Go-Between

by Lisa Brackmann

  Their screenplays. Their bands. Their high-concept restaurants.

  Their charities.

  Now it was Caitlin’s turn to smile. “Tell me more, Mr. Stone—Troy.”

  Caitlin, apparently, had heard her share as well.

  A small grimace crossed his face, and then a short burst of a sigh. “Look, we can sit here and talk about economic opportunity and social justice and all of those big issues, but that’s not why I wanted to talk to you, and I think you know it.”

  Caitlin seemed surprised. Maybe she’d expected a little more small talk before getting down to business. “I’m not sure that I do. Though I assume it has to do with our election efforts here.”

  “It does. Look, I believe your intentions are good, but those propositions have the potential to make a positive impact in a lot of communities here.”

  “Really? Legalizing pot is good for communities?” She smiled deliberately. “Like liquor stores are?”

  He leaned forward. Not quite in her space, but closing the gap. “What you need to understand is that people of color who are not wealthy tend to have very different interactions with law enforcement and the justice system than white, affluent folks do.”

  “I do understand that, actually.” Her voice had turned hard. Defensive. “I realize there are some problems with how the law is applied. But that doesn’t change the need for appropriate laws. And it doesn’t remove the danger of being too lenient in how we deal with criminals.”

  This had gotten offtrack very quickly, Michelle thought. Troy and Caitlin were bristling at each other when they’d barely started talking.

  “It goes beyond ‘some problems,’” he said. “If you need statistics, I can quote them all day. But here’s one that’s relevant to your efforts. Whites and blacks smoke marijuana at about the same rates. On average, a black kid is four times more likely to get arrested for possession. In some places? Up to thirty times more likely. In poor neighborhoods where there’s a heavy police presence, a lot of black kids end up with a so-called extensive criminal history that’s nothing but minor possession busts. And that record follows them around for the rest of their lives. You know that blacks are ten times more likely to go to prison for a drug offense than whites?”

  Michelle could see Caitlin’s grip tighten on her wine glass. She had to know these statistics already. And hadn’t she expressed doubts about the whole marijuana focus at the last board meeting? But her tone, her body language—she didn’t want to hear it now. Not from Troy.

  “I’m not saying there aren’t problems,” she said. “But addressing them by wholesale legalization? You really think that’s a way to help poor kids of color do better in life? Making it easier for them to smoke pot all day?”

  “I’d rather have them smoking pot than sitting in prison, learning nothing except how to be better criminals. But you know what, I can understand why people have doubts about legalization. I can understand why your group is against that, even if I’m not so clear on why an organization from Texas is dumping a ton of money on an election in California. Shouldn’t we be left to make our own decisions about this?”

  Caitlin snorted. “What happens in California doesn’t stay in California. I think you know that.”

  Now Troy sat back in the booth. He chuckled. “Well, all right, you have a point there. And look, I know I’m coming on strong. I get impatient sometimes. I’ve just seen too many kids get screwed up by the system. You see them when they’re little, running around and playing without a care, and you watch them turn hard and hopeless. It’s got to stop. Even if we disagree on legalization, can we at least agree on that?”

  Caitlin nodded slowly. “I guess we just disagree on how to go about it.”

  “Can we talk about sentencing reform, then? Because I’m having a hard time understanding why Safer America is so dead set against it.”

  “Because longer sentences work. Why else have we seen crime rates drop the way they have?”

  “Now, there’s absolutely no proof that longer sentences have anything to do with that. Rates started dropping before longer sentences kicked in.”

  “What does it have to do with it, then?”

  “Demographics. Not as many young people since the Boomers aged up. Smarter policing in some cases. Less opportunity to commit crime in others—increased surveillance, cell phones—”

  She lifted an eyebrow. “Cell phones?”

  Something had shifted between them. Michelle couldn’t exactly call Caitlin’s attitude playful now, but she was interested. Engaged. Troy had relaxed, too, leaning back against the bench, arm stretched along the back.

  “Yeah. Cell phone videos. Crime’s just harder to get away with than it used to be.”

  “But you can’t just pretend punishment doesn’t play a role in that. A criminal in prison doesn’t have an opportunity to commit crimes, now, does he?”

  “All right, I’ll grant you that. But how does a drop in violent crime correlate to locking up non-violent offenders for longer and longer periods? There isn’t a country in the world that incarcerates a greater percentage of its people than the United States. And about a half a million of those people are behind bars for drug offenses. That’s over a thousand percent increase since the War on Drugs started in 1980. You can’t tell me that’s what winning a war looks like.”

  “Maybe not. But legalization? Isn’t that just giving up? We passed a few of your pot ‘clinics’ on the way over here. Aren’t those bad enough? Waiting rooms full of kids working the system to get high legally? You want even more of that?”

  “Oh, you were down on the boardwalk.” He rolled his eyes. “Yeah. Look, I agree there’s abuse. I just disagree that this abuse is worse for our communities than criminalizing behavior kids are going to engage in anyway.”

  Caitlin nodded slightly. Not because she agreed with him, Michelle thought, but just to show that she’d heard what he had to say.

  She sipped her wine. He drank his beer.

  “Besides, some of those clinics are doing good work,” he said. “I can take you to one, if you’re interested.”

  Caitlin laughed a little, uncomfortably. Maybe she was picturing all those stoned kids on skateboards and not particularly wanting to mingle with them. “I don’t know that we have time for that.”

  “It’s just up the block. I mean, literally. On this street.”

  Abbot Kinney’s marijuana dispensary was hiding in plain sight, between an old bungalow turned shoe boutique and an art gallery. It had a cheerful neon green sign that said Organic Medicine, a display window with hoodies and Chinese herbs and medicinal teas. Outside, there was a rack of Tshirts and a table and chairs, with a big aluminum water bowl for dogs. But the most unusual thing about it to Michelle’s eye was the large, open door. That wasn’t how these places generally did business. Usually if they even had windows, they were shuttered, protected by iron bars.

  This one looked like an ordinary retail store.

  “We’re an open clinic,” the young woman at the counter explained. “You don’t have to have a prescription to come in and look. We sell all kinds of other medicinal products. And our herbalists can recommend things other than cannabis, if you’d like.”

  She didn’t look like the sort of person you’d expect to find working at a pot dispensary. She wore a tailored white blouse and black slacks, tortoiseshell-framed glasses. The store didn’t look like the dispensaries in Humboldt Michelle had seen either, with its neat racks of Tshirts and sweatshirts, shelves of teas and herbs, aromatherapy burners and neti pots.

  But then there was the main counter, filled with pipes and vaporizers and edibles, and the large glass jars of buds that lined the shelves behind it, the pungent scent somewhere between pine sap and skunk that they couldn’t completely seal up.

  There were a couple of customers at the counter, being serviced by two twentysomethings, a man and a woman wearing logo Tshirts.

  “I’ll take two grams of the Fire OG Kush and what do
you have in a top-shelf Sativa dominant today?”

  He looked like a studio exec, thirtysomething, swept-back hair, expensive, slouchy suit.

  “I’ve got a dank Jack Herer,” the clerk said.

  “Organic?”

  “It’s indoor. This time of year, that’s what you’re going to get.”

  The other customer was a woman in her sixties, frail, with the sort of gray pallor that came with a serious illness. “Why don’t you try the 420 Bar?” the clerk was saying. “And another thing you might like are these tinctures. They’re great for making tea.”

  “Well, this is pretty interesting,” Caitlin said. She turned to the woman behind the register. “So if I told you I had a particular condition, you’d recommend something for me?”

  “I wouldn’t,” the woman said. “I’m not an expert. I mean, I know the basics. But it’s really best if you consult with one of our herbalists and decide on a course of treatment.”

  “I’m just curious,” Caitlin said. “You medical-marijuana people make all kinds of claims on what it’s good for. If I came in here with a doctor’s note, saying I wanted something to treat, I don’t know, insomnia or PTSD or something, you’d tell me there’s some kind of pot that’s good for that?”

  “A lot of our patients use cannabis for insomnia. And there are a few small studies where veterans are finding cannabis helps them with their PTSD. You really should talk to one of our herbalists about it, if you’re interested.”

  Caitlin hesitated. “That’s all right,” she said. “I’m from out of state, anyway.”

  “Yeah, that’s a problem with edibles,” the clerk was saying to the older woman, nodding. “They can take a long time to kick in. If you don’t want to smoke, have you considered vaporizing? There’s a couple vaporizers I can recommend that don’t cost too much.”

  “I think I do want to try that,” the woman said. “I’d like something that works right away.”

  x x x

  After that, they walked up to the Oakwood Recreation Center. All the years she’d lived in Los Angeles, and Michelle had rarely been to this neighborhood. It had been the ’hood, after all, one of the few places on the Westside where the ’92 riots had flared, where rival gangs murdered each other. That’s how she’d always thought of the place, anyway. The truth had probably always been more complicated (if she’d learned anything the past few years, it was that).

  And Oakwood had been changing for a while. Expensive houses were being built. Tom had looked into projects here, though he’d never managed to put anything together, as far as she knew.

  Oakwood didn’t feel dangerous now. Tree-shaded streets with low bungalows and Craftsman cottages, a few dense stucco housing project apartment buildings, new concrete condos here and there, and designer bunkers that looked as though they’d been dropped onto a lot that was too small to contain them. People pedaling slowly by on beach cruisers, kids on scooters and skateboards, a Mexican vendor selling ice cream from a pushcart.

  “Yeah, it was pretty heavy for a while,” Troy said. “Things have calmed down a lot. I don’t know if it’s because most kids now don’t want anything to do with the crack cocaine, seeing what it did to their elders, or if enough bangers got priced out of the neighborhood, or what. I think maybe people just got tired of it all.”

  “Or cell phones,” Caitlin said, with a sideways smile.

  He laughed. “Yeah. Maybe.”

  “How’re you doing today?” a man called out from his porch.

  “Oh, just fine,” Troy said. “You?”

  “Can’t complain. It’s a beautiful day.”

  “You know, it really is,” Caitlin said.

  At the rec center, Latino kids played soccer. On the other half of the field, there was a kickball game going on, two teams of mostly white hipsters. A few middle-aged black men and women sat at the picnic tables around the fringes.

  “There’s all kinds of great programs here for the kids,” Troy said. “Not just sports. Music, art, cooking, tutoring for school. What we really need are more things like that. Support for kids who have problems at home. A better education. And jobs at the other end. Not a pipeline to prison for smoking weed.”

  Caitlin stared at the soccer field, watching the children play. Michelle thought they looked to be about seven or eight years old. They played with a combination of intensity, laughter and tears.

  Had her little boy, Alex, played soccer?

  He probably had, Michelle thought. Most kids his age did these days.

  They stood outside Shutters by Troy’s Pathfinder, where valets parked a succession of BMWs, Porsches and Benzes.

  “I appreciate you taking the time to meet with me today,” he said.

  Troy had driven them back to their hotel. “Come on, it’ll take forever for a cab to come. And it’s really no problem. I need to get back to the office, anyway.”

  “Well, thank you for the discussion and tour.” Caitlin shook herself, like a cat who’d gotten sprinkled with water. “And I mean that.”

  “I don’t imagine I talked you into anything though.”

  Caitlin stood just at the edge of his open car door. “It’s a little soon for that.”

  Troy paused by the door frame. “Can we keep talking?”

  “I can’t see any reason why not.”

  “Good.”

  They smiled at each other. He got into the car, swung his legs inside like his back was hurting, reached to close the door.

  “Lead,” Caitlin said.

  “Lead?”

  She seemed almost embarrassed. “I read somewhere that there’s a strong correlation between lead in the environment and violent crime. And the decline of lead tracks with the decline of crime.”

  “Really? I’d love to read that.”

  “I’ll see if I can dig up the link.”

  Watching the two, Michelle could still sense tension between them, but a different kind than there had been before.

  She’d bet money what she was seeing now was attraction.

  The back of her neck prickled.

  She was pretty sure that this could not be good.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Well, so what?

  Michelle leaned back in her business class seat and sipped her wine. Caitlin dozed in the seat next to her. It was about 8:30 p.m. Los Angeles time.

  So what if Caitlin liked Troy? So what if the feeling was mutual? Caitlin was flying back to Houston. He was in Los Angeles.

  Of course, with Caitlin’s money, she could fly back to LA any time she wanted. And with this election going on, she’d have plenty of reasons to be in LA.

  Just because they were attracted to each other didn’t mean they’d get together, Michelle told herself.

  What if they did?

  You’re not thinking this through, she told herself. It wasn’t the attraction that was the problem. The problem was Caitlin coming out of her shell. Opening herself up to new ideas. Maybe wanting to quit Safer America.

  Or worse. What if Caitlin decided to steer Safer America in a different direction?

  Follow the money. She was assuming a lot of things, but if it all came down to money, the people funding Safer America expected results from their contributions.

  Who exactly was funding Safer America?

  Was there any way she could find out?

  Don’t go there, she told herself. She needed to focus, on doing her job and not pissing off Gary. On getting Danny out of jail.

  But if her “job” was taking care of Caitlin … what did she owe Caitlin? Anything?

  And Gary would almost certainly fuck her over in the end.

  It wouldn’t hurt to know more about what she was up against. There were things she could find out without taking stupid risks—more about the backgrounds of the board members, for one. She could do that on her iPad. That shouldn’t be dangerous.

  Assuming Gary hadn’t somehow hacked it.

  Michelle had arranged for a car service to pick them up a
t the airport. Caitlin was mostly silent on the ride. Tired, Michelle supposed, and feeling the effects of the wine she’d had on the plane. As they approached River Oaks, Caitlin stirred. A smile crossed her face, as though she’d recalled a pleasant memory.

  “You know, that was a really great trip,” she said.

  “It was,” Michelle said, mustering whatever fake enthusiasm she had left.

  Caitlin suddenly turned to her.

  “I know I make a lot of jokes, but you really have been a great help to me. And, okay, I’ll admit it, a good influence.” She reached out and briefly rested her hand on top of Michelle’s. “Thank you.”

  You need to tell her, Michelle thought. You have to.

  “You’re welcome,” she said.

  Her apartment felt like a stale sauna, smelling faintly of old moldy carpet. She switched on the air conditioner. Dumped her suitcase by the bed. Checked to see if her cash was still in the other suitcase in the closet. She was a little surprised and vaguely pleased to see that it was.

  She took a quick shower, changed into a pair of jersey shorts and Danny’s old Air Force T-shirt. Powered up her Emily phone.

  One message.

  “This is a collect call from an inmate in …” A pause. “Harris County Jail … If you are willing to accept, press one.”

  Click. A hangup.

  Danny.

  He called again the next day, while she was dropping off Caitlin’s clothes at the dry cleaner. She’d risked keeping her Emily phone on, in case he called back.

  She waited for the prompt from the recorded voice, pressed the button to accept the call.

  “I’m sorry,” she said to the clerk at the cleaner’s. “I, I have to take this.” Scooping up the clothes she’d laid on the counter, she slung the laundry bag over her shoulder and left the air-conditioning to stand outside on the sidewalk, in the steaming heat of a Houston late morning.

  “Hey,” he said. “Hope this is an okay time.”

  “It’s fine.”

  For a moment, there was silence on the line.

  “I … I’m sorry, ” she said.