These Women

by Ivy Pochoda

Hey, any of you fools down there see someone standing by that dead-ass tree across the way?

  Don’t give me, no. I saw. Some dude’s watching me. I can motherfucking feel him, you know what I mean?

  Paranoid? Like hell I am. I know what I see. Paranoid? Fuck.

  Are you telling me to keep my voice down? You keep your voice down.

  Shit. He was there last night. Swear to it. I know when someone’s watching me. I know.

  Can’t motherfucking sleep, I’m telling you. Can’t do goddamn anything. Feel like there’s something on my back. That’s what I said—something on my back. Like watching me. Everywhere, no matter.

  You just go about your business like what I say don’t matter. Yeah, go on.

  You know what it’s like, walking down the street and think your own shadow is chasing you? That your own goddamn shadow is out to get you? Makes me feel like a damn junkie, is what. Like one of those women having a full-on argument with herself for everyone to see.

  Except I’m not crazy. I feel what I feel.

  The other day, let me tell you what happened. I’m walking to the store. Just to get a few necessities. Stuck inside all day, I need food. Something to keep my strength up. You know. Last I checked it should be possible to go to the minimart without feeling like someone was following you—like someone was gonna jump out from every dumpster.

  Where I really wanted to go was the liquor store down on Sixty-Fifth, get some Hennessy and my Pall Mall—my regular, you know. My supplies. But fuck if I’m ever going there again. Gonna have to walk halfway to Jefferson Park to get my booze now.

  So no booze for me, because I’m not gonna risk that place. Not after what happened.

  Don’t make me tell you what happened. I’m not going into that shit.

  So this time, all I was after was some rice and shit. Some soup. Something soft. Because it goddamn hurts to chew. So that’s what I’m doing. But I’m getting this feeling that there’s something following me. No, more than feel. I know. I know.

  And I’m starting to sweat. It’s like, pouring down. Like I’m some kinda professional basketball player. It’s raining off my head. I’m motherfucking making it rain.

  And my heart—let me tell you about my heart. It’s like someone took a needle full of speed and shot it right in there. It’s beating so fast I think it’s gonna outrun my body. I can feel it in my fingers.

  And I can’t breathe, you know. My throat, it’s closing.

  A panic attack? You think I don’t know it was a panic attack? Shit.

  You going to let me finish or you going to keep telling me things I already know?

  So I’m sweating and shaking—can barely walk down Western. And I can feel this person behind me. Like he’s gonna stab me all over again. But I can’t keep walking, because I’m going to collapse. Like my heart is going to fall right out on the street. And I can feel this person coming closer. But I can’t move. No fucking way. It’s like my heart is beating so fast it’s all I can do to stand up.

  So I double over, right there on the sidewalk, like I’m having a heart attack or some shit.

  And what happens? Some goddamned white lady walks on past. Some old, skinny bitch.

  That’s what I was afraid of. Old white lady walking down Western. Tell you what—she’s the one should be scared. She was way out of her playpen.

  But it goes to show—my mind is scrambled. I’m seeing things I shouldn’t. Hearing and feeling them too.

  It’s like the whole world’s out to get me. Every goddamn shadow’s got murder on its mind.

  It’s a burden to even go outside.

  Okay. Sounds like you’ve heard enough. And I’m going. I’m going up to my place. Gonna keep watch from my window. But keep an eye out, you hear. You see someone you let me know.

  YOU! GET THE HELL AWAY from the tree. Might be dark, but I can see you. You’re motherfucking watching me. Don’t make me feel like I’m crazy. Now, go on. Get.

  Don’t make me open up this window wide. Don’t make me lean out farther. I’m banged up enough already. Got my throat slit to ribbons. I don’t need to go falling out this motherfucker as well.

  Fall out my own goddamn window. Now that would be a way to go. Survived nearly getting murdered, then break my neck on Western.

  Folks will think I got all suicidal after my ordeal.

  I’m talking to you.

  Yo. I’m talking to you. I saw you over by that tree. Now you’re in the carport across the way. Can’t fool me. You motherfucking can’t.

  Don’t make me keep screaming at you. You know what it feels like to talk after you get your throat slit? Can you even try and imagine that shit?

  How long you gonna watch me for?

  I can’t see your face, but I know you’re there.

  You come to finish the job? That’s who you are? You’re pissed that I’m still breathing. You mad at yourself not being able to carry through. Disappointed. Well, shit.

  NoIwillnotshutthefuckup. Somebodyouttherestalkingme. Youshutthefuckup.

  Next time I see you out there, I’m gonna call LAPD. Matter of fact, I’m calling them now, let them know I’m being harassed. Let them know the man who tried to kill me is trying to finish what he started. Hell, I’m gonna do their job for them. I’m going to catch you myself.

  You just wait up.

  You got something to say, say it to my face. You’ve already done your worst.

  I’m coming.

  I said wait up. Took me a minute to get down the stairs. Can’t move so fast with these stitches in my throat and all.

  You still there? Come over here and show yourself.

  Okay, so you’re gonna run away. You some kinda lurker? Had the balls to slit my throat, but now you’re hiding? Shit.

  NoIwillnotkeepitdown. Gottherighttoraisemydamnvoice.

  Excuse me? And who are you now? Lady, you have something to say? You just here to watch the show? Oh, you’re just passing by? Well, be my guest. Pass on by. Don’t mind me. There you go. Quick now.

  Hold up. Lady, I said hold up. HOLD UP.

  Don’t I know you?

  I feel like I know you.

  Come back so I can place it.

  You’re not gonna come back?

  Wait. I saw you the other day. Right when I was having that attack. Right when I was doubled up on Western. You were passing by.

  You new in the hood? Is that what it is?

  You new?

  Am I supposed to know you or some shit?

  Lady, let me give you a piece of advice—there’s a stalker out there. Watching me. I’m just doing you a neighborly kindness letting you know. Wouldn’t want you to get hurt or nothing. No ma’am.

  Hey, lady! Don’t run off like that. I got one more thing to tell you. Listen up. I got one more thing to say and it’s goddamned important. Mind your own business.

  1.

  THERE IS AN ANSWER FOR EVERYTHING. IT’S USUALLY SIMPLE. It’s people who complicate things. It makes them feel important, smarter. It’s easy to impose your intellect on simple problems you can’t solve. Blow them out of proportion.

  Take cops for instance. Always on about motive. But motive is a distraction. At the end of the day all that matters is who did it.

  Here’s a clue: Honey Bunch. Answer: Bees or Hive. There can be more than one choice but only one right answer.

  Crime isn’t much different from a crossword. There’s always a solution. The catch is finding it.

  You have to be on the lookout for a small trick. A distraction. Either intentional or accidental.

  See that guy over up the block? Slept in his car in front of his house?

  Why?

  Fight with his wife? Possible.

  Came home drunk and fell asleep?

  The answer: locked out and couldn’t afford a locksmith.

  See. Simple. And usually less interesting than you thought.

  Don’t complicate. Don’t overthink. The answer is there.

  Now how about th
is: last name Perry. Essie Perry. Everyone thinks she’s a big mystery because she doesn’t look like an Essie Perry. So people look at her funny, as if she’s a puzzle. As if she’s trying to fool them. Like there’s some great mystery to why a Latina woman has a white-lady name. A name like a woman from a country club. Your doubles partner. The chair of the garden committee. They imagine there’s some big complicated answer.

  It’s her husband’s name of course. Just ask. And Essie? Well, Esmerelda’s a mouthful, a bad name for a cop.

  She’ll tell you. Not everything. Essie’s not in the habit of keeping secrets. She just doesn’t think everyone needs to know the entire truth. It’s good to keep something to yourself. You never know when you’ll need it.

  Why did she keep her husband’s last name after everything? Simple. It’s her work name. It’s on her badge. Changing it would have meant starting over. It would have implied she was hiding something.

  Here’s another question. What has Mark Perry been doing all night? Did he sleep? Essie can hear him in the small study downstairs. Even if she didn’t hear him, she knows he’s there. She can’t remember the last time he left the house.

  Here’s a final one: When are the rest of Southwest Station going to see the pattern? Three dead women tossed near Western in less than a year? She can’t be the only one who’s made the connection. But there’s more, not just these recent killings but the ones that came before, especially Dorian Williams’s daughter. Either Essie’s mind is playing tricks (which she’s been told it does) or there’s not just a coincidence here, there’s a pattern.

  Serial means more work.

  It means press and headache and tip lines.

  Perhaps they are intentionally blind. Or perhaps it’s the sort of women who’ve been killed that make their deaths irrelevant. One more and Southwest won’t have that luxury. It almost makes Essie want her old job in Homicide back. But she knows that’s not going to happen.

  Before getting out of bed, she finishes the Friday New York Times crossword. It takes her twenty minutes—the L.A. Times takes ten. Rubber from the Middle East? Aladdin. A dumb way to begin the morning. But reassuring. Answers. Solutions.

  The radio is on, local news. The tail end of a press conference with the mayor about a Black Lives Matter protest in downtown L.A. in the wake of the Jermaine Holloway killing. Opposite coast but a nationwide problem. Then cut to Morgan Tillett, local activist from Power Through Protest, a BLM splinter organization, who says she’s calling in from her house. Except she’s not home, at least not in Los Angeles as far as Essie can tell. In the background is the aboveground rattle of a train like the El in Chicago or the New York subway. It has a different pitch than the L.A. Metro, a roar not a rumble. She’s telling the host that the recent protest is only the beginning. That there’s going to be more actions unless the cops and the nation start to pay attention.

  The host asks her about the climate in Los Angeles, whether racial tensions are reaching Rodney King levels. She laughs and says, “From where I’m sitting it looks like the city is about to explode. They haven’t seen anything yet.”

  Except Morgan Tillett is lying. She’s hiding something. Essie doesn’t care what. She hears that subway rumble again confirming it. Again, the reason doesn’t matter. Just the facts.

  She gets out of bed. Gets dressed in one of her suits. Even she can barely tell them apart. She does her makeup—summery colors. Too bright for her complexion, she’s been told. She flattens her bangs and checks her roots. She never should have started dyeing her hair when she got out of uniform. Her old partner, Deb Harden, warned her not to—told Essie that her new look would never match the name on her badge. By the time Essie realized Deb was right, it was too late to go back to her natural black. It would have been like admitting she’d made a mistake or, worse, that she was ashamed. Deb saw the lay of the land better, saw into the future, played the angles. She knew what they were up against.

  Essie tucks in her rayon blouse and pegs her trousers so they don’t snag in her bike chain.

  From the hallway she can smell burned coffee on the warmer.

  She can hear the monitors whirring in the study. She can see their blue reflection on the wall as she descends the stairs. Japan. Shanghai. London. Switzerland. The US Stock Exchange—they’ve all been up for hours and Mark’s been up with them.

  Essie peeks in the door of the study. Her husband’s face, bathed in the lights of one of his computers and pale from years without direct sunlight, is a sickly blue.

  She watches the numbers scroll by on the screen—signs, codes, cyphers, a world of money and value that is a mystery to her.

  Mark trades low—small stakes, not quite micro trades but close.

  The accident took away his confidence. He doesn’t gamble. Mostly hedges. He brings in a little. With her salary and their small house paid off, they don’t need much. No car. No dinners out. There’s not much to say anyway.

  Seven A.M. in Los Angeles. Ten in New York. The Asia markets are already closed. Six and a half more hours in the trading day. Then Mark will eat a frozen pizza, drink a bottle of Mexican coke, and go to sleep. He’ll be in bed when Essie gets home.

  Essie pulls out the coffeepot. She can see where the liquid is scalding on the burner. The criticisms she’d face for such a mistake at the station arrive uninvited.

  Perry, you burning the coffee again?

  You put too much water in the pot?

  You the one forgot to hit the on switch?

  As if coffee is a woman’s job. As if any mistake is her fault.

  Her work is checked, even on the most inconsequential details of station business—coffee, light switches in the interrogation rooms, food left on the counter. And even on the other stuff—follow-up reports, booking sheets, files. Stuff she does in her sleep. They never let up on her, always certain she’s fallen short.

  Perry, you followed up on that, right?

  Perry, you filed the report?

  Perry, you saved that doc?

  Perry, you still bothering everyone about a handful of dead hookers?

  Perry, you wasting our time?

  Perry, you sticking your nose into Homicide’s business?

  Like she’s a child. Or worse, a rookie. It doesn’t help that she’s barely five foot. That’s another thing Deb had on her—five inches.

  Maybe Katherine Sims will wake them up.

  Essie slides the coffeepot back onto the warmer without pouring a cup. Doesn’t spill a drop.

  She takes her badge from the kitchen drawer where she stores it alongside rubber bands, her passport, packs of gum, a few older ID cards, a picture of her and Deb at the LAPL softball game. Her gun is in a safe in the broom closet though she rarely locks the safe. If Mark wanted to get the gun, he could, she’s pretty sure.

  She checks that her phone is on. That’s one of the luxuries of switching from Homicide to Vice. She can turn it off when she sleeps. Vice cops rarely get called out and only work overnights on sweeps.

  Essie doesn’t like living so near her station. Better to bunk elsewhere so the work doesn’t come home with you. But she needs to be close enough to bike or walk, which gives her a three-mile radius around Southwest.

  Between the drag races, road rages, and geriatric buses huffing and wheezing in the slower lanes, Los Angeles isn’t set up for biking or for pedestrians. No quarter given to someone old or injured taking his time to make it across the street. Just lay on the horn, express your annoyance because the world isn’t moving at your chosen speed.

  The more time Essie has spent out of cars, the more she’s come to resent drivers. All of them. Even before the accident Deb did all the driving. Not driving frees Essie from at least one line of harassment.

  Perry, you checked in the cruiser?

  Perry, can you see over the wheel?

  Perry, you need a booster seat?

  No more.

  You learn things on foot. You see your beat better on a bike. You catch flak fr
om perps, witnesses, and officers. Worse things have happened.

  Jefferson is the best route east-west. It moves slower than Adams and Washington. Then south on St. Andrews one street west of Western for nearly twenty blocks. It’s residential. Stop signs instead of stoplights.

  Essie’s early. She’s not on for nearly an hour.

  There’s a Starbucks on Jefferson and Western with outdoor seating overlooking the intersection. A good place to take in the streets.

  She locks her bike. Then buys a small coffee, black.

  It’s chilly but she sits outside. There’s not enough cold in L.A. so you need to take what you can get to remind yourself that things change and the world keeps spinning.

  She watches three prostitutes pass. Essie doesn’t recognize them. Circuit girls—women who are moved as a unit to different areas of the city even as far as Oceanside or Stockton. Girls who don’t get on Southwest’s radar. At least they look of age, for what that’s worth.

  She takes out her phone. Does the mini Times crossword in two minutes.

  “Detective Perry.”

  Essie looks up. It’s Shelly. She’s coming off a long shift it seems like. Midforties. Handful of convictions for the usual. Pimped by Jericho. No gang affiliation. Usually works farther north.

  “Long night, Detective?”

  “Early morning.” Essie takes a pack of gum from her suit pocket. She was never a smoker. The chewing focuses her. Keeps her in the moment.

  “How many johns y’all arrest last week?”

  “How long have you been out here, Shelly?”

  “Today?”

  “Ten years?”

  Shelly shrugs and waves her arms, saying something like that or even longer. “So how many you get? How many johns? You’re hurting our bank and when you hurt our bank—”

  Essie snaps her gum. “How long have you been working?”

  “I’m not going to be working if you keep killing the business. I’m gonna be doing nothing at all.”

  “You worked the strip down here?”

  Shelly’s usual beat is the other side of the 10 as far up as Olympic, even up to the 101 where she’s probably fooled herself into thinking there’s a better class of customer than down south.