White plaster dusted the floor as if someone had exploded a bag of flour. The walls were dimpled with fresh bullet holes. Bullet shells lay scattered across the floor like chicken feed. The television was shattered, with a dime-size hole in the center of the tube.
Reggie noticed the outline of a shoe in the plaster dust. “You guys got this print?” asked Reggie.
“Yeah. We’re done with the floor. You can walk on in.”
Reggie stepped around the print anyway and walked into the bedroom. Piles of rock cocaine lay on a card table in the corner, along with stacks of plastic baggies. One boy lay on the bed, a bullet hole in his chest; his hand, half under the pillow, gripped the stock of a .44 semiautomatic. The other boy sat in a ratty overstuffed chair with a .38 under his cushion. The top of his head was blown away.
As Reggie returned to the living room, the coroner showed. Reggie watched as he turned over one of the children, a little girl, pink barrettes at the bottom of four stubby braids, her arm over her face as if to protect herself. Such little hands, thought Reggie, recalling his own sons as babies, their tiny, grasping hands that you could never imagine growing to adult size. These hands wouldn’t.
It hit him—all at once and hard. He felt like he was shrinking, his mind plunging down through his center. He fought nausea, trying to focus, searching the wall for something to lock on. Pocket-marks of plaster formed hundreds of faces from corpses he’d seen on Los Angeles streets, eyes and mouths wide open as if in surprise.
He felt exhausted, like he’d been forced to watch a marathon newscast on a bank of television screens, like his brain couldn’t process any more images. He felt too tired to care anymore. What did it matter when tomorrow there would be faces of more dead children, their killers children themselves, arrested, perhaps, sent to prison only to make rage their master and to learn better ways to destroy their minds and souls, better ways to rob, rape, and murder? What did it matter?
For a moment, he saw Laura’s face flicker over the raw plaster holes, smiling. It seemed she was trying to tell him something. Then she was gone.
“Are you all right, Sergeant?” asked Sanchez beside him, who looked a bit green himself.
“Fine.” Reggie stood, grateful for his height so Sanchez couldn’t see into his eyes. “Have we located the mother yet?” he asked.
Before Sanchez could answer, Velma blustered in and glanced down at the toddlers. “I’m gonna find this motherfucker and fry his ass. I want these predators off my streets, fuckin’ outa my neighborhood. This shit has gotta stop.”
“This isn’t your neighborhood,” said Sanchez.
“Every neighborhood is my neighborhood,” she snapped. She knelt beside the coroner as he stripped the bodies to examine exit and entry wounds and to take body temperatures. She flipped to a new page on her notepad and jotted down the findings.
Reggie looked at her with curiosity—her facial muscles contorted, jaw forward, eyelids lowered, ears back like those of a pit bull ready to attack. Reggie understood her rage yet felt nothing.
He began to realize that ever since Laura had disappeared, he’d been in this fog. He had no concentration. Nothing seemed to matter. He felt as if he were acting in a play in which he didn’t know his lines, staggering aimlessly across stage. If only he could see Laura again, it all would make sense, and if it didn’t make sense, maybe he could at least feel something—even pity would do.
Around two o’clock, the mother of the two toddlers came home all dolled-up, hair curled and ironed so it looked more like a hat than hair, skirt slit to her crotch, breasts—stretch marks and all—popping out of a leopard-print top. She stumbled on her three-inch heels toward the yellow tape, nearly knocking down a uniformed officer. She clung to his arm, staring blankly at her house until it sunk in. No words came out, only screaming. She screamed until she choked, spit and vomit dribbling out of her mouth, a piercing, ragged sound that grew shriller with each gasp, like a buzz saw hitting granite, a scream not of love and loss, but of self-loathing and guilt.
As her scream ripped up the potholed street, a cool mist penetrated and numbed Reggie’s heart. It wasn’t his job to absorb her pain; it wasn’t his job to comfort her; it wasn’t his job to wonder how many other children would be murdered on the streets of Los Angeles that night. He yearned for stillness. He approached the mother and gently squeezed a pressure point at the base of her neck; she percolated down to a whimper and stopped fighting the two patrol officers who held her back.
When Reggie asked her to come down to the station, she nodded. He led her to his car.
* * *
Scott jumped out of bed. He was late again. He needed to dash to the office and finish the offer for the Mandeville Canyon house before the Brightons showed. He dressed in a hurry, but just as he was locking up, the telephone rang. Scott raced back into his apartment and grabbed the phone.
“Scott here.”
“So . . . did you find it yet?”
“Hi, Samantha. How ya doing?” Impatiently, he glanced down at his watch. He had no desire to talk to his sister.
“You pawned it, didn’t you?”
“I can’t imagine what you’re talking about, Sammy.”
“Don’t be a dickhead.”
“Oh, you mean the ring. It was never lost. It’s sitting right here in my drawer, between my jockstrap and my condoms.”
“I want it now, Scott. Mom said I could have it.”
“Jesus, Sammy, you sound like you’re twelve years old. Why don’t you find a boyfriend to give you your own ring?”
Sammy chuckled bitterly. “Guys don’t want to get engaged anymore. They don’t even want sex. They’d rather jerk off and go to the gym than have a relationship.”
“Are you saying you can’t get a date?”
“None of your beeswax,” she snapped. “Just give me the ring, why don’t you?”
“Why is it so important to you, Sammy? If you got a problem, you can talk to me. Let me guess. I bet you want it to cover for some lie you told. You trying to impress someone? Make someone jealous?”
He heard silence on the other end. Then she said, “I want a piece of the family history.”
“What crap. Can’t you come up with something better than that? Besides, didn’t Mom ever tell you? You’re adopted.”
“I’m not kidding, Scott. If you don’t give it to me, I’ll tell Mom about the silver.”
Scott got a sudden nasty taste in his mouth, like when a bum won’t stop pestering you. Sammy was referring to the silver and jewelry he stole from his mother when he was twenty. It was his mother’s fault. She had agreed to pay for college, so he had enrolled at USC, an expensive school. She stopped paying after the first year, not for any financial reason but because she felt Scott, as the male in the family, shouldn’t rely on handouts. She told him just a few weeks before the fall semester began, so he didn’t have time to apply for a scholarship (which he probably wouldn’t have gotten anyway), or hustle up dough from his dad (if he could find out where in the South Pacific his yacht was). It was even too late for a student loan. So he burgled the house and made it look like a robbery. He sold the stuff for tuition, stuff, he justified, that his mother didn’t use or like. Sammy found out about it. He couldn’t remember how. She had promised to keep it a secret. “That’s ancient history,” he said. “Mom would just laugh about it now.”
“Oh really? You don’t know Mother very well, do you?”
Sammy was right. There was no statute of limitations on their mother’s vengeance. He had only had to look at her ex-husbands; she found many ways to make them pay. “I’ve got to go, Sammy. I’ll call you later.” He hung up. His heart was beating fast. She was a persistent irritation, an eczema that wouldn’t go away. Sooner or later, he’d have to deal with her.
* * *
After talking with Father John, Reggie resolved to spend more time with his wife. For him and Audrey, that meant sailing.
As they turned into Burton Chase Park a
nd drove into the lot reserved for members of the Santa Monica Windjammers Yacht Club, Reggie recognized Susie Edmunson and her husband Ralph and several others he knew by sight. They all waved, with big grins. Paul Axlerod, a crusty old sea dog, shuffled over and offered to help get their boat down from dry dock; it was the part of sailing Reggie didn’t like much, but it was cheaper than paying rent on a slip and having to scrape the bottom of the boat.
It was Audrey who taught Reggie to love sailing. She grew up in Washington, D.C., a member of the old-moneyed black elite. She gave it all up to marry Reggie—a tar-black Catholic cop completely unacceptable to her family—but the summer sailing lessons with her father in Martha’s Vineyard at the Sunshine Club, an exclusive East Coast yachting club for black physicians and attorneys, had not gone to waste.
Even before they bought a house, Reggie and Audrey purchased Amazing Grace, a thirty-foot Coronado with a small but comfortable cabin. It was their escape—from the city, the department, her job, the kids, the constant stress of trying to cram too much into one day. When Reggie and Audrey were out on the boat alone, just the two of them, they became as they were when they first began discovering each other, during long nights of whispered confessions and sweaty sex in Audrey’s dorm room at UCLA, nights made sleepless as they struggled to keep from rolling off her twin bed. The boat was their refuge, a return to their tenuous intimacy that existed in its own time and space. It was on the boat where Reggie and Audrey talked. It was on the boat where they conceived their two boys.
“You guys headed out to Catalina today?” asked Paul. His face, tanned and leathery, twisted to look at the horizon to see if the island was visible. It wasn’t. Too much haze.
Reggie attached chains to the hoist, then he and Paul lowered the boat into the water. Audrey dragged over the hose to wash down the deck. “We thought we’d spend the night and come back tomorrow” Reggie said.
“Good weather for it. Wind’s at thirteen knots. You should make it in four and a half hours or so.”
“We’re not in a hurry.”
Amazing Grace slapped into the water, bobbing up and down. Reggie thanked Paul, and he and Audrey hopped on. Reggie opened the hatch, pulled out the mainsail, and began attaching the genoa and the other rigging. Audrey started the motor. As Reggie hoisted the jib, Amazing Grace puttered around the docks into the main channel.
* * *
Scott kicked himself. He never should have told his mother he was engaged. But there it was, popping out of his mouth like it was true. Now he had to find someone who would play along. He unearthed his address book from beneath a stack of bills and magazines. He’d never thought of it as his little black book, but he supposed it was. He sat on a worn, overstuffed chair, his legs over the armrest, and flipped through the pages, running his fingers over the names of women he had dated. Some had moved or married or, he suspected, would not appreciate a call from him. Some names he couldn’t remember. One had become a lesbian.
Then he came across Connie Philips.
Connie was an all-around great girl: pretty, with a band of freckles across her nose, athletic, adventurous, and sweet. She was famous—well, almost famous, a kayaker at the ’96 Olympics in Atlanta, used in a couple of commercials because she was attractive, and even though she brought home only the silver, she won enough media time to launch her own line of women’s athletic wear. She loved more than anything to spend the weekend kayaking, mountain biking, sailing, or hiking. A real tomboy, but sexy as hell.
Scott couldn’t remember why they broke up. Maybe she was too easy. Frank and open. She was never moody and didn’t seem to need anything from anybody. Not that she was tough. Not at all. She was just so reasonable. Like one of his buddies. She wasn’t mysterious, like Laura. That hardly seemed like a good reason to break up with someone, but that was the best he could come up with.
Actually, he recalled, they never really broke up. After their last date, he simply let several weeks slide before calling her, then chatted her up without asking her out, a technique he used to deflect that awkward conversation where he’d have to say he wasn’t ready for a relationship or some other lie. Like most girls, she got the picture.
He rang her up and left a message on her machine. He was pretty sure she’d call back.
* * *
Anchored in Catalina, Amazing Grace rocked back and forth, the waves lapping her hull, gulls screeching outside, the orange sunset peeking through the portholes. Reggie and Audrey lay collapsed on top of one another.
“Let me get this straight. You’re confessing to me that you feel concerned about this girl?”
Wearily, Reggie propped himself up on an elbow and admired his wife. She lay on the bunk between brown satin sheets, her skin almond, her negligee pink-orange. She looked like a tropical fruit hidden beneath a dark forest canopy, behind orchids and ferns. She smelled of musk and ripe cantaloupe. The sheets shimmered, and as he rested his cheek on her stomach, he imagined the two of them floating on a raft down the muddy Amazon.
“I guess that’s about it,” Reggie muttered, marveling at his wife’s clarity. She would make a great lawyer. His own thoughts were a muddled mess of half-formed feelings and fears that he couldn’t articulate. Often he’d ramble on for ten minutes and still not know what he was trying to say. But with scalpel precision, Audrey would find the topic sentence. He suspected she understood his interior life better than he did.
“You say she’s the delicate sort, without any family nearby, and she was being stalked by her ex-boyfriend?”
“Yes.”
“You think he murdered her?”
“There’s no evidence of that.”
“But she’s gone. Just disappeared.”
“Yes.”
Audrey ran her fingers over his massive forehead, his oversized nose and lips, and smoothed his eyebrows over his sleepy-cow eyes. “I would be angry with you if you weren’t concerned about her.”
Reggie exhaled deeply. He found her hand and kissed her fingertips. “You’re making it too easy for me. I’m not sure it’s that simple.”
“You didn’t sleep with her, did you?”
“God, no!”
“You didn’t kiss her?”
“No.”
“Do you want to sleep with her?”
“No. Not really.”
“Not really?” She lifted an eyebrow skeptically, then let it pass. “What do you feel so guilty about then?”
“I worry about her. I wish more than anything I could protect her. And now she’s disappeared. I feel like I should’ve done something.”
“She sounds smart to me. I think she figured the only way to be safe from her ex-boyfriend was to disappear without a trace. It’s what I’d do. I bet you she’s fine.”
“Maybe,” he said. Perhaps she was fine. Perhaps it was merely his own desire to see her again that left this raw knot in his stomach. But that wasn’t usually what the knot meant. It showed up when he listened to a plea for help on a 911 tape, or when he saw fresh blood on a playground in Venice. He always hoped he was wrong, but the knot didn’t lie. It meant someone had died. “I have a feeling about it.”
Audrey sighed, exasperated. “Reggie, you can’t keep anyone safe, you know. Not me. Not the boys. You’ve taught them to look around, to stay away from drugs and guns and the kids who’d like to mess with them. You’ve taught them how to fight if they have to. But if they’re walking down the street and some kids drive by shooting guns, there’s nothing you can do. You have to trust in God.”
“I do trust God. I guess maybe not enough.” He felt a squeeze in his throat and a tingling behind his eyes. He couldn’t help himself. “I feel like I’m supposed to do something, but I don’t know what.”
Audrey kissed his eyes and his forehead. “Only good people feel guilty about such things. I know you’ll do what’s right.”
She didn’t get it. How could she forgive him if she didn’t understand? If she understood, how could she love him? Fury shook
his body like a sudden fever. He couldn’t breathe.
He realized she was aroused, running her hands over his buttocks and back, pulling herself to him, and as much as he wanted to shake her off, he couldn’t. He needed her so much. As she ran her tongue down the ridge between his ribs, over his penis, between his thighs, he felt the knot in his stomach melt into passion.
* * *
By the time Monday morning rolled around, all the gentleness and harmony nurtured during their trip to Catalina had dissipated like water in a desert.
They had argued this morning, he and Audrey, the worst ever, after the boys left for school when they could really let loose. “You’re not the man I married,” she’d said plaintively. “You’ve changed.” She said his depressions were pulling her down. Reggie knew brothers who slipped back into dialect or ghetto-speak when they got mad. Audrey went to the other extreme, articulating like a snapping turtle, spitting out SAT words: indolent, solipsistic, melancholic, anguished. “I’m tired of your self-indulgent angst,” she said. He figured she wanted to fight, to make him talk, to make tangible this coolness that drifted between them like morning mist, to burn it off with their anger. “I bet you don’t even know what classes your sons are taking,” she said. “Do you know what Luther is building for the science fair? Do you know that Leon’s baby teeth haven’t fallen out yet? Do you care, Reggie? Do you?”
Reggie did care. A lot. But he never thought to ask, which was something he couldn’t explain. He couldn’t bring himself to fight with Audrey and caved. When he didn’t fight, Audrey got even madder and stomped out of the house.
She’d be early for work, he thought. He imagined her using the extra time to eat a bran muffin and coffee, bending over her desk so as not to get crumbs on the floor, a hard lump of anger in her throat, the muffin tasting like grit. She’d choke down her tears, determined not to let her feelings mess up her day.
She was right. He was depressed. He knew what she wanted, but couldn’t seem to give it to her, as if she were an apparition reaching out to him from a foggy swamp. He loved his family. He loved Audrey. But there was this thing, wrapped around his heart like plastic.
Good Morning, Darkness Page 7