Lola
Page 11
“How are you feeling?”
“Fine. Think they’re just being overly cautious. Must have been a slow night.” He tries a smile, and Lola responds in kind.
The television hums a catchy tune that hurts Lola’s ears, then there is a commercial with a wrinkled celebrity sitting at a modest kitchen table, trying to sell reverse mortgages, whatever those are, to senior citizens. The word reverse strikes Lola as wrong—why would you want the reverse of what you worked so hard to get?
“Must have,” she says after too much time has passed for it to qualify as a response to Hector’s observation.
“Lola,” Hector says, knowing she is somewhere else.
She covers his bandaged hand with hers and bows her head over it, kissing his hand, the gauze, his blood.
“Lola,” Hector says, and his tone is sharper now, correcting her.
“I’m sorry,” she mutters.
“I’m the one who should be saying that,” Hector says, his cheeks flushing, not with humiliation, but with anger. “I’m the one who should be kissing your hand.”
Lola sits back, crossing her arms. How is the reverse mortgage commercial still playing? She guesses senior citizens have nowhere to go in the middle of the day. Even if they wanted to get up for a snack, it might take them more than thirty seconds to cross their dated living rooms, to walk from armchair to refrigerator. They would have to hear the commercial. They would have to hear about the benefits, the importance, the need to call right now.
Her heart pounds and thumps then, and she wants to bolt. Hector was content without her here. He was at peace. She interrupted and upset the balance. Now, he is angry because she came here and reminded him he owed her something. That was not her intention. She came here as his sister.
“I’ll do anything,” Hector says. “What can I do?”
“Nothing.”
“When’s the deadline?”
“Forty-two hours.”
“Lola,” Hector says.
“Don’t worry. It’s not gonna happen.”
“It’s my fault,” Hector says.
“No,” Lola says, and he gives her a look that tells her not to lie to him. But that is her job, to protect him. Not to punish him.
“I’m gonna fix this, when I get out of here.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know.”
“Then why’d you say it?”
Hector shakes his head and shrugs. “Sounded good.”
Lola smiles at him. “Can’t do that shit. Talk out of your ass like that.”
“Learned it from you,” Hector says, and Lola laughs loudly, competing with the game show jingle.
“I’m gonna make it up to you. I’m gonna fix this,” Hector lies to her.
“I know you are,” Lola lies back, a parent just wanting her baby to go back to sleep so she can get on with her day.
“Three pearl necklaces, my best diamond earrings, and a set of Ginsu knives—not the kind for sale on television.” The woman in front of Lola dictates her stolen possessions to a desk sergeant at the LAPD’s Pacific Division. All Lola can see is the woman’s back—she’s blond, with the bob haircut, khaki Capri pants, and pastel cardigan of a smiling mother in a Swiffer commercial. She wears a diamond the size of a bullet on her left ring finger. Seeing the woman’s weighted finger makes Lola think of Hector, and she has to look away.
From what Lola has gathered, Pacific Division operates at a slower pace than most precincts surrounding South Central. Maybe it is a particularly slow day here, but so far she hasn’t seen so much as a cuffed prostitute grace the double doors since she arrived half an hour ago. The single perpetrator the cops have thrown in holding is a streaker—although the guy could just be a drunk who had the bad luck to take a piss where he didn’t know people were watching. This issue—streaker or drunk—necessitated debate between ten detectives, all in off-the-rack suits and clip-on ties, slurping stale coffee into their mustaches as they deliberated.
“Could you describe each knife separately for me, ma’am?” The desk sergeant doesn’t look up, his pen scratching paper as he fills out a robbery report. Lola prepares to wait another half hour. In her neighborhood, the only knife that would concern police would be one stuck in a throat.
In her neighborhood, no one wears matching cardigans. There, a single detective might bring in a different suspect on five different murders in one night. There, the interrogations were like therapy, with the detective giving the suspect coffee, the suspect pushing it back toward the detective. Eyelids got heavy. Cop and perp held each other up, needing each other, going through the dance they knew they had to, until the station or prison spit the perp back out to wash, rinse, repeat, and come back to the cop, faded and comfortable as an old T-shirt.
When did it stop? Never. Symbiosis was natural, Lola had learned in eighth-grade science class.
She imagines a world with no crime. No cops. No lawyers. No judges. She imagines the people who would be out of work and starving because crime had fed their families.
Who was anyone to judge her? She was keeping these assholes in their clip-on ties and American sedans. Everyone was always yammering about change, revive the neighborhood, her neighborhood, but no one was prepared for what came after better schools, cleaner sidewalks, full bellies, and arms full of healthy, bulging veins. Then what? Then there must be new ways to judge people. People will find new ways to make outcasts, because as always, some must suffer. Some people have to be less, so others can have more.
“Ma’am?” The desk sergeant speaks to Lola. The Brentwood woman has vanished, most likely to a German SUV parked far enough away that no one will scratch it. Lola wonders if Garcia has seen the woman walking to her car, crying into her cell phone as she describes her harrowing ordeal to another sympathetic sheltered ear.
Lola made Garcia wait in the car because he has visible gang markings. She does not, having never felt the desire to show off her loyalty. Besides, she is a woman. She can be here in peace.
Lola clears her throat as she contemplates the desk sergeant—tall, broad, older, probably in his fifties, with an eighties-style mustache that’s still more pepper than salt. He wears a thin gold wedding band. She’s guessing he’s got kids, maybe a grandbaby. She bets he wants to retire alive, and that’s why he’s here, behind a counter, taking down tedious descriptions of steak knives.
“Ma’am? How can I help you?” the desk sergeant says. His smudged name badge reads “Tom,” and his voice is not unkind. She must be his daughter’s age, and he must see the sadness in her that she tries to keep hidden. He is a cop after all. Lola has found that, try as she might to despise them, many police can read a person in five seconds flat—hopes, fears, hungers. Then again, many can’t.
“I need to report a missing person,” Lola blurts out the lie. She’s no good at stammering or faltering. She barrels ahead like a runaway train, leaving chaos in her wake.
“How long has the person been missing?”
“Almost forty-eight hours,” Lola says. The timing is crucial.
“Almost?”
“Almost.”
She has heard from other people in her neighborhood—cousins and friends and enemies—that the police won’t do shit for a missing person if it hasn’t been forty-eight hours. Even if said missing person is white.
“How long until it’s been forty-eight hours?” Tom asks with a sigh. She had hoped for an impatient desk sergeant, but Tom’s sigh bleeds empathy. She’s in trouble.
“Forty-three minutes,” Lola says.
Tom pauses, lifting his pen from paper so that the whole station suddenly seems quiet. Lola knows this can’t be—there are detectives hunting and pecking at computers, and the streaker or alcoholic conspiracy theorist in holding hasn’t shut up about 9/11 being an inside job. Lola understands the man’s wish that there were something more, but she knows what happened happened, and people died the way they died, and there was nothing beyond that.
Instead, Tom says, “Give me a name.”
Caught, Lola stammers her brother’s name. “Hector Vasquez.”
“He live in the area?”
Lola shakes her head.
“Address?”
Lola gives it, picturing Hector where she last saw him—at the hospital, watching a game show and asking for another piece of cheesecake.
Sergeant Tom peers over the spectacles Lola hadn’t realized he was wearing until now. Another sigh. “This is Pacific Division, ma’am. If you’d like to report your brother missing, you’ll need to go to your local police station in Huntington Park—”
Red tape. Lola had counted on it. She hadn’t wanted to give a name, but she had needed to stall for time. It’s brazen, for sure—giving a false report. Maybe she wants the police to punish her. But the cartel will do that before the cops ever have a chance. She doesn’t know whose gauntlet she’d rather run—the cartel will make her death painful and long, Lola’s guessing up to three days, but rotting a life away in prison with bland food and steel bars? Not for Lola. She wants to go out screaming, not sighing like poor content Sergeant Tom here.
“Okay. Okay, I—” Lola thinks fast. “I just gotta wait for my ride. Can I sit over there a few minutes?” Lola does her best to look tired. It’s not difficult.
Sergeant Tom beckons for Lola to lean closer. “When you go to file your report, ask for Detective Mattingly,” he says. “Richard Mattingly.” He scratches out a quick note on the back of a business card. “Tell him Tom Wiederman sent you.”
Lola takes the card. Sergeant Tom has excellent penmanship. Lola admires his dedication to his job, to helping her find her missing brother who isn’t missing, even though she is brown and in the wrong neighborhood. Lola finds comfort in a person, cop or criminal, who can remain kind despite all the hate they’ve seen humans hurl at other humans. She can’t figure out if it’s mercy or naïveté, but she respects it.
It’s too bad Sergeant Tom’s help will go unused.
“You want something to drink while you wait? Bottle of water? Coffee?”
“So you’ll have my DNA?” Lola says, too quick, because she shouldn’t crack a joke now, when she’s supposed to be worried about a missing relative.
“Well…yeah,” Tom says, a smile playing at one corner of his lips, and Lola smiles back.
“Water,” Lola says, and in seconds she’s sitting on the bench with the view of the double doors and the bullpen, sipping cheap bulk bottled water. She could sleep here, with the bustle around her, although she could take some added action—a heated interrogation, a few token pimps—to help her relax. She’ll have to settle for the streaker, who has shouted his way to sleep in holding, and the two detectives discussing last night’s game—hockey, football, what does it matter. After today, she has one more day to live. She imagines more noise, more chaos, and her eyes flutter and close like some modern damsel in distress.
The woman who bursts through the double doors holding the tallest Starbucks cup they sell is a tiny storm, heels clicking, breath hurried as she pats several flying wisps of chestnut hair into place. She’s wearing a tailored skirt and silk blouse. She can’t be much more than five feet and a hundred pounds. Lola likes this game—it’s like sports stats. Height, weight, reach. How else can you measure a person at first sight?
“Hey, Tom,” the woman says, and she chucks her empty Starbucks cup into the wide can next to Lola as she’s already pouring another from the communal pot near Tom’s desk. She rips open a packet of powdered creamer with her teeth, a little animal.
“Andrea,” Tom gives her a respectful bow of his salt-and-pepper head.
“That her?” The woman named Andrea jerks her chin toward Lola, and Lola sits up, because she didn’t know the woman had even noticed her.
“Who?”
“Bubba’s girl,” Andrea says, and Lola realizes this fury of a woman has mistaken her for Sergeant Bubba’s meth head CI. Andrea is looking for the same person she is—the small blonde from the drop.
“Nah, he’s not here yet,” Tom says. “You want me to take you to his desk? He bought his own chair. Real comfy.”
“Smart. Your chairs are shit.”
“I don’t mind them,” Tom says, and Lola sees a flash of hurt flicker across his face.
“Yeah, well,” Andrea says, not finishing the sentence as she whips out an iPhone and starts to tap out an e-mail.
“You buy your own chair?” Tom asks, as if the concept of bringing one’s own furniture, the kind you pick out yourself, is foreign to him. Of course, Lola has never heard of it either. If someone were to give her an office, with a desk and a chair, she wouldn’t think to replace the furniture. It would be rude, wouldn’t it?
“D.A.’s office gives you a decorating stipend. A very small stipend. Then you pick your own chair,” Andrea says.
So she is a prosecutor. And she’s here for Bubba’s meth head. But surely not to prosecute, not if Blondie is a CI. They must have some sort of case against someone—Blondie’s boss, Mr. X, the WASP from the Chrysler? Lola chugs some water. If she can get that clean-cut white man’s name, it might be worth more to the cartel than the heroin and the cash combined. He is their sole competition.
“Where’s the lineup?”
“Room Two,” Tom says.
“Ugh. Bad lighting.”
“Bad lighting in all the rooms,” Tom says. “How’s Jack?”
“Fine. Working.”
Lola notes the wedding band glinting with tiny diamonds on Andrea’s left ring finger. It’s not gold, but not silver, either. What’s the really expensive metal? Platinum. Andrea’s wedding band must be platinum.
“Sure, a shrink’s always on call,” Tom says.
“Don’t let him hear you call him that.”
“I wouldn’t,” Tom says, and he and Andrea laugh. “Don’t you want to sit down? Bubba’s probably stuck in traffic. Who knows how long he’ll be?”
“Yeah, I’ll sit,” Andrea says in a resigned tone, as if it’s a punishment. She turns to Lola. “You mind?”
“Fine by me,” Lola says, and the tiny woman sits, toe tapping on the hard tile floor. She hunches over her cell, tapping toes and fingers, incapable of sitting still.
Lola has cultivated the skill of calm over years of exhaustion. She is used to the world spinning around her. She is used to staying still in a storm so that no one notices her. It is the only way she has stayed alive. In Andrea’s world of platinum wedding bands and workaholic shrink husbands, it doesn’t matter if someone notices her. Andrea is at the top of the food chain, and there is no predator who can take her down. To Lola, she is an exotic species, a professional woman who walks into a room wanting others to know she is there. Andrea does not have to stay in the shadows.
Lola feels the urge to lay her head on the woman’s shoulder, to wrap her body around her. Stay still, she wants to whisper. Stay still.
The double doors inch open, and Lola spots a broad back in a familiar leather jacket. Sergeant Bubba. When he turns to face the station, Lola sees the tiny blond meth head with him. She has traded her miniskirt and high heels for sweatpants and sneakers, and she looks twenty years younger—if it’s possible for a twentysomething tweaker to look six. With her thread-thin hair, scraped into a messy ponytail, and scrawny skinny legs, lost somewhere deep in cotton fabric, she reminds Lola of a neglected child.
Blondie is not high, Lola
can see that, but she has the wandering, confused eyes of someone taking their very first step on the road to recovery. Someone discovering the world anew, and maybe not liking what they see. Lola used to see the same look on her mother’s face, every few years, every few state-run rehab centers—baffled at how the world off drugs grated and edged and stung. Of course, her mother was on heroin, and Blondie here’s only struggling with meth. Her brain might be Swiss-cheesed, but she won’t suffer the same physical withdrawal that kept Maria Vasquez shivering and sweating for days.
“Bubba.” Andrea stands, her eyes on her phone’s screen.
“Andrea,” Bubba says, steering Blondie toward the bullpen.
“Tyson joining us?”
“He’s sitting this one out.”
Andrea nods to Blondie but speaks as if she’s not there. “Let me guess. She won’t talk with him present.”
“Something like that.”
Lola wonders if Bubba is telling the truth or claiming Blondie doesn’t want Tyson there because Bubba can’t stand the fat fuck.
“Any idea what intel she’s got?” Andrea continues to ignore Blondie, whose eyes dart from doors to vending machine to Sergeant Tom, who tries out a kind smile she doesn’t seem to understand is meant for her.
“She’ll tell you inside.”
“Room Two,” Sergeant Tom says, and Lola thinks she hears a buzzer as Sergeant Tom presses a button somewhere under his counter. Then they’re disappearing, Andrea leading the way, with Bubba behind her, his hand on Blondie’s elbow.
But Blondie looks back one more time—is it the Doritos in the vending machine that have caught her eye, or maybe the stale cheese Danish?
Lola had planned for this moment, because of course Blondie might remember her—to her, Lola is the woman from the drop who ran after her when that nice Latino boy couldn’t pull a gun on her.
“You.” Lola hears the soft cracking voice of a girl who’s forgotten she can speak.
“Huh?” Bubba turns to Blondie, who’s staring at Lola, the flicker of recognition gaining light until it is a surefire flame.
To Lola, the seconds pass like long drops of blood drawn from her veins. Does she want Blondie to turn her in? Does she want to get closer to this case than she had planned?