It was almost midnight when we finally pulled up to my house in the Fairfax District. A white, Spanish-style, one-story stucco with a blooming jacaranda tree in the front, the house Keith and I bought fifteen years ago sat on a rising knoll in the middle of the block, a blue-shuttered oasis in the still-smoky night.
My neighbor, Odetta Franklin, stood barefoot in her front yard, an African head wrap covering her short, graying locks, looking for all the world like a Ghanaian woman going to market or like she was still in her native Beaumont, Texas. In her left hand she gripped a leash. My tan-and-white boxer strained the other end. “Hey, Miz Charlotte,” she drawled across the street. “This here dog was worryin’ me to death, barkin’ and yelpin’ his ass off in yo’ yard. I finally brung him home t’sit with me.”
Beast jumped and strained against the leash as she walked him over. She stopped when she caught sight of my arm. “Darlin’, what happened t’you?”
“Just a little situation over on King,” I explained as Perris helped me maneuver out of the car and open the front door.
“The one at Mel’s Tacos? Child, I seen that on The Scene at Six. Was you hurt bad?”
“Just this damn shoulder again.” I decided not to tell her about Cinque Lewis right then.
“These fools out here have lost they minds. Son, give this dog some a them peanut butter biscuits in the kitchen and lemme get her inta bed.”
Mrs. Franklin had been my neighbor for almost fifteen years and was the one who found me in the driveway the day that Keith and Erica were killed. Later, she was one of the few who supported my decision to join the force, and she had been the only one from the neighborhood to come to my graduation from the Academy. Even my own brother and mother didn’t come, but Mrs. Franklin was there with my father, Grandmama Cile, and my two younger sisters, cheering as if it was a Grambling/Alcorn football game.
Perris came to the doorway with the dog just as Mrs. Franklin was settling me into bed and I was putting my notebook on the nightstand and my Beretta in the drawer. I patted the comforter. “Up, Beast.” The dog bounded onto the bed, licking my face and snuffling my immobilized arm. As I hugged him around his thick neck, I could smell the smoky residue of a thousand recent fires that permeated his coat.
I turned on the television news and was instantly sorry. If one more white newscaster called black and Latino rioters “those animals” without showing the numerous white rioters I’d seen on the streets, I was going to throw a brick through the screen. The rebroadcast of Brett Stewart’s The Scene at Six, despite the comfort of having a handsome black man as a co-anchor, wasn’t much better; the station seemed to be as obsessed with intercutting images of Watts burning in ’65 with footage of armed Koreans on store rooftops and blacks beating up Reginald Denny as everyone else. The situation at the taco stand got barely a mention.
I kept flipping channels, hoping to find something with some black folks in it that was positive. My choices were Yo MTV Raps or ’Round Midnight, video gangsters versus junkie jazz musicians. I settled for an ESPN roundup show.
Mrs. Franklin had gone to the kitchen and reappeared with her hands on her hips. “Baby, you ain’t got nuthin’ in there but shrimp fried rice tha’s growin’ hair and frozen food,” she declared. “Lemme go next door and get you some pound cake; I made it myself yesterday.” My objections were scattered like chicks before Mrs. Franklin’s waving hand. “You’ll be glad you got somethin’ sweet in the house when them painkillers wear off.”
My brother and I chuckled after we heard her close the front door. It was the first time we’d laughed together all night. Before it died away, I figured I’d better head off any more big-brotherly lectures. “Perris, I’m really beat. Can we just call it a draw and take it up again tomorrow?”
He nodded, patted Beast’s head, then came around to squeeze my good hand. “Char, I know I’ve not been the best of brothers to you, but I hope you know I love you and I’ve always been concerned about you. We need to deal with this.”
His worried brown eyes let me know he wasn’t talking about restoring order to the streets of L.A. But I wasn’t ready to talk about it . . . not yet.
“Thanks, Perris” I said softly. “I appreciate your concern. Really. But I’m going to be all right. Don’t I always pull through?”
Perris had finally left and I was just getting into the NBA scores when I heard the door open again. I eased opened the nightstand drawer, felt better when I put my hand on my gun. “Mrs. Franklin, is that you?”
“Yeah, baby, don’ shoot me. I’m just puttin’ the cake on top a the refrigerator.” A few minutes later she reappeared in the bedroom doorway, leaned on the jamb. “Is your friend coming by?”
“What friend?”
Her eyes became round brown and white saucers. “Now I don’ know his name. I calls him ’Vette Man. You know,” she prompted, “the white-lookin’ fellow who comes by here in that black Corvette?”
Odetta Franklin should work surveillance for the Department. Annoyed, I picked a flea off Beast’s ear and popped it between my fingernails. “Him? He’s just my supervisor, Mrs. Franklin.”
Mrs. Franklin nodded, eyes narrowed and her mouth pinched. “I figured him for a cop—always sittin’ in the car for a few minutes ’fore he gets out, like he’s lookin’ for somebody in the bushes. A lotta times he don’ even go up to the porch, just sits outside starin’ like he lost somethin’. ”
How odd. Steve had only been inside my house twice that I knew of. But I didn’t have much time to consider the implications of what she said because Mrs. Franklin, who offered psychic readings at a storefront around the corner under the name of Sister Odetta, stood at the foot of my bed, squinting at me over her cheaters and trying to penetrate my soul. If she was hoping I’d add a little more information to her data bank, she was sadly mistaken; I let her last comment hang in the air longer than a Michael Jordan three-pointer.
Finally, she gave up. “It’s none a my business anyway. I just figured you might want the comp’ny.”
“I’m fine, Mrs. Franklin. Thanks for checking up on Beast.”
“He ain’t no problem. In fact, it was good to have some comp’ny these last coupla days.”
Beast’s furiously twitching stump said he’d enjoyed it, too.
I didn’t really relax until Mrs. Franklin dead-bolted the door and dropped the key in the mail slot, and even then I couldn’t calm my mind. The ESPN program was over, so I channel-surfed some more, then picked up a magazine by the bed. It was hard to get into Essence’s article on “Your Summer Look” when my world was up, down, and sideways. Ditto for reading the May 1 meditation from the Daily Word, a recent gift from Mrs. Franklin, part of her well-meaning attempt to put me in touch with what she called my Higher Self. “As we rest in God’s healing presence,” the little magazine told me, “we experience freedom from fear, anxiety, and tension.”
I wished.
I checked the messages on my answering machine; there were several from my parents and siblings, one from my Uncle Henry, a couple from my girlfriend Katrina. The clock on the nightstand glowed 12:30, too late to call anybody back. I started to call Steve to talk about the Lewis case but thought better of it, especially given what Mrs. Franklin had said about his clandestine visits. But my curiosity got the better of me, and I dialed his house anyway. When his answering machine picked up after the fourth ring, I hung up without leaving a message. I didn’t want him to get the wrong idea about the reason for my call.
When Steve split up with his third wife in March, he was so shaken by the young woman’s sudden departure with their three kids that I found myself commiserating with him over a glass of wine after work or dropping a “cheer up” card on his desk. Once he followed me home in his Corvette after a particularly grueling murder scene and hung around for an hour, reminiscing about his Jewish grandparents, who had, in the sixties, lived in a house very similar to mine just a few blocks away. How Grandfather Feuerstein would mutter “shvartzes” under his breath when little Steve and his black mother would go with his father for excruciating Thanksgiving dinners or Seders. I remember him examining the door frame for evidence of the nail holes that meant a mezuzah once kept the house’s inhabitants safe. His excitement when he found the putty-filled, painted-over markings was sad and touching in a way that’s unusual for a cop.
About a week later he was back at my house again, wired up from something he’d discovered on a case we were working but at the same time depressed about being separated from his family. I felt sorry for him, but when he tried to kiss me, I was frankly taken aback, even more so when I found out that wasn’t all that was on his mind.
My girlfriend, Katrina Timms, had expounded many times about the limitations of what she called the sympathy fuck. But, as she would also be quick to say, getting your account serviced halfway is sometimes better than not at all. Katrina works in a bank, so I guess she knows about such things. All I knew was it had been a long time since anyone had made a deposit in my account. But I also knew it wasn’t going to be Steve Firestone.
And it wasn’t because Steve was a cop that I avoided getting into a relationship with him. Cops dating each other, or even being married, was not unheard of in the LAPD. But seeing someone who was my immediate supervisor, technically still a married man, not to mention confused about who and what he was? Not in this lifetime. Besides, I knew a few cop wives who shopped at the local Vons, and I didn’t even want to think about them confronting me in the frozen-food section over some rumor they heard about me breaking up an allegedly happy cop home. Not to mention what my colleagues or my lieutenant at RHD would say.
After the situation on King Boulevard, they would probably be closing ranks anyway. And while I credited myself with averting “Rodney King: The Sequel” by getting Mitchell away from that taco stand, at least one of my colleagues on that bus acted as if I had crashed his own private lynching party. The fact that he was a physician didn’t make any difference; for Cooper and some of those other guys on that bus, Lance Mitchell just happened to be a nigger in the wrong place at the absolute worst time.
But now with the Cinque Lewis murder, Mitchell’s presence near the scene raised even more questions than it answered. Maybe Mitchell was just looking for a bite to eat after his mission of mercy. Maybe he was out there playing Rambro, stumbled across the body, and fled the scene. But common sense would have dictated he would have admitted to seeing the body when Rivers and the others first approached him.
Unless he did the deed himself. Maybe Lewis had tried to rob him. It was possible, but surely a man like Lewis, who’d managed to avoid the law all these years, had more sense than to pull such a poot-butt crime. Or maybe Lewis was a hype, rousting folks for money for a fix. But that prosthesis and the clothes he was wearing were expensive and suggested Lewis had some kind of means, or did at one time.
Had Mitchell gotten into a fight with Lewis over the wallet, struggled over Lewis’s gun, and shot him in self-defense? Rivers and Cooper didn’t seem to remember any scratches on Mitchell when they first approached him, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there. And I didn’t notice any powder burns on his hands either, but maybe he had worn gloves. But why would he?
And if Lewis had robbed him, where was Mitchell’s money now? In the pocket of another rioter who went through Lewis’s pockets after the fact?
I could help Steve retrace our steps and try to figure out if Mitchell disposed of the gun somewhere. Mrs. Franklin could drive me back over there tonight.
I tried to get up, but just the thought of putting my clothes back on made me dizzy, and I gratefully sank back into the pillows. But I had to do something. Maybe I would be able to turn my brain off if I made a few informal notes. I reached for the little notebook I always carry and began to write some quick notes:
1. Vic/Cinque Lewis |
Any wits see him arrive on scene? Check the toxicology report for drug usage Where’d he get that arm? Where’s he been for 14 yrs? |
|
2. Mitchell |
Good Samaritan, Looky Lou, or both? Why look for fast food in a war zone? Any wits see him behind stand? See him talk/fight with Lewis? Scratches on face—when acquired? |
|
3. Scene |
Apartment buildings—any wits in sight lines of stand? |
|
4. Weapon |
Where is it? Retrace route in daylight, look for outdoor hiding places Check with F-Stop—hidden in his car? Does Mitchell have a gun permit? |
But the one question that remained, that gnawed at me like a ghetto rat on a baby’s crib: Why wasn’t I the one to find Lewis behind that stand? Better yet, why couldn’t I have been the one to pull the trigger on the man who stole my life?
The more I thought about it, the more I could feel myself losing it; my chest was getting tight, it was hard to catch a breath, and my headache was coming back. I felt like I would explode if I didn’t get myself under control.
Breathe, I told myself. Stay calm.
It wasn’t working. I rummaged through the nightstand, trying to find my Alupent or the Xanax my doctor prescribed for times like this, times when I needed to shove the memories back into the little corner I’d allotted them in my well-ordered universe.
I couldn’t find the asthma inhaler or the tranquilizers. Finally I went into the kitchen. I kept the good stuff in the back of a cabinet above the stove—a hiding place I started using back when my brother was drinking heavily. Standing on a chair, I could see a half a bottle of Cragganmore up there. I strained to grab it and stuck it under my good arm while I hopped down.
I cut back from my usual two fingers to one in deference to the painkillers, pouring the fragrant single-malt Scotch into a brandy snifter. I reached for Mrs. Franklin’s cake on top of the fridge, cut myself a healthy slice, and put it on a paper towel. Beast, who had trailed me into the kitchen in the hopes of more peanut butter biscuits, tried begging for some cake. When he saw he wasn’t going to get anywhere, he snorted in disgust, padded down the hardwood hallway, and flopped onto his futon in my bedroom.
I sniffed the Scotch again as I sat on the edge of the bed and let its ribbon of fire work its way down my throat. I eased back into the pillows, took a big bite of cake, and tried to let my mind drift. It worked for a while, until I caught myself wondering about Steve’s assessment of the crime scene.
I never tired of Steve’s ability to draw the right conclusions about a case from seemingly unrelated bits of evidence. I knew why he made D-III so fast. In turn, his more experienced listening ear gave me a chance to work through the theories that rattled around in my head, talking to each other.
My conversations with Steve about race were usually much murkier. He could unravel any mystery but that one—was he black, white, or other? His confusion showed at the office. Whenever I saw him around Parker Center, he was usually with whites, talking and laughing just a little too loud. The brothers at Parker Center had taken to calling him “incognegro” for his unwillingness to socialize with black folks. And even when I did see him talking with a black person, he seemed uncomfortable, like he didn’t quite know how to behave, didn’t want anyone to think he was one of us.
But he was still a good detective, one of the best. I drifted off trying to imagine Steve’s face, to read his reaction to the night’s events, but was jolted awake by the image of my husband’s instead. He would have been able to put all of this in perspective even better than Steve. Keith Roberts was the most perceptive man I ever knew. Even after all these years, just the thought of him could wake me up from a sound sleep, make my heart start hammering. I lay there, feeling a strained ache in my chest, as if my heart were covered by heavy scar tissue that kept it from beating freely.
That’s how Keith and Erica’s deaths felt to me, like an old scar. Healed over but an ugly, raised scar nonetheless. To touch it was to remember just how you got it, just what you were doing when you were injured. And I didn’t want to go there, didn’t want to relive the way Cinque Lewis cut down my husband and baby in our driveway, virtually in front of my eyes. I burrowed down deeper in the bed and tried to block out the image with a pillow over my head.
But I couldn’t block out the sound of my brother’s voice. It’s always easy for someone else to say, “You should talk about it” or “You need to deal with this.” But these well-meaning people are never around at two in the morning to put the pieces back together once you do, once you start picking at old scars. And if you happen to open up around them, to let it out—and there are no words for the feelings, so you howl—they’re the first ones to start reaching for their hats. “Better let her have some time to herself,” they whisper as they tiptoe away.
I tried to talk to Grandmama Cile right after it happened. That’s when she copied out the Twenty-eighth Psalm and recommended regular church attendance.
I tried to talk about it with Perris a long time ago, but all he ended up doing was getting drunk on Rémy Martin and crying over Keith and Erica as much as I did.
I tried to talk to my parents about it. While my father was willing to listen, my wild grief made my mother uneasy. “Tearing yourself up like this for so long is unhealthy,” she warned as the first anniversary of their murders approached, and I had fallen into a deep blue funk. “You act as if you’re the guilty one, instead of that wretched piece of trash. Don’t let him have his victory over you. You’ve got to get on with your life.”
So I stopped talking about it. I took my anniversary grief and my everyday pain home. And there I was, left in the middle of the night with demons I hadn’t even summoned, with only a prayer copied from the Bible in my grandmother’s ornate hand, the eerie glow of a television set, and a bottle of something to ward the evil off. Something the color of rich amber that would slide down my throat, a liquid barrier against the blue-black nightmares that glowed darkly on the other side of the crime tape and threatened to eat me up alive.
When they began shortly after Keith and Erica were killed, the nightmares had been like both an alarm clock and a three-day drunk—waking me up but making it almost impossible to get out of bed. I couldn’t finish my dissertation. I was so numb it felt like my heart and lungs had been ripped from my body, and I cried so much those first few months a good puff of wind could have knocked me over. I found myself on my knees a lot, something I hadn’t done since nightly prayers at Grandmama Cile’s house when I was little. By that August I was making a bargain with God, or maybe it was a deal with the Devil: all my future joy in exchange for getting rid of the nightmares for good. I sealed the bargain with a half a bottle of Cragganmore.
I didn’t know how to hold up my end of the deal until I entered the Academy that September. But instead of it being penance, I found at twenty-five a mission in policing, a calling, a life if not of joy then a certain dry-eyed satisfaction that I could protect other families better than anyone had protected my own. And the nightmares stopped.
Breathe in . . . stay calm . . . breathe out . . . stay focused. I would not cry, I would not fall apart. There was too much to be done.
Think about something more pleasant would be my mother’s advice. I took my glass, wandered down the hall and back to the kitchen. Another piece of Mrs. Franklin’s cake would certainly be more pleasant than thinking about Cinque Lewis. Two fingers of cake and one of Scotch. Or maybe it should be the other way around.
I had to laugh as I stood there, with my crystal brandy snifter and paper towel shedding crumbs: my vices had become so adult. Nothing like my response when I found out Aubrey had married Janet Murphy. It was 1970 then, and I was only seventeen, too young to drink legally and too proud of my newly found figure—courtesy of a freshman-year crash diet—to eat anything as verboten as pound cake. Back in those days the only thing I could do to ward off the blues was lose myself in my studies.
Studying had gotten me into college at sixteen and a 3.8 GPA, so it couldn’t be all bad. And it wasn’t as if I didn’t date anyone after Aubrey broke my heart. But a relationship, a serious one-on-one, boyfriend-girlfriend thing, maybe even a little jazz-radio-playing-in-the-background-while-we-have-sex-in-his-apartment kind of thing—I didn’t even get close.
Professor Roberts—Keith, as he insisted his students call him—was one of the few bright spots in my life in those unhappy days after Aubrey got married. I signed up for his Introduction to Criminology class, thinking it the perfect place to plan the murder of the new Mrs. Aubrey Scott, but once I went to a few classes I was hooked. Keith had an uncanny ability to make lectures about the constitutional underpinnings of our criminal justice system seem like the most exciting thing in the world. I was fired up for the first time in my college career. I aced my midterm, wrote a blistering term paper on the significance of the Miranda ruling, and began to think for the first time that maybe there were other careers besides teaching high-school history.
My change of heart regarding a teaching career had a lot to do with Keith. He was intelligent, caring, completely in my corner. So much so he wouldn’t let me coast through undergrad with a History/Black Studies major. While my mother considered it perfectly acceptable for me to pass my time teaching high school history until I got married, Keith argued it was the career of least resistance for a girl child of what he disdainfully called the L.A. niggerati. He believed I could do much better if I just put my mind to it.
Part of our assignment in Keith’s class was to observe a trial. While everyone else in class chose the sensational murder trial of a black sportscaster, I chose the first-degree murder trial of a Nestor Avenue Deathstalker accused of killing a rival Mudtown Royal. Keith testified as an expert witness for the prosecution, and I was fascinated to see another aspect of what a criminology professor does. The picture Keith painted on the stand of the Compton-based gang and their sworn enemies in Watts—their origins, how they had their roots in the Slauson gang of the sixties and even before—opened up a new door on the world for me, one I didn’t get to see in View Park, the golden ghetto where I’d spent most of my childhood.
Keith’s expert testimony helped the D.A. establish a motive in the killing, one based on territorial boundaries between gangs that law enforcement was then only beginning to understand. And got me turned on to a field of study that would take me as far away from teaching in the L.A. Unified School District as I could possibly get.
The Cragganmore tasted good, unlike the first time I tried it. I was eighteen then, and the occasion was to celebrate the conviction of that Nestor Avenue Deathstalker. Keith and I were at his apartment in the then-middle-class Jungle, a maze of apartments just north of my parents’s house in View Park. Keith was so sophisticated and so different from me. Ten years my senior, a product of New York City’s down-and-dirty Harlem versus L.A.’s sheltered View Park, Cragganmore versus the Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill wine my classmates and I drank.
By that time I had a crush on Keith that was stronger than dirt, and I was just old enough to think I could do something about it. But as he sat next to me on his sofa, Keith made it very clear we were going to be colleagues and friends, not lovers. “Girl, you’re practically jailbait,” he teased and took my glass when I turned up my nose at the bitterness of the single-malt Scotch.
So we were friends and colleagues until I entered graduate school. By then I was more mature—a very grown-up and filled-out twenty before he even kissed me and almost twenty-one when we finally made mad love one night at his apartment. Since at that point we were so much in tune with each other’s work, aspirations, and dreams, getting married seemed the next logical step. So we did it, jumped the broom, on an unseasonably warm November Saturday in 1974.
From the balcony of our honeymoon hotel on Maui, Keith predicted we could be as influential as Will and Ariel Durant, the famous husband-and-wife historians. “I’d prefer Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee,” I had countered and dragged him to bed, determined it was time to do something other than talk shop.
For the three and a half years of our marriage we were a team—friends, lovers, independent parts of a strong whole. Our research and fieldwork on gangs complemented each other but allowed each of us room for our own professional achievement and recognition. Our life together gave us rock-solid love and unquestioning support, someone who always had your back. Our daughter, Erica, an acorn-colored angel with the widest smile on earth, gave us joy.
My glass was empty again. I allotted myself one more finger of Scotch and another of cake and went back to bed. As I moved down the hall, I passed the closed door of the bedroom that had once served as a combination of Keith’s office and Erica’s nursery. I started to go in, but figured I’d strolled down memory lane as much as I dared in one night. As my mother would say, let sleeping dogs lie. I took another sip of Scotch, hoping it would help me have a long, dreamless sleep.