Where to Choose

by Penny Mickelbury

  He spent his days helping his “auntie” and her friends—running errands for them, repairing odds and ends around their homes, tak­ing them to lunch and dinner, meeting and talking to their neigh­bors. He’d learned that there was, indeed, an undercover police presence in Jacaranda Estates. “‘Cause I know a cop when I see a cop,” he’d growled, Jake-like, when Carole Ann had pressed him about the certainty of his information, and they didn’t appear to have any connection to the group on the playground. One of them was a young Mexican woman who lived with her aunt and uncle, the one who spoke out against retaliating against the violence and whom none of the other residents knew; another was a Black guy named Bobby who’d thwarted the attack on old Mr. Asmara.

  He’d also learned that for the past four days Luisa had been stay­ing with her daughter in Van Nuys, in the San Fernando Valley, north of Los Angeles, waiting for the bruising and swelling in her face from her latest beating to recede. Which is why Carole Ann couldn’t find her after her return from Mexico. And he’d learned that Mr. Asmara was moving to Glendale, to live with his son, ap­parently having accepted that his wife’s coma was permanent. And he’d learned that a new family would be moving into the Asmara home some time in the near future.

  Carole Ann looked beyond the throng skating and jogging and strolling on the walkway before her, out to the ocean and on to infin­ity. There was no hint of the ugly smog that so frequently draped itself over the L.A. basin that a sunny day was an anomaly. Growing up here, she mused, every day had been bright and sunny and per­fect. Every day had been the fairy tale that untold millions sought as their truth. She studied the people around her—a universe of people—and felt, for a moment, normal. Felt as if she belonged to a world where sitting at a cafe a hundred yards from where the Pacific Ocean glistened and rippled in the sun was normal and natural behavior. And in feeling that sense of belonging, she shed, for an instant, the aura of alienation that had clung to her for the past month.

  She looked quickly around as self-consciousness snuck up on her, waiting to be recognized as the “karate lady from TV” Then, relax­ing and grinning, she noticed that the tables around her contained real television personalities, names she didn’t know but faces she recognized from small and large screens. All of them relaxed and calm and pretending an unawareness of the fact that all around them, people were pretending an unawareness of their existence.

  She returned her gaze to the ocean and there was Tommy, strolling loosely and easily, lips pursed as if whistling, his eyes con­cealed by a pair of sunglasses. He wore a body-caressing tee shirt and the loose though sensually suggestive slacks favored by body­builders, and some leather sandals Carole Ann hadn’t seen before. She studied the people surrounding him as he deliberately walked past the restaurant. Carole Ann thought herself as adept at recog­nizing a cop as Tommy, and satisfied herself that no undercover po­lice presence preceded or followed him.

  He stopped suddenly at the table of a tee shirt vendor and nobody stopped with him. He studied the shirts for a few moments, holding up one and then another, before turning back toward the restau­rant, where he paused to peruse the hand-lettered menu on the board outside the door. When he entered, he brushed quickly past the hostess, through the front patio, and around to the side where Carole Ann sat.

  As soon as he removed the dark glasses that had concealed half his face, Carole Ann knew something was wrong. Reflexively she hunched her shoulders and closed both her hands tightly around the glass in which all the ice had melted and created puddles of water on the glass-topped table. Tommy banged into the table as he at­tempted to fold his bulk into the too-small chair, and water dribbled over the edge into her lap. She didn’t care. She was too intent on try­ing to read meaning into the look on Tommy’s face.

  “Can the news be that bad?”

  “Couldn’t be much worse,” he said.

  “Well,” she said, and cleared her mind of the clutter of specula­tion and wonder.

  He took a breath and blew it out like a whale. “LAPD is turning its back on Gutierrez. Their story is going to be that whatever he was doing at Jacaranda the night he got offed, he wasn’t doing it for them since he’d already been suspended without pay for an infraction they won’t specify.”

  “But what about the others? They can leave Gutierrez dangling but they can’t keep pretending the others aren’t there.”

  “Sure they can,” Tommy said with a shrug. “The LAPD hasn’t ad­mitted it’s running an undercover operation—” He was stopped by an expression on Carole Ann’s face. “What?”

  “Suppose there are two undercover ops, Fish. The young woman who lives with her aunt and uncle, and that Bobby—they’re one; and the playground guys are another.”

  Tommy scratched his chin and nodded his head. “It’s possible. It’d be a real screwed-up way to do things, but it’s possible. Makes sense, even, considering.”

  “So, how can we prove it? How can we push back against the LAPD?”

  “We can’t.” Tommy was shaking his head. “They’re the biggest gang in L.A.”

  Carole Ann understood the futility of her objection even as she made it, yet could not stop herself. She understood as clearly as if the words had been engraved on the concrete walkway in front of her the implications of Tommy’s words: The L.A. police had heaved, shrugged, and dropped the weight of the murder of their obviously corrupt undercover cop right back on the shoulders of Jacaranda Es­tates and its residents, three of whom, at least technically, were murderers. In fact, had upended Addie’s defense strategy, leaving all of them exposed and vulnerable—Carole Ann, Roberta, Angie, and Grayce. All except Luisa. She muttered a curse and shook her head. Then she shrugged and a self-deprecating grin spread over her face.

  “Damn,” Tommy whispered, and reached into his waist pouch and retrieved a cell phone.

  “Who’re you calling?” Carole Ann demanded to know, still grinning.

  Tommy arched an eyebrow at her, pursed his lips, opened the phone, and punched buttons. “Jake,” he muttered between punches at the phone’s keypad. “He needs to know that you’ve gone completely around the bend.” His seriousness increased her humor and she was laughing out loud when she reached across the table and snatched the phone from him.

  “I’m perfectly fine, thank you. In fact, I’m finer than I’ve been in quite a while. And if you want to tell Jake anything, tell him I just re­membered his first rule of survival: Don’t get mad, get even. I’ve spent the last couple of months yo-yoing between being frightened and being angry. It is now get-even time. Tell that to your boss when you talk to him.”

  Carole Ann rehearsed her words to Angie. Rehearsed as she would a summation to a jury. Not just the words she’d say, but the tone of voice she’d use, and the pitch, and the pace. And she worried whether to sit next to Angie and hold her hand or face her across a divide, putting distance between them—between the strength of their relationship and the potential damage Carole Ann was about to inflict upon it. For she could no longer not press Angie for details about Dottie, who she was and how she was murdered.

  Carole Ann had called Angie to say that she wanted to talk and to set a convenient time. Puzzlement heavy in her voice, Angie had said come now. And now Carole Ann was standing outside the door that was downstairs from the door she’d called home all of her life. Angie’s door, one at which she’d never before knocked. She stood there, hand raised. The door swung open and Angie welcomed her, as always, with a smile of love and warmth and welcome, and she knew this was no time or place for a speech. Angie was no jury.

  She entered, closed the door, and accepted Angie’s embrace, turn­ing it into a brief, fierce clutch before releasing. She followed the older woman into the home that always spoke in a language of the past. The combined living and dining room reflected the truth of who Angelique Arroyo was. Several richly colored hand-woven rugs covered the floors, hand-woven baskets adorned walls and, at vari­ous intervals about the room, held articles of n
eed and interest. The dining table and coffee table were of hand-hewn north-woods planks, as was an armchair with a stretched, tanned hide. The sofa and com­plementary ottoman were commercially produced and looked as if they weren’t, being of some fabric natural enough to blend in with the decor.

  She followed Angie to the sofa, where, on a rough table in front of it, a bottle of seltzer water and two tumblers waited on a woven reed tray. Angie poured water and Carole Ann drank. She was ready.

  “You remember a few weeks ago, Angie, when I was out of town for a couple of days? Before all the media madness? I went to An­guilla to see Arthur Jennings.”

  Angie’s eyes widened slightly but held no question, and she waited, hands folded in her lap, for Carole Ann to continue.

  “He told me about Dottie.”

  For several seconds Angie registered no reaction. It was as if the words either had no meaning when they reached her brain center, or there was a short circuit that prevented their meaning from reg­istering immediately. And when she responded, it was not in the way Carole Ann had anticipated, for which she had steeled herself. Angie tilted her head slightly toward the left and her eyes narrowed slightly.

  “Why?” she asked almost lightly. “Why would he talk to you about Dottie?”

  Carole Ann released breath she wasn’t aware she was holding and explained her theory connecting the present-day mayhem at Jacaranda Estates to something in the past. Angie reclined back into the embrace of the sofa, tucked her feet beneath her, and closed her eyes. Her breathing was even and her body was perfectly still. She could have been meditating. Except that after less than a minute, she opened her eyes and looked at Carole Ann. Without speaking, she unfolded herself, stood, and walked briskly to the bed­room, bare feet whispering on the floor where there was no rug. She returned almost immediately with an ancient black leather brief­case, the kind preferred by professionals of another era. It was an accordion case—it opened on hinges and was wider at the bottom than at the top.

  “This was Dottie’s,” Angie said, placing the case in Carole Ann’s lap. It was heavy. It also was clean and the leather was gleaming and pliable, as if this case was polished and buffed regularly. And, Carole Ann knew, it was.

  “Tell me about her, Angie. If you don’t mind. I don’t mean to be rude, to pry. But I’d like to know. It hurts me that I never knew before.”

  Angie smiled and shook her head. “I don’t mind. I wish you could have known her. She was beautiful. And funny. And very smart. She was a bookkeeper for the government. She worked for the immigra­tion department. That’s what it was called back then. It was a good job for a Colored woman to have, but she couldn’t really take pride in it because she was being used against other Colored people. You see, they wouldn’t let Mexicans or Chinese or Japanese work for im­migration. Not in office jobs, like Dottie had. And they used the Ne­groes against the other Colored. If Dottie wanted to keep her job, she had to uncover so many illegals every month.” She stopped talk­ing and Carole Ann misunderstood.

  “Angie, don’t talk any more if it’s too painful.”

  Angie gave her hand a gentle stroke. “I got over the pain long, long ago, C.A. Don’t worry about me. I mean it.” Carole Ann searched the face before her. There was considerable sadness, and loneliness, and a hint of anger. But no pain.

  “If she was a bookkeeper, why was she doing whatever it was she was doing,” Carole Ann asked, and realized that she was guilty of a form of transference: She was the one in pain. It hurt to feel the implications of Angie’s words. She wanted to hear more, so she stiff­ened her spinal column and urged Angie to continue.

  “They never would let her—any Colored person—do their real job. Not back then. We were lucky just to have an office job. But Dottie didn’t feel lucky. She felt dirty. She’d started warning people, es­pecially people with families, that immigration was after them. She was going to quit and go to work for J and J as their bookkeeper. And then she got murdered.”

  “What’s in here, Angie?” Carole Ann asked, stroking the soft leather of the old briefcase, willing the tears now stuck in her throat to remain there. Angie may have released her pain, but Carole Ann still carried a full load.

  Angie shrugged. “Whatever was in there when she died. She brought it home from work every night. Sometimes she worked at home, sometimes not. For years, I couldn’t bear to look. Then, after a while, it didn’t matter what was in there. She wasn’t. And nothing in there could bring her to life. I kept it in good shape because I don’t believe in waste. If you think it can help, you can have it.” Carole Ann picked up the case and pressed it to her breast. It eas­ily could have belonged to Al.

  Ricky Nunez called her a nigger and spit at her and she smacked him hard enough to propel him across the room, and across all the furniture that was in the room. Then she made the fool’s error of turning her back on him. She was feeling just angry enough to tell Luisa to stop with the screaming and the goddamn praying when she felt the cold wetness spread across her shoulders. Then she felt the pain and smelled something slightly disgusting. Then she heard shattering glass. Ricky had thrown a bottle of that awful malt liquor at her. Had he been more sober or had a better arm, the bottle would have opened a gash in her head.

  He was standing across the room screaming and cursing at her; Luisa was tugging at her arm and screaming and praying at her, the only intelligible words “Madre deDios” and “he’s just a baby.” In that moment, Carole Ann despised the two of them. She looked at Luisa and heard “doormat.” Looked at Luisa and saw a woman who had lived more than half her life with the knowledge that her husband had raped and murdered her best friend’s lover, a zombie. Looked at Luisa and saw a woman who harbored a boy who beat her and who might be responsible for terrorizing an entire community.

  She felt a fury previously unknown. Not even in the aftermath of Al’s murder and the ensuing hunt to bring his killers to justice had she experienced the kind of rage she now was feeling. She stepped over a broken chair to reach Ricky and so quickly grabbed the hand that he’d raised to strike her with, and found the pressure point, that he was on his knees writhing in pain before he fully understood what was happening to him. Anger creased his face momentarily crowding out the vestiges of drugs and alcohol, and he opened his mouth to speak. Carol Ann increased the pressure on his thumb and he emitted a squeak.

  “If you ever touch me again, I will kill you,” she hissed into his ear. “And if you ever hit your grandmother again, I will kill you.”

  “Me and my grandmother is none of your business,” he spat back at her, and she found herself slightly impressed that he had either the energy or the courage to mount a protest. But only slightly. She bent the finger back toward his wrist and the breath left him in an audible hiss.

  She leaned in closer to him, then recoiled at the smell. “I don’t give a good goddamn about you, you little piece of shit. But your grandmother was my business before you were born, and she’ll be my business when they slam the jail door on your sorry ass, and don’t you forget it.” She released his hand and stood over him for a long count to ensure that he remained subdued. She didn’t ap­proach Luisa again, but at the door she turned toward her and felt all the anger ebb away at the sight. Luisa was a broken woman. A doormat upon which the footprints were visible. How, Carole Ann again asked herself, had she never before noticed? And how, she wondered, could she ever confront this woman, ask her the ques­tions that had begged answers for almost forty years? And she knew she could not. Should not. Would not.

  Ignoring the cobblestone pathway, she trudged across the grass, angling toward Roberta’s house. First Angie, then Luisa, then Bert, and finally Grayce. That had been her planned order of confronta­tion. So far, neither encounter had proceeded as expected, and Car­ole Ann found herself apprehensive about facing Roberta. She’d thought she knew these women, had thought she understood them, understood their motivations. She now knew that she was mistaken. How, then, would Bert react and res
pond? With anger? With pain or sorrow or regret? With resentment toward Carole Ann for her in­trusion? Would she even acknowledge the facts of the history? Bert, Carole Ann reminded herself, was the most obstreperous of the group, the real hardhead. Bert was tougher even than Grayce, and Grayce Gibson was plenty tough enough for Carole Ann.

  She was grateful for the grin she could experience at the sight of Tommy’s new car parked at the curb in front of Bert’s house. It was “new” only in the sense that it was a recent acquisition. The car was a 1966 Bonneville convertible, gleaming white with red leather in­terior. It had been lovingly and perfectly restored beyond its original magnificence, and Tommy was so proud of it his chest visibly ex­panded when he was in its presence. He was, she mused, becoming a bit too acclimated to the California lifestyle. What in the world would he do with a Los Angeles muscle car in Washington, D.C.?

  She was wondering whether it was wise or not to attempt to tackle Bert in Tommy’s presence when he opened the door and stepped out onto the walk. He spied her and immediately came to­ward her. He stopped several feet away and compressed his face into something quite unattractive.

  “You smell like you fell into a bucket of piss!” he all but shouted at her. “Where have you been?”