Free Fall (10 page)

The old man nodded and the girl picked up a remote control and clicked off the TV.

The younger man said, “Go tell Mama we got company.”

The girl slipped off the couch and went down a little hall into the back of the house. I said, “Your wife?”

“Lewis’s girlfriend, Shalene. This is their son, Marcus, and this is my grandfather, Mr. Williams. Say hello, Marcus.”

Marcus covered his eyes with his fingers and sat
down on the floor, then rolled over onto his belly. He giggled as he did it. The old man started rocking.

Lewis’s girlfriend came back with a heavy, light-skinned woman in her fifties. Ida Leigh Washington. There was a friendly half smile on her face, and a fine film of perspiration as if she’d been working.

The younger man held the card toward her. “Man wants to ask you about Lewis.”

The older woman froze as if someone had put a gun to her head, and the half smile died. “Are you with the police?”

“No, ma’am. I’m a private investigator, and I had some questions about what happened to Charles Lewis Washington. I was hoping you could help me.”

She looked at the card, and then she looked at me, and then she looked at her son. He crossed his arms and stared at her with the sort of look that said you’re on your own. She shook her head. “I’m very sorry, but you’ve come at a bad time.”

“Please, Mrs. Washington. This won’t take long, and it would be terribly inconvenient to come back later.” I thought about saying
aw, shucks
, but I figured that would be overboard.

She fingered the card and looked at the younger man. “James Edward, did you offer the man a cool drink?”

James Edward said, “You want a Scrapple?”

“No, thank you. I won’t take any more of your time than necessary.”

Mrs. Washington offered me a seat in the overstuffed chair. It was worn and comfortable and probably had belonged to Mr. Washington. She sat on the couch with the girl and the baby. James Edward didn’t sit.

I said, “Was Lewis in a gang, Mrs. Washington?”

Her foot began to move. Nervous. “No, he was not. The police said he was, but that wasn’t so.”

“I saw his arrest record. He was arrested for stealing electronics equipment with three other young men when he was sixteen years old. All four kids, including Lewis, admitted to being members of the Double-Seven Hoover Crips.”

“When he was a baby.” The foot stopped moving and she made an impatient gesture. “Lewis got out of all that. That Winslow Johnston was the troublemaker. They put him in the penitentiary and he got killed there and Lewis gave it up. He joined the Navy and got away from all this. When he came back he found Shalene.” Mrs. Washington reached out and patted Shalene on the thigh. “He was trying to make something of himself.”

Shalene was staring at me the way you stare at someone when you’re thinking that a good time would be punching little holes in their head with an ice pick.

“The report also said Lewis owned the pawnshop.”

“That’s right.”

“Where’d he get the money to buy an ongoing business like that, Mrs. Washington?”

There were lovely crocheted doilies on the couch’s arms. She straightened the one nearest her, then began to twist it. “He had money from the Navy. And I co-signed some papers.”

Marcus climbed down off the couch and toddled out of the living room and into the kitchen. Mrs. Washington leaned forward to see where he was going but Shalene didn’t. Mrs. Washington straightened and looked at her. “You’d better see where he’s going.”

Shalene went into the kitchen after him.

I said, “Mrs. Washington, I don’t want to offend you, and I promise you that nothing you say to me will be repeated to police or to anyone else. Was Lewis fencing stolen goods?”

Her eyes filled. “Yes,” she said. “I believe that he was. But that gave them no call. Lewis didn’t carry no gun. Lewis wouldn’t have done what they said.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I know my boy. I know him the way only a mother can know a son. They had no call to hurt my boy.” Jennifer Sheridan knowing Mark Thurman.

“Yes, ma’am.” She was twisting the crocheted doily into a high, tight peak.

I said, “If you believe that, then why did you drop the wrongful-death suit against the officers who killed him?”

Mrs. Washington closed her eyes against the tears, and the old man spoke for the first time. He said, “Because Lewis was always looking for trouble and he finally found it. There’s nothing else to it, no reason to keep it alive.” His voice was deep and gravelly, and more like a bark than a voice. His eyes blinked rapidly as he said it. “It was right to let it go, just let it go and walk away. Let the dead lie. There’s nothing more to say to it.” He put the Scrapple can carefully on the floor, then, just as carefully, he pushed himself up and walked from the room. He took very short steps, and used first the couch and then the wall to steady himself. Shalene had come back with Marcus in her arms to stand in the door to the kitchen, staring at me and hating me. Mrs. Washington was staring into the folds of her lap, eyes clenched, her body quivering as if it were a leaf in the wind. I sat there in the warm living room and looked at them and listened and I did not believe them. Mrs. Washington said, “You should go. I’m sorry, now, but you should go.”

“You really, truly believe he was murdered.”

“You have to go.”

I said, “Did the officers threaten you?”

“Please, go.”

“The officers who shot Lewis. Did they come here and threaten you and make you drop the suit?”

“Please leave.”

James Edward said, “What’re you going to tell him, Mama?”

“Don’t you say anything, James Edward. There’s nothing more to say.” Ida Leigh Washington pushed to her feet and waved me toward the door. “I want you out of my house. You’re not the police and you have no paper that says you can be here and I want you out.”

Marcus began to wail. For a moment, everything was still, and then I stood. “Thank you for your time, Mrs. Washington. I’m sorry about your son.”

James Edward went to the door and followed me out. Mrs. Washington hurried after us, but stopped in the door. “Don’t you go out there with him, James Edward. They’ll see you, out there.”

James Edward said, “It’s all right, Mama.”

He pushed her gently back into the house and closed the door. It was cooler on the porch, and the rose smell was fresh and strong. We stood like that for a moment, then James Edward went to the edge of the porch and peered out between the roses and looked at his neighborhood. He said, “I wasn’t here when it happened.”

“The Navy?”

He nodded. “Missed the riots, too. I was away for four years, first in the Med, then the Indian.”

“How long have you been out?”

“Five weeks, four days, and I gotta come back to this.” He looked at me. “You think it’s the cops, huh?”

I nodded.

He gave disgusted, and moved into the shade behind the trellis. “The cops killed my brother, but a nigger named Akeem D’Muere made’m drop the suit.”

I gave him stupid. “Who’s Akeem D’Muere?”

“Runs a gang called the Eight-Deuce Gangster Boys.”

“A black gang made your family drop the suit?” I was taking stupid into unexplored realms.

“You’re the detective. I been away for four years.” He turned from the street and sat on the glider and I sat next to him.

“So why’s a black gang force a black family to drop a wrongful-death suit against a bunch of white cops?”

He shook his head. “Can’t say. But I’m gonna find out.”

“There has to be some kind of connection.”

“Man, you must be Sherlock fuckin’ Holmes.”

“Hey, you get me up to speed, I’m something to watch.”

He nodded, but he didn’t look like he believed it.

I said, “This is your ’hood, James Edward, not mine. If there’s a connection between these guys, there’s going to be a way to find out, but I don’t know what it is.”

“So what?”

“So they don’t have a detective’s-mate rating in the Navy, and maybe I can help you find out. I find out, and maybe we can get your mother out from under this thing.”

James Edward Washington gave me a long, slow look, like maybe he was wondering about something, and then he got up and started off the porch without waiting for me. “C’mon. I know a man we can see.”

W
e walked out to the Corvette and James Edward Washington gave approval. I got in, but James Edward took a slow walk around. “Sixty-five?”

“Sixty-six.”

“I thought private eyes were supposed to drive clunky little cars like Columbo.”

“That’s TV.”

“What about if you follow somebody? Don’t a car like this stand out?” James Edward was liking my car just fine.

“If I was living in Lost Overshoe, Nebraska, it stands out. In L.A., it’s just another convertible. A lot of places I work, if I drove a clunker it’d stand out more than this.”

James Edward smiled. “Yeah, but this ain’t those places. This is South Central.”

“We’ll see.”

James Edward climbed in, told me to head east toward Western, and I pulled a K-turn and did it.

We drove north on Western to Slauson, then turned east to parallel the railroad tracks, then turned north again. James Edward told me that we were going to see
a guy he knew named Ray Depente. He said that Ray had spent twenty-two years in the Marine Corps, teaching hand-to-hand down at Camp Pendleton before tendering his retirement and opening a gym here in Los Angeles to work with kids and sponsor gang intervention programs. He also said that if anyone knew the South Central gang scene, Ray did. I said that sounded good to me.

Four blocks above Broadway I spotted the same two guys in the same blue sedan that I’d suspected of following me two days ago. They stayed with us through two turns, and never came closer than three cars nor dropped back farther than six. When we came to a 7-Eleven, I pulled into the lot and told James Edward that I had to make a call. I used the pay phone there to dial a gun shop in Culver City, and a man’s voice answered on the second ring. “Pike.”

“It’s me. I’m standing in a 7-Eleven parking lot on San Pedro about three blocks south of Martin Luther King Boulevard. I’m with a black guy in his early twenties named James Edward Washington. A white guy and a Hispanic guy in a dark blue 1989 sedan are following us. I think they’ve been following me for the past two days.”

“Shoot them.” Life is simple for some of us.

“I was thinking more that you could follow them as they follow me and we could find out who they are.”

Pike didn’t say anything.

“Also, I think they’re cops.”

Pike grunted. “Where you headed?”

“A place called Ray’s Gym. In South Central.”

Pike grunted again. “I know Ray’s. Are you in immediate danger?”

I looked around. “Well, I could probably get hit by a meteor.”

Pike said, “Go to Ray’s. You won’t see me, but I’ll be there when you come out.” Then he hung up. Some partner, huh?

I climbed back into the car, and fourteen minutes later we pulled into a gravel parking lot on the side of Ray Depente’s gymnasium. James Edward Washington led me inside.

Ray’s is a big underground cavern kind of place with peeling paint and high ceilings and the smell of sweat pressed into the walls. Maybe forty people were spread around the big room, men and women, some stretching, some grinding through
katas
like formal dance routines, some sparring with full-contact pads. An athletic woman with strawberry hair was on the mats with a tall black man with mocha skin and gray-flecked hair. They were working hard, the woman snapping kick after kick at his legs and torso and head, him yelling c’mon, get in here, c’mon, I’m wide open. Every time she kicked, sweat flew off her and sprayed the mat. Each of them was covered with so many pads they might’ve been in space suits. James Edward said, “That’s Ray.”

I started fooling around with the martial arts when I was in the Army and I got pretty good at it. Ray Depente was good, too, and he looked like an outstanding teacher. He snapped light punches and kicks at the woman, making her think defense as well as offense. He tapped them on the heavy pad over her breasts and taunted her, saying stop me, saying Jesus Christ protect yourself, saying you mine anytime I want you. She kicked faster, snapping up roundhouse kicks and power kicks, then coming in backwards with spin kicks. He blocked most of the kicks and slipped a few and taunted her harder, saying he ain’t never had a white woman but he was about to get one now. As fast as he said it she hooked his left knee and he stumbled to catch himself and when he did she got off a high fast spin kick that caught him on the back of the head and bowled him over and then she was on him, spiking kicks hard at his groin pad and his spine and his head and he
doubled into a ball, covering up, yelling that he gives, he gives, he gives, and laughing the big deep laugh. She helped him up and they bowed to each other, both of them grinning, and then she gave a whoop and jumped up to give him a major league hug. Then she hopped away to the locker rooms, pumping her fist and yelling “Yeah!” Ray Depente stepped off the mat, unfastening the pads, and then he saw us standing on the hardwood at the edge of the mat. He grinned at James Edward and came over, still pulling off the pads. He was two inches taller than me and maybe fifteen pounds heavier. “Welcome back, Admiral. I’ve missed you, young man.”

He grabbed James Edward in a tight hug, and the two men pounded each other on their backs. When James Edward stepped back, he said, “You ain’t never had a white woman but you’re about to get one now?”

Ray grinned. “Thirteen months ago two assholes followed her into a parking lot in Rancho Park. One of them raped her in the backseat of her MB. The second one was just getting ready to mount up when a couple of women came along and scared’m off. What you think would happen if those guys came back today?”

“Testicular transplant?”

“Uh-huh.”

I said, “She’s come along fast.”

“Motivation, baby. Motivation is all.”

James Edward said, “Ray, this is Elvis Cole. He’s a private investigator.”