Strange Bedfellows

16

The Four-One-One

By Friday morning, the office was in high gear. Armed with the warrants, Thor and Perkins were wrangling with Wunderlich and a team of his colleagues from Justice and the FBI over the particulars of an early afternoon visit for our combined teams to search CZ Toys’ offices; the homes of Mario Zuccari, Natalie Johnson, and Felton Carruthers; and the offices of Shuttleworth & Bezney. Since coming home the night before, I’d been busy too, summarizing my notes from the interviews up north and the reports from Engalla’s P.I. on CZ Toys’ sham vendor so I could review my findings with the team prior to the raid.

I had just finished taking Nilo’s cash to Latent Prints for processing and was logging into evidence the documents I’d obtained up north when I realized it was almost ten and I still hadn’t talked to Billie about Malik Shareef and Alma Zuccari. I pulled her away from the Feds and took her into MIA’s empty office to fill her in on my run-in with Special Agent Taft as well as my interest in approaching Shareef’s widow. “We need to tie off that loose end ASAP, but I was hoping you could review my interview with Muhammad on your own while I handle this Taft thing.”

She took the interview summary. “Sure thing, Charlotte. Whatever it takes to nail that asshole.”

After she closed the door behind her, I dialed Pearline Taylor. I’d hung out (and been hung over) with Pearline one wild weekend at a black police convention three years earlier in Las Vegas. I found out that in addition to loving card games and single-malt Scotch, we were both trailblazers of sorts, me the only black female in RHD, Pearline the only one in the FBI’s Sacramento office. She was such an asset to the FBI that in addition to her fieldwork she’d been charged with recruiting, but I wasn’t calling to put out any feelers about a job with the Feds.

We chitchatted for a few minutes, catching up each other’s plans to attend the upcoming convention, before I got down to the reason for my call. “As few of us as there are, sure, I know Taft.” Pearline had put me on a speakerphone, her voice growing more distant as she closed the door. “He’s been with the Bureau-what?-maybe nineteen years. What else can I tell you?”

“A lot more than that, I’m hoping.” Since I’d thought of calling her yesterday, I’d been wondering how I could get Pearline to give me the four-one-one on Taft without raising her suspicions. I’d decided a sister-to-sister approach would be best. “Taft and I’ve crossed paths on a case I’m working down here and… well… between you and me, Pearline, he said some things to me that were highly unprofessional.”

Billie came into the office, a pink message slip in her hand. I motioned her to sit down, indicating I’d be just a few minutes.

On the speakerphone, Pearline said, “Personal things?” her voice echoing sharply.

“Which are too disgusting to repeat,” I said, checking with Billie to see if I was striking the right note. “But he seems nice enough otherwise, so I don’t want to bust the brother’s chops if he’s under some kind of job or family pressure or something. Lord knows we all have enough of that.”

I heard a loud snort, then Pearline picked up the receiver. “I can’t tell you how disappointed I am to hear this.”

“Maybe I shouldn’t have brought it up.”

“Shit, I’m not talking about you, Charlotte!” She was silent for a moment, then: “I’m out here busting my ass to recruit minority and female personnel to the Bureau, and Taft, and some of his frat brother cronies are sabotaging my efforts behind the scenes!”

“Don’t worry, I wasn’t thinking of joining the Bureau.”

Billie rolled her eyes and lifted her feet off the floor as if to say, the shit’s gettin’ deep in here.

“That’s not it. You know how it is when you’re a minority. We’re always being used as examples, and if it’s a bad one, that works for some of these prejudiced white people just fine. And, unfortunately, Paul Taft’s one of these dangerous brothers who thinks that just because he’s wearing the badge, he’s above the law.”

“You’ve got that right,” I said fervently.

She cursed again. “This has got to remain strictly confidential, okay?”

“Ditto for what I told you,” I said, giving Billie a wink.

“Of course. All I know is, last fall Taft was scheduled to help me on regional recruiting visits at Berkeley, Stanford, and UC Davis, but they had to send a substitute because he got bounced out of the San Francisco office, allegedly for trying to play grabass with a civilian employee.”

“Girl, no!”

“Way I heard it, he gave this female a ride home in his government-issued car and tried to put the moves on her a few blocks from her house. Her husband happened to see them as he was jogging by with their dog and knocked out four of his teeth with a five-iron!”

Taft’s artificially white smile now made sense. “That must have been messy.”

“It was, especially for the husband, because the Oakland PD had rolled up and arrested him for aggravated assault. Taft tried to play it off as consensual until the female started making noises about telling what she knew if Taft pressed charges, and suddenly the whole thing went away.”

“What she knew about what?”

“That I never heard. But the fallout set affirmative action in the San Francisco office back ten years. The agent in charge of the office had to transfer Taft out of San Francisco, and his running buddy over in the DEA, Verdelle, got demoted for cutting the woman’s tires so Taft could get her alone.”

I felt my skin tingle. “Did you say Verdelle?”

“You working with Agent Owens, too?”

“I think I might have met him,” I said carefully, “but I’m not sure if Owens was the name he gave me. Is he a medium-complected brother with acne scars on his cheeks? Real square-looking?”

“That’s Verdelle.”

I scribbled a note to Billie: Taft’s been playing us. His Nation of Islam informant’s a DEA agent.

“What he was doing abetting Taft in assaulting that young female I will never know,” Pearline was saying. “But those two go way back-worked the Birmingham and Mobile field offices when there weren’t too many of us in the South, so I guess Owens was caught between a rock and a hard place.”

My hand had grown so sweaty I almost dropped the phone. Eddie Aycox’s crooked vending machine business was in Mobile, Alabama. Taft and Verdelle Owens aka Shabazz had probably worked that case together, and then trailed Aycox to the West Coast, in search of his hidden assets. But the way they were approaching it-using Malik Shareef’s murder as a smoke screen to trick us into delivering up Aycox-suggested that they weren’t exactly on the up-and-up. And I wasn’t having it.

“You need me to drop a dime on Taft from up here?” Pearline asked. “I know the agent in charge down in L.A. He’s a good guy.”

Not so good that he had taken my complaint seriously when Thor had presented it to him the day before. “No, that’s okay. I can handle it from my end.”

I never had a good feeling about that guy,” Billie said after I told her what I now suspected about Paul Taft.

“He and his buddy Verdelle are up to something. I’ve just got to make sure Perris isn’t caught up in this somehow.”

“Your brother?” Billie said, her brow furrowed. “How?”

“I don’t know, but he’s connected to Taft-I’m almost sure of it. I was going to wait to confront him in person, but now I think I’d better call him, give him a heads-up.”

“Speaking of calls,” Billie said, “I almost forgot.” She handed me the message slip. “This came in while you were on the phone.”

It was from my godfather, Chief Youngblood, asking me to call him back ASAP. “Did he say what it was about?”

“Something about some documents he requested. He didn’t sound too happy, either.”

Billie left me in Stobaugh’s office while I tried to decide who to call first. Uncle Henry had obviously found out I’d forged his signature on that request for the PDID files on the Black Freedom Militia, so I knew I didn’t want to hear what he had to say. I dialed Perris’s office instead, but his receptionist said he was tied up in a deposition in Century City, so I left a message at his cell phone number telling him about my encounter with Paul Taft and my concern for him. “I don’t know what Taft has to do with you taking Keith’s files, or maybe they’re not related, but just watch your back and call me as soon as you can, okay?”

Back in the bullpen, Billie was talking to Thor about how we should approach Habiba Shareef. “I say we bring her in,” she argued.

I disagreed. “I don’t want her thinking she’s a suspect and turning up with a lawyer.”

“Far as I’m concerned, she is a suspect,” Billie countered. “Based on my reading of Muhammad’s statement, Mrs. Shareef could have contracted to have her husband killed because of the affair.”

“We don’t know that for a fact,” I reminded her.

Billie flipped to the last page of Muhammad’s statement. “‘If that baby comes out black, you die,’ sounds like Mrs. Shareef did!”

Although I’d wondered myself if Habiba Shareef had had her husband murdered out of anger at an alleged affair, I wasn’t completely sold on Billie’s interpretation. “That could just be a figure of speech.”

“It was,” Billie said as she craned her neck. “Until her husband turned up dead.”

“It may be a long shot, Justice,” Thor conceded, “but something made Collins hire those two felons as muscle.”

“You checked them out?”

“Leykis did two stretches for possession with intent to sell and aggravated assault, while his little sidekick, Ybarra, has some convictions from when he rolled with one of those Santa Ana gangs that would curl your hair. For Collins to turn to guys like them must mean they’ve got some serious concerns for the Zuccaris’ safety.”

“But why didn’t Collins call us if he suspected Mrs. Shareef?”

“You said it yourself the other day,” Thor reminded me. “Collins isn’t the brightest bulb in the pack, although he is a former deputy with the Orange County Sheriff’s Department.”

“You’re joking!”

“Worked out of Laguna Niguel for seven years before he went private. I checked him out the same time I checked out Leykis and Ybarra. He probably threw some cop talk at the family and convinced them he could handle the threat without attracting the press-or the heat from Wall Street.”

I could almost understand the company’s logic, but I still felt that going after Mrs. Shareef was the wrong move.

“She was the only one not injured that night,” Thor reminded me.

“And if we bring him in and squeeze her,” Billie added, “she’s gonna pop, especially when we let her know we’re looking at her for Malik’s murder.”

I finally relented, although, piggybacking off Thor’s information about Leykis and Ybarra, I wondered aloud whether maybe we were all reading the situation incorrectly. “What if Habiba Shareef wanted Alma Zuccari dead? Alma could have uncovered something in her conversations with Malik or her subsequent review of the prototypes for the ethnic dolls that would have jeopardized their deal with CZ Toys. Maybe Habiba wanted her killed to shut her up.”

“However it turns out, just interview the woman sooner rather than later,” Thor cautioned. “Mario and Gabriella Zuccari got back from New York last night. Mrs. McIntyre’s scheduled us for what I told her would be a brief meeting at one. I want to serve him the warrants and have you two in place to search his residence by no later than two.”

But when I called Mrs. Shareef’s office, I was told she was setting up a doll exhibit at Broadway Federal Savings & Loan, a black-owned financial institution. When I caught up with her at the S &L’s Midcity branch, she insisted she couldn’t break away. “If you need to talk to me right away, maybe you could come here,” she suggested. “We’re in the middle of setting up for the reception tomorrow night, and some of these dolls are too fragile to leave to the installers.”

Realizing this must be the event Uncle Syl and my mother were discussing at Aubrey’s, I repeated what she’d said for Thor’s benefit, and suggested I could talk to her at the reception. Do it, now! he mouthed, shaking his head vigorously.

“We’ll be there within the hour,” I promised.

Billie and I found her in Broadway S &L’s conference room, standing knee-deep in packing materials, unwrapping a delicate cornhusk doll. A dark-skinned woman with broad features softened by a gauzy black scarf loosely covering her head, Habiba Shareef was surrounded by African fertility dolls that looked to be hundreds of years old as well as antique dolls made of clay, bottles, and unglazed porcelain plus the Francines and Chatty Cathys and other black dolls I recognized from my childhood.

“Call it our way of giving something back,” she explained after I introduced her to Billie. “After Broadway’s main branch burned down in the Uprising, my husband and I decided that in addition to banking here, exhibiting our collection here would be the right thing to do, another way of helping to rebuild our community. But he was shot before we could get it organized. Then we were overwhelmed by his care, and afterward some of the collection were on loan to the William Grant Still doll show. So, here we are.” She heaved a mighty sigh. “Better late than never.”

Flyers on the table announced the opening of the Malik Shareef Black Doll Collection the next evening and included a quotation. “What action is most excellent?” I read aloud. “To gladden the heart of a human being, to feed the hungry, to help the afflicted, to lighten the sorrow of the sorrowful, and to remove the wrongs of the injured.”

“That was my husband’s favorite quotation from the prophet Mohammed, peace be unto him,” she murmured. “And now that he’s gone, it’s up to me to carry out his wishes…”

Habiba Shareef was attired in a flowing black dress, mudcloth vest, and gauzy head covering, and her brown eyes had the gleam I’d seen in so many other black women who were the widows of great men. Coretta Scott King, Betty Shabazz, Ivy Duncan all took on their husbands’ life’s work after their deaths, and Mrs. Shareef was clearly casting herself in that role-the dignified yet saddened widow, carrying on despite a tragic loss. And as moved as I was, I had to ask myself-was she for real, or was this an act of penance to assuage her guilt for having her husband murdered?

“I heard about the young man who worked for CZ Toys on the news,” she said. “I hoped you’d be getting in touch to give me an update.”

I motioned for her to sit down in a chair at the conference table and took the chair opposite her. Billie went around to the other side of the table and started making herself invisible by examining the flyer and checking out the dolls. “We’ve gotten another lead that we need to discuss with you,” I began.

She squared her hips in the chair. “Okay.”

As I explained the rumor that had surfaced about her husband’s relationship with Alma Zuccari, Habiba Shareef’s shoulders slumped, her arms folded across her ample bosom as if warding off a blow. “Why bring this to me?”

“Did you observe anything unusual about Mrs. Zuccari’s interest in your husband last year?”

Mrs. Shareef waved a hand in an attempt at casualness, but I didn’t miss the pained expression on her face. “Women were always flitting around my husband. He was a very handsome, very charismatic man. But he knew where his home was. He knew who had his back.”

“But Mrs. Zuccari did spend a lot of time with your husband in the months before the shooting?”

She picked up a carved wooden fertility doll and examined it carefully, lips pursed. “She was very interested in the dolls and in the histories we’d created for them. But why wouldn’t she have been? They were beautiful dolls, and beautifully packaged.”

“Was she interested in anything else?” I pressed.

Angry tears gathered in Mrs. Shareef’s eyes as she placed the doll back on the table. “Who’s spreading these lies?”

“It’s just that Mrs. Zuccari’s interest struck us as unusual, given that she wasn’t employed by her husband’s company.”

“Don’t you think I knew that?” she said through clenched teeth. “Alma Zuccari took what Malik believed was a genuine interest in our dolls, and talked up the deal with her husband. What were we supposed to do-look a gift horse in the mouth?”

“But why would she do that?”

“Maybe you should ask her!” she snapped.

“We will, but we want to know what you think first,” Billie said from her spot across the table, where she was about to pick up a white baby doll in a red gingham dress.

Mrs. Shareef reached over and snatched up the doll from Billie, flipping it over to reveal a black doll underneath. “I never talked to her about it, but Malik said that Mrs. Zuccari believed the line we were developing for CZ Toys would be a great success. That the market for ethnic dolls was bigger than even her husband thought it would be.”

“And you believed him?”

“My husband is dead, Detective Justice,” she said quietly. “What difference does it make now whether I believed him or not?”

“It could make a lot of difference if you didn’t,” Billie replied. “It could mean maybe you thought there was some truth to the rumor.”

Mrs. Shareef pulled herself up to her full height. “And you think I had someone kill my husband over a woman like Alma Zuccari?” Her voice had grown loud as an angry tear slid down her cheek. “As much as I loved Malik, and miss him, I would never have done anything to hurt him.”

“What about Alma?” Billie asked.

Mrs. Shareef shook her head. “That poor woman was nothing but a trophy in Chuck Zuccari’s life, nice but completely dependent on her looks. A woman like that was no threat to what Malik and I had.”

“Mr. Zuccari’s ex-wife probably said the same thing,” I noted, and watched Habiba Shareef cut her eyes at me.

“Maybe Alma heard about your previous venture with Malik’s brother and his friend,” Billie added. “That could have made doing the deal difficult for CZ Toys.”

I expected Habiba Shareef to be surprised at our knowing about SMA Dollworks, but she dismissed Billie’s comment with a wave of her hand. “The legal department at CZ Toys had worked all that out. They were going to buy out Malik’s brother’s and Brother Aycox’s equity position for a fair price. Malik insisted on that. To do otherwise would have violated the Islamic principles of Shari’a, which govern Muslims in all business dealings! We spent a lot of time with Mr. Merrit and CZ Toys’ legal staff making sure our transactions were ethical.”

“I’m sure you did. Still, some people at the company might have been concerned that your prior business relationship-”

Mrs. Shareef balled her right hand into a fist. “I know who told you this. It was that horrible woman, Renata!”

“Renata Lippincott?” I broke in. “What does she have to do with it?”

“She never wanted to do business with us!” Mrs. Shareef explained, her fist beating softly in her lap. “First, she tried to use our agreement with Rashaan and Brother Aycox to trip us up. Then she tried to say we were making too much of the cultural aspects of the line, that the public wouldn’t be interested in a Muslim doll as part of the collection. Then, when we produced research to the contrary, she called me, asking me why Alma was spending so much time with my husband. With that black man is what she wanted to say, but she caught herself just in time.”

She glanced at Billie as if looking for sympathy, but all she got back was Billie’s bland expression.

“I told her Alma was interested in the dolls and the stories behind them, which was a good indication of the strength of the product and the packaging, and she went off, said Alma had no right to meddle in the company’s business, that she was a deceitful little witch-although that’s not quite what she said-who had to be stopped. That’s when I began to wonder whether the ex-wife was just bitter or…”

“If Alma Zuccari’s interest in your company was legitimate?” I said gently. “Why didn’t you tell us this before, ma’am?”

Habiba Shareef sat motionless except for the heaving of her chest. “It seemed so trivial, and after Malik died, I just couldn’t let anything… tarnish his memory.”

“We understand,” I murmured, as Billie nodded and made a few notes. “Did you ever confront your husband about Alma Zuccari?”

She nodded sadly. “He denied everything, of course.”

I heard the note of reproach in her voice. “Did you do anything else?”

She turned away, too late to hide the tears flowing down her cheeks. “I… I was so hurt, so angry, Malik ended up sleeping in the den for three weeks.”

“But you eventually made up,” I said after a pause. “You forgave him.”

“Th-that’s just the point.” She dabbed at her eyes, and faced me with her chin quivering. “We-I didn’t! He was shot before we… before…”

Billie and I exchanged a look. No wonder Habiba Shareef was so guilty and so intent on preserving just the right memory of her husband and his work.

“The shameful way I behaved toward my husband is something I’ve got to live with for the rest of my life. So I will not let anyone speak ill of him, or the work we tried to do.” Malik’s widow sighed heavily and wiped her eyes with a handkerchief. “Can I ask you something, Detective? A friend of mine said whoever killed my husband might not be prosecuted for murder, given his death came as a result of complications of the heart surgery. Is that true?”

“That would be up to the district attorney, ma’am,” I replied, wondering where this was headed.

“My husband was in perfect health before he was shot,” she insisted tearfully. “I can produce his medical records, if you need them. Just don’t let whoever stole my husband from me get away without paying for it, Detective! That’s all I ask.”

I promised I wouldn’t, but as we left the S &L I wondered if Habiba Shareef’s jealously hadn’t robbed her of her husband as thoroughly as the person who’d shot him.