From Cape Town with Love

by Blair Underwood

  The text message blipped across my phone on a Friday night, on a rare evening when I was thinking about going out. Dad had company, so I didn’t feel any pressure to stay and keep him company while his lady friend, Marcela, was at her book club meeting.

  I had a spy in my life, and now she knew my cell number and my email address. It was the third message in seven months, arriving as unexpectedly as the first—I’d gotten the first one right after I solved the T. D. Jackson case, while I was sitting on the plane bound for South Africa. My “old friend” knew things about my life he, or she, shouldn’t.

  And two of the messages mentioned Chela, which made me nervous. Outside of a very small circle of people who had a stake in keeping their mouths shut, no one knew how and why Chela lived with me. But my spy knew.

  I cursed myself again for not working harder to make Chela’s adoption legal. I’d traded calls with a lawyer as soon as I got back from South Africa, inspired by my visit to Children First, but I’d let it slide. My case had complications: Chela was a runaway and a fugitive, and I had been harboring her illegally. I was also a single man trying to adopt a teenage girl with a history in the sex game. Trying to adopt her might cause more problems than it would fix, especially with her eighteenth birthday only a year away. I had kept her out of trouble, for the most part, and I hoped that was enough.

  But someone out there wasn’t willing to forget about us.

  I walked across the hall to Chela’s room and knocked. Through the door, techno music played with the wildly earnest drone of hormonedrenched dance clubs. Chela cycled between techno and Metallica; I longed for the days when it was nonstop rap. When she didn’t answer, I knocked louder and tried the knob. The door was locked. Strictly verboten.

  “Hey,” I said.

  The door flew open. Chela had her phone to her ear and her Gucci bag on her shoulder, ready to go out. At seventeen, Chela looked years older behind her dark eye makeup, her only girly concession. Her style was baggy jeans, sweatshirts, and Dodgers caps, but her height made her look like a runway model undercover. She was five-ten—a five-inch growth spurt in two years.

  Chela tried to close the door before I could get a good look at her room, but I saw the mountain of clothes. I wished I’d kept my own room, but I probably handed over my prized space because Chela had so little, and had lost so much. Yeah, I spoiled her. Guilty as charged.

  “I just got a weird email,” I said. “You gotten any messages from someone you don’t know? Won’t say who they are?”

  I hadn’t mentioned my previous message. With a few choice key strokes, my unknown ally had disentangled Chela from an internet chicken hawk.

  “Weird messages?” Chela shook her head blankly, listening to her phone.

  “Where you going?” I said.

  “Check the board.”

  After our spring adventure in São Paulo, Chela had to write her whereabouts on a schedule posted outside her door—the green marker scrawl said she was going to a M (movie) with B (her egghead/wrestler sometime boyfriend Bernard). In São Paulo one night, she’d ended up in a room party with a herd of Texas millionaires. I found her drinking shots and regaling cowboys with dirty songs, a life-of-the-party version of Chela I had never seen up close.

  And yes, that’s tangentially related to why I can’t go back. And no, I won’t say more. But it did involve a variant of Texas hold ’em that gives new meaning to the term “No Limit.”

  “What movie you going to?” I said.

  “Wow. This is really a whole new level of pain in my ass.”

  “I’m just curious.”

  “Curious like a prison guard.”

  Every shard of information was a battle with Chela, so protecting her was hard work. Soon after I rescued her from a madam I once worked for myself, two dirty-as-they-come LAPD officers abducted Chela in Palm Springs. To them, Chela was nothing more than a rich man’s property and plaything. Both of us nearly died that day. I still had bad dreams about it.

  “Let me holla at Bernard,” I said, trying to sound casual. When I held out my hand for the phone, Chela’s eyes said, Negro, please.

  “B., Ten says hey,” she said to her phone. I heard an insectlike voice that might belong to the long-suffering kid who was struggling manfully to be Chela’s boyfriend. “Great—B. says hey, too, so we’re all happy. Okay, Officer?” Chela’s voice was smiling, but her glare told me to fuck off.

  I hated my father when I was Chela’s age, so I understood that glare. But Chela was too good a liar for me to trust her, and I couldn’t pretend I didn’t know better.

  “Just think . . . ,” I said. “When you go to college, I’ll be off your back.”

  Chela gave me an exasperated shrug. “Yeah, right. See you at midnight,” she said, and breezed past me to the stairs. Midnight was her curfew, though neither of us used that word. A promise to adhere to one of my rules was as good as Chela saying, Good night, Ten, I love you.

  I’d been so pleased with my plan to put Chela through college that I’d forgotten to bring her on board. Chela had ignored her chance to take the SATs as a junior, and I hadn’t noticed in time.

  “We need to talk about college!” I called after her.

  “Says the guy who dropped out.”

  Then she was gone. The front door opened and closed nearly silently while Chela made her hasty escape. There was a cop in our house, after all.

  Loud men’s laughter floated from the living room, a reminder of why I’d avoided going downstairs. Dad was free to entertain anyone he chose, but LAPD Lieutenant Rodrick Nelson was no friend of mine. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d heard such a braying, carefree laugh from my father’s throat. Hell, maybe never.

  I walked downstairs, noticing Alice’s collection of movie posters and memorabilia hanging on the stairwell walls. Josephine Baker in a banana skirt. Signed photos from Count Basie and Sidney Poitier. Every item was fascinating, but nothing was intimate—just like April had once told me.

  “. . . and then the nigger said, ‘I thought it was you,’” Nelson finished in his wall-shaking basso. Another gale of laughter from my father, and Nelson wiped tears from his eyes while my father slapped his knee.

  “Stop, man,” Dad said. “You oughta be ’shamed.”

  Dad and Nelson were on their second round of Coronas, as cozy on the living-room sofa as two homeboys on the stoop of a corner liquor store. Or like a father and son, except for the laughing. The sight of them together pissed me off.

  Nelson was my age, a dark-skinned brother who could double for a Shaft-era Richard Roundtree. He was my father’s protégé, had served with Dad for fifteen years in the Hollywood division before Nelson got promoted to Robbery-Homicide and my father’s heart attack forced him to retire. This was Nelson’s first visit to my father in five years—except for one time in a Ventura County hospital that had been an interrogation, not a visit.

  Turns out Dad was keeping the wrong company. Long story.

  Grins and teeth faded fast when I appeared. Were I the paranoid type, I might have thought they were talking about me.

  Nelson glanced at me as if I’d brought an odor. “Okay, I gotta run, Preach.”

  I’d solved two cases for him, so Nelson should have hugged me; instead, he was too tight to speak my name. Nelson thought he knew the real Tennyson Hardwick: booked for prostitution at Hollywood division, my father’s old command. Maybe Nelson was the reason that arrest had been wiped from my record—that and the trumped-up attempted murder charge during a bodyguard gig.

  But if Nelson was my blue-winged guardian angel, it was only to spare Dad the scandal. If not for Dad, Nelson would have sent me to prison without a thought. He itched to tell Dad who I really was, or maybe he already had. It hardly mattered anymore. After I lost April, I vowed not to let anyone else hold my past over me.

  “Come by anytime, Nelson,” I said with a too-friendly grin. “We missed you.” What took you so long, asshole? Easy to laugh when the mess is cleaned
up.

  Nelson saw my thoughts, and shame made him blink away. He knew all about dispensing shame: After Serena died, he orchestrated an army of cops to swarm my house, a spectacle my neighbors were still talking about. That shit had been plain unnecessary.

  Nelson rose to his feet and my father followed, pushing himself up with help from the sofa’s armrest. Dad walked across the living room, toward the door. Walked. The man had been bedridden when I moved him into my house.

  Dad was showing off for Nelson, so he levered himself off the dining-room table, the back of the recliner, and the corner wall, making it to the foyer. Nelson matched my father’s pace, pretending not to notice Dad’s struggle to stay upright. Dad needed his wheelchair or walker in public, but at home he was a man on his feet again.

  Dad’s health struggles had allowed me to witness his mesmerizing calm in the moments before his heart surgery—and then his quiet, tenacious battle to rise from the dead. Nelson had missed the most important lessons. Asshole.

  “I’ll get back to you on that dinner, Preach,” Nelson said from the open doorway.

  “Naw,” Dad said, resting his back against the wall. “I don’t get out much these days.”

  “C’mon,” Nelson said. “You can’t miss this! Dolinski’s finally retiring.”

  “Damn, Dad, get out of the house,” I said, grudgingly agreeing with Nelson. Hal Dolinski was one of the few cops who’d kept in touch with my father, and he’d come through for us when I was a suspect in Serena’s death. I owed him big time. “I’ll go with you.”

  Nelson gave me a Look: The hell you will.

  My Look: Try to stop me.

  “Sure, come fellowship with us, Tennyson,” Nelson said. “But be warned: We’ll be real cops using big words that might go over your head.”

  “Like ‘I indisputably fucked up my cases’? Or ‘I conclusively have my head up the boss’s ass’?”

  The cords in Nelson’s neck tightened. Nelson would never have solved the deaths of Serena and T. D. Jackson without me. He didn’t know everything I knew about either case, but I’d given him enough to clear the files and look good to the police chief. And he hated that.

  “Like a couple damn kids . . . ,” Dad said, pleased that we were fighting over him.

  When Nelson finally left, I told Dad about the mysterious email I’d received—so I had to tell him about the first one, which I’d kept quiet for Chela’s sake. I told Dad that a stranger had flushed out an internet predator seven months before—I just didn’t mention how pissed off Chela was when I made her stop flirting with the forty-six-year-old married prick.

  I showed Dad the email I’d received the previous fall:

  Hey, Ten—

  Long time no see.

  I’m sorry to pop into your mailbox unannounced, but I seem to have done a bad thing. You should know about it. You may recognize the man in the attached photos. I know it was naughty, but I intercepted them on the way to Chela’s secret account, one you don’t know about. Don’t worry; she hasn’t used it in quite a while, he’s somewhat frantic about that.

  Was it naughty of me to send the pictures to his wife, with an exhaustive history of their “relationship”? I told her to ask about Bomb346@Quickmail.com. You might ask Chela about that account, too, but don’t worry, she hasn’t used it in quite a while. On the other hand, the musician is getting desperate. I suspect Mr. and Mrs. Cradlerobber will be having a heart-to-heart right about now. Your problem is probably over, but let me know.

  What do I want in return, you may ask? Only a smile.

  Who am I? Wouldn’t you like to know . . . ?

  —A friend indeed

  Sure enough, Chela never heard from internet guy anymore, but mysteries make me nervous. I told Dad how I’d tried writing my “friend” three times, trying to get more information, especially a name, but received only an oddly cryptic response two weeks after my last note:

  Nope. Can’t tell you my name, Tennyson. It’s a shame, because I think we could have been friends. Maybe people like us don’t get friends, and those dreams remain deferred. In the old days, I thought I could have it all, but we learn as we go. Sometimes you just got to know when to give up some things . . . and hold on to what you got . . .

  Why? I could tell you, but I’m afraid you wouldn’t understand. Like Mama said once, there ain’t nothing left for me to say.

  “What the hell’s that mean?” Dad said.

  The words in the second note rang eerily familiar.

  The messenger probably was connected to one of my clients from my prostitution days, women with power and influence. The reference to “Mama” made me suspect a woman I called Mother, the madam Chela and I had both worked for. Email and internet companies weren’t her style, but Mother could afford to diversify. I just couldn’t figure out her angle.

  But that was more information than my father needed.

  “Whoever she is, I think she knew me,” I said. “Maybe a long time ago.”

  Since my spy knew Chela’s computer password, my only lead was SecureGuard, the computer security company I’d engaged when I first suspected that Chela had a secret cyberlife. The customer service number on the SecureGuard website, if you could find the number, always led to voice mail. I had a buddy in Chicago check out the company’s listed street address, but he found only a tiny storefront full of twentysomething temps with no idea how to answer our questions. I cut off my SecureGuard subscription, but by then, as Dad would say, the horse was out of the barn.

  “Why you think it’s a ‘she’?” Dad said.

  “See how she talks about being ‘naughty’?” I said. “Only wants ‘a smile’? Dudes don’t talk to other dudes like that.”

  “They do in West Hollywood.”

  “This is a woman. And she’s keeping an eye on Chela. I just don’t know why.”

  “So . . . when are you gonna tell me?” Dad said. “How you got mixed up with Chela.” Dad spoke in clipped sentences. His speech was much better now that some time had passed since his stroke, but long sentences tired him. Until now, Chela’s missing pieces hadn’t seemed a problem.

  “She doesn’t want you to hear, Dad. She’s afraid you’ll think less of her.”

  “Think I haven’t guessed?”

  “The woman Chela worked for . . . ,” I paused, and Dad nodded, “. . . was worried when she didn’t come back from her client. I was hired to find Chela, and I crossed a few lines to get her. I had the choice of taking Chela back to the devil’s doorstep or bringing her home with me.”

  “Third choice, too.”

  “Who? The police? Hell, I was a murder suspect. Nelson wouldn’t have let that go. And Chela wasn’t going back into the system, Dad. You know that.”

  Dad nodded; there were plenty of nights we wondered if Chela was going to run away from us, too. But Dad saw the gaping holes in my story. “And the people who had Chela?” His eyes were clear, ready for anything. “What happened to them?”

  Probably best not to mention the man I’d tied naked to a chair.

  “I didn’t kill anybody,” I said. “But believe me, I wanted to.”

  “No police? No justice, then.” Justice was Dad’s favorite word.

  I shrugged. Despite everything I’d taught Dad since he moved in with me, he still believed police intervention was always the answer. Did Mother deserve to be in prison? Hell, yes, unless you think pimping fourteen-year-olds should be filed between jaywalking and prank calls. But she’d given me shelter the only way she knew how when I was low, and I couldn’t be the one to turn her in. Not that Chela would have cooperated anyway. To Chela, Mother was a savior who had yanked her from the streets. We didn’t talk about Mother, if we could help it.

  “You’re not telling it all,” Dad said, so I would know he knew.

  I changed the subject. “I want to adopt Chela.” I’d never said the words plainly.

  “In for a battle, I expect.”

  “Got a helmet.”

  “Gues
s you do.” I had earned the admiration in my father’s voice. He recognized how good I was at getting a job done—and unlike Nelson, he didn’t resent me for not having a badge. On the T. D. Jackson case, Dad and I had become something like partners. The memories weren’t the sort you sit and laugh over, but that case had put our bad days to rest.

  Dad’s mouth gave a tic from discomfort. “Don’t know what’s at the end of that road, though,” he went on. “What’ll come out.”

  “Good thing I can afford a lawyer, then. First thing Monday. Chela deserves that.”

  Satisfied that he’d warned me, Dad nodded and grinned. “’Bout damn time.” He took a deep breath, gazing toward the ceiling rafters. “Like the book of James says: ‘Look after orphans and widows in their distress and keep oneself from being polluted by the world.’”

  Too late on that last part, I thought. Dad had no problem speaking when he was quoting scripture. “You got that book memorized now?”

  “Just about,” Dad said.

  I won’t claim that I felt God’s approval, but having Dad in my corner was enough for me. I longed to tell Chela my plan, but not before I talked to a lawyer. Chela had suffered enough disappointment in her seventeen short years, losing everyone she loved way ahead of schedule—even Mother, in the end.

  I hoped our budding family would get a second chance.

  Mystery Lady’s latest puzzle kept me up late Friday night. What did she want from me?

  Her latest text message was from a private number, so that didn’t help me. I was staring at her first two emails on my computer, looking for clues, when I realized I’d overlooked a huge one: I had her email address! Even if she had a half dozen more, she might have used FIDO26 before. And if she had . . .

  I Googled the email address and held my breath.

  Ten listings popped up. The first two were obvious scams: “Looking for sale prices on FIDO26?,” the name obviously dropped in at random. I hate that.

  Three looked really good. Two were on a guns-and-ammo–type site. She was making comments about reloading shells as opposed to purchasing factory loads. I didn’t understand the jargon, but it seemed to be something about an exotic propellant that provided more foot-pounds of energy with less noise. Whoa. The other was a cooking site, a recipe for fudge cookies she said she had learned in home ec at Hollywood High.