“We would like to speak with James Conklin,” I said. “There is no James Conklin here,” he said. He looked me over with uncomfortable yet not hostile, intensity. “But if James Shabazz will do…”
“I am Maggie MacGowen, Mr. Shabazz. This is my colleague Guido Patrini.”
“I know who you are, Miss MacGowen. I am an admirer of your work. On several occasions I have shown your films at F.O.I. evenings at the temple.”
“What is F.O.I.?” I asked.
“Fruits of Islam. Lessons on family living. I have shown Latchkey several times. Aged and Alone as well. We who are in the middle must take the responsibility of caring for the little brothers and sisters as well as our elders.”
The old lady shopper said, “Amen, brother James,” and moved on to the fresh broccoli.
“You have rare insight, Miss MacGowen,” he said. His stare made me uncomfortable. “And compassion as well.”
“Thank you,” I said. I knew I was blushing and would not look at Guido, but I gave his arm a pinch.
“What brings you here?” Shabazz asked. “Are you working on a film?”
“Yes, I am,” I said. “We want to talk to you about your grandson, Tyrone Harkness.”
“My grandson?” He was taken aback.
“Tyrone told me you are his ‘daddy’s daddy.’ That’s why I assumed your name was Conklin. Is Charles Conklin your son?”
“I suppose in the sense that all of Allah’s children are the sons and daughters of all mankind, then the young brother is my son. But I have no children of my own. Would you like to come inside and have a cup of coffee?”
I looked at Guido.
“Maybe something cold,” Guido said, meaning another beer. We followed James Shabazz inside. The market was immaculate and attractive, a cross between a health food store and a 7-Eleven. There was no alcohol of any kind, nor anything like a hot dog in the deli case. Three teenage boys in big white aprons were attentively helping customers, keeping things in order, and working the register. A sign over the check-out counter said, “Allah provides.”
Shabazz filled three paper cups with unfiltered apple juice. As he handed one to me, he said, “How is Tyrone?”
“Considering where he is, I suppose he’s all right,” I said. “He spoke of you with real affection. He told me you’re going to take him away from the city when he gets out.”
He smiled. “I was talking about helping him enter the Kingdom of Allah, but Tyrone seemed to think I meant summer camp.”
“What is your relationship to Tyrone and his father?”
“Let me show you,” he said, and led us out through the back of the store to a patch of asphalt off an alley. Bright, crude murals covered all of the facing walls. Paint-spattered tables and easels were folded up against a small shed at the side.
“I have this little parking lot here,” Shabazz said. “After school there isn’t much for the youngsters to do. Idle hands and minds go looking for trouble. Every child needs structure to his life, something productive to do with his time. Years ago, we started offering afternoon programs to any young ones who wanted to drop in. Crafts, music, dance. Educate them to their heritage, give them structure.
“Growing children are always hungry,” he said, smiling like the fond uncle. “To keep their strength up, we serve them snacks, too. Feed the body along with the spirit.
“We saw that some kids only came for the food. Charles Conklin was one of those—could not entice him away from the table. He got breakfast and lunch at school—and that’s all that kept him in school. What he ate here was all he would have for supper. When I learned that sometimes he did not have a safe place to sleep at night, I offered him sanctuary, as I later offered sanctuary to his son.”
“You saw something redeemable in Charles?” I asked.
“Charles?” Shabazz considered the question for a moment before he answered. “The little brother never had a chance, Miss MacGowen. The streets reached up and sucked him in, consumed him whole when he was still a baby because there was no one to hold him away. No one. Your question, did I see something worth redeeming in him? All of Allah’s children can find redemption. But a boy who would put a bullet in the back of a man’s head to steal his car for an hour’s ride, who would take his own girl child into his carnal bed, a boy like that was beyond my power to help.”
Guido looked nauseous.
“Mr. Shabazz, did Charles Conklin ever talk to you about the shooting of Officer Wyatt Johnson?” I asked.
“No. The others did. But never Charles.”
“What others?” I asked.
“The little girl who found the body came to me. She told me Charles shot a man. I was the first to call the police.”
“She told you?” I leaned closer, needing to pull something more from him. “And you believed her?”
“Ten-year-old children lie about stealing candy, or did they brush their teeth. They don’t lie about murder, Miss MacGowen. I walked her back to the place where it happened and she showed me.”
Guido chimed in, “What was a ten-year-old kid doing out alone after midnight in the first place?”
“I told you.” Shabazz pointed an accusing finger at Guido. “No structure. The child’s mother worked in the cafe across the street from the filling station where the shooting occurred. Couldn’t afford a sitter and she didn’t want the girl to stay home alone, so the child would walk over after school and sort of hang until quitting time—midnight, one o’clock. The mother did her best to keep an eye on her. She was a good child. Went to church, got through school. Works for the county libraries now.”
“LaShonda DeBevis?”
His face lit into a broad smile. “Do you know LaShonda?”
“I want to talk to her, but I can’t find her. Can you help me?”
“I will ask around.”
“Do you know Hanna Rhodes?”
His smile was suddenly a deep frown. “I never knew much about Hanna. She was a street child, like Charles. Had no safe place to go home to. Have you talked to her? What’s become of her?”
“I’m sorry to be the one to tell you, but Hanna is dead.”
“Dead, you say?” Asked the way a man visiting home after years away inquires about the old neighbors. Reverent pause in recognition of the fact, not necessarily grief or sadness. “How did it happen? Drugs or a man?”
“Maybe a combination of the two. She was shot night before last.”
“Night before last?” Shabazz looked around the spattered lot as if there were some answers inscribed in that chaotic mix of colors and shapes. “So recently? I haven’t seen her around, walking on the streets, for a long time. I assumed she had passed a long time ago.”
“I’m sorry,” I said again, because there was nothing else to say.
He shook himself. “It was inevitable. She was walking the streets selling herself for drugs when she was twelve, thirteen years old. Dead depends on your definition.”
“Were the two girls friends?”
“No. LaShonda’s mother wouldn’t have allowed that. What brought the girls together that night was the weather. It was cold. They had a little fire going out behind the filling station. That’s where they were when the officer was shot.”
“Why didn’t La Shonda go across the street to her mother instead of running five whole blocks to get you?” I asked.
“She was afraid of Charles. All the children were. She knew Charles wouldn’t hurt me.”
I took Guido’s arm. “Do we have batteries?”
“What if I say yes?” Guido asked.
“I want to shoot some background footage at the murder scene.” I turned to Mr. Shabazz, smiled at him. “Want to be in pictures, Mr. Shabazz?”
He smiled his assent. It was his turn to blush—I saw red rise up in his oak-colored face. “What do you propose?”
“Walk us through the scene as you remember it.”
He laughed a nervous laugh. “Do you pay scale?”
“I’
ll give you a copy of the finished tape for F.O.I.,” I said.
“Fair enough.”
I turned to Guido. “How much time do we have on the batteries?”
“Easily an hour. If I’d had some warning…”
“Then let’s do it,” I said.
“My pleasure,” Shabazz said. He charged one of his teenagers to watch over the store and, after checking his reflection in the glass door of a soft drink cooler and adjusting his cap, he came out into the glare of midday with us.
Guido had sweated off his breakfast beer by then, so he drove, with Mr. Shabazz in front with him. I sat in back with a camera out the window, taping the route Shabazz had taken that night with LaShonda.
With the viewfinder in front of my eye, I asked, “Did you grow up in the area, Mr. Shabazz?”
“This is Watts,” he said, again as if I should have known better. “There were no Africans in Watts when I was a child. Things changed after the world war. I came here after Korea—the navy discharged me in Long Beach.”
When we got back up to Century, Shabazz pointed to an abandoned lot on the corner of Clovis Avenue.
“That’s the place. The filling station went out about the time Mr. Reagan came into office. There was a body shop in here for a while, but it didn’t last more than a year or two. The corner is notorious.”
Nothing was left of the old station except a few thousand square yards of cracked asphalt and the gutted stucco shell of the office and service bay. A chain-link fence that had been erected around the property had been pushed into rusted, pleated heaps. Campaign posters plastered to anything upright, competing for attention with the ever-present graffiti.
There was enough of the old station building left to offer some shelter. It had obviously seen regular use: the dim interior was cluttered with liquor and beer empties, discarded mattresses, little piles of toilet paper and dried feces. Every surface, even the broken asphalt, was covered with elaborate, overlapping gang tags that defined overlapping gang territories: Eight-Tray Gangster Crips, Rollin’ 90s, Grape Street, Kitchen Crips, Black Bishops, Be-Bop Bloods, Black P Stone.
I had the newspaper account of the shooting of Wyatt Johnson in my mind as I looked around. On the corner of the lot there were two concrete pads, the remains of the public telephones where Johnson would have placed his last call. The distance from the telephones to the restroom where he died was maybe thirty feet. A short last mile.
I knew the scene would look good on tape. Heat reflected off the faded pavement in shimmering waves that, with the heavy smog that was now in place overhead, would give everything a silvered, chiaroscuro effect. Colors would have a thin, hard quality. Very urban.
Guido had been casing the scene, too.
“What do you think?” I asked.
“Depends on the tone you’re aiming for,” Guido said. “This background is fine if what you want is war zone. But I think it’s distracting. Too ominous, you know? The night of the murder there was a functioning business here. This is something else. I say walk it through to get perspective, but keep the background in soft focus.”
“Let’s try it,” I said.
We stood a few yards from where the office had been. I positioned Shabazz so his side was to the building, his back to traffic moving down Century Boulevard. Guido checked it through his lens, repositioned us both a few degrees. Then he hefted the camera to his shoulder and said, “Century and Clovis, Shabazz and MacGowen. Go ahead, Maggie.”
“Mr. Shabazz,” I said, “the shooting death of Officer Wyatt Johnson fifteen years ago went largely unnoticed by the press and by the public. Yet the ramifications of that shooting have been large, affecting lives for several generations. What can you tell us about the events of that November night?”
“It was after midnight,” Shabazz said, seeming very comfortable with the camera aimed at his face. He had a natural sense for drama. His cultured speech took on more ghetto flavor as he got into his narrative. “A little sister came to my house and woke me up out of bed—I have an apartment over my store. She said some brother was shot up at the filling station. She said Pinkie did it. I knew Pinkie to be Charles Pinkerton Conklin, a boy who sometimes stayed at my house before he was sent to prison. She said, ‘Don’t let Pinkie get me.’ “
“She was afraid of him?”
He nodded. “She had reason to be. I suppose on the streets now he would be labeled scandalous. Fifteen years ago we called him a delinquent. Always in trouble.”
“What did you do?” I asked.
“I told the child to show me.”
“Will you show us?”
“Around here,” he said. He narrated as we walked. “It’s trashy here now, and it was trashy then, too. Henry Woodsonhe owned the station—kept some old wrecks in back he cannibalized for spare parts. A couple of Cadillacs, I recall, and a Bonneville.” He pointed out where these had been, dark oily patches on the ground. “Drunks used to climb into the cars to sleep. The girls should have known better than to be messing around out there, but they got a little fire going in an empty oil barrel and they were trying to keep warm.”
Shabazz stopped and looked around for bearings. Then he held out his hands in front of him, defining a big circle, maybe the oil barrel. “The girls were just about here when they heard the shots. Even fifteen years ago shots weren’t unusual. But the children were scared, so they started to run toward the cafe across the street where LaShonda’s mother worked. They ran smack into Charles as he backed out of the men’s facilities. They saw a gun in his hand. And they saw Officer Johnson lying on the floor inside.”
By then we had walked all the way around to the Clovis Avenue side where the restrooms had been. The doors and plumbing were long gone, most of the interior walls were gone, too. Standing opposite the restroom door, I could see daylight through the far wall of the old service bay.
Shabazz pointed toward the floor. “This is where the officer was lying when I saw him, face down with his head between the bowl and the sink. There were six bullets in his back and his head, I hear, but all I could see was blood.”
We had to step aside so that Guido could play around with what I was sure was an arty interior pan. He didn’t need us for that, so I moved away where the human smell was not so intense. Mr. Shabazz came with me.
I asked him, “Mr. Shabazz, even if he was an armed, streetwise cop, would a nice boy like Wyatt Johnson use a public restroom in a neighborhood like this after midnight?”
He blushed a little again. “Maybe not for the purpose it was intended. No one has ever answered why he was here. He was not robbed, you know.”
“Maybe the girls interrupted Conklin before he could finish some kind of business with Johnson,” I said.
He shook his head. “They met him on his way out.”
Guido joined us. “I don’t know how much time we have left, Maggie. Better give me your parting shot now.”
I looked around, chose open space for a backdrop. With James Shabazz next to me and Guido’s lens two yards in front of me, I said, “Mr. Shabazz, when Tyrone Harkness was still in diapers, his father was sent to prison for the rest of his life. If he had not been convicted of that crime, how do you think young Tyrone’s life might have been different?”
Shabazz shook his head. “No different. If Charles had not been sent up for that murder, he would have served time for something else. The most positive influence he could have on his son’s life was his absence from it.”
I paused for fade-out. Then I said, “Miss anything?”
“Let me think,” Guido said, flexing his arm, stiff from supporting the shoulder-held camera. “We have Mr. Shabazz I.D.‘ing Conklin as the shooter. No, I guess that’s everything.”
“Real funny, Guido,” I said. His words gave me a hot spot in the pit of my stomach that had nothing to do with Barragan’s salsa.
Shabazz said, “A private joke?”
“He’s needling me,” I said.
“Go ahead, Maggie. Ask h
im if he knows Mike Flint.”
“Officer Flint?” Shabazz said. “Of course I know him.”
Guido raised his camera again. “Tell us about him.”
“I have been watching the news,” Shabazz said, hesitant, as if feeling his way through a mine field. “I heard the names of Charles Conklin and Officer Flint linked.”
“I don’t have much juice left, Mr. Shabazz,” Guido said. “So, cut to the chase. Did Officer Flint coerce, threaten, bribe, intimidate LaShonda DeBevis and Hanna Rhodes to make them identify Charles Conklin as the man who shot Officer Johnson?”
Shabazz stroked his chin and posed for Guido, giving him a three-quarter profile. “I can’t answer that. Even if he did nothing overt, certainly Officer Flint’s size, his color, the authority of his position intimidated the children. I was not present during the questioning, I do not know whether he told the girls what to say. This I know, the truth they told was dangerous to them, and they would not have told it unless they were equally afraid to hold back. Does that answer your question?”
“No,” Guido said. “She wants to know if you like Officer Flint. Do you think he is redeemable?”
Shabazz smiled. “Do you like him, Miss MacGowen?”
“Yes I do. Very much.”
“Then, let me say this. Officer Flint operates under his own code. Now and then his code is in direct opposition to the laws he and his fellow officers have sworn to uphold. From my experience, Officer Flint did not always bother with the niceties and delays of due process.”
“You’re begging the question,” Guido said. “Yes or no. Do you like the guy?”
“Put that way,” Shabazz said, “the answer is no. I detest him.”
Chapter 15
“‘A truth that’s told with bad intent, Beats all the lies you can invent,” I said.
“Deep.” Guido yawned. “Very deep. Where’d you get it?”
“William Blake.”
“Deep and mystical. The question is, who’s telling the truth?”
“All of them. None of them,” I said. “The big question is, what is the intent?”
“Heavy.” Guido was hot, so I had bought him a couple of beers for the road. He finished one and opened the other, but he was already too sleepy to hold it upright. Wasn’t necessarily the beer. Guido sleeps like a cat, short naps whenever he can get them. The last thing he said to me was, “Fix the air conditioner, will ya?”
Bad Intent Page 13
