Strange Bedfellows

14

Fugitive From Justice

It was after nine by the time my sister picked me up in front of the Joaquin Miller ranger station. I was so glad to escape the confusion of that park, to clear my head and see a familiar face, that I almost forgot I hadn’t seen Macon in more than a year.

Not that I’d missed her. Sad to say, but when you have a sister who’s ten years younger, it seems she’ll always be a thorn in your side-a gum-snapping nuisance when you’re trying to talk on the phone, a snooping machine who reads your diary and then recites the contents to your high school crush, or a babysitting chore when you’d rather be at the movies with your friends. The only thing that had kept me from sororicide was my father’s theory that Macon was underfoot so much because she wanted to be like her big sister. I had another theory-Macon was the spawn of Satan, sent to earth to make my life a living hell.

It didn’t help that she had adhered to our Macon, Georgia-born mother’s directive of postgraduate degrees for all her children, obligingly getting not only her doctorate in education at twenty-three but becoming headmistress of an exclusive Oakland private school just three years later. But instead of basking in our mother’s approval, Macon had recently dropped off her branch of the Nut House tree, becoming a no-show at Justice Family gatherings, conveniently unavailable when Mother and Daddy visited the Bay Area, communication relegated to an expensive, generic holiday card.

Just last Christmas, I’d offered to make a few discreet inquiries among my contacts in Oakland law enforcement to see if she’d seriously gone astray. But Perris argued we should leave Macon alone, while my mother said children had to eventually leave the nest and go their own way. And from the looks of it, she had, judging by her brand-new Subaru Outback, her so-short-you-could-smell-brains Afro, and the tiny gold stud adorning her right nostril.

After jumping out to give me a somewhat mechanical hug, Macon got down to business. “What are you in the mood for?”

“A drink.”

She rolled her eyes. “I meant food, Char.”

I scrambled into the seat beside her. “The celery from a Bloody Mary will do. Really, Macon, I don’t care. As long as they’ve got a bar.”

“Well, we love Art’s Crab Shack, which has a full bar. It’s only-”

“No!” I said, checking her side mirror to be sure no one was following us.

“Damn! You don’t have to jump down my throat.”

“Sorry. I’m just not in the mood for crab.” Or running into that crazy ass Paul Taft.

“How about Creole?” she suggested. “T.J.’s Gingerbread House over on Fifth is pretty good. And there’s an awesome doll collection upstairs you’d probably enjoy.”

“No dolls, please! The last thing I want to see is something that reminds me of the case I’m working.”

I could tell Macon was getting frustrated by the way she sighed. “Then how about Vietnamese-or are there Vietnamese victims on your case?”

“No, Miss Smarty Pants.”

“Good. One of our favorites is over on Jefferson.”

“Our? I didn’t know you were seeing anyone.”

Macon gave me a sidelong glance as she pulled onto the main road leading out of the park. “Mom didn’t tell you?”

“Joymarie hasn’t said a dozen words about you since that last Thanksgiving you were in L.A.”

Macon snorted, her nose stud winking in the light from the approaching cars. “No surprise there.” She reached into her handbag for her phone and punched in a number. “Hey, baby. We’re just leaving Joaquin Miller. I suggested Le Cheval, over on Jefferson. You still want to meet us? Okay, thanks, sweetie. I love you, too.”

She ended the call and handed the phone to me. “Kelly’s going to call ahead for reservations and meet us there.”

“Kelly, huh?” I wondered about the androgynous name, but I couldn’t figure out how to ask for clarification without sounding as if I were prying into my sister’s sexuality. Could this be why my mother hadn’t mentioned Macon’s name in over a year? How could she be so narrow-minded, especially given that her beloved brother, our Uncle Syl, was gay? But then I was forgetting that Joymarie Curry Justice’s picture was in the dictionary, above the word hypocrite. “Where’d you two meet?”

“Jogging around Lake Merritt.”

Serial rapists jog around lakes, I wanted to scream at her. “And what does Kelly do?”

“Photographer for the Oakland Tribune,” she replied, smiling. “And a good one, too. Shared a Pulitzer a few years ago.”

Was Macon being stingy with her pronouns for a reason, or was she just trying to buzz me up? “Really? I’m surprised Mother didn’t tell me about this Kelly.”

“And I’m surprised you didn’t rent a car.”

I noticed her smooth deflection of the conversation away from Kelly and Joymarie and let it go for the moment. “I should have.”

“Why didn’t you?”

From our vantage point in the Oakland Hills, I could see a thousand pinpricks of light from the city below, yielding to the dark velvet of the bay beyond. Paul Taft was out there somewhere. Maybe he was a few blocks behind us, hoping I’d gotten Muhammad to tell me Aycox’s location and lead him there. Maybe Taft had decided to pursue Aycox on his own. Whatever he was doing, I wanted to be as far away from that man as possible. “It’s a long story.”

“Which, I know, is none of my business.”

The petulant tone in Macon’s voice made me want to tell her about Taft, but I knew it wouldn’t be wise, especially if her lover worked for the local paper. Just imagining the headlines made my head start hurting again. “It really doesn’t have anything to do with me having dinner with you, so let’s drop it.”

“Fine.” Macon had pulled into a parking space on Jefferson. “Le Cheval’s just across the street there. And, yes, Char, they have a full bar.”

Which was teeming with a multiculti herd of customers, spilling out onto the sidewalk, leaning against a bronze sculpture of the restaurant’s trademark horse, cramming the small bar. When I asked about the eclectic mix of people, Macon giggled, a giddy sound I hadn’t heard since we were kids. “Kelly took photos for an article that showed that on any given night you’re liable to see everyone from pimps to politicians in here.”

Macon stood on tiptoe, scanning the faces in the crowd. As she looked over my left shoulder her pecan-complected face blossomed into a radiant smile. Whoever made my little sister smile like this was okay with me, regardless of gender. “There’s my sweetie,” she beamed.

Before I could turn around, I felt strong hands on my shoulders, and a husky voice said: “This must be my future sister-in-law.”

“Charlotte. This is Kelly McDermott.”

I turned to look up into a pair of smiling, deep-set eyes and a face that told me exactly why Joymarie had never mentioned a Pulitzer Prize or anything else about Macon’s sweetie.

Kelly McDermott was a white man.

And a chivalrous one at that. After giving me a hearty hug and leaning over to kiss my sister, he asked us what we wanted to drink, then shouldered his way through the crowd to the bar. “Isn’t he adorable?” she cooed.

“And tall, too.” I pinched her arm. “You should have told me!”

“Told you what?” she snapped, jerking away and frowning.

“You know what I mean!”

“After the reaction I got from Mom, I decided to keep my good news to myself for a while. You know how she can be.”

I nodded in sympathy. “When she found out Aubrey and I had moved in together, it was all I could do to stop her from sending out the engagement announcements!”

“I heard you were dating Perris’s old friend. How’d that happen?”

I was just catching her up on how Aubrey and I had met during the riots when we were interrupted by Kelly, balancing three drinks between the fingers of his large hands. “Glenfiddich is the best they have,” he said, unloading a glass of amber bliss into my waiting hand. “If Macon had told me you were a single-malt Scotch drinker, I’d have suggested another place.”

“Why so secretive, little sister?”

“Not secretive,” she said, kissing Kelly lightly on the lips as she relieved him of a glass of white wine. “Just trying to respect people’s boundaries.”

“Well, Macon did tell me about your Pulitzer, Kelly. Congratulations.” I clinked glasses with him, noticing that his contained a similar amber liquid. My kind of guy.

“Thanks,” Kelly mumbled, his face so red that, with his copper-colored hair, he looked like a parboiled lobster.

“What was it for?”

“It was a team effort, really, for the paper’s photographs of the ’eighty-nine Loma Prieta earthquake.”

Kelly’s name was called, and we followed our hostess to a table by the window, where she seated us and handed us oversized menus. After Kelly ordered spring rolls, lemongrass chicken, prawns with tofu, and a hot and sour catfish firepot, he picked up Macon’s hand and gave it a kiss. “Your timing couldn’t be better for a visit. Macon and I have decided to get married the Saturday after her birthday. We hope you can come.”

“Married. Wow!” was all I could manage to say. I turned to Macon. “Is this why you’ve become a fugitive from Justice?”

She rolled a shoulder and gave me a noncommittal smile. “Partially.”

“Have you told Joymarie and Daddy?”

Macon’s half smile disappeared as she twisted her mouth and shook her head. “Mother wouldn’t come, and Daddy’s not going to go against her.”

“Nonsense! Daddy would be devastated if he couldn’t give you away. And Mother’s been itching to plan another wedding ever since Perris and Louise’s. You should call them. They’ll be thrilled!”

“That’s what I told her,” Kelly added, “and I haven’t even met your parents.”

“Don’t worry, you will.” I rose from my chair and gave each of them a hug. “Congratulations, you two. I’m so happy for you.”

“Are you really, Char?”

“Of course. And Daddy and Mother will be, too!”

“I wonder.” Macon looked worried for the first time that evening. “Between Mom being so negative when I first mentioned Kelly, plus all the other shit going on, I just didn’t feel like dealing with the drama.”

“What other shit?”

“That’s why I haven’t been around much lately,” she explained, ignoring my question. “And why I wasn’t going to tell them until after the wedding.”

“You told Mother about Kelly that last time you were in L.A., didn’t you? What’d she say?”

Kelly pushed back his chair. “If you two need to talk…”

“No, baby,” Macon said, holding him down with her outstretched hand. “This is nothing you haven’t heard before. You’re right, Char, it was Thanksgiving. I was so excited about meeting someone I could really talk to, I was about to burst. But I knew I’d have to introduce Mom to the idea gradually. So I waited until dinner was over, then volunteered to clear and wash the dishes. You know how stressed she is until the dishes are done.”

“Last year, it was five courses,” I said to Kelly. “We could have used both of you to do the dishes on that one.”

“When we were in the kitchen,” Macon went on, “I told Mom I probably wasn’t coming down for the Christmas holidays because I was going skiing with this guy I was dating and his parents. When I told her what he did, she was all excited about him working for such a well-regarded black-owned newspaper and the Pulitzer and all. Until I told her his name and she asked me if he was white.”

Now it all made sense-Macon’s prolonged absence, my mother’s pointed comments about children going their own way, even her diatribe against white men when we were watching Unforgiven. All because Macon had committed the one unpardonable sin in my mother’s book-crossing the color line to marry. “Who else in the family knows?”

“I assume Mom told Daddy, but I didn’t say anything to him directly. I told Rho. She said Mom was either going to get over it or die with it on her mind.”

Which sounded just like my baby sister Rhodesia. “Did you tell Perris?” I asked, remembering how he’d argued for leaving Macon alone.

She shook her head. “At first, I was so taken aback by Mom going off on me, I wasn’t sure I could cope if anyone else started acting out. But when it got to be spring of last year and Mom was still tripping, Rho suggested I talk to Perris. We figured if anyone could get her to chill out, her Black Prince could.”

I was amused, and somewhat saddened, that Rhodesia and Macon saw Perris and my mother’s relationship the same way I did. And a little hurt that Macon hadn’t confided in me. Maybe it was natural for my younger sisters to be tighter, given their closeness in age, but if I was honest with myself I would have to admit that I was probably too caught up in some case or departmental politics to have paid her much attention if she had called. “So what did he say?”

“We never got that far. I made the mistake of mentioning this brother up here who used to work with Perris first, and we never got around to it.”

I shot a glance at Kelly. “Was this someone you were dating?”

She shook her head. “He was a parent at the school, worked for the Feds. He’d been one of the participants in a career day we had for the kids a few weeks before.”

“Why mention him to Perris?”

“Because after he spoke at the assembly, he asked me if I was related to a fellow Q he knew who had twins and who worked undercover for the LAPD back in the seventies.”

A chill passed through me, causing the hairs on the back of my neck to stand at attention. Louise thought some of Perris’s clandestine phone calls were to an Omega, also known as Qs. “You remember his name?”

She shook her head again. “All I remember is he and his wife had moved here from the South somewhere and had twins, too.”

Relief swept over me, and I could feel myself breathing again. For a minute I’d thought she was talking about Paul Taft, but he’d made a point of saying he didn’t have any children, only a mother in San Jose. Besides, my brother and Louise didn’t marry and have their twins until after he left the department. “Did Perris know him?”

“He said no when I told him, but he took the guy’s number anyway, said he’d try to help him out.”

My brother was the last person on earth who would want to help a cop, especially a Fed. “Are you sure you can’t remember the guy’s name? What did he look like?”

“Tall guy, older, probably about Perris’s age.” Macon looked to Kelly for an assist. “You’d know the name if I called it.”

The hairs on my neck were pricking at my collar, and I began to feel light-headed. “Why would I know it?”

Macon said to Kelly: “The paper ran one of his poems during Black History Month, remember…”

Kelly frowned, eyes focused on some point in the distance. “Not his, exactly…”

Before she could say the line “We wear the mask that grins and lies,” the same poem I’d quoted at Teddy’s, I knew she was talking about Paul Taft. Stunned, I sat trying to piece together every interaction I’d had with the FBI agent over the past two days.

In that Monday meeting with him and Frohlich, it was Taft who suggested I be the one to hear his tipster’s information on the Nation of Islam, and then steered me into this trip up north.

And it was Taft who’d somehow known I was seeing my sister tonight, even though I was certain now that he hadn’t been anywhere nearby when I called her from the FBI’s offices.

And it was Taft who had told Macon things about Perris’s alleged work in the department that our brother had never mentioned to any of us. How could Taft know all that when he told me he had never met my brother?

All I could conclude was that for some reason, Paul L. D. Taft knew Perris and had been surveilling our family for some time. But what he hadn’t counted on was Macon making a lasting connection between his fishing for information about Perris last year and her fishing for a way to keep Joymarie out of her business, and then telling me about it.

Or had he? Maybe this game Taft was playing was designed to scare me, or Perris-about what I wasn’t sure. But I was uneasy enough to confide in my headstrong little sister and convince her that she should take a few days off work until I could sort out what Paul Taft wanted with our family. In response to the protests she threw at me, I told her it was not only for her safety but Perris’s as well.

“But why?” she insisted.

It was a question I asked myself the entire night as I kept watch in a chair in Macon’s living room, my gun on the coffee table, just in case. More than once I started to call my brother, to warn him or just confront him over the phone, but I feared I’d get nothing but a drunken denial and my window of opportunity would be slammed shut forever. Besides, if Perris knew Taft and had reason to fear him, he’d be taking appropriate precautions.

But there was someone I could call who might give me a straight answer, Chief Henry Youngblood, who was not only my godfather and C.O. of the bureau under which RHD fell but had been Perris’s commanding officer years before in Southwest. If Taft knew Perris professionally, Uncle Henry would have met him, too.

I caught him playing bid whist with some of the senior black command officers in the department, a ritual I knew about but had never been invited to join. “How are you doing, Goddaughter? I heard you took care of your business downtown.”

“If you’re talking about Chinatown, you pretty much didn’t give me a choice. Can we talk for a minute?”

“Problems with the Smiley Face case?”

“Problems with Perris.” Into the silence on the line, I said: “Last time we spoke, you asked me to cut him some slack. Something about his demons.”

“I vaguely remember that.”

“Well, one of his demons has resurfaced, and I was hoping you could tell me what it’s all about.” I told him about Agent Paul Taft, his and Wunderlich’s appearance on our case, his lies, Macon, the whole nine. “Taft told Macon he knew Perris from when he worked undercover for the department, but he told me yesterday they’d never met. What’s going on, Uncle Henry? Who is this guy and how does he seem to know that Perris worked undercover for the department when we don’t?”

I could hear my godfather excuse himself from the card game and a sliding glass door open and close. A click and a long inhalation told me he’d lit a cigar, something his doctors had told him to give up. “That was a long time ago, Charlotte. And it was only for a minute.”

He didn’t elaborate, which I wasn’t expecting, but which annoyed me just the same. “Did Perris and Taft work together?”

Uncle Henry was silent for a moment, then I heard him exhale. “How would I know? That was a lifetime ago, Char. Why can’t you let it go?”

“Because Paul Taft won’t let me.” I explained what had happened in Oakland that evening. “I need you to be straight with me, Uncle Henry-does this guy circling around our family have anything to do with Perris stealing Keith’s files last week?”

“That I can’t tell you,” he said, his voice weary.

“Can’t or won’t?”

“You’re going to have to ask your brother.”

“Don’t worry. When I get back, I will.”

“Maybe we can all sit down-”

“No, that’s okay, Uncle Henry. I shouldn’t have called you. As you said, I need to talk to Perris. This is between him and me. I’ll take care of it.”

“Charlotte, be careful,” he warned. “I don’t want to see you get hurt. Nobody does.”

“Don’t worry, Uncle Henry.” I wedged the phone between my ear and shoulder, hefted my weapon, checked it again, and put it back on Macon’s coffee table. “I can look out for myself just fine.”