why did it take so long to answer?” she asked, buttoning her shirt. “You got so nervous just then. I felt you.”
“No, I didn’t,” he said, sitting up. “Of course I’d marry you. I want to marry you.”
“You bastard.”
“What do you mean?”
“You hesitated. You had to think about it. I can’t believe you. I’m not good enough to marry?”
“That’s ridiculous,” he said. “You know I love you.”
“Do you?” She glared at him. “Is it?”
They argued—or rather, she yelled at him and he tried to explain himself. Eventually she stormed out of the office. He didn’t see her for one week, then two, and pride and confusion kept him from tracking her down. But those weeks were worse than anything, worse than fearing for his life in Europe, and her absence weighed on him so heavily he could hardly draw breath. He did not know how to fix this, how to take back or make disappear the two seconds before he’d said yes. Because she was right. If it was true
that he wanted to bring their love into the daylight, to be with her forever, it was also true that, at least for a moment, the thought of it had scared him. He needed to make her understand that she was his life, as vital as water or air. And so finally, hat in hand, he walked over to the young woman’s house for the first time since he’d known her. And the sour-faced man who answered the door informed him she was gone.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
1994
ON MONDAY morning, Jackie drove downtown again, this time with Lanier at her side. They were both wearing suits, and Lanier kept teasing Jackie; he’d never seen her so dressed up.
“So what happens after this?” she asked as they drove past Crenshaw. She looked right, off the freeway, down the boulevard she saw as a timeline now, a measuring-stick of her history.
“Just what you said. The D.A.’s office takes the information and decides whether or not to press charges, and then, hopefully, we all go to court.”
“I know that,” Jackie said. “I mean…” What did she mean? She meant, what was going to happen with them? Without even giving it a second thought, she’d assumed that she and Lanier would still see each other a couple of times a week, and talk on the phone every day. But now it occurred to her that their work was done and she had no reason to see him again until the trial—provided there was one. “I mean, what are we going to do with ourselves now? We don’t have any more people to chase around.”
Lanier smiled. He understood what she was really saying, and he felt the same way. Jackie had been his only constant for the last three months—the person to talk to, the thing he could always do. And, as awkward as things still felt between them now, he hadn’t realized how used to her he’d gotten. “Well, we could find some other mystery to solve. Or you could come down and volunteer at Marcus Garvey.”
Jackie laughed. “But I’m not a young father. What good would I do?”