In the Night of the Heat

by Blair Underwood

  Over time, Dad’s room had become less a glorified medicine cabinet–slash–rehab room and more a living space. My downstairs guest room had a bathroom and a fair amount of square footage, so we’d brought in the old antique oak rolltop desk he’d put in storage after he got sick, the one where he’d spent most of his late nights studying case files and crime-scene photos when he was a detective, then payroll records and memos after he got promoted. That desk was like his office, and we both liked having it around.

  Marcela had also launched a project to preserve his awards and certificates, so in its own way, Dad’s room didn’t look so different than Judge Jackson’s study—except without any sign of his son. I noticed Judge Jackson’s name on an appreciation certificate to Dad from the Beverly Hills–Hollywood NAACP. Small world, and getting smaller.

  The only photos of individuals were snapshots of my parents together, my mother alone, and one of all three of us, when I was six weeks old. Apparently, that was when Dad had stopped taking pictures. The delicate-boned woman who gave birth to me looked like she had a dancer’s frame, with a bulb nose and skin that matched mine perfectly. She was sitting at the bench of the old black piano that had sat in our home until Dad got sick and we finally sold it. I wish I’d kept the piano, but I never really learned to play it. Here’s what I can tell about my mother from her photos: She liked to laugh, she knew she was pretty, and she thought my father walked on air. Her photo with her baby is the only one where she isn’t smiling, just tired. No more laughter. In nine months, she would be dead.

  I try not to take it personally.

  I almost overlooked a new photograph on Dad’s desk in a small ceramic frame: Marcela standing in the kitchen chopping celery, her face glowing.

  “Don’t…you…ever…dis-re-spect…Marcela…again,” my father said. I couldn’t pretend I didn’t know what he was talking about. Dad was overreacting, but I’d been rude to Marcela when she told me about Melanie’s call. I knew better.

  “She’s…’fraid…you…lost…your…mind.”

  “I’ll call her and apologize.” I would have reminded him that my life was in a free fall, but pity wasn’t his strong suit. “Tonight. Before it gets late.”

  “What about…Chela?” Dad said. He folded his hands, ready to hear.

  My allegiances felt torn, but not for long. I needed allies. “There’s a guy on the internet she was in touch with a few months ago, and he showed up again. I squashed it.”

  Dad grunted. I had never told him outright that Chela had been a prostitute, but he knew she was a runaway, and he knew their world. Dad had dedicated the last ten years of his career to Hollywood’s teenagers.

  “She…staying?” Dad said.

  “We’ll see by morning. I’m not gonna chain her down.”

  Silence. I always felt itchy in Dad’s room, but there was nowhere to divert my gaze, except to photographs of the dead woman who haunted both of us. I thought about Chela’s anger toward her mother and let myself feel how much I was pissed at mine, too. You can’t get sick and die when you have a kid. You find a way to fight.

  “Her gramma was dead…five days…’fore any help came,” Dad said.

  “She just told me.” I couldn’t be jealous Chela told Dad first; I was just glad she’d had someone else to talk to. Sometimes I worked fourteen-hour days on the set. Used to, anyway.

  “Helluva life…”

  “Yeah.” I sighed, still itching to go. “But she listens to me. I’ve got some insights.”

  “Howso?” Dad shifted in his chair, leaning on his elbow, settling in to talk.

  I am not about to have this conversation, I told myself.

  “There was a teacher who used to invite me over after school. First it was swimming, then it was more. For a while I was hanging out there almost every day.”

  I watched Dad’s face, but it didn’t change. Either his stroke had wiped nuance from his expression, or my words had had no impact at all. I didn’t know what I’d expected him to say, but his silence was pissing me off.

  “How…old?” Dad said finally.

  “Thirteen.”

  Dad’s head snapped back. He sucked in his breath. He didn’t ask me which teacher. He didn’t say he wished he had known, or what he would have done if he had. He held the information in his head for a while. “Too…young,” he said.

  I shrugged. I still felt ready to bolt his room, but not as much.

  “I went to Judge Jackson’s house today,” I said.

  “Whafforr?”

  I told him about almost everything except the murder book. I trust my father well enough, but a promise means something to me. Although I didn’t mention Judge Jackson’s suspicion of an LAPD cover-up, Dad nodded as if he knew the whole story. Nothing could surprise him. Same old, same old. I could almost hear his thoughts.

  “You…taking…the case?” he said.

  I’d brought the money home, but if Dad helped me change my mind, I could always return it. “Thinking about it.”

  “Don’t…break the law.”

  I nodded, but I didn’t make a verbal promise. And Dad didn’t call me on it. “Anyway, there’s probably no chance in hell of figuring this one out,” I said.

  “Not just one,” Dad said. “Two.”

  “Two what?”

  “Not just T.D. The…wife. Good chance…they’re…related.”

  I hadn’t thought about it that way, but he was right. I would have a much better chance of solving T.D. Jackson’s murder if I could learn the truth about the death of his ex-wife. I needed to drive back to Judge Jackson’s first thing in the morning and give him his money back. I must have been out of my mind to take it, I thought. Who in the hell could sort through this mess?

  “If anybody could…” Dad said. “…you could.”

  If anybody could, you could? Was he reading my damned mind? I was sure my ears were messing with me. My father never gave me compliments. Never.

  Once, after I’d only been escorting Alice about a month, on our first trip to Morocco, she said “I love you” while she stroked my stomach in our bed. Or, that’s what I heard. Or thought I did. I didn’t know what to say, and she never said it again.

  Just like with Alice, the night Dad said the nicest thing about me I could remember, I was too startled to say a word.

  TEN

  IT WAS EARLY WHEN I GOT TO MY ROOM, not even ten o’clock, but I was ready for sleep. Unfortunately, sleep wasn’t ready for me.

  LAPD’s murder book sat in my nightstand drawer, waiting. Between the racket in my head and the mystery of what lay within the police accounts of the death of Thomas Dorsey Jackson, I couldn’t keep my eyes closed. I wished I’d taken Reggie’s advice and bought a humidifier to mask the ringing in my ears, but I didn’t feel like going back out that night.

  Instead, I turned on my brass banker’s lamp.

  I’d seen murder books from Dad’s days on the force, so I knew they were usually bound. This one wasn’t. I pulled out a loose stack of about one hundred pages from the manila envelope Judge Jackson had given me. I’d had manners enough not to peek while I was in the car with Melanie. She hadn’t asked to see it, so I hadn’t offered, sliding it under my seat.

  With only quick glances, I fanned through the pages of crime-scene photos, documents, reports, and handwritten notes from detectives’ slim notebook pages. Flipping through, I noticed that some page numbers on the documents were missing; apparently, some of the two-sided reports had never been flipped over, or whoever made the copies had skipped pages, accidentally or deliberately. The records had been copied by someone close to the case, because no one else would have had access to it long enough to copy it. Despite the access, they had definitely been in a hurry. More than a few pages were crooked, or marked by dark shadows signifying that the lid of the copier had been opened too early. Impatient.

  Still, it was a treasure trove. And I realized how foolish it would be to try to translate the jargon alone. I would have to let Dad
see the murder book. I would need his help on this one.

  That night, I tried to take from it what I could.

  The very first page was a photocopied picture of T.D. Jackson’s corpse lolling back in a plush office chair facing away from his desk. His face was so dark that his features were shadowed. Just as well, I thought. I found an empty spiral reporter’s notebook April had left behind and started making notes.

  I could see the exit wound just below the right temple, so he’d shot himself with his left hand. He was notoriously ambidextrous on the field, but…his very best catches, in the biggest games, were made with his right hand. Under pressure, he was a Righty. Odd.

  Did suicidal depression qualify as pressure?

  Other photos revealed other details: T.D.’s right hand limp on the armrest. A light metal .38 automatic on the floor to his left, below his dangling arm.

  To me, T.D. looked posed. Had he posed himself, or had someone else done the posing?

  The blood toxicology wasn’t included in the coroner’s report, which would tell me if he’d had any drugs in his bloodstream—those always took forever—but the coroner provided badly needed details. T.D. had been shot squarely in the left temple, the slug causing massive trauma before exiting the right side of his head. It had been found in a bookshelf, wedged in the binder of a leather-bound edition of Think and Grow Rich. I doubt he would have appreciated the irony.

  “You had some balls, brother,” I muttered, just in case it was suicide.

  According to the report, there was GSR—gunshot residue—on T.D.’s left hand, which fueled the suicide speculation. A lazy cop’s wet dream.

  The copies of the autopsy photos were very dark and hard to see, but I’m neither a necrophiliac or a forensic ME, so I’m no expert on corpses—even if I saw every Faces of Death movie. One close-up showed T.D. on his stomach, from the waist down, mostly his buttocks. I puzzled over the significance until I noticed a dark marking on one flank, the left: a symbol. An “H” keloid scar the size of a silver dollar. That must have been what the photo was trying to capture, I realized. I didn’t have a magnifying glass for a better look, but I made a note to ask his family whether they knew anything about a tattoo.

  I scoured the police reports next, and two names jumped out at me: Arnaz and O’Keefe. They were the homicide detectives from Hollywood division who’d knocked on my door to tell me that Serena was dead, all the while scanning my living room for clues in the murder. Since I’d spent a beautiful afternoon with Serena only hours before she died, I was a ready-made suspect. I’d even left my DNA behind in a condom.

  Apparently, their dead-wrong instincts about Serena’s murderer hadn’t kept them from getting promoted to Robbery-Homicide, LAPD’s most prestigious assignment, except for SWAT. They were both apparently in RHD’s Homicide Special Section, which meant high-profile cases and serial killers. I chuckled, shaking my head. Figured. Lieutenant Nelson, who had been in charge of Serena’s case, must have woven a tapestry of bullshit to arrest the real killer without admitting that I’d done LAPD’s job instead, and those two detectives had been rewarded for making him look good. Or for keeping their mouths shut.

  Had Arnaz or O’Keefe photocopied the murder book for Judge Jackson? It didn’t seem likely. But either way, I wasn’t going to give them a call. If Lieutenant Nelson caught a whiff that I was working the Jackson case, he’d find an excuse to lock me up. Period. The brother was my father’s protégé, but during our run-in he hadn’t struck me as the sentimental type.

  Those officers’ names resurrected bad memories, so I moved on to the report’s red meat. The investigators had dotted every i and crossed all of the t’s, at least on paper. The typed sections were impeccable, and even the handwriting was neat. The only thing missing was a shiny red ribbon. The report was as spiffy as if it had been written for posterity.

  Since he died on a Sunday, T.D. Jackson had spent his last day with his children. According to the initial investigation, T.D. had attended a 10 A.M. church service at Faith Central Bible Church at the L.A. Forum on Manchester with his parents and two children. (T.D.’s thirteen-year-old daughter, Maya, and eight-year-old son, Thomas Jr., lived with his ex-wife’s parents. The Hankinses, apparently, did not attend the morning service with them.)

  Afterward, T.D. and his kids—as well as a small entourage including his lawyer and his friend Carlyle, whom I’d met at the fund-raiser—had spent an afternoon at Universal CityWalk, the domain of tourists and divorced dads looking for a way to substitute Fun for Family. At 6 P.M., T.D. had dropped the children back at his parents’ house—the designated neutral ground for the two families—then joined another set of friends for drinks at the Mondrian Hotel. I didn’t recognize the other names, but Carlyle was at the Mondrian, too. Apparently, he and T.D. were attached at the hip. A waitress at the bar reported that T.D. looked intoxicated, and he “might have had” cocaine residue on his nose. She also said T.D. was there with two blond twins who seemed like “hookers.”

  The waitress had been an observant witness. I made a note about the twins: Mother? And put a checkmark beside Mother’s name. If T.D. Jackson had a taste for prostitutes, he would have been in touch with Mother. Mother specialized in a celebrity clientele.

  Despite reports of partying, T.D. Jackson was home early for the night—and, as far as police could determine, he’d been alone. Carlyle had driven T.D. home. The last he’d seen of T.D. was a wave from the front door at 9:45 P.M. (“I always watched him until he was through the door,” Carlyle told investigators. “He was living under siege.”) Carlyle had a roomful of witnesses to corroborate his whereabouts afterward, since he’d been at his girlfriend’s house.

  T.D. disarmed his ADT alarm two minutes later and wouldn’t reactivate it for more than an hour. Plenty of time for an intruder to get inside.

  Phone records showed T.D. made six calls in the next hour. First he checked his home voicemail. Next, he called his father, his probable bookie, his driver, his lawyer, a promoter in Tokyo, a girlfriend in San Francisco, and his lawyer for a second time. With the civil trial coming up, T.D. needed a lot of hand-holding.

  Then, T.D.’s phone fell silent. He armed his alarm at 10:53 P.M. Since there was no video surveillance inside the house, the rest of the night was pure supposition. The bathroom showed signs that he took a shower, and possibly shaved. Odd. Then, by all appearances, he went to bed.

  T.D. was wearing a faded SoCal Spartans T-shirt and 49ers gym shorts when he died, clothes his parents confirmed were his pajamas. One last shout-out to the fans at the end, I thought. All of the football players I know were affected by their experience on the field in a way similar to combat veterans. Maybe it’s because the game of football is so much like war. It’s hard to imagine anyone breaking his spine playing baseball.

  T.D. Jackson had been killed by a single shot to the temple by a Smith & Wesson automatic. Only three bullets remained in the clip; there was room for eight. No one heard the gunshot. It was a big house.

  I knew the rest from the news: His body had been discovered by his housekeeper at 6:00 A.M. She had a key, so she routinely let herself in. She also knew the code to disable the alarm, and she noticed that it was already disarmed when she arrived. That was why she assumed T.D. was home but busy somewhere, since he rarely armed it when he was there, especially during daylight hours.

  The housekeeper, a Dominican woman named Rosaria San Martin, was not considered a suspect or a person of interest. She had been asleep beside her husband at the time T.D. died, and she had worked for T.D. for almost a decade. The housekeeper was also so distraught by his death that the video of her wailing was playing in a loop on the cable news shows. I was sure I’d seen Dad watching her being interviewed on Larry King Live, and she’d been crying then, too.

  I stayed up two hours reading the murder book. By the time I finished, I wondered if Judge Jackson had wasted his money looking for a killer. The image of T.D. Jackson shooting himself in the head was appealin
g, and there was certainly no evidence of anything else. As unlikely as suicide was, it was possible. T.D. might have been hated by Chantelle’s family, and her fiancé’s family—and the murder book included a long list of people who had made threats against him, from outright kooks to a woman in the prosecutor’s office who had a nervous breakdown—but the evidence in the reports cleanly added up to suicide. Maybe too cleanly.

  Every actor has his own technique for getting into a role. I have my own way, cobbled together from every acting class and seminar I’ve ever attended, along with my own mental quirks. I visualize the scene. See it as an audience would, then switch to see it from the position of each actor, in turn.

  It’s what I call my “Stage.”

  I walk from the wings onto the Stage, as I have a thousand times before. Blank. Intimidating. I dressed it: a desk, wall plaques, a plush chair. A minimalist office. I watched T.D. Jackson walk to the chair, and sit. Take a gun from a desk drawer…

  I am the director now: “Wardrobe? Does he have to be wearing pajamas…?”

  So, what…? He dressed for bed, then decided to kill himself? He was in bed, and had a guilty dream and decided to blow it out of his head?

  How about this: He is in bed, and the front doorbell rings. He disarms the alarm, because he knows the person on the other side of the spyhole.

  The lights went down. The stage disappeared. I was back in my room again. It could all be suicide. But if it was murder…he knew his killer.

  My stomach cramped, and I knew why. All night, without realizing it, I’d been running a conversation with April in my head: Can you believe these guys got promoted to Robbery-Homicide? Can you imagine what Nelson would say if he knew I had this book? What does your gut tell you about what happened to T.D.? I had a hundred questions for her. A hundred things to say. April was another part of my mind—another part of me—and she was gone. The silence in my head was the only thing worse than the ringing.

  She hadn’t called me. That wasn’t an accident, and it made my stomach hurt.