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“Then word on the street’s gonna be that Ocho’s girl was ballin’ an off-brand. I’ll let Ocho figure out who.”

  Frank let that sink in, then added, “Si estas firme, your boyfriend can come home.”

  La Reina made a face suggesting that wasn’t much of a reward for her troubles.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Frank was talking to Nook and Bobby, about to call Northeast CRASH to see if the gang division would give them a liaison to help ID bangers who might have been at the Eagle Rock party.

  “We don’t need any help,” Nook protested. “I can —”

  “— you know that area?”

  “Not so well, but I can figure it out.”

  Frank put her hand on the phone.

  “No offense, but this’ll go a lot faster if we’re working with someone who knows the place.”

  Frank saw that a lot, cops hating to give help or ask for it. They were greedy with their knowledge, hoarding it like provisions during famine. They were most disinclined to lend assistance to other agencies, but were even possessive within their own divisions and with their own colleagues. Frank guessed because most cops were men, it was a pride thing, like not asking for directions. She thought it ridiculous and had no trouble asking for or giving help to other jurisdictions. With the advent of computerized databases, sharing information was becoming increasingly easier, and some of the “I got mine, now you get yours” attitude was breaking down. Still it was common with old-timers like Nook, and Frank wasn’t about to let him get away with it. Especially on this case.

  But the CRASH cowboys were as reluctant to offer help as Nook was to accept it. A lieutenant told her they couldn’t possibly break anyone loose until Monday. Frank had no alternative but to let her boys do what they could alone, and meanwhile, they could track Itsy down too. She sent them out and reached for her ringing phone.

  “Howdy,” came the long drawl at the other end. “How ya doin?”

  “Hey, sport. What’s up?”

  “Not much. I’m at work. Luchowski’s got me back on paper. Doesn’t want me gettin’ over-exposed,” she complained dramatically. Frank almost smiled. Kennedy loved undercover work and resented when she had to stay behind the desk for any length of time. Frank didn’t say he was probably right, only offered condolences.

  “Well, I reckon as I’ll live. Not happily, but I’ll live. I been sittin’ a spell, goin’ through this joker’s file, trying to find some aliases and I came up with a homey name a Custard Pie. I ran him in the computer but nothing came up. I remembered Diego was talking about him one night at the Alibi. I remembered on account a how that infected eye gave him the name. You know the dude I’m talking about?”

  “I know the guy, he’s an Eight-trey Crip. Deals mostly weed and Sherms.”

  “Yeah, that’s him,” Kennedy said languidly, “only now he’s hanging around elementary schools trying his hand at crack.”

  She needed whatever Frank had on him and Frank promised to get it for her.

  “Cool. I’d shore appreciate it.”

  Annette Funicello meets Dale Evans, Frank thought.

  “No problem.”

  There was a slight pause, then Kennedy said, “Now be honest, you miss me, don’t ya?”

  The moment she heard her voice Frank figured something like that was coming, and she was steeled for it.

  “Can’t sleep at night.”

  “I know you’d never tell me anything like that if it was true,” Kennedy countered, correctly. Then she pushed even further, saying, “Looks like you and Doc Law are gettin’ along real good.”

  “No better than you and me.”

  “You sure about that? You two look awful snug together and don’t I get some hairy eyeball whenever I come around.”

  “Don’t read too much into drinks after work, sport. Not everybody has your appetite for bed-hopping.”

  “Oo-o,” Kennedy drew out, “did I hit a nerve?”

  “No,” Frank lied, irritated by the conversation. “You’ve just spoiled me for other women. Look. I’ve got to get back to work. I’ll get the Custard Pie data to you ASAP”

  She hung up without waiting for Kennedy’s goodbye.

  Frank sniffed the gummy coffee at the bottom of the pot and put it back down. She’d much rather have a beer at the Alibi with her feet propped on a chair but she had an appointment with Clay at 4:00. Checking her watch, she calculated she could squeeze in a quick visit to the Estrella’s. She did, and was pleased to find them all home.

  “One big happy family,” she noted affably, perching on the sofa arm. “But every family’s got secrets, right?”

  Gloria juggled the baby and didn’t take her eyes from the novela on the TV Claudia leaned silently against the wall and Tonio looked like he’d been doing some herbal, sprawled in the worn easy chair, dull-eyed and slack-mouthed.

  “Tell me something. I thought Itsy and Placa were hooked up, but now I hear they busted up a while back. Who was Placa’s new tight?”

  They all stared at anything but Frank. Zero reaction.

  “What if I told you she was twistin’ Ocho’s girlfriend?”

  “You’d be fuckin’ crazy,” Gloria laughed, but Tonio threw Frank a hasty glance. He licked his lips and wiggled deeper into the chair. Frank smiled inside, knowing he knew.

  “De verdad,” she continued. “Placa had La Reina tattooed on her leg, right up here,” Frank drew a line across her thigh. Tonio didn’t look but the other two did. Gloria stopped bouncing the baby.

  “Mentirosa,” she growled.

  “Tejuro,” Frank pledged, hand held in the air.

  Gloria jumped up in a full and sudden fury, screaming, “Jodida puta! How could she be disrespecting her clica like that? That fuckin’ bitchl”

  Claudia merely watched her grandchild crawling on the floor and Frank asked, “You knew?”

  She waved a hand, “I don’t know about that kinda thing. Carmen, she always have to be different. Always want to be somethin’ she not. I don’t want to know nothin’ about that business of hers.”

  Claudia crossed herself and Frank looked at Tonio for an answer. He wouldn’t meet her gaze. She wanted to talk to him, but she wanted him alone. She’d wait. She was running out of time for today. With a grin, she said, “I hope this was as much fun for you as it was for me. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  She let herself out, pondering how to approach Tonio as she crept through side street traffic to the freeway traffic. She was five minutes late for her meeting with Clay, but his secretary apologized that he was running late too. Frank nodded, quickly disregarding the mental health brochures scattered around as reading material. A bottled blonde, rail-thin and heavily made-up, rattled through a Good Housekeeping. Must have brought it with her, Frank thought, wondering who she was waiting for. Husband? Boyfriend? Frank decided to wait in the hallway, not wanting to bump into whoever came out of Clay’s office.

  She paced, chumming her thoughts back to Placa. Maybe it was inevitable, but like Noah and Bobby, Frank had hoped Placa would turn out differently. She wasn’t the only one who must have thought that; there probably wasn’t a cop in Figueroa who at some point hadn’t picked up that baby girl padding happily along the sidewalk in a loaded diaper. She’d laugh and wiggle when you held her and always tried to pry your badge off. As an older child she’d become wary, but quick to smile when she recognized you. When she started banging, she’d become hostile and insolent, but still able to summon a trace of civility for the cops she knew best. Despite the rough tagger exterior, there was still a tenuous respect for the past if nothing else. It was that faint memory, of a time before gangs, that cops like Frank and Noah had hoped would jettison Placa out of the life.

  Claudia had chipped during Placa’s earliest years. When she wasn’t in the spoon she took good care of her kids, and with their overwhelming backlog, Child Protective Services never got around to taking them. There were occasional men around, the longest lasting being Gloria’s father. He was a ratty
punk and Claudia had his name tattooed over her left breast. Frank had broken up more than one bottle-flying, fist-smashing catfight over him and it wasn’t unusual to get a Saturday night domestic violence call from Claudia’s house. What money he didn’t make hustling and fencing cars, Claudia made by selling junk, and doing minor B and E’s. She’d been busted dozens of times, from misdemeanors to grand theft auto, and Frank had taken her in at least seven or eight of those times. But there were so many more “serious” offenders on the LA County court dockets. When she shyly appealed to the judge that she had three babies at home that needed taking care of she got off on probation or her cases got tossed or pleaded. At worst, she’d end up at Sybil Brand for a couple months and Julio’s wife would take the kids in.

  Frank had a softness for Claudia. They ran into each other frequently, and while Claudia was uncommunicative, she was never as openly hostile to Frank as she was to the other jura. The last time Frank had taken her in had been years ago, when she was a Sergeant, and Claudia’d been on the nod. Her hair was dirty and there was no make-up to cover her yellowing skin. Where she’d fallen onto the sidewalk her cheek was gouged and her upper lip was split. Frank had propped her in the back of the squad car and flies tried to cluster around a bloody scrape on her knee. Frank had waved them away, closing the door carefully. Behind the wheel she’d flipped the rearview mirror so Claudia could see herself.

  “What happened to that pretty girl I met my first day on patrol?” Frank wondered aloud. Claudia had stared cloudily at her reflection, as if trying to find the answer. Maybe the question had done some good. When she went into Brand that time, she’d been forced into quitting the smack. She was also carrying her second son, and when she came out she’d stayed clean.

  It was a couple years later that Frank presented Placa with the metal badge. She’d pinned it on the chubby girl’s thin T-shirt and she’d beamed. She couldn’t stop staring at her chest. Every time Frank saw Placa after that she had that damn badge drooping off her chest. Until one day Frank saw her playing on the sidewalk, in a bare shirt. When Frank asked her where the badge was, Placa’s face darkened and she said some boys had ripped it off and jumped on it till it was flat and crumpled. So Frank had paid the cop with the machine shop to make her half a dozen and the cycle continued until one day Placa didn’t want the badges anymore.

  “How come?” Frank had asked.

  “My tio and brother says they’re stupid, only the police wear badges and I’m not a police.”

  “You could be a police,” Frank said, “when you’re a little bigger.”

  Placa considered that carefully.

  “Then I could wear a badge all the time?”

  “Everyday. And no one could ever take it away from you.”

  “No one ever takes your badge?”

  “Nunca.”

  “But how big do I have to be?”

  “You have to be as old as your brother Chuey.”

  Then very seriously, Carmen said, “Entonces, I’ll wait to be a police. Then I can have my own badge and no one can take it from it me.”

  She and Frank had exchanged a low-five. Thing was, Carmen never got to be as old as her brother Chuey.

  The receptionist told Frank she could go in. Clay rose to meet her and they shook hands. After she settled uneasily into one of his chairs he asked how her week had been.

  “Okay,” she answered noncommittally, knowing she was buying time. Clay stared over the glasses at the tip of his nose. Frank knew what was expected and Clay always gave her the option to waste the hour or be productive.

  “Had a girl get shot up this week. Knew her for a long time. She was a banger, but she was a good kid, good grades. She was a mean OG so nobody gave her trouble. She could get away with being smart. Could have gotten a scholarship to art schools.”

  Holding her thumb and forefinger together, Frank continued, “She always got this close to convictions. Managed to wiggle out of them like her mother. Would have been fun to see her come up.”

  When Frank didn’t continue, Clay said, “How does her death make you feel?”

  Frank tossed a shoulder, shying from the answers. They swirled on the edge of her consciousness, waltzing like women in gauzy ball gowns. It took her a moment to pick out individual feelings and give them names. She walked over to the window. The pane was cool and solid against her fingers, a comforting contrast to the turbulence within. Knowing what Clay wanted to hear, she quickly catalogued and labeled her feelings.

  “Mad. Sad. Frustrated.”

  Then Mag’s parting words rang in her ears.

  “When are you going to grow up?”

  Did Frank really want to drag her ass in here once a week to try and pull one over on Clay or did she want to get on with her life? She conceded the former was more appealing but the latter more necessary. She didn’t ever again want to come close to the abyss she’d stepped into after the Delamore case.

  She’d conveniently blamed her crash on the burden of that case, knowing full well that if Delamore hadn’t tipped her over the edge, something or someone else inevitably would have. Kennedy had her flaws but Frank would always be grateful she’d been around that night. Next time, if there was a next time, there might not be someone there. She turned and faced Clay.

  “She was only seventeen. She was actually going to graduate from high school in a few months. I don’t think anyone else in her family had ever done that. She was born the year I joined the force. Fact, I met her mother first day on the job. She was hanging with some cholos, drunk off her ass. She was pregnant, just huge, about to deliver any day and she was swigging out of a bottle of Boone’s Farm. It’s funny. I smell that stuff and it’s pow — total flashback to that day.”

  Frank paused. The memory was as clear as the window she looked through.

  “My FTO and I were driving around, and he saw her in this alley. He pulls up. He’s already pissed that he’s being forced to work with a woman — and that would have been the nicest thing he ever called me — so by the time we get to these homes, he’s on a royal tear. He swaggers down the alley, slapping his stick in his hand, and I’m still trying to get out of the car. I’m jamming my hat on, trying to get my stick in my belt, juggling my field book. I’ve got no idea what’s going on, got no clue what’s being said on the radio. I thought, maybe he heard something, but then I was wondering, why didn’t he respond? So whatever, I’m following him like a lost dog, and he says something stupid to these kids, which doesn’t surprise me after having driven with him for an hour.

  “They’re all just staring at the ground, kicking at it. You can tell they’re not happy. And no one answers him, so he swings his stick at the kid closest to him and says ‘Hey! I asked you a question.’ I heard his stick connect and thought, man, that must have hurt. Well this kid says they’re not doing anything and that Roper, that was his name, he didn’t have to do that. Of course this just pisses Roper off even more. Then the girl says something really stupid in Spanish, about a fat pig or something. She is totally pasted, and I’m thinking, ‘Oh Christ, the shit is going to fly’ But Roper’s cool. He just goes and stands over her. He puts his shoe on her shoulder and she tips over. I want to help her but I’m thinking I better just stay out of this. But the guy who’s already mouthed off, he tries helping her and Roper swats at him with his stick, like he’s playing with him. He says, ‘You want to fight me over this, Juan? Huh? You want to fight me over this cunt? just totally baiting the guy. And this kid knows he’s fucked.

  “Roper tells them all to leave, but this guy, he wants a piece of Roper so bad he can taste it. He stands there, staring at Roper and I’m thinking, ‘Just go home, buddy. For Christ’s sake.’ But he reaches down to help Claudia up, she’s out of it, all sticky with wine, and Roper goes whap! with his stick. Right on the guy’s wrist, just shattered it. If he’d been playing baseball he’d have had a homerun. The kids got to be in pain but he just makes this little yelp and jerks his hand away. It starts swellin
g up like a fucking basketball, but the kid doesn’t say a thing, just holds his arm and gives Roper the evil eye. Roper gets into his face, saying all sorts of shit, and he’s backing this guy out of the alley. The other homeboys are gone. They saw the shit going down and they flew. So Roper finally gets the poor sonofabitch out of there, and he comes back into the alley, all happy now. He’s got this wicked grin on his face, and I don’t know what’s happening next but I know it’s not going to be pretty.

  “And he’s a big guy. LAPD beautiful. Tall, dark, built — the kind of cop straight women just pray will show up to their calls. So he strolls over to Claudia, unzipping his fly. He grins at me, an evil fucking grin, and he says, ‘You can watch this or go back to the car like a good little girl.’ “

  Frank stopped. She watched a man lean into a bronze sedan, talking to the driver. He wore a gray suit and carried a briefcase. His hair was sandy and thinning though he looked trim and fairly young.

  “I knew that was a defining moment. Either I was in with Roper or I wasn’t. I could just see my whole future. It was like a long highway with a fork in the middle. On the one side, I was down. I’d go along with him. I’d be part of the team. What was happening was ugly, but that’s the way it was. I’d seen it in my own neighborhood growing up. That was just the way the world was. Nothing I could do about it.

  “On the other road, I was alone. There was just me in the middle of this goddamn highway, no team, nobody. And I wanted to be part of the team. I remember thinking I’d always been alone and that it would be so nice to be part of something, just once. I’d busted my ass to get where I was and I didn’t want to lose it. That other road was calling me and God, I wanted to be on it.”

  The man stuck his hand into the car, seeming to shake the driver’s hand.

  “I remember I just kind of looked at my feet. That alley was filthy. Busted bottles and beer caps, cigarette packs, tossed garbage. And it smelled like rotten vegetables and piss and wine. I thought I was going to throw up. Roper was saying something to Claudia and I saw her spit on him. Goddamn. He had her by the hair and he yanked her head back so hard I thought he was going to break her neck. And then I just snapped. It was so fucking weird — I literally saw red. I slammed him with my stick, I mean with everything I had and that fucker went down. And son-of a-bitch, I was excited by that. He looked up at me, surprised at first and with just this trace of fear, and I loved it. Then he got pissed and I got scared — well, not really scared, but just incredibly amped and wired and wanting to take him on. I was ready to kill the sonofabitch. I understand how that happens. I understand why people do what they do out there.