I had done my best to ignore the trial, since celebrity trials are a waste of taxpayer money. But anyone with ears knew the details: T.D.’s ex-wife, Chantelle, had been highly pedigreed. She hailed from a political family, and she was an entertainment lawyer well liked in the industry. While her two children were at their grandparents’ house, she and her unlucky fiancé, Arturo Salvador, had been hogtied, gagged, and murdered in her garage. Having gained some painful experience with gags and hogties recently, I felt especially sorry for them. It’s no way to die.
Even as murders go, this one was mean-spirited. Personal. The coroner had determined that the murderer killed the fiancé while T.D.’s ex was forced to watch, then she was shot execution-style in the back of the head. (In the end, was the killer unable to look at her face? That was my bet.) The killer’s boot had left partial tread marks on his upper thigh. Injuries to the man’s swollen groin suggested a bit of ill will. The murdered man had once been a probation officer, so T.D.’s defense had argued that the killings might have been retaliation for a job well-done.
But police records proved that T.D. had threatened and harassed his ex-wife in the year since she won half his fortune in their divorce. His blood was found on the scene, and threads from a type of fiber and weave identical with a jacket T.D. had had custom-made not nine months before…and what some considered a telling degree of mental confusion in the forty-eight hours following the crime—I thought the L.A. prosecutor’s office might win a big one at last.
Nope. The justice system just isn’t set up to penetrate a multimillion-dollar defense. Celebrity just makes it worse. The jury’s failure to convict T.D. Jackson felt like a far cry from vindication, considering that half the jurors posed for pictures with T.D. after the trial.
To the Taus, T.D. Jackson was family, plain and simple. Ask any mother sheltering her fugitive child how difficult it is to give up on family. Still, that crowd’s certainty of T.D.’s innocence—or, rather, their utter lack of imagination regarding the possibility of his guilt—made me wonder if they thought they could read the man’s mind. I could understand T.D.’s classmates and relatives fawning without restraint or caution, but what about the people who’d never met him, and only knew him as a face on the screen?
Faces aren’t windows. They’re just masks made of skin.
Extraordinary talent or success implies a level of sanctification that can make wrongdoing seem impossible. Not to me. I’ve collected too many secrets of my own. There was every chance T.D. had killed those two people, despite his football records, hit movies, and boyish smile. I wasn’t going to spit in his face like April would have liked to, but I wouldn’t kiss his ass either.
I have too much respect for the dead.
Two blond twins with bodies like Playmate caricatures—overblown lips, concave bellies, and island-sized breasts—waited for T.D. in folding chairs just beyond the photo booth. They both sat with their legs crossed, their short dresses hiked up high enough to cast shadows between their thighs. They were hookers or porn stars, or maybe both, and they reeked of pheromones. Every sister in fifty feet tightened her grip on her man’s arm.
T.D.’s crew hovered, too. They were former football players, but that night they were on protection detail. Hard, watchful eyes scanned everyone who came close. For an instant, April locked eyes with the biggest of them, who looked like a younger Jim Brown, and her face made him puff out his chest like a dare. Don’t start no shit, sister. I hoped April had as much common sense as I thought.
April’s shoulders rose as she steeled herself to approach the Tau president, which meant walking within ten yards of T.D. Jackson. She kept her eyes on Percy Duvall, never glancing at T.D. Truth be told, I think T.D. scared her more than his hulking friends. Smart girl.
“Percy? I was wondering…” she began.
“April, thank God,” he interrupted. “Did you hear? We need you in South Africa…”
Suddenly, a hand was on my shoulder. A woman’s feather light touch. “I don’t believe this! Tennyson Hardwick. Speak of the devil!”
I was trying to eavesdrop on April’s conversation, and suddenly April wanted to listen to mine. April’s eyes dashed away from Percy in time to see a woman rise to her tiptoes and kiss me lightly on the lips. I saw the delicate tip of an ear, long braids, a slender frame, and ochre-colored skin before the woman pulled back far enough for me to take in her face.
“Melanie Wilde,” I said, recognizing her. Another classmate from SoCal State. I hadn’t realized I had been in school long enough to make so many friends. Melanie’s name hadn’t crossed my mind in nearly twenty years, but her face was impossible to forget. She had a high forehead, button nose, and pronounced cheekbones, like a Senegalese princess. Exotic and beautiful. “Long time.”
I was careful about my distance, opening a chasm between us. Melanie was T.D. Jackson’s older cousin. We had met because she came in and out of the dorm, often carrying loads of T.D.’s laundry. I had asked her about the laundry once, and she only laughed. Success is a family project, she had said, her cousin’s future dancing in her bright eyes. The Church of T.D. Jackson had opened its doors long before he won the Heisman or played in the NFL.
“Oh no, you don’t understand,” she said intensely, grabbing my hand. “This is uncanny. God is at work here, Tennyson. I was just speaking your name. Hey, Bumpy!”
She waved toward T.D. Jackson, and the sound of her voice made his head snap up. His offensive line stepped aside to make a path for her as she pulled me toward him by the hand. April’s eyes burned a hole in the back of my head.
“Look who it is!” Melanie said when T.D. turned to face me. “This is the one. Tennyson Hardwick, remember?”
T.D.’s crew closed a circle around us, shielding T.D. from the waiting crowd. Anyone who was pissed about the interruption kept it to themselves.
When he saw me, T.D. Jackson’s face lighted with a grin that no one could refuse to return. “How you been, man?” He leaned in for an embrace, patting my back. For an instant, my head swam. Maybe T.D. and I had been tight all along, like brothers, and I’d forgotten somehow.
“Who’s this?” one of his friends said in a skeptical basso. He was square-jawed, with a deep cleft in his chin.
“Hardwick,” Melanie said. “The bodyguard.”
There were murmurs of recognition, and another pat on the back from T.D. The circle closed in more tightly. They checked me out, jock to jock. They’d seen movies, and knew a glance can’t tell you anything about a man’s skill with a gun, or behind the wheel of a car: two critical skills in the close-protection industry. And hand to hand? You just don’t know. I work out with a skinny little guy who’ll be sixty-five next birthday, one of the best real-world bodyguards there is. He won’t play dojo games: You’ll just wake up hurting, if you’re lucky.
So about the only thing about me they could evaluate was my fitness. Not even that: They weren’t going to ask me to run a hundred, bench my max, or hit the sled for them. And they weren’t going to ask me what my ring record was, or number of red stripes on the black belt. They would take the instant, male-male snapshot appreciation, an automatic question most guys don’t talk about much: Can I kick his ass?
Of course, there’s a balancing question: Can he kick my ass?
You could divide men into categories based upon the instinctive choice of one of these questions. Whole families of life decisions and actions separate the worlds of the men who think of themselves as Thumpers and Thumpees. Neither is a better or worse human being. But trust me: They’re two different guys.
T.D., these men, and I were all Thumpers. We all knew we’d bruise each other up. One level of reflexive male challenge done, and bonding begun. I wasn’t afraid of them. I wasn’t a monster, but my solid muscle was balanced, loose, bouncy. Watchful. They couldn’t know how well trained it was, but they had to wonder why I wasn’t intimidated. But if I was a leopard, they were lions. They figured they could kill me, even if they’d get scratched up doing it.
All right, you’re okay buddy, you can watch my flank, and I’ll watch yours. We had sized each other up almost instantly, and the mutual answer was “yes.”
I enjoyed being welcomed into the heart of that invincible tribe. I admit it. The rest of the banquet hall vanished.
All his career, the media had criticized T.D. for his arrogance and cockiness. But I watched the grin fade from his face, revealing what he kept from hidden from everyone except his closest friends and family: He was tired and scared. The smooth skin he’d had in college looked weathered, and his eyes were slightly red, even crazed. No telltale white residue on his nostrils, but his eyes looked like fried marbles.
Six men were talking to me at once.
“Since the verdict, it’s crazy, man…”
“…people done lost their damn minds…”
“…can’t even open his mail…”
Melanie raised her hand, and the men fell silent. She was the smallest of any of us, but Melanie Wilde was in charge. She surreptitiously showed me a grainy five-by-seven color photograph, and I nearly recoiled. That photo had run in the Enquirer after a police source leaked it to the tabloids: Chantelle Jackson bound to a chair, her lifeless head dangling to one side, taken inside the garage where she’d been killed. I was grateful the photo had been taken from behind, her face hidden from view. I’d already seen one dead woman too many.
“Where’d this come from?” I said.
Melanie leaned close to me. “Some coward slipped it on the table and walked away.”
“Wish I’d seen the motherfucker,” Basso growled, scanning the crowd. I scanned too: Nothing but well-dressed Taus patiently awaiting their turn to touch greatness. All smiles.
“T.D.’s getting threats,” Melanie said, voice low. “Not just this. Ignorant people unfamiliar with our system of jurisprudence don’t understand the words Not Guilty. Anyway, Dorothea Biggs teaches Sunday school with me at my church, and she talks about you all the time. Her son told her he’s never seen a…what? Close-Protection Specialist? Quite like you. You pulled him out of a fire, during the Afrodite thing?”
She said it like she was trying to jog my memory. As if I could forget.
Serena “Afrodite” Johnson’s death still infuriated me—I had nearly gone to jail myself after she’d been murdered, since I had spent a precious afternoon with her the day she died. Serena and I hadn’t seen each other in five years until that day, and it had been like meeting for the first time. We might have started all over again, both of us born anew.
“He was a bodyguard for who?” said Skeptical Basso, looking me up and down. He had fifty pounds on me. I’m not small, but it was like an oak talking to a pine.
“Devon Biggs,” Melanie told him. “And Afrodite.”
“Well, shit, that didn’t work out too good.”
My eyes flashed fire. Knowing that I might have found a way to save Serena’s life still sometimes made it hard to go to sleep at night. Linebacker or not, I wasn’t going to tolerate taunting about Serena.
T.D. Jackson laughed, but without mirth. His glassy eyes shimmered. “You got heart, man. Don’t let Carlyle fuck with you,” T.D. told me, and shook my hand; almost holding it, really. “Melanie says you’re the real thing, and my big cousin never steers me wrong. I need somebody I can trust, from way back in the day. The shit’s gonna start all over with the civil trial. My boys got their own lives, you know? They can’t keep babysitting my ass. That true about Devon Biggs and the fire? Six dudes shooting at you?”
“Three,” I said. The memory of the trap set for me and Devon in retaliation for Serena’s murder forced itself to the surface. I had shot and almost killed a man that day. I could still taste the soot and smell the gasoline. “The fire’s true.”
T.D. Jackson’s face went slack with gratitude, the way he might have looked at a doctor who promised to cure a fatal illness. “Yeah, man. That’s what I need, Tennyson. No bullshit.”
In that instant, T.D. Jackson felt like an old friend I could invite home to crack open a six-pack and watch a ballgame. That’s the ugly truth of it: People aren’t all bad or all good. You can dig down to find the saint, or the monster, in anyone.
A business card slipped into my hand. I glanced down: Melanie Wilde, Attorney at Law. She worked at a downtown firm housed in a glass tower on Sunset.
“Let me know how to reach you,” Melanie said. “We’ll take you to lunch and talk details. We’re not playing, so name your price.”
A piercing gaze somehow has physical weight. April’s eyes were bludgeoning the back of my head. Instinct made me want to call her over, and say, “Hey, guys, this is my girlfriend, April Forrest.” But April didn’t want an introduction. She wanted to know why the hell I was talking congenially with T.D. Jackson and a woman who looked like an East African postcard. I wondered, too.
I’d almost forgotten that I had a steady job, and that investigating Serena’s murder had soured me on the bodyguard business. I’d almost forgotten my respect for the dead.
I made a show of trying to give Melanie’s card back to her. She refused it.
“Wish I could help,” I said, first to her, and then to T.D. “But I’m pushing the acting thing now. Might have seen me on the previews for next week’s Homeland?”
T.D. blinked. No reaction at all.
“The Afrodite business was a onetime thing,” I said. “Sorry.”
“What?” T.D. said, genuinely puzzled. T.D. Jackson wasn’t used to being refused. “You think I can’t pay, man? I can pay.”
“It’s not that. I’ve got a gig, T.D. Sorry.”
His eyes never wavered, but somewhere deep inside T.D. Jackson there was a seismic shift. For an instant I glimpsed a morsel of the rage his dead ex-wife might have known, whether or not he killed her. T.D. Jackson didn’t have a Warm setting: He went from Cold to Hot. His eyes, which looked vaguely golden in that instant, were sharp as knives.
Melanie Wilde saw it, too. She moved toward T.D., standing between us, although her eyes never left mine. “Please keep my card,” she said. “We could really use you, Ten. You can imagine what the stress is like. First the loss…then the trial…” Melanie had been making excuses for her baby cousin her whole life, and she was good at it.
Mostly for her sake, I opened my wallet and nestled her card inside—although I didn’t offer her mine. Then I tipped an imaginary hat. If I didn’t tend to April soon, I was the one who was going to need a ride home.
I met T.D. Jackson’s eyes for the last time. They still glinted, sharp. “T.D.? Good luck with the security, man. If I think of anyone else, I’ll let you know.”
T.D. only shook his head with a scoffing, dismissive laugh. His eyes left mine, and I became invisible. He had exposed his heart to me, and beneath his armor he was sulking like a ten-year-old boy. “Triflin’ motherfucker,” he muttered, walking away. Melanie winced.
Just that quickly, I was out of the club.
I didn’t know it at the time, but my tally rose that night. Serena wasn’t alone anymore.
Now there were two lives I might have saved.
FIVE
I WAS SHOCKED when April announced she would spend the night with me after the fundraiser. I made a mental note to attend more meetings with her. Apparently, I’d explained my brush with T.D. Jackson well enough in the car to keep her in a good mood.
We got home late, so Dad was already asleep, and Chela was wrapped in the wall of loud music behind her closed door. I’d eaten dinner with Chela and Dad, so a knock at Chela’s door and a “whassup” were all she needed for the night. I confirmed that she was where she was supposed to be. Chela, like me, was self-sufficient and couldn’t stand crowding. Maybe that was why we worked so well.
I didn’t tell Chela that April was with me, and Chela didn’t ask.
I regretted that I had sacrificed my old room, the master bedroom, to give to Chela. The former guest room that had become my bedroom always looked overcrowded because I’d tried to stuff my kett
le-bells, heavy bag, and folding mats in, and there was hardly room for a queen-size bed. Chela’s room, on the other hand, was the size of a generous studio apartment. If the room hadn’t been upstairs, I would have offered it to Dad. But I figured that after living on the streets, with only a dead grandmother and a soulless madam as her caretakers, Chela needed a space of her own. I was probably spoiling her, but everything is relative.
I could tell that April felt cramped in my room, but she didn’t complain. I turned off the light and pulled her close for the kiss I’d been craving far too long.
“Let’s take a shower,” I said. I wanted to wash myself, and I wanted April with me.
No small feat. The bathroom was across the hall. I pulled her hand into mine, unbuttoning my shirt with my other. But April’s feet dragged behind me before we reached the doorway. “Ten, I want you to tell me what happened today. We spend all this time preparing for a meeting, and then you won’t tell me anything? I didn’t expect her to offer you the part on the spot, but still…”
“She never wanted to offer me a part,” I said slowly. “She offered me a piece.”
At first, April looked confused. Then she smiled, thinking it was a joke. But when she didn’t see a return smile, hers evaporated. Her dark eyes flashed. “What?”
The shower would have to wait. Maybe for a long time.
I sat April on the bed and started from the beginning, garment by garment. It could have been worse: At least April already knew about my sex-for-pay past. She’d learned my history from a police lieutenant, a former student of her father’s who had tried to keep her away from me. I told April about everything in the hotel suite, except for my arousal. Erections are involuntary, but I knew better. The story was tough enough for April. I saw that in her face.
“You went to a hotel room with her?” she said. Hurt cracked her voice in a way I had never heard from her. It felt like breaking a rare crystal artwork. “And let her put her hands on you? Why the hell would you do that, Ten? You thought that was business as usual?”
In the Night of the Heat Page 5
