by Scott Frank
The second Leo Manning finished what he had to say, Kelly got in her car and drove to the first liquor store she saw and bought a bottle of cranberry-flavored vodka. Once she got home, she drank most of it inside an hour. A record even for Kelly. She had stopped drinking some three months earlier, seeing as that’s what got her into trouble in the first place. But after her brief conversation with the lieutenant, she needed a drink.
No, she needed to be drunk.
It went like this, Leo getting right into it as he always did:
“They’re pulling you.”
“I’m only on the guy.”
“Then what are you doing here?”
“My guy may be part of this.”
“Even so.”
“Come on, Leo.”
“They don’t want you on any of it.”
“This is bullshit. You know that, right?”
“What I know is, I need you.”
“Then say something.”
“You don’t think I did?”
“There’s no way this comes from Parker Center. There’s too few of us as is.”
Leo said nothing.
She shook her head. “The fucking mayor.”
“I’m sorry, Kelly.”
“Maybe I should have let him feel me up that time.”
“You got here all by yourself.”
“This is total bullshit.”
“On that we agree.”
—
Kelly had never thought of herself as a racist, which, according to the department shrink, is pretty much what all racists say.
Still, Kelly was nothing compared to her family. The stuff she’d listened to growing up in Orange County. And not the nice part like where the mayor spent his early years. Because Kelly looked white, a lot of people talked freely around her about how much it pissed them off that the immigrants were taking over L.A.
Her father had been an avocado farmer in Oaxaca, but moved to Anaheim two years before Kelly was born, working for most of Kelly’s life as a manager for an Armstrong’s nursery. Kelly’s mom did nails alongside the Filipinos at a salon in a minimall on Harbor Boulevard, near the border of Garden Grove. Financially speaking, they were one step above white trash. They barely made ends meet and nobody at home was particularly happy. Especially once the black families started moving into the neighborhood and the shootings started.
Kelly couldn’t wait to get out. But she also didn’t want to sit around and stew in her anger like her parents had. She got recruited by the LAPD while taking a court reporting class at Foothill Junior College. The teacher, Janet Regal, was an ex-cop who had to leave the department after getting in a near fatal car accident on the job. She immediately took to Kelly, liked how bright and how tough she was and thought she’d be excellent on the street.
For her part, Kelly loved the first couple of years out there, hanging with the girls from the Fruit Town Brims. Satchi and Marvilla and Nola and all the others. She knew all their secrets. They knew hers. They were family. Even now, Kelly believed that. They loved her. She went to weddings, christenings, and funerals. Lots of funerals.
Of course, at first, they didn’t know what to make of this green-eyed, light-skinned, half-Mexican chick who looked more like a newscaster than a cop.
Kelly had been recruited to the new and as yet unnamed gang unit because she spoke fluent Spanish. Around the city, especially in places like Hollywood or down near USC, the girls were becoming nearly as big a problem as the boys.
The mayor had been told by his newly appointed gang liaison that one gang in particular, the Fruit Town Brims, was using the women in the gang to expand into the Hollywood area. So the mayor wanted to start a new unit of younger black and Latina cops who would just “hang out” in the neighborhoods, get to know the families. “Listen to them,” he said to Kelly one night over drinks downtown; he’d asked her to join him at WP24 to “pick her brain.” But once she got up to Wolfgang Puck’s big lacquered Chinese restaurant on the twenty-fourth floor of the Ritz-Carlton, and was sitting there looking out at four different freeways, it was clear what he actually wanted. The mayor kept talking about playing to her strengths, her fortes, apparently his word of the evening, all the while reaching across the table to touch her hand, ostensibly making a point, but really making all sorts of them.
For her part, Kelly kept it all business. Said that she had lived in Compton for a few years when she was in high school. Knew some of the girls in the Brims. They were mostly centered around Vermont Avenue, from Jefferson Boulevard and 38th Street down by Exposition Park and USC. And while some of them might be hanging out in Hollywood, there were other gangs he should be more worried about, such as the Brims’ longtime rivals, the Rollin’ 30s Crips.
“I just love the names,” the mayor said, giving her that smile. “Fruit Town, as in L.A. and the whole orange grove thing?”
“Fruit Town as in North Compton. The streets up there are all named Cherry, Peach, and Pear. Like that.”
“Compton?”
“They started there in the seventies, as an offshoot of the Fruit Town Pirus.”
“Another awesome name.”
“Most of them went to John Muir High School. Where I went for a while. Before we moved to Anaheim.”
“Anaheim, really?”
He showed her a few thousand dollars’ worth of dental bleaching and asked, “And Brims, like hats?”
“Black Revolutionary Independent Mafia.”
“You know so much.”
“Wasted childhood.”
He stared back at her with his pretty blue eyes for what seemed like a week before tossing out this gem: “I want to focus on the family aspects of gang life. On the females in particular.”
The females. Like they were some kind of ape in the wild that needed further study. How did this fucking guy get elected? No, Kelly knew how he got elected. This was L.A. And look at him. He was young. He looked like an actor. Like a specific actor. What was that guy’s name? The Spanish guy, married what’s-her-face from that movie, Working Girl.
Her husband’s favorite movie.
“Listen,” Kelly said, “you should know going in that these kids don’t respond the way other kids do.”
“How do you mean?”
“I’m talking about ideas, ideas we throw at them, like working hard to get ahead, going to school, just saying no, peace and brotherhood and all of the bullshit people talk about when they talk about gangs.”
“What’s wrong with working hard or going to school?”
“Nothing,” she said. “But you need to understand that those things have a different meaning out there. Especially the possibility of any kind of peace. That’s one they just can’t picture.”
“Why not?”
“Because these kids have no fucking idea of peace and tranquility. For them life has always been full of violence and struggle, especially violence.”
“They do tend to shoot each other.”
She wanted to hit him, but kept on. “I’m not talking about what happens on the street. I’m talking about where they live. Inside their own homes. I’m talking about the poverty of their families and the domestic violence among the people supposed to be taking care of them. That’s all outside of the gang wars and what they consider to be an occupational police force. The only peace these kids see is on TV in shit like Modern Family and Parenthood.”
“They watch those shows?”
“Think about waking up every morning stepping over people sleeping on your living room floor. Your father is your mother’s latest boyfriend. You’re told in a hundred different ways, every day of your fucking life, that being subliterate and without marketable skills is just the way it is, the best you can hope for.”
The mayor looked like he had tears in his eyes, but all he said was “Wow.”
They talked for another hour about how the mayor’s little task force could work and Kelly felt that she’d gotten the conversation, the entire evening, for that
matter, back on track.
That is, until the guy made a sloppy pass as she was getting into her car, the man reaching around to palm her ass as he leaned in for a quick one, saying something stupid like You and I make a great team.
Kelly gently pressed her fist into his chest to stop his advance. The mayor bumped into it, looked at the wedding band that she was now showing him. But the fucking tool was drunk and either didn’t see it or didn’t care. She remembered him smiling and trying to put her finger in his mouth. Kelly pulled her hand away and got into her car saying, “I voted for you, asshole.”
Even though she hadn’t.
Kelly figured that was probably the end of that shiny new assignment, but a week later, there she was, walking up and down Hollywood Boulevard, hanging out. And after three years of that, she went to North Hollywood to do the same thing along Laurel Canyon Boulevard.
From the beginning, she was known for her big mouth, but Kelly thought she just called things as she saw them. Her fellow officers sometimes couldn’t believe some of the goodies she said in front of other human beings, but they, for whatever reason, understood her and laughed it off as one of her many tics.
Kelly got the joke, but it also pissed her off that anyone would think she was racist, given everything she was doing to help the kids on the street, black, brown, or otherwise. She loved them all. She saw firsthand what they went through. And in her way, she took them more seriously than any other cop she knew. She got them. Damned if she would shut up about what she saw on the street every day just because other people hid behind being PC when, in reality, at least in her mind anyway, they were all pussies and couldn’t be honest about anything.
In the end, though, it was the word “eradicate” that fucked her.
The only way to deal with the so-called gang problem is to eradicate each and every one of them.
Then, like now, she was drunk. It was late at night at Hollywood Station and all she could think about was that little rapo, Ronnie Rabidou, smirking at her. Did he smirk? Or did she just think he did. It didn’t matter: he raped and murdered a woman in front of her nine-year-old daughter, and then killed the little girl as well. Guy’s lucky that he’s a cripple, can still play video games and get stoned with his homies, buy his groceries at the liquor store in his jammies after he wins his lawsuit eight years from now. He’s lucky that Kelly didn’t walk into that room and shoot him.
Of course, it also didn’t help that earlier that same morning her husband, Steven, told her he was done. Told Kelly that he was on his way out the door for someone who was actually around once in a while. Told her that he’d found someone who paid a little attention to him every now and then, someone whose hair didn’t always smell like a fucking crime scene. Of course, what he didn’t say was that this special someone was another man named Neddy Mars, star of some show on the WB about vampire crime fighters who Steven had been training, privately, at the dojo for the previous six months.
That might have contributed somewhat to her anger.
And if she had just tooled up the kid and then taken whatever punishment came her way, she might have survived.
But Kelly Maguire being Kelly Maguire had to open her mouth. So what if it was intended to be heard only by her partner, Rudy Bell, at the other end of a phone call, Kelly calling him from the Burgundy Room in Hollywood, the night she got hit with her suspension. Rudy always there for her, maybe just a little in love with her if she really thought about it, which Kelly never would. Whatever. She still should have shut the fuck up. But for days after she left the kid on the floor of the interview room, she couldn’t stop moving. She had all this energy with no place to go. Plus she was drunk.
So she called Rudy, got his voicemail, and started talking.
Jesus, there’s just too fucking many of them. Rollin 60. Eight Trays. Fo’ Trays. Twenty Bloods. 5-Deuce Hoover. 11-Deuce Hoover. Shotgun Crips. Outlaw 20 Bloods. Grape Street Watts. PJ Watts. Park Village Compton Crips. Altadena Blocc Crips. Marvin Gangsters. Playboy Gangsters. Harlem 30s and Rollin 4os. 5-Six Syndicate. 6-Deuce Brims. And that’s only a few. Christ. Fuck each and every one of them. I give up. I’m done.
There’s just no way to win a fight against what’s now an entire population with an average lifespan of what, nineteen years? These people have no choice but to join a gang. If I were them, it’s what I would do. I mean, is it really so hard to understand why young black kids are killing each other with such gusto? The truth is, we could, if we wanted to, just wait for them to do the job for us. The self-cleaning-oven theory of law enforcement. And why not? The only way to deal with the so-called gang problem is to eradicate each and every one of them, starting with that smirking little black fucker, Ronnie Rabbit.
She knew Rudy would get it. They talked like this all the time, in the car, in bars, at lunch. Okay, maybe it was just Kelly who talked like that, hard to say, now, looking back. But either way, she was talking to Rudy. Just Rudy.
Except that she wasn’t talking to Rudy.
She had not called Rudy Bell. In her drunken state, Kelly had actually called a man named Oren Krueger, a blogger (#OKstreets.com) and sometimes contributor to Los Angeles Magazine. Recently, Krueger had done a series of vines as he walked around various parts of L.A. filming himself on his iPhone while he spit out seven seconds on the history/troubles/color of whatever neighborhood he was passing through. His idea was to string together all of these informative bits about his beloved L.A. and make a film or publish them or both. At the time Kelly mistakenly rang him up, O.K. had several hundred thousand followers. A day later, he would have several million.
Here’s how Kelly fucked up:
A week earlier, Rudy Bell had changed his number and personal email address after a still unknown gangsta had somehow managed to steal his phone and tagged a wall on Van Nuys Boulevard with all of Rudy’s contact info.
Krueger heard about it from one of his tipsters and recorded one of his vines in front of the wall. Assuming correctly that Rudy Bell would immediately change his phone number rather than spend his days deleting hundreds of “Fuck you, pig” messages, Krueger walked into a T-Mobile Store on Fairfax and secured the number for himself so that he could record those messages that might come in from any OGs out there who didn’t read his blog or follow the news in general, i.e., pretty much all of them.
Of course, that was also the week following the shit with Steven and Ronnie Rabidou, the same week that Kelly went on the Vodka & Weed diet, so she was pretty well juiced when she picked up her phone to vent, dialed Rudy but got Krueger’s new voicemail instead.
Coincidence? As Miles Sugar, her training officer at the academy, used to tell her, “There are no coincidences, only what happens.”
Twenty-four hours later, Kelly’s private rant went viral. Soon, no one in the department was laughing at her, or even listening to her. She was a nonperson. Worse, a nonofficer. She was done. Not wanting to fire her, they decided to wait her out. They put her on DV Follow-up. Visit the battered wives and girlfriends late at night when no one was around, when cops and vics could supposedly have a better, more honest conversation. Maybe have a word with the abuser, leave behind a pamphlet or two, and then go home and try not to get drunk or, worse, eat a bullet.
But then, Councilman Peres got his head pulped and, for a moment at least, they needed her again.
Finally, a way back.
Or so she thought.
Kelly was pouring the last bit of vodka into a mug when the apartment began to shake. Just an aftershock, she thought, but a big one. And it kept going. A picture came off the wall and she could hear glass breaking in the kitchen. Kelly got up and moved her ass to the front door and opened it. She then stood there in the alleged safety of the jamb while the building rattled all around her.
Two units down, a fluorescent tube fell out of a fixture and shattered on the floor. A moment later, Kelly saw a woman in her underwear wobbly step out of her apartment.
“Careful,” Kelly said.
“There’s broken glass.”
The woman looked up the hall at Kelly. She was maybe thirty-five with short brown hair and, though skinny and small breasted, Kelly had to admit she had a decent body. She also had what looked suspiciously like a joint in her mouth. It was hard for Kelly to say for sure as she now pinched the smoke and put it behind her back.
The shaking stopped and the woman cut a nervous glance into her apartment.
Kelly smiled at her. “Not so bad.”
“No,” the woman said. “Not as bad as some have been.” Then, as if obligated now that Kelly had seen her in her underwear: “I’m Erin.”
“Kelly.”
“Yeah, I know. You’re the cop.”
Kelly shrugged. “I guess so.”
“You guess so?”
“There seems to be some question as to my position at the moment.”
“Oh.”
The woman looked into her apartment again.
“Everything okay in there?”
“My son. He’s five.”
“Is he all right?”
“Completely conked. He can sleep through anything.”
“I bet,” Kelly said. “Especially after breathing in all that secondhand ganja smoke, kid must sleep like a log.”
“Shit.” Erin took the blunt from behind her back. Looked at Kelly. “Actually, I was out on the balcony.”
“Yeah, I know,” Kelly said.
“You catch it over there?”
“Every night.”
“Sorry.”
Kelly said, “Don’t be.” And then she asked, “Can I have a hit?”
By the time the mayor arrived at Valley Presbyterian, well over two hours late, the press was good and pissed. There was a Santa Ana condition that afternoon and it was nearly ninety degrees outside, higher in the asphalt parking lot where everybody was standing around drinking bottled water provided by the hospital, a few hardcases drinking beer stashed in brown paper bags. These veteran men and women waiting for their early retirement offers from the L.A. Times, so they could take their pension, then go blog or write a novel, become the next Michael Connelly.