“’Fore you know it, Indians will have gone through as many name changes as black folks!” my grandmother tsked. “As for that Audrey Hepburn movie, I always thought it was a little strange.”
Uncle Syl dismissed my grandmother’s criticism with a wave of his hand. “Girlfriend still looked fabulous!”
“You talk like you designed the costumes yourself,” my grandmother teased.
From inside my glass, my family’s faces were distorted, their pasted-on smiles and gestures almost comical as they tried to steer the conversation away from the elephant in the middle of the room.
“To answer your question, Grandmama Cile,” Aubrey said over the hubbub, “this is the one with Clint Eastwood and Morgan Freeman.”
“How’d you get a tape so soon?” Uncle Syl wanted to know.
“My next-door neighbor is a member of the Academy, so he let me borrow his screening copy.”
“Didn’t he have Malcolm X?” I said, just to be contrary.
My grandmother grunted. “I loves me some Denzel!”
“You know, a sister by the name of Ruth Carter is nominated for best costume design on that one,” Uncle Syl said to me, with obvious pride in his voice.
A murmur of appreciation flowed through the room. Through my family’s not-so-subtle maneuvering, the moment had passed to confront the problem of Perris. Maybe it was just as well. I grabbed a handful of popcorn from the bowl on the coffee table and handed the rest to my father as a peace offering. “I’ve been so busy I haven’t had time to see any of the nominated movies, Uncle Syl.”
Aubrey kissed my ear and whispered: “I’ve been trying to get you to go.”
I could feel another argument tickling the back of my throat, which I doused with a swallow of Scotch. Aubrey knew I’d been preoccupied the past few months, between the job and the months I’d spent working with Perris and my Police Protective League rep to fight that last suspension, so why was he rubbing it in?
“I’m so glad Morgan Freeman’s in this one,” Louise whispered over the opening prologue. “He’s such a great actor.”
My mother sighed. “Thank heaven he’s not playing a pimp or a chauffeur this time. I’m tired of seeing our actors in those stereotypical roles.”
“He don’t fare much better in this one,” Grandmama replied. “I hear he gets . . .”
“Mom!” my father pleaded.
“I’m just trying to prepare you,” she said innocently. “My missionary group saw this one over the holidays, and hated it!”
“Hush, Cile,” my uncle exclaimed, snickering at her imitation of the movie critics on In Living Color. “You’ll spoil it for the rest of us!”
The general hue and cry subsided as we watched a prostitute get brutally slashed by a drunken john. The excuse the brothel owner gave for the crime—“Just hard-workin’ boys that was foolish”—drew derisive whoops from the room. “Why white men think they can just use women any way they want is beyond me!” my mother said, her voice quavering with anger. “It’s one of the reasons I’ve told my children to be careful who they lay down with. It’s like Mother Justice says: You lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas!”
“Joymarie!” my father warned his wife again. “We don’t need to get into that right now.”
But for once, Mother and I were in agreement. The scene was an uncomfortable reminder of Steve Firestone, Larry Thorfinsen, and every other jackass I worked with who thought they could get away with perpetrating everything from tasteless jokes to sexual assault against their female colleagues. And the only thing that stood between them and their next target was me, and Gena, and the other good women in the department who stood up to them, told the truth and damn the consequences.
Don’t forget Perris. He takes a lot of those good women’s cases. I sat with that thought for a few minutes. Finally, I tapped Aubrey’s shoulder. “Can we talk for a minute?”
“I want to watch the movie.”
I pulled Aubrey by the hand into the bedroom and closed the door. He sat on the edge of the bed, leaned back on his elbows, and waited. “Sorry about earlier,” I began, moving toward him.
He crossed his leg, effectively blocking my approach, and just stared.
I stopped in my tracks, feeling the sting. “You know, getting home late.” I decided it was better not to mention forgetting about Film Night, my argument with my family, or anything else. “I didn’t expect to end up behind the Orange Curtain this afternoon.”
“You’ve got a bad habit of not showing up to your family’s events that’s got to stop.”
“What do you mean?”
“Last time it was brunch when you were working that political consultant’s murder.”
“You know how it is when I’m working a case!”
“The time before that it was—”
“Look, I didn’t call you in here to fight. I just wanted to apologize and, you know, tell you what was going on with me.”
Aubrey tilted his head the way Beast does sometimes and said: “So what is going on with you, Char?”
I had longed to tell him about my therapy, about how angry I was at being cornered by some soft-gutted shrink, about my ambivalence at being back on the job, about how deeply Perris’s antics hurt me. But something about Aubrey’s tone made me bite my tongue, suddenly unsure of what his reaction would be. Or that I could handle it.
“Nothing that can’t wait. Go watch your movie.”
Aubrey was already on his feet. “Good. I want to see what happens to Morgan.”
“You go ahead. I’m going to slip into my office and sort through my notes for tomorrow.”
“That’s not being fair to your family, Char! They came here to see you, not me.”
“They came to eat good food and see a movie, both of which they’re doing. Besides, they know how it is when I’m on a case. You’re the one who seems to have a problem.”
But instead of returning to the den, Aubrey stood in front of me and held my arms. “That’s bullshit, Char! Given the kind of work I do, I know better than most that work can get in the way. You just can’t let it eat up your life and drive you crazy!”
I squirmed out of his grasp and shook myself. I’d be damned if I told him about Chinatown now. “You don’t have to be concerned for my sanity, Aubrey.”
“Fine.” Before I knew it, he was at the door, his hand on the doorknob. “I’ll see you out there in a few?”
Aubrey Scott was as tall and good-looking as I’d remembered from the days of my schoolgirl crush, back when he and Perris were high school seniors and I was a sophomore. But I knew that was a fairy tale of long, long ago, and there was a lot I didn’t know about the very real man standing before me.
“In a few,” I said.
Unforgiven got a split decision: three thumbs up, three down. My father—who just couldn’t break ranks with Spike Lee—spoke for the defense. “Malcolm X is the best movie Spike’s ever made,” he argued as they all trooped upstairs. “He deserves that Oscar!”
Amazingly, my mother disagreed. “It’s also the best movie Clint Eastwood’s ever made. For one thing, he didn’t let them call Morgan a nigger in a couple of scenes, like you know they would have if it had been some other director. And they didn’t lynch him either!”
“That’s one of the things that bothered me,” my uncle admitted as he helped Cile into her coat. “It wasn’t real.”
“It’s nice not to have to suffer through watching a black man degraded like that,” Louise said, her dreadlocks swaying as she shrugged into a leather jacket. “But you noticed Morgan’s character was still the only good guy who got killed!”
“Frankly, I appreciated the way the movie dealt with the violence,” I said, although I had left the room during a couple of scenes on the pretense of checking the office for messages.
“Me, too,” my mother agreed, surprising me again. “It wasn’t prettied up. And that one line William Munny says after the guy got shot in the outhouse really got me.”<
br />
“‘Hell of a thing, killing a man,’ ” I quoted. “‘Takes away all he’s got an’ all he’s ever gonna have.’ ” In response to everyone’s surprised looks, I explained: “When you interview people in your job, you get used to remembering what they say.”
My father gave me a hug. “Lets you know there’s a price to be paid on all sides, doesn’t it?” He kissed my cheek before dashing into the night to retrieve the car.
Aubrey had gone inside to clean up the kitchen, and the others were waiting at the curb, but Louise still lingered at the door. “Char, I—”
I put my arm around her and hugged her close. “I’m sorry I went off on you like that, Louise. I know you can’t control my brother any more than my father can control Joymarie.”
But my little joke was lost on my sister-in-love, so intent was she on what she had to say. “I don’t know what’s gotten into Perris,” she whispered. “You know he’s started drinking again, heavily.”
“Yeah, Aubrey told me about what happened.” Two Sundays ago, Perris had gotten what Aubrey termed “tore up from the floor up” at a brunch I had missed because of the Vicki Park case. Perris’s behavior must have been particularly difficult for Louise, whom he’d met at an AA meeting after he had injured himself in a drunk driving accident and she had lost her job as a management consultant because of her drinking.
In the ten years since, they had gotten their lives together, married, and had two great kids. Along the way, Louise had given up her career to raise the kids while becoming the unofficial president of the Perris Justice Fan Club. But over the past few months, I’d noticed her thin-lipped disapproval of my brother’s little transgressions—a celebratory glass of champagne last spring, the Chardonnay at Thanksgiving. Plus there were the ones she hadn’t seen—the beers he’d have after shooting hoops with Aubrey and his buddies, the sips of Glenlivet he’d sneaked out of my glass at The Townhouse, a black bar in Ladera Heights where we met to strategize my testimony before the Board of Rights.
But Louise had to have seen the effects of those clandestine drinking sessions and known what was going on. Spouses always do. Yet, regardless of what she knew or when she knew it, Louise remained fiercely loyal to her husband, so for her to admit that his drinking was a problem let me know how concerned she was, and how far it had progressed.
“And he’s been calling some of his old contacts in the LAPD, having these long conversations late at night.”
“About what?”
“I don’t know,” Louise muttered as she worried a cuticle between her teeth.
A few feet ahead, I could hear my mother saying something to Uncle Syl about what she would wear for a senior golf tournament my parents were playing at Chester Washington on Friday, and some reception at a local bank they were all attending the following night.
“When I walk into the room,” Louise went on, “he hangs up the phone. And when I ask him what’s going on, he says it’s nothing to be worried about.”
I put myself between her and the others. “How do you know he’s been calling cops?”
“Maybe he wasn’t.” Louise’s dark face was thrown into relief by the light coming from the living room windows. “But whoever it is, he talks to them in a shorthand kind of way. I just assumed they were cops, but it might have been his frat brothers or something.”
Some uglier possibilities came to mind, but I bit back my suspicions to concentrate on what she was saying.
“Last night, I’m pretty sure he was shut up in the den with the files—”
“The ones he took from my house?”
She nodded. “And he was on the phone for the longest. But when I asked him if he was talking to one of his Omega buddies, he just said something about Qs I didn’t understand.”
Perris belonged to one of the older black fraternities, Omega Psi Phi, whose members were commonly called Qs. But I couldn’t understand what the connection was between a fraternity and my late husband’s files on a black militant group, unless Perris was talking about Q-Dog, one of the members of the Black Freedom Militia. Then there was the kid I’d met at a reception during the riots named Quarles, but I was with Aubrey that night, not Perris.
What about Querida Strange, the girl Perris had the hots for in high school? I was just wondering if they could have run into each other when Louise said: “Talk to him, Char. He’ll listen to you.”
“I don’t know, Louise.” Suddenly I wasn’t sure I wanted to get into the middle of Perris’s late-night tête-à-têtes.
“It’s a short list of people he’d open up to; you know that.”
And I knew every name on it. “I’ll think about it.”
“Thanks. But if you talk to him, don’t let on that I’ve said anything.”
I promised, giving her another hug and a kiss before sending her into the night.
Inside, I bypassed the kitchen, where Aubrey was loading the dishwasher, and tiptoed downstairs to my office. Converted from a guest bedroom, my little office was a bit of my old house transplanted to the hills. My favorite Betye Saar collage hung above my desk, and my collection of black dolls sat on shelves across the opposite wall. My hand-dyed Gabby doll was there, as well as the Black Chatty Cathy I got when I was nine and a Colored Francie doll that my Uncle Syl gave me, outfitted in a sequined dress he’d made himself. All served as bookends for my collection of texts on criminology and policing, including the indispensable Techniques of Crime Scene Investigation. Yet, the kind of crime I feared my brother was perpetrating seemed as far from the cases contained in Barry Fisher’s classic as honky-tonk was from Beethoven’s fifth.
I picked up the phone and punched in Perris’s number. He answered on the third ring and slurred out a hello. When I didn’t answer, he said “Fuck off!” and slammed down the phone.
Unless he’d OD’d on flu medication, Perris was tore up from that floor up again. My heart pumping pure dread, I rummaged through my desk drawer until I found my phone book and dialed a number I used to know by heart. “Hey, can we meet for breakfast?” I said, dispensing with the formalities. “I need some advice.”
8
Moving On, Moving Fast
He picked the place—John O’Groats, a popular breakfast spot on Pico frequented by the Mommy-and-me crowd, local businessmen, a lot of golfers, and very few cops. And he was definitely no longer the latter, if the pastel cardigan and designer polo shirt he wore with his khakis were any indication. He’d even shaved off his mustache, which made him look a good ten years younger than I knew him to be.
He ambled toward me, his height and bearing still more reminiscent of John Wayne than John Q. Public, and extended a pale mitt of a hand in my direction. “I hope this is okay.”
“Come on, now, Burt.” I brushed his hand aside and embraced his midsection. “You know me better than that.”
“This place has got the best biscuits in town,” he explained, a little embarrassed at my show of affection.
“Not to mention it’s close to a golf course, which it looks like you’ve been visiting a bit lately.”
“What makes you say that?”
“One, I’ve never seen you wear a cardigan in all the time I’ve known you. Two, I bought that same cardigan for my father at a golf shop last Christmas, and three, the tan face and pale right hand are a dead giveaway.”
He nodded approvingly. “Good to see you’re keeping your skills up, Charlotte.”
“I was taught by the best.”
Almost thirteen years earlier, Sergeant Burt Rivers had been my training officer, back when I was a boot in Southwest, a rough-and-tumble division separated from this Westside location by a few miles and more money than you could shake a stick at. Burt had taught me how to deal with drunk drivers and domestic disputes, how to search a hooker and do field interviews when no one wanted to talk to a cop. Last time I’d seen him was during the Rodney King riots, when Cinque Lewis’s body was discovered behind a taco stand. It was Burt who’d ID’d the murderer of my
husband and child, who’d recognized Lewis from his days as leader of the Southwest-based Black Freedom Militia.
I’d called Burt because he was on my short list of people I’d go to when I was in trouble. And more importantly, he was on Perris’s short list as well. They’d been coworkers and good friends until Perris left the force after being shot and went over to the other side of the law-and-order aisle—a fact that Burt mentioned almost every day we rode together. Perris’s defection to the ranks of criminal attorneys rankled the department and Burt. Which I was painfully reminded of when I saw the two of them circling each other like roosters in a cockfight the night they found Lewis’s body. But I remembered the caring underneath the sparring that night, at least on Burt’s part, which I was hoping I could tap into to help understand what in the hell was going on with my brother now.
We selected a table by the window and ordered. I was aware that while I was ordering, Burt was looking me over as carefully as a mother hen inspecting one of her chicks. “You don’t look any the worse for wear,” he concluded after the server left.
I mustered a smile. “Should I?”
“I hear you’ve been through the wars lately.”
“Heard from whom?”
A part of me hoped, for once, that Perris had talked out of school, which would make having this conversation that much easier, but all Burt would say was “I still have my sources.”
The phrase made me uneasy, but I shrugged off my reaction to give him a brief outline of the Koreatown case I’d worked last week, and the Smiley Face shootings that were occupying my attention now. “But what about you? How’s life off the job treating you? I was surprised to hear you were even eligible for retirement.”
“Fifty-two and twenty-three. You do the math.” Burt had opted out of the LAPD, availing himself of a formula that allowed an officer to retire if his age plus years of service equaled seventy-five or more. But at Burt’s age, cops left the department only if they had hit the Lotto—or were forced out under the new “pick the low-hanging fruit” initiative of weeding out the worst LAPD troublemakers, starting with the Christopher Commission’s infamous List of Forty-Four.
Strange Bedfellows v5 Page 9
