Shaker

by Scott Frank

  Nothing would ever stop Albert Budin. Driving through L.A., looking at all of the damage from the quake, he knew that he, like the city itself, would keep going and, in the end, out-survive them all, including Roy.

  At this moment, though, Albert had to wonder about the well-being of Kelly Maguire, now two cars ahead of him on the 405. He’d been following her for only ten minutes and he had already witnessed her scream at two other drivers, badge a third, and was pretty sure she had just waved her gun at a gentleman in a black Aston Martin who had been dumb enough to glue himself to her rear bumper. The lady was a tiger, one that a curious Albert wanted to ride. It was going to be harder than he thought, he decided, to leave her here when he was all through.

  He was definitely having trouble figuring out what she was up to. She had driven from the North Hollywood station to an area in the shadow of downtown. She parked at a high school just as it was letting out, the lot full of mostly colored kids, and went inside. Twenty minutes later she came out and walked down to the athletic field. Albert waited two hours while she sat in the empty bleachers watching football practice.

  When the boys went into the locker room, she sat in her car and, again, waited. A half hour later, a lanky black kid came out and got into a minivan. Kelly followed them, and Albert followed her. He wondered if that kid was one of the ones who had put down the old man, but he didn’t look like it. This one looked like a jock through and through, and they were too far from North Hollywood. Albert had no choice but to tag along in the hope that Sergeant Maguire would eventually lead him home.

  Albert followed the little procession from the high school to another neighborhood full of well-kept houses, though the faces he saw were all black. The minivan pulled into the driveway of one of them and Albert saw a woman in a nurse’s uniform get out, followed by the high school kid and what Albert assumed was a younger brother.

  Who were these people? Were they connected to Roy? Neither kid looked much like a gangbanger. Albert was thinking that he may have to go into that house at some point when Kelly Maguire started her car and pulled out once more.

  It was dark now, more difficult to keep her in sight with all the fucking traffic. But eventually Albert found himself parked across the street from what had to be her apartment. One look at the place and he knew that she lived here. The dark shingle siding, the sad palm trees, the stupid fountain. This was her.

  He would wait an hour before going in. Let her get settled, maybe even have a drink or two. That was the plan anyway. But Albert was tired after the trip down and fell into a deep sleep. And so it was that he didn’t enter her apartment until six hours later, a little after five a.m.

  “Sometimes you get your ass kicked on your own block. The OGs get drunk and they look at you and be all like, ‘Let’s see if this nigger’s down,’ and next thing you know you gotta fight. Always happens when I hang with my cousin and all his homies. They always be drinking or smoking some shit. And you can’t cry or punk out, ’cause then they just hit you harder or they bust you, be all like, ‘Get the fuck outta here!’ ”

  Kelly said, “That’s gotta be rough.”

  Trevor Green nodded. Kelly could see that he was near tears just thinking about it. This kid didn’t want to be in a gang. Not anymore. It would be a relief to find a way out, and Kelly was just about to give him one when his fucking lawyer walked in the door and ended the interview. Though not before handing her his card and saying, “Be good for someone in your situation to have a face with some color on your team.”

  Knowing the kid wasn’t going to school, Kelly had been calling Trevor Green, aka Shake, at his home for the past twenty-four hours. She’d left messages with his aunt, his grandmother, his grandmother’s boyfriend, and, finally, his little sister, Taya. Kelly left her number that time and said to tell Shake/Trevor to call her back if he wanted to get out of the deep shit he was currently up to his lips in. The little girl said she’d be sure and pass that on.

  Of course, the kid never called, so Kelly finally showed up at the house unannounced and found him eating cereal in front of the TV. She was making good progress and was about to ask the kid where the gun that did Councilman Peres had come from—tell me that and we can make a deal—when Johnnie Cochran walked in and pissed all over everything.

  As the lawyer correctly pointed out, Kelly couldn’t arrest Trevor. Not yet. There was no way anyone could pick him out on the Zarate video and her only witness was AWOL. Did she, given her current situation, really want to risk a misstep like that? She got up, looked at Trevor, and said, “To be continued.”

  Meanwhile, Delroy Kinney, aka L, was in the wind. No one in his family had any idea where he’d gone to and Kelly actually believed them. She figured that the kid would eventually turn up, especially now that she’d released his mug shot—Delroy having been arrested twice for possession of narcotics with intent to sell, once for possession of an illegal firearm, and once for mayhem—to the press. He and the now deceased Truck, aka Kenny Meadows, were the only two faces that were clearly visible in the Alonzo Zarate cell phone footage. Although Zarate himself was turning out to be a terrible witness, picking out only Truck with any real degree of certainty the day after the shooting. He said he had been too busy staring at his phone, trying to get the framing just right, to notice any other details.

  Kelly paid a visit to Cole Bennett’s house and asked about his little brother, Noel. Cole appeared to be in genuine shock that Science had been involved with the shooting of Peres as well as the shooting of Truck and the Marcus twins. He had never thought of his little brother as a killer or much of a worker. But then the kid never said shit to him these days. Never spoke to anyone except their older brother, Guy, who had taken a leave from the Navy and was at this very moment on his way home from San Diego to go look for their baby brother, try and stop him from getting into any more trouble. Noble, but late, Kelly thought. Way fucking late.

  Science’s mother, Nicole, was another matter. She told Kelly that she hoped her boy was out there heading up with anybody who got in his way. He was doing what was right for his ’hood. Didn’t matter that, as Kelly pointed out, it was a “ ’hood” he didn’t even live in, his house being two miles away from where the shit had been going down. Nicole just shrugged and said, “It’s all one big ’hood now.”

  Carmen couldn’t give Kelly any help with Science. While she’d heard much about Cole, she didn’t know that his little brother banged until now. Carmen remembered hearing that Cole had a brother in some charter school for genius kids in Studio City around the same time that Cole got shot, but that was about it. Kelly found the school, and they told her that for a few years the kid was a model student, got straight As and behaved himself, but then something changed, and when he wasn’t disappearing from school for hours at a time, he was skipping entire days until, about a year ago, he stopped showing up altogether.

  Carmen knew a lot more about Delroy Kinney, and told Kelly that L had a baby with a shorty named Keshawnda who wasn’t hard to find. She had been one of Kelly’s girls before the “incident.” She and Kelly had always gotten along and helped each other out. Carmen informed Kelly that Kesha, as just about everyone called her, currently worked stocking shelves at a Rite Aid on Lankershim. Kelly brought up the baby and quickly got the girl talking. According to her, L wasn’t so down for his set now that he was a father and Kesha was hounding him all the time for help. Kelly found that the girls in the gangs were getting much tougher these days on their boys. So now if death didn’t end your banging, fatherhood certainly put a damper on it. Even if you were only fifteen.

  And so it was that Kesha proudly stated that L was indeed in Chatsworth with his cousins, and had started going to high school out there. She wasn’t sure which one, but said that it was a better school than any he’d been to and she hoped he’d stay put this time. She planned on moving there with the baby in the next month or so.

  Kelly wasn’t surprised that Kesha hadn’t the faintest cl
ue that L had been involved with the shooting of Frank Peres. She just thought that Kelly had stopped by to holler about the baby. She was, as they all were, in her own, very small world. This was the thing that always broke Kelly’s heart: they had no idea what was out there. But she also knew the girl was lying. It was all too chatty and pat, as if Kesha had been giving the same line to anyone who asked.

  Kelly would call the two schools in Chatsworth on the off chance Kesha was dumb enough to be telling the truth. If so, she could always get some uniforms from Devonshire to pick up the kid. Cell service being what it was, or, in the current case, what it wasn’t, Kelly decided to go back to the station and use a hard line.

  Of course neither school had any record of any Delroy Kinney, or any new male student for the matter, in the past three months. Kelly had just hung up from the second school when Rudy rang through on her cell, not knowing she was in the office. They managed to have a conversation for a full minute and a half before the call dropped.

  Rudy was in New York, but was about to get on a plane for Missouri. It turned out that Roy Cooper’s prints matched a Juvenile beef for Murder Two out there. Spent eight years in JD before all trace of him disappeared. Rudy had been to both Roy Cooper’s apartment in Queens and his place of business, Gold Shield Security. The latter, a two-story hoarders’ paradise in College Point, the place jammed floor to ceiling with newspapers, magazines, and junk mail, was now a crime scene, the owners, Harvey and Rita Cooper, having recently been found in their basement shot to death. Rudy said that so far it was looking a lot like a murder-suicide, with the wife doing the honors, but that was NYPD’s problem.

  “And Cooper’s apartment?”

  “Cleanest place I’ve ever been in. Hardly a stick of furniture and get this: no prints.”

  “None?”

  “The place was wiped. Every inch. Even the baseball shit.”

  “Baseball shit?”

  “Souvenirs. Apparently the man likes his baseball. St. Louis in particular. Kansas City before that. He’s got score sheets, pennants, shirts, a full fucking uniform hanging in the closet. It’s like he’s twelve.”

  “I know what you mean.”

  “And Cooper’s not his last name. We got a birth certificate from—”

  And, naturally, that’s where he dropped. She texted him and told him to send her a screen shot of the birth certificate when he landed. Kelly had been scribbling her notes on an envelope and now flipped it over and saw that it was the envelope Ruth Ann Carver had left behind a few days ago, but now seemed like another lifetime. Kelly had forgotten all about it.

  She opened it and slid out the photo of the young black man. The father of the boy Ruth Ann Carver had asked her to look for.

  And now something about Roy Cooper got her thinking about Ruth Ann Carver and her long lost son. If the woman was to be believed, her boy disappeared, then reappeared as someone else. A new kid in another part of town. And now Rudy was telling her that Roy Cooper, or whatever his real name was, disappeared some twenty years ago, and then reappeared as whatever kind of wrong guy he was today. Kelly was the last person to believe in signs, but, nonetheless, she found herself unable to turn away from the photo.

  There was, of course, no connection between Ruth Ann Carver’s missing son and Roy Cooper, but Kelly thought she could hear both of them calling to her, so she spent ten minutes on her computer and found the old case file. The officer who signed the report was a woman named Dana Russo. Personnel informed Kelly that Russo retired fourteen years ago and was now an immigration lawyer in Huntington Beach. Curious, Kelly got her on the phone, mentioned Ruth Ann Carver, and Russo immediately said yeah, she remembered that one.

  “We worked it for maybe six months, but all we ever found was the kid’s blanket in one of the train yards near Union Station. I tried to keep track of Ruth Ann after that. But it was tough. The woman’s life just fell apart. How is she now?”

  “She thinks she saw the kid in Koreatown.”

  Dana Russo said, “Huh. Be something if she did.” Meaning she doubted it.

  They went through it for a little while longer and then Kelly thanked Russo and hung up before they could get into any other shop talk. She sensed the lawyer would be one of those ex jobs who wanted to hear about this cop or that, what it was like in the department these days, all of it a slow spiral toward what most cops, ex and otherwise, really wanted to know: was Kelly Maguire going to quit anytime soon?

  She shoved the photo in her purse, would return it to Ruth Ann Carver at the shelter tomorrow, tell her there was really nothing she could do. If she thought her son was living somewhere near Koreatown, she should go to Rampart and Wilshire divisions and talk to them.

  Right now, Kelly needed to find L. If Kesha was saying that he was in the Valley, then the chances were pretty good that he was somewhere in the opposite direction. There was one thing Kelly didn’t think she was lying about: the best way for a kid in a gang to disappear was to get off the street and go to school. Nobody would look for him there. And with the new baby, Kesha would be pushing for L to better his ass.

  Kelly knew from his previous arrests that Delroy had an older sister who was a Scientologist, did some kind of labor for the church, and lived in an apartment with a few other slaves on Fountain, several blocks west of Vermont. He could easily be crashing there. She didn’t want to talk to the sister, set off any kind of alarm, so Kelly decided she would see if maybe she could get lucky and take a walk through nearby Dorsey and Crenshaw high schools. She knew that Delroy wasn’t dumb enough to enroll under his real name, might not have enrolled at all, might just be there. Classes had become so overcrowded that he could probably pull that off for a week or two before he got caught.

  Dorsey was a bust. No one there had seen Delroy. If he wasn’t enrolled, the security guard told her with apparent sincerity, and he came on campus, someone would know. Kelly left a photo with the guard and did her own lap around the school. A few of the girls recognized her and gave her dark looks or threw their signs, but kept them low and close, as it was cause for suspension to fly anything for your set on campus.

  Kelly gave them all waves and big smiles and then got back into her car and headed for Crenshaw High School.

  The traffic was hell, not so much quake repair work as the usual L.A. fuckwits. There was the woman in the Nissan Leaf, for example, who ignored the dozen or so lane-ending signs on Fountain and drove right up to the back of a parked car and stopped and then decided to actually look over her damn shoulder and signal that she needed to move over. Pissed off, of course, that no one would now let her merge. She gave Kelly a dirty look as Kelly passed, and Kelly flipped her off and shouted, “Is that a look? You had two fucking blocks to get over!”

  She looked in her rearview and saw that the guy behind her was laughing and said, “Fuck you, too.”

  Barely ten minutes later, on Slauson, Kelly got into a drag race with some asshole who sped up just as Kelly tried to move into his lane. She sped up to get ahead of him and then he sped up to block her move. So she pulled her badge from her belt and waved it at him.

  “Back it off, asshole!”

  The guy saw the badge, panicked and locked his brakes, the car behind him barely swerving around him in time. Kelly thought she recognized the driver as the guy who was laughing back on Fountain.

  The teeny-tiny vice principal at Crenshaw High School was a little too chatty for Kelly’s taste. Inviting her into his office while they discussed Delroy Kinney. Dr. Towns—he informed Kelly that he had a PhD in education within the first two minutes of meeting him—was a short black man, maybe five-two in his socks, fiftyish with this pencil mustache that Kelly had to believe every kid in the school made fun of. The man started nodding the minute she took the photograph out of her purse and passed it to him.

  “Yes, of course he’s here,” Dr. Towns said. “But he didn’t just enroll, he’s been with us nearly four years.” He looked up at her and added, “Someone’s clear
ly given you bad information as his name is not Delroy, but Jamal. Jamal Allen Wilson.”

  “You sure?”

  “Very. The kids used to call him ‘Jaws’ on account of his initials and the rather serious braces he had on his teeth back in his freshman and sophomore years.” He passed the photo back to her and said, “It’s an unusual picture. He doesn’t really dress like that.”

  Kelly took it from him and realized that Dr. Towns had not been looking at Delroy Kinney, but at the photo of Ruth Ann Carver’s late husband. She had apparently reached into her bag and come up with the wrong photo.

  Kelly could not seem to escape Ruth Ann Carver.

  Maybe she should quit trying.

  She held up the picture once more and said, “This kid goes to Crenshaw?”

  “One of our best students.”

  “Can I talk to him?”

  Dr. Towns narrowed his eyes at her like she was here for smoking in the bathroom. “May I ask why?”

  “You can ask.”

  “I’m just wondering, he’s not in any trouble, is he? Because if he is, and you want to talk to him, his parents should be notified. And, to be honest, I should probably also be present for any interview.”

  “He’s eighteen, so if I want him, I got him. But I promise,” she smiled, “he’s not in any trouble.” She then stood up. “Where is he?”

  “Where he always is at this time of day.” He nodded out the window. “On the football field.”

  They were running a scrimmage when Kelly walked down to the field, the turf a typical L.A. mix of green and brown. In their practice uniforms, it was hard to tell one player from another. She saw a kid on the bench, obese with high curly hair, his helmet on the seat beside him, eating a power bar. She walked over and put a foot on the bench, leaned on her thigh.