Strange Bedfellows

7

Unforgiven

It was nearly eight by the time I arrived at Aubrey’s hillside home, bone-tired and ready to climb back into the cocoon of steam where I had begun this day. I had pulled off my jacket at the door and was about to remove my weapon and holster when I heard voices coming from the den downstairs. It took a moment before I remembered it was our turn to host Justice Family Film Night.

I tiptoed down the front staircase to find most of the usual suspects in attendance. My father had planted himself in one of the leather armchairs by the television, my mother was sitting on the sofa talking to Uncle Syl and Grandmama Cile, and my sister-in-law Louise and Aubrey were descending the back stairs with bowls of popcorn. But my brother Perris was nowhere in sight.

Spotting me, my uncle called out: “There’s my Baby Girl! You’re just in time.”

Everyone shouted out a greeting except Aubrey, who was concentrating on positioning the bowls on the coffee table. That finished, he moved to give me a perfunctory hug. “It wasn’t right to keep your family waiting dinner for you,” he whispered in my ear; then for everyone to hear, “You want something to eat?”

Beast ran to my side and leaned into me to be petted. At least my boxer’s affection was genuine. “We picked up something on the drive back,” I muttered, hoping my stomach wouldn’t growl and make me a liar.

Staccato explosions were coming from the kitchen. “That’s the popcorn,” Aubrey explained, and followed the sound up the front stairs.

“You missed a good dinner, Baby Girl.” Uncle Syl smacked his lips. “I didn’t know Aubrey could rattle pots like that.”

“Go up there and see if some’a them buffalo wing appetizers are left over,” Grandmama Cile added. “Although I never knowed buffaloes had wings!”

My grandmother chuckled at her own joke, while my mother and Uncle Syl exchanged long-suffering looks. “Aubrey mentioned you went back to work on the Malik Shareef case,” my father said as I was on my way to the bedroom.

I closed the door between us. “Why wouldn’t I?”

My quick response threw him a bit. “It’s just that… you’ve been through a lot lately.”

I rolled my eyes, dropped my purse, shed my weapon and clothes. Put on my favorite jeans, and decided on a sweatshirt from Sting’s Nothing But the Sun tour to go with it. Checked out my appearance in the mirror, reminded myself to try and get some sun, and reentered the den with a suitable smile. “Don’t worry, Daddy. I’m not lead on the case. They put Larry Thorfinsen in charge.”

“Didn’t you tell me he was retirin’?” my father said.

“I thought he was, but I’m beginning to think now that’ll only happen if they carry him out feet first.”

“Some people would say that about you,” my mother mumbled around a mouthful of popcorn.

“Joymarie!” my father snapped in warning.

Before I could launch a retort, Uncle Syl popped up to give me a hug. “Now, Baby Girl, I know you like Sting, but you shouldn’t wear that sweatshirt with the tour dates on them. Tells people how old your clothes are!”

I disentangled myself from his embrace. The twinkle in my uncle’s eye said, Forget it, she’s not worth it. I retreated to the bar in a neutral corner and grabbed a glass. “You keep promising me you’re going to make a lounging outfit for me, Uncle Syl, but I haven’t seen it yet.”

While my uncle and I debated the virtues of silk versus cotton knit, I poured myself a Lagavulin, hoping its heavy aroma and smoky bite would blunt the effect of my mother’s barbed observations. My father cleared his throat. “How’d it feel to be back?”

His tone made me wonder if Chief Youngblood, aka Uncle Henry, had ratted me out about my visit to Chinatown, but there was no way I could find out, with my family waiting expectantly for my response and Aubrey appearing from the back stairs with another bowl of popcorn. “Weird,” I decided on, sitting near my father on the carpeted floor. “I’m not used to having so many live victims, or sort of alive.”

Plopping down next to me, Aubrey listened while I described the condition of Chuck Zuccari, his wife, and his infant daughter. “When I was working the ER,” he said, “we used to see a lot of gunshot victims who ended up that way. You get to the point you know which ones will end up in the vegetable bin.”

“Aubrey!” my mother exclaimed, her hands over her ears. “That’s a terrible thing to say!”

“No worse than cops calling dead bodies DBs or floaters,” Louise reminded her from the armchair where she had settled. “Perris still slips up and says that kind of stuff when we’re watching the news.”

At the sound of her favorite child’s name, my mother had uncovered her ears. “After all these years?” she asked incredulously.

“He says it puts some space between him and the ugliness.”

“Speaking of ugliness, where is my darling brother? Afraid I’ll kick his butt for pilfering Keith’s files?”

“Leave her alone, Charlotte,” my mother cautioned. “She didn’t have anything to do with those files.”

“That’s true.” I turned to my mother, glad she’d provided me with an opening. “’Cause the way I heard it, you were the one locked up in Keith’s office with Perris and the files that Sunday, just before he stole them.”

Cutting her eyes in Aubrey’s direction, Joymarie’s face turned a mottled red, just like Mario Zuccari’s when he was put on the spot by Thor. “W-we were just talking…”

“Come on, Mother! I might have been born at night, but it wasn’t last night!”

Her eyes darted to my father, who placed a restraining hand on my shoulder and whispered: “Ease up now, Char. We don’t need to dredge up the distant past tonight.”

“Distant past? We’re only talking about a week ago!”

“I was trying to talk some sense into him!” my mother insisted.

“Get real, Mother! You and Perris have been after me to get rid of the files on Keith and Erica’s murders for years.”

Her mouth was working, but little sound came out.

“And since I wouldn’t do it, you took matters into your own hands!” I blinked back the rage stinging my eyes. “You were supposed to be helping me finish packing up the house for the movers, not aiding and abetting my brother in robbing me blind!”

“Come on, everyone.” Uncle Syl’s tone was cajoling. “Let’s not ruin our first Justice Family Film Night at Aubrey’s lovely home. He might not ask us back!”

“I just want an answer to my question!”

Despite the coolness of the evening, a prickly discomfort filled the room. Aubrey got up to load the tape while my father watched, as fascinated as if he were performing a tracheotomy. Grandmama Cile flipped through one of Aubrey’s emergency medicine journals and showed an article to Uncle Syl, who pretended to read it without his glasses. My mother chewed the inside of her cheek while Louise fingered the fringe on a throw pillow.

It was Louise who broke the silence. “Look, Char, I don’t know why Perris borrowed those files, but-”

“Borrowed? Let me find my dictionary so you can look up that word.”

“Why don’t you call and confront him instead of me?” she snapped back. “He’s at home with the twins, nursing a cold.”

Before I could press her, my father squeezed my shoulder hard. “She can do that later.” He turned to Aubrey, who was moving back to his spot next to me. “What’s on the bill tonight, son?”

“Unforgiven,” he replied, glancing at me, concern knitting his brow. I nodded a go-ahead while, remote in hand, he cued up the tape in the VCR.

The irony of the title made me chuckle and take a long sip of Scotch, but Grandmama Cile groaned in response. “Not the one where they cast poor Audrey Hepburn as an Indian?”

“That’s The Unforgiven, Mom,” my father told her. “And the correct term is Native American, not Indian.”

“’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.”

“‘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.”