Strange Bedfellows

10

We Wear the Mask

Couldn’t you find a conference room in Parker Center?”

“They’re all being used,” I said. Thor, Billie, and I had put our heads together after the meeting and agreed that no one wanted the Feds sniffing around the office, so I had taken the special agent to Teddy’s, my favorite downtown coffee shop/hamburger joint. The place was almost empty, save for a couple of guys sitting at the counter, watching news of the Branch Davidians’ standoff with the FBI on a television suspended from the ceiling. Helga could tell from the look on my face that I wasn’t there for the pleasure of eating Teddy’s legendary hamburgers, so she left a couple of menus at my booth in the back and joined her husband and the others in front of the TV.

Ignoring the menu, Taft scanned the room, eyes narrowing at a crack Teddy made about the FBI. “Who’s the old guy?”

“Theodore Roosevelt. He and his wife, Helga, own the place.”

Hearing the name, Taft shook his head as if to say my people, my people. “I would think another black man named after a president would appreciate the irony.”

He smiled into my eyes and extended his hand. “It’s Paul.”

“What?”

It was a nice smile, enhanced by teeth so sparkling they had to be capped. “Not William Howard. Paul L. D. Taft.”

“Your mother named you after a poet?”

He smiled slowly. “I’m surprised you’d pick up on that.”

His hand was still out. I shook it reluctantly. “Hard to be a black kid growing up and not know Paul Laurence Dunbar’s name.”

“Especially among our parents’ generation,” he agreed, releasing my hand at last.

“‘We wear the mask that grins and lies,’ ” I recited. “‘It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes.’ I had to recite that poem in Jack and Jill.”

Taft shrugged. “My mother was more into ‘When Malindy Sings’ than his protest stuff.”

Annoyed that I’d have something in common with this Fed, I signaled to Helga that we were ready to order. “Whatever.”

Paul Taft asked for coffee, no cream, while I ordered tea. “You and that Detective Truesdale really slammed us in that meeting,” he said after Helga left. “I’ve come to expect it from the white boys, but it packs an extra wallop coming from your own.”

First it was black poetry, and now this. “Oh, so now you’re trying to be my ‘brother,’ is that it, Special Agent Taft?”

Taft’s smile returned, broader now. “As I said, the name is Paul. And this is not about me trying to be your brother, as you call it, but just straight up professionalism I’m talking about.”

“You complaining about professionalism is a little like the pot calling the kettle black, don’t you think?” I snorted at his arching eyebrow. “The FBI and DOJ weren’t exactly forthcoming with information about the Nation of Islam’s connection to the shooting.”

“I thought we explained that.”

“Not to my satisfaction, Paul L. D. Taft, so let me try out an alternative explanation on you.”

His large hand swept out in my direction. “Be my guest.”

“Someone at Justice planted information with one of our people last July about the Nation’s connection to the Smiley Face shootings, but we didn’t find what you wanted us to.”

Taft’s smiled faded a bit, and I could see the veil drop behind his eyes. “I’m listening.”

“It always struck me as strange how the Nation of Islam connection kind of came out of the blue at the time. I mean, Malik Shareef and his wife had broken ties with the Nation decades ago, but we spent a lot of time running down leads on the Nation anyway. Maybe your contacts in Justice had something to do with that, too.”

The smile flickered for an instant on Taft’s dark face, then died. “Be that as it may, your Detective Truesdale seemed more bent about it than she needed to be.”

Ooh, girl, you know you hit a nerve! Look how he’s trying to change the subject.

“Is it because she hates the Bureau, or is it just men in general?”

Taft’s innuendo sent a chill down my spine. Was he trying to signify some knowledge of Billie’s sexuality, or was he just being snide? For the sake of her privacy, I hoped it was the latter.

“You work with her. Which do you think it is?”

I knew Billie had been raised pretty far left of center, but with the FBI’s track record on COINTELPRO, not to mention the files it was rumored they kept on black folks from Thurgood Marshall to Marian Anderson, I could understand her skepticism. But Taft didn’t need to know about Billie’s or my feelings about the Bureau, her feelings about men, or anything else for that matter. “Maybe we should just stick to the information you have on Shareef’s murder and leave Detective Truesdale out of it.”

“However you want to play it.” Taft watched while Helga brought our drinks and hustled back to the news program, which had moved on to report the death of a cop in Parker Center the week before. Curious to see if my name would be mentioned, I had to force myself to listen to what Taft was saying about his work on a case in northern California.

“Before I transferred back to the L.A. field office, I was pretty well hooked into the Nation of Islam community in the East Bay. Not long after the shooting down here, one of my old C.I.s called about the Shareefs.”

Listening intently, I noticed how Taft was milking the mention of his confidential informant for maximum dramatic effect.

“You know Malik Shareef was raised in one of the Nation of Islam’s mosques in Oakland?”

“I also know that he and his wife left the Nation in the seventies, when he entered Harvard, and adopted a traditional Muslim faith.”

Taft leaned forward, his face animated. “But Malik’s family stayed in the Nation. His half brother, Rashaan Muhammad, and a buddy of his, Eddie Aycox, approached him in ’eighty-six, a couple of years before Shareef and his wife’s book took off. I don’t know if you know of it-”

“Beautiful You.” When Malik was a graduate student, he replicated Kenneth Clark’s landmark study used in Brown v. Board of Education, which showed that a majority of black girls and boys still preferred white dolls over black ones, whether it was Barbie or the latest action figure. Malik’s findings, and subsequent testing over the years, became the basis for Beautiful You, arguably the most successful guide to black self-esteem in the past twenty years. “My sister-in-law quotes from that book all the time. She and my brother Perris loaned me their copy at the beginning of our investigation.”

“Interesting,” Taft murmured, a curious look on his face. “Anyway, based on their early review of Shareef’s research and the manuscript for the book, Muhammad and Aycox offered to become partners with the Shareefs in a toy company that would manufacture ethnically diverse dolls.”

“Which is what the Shareefs agreed to do with CZ Toys just last year, for millions.”

“Exactly. But when Muhammad and Aycox became their partners, Malik Shareef was just another academic trying to get his book published by a university press. This was before it was picked up for six figures by a New York publisher and he and the wife appeared on 60 Minutes and Phil Donahue.”

And the cover of Ebony and Time magazines, an occasion that was noted at the time by my race-proud father. “That young couple is going to go far,” he’d predicted, passing around the article featuring the handsome Shareef and his elegantly dressed wife.

“Not so young, Daddy,” my baby sister Rhodesia had corrected. “Malik Shareef’s been telling the truth about black folks and self-esteem for a long time. One of his books is required reading in my ‘Ethnic Issues in Psychology’ class.”

Needless to say, my family was devastated when Malik Shareef was shot, and furious when he died of complications some months later. “Why do we always have to lose our best and our brightest?” my father had lamented.

When I shared my family’s admiration for Malik Shareef with Taft, he said: “That can go to some people’s heads.”

“What do you mean?”

“Were you aware that the Shareefs had formed a corporation prior to Beautiful You Dollworks?”

An uneasy feeling came over me. “That never came up in our investigation.”

“That’s because it was only on paper. The company never opened an office or reported any revenues. But Muhammad and Aycox contributed seventy-five thousand each into the venture, in exchange for what they thought was a forty percent equity position. You know what happened next.”

I was afraid I did.

“Shareef and his wife ran the money into the ground over the next two years, doing ‘research’ on a line of diverse dolls that were supposed to be manufactured with Muhammad and Aycox. But, at the end of the day, not one doll came to market.”

A dozen questions were swirling in my mind, like whether that kind of behavior was in keeping with the Islamic ethical beliefs Billie was talking about in our meeting and, more importantly, what did seventy-five thousand dollars represent to Shareef’s half brother and his buddy. “Where’d they get the money?”

Taft sat back in his seat and crossed his arms. “I don’t think that’s relevant to your investigation.”

“Okay, I get it, ‘don’t ask, don’t tell.’ What can you tell me about Muhammad and Aycox?”

“The important thing is that when that first venture went belly-up, Rashaan Muhammad and Eddie Aycox never saw a dime of their money. And the Shareefs, who had been hanging by a thread financially, came out the other side with a big house and a couple of Benzes. Then, after their book hit the best-seller lists and the media made them into stars, they formed Beautiful You Dollworks and never looked back.”

“Or, let me guess, ever settled up with either Malik’s half brother or Eddie Aycox.”

Taft’s smile was ironic. “I told you you’d know what happened next.”

It was a knowledge I’d rather not possess. Just days after the shooting, I had reinterviewed Habiba Shareef at her home in Ladera Heights, one of black L.A.’s more prosperous neighborhoods. While my heart ached for Mrs. Shareef’s loss, the cop in me noticed the intricate designs in her inlaid hardwood floors and her collection of vintage black dolls. But I’d assumed the money to support the Shareefs’ lifestyle had come from the book or their deal with CZ Toys, not from messing over friends and family.

“At an Oakland bakery,” Taft was saying, “a couple of weeks after the shooting, my informant heard Eddie Aycox spouting off about how Malik’s preference for getting in bed with the blue-eyed devil cost him his life.”

“Which you took as an admission of guilt as opposed to an acknowledgment of the laws of karma?”

Taft gave me a lopsided smile. “I tried to plant the seed with your superiors in RHD last summer.”

Which explained Thor’s earlier comments about the case and his interest in pursuing the “Black Muslim angle.” “Who’d you talk to-Steve Firestone?”

“That sounds about right,” Taft replied, “but I couldn’t give up our informant without jeopardizing a much larger investigation.”

And while Paul Taft and his colleagues were fiddling around trying to protect their precious investigation, our leads on Shareef’s killers were disappearing like dust in the wind. “So when can I read this file you’ve developed on Muhammad and Aycox and talk to your informant?”

“Our guy’s still up in Oakland,” Taft said. “You think your C.O. might approve a trip up north to talk to him? Or we could do it by phone…”

I signaled Helga for the check. MIA had made it clear he wanted us to pursue this lead, which meant there was no way he’d accept a phone interview with a key informant in a murder investigation. “I’ll get the travel approved. Just have your informant ready.”