Twenty minutes later, two vans arrived. Honduran cleaners.
CHAPTER 31
FIRE TRUCKS HAD come and gone, same for the police, an ambulance, and the crowd, but the stench lingered in Leimert Park. Nothing smelled like a car that had been burned until the fiberglass had melted into the concrete. Nothing smelled like a man who had caught fire and was unable to outrun the flames. We were people made of energy. And this morning, the energy was off. I felt the fear. People on Jake Ellis’s block had been woken by gunshots, shouts, curses, a man on fire, and the screaming of sirens hours ago. Same level of noise had come from the slave-catcher-mobiles when they arrived in what had felt like Baghdad. Gunshots had hit four windows, had terrified everyone in the twelve-unit U-shaped building. More shots had hit the building, and the yellow police tape showed Jake Ellis’s complex was marked as a crime scene, but no one was injured. His car had been set on fire. Scorned women did that all the time in the hood, the ones who had evolved beyond keying automobiles to make themselves feel better, but the slags knew this wasn’t a lover’s quarrel. The gunshots, the man on fire, the sounds of men screaming, put together, it had made it something else in the wild, wild west. Not even Crips and Bloods were rocking it that way, not on this side of town. We were too close to mansions and wealth.
A hundred windows faced Stocker from both sides of the pond. People young and old had seen Garrett’s bushwhackers rush into an ice cream truck but hadn’t seen their swarthy faces up close. Just saw strapping black men in dark clothes, men rocking Tims, the standard street attire of the Shaw since the nineties. On this side of town, if anyone had seen Richard Garrett on Stocker, in that darkness, on our dimly lit street just right of the midnight hour, they would have assumed Dickie Bird was either Creole or a light-skinned old-school Negro with processed hair. No one would believe that in California a white man had the balls to step into the 90008 and do to a neighborhood in flux what Klansmen had done in the Bible Belt. Good news was, the gunshots might slow down gentrification by at least one week. Bad news was, they would make prices drop. Lower prices would then accelerate gentrification.
“For all we know, they could’ve been white men in blackface.”
“That’s the kind of stuff they do. Saw it on the Internet.”
“Me too. White boy in Ohio was robbing banks and drugstores and everyplace else wearing a mask to make him look just like a black man, and he almost got away with it.”
“That’s the kind of stuff they do to get police to shooting every black man they see.”
Without race being factored in, with no way to tie last night to any gang, this was too big for the police to ignore but too small for the suntanned newspeople in LA to care about. There were no swastikas. No one this color had killed someone of that color. Couldn’t blame Muslims. Jews lived in the area, but nothing anti-Semitic had been found. If this had happened six miles away in Beverly Hills, CNN would be out front with two trucks. But here, to America, this wasn’t news. A police report would be done, for kicks, but there wouldn’t be much of a follow-up.
I had missed it, but last night twenty cop cars had come and lit up the area with their rainbows of lights. Down where lower-income melanin-blessed Americans accused AT&T of redlining by giving them low-speed Internet access, it was being tweeted, retweeted, and repeated and liked and shared on Facebook. Video of the car fire and bullet holes was being circulated via the Nextdoor app’s View Park section. The fire was out, but the cops would be back. They wanted to talk to the African called Jake Ellis. It was his car. It was registered to his true name, to his African name, not his adopted name. Jake Ellis’s leased Mustang was unrecognizable. Had been set fire to, and with an accelerant, and it had burned from one end to the other. My .38 was inside, under the seat, probably surrounded by plastic from the stash box. The gun was clean, had no bodies on it, was registered to me, and I had no problem saying I had left it in my friend’s car. The vehicles street-parked in front and in back of Jake Ellis’s muscle car had caught some heat too, enough to melt plastic.
His Haitian lover had fled when Jake Ellis had gone after Garrett. The professor, the high-class, degreed, married woman couldn’t be here when the cops came. She couldn’t come running out of a burning building half-naked. People knew she had a younger lover here. But for appearances, Jake Ellis’s landlord needed to be home with her husband when the call came. Then they rushed back to their damaged property as husband and wife. He was an intellectual.
She had her alibi. If her husband knew, it didn’t show in public.
I asked Jake Ellis, “Bro, what you want to do?”
“Bruv, have them drop me around back. I’ll hit the alley and go in my back door.”
“You can come to my place until the crowd dies down.”
“Nah. I’ll go in my back door. I need a shower. And fresh clothes.”
“Yeah, you stink.”
“Bruv, smell yourself and fix your own stank before you talk about me.”
From the back seat of one of San Bernardino’s SUVs, while nontalking white men young enough to be our sons chauffeured us down Stocker, as we slowed by where Garrett’s bushwhackers had attacked Jake Ellis, in front of his destroyed car, we saw more neighbors at once than we ever had. Black. White. Asian. Mexican. Puerto Rican. Dominican. African. Windows were tinted limousine black. We could see the crowd. No one could see us.
Jake Ellis said, “Them here. Them all over. Standing and shaking heads.”
“Them.”
“Like Nathan McCall referred to the invaders. Them. The other people.”
“Your car is the main attraction. Look at the faces. White people are suspicious of black folks and black folks are giving the white people the side-eye. Team Gentrification is fascinated.”
“Sipping coffee, being nosy. Reminds me of how them all came this way after the LA riots. For entertainment. It was crowded like Crenshaw used to be on Sunday, bumper-to-bumper.”
“Actually, it was much worse. But the police were nicer to the tourists than the locals.”
“Them came to photograph destruction and see what animals looked like without cages.”
Jake Ellis’s Haitian lover was out front with her husband, inspecting the damage to their twelve-unit property. The husband was disgusted. His anger was strong enough to light up Crenshaw from one end to the other. So was she, but I bet she was worried about Jake Ellis at the same time. The older residents had come to see what had happened to the legacy of our African American neighborhood. People who had been here for decades cried when they saw the damage. Might have resurrected old memories, old fears. Watts. LA. Detroit. They remembered riots and fires. Outside of the bullet holes, the fire damaged the exterior, burned parts of the worn stucco. Even though it would have pleased Garrett to have burned Jake Ellis to the ground to get his revenge, the area didn’t go up in flames like Black Wall Street. With the dry heat, with the dryness in the trees, with the way other parts of California were on fire, with what Garrett had done to the concrete jungle, we had been lucky.
I found out that one of Garrett’s wounded men had been in contact with the thugs who had been sent after my ex-wife. One of the wounded men’s tasks had been to maintain contact with that two-man crew in the middle of all this madness. One of the thugs going after my wife was a Jamaican, and the other was this fool’s cockeyed, “fresh out of California Correctional Institution” cousin. The wounded man saw what we had done to his coworkers. From where he was, he had probably seen Garrett get pushed down the stairs, probably saw Mrs. Garrett feeding Mr. Garrett a clip of hot lead. Or he had seen her and San Bernardino get their revenge. The wounded man wanted to trade information for his life. He could have had the secret to curing cancer in his back pocket, I didn’t care. I just wanted to know what had happened to my ex-wife. I needed to know what the Jamaican and this motherfucker’s cockeyed cousin had done to the mother of my only child. What
the wounded man told me helped ease my angst and slow my heartbeat. He said that Garrett’s bushwhackers had followed Jimi Lee. Down Crenshaw near the entrance to the 10 eastbound, they ran into her car, ran her off the road. Six lanes of traffic. A million cars. Homeless people camped out or in the intersections asking for spare change. A half dozen people with phones tried to record the accident, hoping for a WorldStar moment.
Plus, the sirens.
There were always sirens screaming up and down the Shaw.
Sirens made bad men feel uneasy, made a bad boy wonder what they would do when they came for him. Garrett’s boys had sped away, left Jimi Lee with a dent in the left rear quarter panel. They had bumped her car, that scam done to get people to stop before a carjacking.
Or a murder. Garrett’s bushwhackers would have brought her to Pasadena and thrown her into his drowning pool with me and his wife. Jimi Lee had no idea what had almost happened. The wounded man assured me that Garrett’s goons had failed, that his cousin and the Jamaican hadn’t followed Jimi Lee after the roadside mash-up, and that my ex-wife was okay. He swore that on his mother’s grave. He said he had his cousin’s number. I made him call, put it on speaker, listened, heard his cousin say it himself. Heard the Jamaican confirm it too. They were frustrated she had gotten away. Luck had been on their side. Jimi Lee was safe. The wounded man told his cousin and the Jamaican to hurry back to Garrett’s estate. His cousin said they were getting off the Pasadena freeway. The Jamaican said they were no more than ten minutes away. I killed the call. The wounded man begged me to let him go free. He didn’t care what we did to his cousin and the Jamaican. The cousin was a relative by marriage, not by blood, and he’d sell the Jamaican up the river for a song. The wounded man saw it in my face. There was no way out. I beat him until Jake Ellis told me to quit, until San Bernardino said enough was enough, and while I was in that rage, I threw him into the deep end of the cement pond. Drowned him for even thinking about harming the mother of my child. A few minutes later, his cockeyed cousin and the Jamaican were back at what to me was no better than Simon Legree’s mansion. They were tardy for the party, but I wasn’t leaving until I saw them. We had business. Going to kill a woman, an innocent woman; in my mind, they were no better than the henchmen Quimbo and Sambo in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Five minutes after they arrived, they were bloodied, battered, and broken, upside-down in the deep end of the pool, surrounded by the dead, on the road to a bad man’s Valhalla.
I had killed at least three men. Three children of Africa. Black babies would be told they were fatherless. Black women would be told their lovers were dead, their husbands were killed. Black mothers would have to bury their children. That would be, if their bodies surfaced.
There were no alligators in Southern California, but there were crematoriums, so they might just turn to dust. They would go missing. And even if they were reported missing, nobody would ever look for missing black men, not even on Facebook.
That Missing Black Men special would never air on CNN.
Black man went MIA and the world assumed a brother was on lockdown visiting his best homies, maybe a few long-lost family members, at Club Fed taking advantage of three hots and a cot furnished by the kind, melanin-free people who brought us black folks mass incarceration. Hard to find anyone from Goldman Sachs or JPMorgan Chase with the same accommodations.
I’d been beaten. Kicked. Shot at. And almost drowned. All since dinnertime.
Like a fairy godmother, San Bernardino would make everything vanish.
Bodies would burn, all except the carcass of Richard Garrett. San Bernardino had to be cleverer. Clever was in her conniving blood. A missing white man was not a missing black man.
A missing rich white man was a missing god worthy of weeks of news coverage.
San Bernardino’s men had wrapped Garrett and loaded the man from Princeton in an SUV. He reeked like South Boston. Maybe all Southies smelled that way this time of day. Richard Garrett was cooling off in the same SUV that I was brought home in. He was in the back, rotting, the smell of death covering us. Jake Ellis did a dozen African finger snaps as he left the SUV.
He left without saying good-bye, but that didn’t bother me. My mind was already in another place. Would have to face Rachel. I had been MIA all night long. And I still had other problems that had to be dealt with. I had them drop me off in the alley behind my home.
Then I eased up the rear stairs to my back door.
CHAPTER 32
WHEN I JERKED awake two hours later, the sun was screaming, but the curtains were closed; kept the bedroom as dark as midnight. I ached too much for a thousand milligrams of Tylenol to keep the pain at bay. My injuries were robust, couldn’t be washed away when I’d showered and scrubbed blood from my hands. I was in my bed, buck naked. Garrett’s death stench was in my nostrils. And I still smelled his wife’s pain. I’d been asleep only off and on, for ten minutes at a time at the most, if that long. I kept jerking awake, expected to be back in the deep end trying not to drown.
Now, as I have for two decades, I expected to hear the cops knocking at my door.
Margaux would be with them, pointing, repeating the name Balthazar Walkowiak.
That recurring dream was why I woke up wanting to scream like the sun.
Jake Ellis had always been made for this shit more than I was.
I wondered about Mrs. Garrett. I saw her hobbling out of her cage, a creature in a Stephen King novel, then shoving her zookeeper down the stairs. Garrett took an ugly fall. Then I visualized his wife limping down the stairs, entranced, and popping her abuser until her pretty pink gun went dry. Her husband was dead, and the woman who had married up only to have a unilateral prenup was free, but now she was indebted, in bed with San Bernardino. I needed to break free. I’d been in that bed for two decades. I’d grown dependent, had become comfortable.
Rachel Redman rolled over on her belly, licked the inside of her mouth for a while, then groaned. She stretched and played with her braids. She reached for her phone and turned it back on, put in her password. Alerts came in rapid succession. Facebook. Twitter. Instagram.
In her morning voice, she said, “They want every black football player to boycott for one game. Solidarity for one week. To prove that patriotism isn’t red, white, and blue, but green.”
Hiding pain the best I could, I said, “You’re going to sing the national anthem.”
“Feels like they’re setting me up to be on the FBI’s Black Identity Extremist list.”
“Good thing you speak Spanish. You might have to flee to Cuba.”
“You’re right. This could end my career. They will take my passport and black card.”
After the last few hours, all of that felt irrelevant. I didn’t care who kneeled or who stood up to take a shit. I didn’t care about the Russian. I was glad Jimi Lee didn’t end up like Garrett.
I’d never be able to speak that out loud. And I still had to deal with Margaux.
Rachel Redman started singing, loud and obnoxious, then said, “I need another shower.”
She eased out of the bed, yawned her way to the bathroom scratching her ass. She started vocal warm-ups, always loud in the morning. I limped to the kitchen, came back with coffee from the Keurig and water. I hurt so bad that she had showered, changed the linen again, and was back under Downy-fresh sheets by the time I came back from the kitchen. She had nodded off again.
Rachel Redman barely opened her eyes. “You put honey in it?”
“Lots of honey in your coffee. Black and sweet like you.”
“This is why I love you.”
She handled the coffee. I sipped the water until I had flashbacks from the pool.
Alaska turned to me. “Did we have sex last night when we got back here?”
Feeling half past dead, I cleared my throat and asked, “What do you remember?”
“Being at the bar. Being in
the Uber. The driver telling me to stop touching you.”
“You showed your ass from the club back home.”
“When you have a moneymaker that looks this nice, why not show it?”
“I’m sure it’s online, all over social media, screaming for attention and likes.”
“All over my Instagram page. I’m in the gym doing squats, motivating my sisters.”
“You know men pull up your images and jack off to them, right?”
“Women do too. Just keeping it real. Well, look at me. I am pretty hot. Last night I was so hot the sun called to beg for its heat back.”
“The bar. The Uber. That’s all you remember?”
“Singing. Dancing. Your finger. The Uber driver telling us to stop kissing, then waking up.”
“Did you hear the fire trucks last night?”
“What fire trucks?”
“There was a car fire up the street. Apartments too. On the next block toward Crenshaw.”
“That alcohol and Kush had me. I was out like Dr. Conrad Murray had given me propofol. Or Pill Cosby had given me Jell-O shots. Tell me what you did to me while I was sleeping, you pervert.”
“You remember decorating the hallway and making the paint peel off the bathroom walls?”
“I don’t want to talk about that part of last night.”
“You turned my bathroom into a bodacious chitlins factory.”
“I hate you, Ken Swift.” She sipped her coffee. “You forgot my birthday.”
“You’ll have another one.”
“Lord willing and the creek don’t rise.”
“Make sure you remind me the day before.”
“This has been the worst birthday I’ve ever had.”
“Whatever.”
“Wait. Fire trucks. What fire trucks? And an apartment caught on fire?”
“You’re not awake yet. I think you’ve still got too much alcohol in your blood.”
Bad Men and Wicked Women Page 30