I HAD ONLY WANTED TO HAVE NORMAL PEOPLE LUNCH WITH A HANDSOME MAN—the first lunch of its kind since divorcing Greg Norton.
“But then you’ve always been a bit of a diva,” Lena Meadows said. She and my other sorority sister, Syeeda McKay, had crammed their heads together to fit in the iPad’s shot.
I had found a parking space close to the park’s fake lake. The millions of raindrops pebbling the Ford’s windows softened the glares of the blue and red lights from patrol cars and fire engines. “Lunch was really … Sam’s so … so effin’ …”
“Say it!” Syeeda shouted. “Hot. He’s so effin’ hot.”
Lena moved her face closer to the iPad’s camera. “So have we broken our three-month dry spell?”
I gave them an exaggerated frown. “No, we have not.”
Lena shouted, “Boo!”
“Pastrami is supposed to be the gateway meat,” Syeeda screamed.
I threw my head back and laughed, long and hard.
“It’s cuz she’s dressed like an Amish settler,” Lena said. “A big-ass sweater, Lou?”
“It’s raining, Lena,” I said. “I could catch cold.”
“But the ex is out of the picture, right?” Syeeda asked.
I lifted an eyebrow. “Sam’s or mine?”
“Both.”
“Yes, for me. As for Mr. Seward, he told me that they only talk about the dog. She has custody, not that she even likes the dog. Or Sam.”
“He’s not ambitious enough?” Syeeda asked.
“He likes being a DA for now. But Rishma wanted to be the mayor’s wife yesterday.”
Syeeda smiled. “You’re seeing him tonight, yes?”
“Maybe. He wants … pie. Hope you don’t mind me missing DVR Wednesday.”
“Only want to see you laughing in the purple rain,” Syeeda said.
“Then I’ll come home really, really late,” I said, skin flushed.
A minute later, I stood near the Japanese bridge in Martha Bonner Park, my heeled boots sinking in mud thick with candy wrappers and cigarette butts, surrounded by cops, firefighters, and paramedics.
“Where you at?” I growled into my Motorola radio.
“Don’t move,” Colin said. “The White Knight’s comin’ to get you.”
I slipped my messenger bag across my chest. “Doesn’t look like a Wednesday, does it?”
No kids swinging from monkey bars or retirees walking the trails. No personal trainers leading small classes of round housewives on a patch of grass. The ducks on the lake had remained, but no preschoolers threw crumbs of stale bread.
“Cuz it’s raining,” Colin pointed out. “You Angelenos don’t do rain.”
A handful of civilians had gathered behind a barrier made of rope, canary-yellow crime-scene tape, and six thousand of LA’s bravest.
Just three miles from my division, and located in Baldwin Hills, Martha Bonner Park was home to gray foxes, raccoons, skunks, possums, and forty-one species of birds. And they weren’t stupid enough to scamper around in this weather. Just us smarter creatures. The 380 acres of land boasted playgrounds, picnic areas, seven miles of hiking trails, and the man-made fishing lake. The park also sat in the middle of the highest concentration of black wealth in the nation. The homes on the park’s perimeter cost thousands of dollars less than their equivalents in Brentwood and Santa Monica—here, you got more house, more land, and maybe even an orange tree. Ah, segregation.
“Lou! Up this way.” Colin Taggert strode toward me. His blond hair lay flat on his head, and his Nikes and the hems of his nylon track pants were caked in red mud. His tanned skin looked pea-green, as though he had been bobbing on a dinghy for three hours.
He pointed at my trench coat, sweater, and heeled combat boots (if Doc Marten and Salvatore Ferragamo had a baby …). “You almost got those right,” he said, pointing to the boots.
“I’m in a good mood,” I said. “Wanna take a chance?”
He blew his nose into a bouquet of tissue. “I was supposed to go boardin’ up in Mammoth tomorrow.”
“A warm cabin sounds really good right now.”
“I invited you,” he said. “We could’ve grilled some steaks. Snuggled in front of the fireplace. Guzzled cases of beer.”
I cocked an eyebrow. “Why? So you could give me your cold?”
“Oh, I’d give you something—” He sneezed, then shoved his nose into the tissue.
I grinned. “If this is you seducing me …”
He started back to the trail still wiping his nose.
“Ooh, baby,” I said, following him. “The way you sneeze, and all that snot. Ooh, Colin, you give me fever. I’m getting hot from just being around you.”
Without looking back, he threw me the bird.
We traveled a well-developed gravel road lined with parked earthmovers and green park services pickup trucks. We veered right and onto a red-dirt trail that ran between large overgrowths of coastal sage, eucalyptus, and cypress trees.
I stopped at the large trail marker. “Where we going?”
Colin pointed to trail 5, northwest of the red “You Are Here” dot. “A mile and a half up.”
Dread knotted in my stomach. “Who’d dump a body that far from the parking lot?”
A police helicopter roared across a sky now the color of tarnished silverware. The rain had stopped, but fog rolled in from the Pacific Ocean four miles away. Up ahead, through the brush, forensic lights burned like supernovas. Clumps of patrol cops dotted the trail, and a few uniforms gave Colin and me a “what’s up” and a “good luck.”
“Before I drove over,” Colin said, glancing back at me, “a man stopped by lookin’ for you. Tall, black, older. Didn’t leave his name.”
That visitor had been Victor Starr, the man who had contributed sperm toward my existence and then abandoned the results eight years later. Back in December, he had spent the night wrestling with angels or some crap like that because, after being MIA for almost thirty years, he had showed up on my front porch, expecting hugs, tears, and a heartfelt chat over cups of International Foods coffee.
Yeah. That didn’t happen. I had better shit to do that day, and the next day and the next day and today and tomorrow.
“Second time this week he’s dropped in,” Colin said. “Some dude you meet outside AARP headquarters?”
“Ha,” I said.
“So who is he?”
A nerve near my left eye twitched. “Victor Starr.”
Colin looked back at me again, eyebrows high this time.
“Yeah,” I said. “Really.”
He chuckled. “He’s just like you: he doesn’t know when to give up. You’re Little Lockjaw and he’s Daddy Lockjaw. So sweet—I think I’m gonna cry.”
“And I think I’m gonna vomit,” I said. “Anyway: you said ‘girl.’ Do you mean that in its colloquial, sexist usage? Or do you mean ‘girl’ as in ‘girl’?”
“As in ‘girl.’ Teenager, if you really wanna get technical. Could be the one who went missing last week.”
“Yeah, that narrows it down.” Not.
Just last week, over in Inglewood, a teen girl had been abducted from her driveway; and in Gardena, another teen had been kidnapped by her stepfather. And then there was Trina Porter, the fourteen-year-old stolen earlier this month from a bookstore near my old neighborhood. We had no clue where Trina was or if she was even alive. So again: which girl?
Guess I’d find out soon.