Strange Bedfellows

3

Family Business

I should have used the ride back to the PAB to focus on Engalla and the Smiley Face shootings, but my thoughts kept returning to something Dr. P had said. And as much as I wished miracles were possible, I held out little hope that therapy or anything else could improve my relationship with my family or keep them out of my business.

The first-born daughter of a high-yellow Angeleno and her darker-skinned, Arkansas-born husband, I had felt like the ball in a Ping-Pong match, ricocheting between the competing interests of the blue-veined Currys versus the down-home Justices.

It had started over my choice of a career. I’d grown up with a natural love of history, a love my father, Matt, encouraged me to turn into teaching-a profession revered by his side of the family.

Whack.

But that wasn’t good enough for my multi-degreed, Talented Tenth mother, who felt that nothing less than doctors or lawyers should number among the fabulous Curry clan.

Whack.

Buffeted by their arguments, I veered toward a life of crime almost by default, spurred as much by the need to break out of my family’s prison of expectations as by the desire to murder a conniving heifer who’d trapped Aubrey Scott, my brother’s best friend and my high school crush, at the altar.

An undergraduate criminology class was just the ticket, allowing me to understand crime and the mind of the criminal without actually becoming one. The benefits of that class were many-I finally found something I was actually interested in, as opposed to having something drummed into my head by my parents, and I was able to transfer my affections from Aubrey to Professor Keith Roberts, a more mature brother who sported a big Afro and who lived in an apartment in the then-fashionable Jungle, down the hill from my parents’ home in View Park.

But even after I graduated and we began to work together professionally, it looked as if my interest in Keith would go unreciprocated until I invited him to a barbecue at my parents’ house one Fourth of July. To my surprise, he not only accepted but suggested we go out to a fireworks display afterward.

While I was shocked, my mother Joymarie was all atwitter, impressed that a full professor from the most prestigious university in town would deign to attend a Justice family gathering. “She’s drivin’ me crazy,” my father reported on the preparations. “I’ve had to rearrange the furniture in the livin’ room three times and have the pool cleaned twice! I hope this professor friend a’yours is worth my sanity!”

Another reason we kids called our parents’ home the Nut House.

My brother was excited about Keith’s visit, too, but for different reasons. Perris had joined the LAPD a few years before and worked out of Southwest, one of the busier divisions in the city. I couldn’t say police work suited my politically left-of-center brother, but my mother had determined he was even less suited to Vietnam, which he had an excellent chance of seeing, given his low draft number. So Joymarie had pulled some strings to get her favorite child on the department and safely ensconced under the watchful eye of my father’s best friend, Henry Youngblood, who also happened to be at the time commanding officer of the LAPD’s Southwest division and my godfather.

Perris had heard me talk about Keith’s research, and thought his knowledge of street gangs could benefit him and his partner, Burt Rivers, in their patrol work. So Perris descended on poor Keith the minute he hit the door, dragging him out by the pool to talk about Crips and Bloods, Deathstalkers and Royals. As the afternoon progressed I saw Keith warm to Perris, as people inevitably did, as seduced by my brother’s probing questions as I was repelled by them when they were directed my way.

But, a week later, when Perris dubbed Keith “a brilliant brother” while looking at the photos taken of Keith and me during the barbecue, my venture into the world of crime was somehow sanctioned, my chosen career as a criminologist suitable for admission into Joymarie Justice’s List of Approved Professions, even if Professor Roberts was a few shades darker than desirable in a potential mate for her fair-skinned daughter.

At least he has a Ph.D., she consoled herself.

And I was on that path, too, was what my father called ABD-all-but-the-dissertation-when Keith and our baby, Erica, were murdered in our driveway, victims of what law enforcement would come to call a drive-by shooting. Their deaths drove me over the edge and out of the ivory tower of academia to face crime where it lived-in the streets and houses of the City of Angels, in the hearts and minds of criminals who perpetrated more evil than I could ever imagine. Hunting them down, seeing them taken off the streets became the driving force of my life, as necessary to my survival as air. And I was willing to do whatever it took to keep doing it, even if it meant dredging up the past with Dr. P, reliving the sights of blood in my driveway, blood on the walls, blood on my hands.

But as the bus pulled up to the PAB, bile rose in my throat again, and I realized that “whatever it took” could be more distasteful than I had anticipated.

It was a blessing in disguise that I spotted Billie Truesdale as I entered the lobby. In a department where watching your back was as necessary to the job as carrying a weapon, Billie was one of the people I never had to worry about. In addition to being a sure-nough sister from the ’hood, what made me like Billie was the fact that she was a warrior, cunning enough to have survived both the violence-prone streets of her neighborhood and the testosterone-laden halls of South Bureau Homicide, where she’d worked for several years before getting called up to RHD. I’d been privileged to work a couple of cases with Billie while she was in South Bureau. I also knew her from the Georgia Robinson Society, an L.A. sisterhood of black females in law enforcement that meets every few months to console and cajole its members into staying the course. But it wasn’t until Billie transferred to RHD that I realized how deep the sisterhood went, how she had my back even when I thought it was covered.

So seeing her emerge from the elevator and cross the lobby that day allowed me to breathe a little easier and focus on the case ahead instead of the one just completed-the one that had taken me up those same elevators and into hell, then sent me back to BSS for another stretch in their padded offices. But no one knew about BSS but me, my commanding officer, and Dr. P., and I intended to keep it that way. Even if it meant keeping a secret from the closest thing I had to a friend on the job.

I slipped up behind her as she was buying some donuts from the snack shop. “Step away from those pastries and put your hands where I can see them!”

“Charlotte! Girl, how are you?”

“Fine, but you won’t be if you keep eating those fat pills.”

She smiled crookedly, hiding the package in a pocket. “Did you get my phone calls?”

I accepted her warm hug, giving her a sisterly pat on the back in return. “We’ve been letting the machine pick up the calls.” Calls from Billie, from my girlfriend Katrina, from exclusive-seeking reporters-and especially from my thieving drunk of a brother, whose bullshit and excuses I just wasn’t up to facing.

Billie snorted her approval as we headed for the elevators. “Fine as that man of yours is, I can understand that! So, what are you doing back so soon?”

I was amused at how Billie could appreciate men yet be so attracted to women. “It’s Aubrey’s fault. He saw Engalla on the news and made me watch the story.”

Billie cocked her head to the side. “And now you’re here because…?”

“I figured I could help out.”

“Won-der Wo-man!” Billie sang and twirled an imaginary lasso over her head.

But after I explained how the Smiley Face shootings had haunted me, she changed her tune. “I’d rather eat broken glass than have a cold case on my conscience,” she admitted. “And I hope you do get assigned to it, ’cause we’re sure ’nough going to need someone around who worked it before.”

I paused at the elevator, lightheaded at the memory of the last time I’d ridden it upstairs. “We? Stobaugh’s already put you on it?”

“Given the department’s workload and Middleton wrapping up the Vicki Park homicide, I’m the only available detective from our team-and a successor of sorts to the original folks who worked it.” The elevator doors opened, and Billie walked past me. “Speaking of Park, we each got a letter of commendation from Chief Youngblood for how we handled that case. I think it’s a bit of a power play on his part to keep the old guard from taking all the credit, but I’m not complaining.”

“Me either.” My feet rooted to the ground, I could not follow Billie into that elevator. “But that’s great for you and Middleton. Your first case out of the gate at RHD and a commendation to show for it. Solving the Smiley Face shootings will be another feather in your cap.”

Billie turned to see the look on my face. “Don’t look so upset! No one’s saying you can’t work the case. It’s just that…”

Realizing she’d misread my body language, I waved away her apology, and slipped inside. “Don’t even trip it.”

She pushed the third floor button. “You sure you feel up to it?”

“You’re the second person to ask me that today!”

“Sorry,” Billie mumbled and faced the front of the elevator. “I just remember the wiped-out look on your face when we found you in that interview room with that cop last week. Kind of the way you look right now.” When I didn’t respond, she repeated her concerns about my readiness to return to the job.

“Don’t be silly!” I managed to laugh this time. “Who’s the new lead on the case?”

But instead of Harry Bosch, Billie gave me someone else to worry about. “Thor.”

Knocking on seventy, Larry Thorfinsen had solved so many cases in his thirty-odd years in RHD that he’d attained mythic proportions in the LAPD pantheon of crimefighters. And while I’d learned a lot from him on our last case, Thor had some very human foibles, including a bad habit of turning a deaf ear when it came to confronting the wrong-headed slurs made by some of our colleagues. The most recent, which had tagged Billie and me as the Dykenamic Duo, had motivated me to bet the senior detective a hundred dollars that we’d solve the Park case, which we did in record time. And although he’d paid up, I had the lingering feeling that Thor was not on my side.

Billie unearthed the package of donuts from her pocket as we got out of the elevator. “I just came downstairs to get some sustenance before going to the briefing he’s called on the case.”

As if he knows anything about it. “Well, let me check in with the higher-ups, see if they’ll let me join you.”

“That’d be great.” Billie’s smile told me she meant it.