From Cape Town with Love (9 page)

No clear shot of my face showed up in the video footage. I hadn't really tried to avoid the cameras, but people like Maitlin seem to get what they want, whether the rest of us like it or not.

I boarded my plane back home to Los Angeles with a check for five thousand dollars in my pocket. Not bad for a day's work; it was more than I would have asked for. I decided I would send half the money to Children First, where a couple thousand dollars would go a long way. Remembering Oliver made me smile.

I couldn't wait to tell April about my day.

Liar,
my memory whispered. April had called me twice the day before, after I left her stranded, and I hadn't called back. I wasn't interested in either the pity or the anger in her messages. If she was pissed at me, maybe it was better that way. Give it all a clean break.

We were gone.

Grief came, so crisp that it shocked me, maybe the worst of my life. If I hadn't been surrounded by strangers, I might have screamed.

At long last, I was in love.

Fuck.

Two months after our visit to Langa, Maitlin messengered me a wedding invitation and a phone number to make travel arrangements for two to São Paolo in March. In a handwritten note, she thanked me for donating money to Children First. I'd asked for anonymity, but Mrs. Kunene must have told her. I didn't mind.

My father didn't feel up to a trip overseas, so I took Chela with me instead. I could write a book about my adventure with Chela at the wedding of the year in São Paolo. Let's just say that Chela gained a newfound
respect for me and my growing clout; and I wouldn't go back there without a bodyguard of my own. But that's another story.

Maitlin's wedding and its guest list whipped the tabloids into such an orgasm that they forgot her pending adoption. But two days after the wedding, when the news was reporting that Sofia Maitlin and her new husband were honeymooning in Cape Town, I got a text from an unidentified number, a one-line message:

WE GOT HER!—S.M.

The next day, the television screens were full of visions of Nandi on Sofia Maitlin's arm. It was the most satisfaction I'd ever felt after a job.

If only real life had fairy-tale endings.

The text message blipped across my phone on a Friday night, on a rare evening when I was thinking about going out. Dad had company, so I didn't feel any pressure to stay and keep him company while his lady friend, Marcela, was at her book club meeting.

I had a spy in my life, and now she knew my cell number
and
my email address. It was the third message in seven months, arriving as unexpectedly as the first—I'd gotten the first one right after I solved the T. D. Jackson case, while I was sitting on the plane bound for South Africa. My “old friend” knew things about my life he, or she, shouldn't.

And two of the messages mentioned Chela, which made me nervous. Outside of a very small circle of people who had a stake in keeping their mouths shut, no one knew how and why Chela lived with me. But my spy knew.

I cursed myself again for not working harder to make Chela's adoption legal. I'd traded calls with a lawyer as soon as I got back from South Africa, inspired by my visit to Children First, but I'd let it slide. My case had complications: Chela was a runaway and a fugitive, and I had been
harboring her illegally. I was also a single man trying to adopt a teenage girl with a history in the sex game. Trying to adopt her might cause more problems than it would fix, especially with her eighteenth birthday only a year away. I had kept her out of trouble, for the most part, and I hoped that was enough.

But someone out there wasn't willing to forget about us.

I walked across the hall to Chela's room and knocked. Through the door, techno music played with the wildly earnest drone of hormonedrenched dance clubs. Chela cycled between techno and Metallica; I longed for the days when it was nonstop rap. When she didn't answer, I knocked louder and tried the knob. The door was locked. Strictly verboten.

“Hey,”
I said.

The door flew open. Chela had her phone to her ear and her Gucci bag on her shoulder, ready to go out. At seventeen, Chela looked years older behind her dark eye makeup, her only girly concession. Her style was baggy jeans, sweatshirts, and Dodgers caps, but her height made her look like a runway model undercover. She was five-ten—a five-inch growth spurt in two years.

Chela tried to close the door before I could get a good look at her room, but I saw the mountain of clothes. I wished I'd kept my own room, but I probably handed over my prized space because Chela had so little, and had lost so much. Yeah, I spoiled her. Guilty as charged.

“I just got a weird email,” I said. “You gotten any messages from someone you don't know? Won't say who they are?”

I hadn't mentioned my previous message. With a few choice key strokes, my unknown ally had disentangled Chela from an internet chicken hawk.

“Weird messages?” Chela shook her head blankly, listening to her phone.

“Where you going?” I said.

“Check the board.”

After our spring adventure in São Paulo, Chela had to write her whereabouts on a schedule posted outside her door—the green marker scrawl said she was going to a M (movie) with B (her egghead/wrestler sometime boyfriend Bernard). In São Paulo one night, she'd ended up in a room party with a herd of Texas millionaires. I found her drinking
shots and regaling cowboys with dirty songs, a life-of-the-party version of Chela I had never seen up close.

And yes, that's tangentially related to why I can't go back. And no, I won't say more. But it did involve a variant of Texas hold 'em that gives new meaning to the term “No Limit.”

“What movie you going to?” I said.

“Wow. This is really a whole new level of pain in my ass.”

“I'm just curious.”

“Curious like a prison guard.”

Every shard of information was a battle with Chela, so protecting her was hard work. Soon after I rescued her from a madam I once worked for myself, two dirty-as-they-come LAPD officers abducted Chela in Palm Springs. To them, Chela was nothing more than a rich man's property and plaything. Both of us nearly died that day. I still had bad dreams about it.

“Let me holla at Bernard,” I said, trying to sound casual. When I held out my hand for the phone, Chela's eyes said,
Negro, please.

“B., Ten says hey,” she said to her phone. I heard an insectlike voice that might belong to the long-suffering kid who was struggling manfully to be Chela's boyfriend. “Great—B. says hey, too, so we're all happy. Okay, Officer?” Chela's voice was smiling, but her glare told me to fuck off.

I hated my father when I was Chela's age, so I understood that glare. But Chela was too good a liar for me to trust her, and I couldn't pretend I didn't know better.

“Just think . . . ,” I said. “When you go to college, I'll be off your back.”

Chela gave me an exasperated shrug. “Yeah, right. See you at midnight,” she said, and breezed past me to the stairs. Midnight was her curfew, though neither of us used that word. A promise to adhere to one of my rules was as good as Chela saying,
Good night, Ten, I love you.

I'd been so pleased with my plan to put Chela through college that I'd forgotten to bring her on board. Chela had ignored her chance to take the SATs as a junior, and I hadn't noticed in time.

“We need to talk about college!” I called after her.

“Says the guy who dropped out.”

Then she was gone. The front door opened and closed nearly silently
while Chela made her hasty escape. There was a cop in our house, after all.

Loud men's laughter floated from the living room, a reminder of why I'd avoided going downstairs. Dad was free to entertain anyone he chose, but LAPD Lieutenant Rodrick Nelson was no friend of mine. I couldn't remember the last time I'd heard such a braying, carefree laugh from my father's throat. Hell, maybe never.

I walked downstairs, noticing Alice's collection of movie posters and memorabilia hanging on the stairwell walls. Josephine Baker in a banana skirt. Signed photos from Count Basie and Sidney Poitier. Every item was fascinating, but nothing was intimate—just like April had once told me.

“. . . and then the nigger said, ‘I thought it was
you,'”
Nelson finished in his wall-shaking basso. Another gale of laughter from my father, and Nelson wiped tears from his eyes while my father slapped his knee.

“Stop, man,” Dad said. “You oughta be 'shamed.”

Dad and Nelson were on their second round of Coronas, as cozy on the living-room sofa as two homeboys on the stoop of a corner liquor store. Or like a father and son, except for the laughing. The sight of them together pissed me off.

Nelson was my age, a dark-skinned brother who could double for a
Shaft-era
Richard Roundtree. He was my father's protégé, had served with Dad for fifteen years in the Hollywood division before Nelson got promoted to Robbery-Homicide and my father's heart attack forced him to retire. This was Nelson's first visit to my father in five years—except for one time in a Ventura County hospital that had been an interrogation, not a visit.

Turns out Dad was keeping the wrong company. Long story.

Grins and teeth faded fast when I appeared. Were I the paranoid type, I might have thought they were talking about me.

Nelson glanced at me as if I'd brought an odor. “Okay, I gotta run, Preach.”

I'd solved two cases for him, so Nelson should have hugged me; instead, he was too tight to speak my name. Nelson thought he knew the
real
Tennyson Hardwick: booked for prostitution at Hollywood division, my father's old command. Maybe Nelson was the reason that arrest had been wiped from my record—that
and
the trumped-up attempted murder charge during a bodyguard gig.

But if Nelson was my blue-winged guardian angel, it was only to spare Dad the scandal. If not for Dad, Nelson would have sent me to prison without a thought. He itched to tell Dad who I really was, or maybe he already had. It hardly mattered anymore. After I lost April, I vowed not to let anyone else hold my past over me.

“Come by anytime, Nelson,” I said with a too-friendly grin. “We missed you.”
What took you so long, asshole? Easy to laugh when the mess is cleaned up.

Nelson saw my thoughts, and shame made him blink away. He knew all about dispensing shame: After Serena died, he orchestrated an army of cops to swarm my house, a spectacle my neighbors were still talking about. That shit had been plain unnecessary.

Nelson rose to his feet and my father followed, pushing himself up with help from the sofa's armrest. Dad walked across the living room, toward the door.
Walked.
The man had been bedridden when I moved him into my house.

Dad was showing off for Nelson, so he levered himself off the dining-room table, the back of the recliner, and the corner wall, making it to the foyer. Nelson matched my father's pace, pretending not to notice Dad's struggle to stay upright. Dad needed his wheelchair or walker in public, but at home he was a man on his feet again.

Dad's health struggles had allowed me to witness his mesmerizing calm in the moments before his heart surgery—and then his quiet, tenacious battle to rise from the dead. Nelson had missed the most important lessons.
Asshole.

“I'll get back to you on that dinner, Preach,” Nelson said from the open doorway.

“Naw,” Dad said, resting his back against the wall. “I don't get out much these days.”

“C'mon,” Nelson said. “You can't miss this! Dolinski's finally retiring.”

“Damn, Dad, get out of the house,” I said, grudgingly agreeing with Nelson. Hal Dolinski was one of the few cops who'd kept in touch with my father, and he'd come through for us when I was a suspect in Serena's death. I owed him big time. “I'll go with you.”

Nelson gave me a Look:
The hell you will.

My Look:
Try to stop me.

“Sure, come fellowship with us, Tennyson,” Nelson said. “But be warned: We'll be real cops using big words that might go over your head.”

“Like ‘I indisputably fucked up my cases'? Or ‘I conclusively have my head up the boss's ass'?”

The cords in Nelson's neck tightened. Nelson would never have solved the deaths of Serena and T. D. Jackson without me. He didn't know everything I knew about either case, but I'd given him enough to clear the files and look good to the police chief. And he hated that.

“Like a couple damn kids . . . ,” Dad said, pleased that we were fighting over him.

When Nelson finally left, I told Dad about the mysterious email I'd received—so I had to tell him about the first one, which I'd kept quiet for Chela's sake. I told Dad that a stranger had flushed out an internet predator seven months before—I just didn't mention how pissed off Chela was when I made her stop flirting with the forty-six-year-old married prick.

I showed Dad the email I'd received the previous fall: