He struggled with the pain. “Which girl?”
“There is more than one?”
“Which girl?”
“Your ex-girlfriend.”
“They all think they are my girlfriends.”
“You have a nice little con going here.”
“What girl are you tripping over?”
“Margaux.”
“I don’t know any girl named Margaux.”
“Tsigereda.”
Now we were on the same page.
Jake Ellis came in carrying the man’s thirteen-inch MacBook Pro in his hand.
I said, “Pull up the video you’re using to blackmail her. From the cloud. From all sources.”
If Garrett had been as terrified as this motherfucker, my day would have been a lot better.
He pulled up the video. I didn’t want to, but I had to look. I was going to make her boyfriend come on this trip, was going to make Kevin beat the shit out the motherfuckin’ asshole who had caused them so much grief, but Kevin didn’t need to see this. A man couldn’t see this and stay with the woman he said he loved. If he saw this, it could not be unseen. I could’ve made Margaux come here, but that wouldn’t be right either. I didn’t want Rachel to stay. She had compromised the doors, had used her skills to bypass the locks, then skedaddled like she had been told. I refused to let Jake Ellis see my daughter in that way. So it was up to me.
It was little more than a glimpse, but I saw my daughter in a way a man should never see his child. The video was more than forty minutes long. For ten seconds, the hardest ten seconds of my life, as long as it took to verify that was indeed my child, as I was unable to breathe, as my anger took control of me, I saw why she would have paid fifty thousand dollars for no one to be able to see her the way she was, doing the intimate things she was doing, with a man she had once trusted.
Feeling hurt and nauseated, feeling like chopping a motherfucker up into a dozen pieces and feeding him to alligators, I shouted, “Delete that. Delete that shit now. Motherfucker, now.”
As I looked, the blackmailer looked up at my mask, shook like he had a fear of clowns, like coulrophobia was his only phobia and my scary clown mask had reminded him of a multitude of childhood nightmares. He trembled, apologized, begged me to let him pay her back, as he deleted it from the cloud. That deleted it from everywhere. That was all I needed. He had videos of other women. African women. White women. East Indian women. And the girl Jake Ellis had seen him with was part of that playlist. I left those intact. Those weren’t my daughter. Those weren’t any of my business. That done, I got him in that LAPD chokehold. Tears in my eyes, I killed him.
I had to kill him. There was no clean way out, other than his death.
He had picked the wrong daughter to fuck with.
Jake Ellis asked, “You didn’t want to take any of that money back?”
“That car. This house. It’s probably spent.”
“Not all of it.”
“Rich boys like this, I bet he’s fifty thousand dollars behind in his bills.”
“And I bet he has that much in a safe in this house.”
“Not my concern.”
“Not paying his bills don’t mean he’s cash-strapped. They stack chips and play the system. I bet he has rubber-banded wads of cash around here somewhere.”
“He might have blackmailed a few, but this can’t look like a robbery.”
Jake Ellis asked what he didn’t want to ask. “How bad was that video?”
I didn’t answer. Not answering told him all he needed to know.
“Bruv, you did the right thing.”
I remembered the last question I had asked Margaux, the one that had gone unanswered. If that blackmail had included sexual favors, I had no idea.
I told Jake Ellis, “I hope so. I hope this was the right thing.”
I went to the counter, picked up notices from the IRS, opened one and saw a lien was being placed on this address. Just like in Leimert Park, the so-called rich were living paycheck to paycheck. They lived like this and were no better than the people they chastised and criticized.
Then I went back to his computer, back to his videos, back to the cloud.
I asked Jake Ellis, “Just to be clear, it will delete everywhere it’s stored.”
“It’s deleted from everywhere in this and adjoining universes.”
“Delete the rest. Delete the rest of the girls. Save other fathers the same angst.”
“If she had told us this shit this morning, we would’ve fixed this in ten minutes.”
“Delete every e-mail to my daughter. Take her name out of his system.”
“I’ll make her no longer exist in his world.”
“Like he no longer exists in hers.”
* * *
—
WE WRAPPED DAWIT Wake up in plastic. I pulled my BMW up to the empty side of the two-car garage and we loaded him in the trunk. I wanted to take him to Kenneth Hahn Park and bury him in a hole on the hiking trail, but that was too close to home. We took his body out to a plot of land in the Pomona area. Heat was still over one hundred out that way. We were well hidden. I dug a hole and put that boy five feet under. I wished he had still been alive to hear the sound of that crunch, crunch, crunch. We disposed of the gear from Home Depot on the way back, put it all in a Dumpster in Monrovia. Then I removed the bogus plates that had been on my car, tossed those and put my legal plates back on, opened a bottle of Gatorade, chugged it as we hit the freeway going west at three in the morning. We headed back to our box, went back to Leimert Park.
Jake Ellis yawned. “Bruv, why didn’t you shake him down for money?”
“That would be too complicated.”
“He got Margaux for a lot of money.”
“Killing him was easier.”
“She’s still going to be broke.”
“But she won’t be hemorrhaging money because of one bad decision.”
“What if there is blowback?”
“We covered everything.”
“It was a rush job.”
“He threatened to send that video out in the morning.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Margaux told me that. That’s why she was breaking down like she was.”
“That’s why she came at you with an urgency.”
“If there is blowback, now or ten years from now, this is on me. She’s free of this bullshit. She’s free. I did what a good father would do, bro. I did what a good father would do.”
Jake Ellis couldn’t relate.
He asked, “Why the masks?”
“Kept us from being called niggers.”
“Yeah. I guess they did.”
“They might call a nigger a clown, but they never call a clown a nigger.”
CHAPTER 36
MARGAUX AND KEVIN were at my front door the next morning, same time as the morning before. I let them in this time. Rachel Redman had taken over my life, got my child’s digits, and invited them back over for another breakfast. They were broke, short on money, and the broke and hungry never turned down food. I did the cooking. I wanted to cook for my daughter, same as I used to do when she was a child. I hurried from the kitchen to answer the door, was shoeless, but had on jeans and a T-shirt that had MLK Jr. on the front, in speech mode, the message being NEVER FORGET THAT EVERYTHING HITLER DID IN GERMANY WAS LEGAL. Rachel Redman came down the hall, appeared in the doorway, face and skin wet like she’d taken a fast shower and then put on a pair of my joggers and a UCLA T-shirt, my clothes swallowing her.
Rachel was excited, told my daughter to get comfortable on the sofa, then ran to my closet, the one where I had kept things for more than fifteen years. Under each arm she had photo albums, my hidden pictures from two decades ago. I asked her to not do that, not right now.
She told me, “Ken, stop acting like you have a messiah complex.”
“She’s not interested in all of that. All of that would be corny to her right now. Margaux, honey, sit down. Let’s take a look at the photos your daddy kept hidden.”
Rachel Redman sat down with Margaux, with the photo albums, showed her pictures I had saved, images of her when she was a newborn, when she was ages one, two, three, four, and five, when I was in my early and mid-twenties, rocking clothes fashionable in the late 1990s and early 2000s. She stopped and stared at images of her with Santa at the mall.
She said, “I have these pictures. Well, similar ones. From different angles.”
“I used up a lot of disposable Kodak cameras.”
“Me and Santa.”
“I took you to sit on Santa’s lap at Fox Hills Mall every year.”
“I have a lot of these pictures. Photos of me and my mother.”
“None with me, I bet.”
“None with you. You’re not in them. I thought you were not there, never present.”
“You don’t see me because I was holding the camera.”
“You have hundreds . . . thousands of pictures I’ve never seen.”
“Look at these.”
“Wow. Pictures of you holding me.”
“And it looks like your mother isn’t present.”
“I guess it does.”
“She was holding the camera. She had her own copies.”
“If that is true, then I think she threw her copies away.”
“Yohanes wouldn’t want images of me in his home. Same would go for your grandparents. Those memories weren’t allowed in your Ethiopian grandparents’ household.”
She asked, “And these are your parents? My paternal grandparents?”
I nodded at pictures of my mother and father, the one time they had met Margaux. Only six pictures of them were in my photo album. I cleared my throat. “They met you once.”
“I heard they weren’t nice.”
“The day your mother met them, things were said, cruel things, and it was ugly.”
“They still living?”
“Yeah. My parents are still living.”
“Where?”
“View Park.”
“Where is that?”
“Right up Stocker. They live five minutes from my apartment.”
“You see them?”
“Not since you were a baby. Not since I defended my wife.”
She clacked her tongue ring against her teeth. “There is a lot I don’t know.”
“Yeah. A lot happened back then.”
“Why couldn’t they just get along?”
“For us, metaphorically speaking, Africa and Mississippi were oil and water.”
“I bet that’s a long story.”
“If you ever want to sit down some day, I can tell you the way I saw things.”
“I just want to hear the good things for now. I can’t handle negativity.”
She looked at pictures of us at Disneyland, then at pictures of her as a child, playing in this very apartment. She saw pictures of her mother as well. She saw our past. My daughter became emotional, had to go to the bathroom a moment, had a cry.
Rachel told me to let her be. Let her sort out her feelings herself.
I went back to that same closet, told my daughter’s boyfriend to come with me. Until he put another ring on her finger, he had been demoted back to being her boyfriend.
I told him, “Help me carry these boxes.”
“These are Christmas presents?”
“And birthday presents. I had forgot how much stuff was crammed in this closet.”
Those boxes were put out on the floor. Rachel stood next to me, and my daughter’s boyfriend stood next to Rachel, all of us worried until the bathroom door opened again.
When Margaux came back, she asked, “What’s going on?”
I said, “Happy birthday.”
“It’s not my birthday.”
“And Merry Christmas.”
“What is all this? You having a party over here today?”
“Party for you.”
“What’s going on?”
“All this is yours. These are things I bought you over the years. I wasn’t with you, but I bought you a present for every Christmas, for every birthday, up until a couple of years ago.”
“All this was for me?”
“Not was. Is. All of this is yours.”
She eased down on her knees, looked at all the boxes, read her name on each one.
Then like a child she began ripping away the wrapping paper.
I had forgotten half the things I had bought her over the years.
There were Troll dolls, Cabbage Patch dolls, a Tickle Me Elmo, two brown Barbies, an Etch A Sketch, a Slinky, Bratz dolls. And for when I imagined her as a teen, there were perfumes.
Margaux sat on the floor smiling, laughing, ripping away Christmas wrapping and opening birthday presents while her boyfriend took the torn-away wrappings and stuffed them back in the boxes. As dead bodies cooled off, I gave my daughter Christmas in summertime. I gave her a birthday party for all the birthday parties I had not been invited to. I won’t lie. I did it for me.
But I did it for her too.
I told her, “I know that stuff is outdated, so you don’t have to keep it.”
“Are you mad? All of this is mine. I’m keeping everything.”
I turned on the news. KTLA channel 5 ran the story about the police investigating gunshots and a Molotov cocktail attack. They said two were thrown at apartments in the Leimert Park section of South Los Angeles yesterday after midnight, and one landed on the roof, and the other hit the side of the building. Said fires were extinguished. They said the man who threw the Molotov cocktails accidently set himself on fire and died of his injuries. They assumed the gunman was his partner and had gotten away. It wouldn’t be connected to Richard Garrett, not from what I could see. After a lame thirty-second report, the news moved on, said a soul-train line of hurricanes was coming, said wildfires were blazing on the other side of Burbank, then gave news reports on a president defending Nazis and supremacists, then more news on how the great nation was devolving into a reality TV show. My daughter and I had nothing in common, were strangers seated at the same table, but that corner of the news gave us a conversation starter.
We talked about a president who was attacking those protesting bigotry.
Rachel Redman said, “I know how I’m going to rock the national anthem.”
My daughter said, “You’re singing the national anthem?”
“At an NFL game.”
“OMG. Are you kneeling?”
“Hashtag, I won’t have to.”
Her boyfriend pointed at the number 7 on his jersey and said, “Hashtag, you have to.”
“I’d rather be original. I don’t like doing what has already been done.”
While San Bernardino’s team of Hondurans loaded the bodies of dead men into a crematorium, while Richard Garrett’s body was being driven out into a desert, while Jake Ellis dealt with drama at his crib a block away, I sat with my daughter, her boyfriend, and my girlfriend, eating Mickey Mouse–shaped pancakes, veggie sausages, and fruit, sipping juice and smoothies, having an awkward conversation, as if two days ago hadn’t been the worst day of my life.
Rachel had turned her phone off. But I hadn’t forgotten about the Russian.
* * *
—
AFTER BREAKING BREAD, my daughter and her boyfriend followed me downstairs. I went out back to the alley, took them to my garage. I had a 2007 BMW 645Ci stored back there. I’d had it since it was new, and it had only forty thousand miles on the odometer. Mint condition. I wasn’t big on driving. But when I did, I looked good on the road.
; I took Margaux to the side and told her, “Your fifty-thousand-dollar problem is over.”
She looked at me, took her a moment to repeat, “It’s over?”
“It’s over.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means you no longer have debt to pay that boy.”
She stood shocked, unsure, then started to cry as she exhaled. “It’s over.”
“You no longer have to borrow and gamble to pay a blackmailer.”
“Should I ask what happened?”
“No. Never ask. And don’t Google his name. Never. Not from your phone or computer.”
“You found him.”
“I found him and made him delete everything.”
She pulled her lips in. “You saw the videos?”
“No. But he deleted them.”
She swallowed, reading my body language as I had read hers, and my daughter knew I was lying.
She asked, “My ex?”
“He’s deleted, Margaux. And that means what it means.”
She swallowed again, this time knew my words were the truth.
She asked, “Are you mad at me?”
“Disappointed. But not mad.”
She lowered her head, wanted to cry.
I didn’t let grief or shock or tears have time to settle. “I know you’re still in a bind.”
“I don’t know what to say right now.”
“Focus.”
“Okay.”
“You paid a lot of money to keep your secret, but that account no longer exists. I want to help you get back on your feet, would love to drop that much cash in your hand, but I don’t have money like that. I did when I was with your mother, and most of that was sent to take care of you.”
“You’ve done enough.”
“I haven’t done enough. Not if you’re still in trouble. If you had come to me at the start, this would have been fixed and money would have been saved. But this is where we are. Learn from that lesson, Tsigereda. Margaux, know that I am your father, no matter what. I can do this, and this is the best I can do for now. You can follow me over to CarMax on La Cienega, and I can sell this BMW right now, then give you what they give me, and that might be about fifteen grand.”
Bad Men and Wicked Women Page 34