In the Night of the Heat (29 page)

We made it inside. One threshold crossed. My eyes cross in de
partment stores, like most men, but this was for Chela. In the formalwear section, the collection of taffeta, chiffon, lace, and beads stopped Chela in her tracks as soon as it came into sight. The dresses radiated queenliness.

“Oh,
hell
no,” Chela said.

“Just find something that works for you, Chela.”

“I'll try on one dress, and we're gone.”

“At least five, or don't bother. For something like this, girls try on twenty dresses sometimes, Chela.”

“Yes—very shallow, lame girls. Chela does not wear dresses like these. Not in a million years.”

When the store employee dashed over to see if she could help us, I waved her back. Extra pressure wouldn't help. Chela would only find something she liked on her own.

“I'll get you started with one,” I said. “You pick the other four.”

“I'm not going to that dance anyway.”

I ignored her. She knew she was going, so that argument was stale. Instead, I headed to the racks and looked through the dresses. There were several short dresses I thought might work, but I deliberately chose a long chiffon gown in pastel rainbow hues, knowing she wouldn't like it. Even if I only girded her tastes in opposition to mine, at least she would be thinking about it.

“So I guess I'll have sex with him,” Chela said casually. “That's what people do after these dances, right? They get all dressed up, then they get a motel room?”

“I'd be surprised if he has any plans like that.”

“Who said anything about
his
plans?”

Chela was trying her best to get under my skin, but I didn't let it work. Instead, I handed her the rainbow gown. Her eyes flashed.

“You're kidding, right?” she said. “You better be kidding.”

When I didn't answer, she plowed into the racks herself. Hangers squealed as she raced through the dresses. One black dress fell to the floor, but I picked it up and hung it up again.

“You said you don't know him that well,” I said. “Isn't it a little early for sex?”

“I've known him since the beginning of the year. He's in my trig class, too.”

I realized Chela might be serious: She'd agreed to go to the homecoming dance with Bernard, and now she was trying to figure out what else the ritual entailed. Out of faith, Chela had fashioned a new life and new rules, but she still felt lost. I kept forgetting that.

Suddenly, I saw the dress: It was a minidress, not floor-length, such a pale powder color that it was almost white. An elegant bubble dress that hung from the neck. It wouldn't fit her too snugly, so she wouldn't feel too exposed even as she would look stunning. The dress had three rows of large mock crystals at the neckline—striking but not too girly.

Chela followed my eyes. “Forget it,” she said. “Cute, but it's white. Not Chela's color.”

“Off-white.” I held it up to her neck, and the dress leaped out against her brown skin. One of the crystals sparkled dully against her chin. Beautiful. “At least put it on the list.”

She shook her head, so I backed off and hung it in plain sight. Once she'd tried on a few others, she might come back to it.

“He eats lunch with me sometimes,” Chela went on. “He makes me laugh my ass off.”

As I thought, she liked Bernard more than she'd let on. “So…you think you should have sex with him because he's funny?”

“Well, what do people wait for? He's hot and funny, we're all dressed up—why not?”

“Does he have a job?”

Chela shot me a look. “At a movie theater, like minimum wage. But he's
sixteen.
We're going to a dance, Ten—we're not getting married.”

I shrugged. “When I was in high school, Dad found a box of condoms in my backpack. He told me, ‘When you're ready to take care of a baby, you're ready to have sex.'”

“He told
me
to wait until I'm married.”

“He didn't bother with that for me. But sure, you can try it.”

“Yeah, right—as in
never,
” Chela said.

“Listen, I just think you should wait for the right guy, the right time. Bernard sounds cool, he asked you to a dance, but he's not even your boyfriend.”

“Well, he is now. That's what everyone's saying, thanks to you.”

“Chela, I'm talking about a relationship.
Love,
right? You love him, he loves you.”

“What if you just want to get laid?” Her voice was loud enough that a bookish-looking woman in the neighboring section glanced over.

I tried not to let her throw me. “So what? You still need to both be set up—you've got an education, you've got a job. Maybe then you'll be ready.”

“Like I said before…that sounds like never. I'm going to the dressing room.”

Chela had five dresses across her arm. In a glance, none of them appealed to me, but it was a start. As Chela went to the dressing rooms by herself, I wished April were home, and that Chela had gotten along with her better. April's absence felt sharp, suddenly.

“Are you gonna come out and let me see how they look?” I called after her.

“No way!”

But within five minutes, Chela shuffled back in a floral print dress so long on her that it dragged on the floor. She gazed at herself in the boutique's array of three full-length mirrors. From the colors to the pattern, the dress was hideous.

“You like that?” I said.

“No. They all suck, Ten. I told you.”

“Let me see another one. That green one…?”

Chela didn't move, preoccupied with staring at her shoulders from different angles. She seemed to like the spaghetti straps. Even in a terrible dress, she saw herself with fresh eyes.

“Now it's my turn to get into
your
business,” Chela said to her reflection. At first, I wasn't sure she was talking to me. “I hope you won't let that cop scare you off, Ten.”

Freedom.
My mantra came to a halt in my head.

“Who?” I said. “Nobody's scaring me off.”

She gazed at me skeptically in the mirror, addressing my reflection. “So who killed T.D. Jackson? I thought maybe that cop scared you off the case.”

“Carlyle Simms probably did it, but I'm not a psychic, Chela. I had a job, I did it, I got paid. Nobody's scaring me off.” I had to repeat myself. Her idea that Nelson scared me was ridiculous, almost laughable. I had to make sure she got her facts straight.

Chela turned to look me in the eye. Then she gathered the folds of her dress so she wouldn't trip on her walk back to the dressing room. “Maybe,” she said. “Carlyle was an asshole, for sure. But it didn't seem like he'd killed T.D. to me.”

Me either. That was the thing.

The other thing was, I had let Nelson scare me off.
Shit.
So much for my freedom.

While Chela was in the dressing room, I turned on my phone and tried April's number before it got too late in South Africa. I hadn't re
alized I was going to call her until I was dialing the number I'd stored on my phone. There was no answer in her room, so I left a message asking her to call me. I told her it had to do with my case. Maybe it did have to do with the case, or maybe I just wanted to talk to her. I didn't care. I wondered where she was so late.

When Chela emerged from the dressing room again, she was back in her drab school clothes. Empty-handed. “I told you I would only try on one,” she said.

“You're getting a dress for this dance, Chela.”

“Fine.” She whipped a dress off of the rack—the same powder dress I'd pointed out to her, the one I'd thought would make her look beautiful. “This one.”

“Great. Try it on.” If it didn't fit later, that was an excuse to avoid the dance.

She held up the dress, studying it. “It'll fit,” she said. “Chela would never wear a dress like this…but Lauren might, I guess.”

“Who's Lauren?”

Chela gazed at me with wide-open eyes, expecting me to understand something important. Her bottom lip trembled, but she didn't answer.

“Is…Lauren your real name?” I asked so quietly that only the two of us heard.

Chela smiled ruefully and nodded. “Lauren Estelle McLawhorn. Try not to vomit.”

She was a runaway. Chela was her street name. She might not have told anyone her real name since she left her dead grandmother's house and arrived in California as a pedophile's passenger, or she would have been found by now. She had just told me something she had never expected to reveal. She had buried both Lauren and her grandmother back in Minnesota.

“Lauren's a great name,” I said. “She'll look great in that dress.”

Chela lowered her eyes and pulled out the dress's tag. “It's almost four hundred dollars. Is that a problem?”

“Not if Bloomingdale's still takes cash.”

Chela grinned up at me. “Then Lauren needs shoes, too.”

DIRECTORY ASSISTANCE IN TORONTO
was no help finding Laura Ebersole—her number was unlisted—but Craigslist came through. Google picked up a two-month-old ad posted by a Laura Ebersole in Toronto with a vintage Moog Liberation keyboard for sale. The ad didn't provide a telephone number, but it listed a Gmail address.

I sent a short note, first apologizing in case my note reached the wrong person:
You don't know me, but I recently spoke to a reporter who was investigating your husband's death. My father is a retired LAPD police captain, and we are conducting an informal investigation. We are especially interested in this case because of Donald Hankins's bid for the governor's office.

Never write anything in an email you want kept a secret. With the magic of forwarding and websites, an email sent anywhere can end up everywhere. But I was willing to take the chance. In a way, sending that email was a declaration.

I sent the email at seven, hoping I might hear back in a couple of hours, or by morning.

Within fifteen minutes, my cell phone rang from a caller in the 416 area code. Toronto. I had just started washing dishes.

“Is there news?” a woman's voice said. That was her only greeting when I answered.

“Laura Ebersole?”

“Yes,” she said impatiently. “Is there news?”

The urgency in her voice made me feel guilty for raising her hopes. She sounded as if he'd been waiting for her phone to ring for nearly a decade. My email might have given her the impression that a team of investigators was hot on solving her husband's case.

“No, there's no news,” I said, and her sigh was more angry than disappointed. “Sorry. But like I said, we're asking some questions. Can you hold on? I'll put you on speaker. I want my father in on this call.”

I muted my phone while I told Dad who I was talking to. Dad looked surprised, but he flicked off
Judge Joe Brown
. Dad wanted to hear this.

“You're the police?” her voice crackled over my speaker.

“Retired,” my dad said.

“What?” She hadn't understood him.

I held the phone closer, and Dad leaned toward the speaker.
“Retired,”
he said. “But I remember…this case. Hollywood Hills.”

“Yes!” Laura exclaimed. “I can't believe this. For six months after my husband died, LAPD treats me like I'm a fanatic, some crazy person, and now a retired captain calls and says, ‘Oh yeah, I knew all about it.' What is this?” She sounded angrier now.

“You're right,” Dad said. “You were…dismissed.”

“And I know why,” she said. “No one wanted to touch the Golden Goose.”

A shimmer of grief in my father's eyes told me she might be more right than she knew.

“Mrs. Ebersole…” I said. “I wish I could change what happened to your husband, and to you, but I can't. All we can do now is try to find any pieces that haven't been lost. You're mad because no one wanted to listen? Well, we want to listen. But we'll need you to talk to us.”

“Why now? Ten goddamn years later?”

I considered mentioning the T.D. Jackson angle and decided against it. It confused the issue. “Because if Donald Hankins had anything to do with Chad's death,” I said, using her dead husband's name, “we don't want him elected governor of this state. That would be an outrage to his memory.”

She didn't say anything for so long that I thought I'd dropped the call.

Then I heard her sob. I'd broken through. After that, it wasn't a question of getting her to talk—it was how to get her to stop.

I wish I had called her as soon as I heard her name.

“My husband wasn't a perfect man. I've never tried to hide that. He had some attitudes I abhorred, and there were times they came between us. I know he said and did things did he shouldn't have done. He got into a fight at a Lakers game once when he was in law school, and yes, he did call the guy who knocked out his back tooth the N-word. Did that word come out of his mouth when he went to see Donald Hankins? You know what—it's possible. But last I checked, calling somebody names wasn't grounds for death.”

I glanced at Dad, and he shrugged. Neither of us had ever heard any assertions of Chad Ebersole making racial epithets against Hankins. Burnside might have known and forgotten, or maybe he hadn't thought it was important. While I assured Laura that there was no death penalty for calling someone “the N-word,” I was glad that the telephone masked our ethnicity. If she was afraid of offending us, she might not be as candid.

“Too many people take political correctness to absurdity,” I said.

“Tell me something I don't know. It's not a gun. It's not a knife. It's a
word,
for God's sake. If someone calls me a bitch, am I supposed to report a hate crime? Call out the National Guard? Anyway, can I see Chad mouthing off at Hankins, calling him a ‘pushy nigger'? Maybe it happened like that. But that had nothing to do with the zoning. We'd invested in that property for five years. Hankins was trying to push us out so he could install his own people and develop the land. That's a matter of public record. The CEO was Hankins's
friend
.”

She paused, waiting for us to share her indignation. On her cue, Dad grunted with disgust and I told her the deal stank. Unfortunately, there are scores of political deals like it. They don't usually end up getting people killed.

“Who told you about that alleged exchange between Hankins and your husband?” I said.

“That guy,” she said. “The one who called the house. The venom! Chad let me listen to their whole conversation, and I took notes. A black guy, I think.”

“But not Hankins?”

“No. The voice was…coarser. Less cultivated.”

“Was there…a regional accent?”

“Yes. Southern, I think.”

Imagine that. “What did he say?”

“He kept saying, ‘You should be mindful who you call a nigger. Some pushy niggers can push back.'”

Maybe it was only in the spirit of recitation, but Laura was much more comfortable repeating the word “nigger” than most whites I knew. Most people spoke low or turned the word over in their mouths like raw food—not that it came up often. The sound of it grated on my good ear.

“And then I'll never forget this: This man says, ‘You need to get right. Maybe you should reduce your work load a little. I think you might know a project it'd be better to let slide.'”

“I bet. And did Chad back down?”

“He hired a bodyguard.” She made a disgusted sound. “Man was huge, but useless.”

“Useless?”

“I know there was a confrontation at the construction site. Chad wouldn't talk about it, except to mutter something about a ‘fucking black rhino' of a man. But I know that the bodyguard and a beefy construction worker were both beaten pretty badly. I think it was the man who talked on the phone. Chad was angry, and frightened, but he still wouldn't back down.”

“And he had an accident.”

“Two weeks almost to the day after that phone call. Maybe five days after the fight. Chad was dead. I kept trying to tell the police, and they treated me like I was a spokesman for the Ku Klux Klan. Some kind of skinhead kook.

“I brought in my own expert to examine those brakes. And guess what: The next time we come to the lot, the car's been scrapped. Right out of the evidence lot.”

Dad nodded sadly. He remembered that, apparently.

“Why did you leave California?”

She paused. “Police harassment,” she said finally.

“What…kind?” Dad said, sitting straight up in his wheelchair.

“I just kept noticing there was a cop car in my rear-view mirror everywhere I went. Or parked down the street. Dumb me, I thought it was extra protection—until I got pulled over on a DUI practically in my own driveway. I was just going down the street to the grocery store…”

“Had you been drinking?”

“Yes,” she said. “I had a problem back then, and my goddamned husband had just been murdered. So go figure, I had a few drinks. I'd had a DUI in college, too, back in Michigan, and all of a sudden I was Public Enemy Number One. One of the cops took me aside—not a patrol cop, but someone in a shirt and tie—and he told me that if I didn't stop making unfounded accusations about Hankins killing Chad, I was going to jail. I almost fainted.
I
would go to jail!”

Her description of the detective was useless: white guy, dark-haired, long face. Dad only shook his head. It could have been anyone. Laura had been drinking, after all.

“Can you excuse me a second?” Laura said, suddenly overwhelmed by shame and memories. In her absence, Dad sighed and rubbed his temple with his index finger.

I muted my phone. “Sound plausible?”

He nodded. “Sure. Just don't know…who.”

“LAPD ran her out of town,” I said. “Not Rubens. Shit.”

The black man with the heavy, Southern voice. A brawl that broke a construction worker and a professional bodyguard. Someone who danced to Hankins's tune and might have fixed a man's brakes.

“Hello?” Laura was back. She called out twice more.

I had spoken half a sentence before Dad gestured to remind me that I still had the “mute” button on. “I'm here,” I said.

“So after the DUI incident, I had a dream. Chad came to visit me. I'd never believed in that garbage, but I swear it was him. Six months, and it was my first dream about him since he died. He reminded me what a great time we'd had in Toronto, and how we'd always talked about moving there. I said I couldn't move now…and he looked me straight in the eye and said, ‘Yes you can, Laura. You just pack and go.' He gave me
permission
. He set me free.”

Now I had a glimpse of how Laura Ebersole had coped with the loss of her husband and the pressure from LAPD. Whether it was her husband's ghost or her own unconscious mind, she realized she didn't want to spend her life, or go to jail, trying to avenge him.

But Chad's ghost couldn't help me.

“Listen,” I said, trying to move her back to the realm of the living, “the reporter told me your husband had a personal encounter with someone who threatened him. Is that true?”

She sniffed and blew her nose. “That's the other thing! This was before that phone call. Chad said a black man was waiting beside his car after work, right in the parking lot. He told him to back off the zoning issue.”

“What did he look like?” For the first time, I readied a pen to take notes.

“He was very big, Chad said. Like a construction worker, he said. Or an athlete. A black male. Maybe six-three or six-four.”

“How old was he?”

“Chad mentioned he was in his fifties, maybe. From a distance, he barely noticed the guy—he said he didn't look like the type to be a problem. Well dressed. Middle-aged. But as soon as Chad got close, he said there was a look in his eyes…”

I almost sighed in frustration. The description of his age and size were promising, but I wasn't going to fly to Florida looking for Rubens because of a widow's recollection of an alleged “look” in a man's eyes.

“Forget his eyes,” I said. “What did he say?”

Dad motioned—
Slow down. Be gentle.

“He said, ‘A man only needs enough about six feet of land. Anything more than that is just greed. Back off. It's not worth it.' And Chad said, ‘Are you threatening me?' And he said, ‘I'm just making conversation. Back off.'” She had memorized it. The transcript might
be playing in her head every night. “As you can imagine, Chad got pissed. Maybe the smart thing would have been to go the police right away, but instead he drove over to Hankins's office the next day and showed him he wouldn't be pushed around.”

“You pushy nigger,” I repeated, just to be sure.

“If that's what he said.”

“And then the phone call came?”

“The same night,” she said. “Not from Hankins. The other one.”

I wanted to groan. She had no idea who the man was who had confronted her husband in the parking lot, or had called on the phone. But I did.

Dad had found his writing pad, too. He scribbled and held it up for me:
DISTINGUISHING MARKS?

“Can you tell me anything else about the way this man looked?” I asked Laura. “Did your husband mention any distinguishing marks?”

“Just that big scar,” she said.

“A scar?”

“Yeah, a big one on his chest. His shirt got torn in the fight. It was like from heart surgery? A pair of lines.”

“Intersecting?”

“Parallel.”

My heart jumped. “Could it have been an H?”

Dad nodded, smiling. He was thinking the same thing.

“Chad said it was a scar, but I guess so. High on his chest.”

 

I told Dad what I wanted to do as soon as I got off of the phone with Laura Ebersole, and he agreed to help me work it out. But first, more research.

I missed April's quick mind to trade ideas with, but it was the middle of the night in South Africa, and she'd never returned my earlier call. For both reasons, I wasn't going to call her back. Maybe she had decided she was tired of talking to me, or maybe she had never gotten back to her room to receive the message. I wasn't sure which scenario bothered me more.

I would have to get used to doing things on my own again.

I brought a cup of green tea into my screening room and sat at my computer. Since there was a giant movie screen behind me, I put on
Shaft
to play in the background. Dad had taken me to see
Shaft
at an art theater when I was fifteen, and it blew my mind. The theme song alone powered me through my fatigue. Hell, just like five million other black men, I thought Isaac was singing about me.

I paid for access to two membership sites to expand my research capabilities: The
Los Angeles Times
archives and Factiva. I bought a two-hundred-article Annual Pass to the
Times,
figuring I would use it again, and Factiva is a business news site run by Dow Jones, with access to business journals and wire services. Knowledge is power.