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  “And I ain’t yo’ slave,” she said in poor black dialect. “But you do get your kicks sleeping with a Negress, don’t you? Lotta white men do. You’d never bring one home to mommy and daddy though.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about, you stupid—”

  “Stupid what?—Nigger?” She started to cry. The anger had been welling up in me. I could hardly control it. She was partially right, I think. She had been a safe haven in rough waters. It wasn’t that I hadn’t liked her, or didn’t still. But it was a crazy time. I was running on adrenalin overdrive. I did like her. And it was more than the riots. More than shelter in the storm. It was more than Teddie, but she didn’t know that. I don’t think the word that was welling up was nigger. I didn’t want to believe that. I didn’t know what it was. Whatever, though, I’m glad she cut it off.

  I stepped toward her. She put her hand out in front of her chest to hold me off. I stopped.

  “That’s what this search for Teddie’s killer was all about too. White guilt.”

  “You’re right.” But I didn’t mean it the way she did.

  She looked through me with intense brown eyes. It was as if she was shocked that she’d been right. She had been right. But she’d been wrong.

  “It isn’t white guilt how you mean it. Colbert came to me to find an address for him. He gave me a name, Teddie or Theodora Matson.” My voice had softened. She had to ask me to speak louder. “I had never heard of her. Don’t watch much TV, except for old movies and news. He told me he was an old friend. Seemed like an easy gig.” I told her the whole story, every detail. Sat in a chair facing the couch. I wanted to hide my head, bury it in my hands. I wouldn’t let myself. Forced myself to look her in the eye.

  She sat on the arm of the couch. She also didn’t want to look at me. She forced herself to. “For two hundred fifty dollars. My sister. And then you slept with me.” Her voice cracked. She was holding the tears back.

  I went on. “I’ve done jobs like this before. There was no way to know. That’s not an excuse. It’s just the way it is.”

  “No. The way it is, is Teddie is dead. No wonder you don’t want to talk to the media. The whole time you played me for a fool.”

  “Are you concerned about Teddie or about how you think I treated you?”

  “Both. Warren’s right. Even he softened. He shouldn’t have.”

  “I never played you or your family for fools. I wanted to get the killer. If I’d told you the truth, you wouldn’t have helped me.”

  She slunk down into the couch, huddled in the corner. “That’s damn for sure. And then you had the nerve to sleep with me. But I guess that’s to be expected. I am just a nigger.”

  “That’s your word. Not mine.”

  “It’s the white man’s word.”

  “Your feelings are hurt. But that’s not the way it is.”

  “Then why didn’t you return my calls?”

  “I was afraid to.”

  “A big ex-SEAL like you.”

  “Why don’t you cut the crap? Let’s have a decent conversation.”

  “Niggers can’t have—”

  I jumped out of my seat. She put her hands in front of her face, ready to block a blow. I wasn’t going to hit her. I grabbed her. Jerked her up and to me. Held her. She tried to get away. I wouldn’t let go.

  “You’re right. I was confused. I liked you but it was all happening so fast. I still like you, though I’m sure you don’t like me anymore. That’s okay. I don’t blame you. I don’t like myself very much when I think about it. I was afraid to call you back. Afraid to hurt you. Afraid to tell you the truth. Debating whether or not I ever should. Wondering if, after the riots, there would be anything for us. Between us. Or was it all just a ‘wartime romance?’ Two people caught up in something bigger than themselves. Would they, we, have anything in common once it was over?”

  She broke free, stepped back. I collapsed on the couch. Exhausted. Talking it out. Telling the truth had wiped me out.

  “Are you all right?” she said.

  “Yeah.”

  “We can never tell my mother or Warren.”

  “It’s your call.” I closed my eyes. “I didn’t intend to hurt you or your family. When I did, I tried to make it up by finding him. There’s no way to do any more than that. I won’t say I’m sorry again. Not because I’m not. Because it won’t help anything.”

  She sat next me. Let her hand fall to my thigh. We sat like that for about ten minutes. Silent. Someone knocked on the front door. I let them keep knocking. Didn’t care who it was. Probably a reporter. I took her hand and led her to the guest bedroom. Pulled out one of my butterfly collection notebooks. Handed it to her.

  “I want you to have this.”

  “What for?”

  “I don’t know. I think you’ll enjoy it.”

  “So will you. And you don’t need to buy me off.”

  “I’m not trying to. You see, this is the problem. Now that you know, you’ll suspect everything. I’ll never be able to do anything, give you anything without your thinking it’s guilt.”

  She took the notebook. Clutched it in her hand. She even looked beautiful when she cried.

  She left a few minutes after that. We had decided to wait a while before talking to each other again. No set time. If one of us decided to call the other, then we’d call. Until then, we’d wait.

  I never did find out if it was the Weasel or Craylock or some crazy person off the street who did Baron. But I would keep looking until I found him or knew he was dead already. And I never found out who was following me, but I’d wager the mortgage it was the Weasel. It would be nice if things were neat and tidy, but they never are. I also wondered what became of Pilar and Anna. Thought I might give Ramon a call some day and see if he was interested in having me find out.

  I missed Rita. Several times I started to dial her. Each time, I hung up before connecting. A couple times when my phone rang and there was no one on the other end I wondered if she was doing the same thing.

  I took time off from work to work around the house. Run at the beach. The city was returning to some semblance of normal. On the surface. Underneath, tension roiled. I tried not to let it bother me. Not that I wasn’t concerned. But I figured I’d better work out my own tensions before trying to solve the world’s.

  One day I drove down Beverly Boulevard until it turned into Santa Monica Boulevard. I headed toward the beach. A few blocks before the water, I turned up a side street. Parked in front of the Ocean View Rest Home. No ocean view. There was an ocean breeze.

  “Mr. Rogers,” a nurse said. “It’s been ages.”

  She led me to my father’s room. The TV droned. He had been a round, robust man with a ruddy complexion and thick brown hair. He had shrunk to a ghost of himself. His hair was thin and greasy. His cheeks sunken and pale. Eyes dull.

  “Hello, Dad,” I said, taking his hand. It was clammy. He grunted some kind of greeting. But it could have been to anyone. He didn’t recognize me. I sat there about an hour. We had never gotten along. He had never been the father I would have picked. I wasn’t the son he wanted. If we’d only respected each other on our own terms we might have gotten along. When I left, a sadness hung over my heart. I drove to the ocean. The sun was dying. Golden hour almost over. I watched the sun set over the horizon, a flaming ball of orange amidst bands of magenta, lavender and yellow.

  On my way home, a white woman was stopped at a stoplight. A group of black kids, couldn’t have been more than ten or eleven years old, were crossing in front of her car. A late model Honda Prelude. She looked nervous. Averting her eyes. The four kids were taking their time crossing the street. When they were in front of her car, the largest of them turned, pounded on the hood three times. “White bitch,” he yelled. The others laughed. She looked ready to cry. Rolled her window up all the way. Made sure the doors were locked. I pulled up beside her. The boys moved on.

  The light changed. She drove off. On her rear bump
er, which the boys couldn’t have seen, a sticker said, “If we knew it was going to be this much trouble, we would have picked the cotton ourselves.”

  Some things never change. And some people never learn.

  I remembered Warren’s line that I would never understand. I guess I never will.

  Back to TOC

  Here’s a sneak peek at the next thrilling Duke Rogers PI investigation…Broken Windows…

  PROLOGUE

  The Hollywood Sign beckoned her like a magnet—or maybe like flame to a moth. The sign glowed golden in the magic hour sun—that time of day around sunrise and sunset when the light falls soft and warm and cinematographers love to shoot. Like so many others, Susan Karubian had come here seeking fame and fortune, hoping to make her mark on the world. Oh hell, she had come to be a star like all the others. And she would do it, just not quite in the heady way she’d anticipated.

  She had spent hours deciding what to wear. After all, this wasn’t exactly in the etiquette books. Probably not the kind of thing you’d find in Ask Amy column. She finally decided on a tasteful dress with high-heeled sandals.

  The young woman drove her Passat down Hollywood Boulevard, turning up Franklin, passing the Magic Castle. She turned slowly up Beachwood Canyon, past the low-rent area north of Franklin, up through the towering stone gates with their “Welcome to Beachwood Canyon” signs. Past the movie star homes in the hills—past where she thought she’d be living by now. She drove in circles, past piles of rubble from the earthquake several months ago, figuring that sooner or later she’d hit the right combination of roads and end up where she wanted to be.

  The Passat crested the top of the mountain—mountain or hill? What was the difference anyway? A small concrete building with an antenna sat just below the road. No cars. No one around. It was as quiet as the Sherman Oaks Galleria on a Monday morning. She parked on Mt. Lee Drive.

  She rolled up the windows, locked the car, set her purse on the floor by the gas pedal. The note she’d written in a steady hand tucked into her pocket. She hoped someone would find it quickly. Standing beside the car, she realized she’d have to hike down to get to the sign. She had thought it would be at the top of the mountain. She was buggin’, as she treaded toward the edge of the road.

  The nonstop rain of the last couple weeks had broken. The view from up here was incredible. You could almost see Mexico to the south and the Pacific glittering in the west. The city below, shiny and bright. Pretty and clean from up here. A million doll houses that reminded her of childhood, playing with dolls and making everything come out the way she wanted it to. Little toy cars down below, scooting back and forth. Swarms of ants scurrying this way and that on important business. Oh yeah, everyone here had important business all day and all night. Everyone but her. She gazed down at Los Angeles on the cusp of the millennium. The place to be. Center of the universe. Totally.

  She hesitated at the edge of the road, her toe kicking some gravel down the hill. It clattered down, somehow reminding her of the industrial music in the clubs where she liked to hang.

  Should she try to talk to him? What would be the point now? She was talked out. And he wouldn’t forgive her. Why should he? She had hurt him. No, it was beyond hurt. There was no way to rationalize it.

  She tentatively stepped off the road, pressing her heel in, testing its firmness. More loose gravel tumbled down the hill. Kicking off her Steven Madden heels, grabbing them by the straps in one hand, she made her way down. She walked and slid and finally made it to the landing—she didn’t know what else to call it—where the sign rested. The city glowed, shimmering with hope and desire and people wanting to make their dreams come true. She knew this, because she was one of those people.

  She had come here for the same reason. The Hollywood Dream. The American Dream. She had wanted to be in front of the cameras from the time her parents took her to her first movie-theater movie, The Black Stallion, in 1979 when she was five. After seeing the movie she had wanted a horse, but more than that she wanted to be in a movie. She hadn’t yet heard of Hollywood, but by the time she was thirteen she was making plans to come here. And nothing could have stopped her. Her mom and dad told her how hard a career in the movies was, how few made it. But she had faith in herself. She was attractive, more than. Oh hell, she was fine, though she didn’t want to come off conceited. And she had talent. She had been acting in school plays for years. She was the star, Juliet to popular Paul Bonnefield’s Romeo, in middle school. Rave reviews. Fake gold acting awards. What did that mean in the big picture? She had come here gushing with hope and optimism. She still thought she could make it if she met the right people—what was the point now?

  People looked up this way all the time, up to the sign. How many were looking at her now, as she climbed the scaffolding?

  Higher and higher.

  Her heart pounded through her chest. Her head throbbed.

  Was she doing the right thing?

  She reached one hand over the other, gripping the steel scaffolding. She held her shoes in one hand and the hard metal bit into her stockinged feet and palm. The pain felt good, like penance.

  Would anyone notice? Would anyone give a damn that she was no longer here?

  She gripped the scaffolding with all her strength and pulled herself up another rung.

  “Don’t look down.” Her breath came in short bursts. She climbed higher. Warm blood trickled down her right palm.

  She worried that the 6.7 quake last January had loosened the sign’s footing. Would she fall before she even made it to the top?

  Reaching the summit of the H, she pulled herself up and sat on top, balancing as best she could. The wind slammed her. She clutched a piece of scaffolding—warm to the touch—maintaining a precarious balance. A gust of wind hammered her. She began to topple, gripping the scaffolding with all her strength. She couldn’t just fall off. It wasn’t deliberate enough, didn’t send the right message.

  Her stockings ran. She thought this might happen, hoped it wouldn’t.

  She looked out again—the golden city. Los Angeles. Hollywood. Was that the ocean dancing in the distance?

  She balanced on top of the H, a light breeze blowing her night-dark hair. She flicked it out of her eyes, put on her shoes, and talked to God. He didn’t respond. If He did, she didn’t hear it.

  What had she done wrong? Was she in the wrong place at the wrong time? No, she had chosen her life.

  The note she’d written was burning a hole in her pocket. She took it out for one last read. The wind blew up, snatching it away.

  “Damn!” There was no time to write a new note and nothing to write it with.

  She forced herself into a standing position. Unsteady in the breeze, she billowed in the wind like a sail. Her dress snagged on the scaffolding.

  Scared to death, literally. That wouldn’t last long. She held her breath until her head throbbed—pushed off as hard as she could. Shrieking. One shoe flew off as she plummeted downward. She waited for her life to pass by like everyone said. It didn’t. The only thing whizzing by was the city below—the City of Angels. And devils. That was her life, so maybe they were right after all.

  If she couldn’t be famous in life, she would be famous in death. But one way or another she’d make her mark. She hoped her fall from grace would be graceful, even if her life hadn’t been.

  CHAPTER 1

  I was famous.

  Dateline. 20/20. Primetime. Good Morning America-famous. I didn’t want to go on those shows, but I didn’t have a choice. If I avoided them they’d have said what they wanted about me and I’d have had no way to set the record straight.

  So now people knew my face. Knew my name. Stopped me on the streets. Some even asked for autographs. I hated every damn minute of it. I never wanted to be famous, just good at what I did.

  But I was famous—for being a fuck-up, only most of the rest of the world didn’t know it. They knew me as the private detective who had found promising starlet Teddie Mats
on’s executioner. They didn’t know I had inadvertently helped him find her to kill her.

  Rita knew. Rita was Teddie’s sister. We’d had a brief fling, for lack of a better word. It’d been two years and I was still waiting for the phone to ring. I would have called her but I didn’t have the guts. You need someone to go down a dark alley with you, I’m your man. But the truth is, I was afraid to call her. Afraid she would reject me. Afraid she would hate me. Afraid she would see me for the fuck-up my father always said I was.

  Sitting in my tiny den on the north side of the house, I tapped keys on my IBM 486 clone computer. I had only recently gotten rid of my Leading Edge 8088 computer with two floppy drives and no hard disk—true Stone Age technology—and already my 486 with its one hundred twenty-eight kilobytes of memory and twenty-megabyte hard drive, running Windows 3.1, was out of date. I was making decent money for a change, but why buy one of those new Pentium computers when it would be obsolete by the time I got it home from the store?

  It had been two years since my dog Baron had been killed and I was finally ready to get another. I thought I might find one on the Net. Of course, no dog could replace Baron—that’s why I waited so long—but I felt the need for the companionship only a dog could give.

  Loyalty was something else. For that I’d have the dog and my bud Jack. We’d been to hell and back together. He had my back and I had his. But I couldn’t curl up with him at two in the morning with an old black-and-white movie on Turner Classics.

  The afternoon sun—the first sun I’d seen in three days, an eternity in Los Angeles—streaked through the window, through the old-fashioned, wide-slatted Venetian blinds, leftovers from when my parents lived in this house. They cast film noir shadows across the keyboard, a lineup of bars holding my fingers hostage. For a private detective I’m a pretty good typist. Took it in high school and it all came back when I needed it. Maybe the only thing I learned in high school that was really useful. Sure, I always loved history, but most of that I learned on my own.