Where to Choose

by Penny Mickelbury

  “What are you, a shit magnet?” Jake had been in worse-than-usual- temper ever since Carole Ann’s return from Anguilla, and the three weeks of media mania had done nothing to improve his disposition. He’d been as taken aback as she by Arthur Jennings’s revelations, and now was deeply concerned that the amount of media attention was doing more harm than good—that opinion from the leading proponent of letting the press shake the information tree to see what fell. She held the phone for several long moments, listening to him think and breathe, not unmindful of what she was doing to her mother’s telephone bill.

  “I feel like worse than that. It’s five in the morning, in case you forgot. Might I assume from your terms of endearment you mean you don’t have anything new for me.”

  He muttered something Carole Ann couldn’t quite decipher, but because it was Jake, she trusted her assumption that it was cussing. Then he said, quite intelligibly, “I got nothin’, C.A. No new leads, no new information, no nothin’. It’s like these people ceased to exist. With the exception of Arthur Jennings, there’s nothin’ on any of ‘em. And if you hadn’t given me a place to start, I’m not sure I’d have found him. There’s something screwy about this whole thing. Man like Jennings, why would he disappear into nowhere? He’s got nothing to hide, nothing to be ashamed of—”

  “And everything to protect,” Carole Ann injected. “I told you he said he retreated to his island paradise to escape claims of the Dame Que Es Mio people.”

  “That was then, this is now,” Jake snapped. “Why is he still hiding out all these years later?”

  “He’s not hiding,” Carole Ann challenged, feeling oddly protec­tive of the old man. “His wife’s dead, his kids are living their own lives—”

  “Whatever,” Jake snapped, cutting her off. “It doesn’t account for the fact that Jamilla is a ghost, and so are the Nunez people—him and her. And I won’t be able even to look for anything on that Dottie without a last name or an exact date of death.” He cut himself off with a sigh, and she pictured him seated behind his big desk, body still as death, face a panoply of scowls and grimaces. “It still makes no sense, but I think you’re right about the past being the key to this current mess,” he said grudgingly, and Carole Ann smirked and wished he could see her. How dare he call her a shit magnet! “What’s your game plan?” he asked, creating an unexpected and unwelcome series of conflicting emotions. She was both pleased and angry that he didn’t give her an arm’s-length list of what to do and when and how to do it.

  She was gratified that he was learning to trust her instincts and terrified that she didn’t know the first thing about conducting a criminal investigation. She was a lawyer. She knew about the law and how it worked and how to use it to benefit clients. Hell! He was the investigator, the homicide detective. But if she were pushed into offering an opinion it would be that the murder of Dorothy—Dot­tie—Somebody was the key that would unlock the door where all the skeletons were hiding.

  As if he occupied a chair on the front row of her brain, he asked whether she’d told anyone yet about her trip to Anguilla and about what she learned there. She was, at that moment, wondering how to approach Angie for information about Dottie, since no one knew she knew about Dottie. She’d thought it wise not to further upset and worry her mother and the others; now she knew they’d defi­nitely have been worried about her talking to Arthur Jennings, but not for the reasons she’d believed. And when she contemplated the scenario in its entirety, she grew angry with new vigor.

  “You think I like listening to you breathe?” he snapped, snatching her back into the moment.

  “I listen to you breathe all the time,” she snapped back, then added, “and Tommy and I are trying to figure out that playground scenario. Tommy thinks they’re cops. And no, I haven’t told anybody anything about Anguilla and I don’t know how I’m gonna backtrack a woman who’s been dead for forty years, whose last name I don’t know. Unless I ask Angie what her name was, and I’m not ready to do that.”

  “You may have to get ready,” Jake said, no charity in his tone. “Or ask your mother when exactly she was killed. Then you can check the death certificate.”

  Now she was irritated. With herself and with him. “Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know what I can do. Thanks,” she said after a grudging beat and was relieved when he accepted her half-assed apology without comment. “Do you really think those guys on the playground are un­dercover cops?”

  She heard him grunt. “Looks like it. Tommy saw what you saw, which is they’re not dealing drugs or doing anything else, except they leave in shifts at specified times. Tommy tried following a cou­ple of them but had to give it up.”

  “But, Jake, if those guys are undercover cops, how—”

  “I can’t answer that, C.A.!”

  “And if they’re undercover cops, then how did it happen that old Mr. Asmara shot one of them?” She heard what resembled a snarl, then she heard a dial tone. It served as another reminder of how dif­ficult it was for him to understand or accept bad police work. If, in fact, that’s what it was. Perhaps they weren’t cops at all. But if they weren’t, who were they and why were they there? And because she knew no answer could or would be forthcoming, she put herself back to bed.

  What she wanted to do upon waking up three hours later was talk to Tommy, but she couldn’t find him and nobody knew where he was. Grayce hadn’t seen him since the previous evening, when he’d treated her and Carole Ann to dinner at a Chinatown restaurant. Able to eat only soup, Grayce finally, reluctantly had acknowledged the need for a dental surgeon, and Carole Ann could see that some­thing major had shifted within her mother with that admission. She was less vigorous. She’d resumed her yoga and tai chi classes and was growing stronger physically every day, but spiritually, she was still in pain. Carole Ann knew her mother could not tell her what she knew about the ugly secrets of Jacaranda Estates. Not yet.

  Roberta, calmer and quieter than Carole Ann had ever known her to be, hadn’t seen Tommy since seven that morning, when he left for the gym.

  “What gym?” Carole Ann asked, senses on alert.

  “You’ll have to ask your friend, Robbie. All I know is it’s in Ingle­wood,” Bert said, conjuring up for Carole Ann a hazy image of yet another solid, middle-class neighborhood being taken on a slalom ride to hell by gang-bangers and drug dealers; and along with the image came a tingle of disquiet. Tommy in Inglewood. The more she felt that thought, the less she liked it. She also didn’t care much for the way Bert looked. Like Grayce, she was hurting inside. She brushed off Carole Ann’s attempts to discuss her case, and grew strangely silent at efforts to open discussion of any aspect of Jacar­anda history.

  Carole Ann was surprised when there was no answer at Luisa’s, and she stood ringing the bell and knocking on the door longer than common sense dictated. Mrs. Philpot had called a little more than an hour earlier to say that Luisa had returned from Mexico, and that the police had been looking for her. She walked around to the side of the house and tried peeking into a window, aware for the first time of the sorry state of the property. The paint was weathered and peeling, the windows were streaked and dirty, the grass was brown and patchy—the whole scene showed years of neglect. And absence. The place looked and felt as if no one had lived there for a very long time.

  She strolled back to her mother’s, head down, hands stuffed into her pockets, worried and fearful. The police were looking for Luisa. Where was she? Who was Luisa? Who were any of them, for that matter? What secret did her own mother harbor, and under what circumstances would it be revealed? She felt anger replace fear and worry, and she had worked herself into a fairly nasty frame of mind by the time she unlocked and opened the door. But the house was empty and she was relieved. She didn’t yet know how to confront any of them with what she knew. Her need to talk to Tommy was be­coming acute. She called Robbie to ask what gym he’d sent Tommy to, and instead was directed to come immediately to his studio. “There’s somebody here you need to talk to
,” he said, and hung up on her.

  Watching the karate class under way in Robbie Cho Lee’s studio was like seeing a bunch of football players in class with the Alvin Ailey Dance Company: There was no grace, no finesse, no re­spect for craft, no inherent artistry. There was only raw power, and too much of that. Robbie would demonstrate a stance and a throw and one of the students—if they could be called students—would lumber forward, grab his opponent, and try to kill him. Carole Ann couldn’t imagine why they bothered, unless the study of martial arts now was tres chic in el barrio. And since it now was chic for drug deal­ers and gang-bangers and other varieties of hoodlums to drive Volvos, why not learn the ancient martial arts?

  She winced inwardly at the look on Robbie’s face, a mixture of several emotions, including fear, and wished she could do something to help him. But as she had no wish to repeat the experience of hand-to-hand combat with a member of an L.A. street gang, or someone who passed convincingly as such, she contented herself with observing from the sidelines.

  It took several moments but what she saw, she realized, were two distinctly different groups of young men—four true gang-bangers and three other guys who, as far as she could determine, were merely of Mexican descent. All three were tattooed and two of them wore earrings, but there was nothing evil in their behavior or de­meanor. Their lack of grace in stance and throw was just that; it was the other four who were defiant and aggressive and desirous of in­flicting harm upon Robbie and one another.

  She sat up straighter, her back flush against the wall, her knees pulled forward into her chest, her arms wrapped around and her chin resting on them, and searched the combatants for signs of recognition. Had one of them been involved in the attack on her mother? Had she seen one of them on the playground at Jacaranda Estates? She strained for some sign of familiarity. She raised her eyes and saw the multiple images reflected in the many mirrors lin­ing the walls. None of the combatants was officially or correctly clad. Two of them wore sweatpants and were topless, the others wore jeans and tee shirts, and Carole Ann considered the inappropriate attire at least partially responsible for the awkward postures. That’s what she was thinking when the energy shifted like the barometric pressure before a storm.

  One of those Carole Ann believed to be a true gangster cursed at Robbie and swung at him. Robbie backpedaled and raised his hands, palms out and facing his would-be attacker. Carole Ann couldn’t discern his words but his tone was calm, conciliatory. The other guy wasn’t having it. He swung at Robbie again, and then lunged. Robbie threw him so hard the floor shook as if experiencing the aftershock of an earthquake. One of his compadres stepped into the breach and Robbie tossed him, too—hard and fast. They lay side by side on the gray carpet and neither of them moved.

  Robbie stood still, arms at his sides, waiting to see what the re­maining two would do. She saw Robbie’s chest lift and fall when they bent over and each one grabbed the arms of a fallen friend and began the tedious process of dragging dead weight across a carpeted floor.

  Carole Ann quickly lost interest in their exit and, when she re­turned her attention to Robbie, she found that he was beckoning for her to join him. Quickly she untied and removed her sneakers and padded toward him.

  “How’re you doing, C.A.?” he asked, and she was surprised at the concern clouding his face and giving his voice an unusual huskiness.

  “I’m fine, Robbie. Really, I am,” she said, and smiled and squeezed his arm.

  He nodded and introduced her to the three remaining students and she confirmed her earlier assessment, made from across the room, that these three young men might be streetwise but they weren’t gang-bangers. They also were not as young as she’d imag­ined from a distance—all three were well into their twenties. She watched them watch her as Robbie explained that he’d introduced her to karate “a lot of years ago, when you guys were little babies,” and told them she would assist him in demonstrating several stances and throws. He didn’t check her reaction to the information that the three young men belonged to a political action group called Dame QueEs Mio, “often mistaken for a gang.”

  “I’m not properly dressed, Robbie!” she complained, aware of how recently she’d mentally criticized the other guys for their im­proper attire, though in sweatpants and a tee shirt, she could more easily and comfortably execute than in her jeans. She hoped her protestations concealed her surprise. At least she now knew why Robbie had asked her to come on such short notice.

  He waved off her objections, bowed to her with a sly wink, and as­sumed the stance. She could but follow. He led her through the moves and positions he’d been trying to teach earlier, explaining and defining each component of each move to a now fully attentive audience. And before she knew it, Robbie had skipped several chap­ters ahead and they were engaged in sophisticated, advanced ma­neuvers, and Carole Ann stopped thinking about the three young men and their political action group and concentrated fully on not having her head handed to her. She was unimpeded by the clothes she wore, and she fought with an intensity that surprised her and Robbie. She was reliving the attack on her mother, this time without the fear or the anger, but certainly with the determination not to be defeated.

  The demonstration was blessedly brief and Robbie and Carole Ann bowed to each other and then to the students, who did nothing to conceal their awe at the performance. They stood open-mouthed and speechless for several seconds. Then one of them, short and stocky with a residual case of teen acne, narrowed his eyes at her and nodded his head.

  “You gave that dude ‘xactly what he deserved,” he said in a voice so soft as to be almost feminine. “Although if I hadn’t just seen it for myself, I’d still be sayin’ no way a bitch could off a dude with her bare hands.”

  Carole Ann flinched. “Please don’t call me a bitch.”

  His eyes widened, then narrowed again, and he shrugged and grinned at her. “You’re right. That’s a bad habit.” He extended his hand to her. “My name is Ray. My partners are Jose and David.” Head gestures to the left and right sides identified the partners, and Carole Ann shook all three hands and received firm, honest, you- can-trust-me handshakes accompanied by steady eye contact. She was one of those who judged a lot of characters based on handshakes and eye contact.

  Jose, on the left, surprised Carole Ann by asking, “How’s your mama?” and all three nodded their heads and offered mumbled messages of goodwill when she described Grayce’s recovery, and Ray once again opined that Grayce’s de­ceased attacker deserved to be deceased.

  “I wish it hadn’t happened,” Carole Ann said, looking Ray di­rectly in the eye. “I’m not proud of what I did.”

  “You’re not proud of saving your mama’s life?” This from Jose.

  She shook her head. “I’m not proud that I needed violence to do it.”

  “You don’t like violence but you do karate?” Ray made no attempt to disguise the disbelief in his voice.

  Carole Ann was forced to smile. “Karate is as close as I’ve managed to get to meditation. And it’s art and sport. I didn’t learn it to hurt anyone and I don’t ever want to again.”

  “Suppose you have to?” asked Jose. “Suppose—”

  She cut him off. “I can’t think like that. All I can think about now is how to find out what’s causing the violence in my neighborhood and put a stop to it.” She paused to look hard at the three young men. “Will you help me?”

  Confusion and distrust struggled for control of Ray’s face, and Jose and David looked at Carole Ann as if she’d suddenly sprouted a new appendage in an unlikely place. She quickly explained to them the history of Jacaranda Estates and the nature of the recent vio­lence and watched understanding dawn. Just as Ray was about to explode in anger she raised her hand and her voice.

  “I’m asking you for help. I’m looking for information. I’m not ac­cusing or blaming.”

  “Bullshit!” Ray spat at her.

  “Truth, Ray,” Carole Ann said, holding his eyes with her
own, not blinking for as long as he didn’t blink. “Do you know Ricky Nunez?” she asked, and when he didn’t respond or blink, she said, “He tells people he belongs to your organization and he might be connected to the attack on my mother and those other women.”

  Ray’s shoulders relaxed and his fists unclenched and he blinked. Slowly. “We’re a cultural and political organization, not a gang. We don’t beat up old ladies. Or young ladies. Or nobody else. You un­derstand me?”

  Carole Ann nodded. She believed him. She’d known as soon as she saw the three of them that whoever they were, they weren’t her mother’s attackers but she’d hoped they could lead her, point her in some useful direction. Now that hope faded. She thanked them for listening to her, apologized to them for any misunderstanding they might have had interpreting her words, and wished them well in their study of karate. She turned to Robbie, who’d been standing and listening, and thanked him with her eyes, and started across the room to retrieve her sneakers. She heard Robbie tell Ray, David, and Jose to call and schedule an appointment but she didn’t turn to catch a final glimpse of them. Had she, she’d have seen the three of them standing as if their feet were glued to the carpet, their stares at her back reflecting off the mirrored walls.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  From her vantage point under the canopy on the side of the restau­rant, Carole Ann enjoyed an unobstructed view of the pedestrian traffic in both directions on the boardwalk, as well as that on the narrow, cobbled side street, without seeming to be engaged in any activity other than drinking ginger beer and people watching. Her mission was to observe Tommy’s approach and arrival and to deter­mine whether he was being followed. It was his suggestion—and she and Jake had agreed—that they limit their Jacaranda Estates con­tact with each other. That way, Tommy more effectively could be Roberta’s nephew from D.C., a body-building homeboy whose ques­tions about people, places, and things would arouse no more inter­est or ire than those of any other newcomer. To Tommy, if anybody asked, Carole Ann was just his aunt’s friend’s daughter, some rich, crazy lady who just happened to have killed some dude. That she also was from D.C. was of no consequence to Tommy. She didn’t hang out with his crowd. She was too old.