Casanegra

by Blair Underwood

  “Come on, she’s dead. That’s not nice,” the girl said. Her voice was much younger than her face. Damn, she was young.

  M.C. Glazer glanced at her over his shoulder. “Nobody…is talking…to your narrow little ass.” Even with the emphasis on each word, he’d said it politely enough—he hadn’t even raised his voice—but the girl’s body coiled as if he was standing over her with a two-by-four. Her eyes went wide under all that mascara, like a raccoon’s. She glued her lips shut. She was scared.When that girl gets home, she’s probably gonna get the ass-kicking Glaze thinks he can give me.

  “Thanks, man, Serena had plenty of money,” I said without sarcasm, enlisting every thespian skill I had. “But since we’re asking questions…I have one.”

  “Watch yourself,” Kojak cautioned me.

  M.C. Glazer stepped within a yard. There was nothing behind me but a picture window, two bodyguards on either side of me and a third waiting to jump in. Glaze folded his arms. “Don’t ask nothin’ you don’t want the answer to.”

  I lowered my voice, nearly whispering. “Why’d you hate her so much?”

  “I don’t have time for hate,” Glazer said, his jawbone rock-hard.

  “You don’t seem sad she’s dead.”

  “If I had to take time to mourn every ho who got a beat-down, I wouldn’t have enough hours in my day,” Glazer said. “She brought it on herself.”

  “Why?” I said to Glaze. My voice was as soft as a priest’s in a confessional. Kojak tugged on my arm, as if to encourage me to shut the hell up.

  M.C. Glazer’s eyes sparked. “You know who Aphrodite was? Thereal Aphrodite? She was a goddess. The Goddess of Love. See how that ho tried to twist it? Like a ho by any other name ain’t still a ho?” I couldn’t help the surprise in my face; I hadn’t expected to hear Greek mythology and Shakespeare in the same breath from the likes of M.C. Glazer. His eyes slitted. “You think you’re the only one who knows something? Fuck you. I’m a poet. In your whole lifetime, you will never have the capacity to learn the most basic shit I know off the top of my head. And listen close, brother: Later on, you may live long enough to ask yourself where this conversation went wrong. And I’ll tell you now, so you won’t have to wonder. You made the same mistake that dead ho made. It’s the same damn mistake every triflin’ nigga lying dead on the pavement makes: Youforgot.”

  I didn’t have the chance to ask him what I forgot, because he sucker-punched me in the groin. His boys grabbed my arms to hold me in place, but I saw Glaze’s shoulder move, saw him bend, and I knew his mind. My arms were pinned, but I turned my thigh into the path of his fist. Glaze’s fist landed on muscle instead of nerve clusters, but it must have given him a satisfyingthunk, because he grinned like boxer Jack Johnson. Even a partial blow to that region is no fun. The room went black for a moment, and then came into focus again. I bent over and moaned, more for effect than out of pain, and even Glazer didn’t seem to notice how much of his blow I’d avoided.

  Glazer leaned over me. “You forgot who the fuck you wuz talkin’ to.”

  The two cops held on tight, in case Glazer wasn’t finished with me.

  “Any more questions, asshole?” Glazer said.

  I did have a few, in fact, but I decided to keep them to myself. Since I didn’t move or speak, his guards let my arms go. Laughing, Glaze sauntered over to talk to his friends as if nothing had happened. The white guard grinned at me with piss-colored teeth, offering me a glass of champagne. “Get a drink and chill out,” he said.

  Jenk, the brother with the glasses, slid my card into his back pocket. He stared at me, then shifted his eyes meaningfully toward the door. Subtle advice. If I didn’t get out there, I was about to get LAPD’s Rodney King Special, and he knew it.

  Two giant breasts bobbed in front of my eyes. “You OK?” Honey said.

  “I’m fine. Go on back down to the floor now,” I said, real quiet.

  “But you said—”

  I smiled, but through gritted teeth. “Just do it, darlin’.”

  The thought that I might be standing within a few yards of the man who was responsible for Serena’s death was doing strange things to my mind, or I would have followed Honey downstairs. M.C. Glazer was right: Later, I would mull over where I’d gone wrong. Instead of sitting quietly to chill with Glaze and his crew, eavesdropping on their conversations, I’d provoked him. I can’t tell you how much I would have paid for ten minutes alone with him, but I didn’t have that luxury.

  Oh, well,I thought.No pain, no gain. I just hoped I wouldn’t get hit in the face.

  “Here’s a little bit I know about Greek mythology, too,” I said in a sweeping stage announcer’s voice everyone in the booth could hear, even over the music. “My father taught me the story of the first murder trial, at least according to the Greeks. The daughter of a god named Ares was raped…” As I said the wordraped, I looked squarely at the jailbait on Glaze’s arm, who seemed younger every time I noticed her. Seventeen? Sixteen? Her wide-eyed stare made her more childlike. I avoided Glaze’s eyes, but I could feel his glare. “Now, Ares is the God of War, so he killed that fool—probably slow and with considerable relish. The other gods brought Ares to trial for murder, but when they heard the facts, they let him go. The way the Greeks saw it, the man he’d killed deserved to die for this terrible act against this woman. So the message history teaches us is this: Don’t fuck with the God of War. Or his daughter.”

  I don’t know where all of that came from, to be honest, but I felt like Laurence Fishburne rallying his warriors in the thirdMatrix movie, when all of Zion is ready to fight for its survival. I think I mesmerized them. For a moment, eight pairs of eyes looked at me as if I were brandishing Poseidon’s trident and could make the earth itself shake. As if I was Ares himself. That was a good moment; a real actor’s moment.

  I felt the white guard beside me swing and slipped his punch with peripheral vision alone, simultaneously popping the heel of my right hand against his chin. Sidestepped into him as his head snapped around, spinning him so that he was between me and Glazer’s other two men. I kept spinning until his back was to me, stomped the back of his thigh, and brought him down, ramming the base of his skull with my knee. He sprawled forward, as unconscious as a man can be, his limp body a line in the sand.

  Two on one instead of three on one. Much better odds.

  The guy at the window had been drinking a Coke from a slender glass with a stemmed cherry. That glass still sat on the windowsill, and before anyone could take their eyes from their fallen comrade, I swept it up and in a single fluid motion threw it into Kojak’s eyes. He was going for his radio, and I wasn’t interested in company.

  He threw his hands up to protect his eyes, and never saw the front kick coming.

  I have a problem finishing some things. I dropped out of the police academy, I never gave my acting career everything I could have, and Mother would probably say I let my greatest talent languish. I also never earned my black belt. What I do have is two brown belts—one in kenpo karate, one in judo—and five years of studying mixed martial arts at the Inosanto Academy in Los Angeles. I’m what they call a dojo bum, hopping from art to art, never nesting. I learned something along the way: I’m not the toughest, or the best, or the strongest, or the most dedicated.

  But I’m faster than hell.

  The ball of my foot took Kojak in the solar plexus, and the air exploded out of him in a rancid cloud. I could have sealed his fate right then and there, but I pivoted just in time to slip a punch that would have landed squarely on my left temple.

  Next came Jenk, the one with the glasses. He moved like a boxer, so I raised my hands like Mike Tyson. I saw a light in his eyes as he realized I was playing his game. He feinted right, expecting me to slip again; he had the left waiting for me. Instead, I dropped to the ground and mule-kicked him in the groin. He fell back into a cocktail table with a cry. I sprang up and turned back toward Kojak, who was starting toward me, still wobbling from the solar plexus b
low. I parried a pawing punch, stepped inside with a rising elbow that almost took his head off, and spun him into Jenk on the floor.

  Total time, about five seconds.

  Glazer was opening his mouth to say something when I crossed the five feet separating us with a single sliding quick-step, lifted him up by his armpits, and pinned him to the wall like he was a scarecrow, my elbow jammed across his throat in case he thought about moving. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Jenk climbing from behind the overturned table, so I had ten seconds at best.

  “Did you kill Serena?”I said.

  The eyes of Alphonse Terrell Gaines were bottomless, showing nothing. Nothing I did would shake him. He’d spent most of his young adult life behind bars, where he’d brushed against people far deadlier than me, even with enough pain in my heart to make me want to break his neck.

  “Yeah, I killed her,” M.C. Glazer said, and my heart nearly stopped. “And I killed Shareef. And Tupac. And your mama, too.”

  I jabbed him in the groin with my knee. He didn’t know the thigh-deflection trick, and screamed like a little girl. He couldn’t have known my mother was dead—he was only being a smart-ass—but I got him as if he’d been the one who planted the cancer in her breast, just for speaking her name.

  When Glaze screamed, strong hands pulled me from behind. Clubbing blows on my shoulders. I remember pivoting, hitting someone, getting hit, sliding down to the carpeted floor. Rage and pain and anger at my own asininity mingled as the room started to swirl and fade, then there was yelling—mine? theirs?—and I was rolling on the floor trying to protect my kidneys, arms crossed in front of my face as blurred vision revealed incoming shoe leather.

  Red. Blackness coming soon.

  Another yell, and the fresh pain stopped. I heard voices, but the ringing in my head trumped every other sound.

  A sturdy, slender arm was around my waist, and I looked up into the familiar face of the bartender who had made a polite pass, and been gently rebuffed. Courtesy goes a long way. “I was checking you out from downstairs, and I saw something was up. Can you stand?” I was already on my feet.

  Five beefy bouncers, larger than the off-duty cops by a factor of three, were standing between Glazer’s boys and me, the object of their antipathy. Apparently, the bouncers were the only ones allowed to stomp ass in Club Magique. Professional pride is a wonderful thing.

  “Show’s over,” the largest bouncer said. I stared at his lips moving, either still slightly in shock or genuinely surprised that one of the Mount Rushmore faces had spoken aloud. Club Magique’s gargoyles gripped my arms and carried me out through the crowd, my feet barely touching the ground. They pushed me through the door and out onto the sidewalk in front of a line of wannabes hoping to get in before 3:00A .M.

  “Don’t come back,” said a bouncer I recognized. Manny.

  I spat out blood. My mouth was filled with the coppery taste. “Don’t worry.”

  As the door slammed shut, I remembered my four-hundred-dollar coat. Shit.

  I ignored the staring faces and stretched my limbs one by one to see if anything was broken. My left ribs were sore as hell, but they were only bruised. I checked myself out in a mirror on the side of a Jeep parked at the curb. Bloody lower lip. Bruise over my right eye.Shit. But my teeth were intact, thank God.

  Even with the bruises and lost jacket, I knew I was damned lucky. For now.

  But Glaze’s bodyguards knew who I was, since I’d been stupid enough to hand out business cards. My problems were just getting started.

  SEVEN

  YEAH, I KILLED HER.

  M.C. Glazer’s voice haunted me in bed that night. I wasn’t having nightmares—you have to be able to sleep before you can dream—but I couldn’t get his voice out of my head. And I was entertaining elaborate fantasies about the different ways I would have liked to throw him through Club Magique’s plateglass window. The fantasies were sweet. Believe me, I understand wanting to kill someone.

  I knew he’d said it to piss me off, but what if hehad killed Serena? Between not knowing and the painful throbbing of every muscle in my body, I felt like I was caught in a bad dream, slowly losing my sanity. I don’t like drugs in general, but I found some Tylenol with Codeine I’d been prescribed after I had a wisdom tooth pulled, so I took two. Slowly, I felt my anxious mind emptying out, and most of my body’s complaints quieted. Good. Rest. I would need it.

  I had promised Mother I would visit her the next day, but I didn’t have time for her games. I knew exactly where I needed to go, the one place I probably should have gone first. I wasn’t looking forward to it. I dreaded it like nothing else, in fact.

  But any detective knows he has to visit the scene of the crime.

  I stopped at the mouth of the alley near Highland and Sunset, practically across the street from Hollywood High. For a while, I couldn’t make myself step beyond the sidewalk into the shadows. It was one of those cool Los mornings, and I knew I would feel the bite as soon as I left the sanctuary of sunlight. My skin was going cold already.

  This was no place to die, or to be found after the fact. A dog deserved better.

  The narrow alley was sandwiched between two brick buildings—a camera shop on one side, an abandoned auto detailer on the other—dead-ending at an eight-foot chained fence leading to a small apartment complex with fading yellow paint. The complex wasn’t the projects, but it was nowhere anyone would choose to live long.

  Well-wishers had come and gone, and their offerings lay against the camera shop wall a few feet from the sidewalk; bouquets of flowers, stuffed animals, publicity photographs of Serena, and handwritten messages likeAFRODITE FOR EVER !!!! The gifts helped brighten the alley a little, but not much. My eyes clouded, so I looked away. I hadn’t come to join the line of the grieving.

  Otherwise, it was just an alley. Dirty. Smelly. A large green Dumpster emitted the familiar, sour smell of ripe garbage to mingle with the muted smell of old piss that slimed the walls. There were a few newspapers and fast-food wrappers strewn around, and an old tire from a semi truck propped against the auto shop wall, but I didn’t bother examining them. The homicide investigators were long gone by now, so I hadn’t come hoping to find physical evidence. Even the crushed Coke can I’d seen in the photo was gone, probably confiscated for fingerprints.

  I just needed to stand there for a while. I would know what I was looking for when I found it. After a deep breath, I took a slow tour of the alley.

  Why would Serena be in this alley that time of night? It made more sense that her body had been dumped. The lock on the fence at the other end was rusty and looked as if it hadn’t been touched in fifteen years, so unless whoever killed Serena had a key, it wasn’t likely that her body had been brought from the apartment side. Someone had come through the front of the alley—probably in a car—and dumped her from the street side.

  Like a director blocks a scene, I tried to visualize the way it happened. The alley was too narrow for a car to bother trying to turn in, especially with the Dumpster in the way. I figured the murderer had backed in, unloaded the body from the rear, and then turned easily onto Sunset. That’s what I would have done. All told, the stop might not have taken more than a minute, if that—and certainly no longer than two. A man or a woman could have moved the body without help. (As I considered the scenarios, she was no longerSerena to me. Her name would have been too painful to think or speak.)

  I crouched to examine the cracked asphalt for tire tracks, as no doubt LAPD’s forensics experts had done in the past forty-eight hours. There was no mud to leave telltale signs, or tracks of any kind. Clearly, this alley didn’t see much traffic, and the sidewalk didn’t get much more. I hadn’t seen a pedestrian since I arrived. Most of the traffic whizzed by on Sunset, and there was plenty of metered parking stretching down the curb. The street was only moderately busy during daylight, so it might be dead at night. A camera shop would have been closed by nine, and the body would have been dumped later than that. No obviou
s witnesses.

  I looked upward for streetlamps, and I didn’t see any within view.

  The killer picked this alley because it was so dark.

  “You won’t find the answer up there,” a woman’s voice said.

  I nearly jumped out of my skin. For a split second, the voice had sounded like Serena’s, as if I’d expected her guidance all along.

  It was the reporter I’d met at the police station the day before, April Forrest. She had a reporter’s pad ready, so we’d both had the same idea. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to scare you,” she said, smiling.

  Maybe it was the grim loneliness of that alley, or the throbbing across my face as my muscles contemplated last night’s beating, but I have never been so grateful for a smile. For a moment, I couldn’t speak.

  “Someone had a bad night,” she observed.

  Self-conscious, I touched my face, trying to hide my swelling eye. Knowing how bad I must look made the pain seem worse. “Long story.”

  “I love a good story.”

  I tried to smile, and probably failed. “Another time.”

  “Your choice. You’re a grown-ass man,” she said, shrugging. “Anyway, I’m glad I ran into you, Mr. Slick. You were holding out on me yesterday.”

  “Holding out how?”

  “You never told me you were a suspect.”

  Whatever smile I’d managed died. I felt blood rush to my ears. I was too stunned to pretend I didn’t know what she was talking about. “Who told you that?”

  “Your friend Lieutenant Nelson was pretty helpful, actually. Thanks for the tip about when to call him, by the way. He was right at his desk, like you said.”

  Now, I was angry. “I told you not to mention my name.”

  “I didn’t, and neither did he. But when I tried to press him about the obvious angle—you know, whether it was M.C. Glazer and a rap vendetta—he told me off the record that there was another suspect. Well, aperson of interest.” She flipped through her notebook. “Here it is: ‘A minor actor Afrodite was involved with’ is how he put it. I put two and two together. Your TV show?”