Where to Choose Read online

  Gloria Jenkins had hustled her mother and children into the house, and she and her lover and their friend had run to the end of her backyard, toward the alley and closer to the yard that had be­come the scene of a massacre, and looked through the fence. They’d seen Ricky Ball drag a bleeding, screaming girl from the yard, drag her to the end of the alley, and force her into the waiting BMW. At the trial this girl would not testify against Ricky Ball, but the driver of the BMW testified that he got on the freeway and drove south, into Virginia, where Ricky raped the girl and tossed her out of the car and into a ditch along the George Washington Parkway, where a jogger had discovered her early the next morning. He also testified that the girl was Ricky’s former lover, who’d left him for the man who was giving the party that night. Gloria Jenkins testified about everything else, including the fact that the two murdered witnesses were her female lover and their best friend. Those murdered wit­nesses, coupled with the fact of the kidnapping, the trip across the state line, the rape during the course of a kidnapping, turned Ricky Ball’s case into a federal offense, and Gloria Jenkins into a candi­date for protection in exchange for her testimony. Her lover was dead, but she had two young children to consider.

  Carole Ann closed the folder. She didn’t want to read any more or remember any more. Or be responsible for any more evil. “What do you want from me, Jake?” she asked wearily, a little afraid of what the answer could be.

  “Miss Jenkins wants her mother in protective custody. The gov­ernment is balking.”

  “Why didn’t her mother seek cover thirteen years ago?” she asked with ill-concealed irritation, thinking that Jake knew as well as she did how slim were the chances of gaining some kind of retroactive protective custody, especially for someone who was nei­ther witness nor victim.

  “The mother is blind. She never saw a thing that night. But she’s had a stroke now, and is terrified. Only reason she’s alive today is be­cause Ricky Ball’s informant is dyslexic.”

  Carole Ann shot him a withering look till he continued. “Ricky bought an address from some dipshit who inverted the numbers of her address. So, Ball shot up a house on the same street but several blocks away. An elderly, blind woman who resembled Mrs. Jenkins lived there.”

  Carole Ann knew by the way that he closed his mouth around those last few words that she didn’t want to know more, but she needed to ask.

  “And the old woman, Jake. How is she?”

  “Not dead, unfortunately.”

  “Dear God.”

  “If I still enjoyed the protection of a badge, I’d personally rid the planet of Ricky Ball.” He spat the man’s name as if it were deadly venom.

  “You’re not capable of a thing like that, Jake.”

  “You don’t know what I’m capable of.”

  This time, Carole Ann blinked first, breaking eye contact with Jake. She placed the maroon-colored folder in her briefcase, stood up, and walked toward the door. “I’ll call you when I have something to tell you.”

  “This is a freebie, C.A. You know that, don’t you?” He was stand­ing now, facing her, his face rid of the venomous residue of dis­cussing Ricky Ball.

  She offered a small smile of acceptance. Of acquiescence. Of friendship. Then asked, “How’d Gloria Jenkins get to you after all this time? Was this your case?”

  “It was. Until the Feds took it from us. Story of my life, huh? Feds taking my cases and me with nothing to show for it.”

  “You have me to show for it, Jake, so count your blessings.” She walked out, closing the door and thereby missing the smile that transformed his face and made him beautiful.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Late-morning sun shone directly down on the purple and lilac and pink and white bougainvillea; shone easily through the tops of tow­ering royal palms that lined the streets of Jacaranda Estates; shone down like a spotlight on the dense, wild-growing jade and birds of paradise and uncounted species of desert succulents. Shone without shadow, though high noon was still more than an hour in the future, in a perfect and smog-free sky, down on the incongruous corpse of Sadie Osterheim. Incongruous because Sadie Osterheim was the only nonliving thing upon which the perfect Los Angeles morning sun shone.

  Five women created a loose circle around the corpse. From a dis­tance they could have been mistaken for participants in some kind of children’s game where a circle is formed and hands are joined and a little song is sung as a little dance is done. Up close, though, the lack of mirth was pervasive: The five bodies were tense and tight; five heads bent low as if in prayer; five pairs of lips held firm—not praying. There was no light in the five pairs of eyes as they stared down at the corpse. Four pairs of the eyes were more than three score years old and were seeing memories; the fifth pair youthful, still surprised by death, and it was that pair of eyes, the youthful ones, that first sought other sights—the four other faces in the circle. It was that pair of lips that parted first.

  “I’m Jennifer Johnson from radio station BLAK. Can any of you tell me who she is? Do any of you know anything about her?”

  “We know everything about her. She’s the same as us. We could be her, lying there like that.” The words came fast and angry from a mouth still held tight, and the eyes in the face of Grayce Gibson flashed, but they did not shift focus; they held to the inert form of Sadie Osterheim like a grip.

  “It probably will be one of us one day, the way things are going.” These words came softly and sadly from lips that quivered and then tightened as Angelique Arroyo won the struggle to regain control.

  “This is the third woman attacked. The second to die. Both of them from right here in this complex. And nobody’s done a thing about it.” Roberta Lawson pushed the words through taut lips. Her hands, clenched into fists, hung at her sides. She breathed as if she’d just completed strenuous exercise.

  “They don’t care what happens to us.” Luisa Nunez blinked rapidly, allowing the tears to spill out and fall. “Madre de Dios, help us,” she whispered. “Nobody else will.”

  “I will,” Jennifer Johnson said quickly. “If I can,” she added more slowly. “I want to try,” she said, making those last words an appeal for permission.

  For the first time the four pairs of world-weary eyes looked di­rectly at the stranger among them. Looked directly into the eyes of the young woman who bravely kept eye contact. The young woman held their collective gaze until they broke contact to survey their surroundings.

  Grayce Gibson glanced over her shoulder, across the wide ex­panse of green grass, to the white-with-green-trim duplex that had been her home for almost forty years, and mourned the loss of safety. Angelique Arroyo raised her eyes and looked directly ahead of her, at the crazy-quilt colored wall of crisp, paper-thin bougainvil­lea that resisted all attempts at pruning and trimming and taming, and mourned the loss of beauty. Luisa Nunez scanned the strange faces in the gathering crowd drawn and fascinated by the presence of death, and mourned the loss of familiarity. Roberta Lawson looked at all of those things—at her pale-gray-trimmed-in-black triplex, at the royal palms, at the flower beds, at the gathering vul­tures—and then returned her eyes to the ground and mourned the loss of Sadie Osterheim, who had been her neighbor in the pale-gray-trimmed-in-black triplex for a dozen years. Then she looked at Jennifer Johnson.

  “What do you think you can do? The police said there’s nothing they can do. Our city council lady said there’s nothing she can do. Our liaison in the mayor’s office said there’s nothing he can do. And the preacher told us to pray. So you think you can do what?” Roberta’s words were quick and clipped and angry, but they were not unkind.

  “I’m a reporter and I think I can make the police and the councilwoman and the mayor and maybe even your minister regret their lack of response to your needs.” Jennifer had spoken softly. Slowly. And had in no way attempted to disguise the threat inherent in her words.

  Grayce Gibson looked at her for a long moment and a tiny smile lifted the corners of her mouth. “
Who does she remind you of?” she asked, and her smile broadened as recognition dawned on Roberta and she picked up the chuckle, as Angelique’s brow wrinkled in con­centrated wonderment, as Luisa crossed herself and whispered a prayer and shook her head as if warding off trouble.

  The reporter looked from one to the other, waiting to learn who she reminded them of, but the woman who posed the question had returned her attention to the body on the ground. So had the others. So, too, did Jennifer Johnson, asking one of the questions that had chewed at her since her arrival: “How could something like this happen in broad daylight? First thing in the morning?”

  “Go ask them,” snapped the one Jennifer had come to think of as “the angry one.”

  Jennifer looked where Roberta pointed, toward the edge of Jacaranda Estates, at a playground inhabited by half a dozen young men. Jennifer had noticed them when she drove up, noticed that they looked like gang members, and then had chastised herself for jumping to stereotypical conclusions. She knew better. She was a twenty-six-year-old Black woman with three younger brothers—two of them college students, the third still in high school—and she knew what she felt when she saw them stereotyped. But she’d also been a reporter for three years and she’d covered gang activity enough to recognize gang members when she saw them. A second look at the young men completing the destruction of the Jacaranda Estates playground equipment was enough to convince her that these men were gang members.

  “Why is it taking so long for the police to get here?” Jennifer asked instead. She’d been on the scene for at least ten minutes, hav­ing heard the call on the police scanner at the radio station, and it had taken her less than twenty minutes to drive here.

  “Ask them yourself,” replied the one Jennifer had dubbed “the tough one,” with a slight shake of her head, “and let us know what they say,” she added dryly as the sound of wailing sirens grew ever closer.

  Then the energy shifted. The police and the paramedics hopped the curbs then sped their vehicles toward the gathered crowd. Bodies repositioned. Doors slammed. Voices queried. The reporter reached into a black canvas shoulder bag and extracted a micro­phone. One hand held the microphone while another did something inside the bag and when the first policeman reached the circle of women, she spoke a question into the apparatus and thrust it toward the uniform, a question not heard by the four women who did not need to observe again the ritual surrounding the removal of the body of a neighbor and friend.

  “Who’s going to call her son?” asked Grayce—the tough one— briskly leading the group away from the death scene, silver head held high and sparkling in the sun. And silver it was, not gray or white; and wearing it closely shorn as she did, her hair seemed a glittering, skull-hugging cap that offset the pecan-brown smooth­ness of her skin. She was a small woman. Those given to cliché would have described her as birdlike. Those paying closer attention, the Jennifer Johnsons of the world, would not, however, confuse her smallness with frailty. Her hurry to leave the scene merely reflected her decision not to be a ready witness for the police. Not again. Not until she’d had the benefit of counsel.

  “Not me! I called Peggy’s people after she got killed. It’s some­body else’s turn.” Angelique was adamant as the memory of being the bearer of bad tidings surfaced, and she wrapped her nutmeg- colored arms around as much of herself as they would encompass as she shivered in the noon heat. Sudden tears made her eyes glisten like black diamonds. There was not a single strand of gray in the wild, burnished mane that blanketed her shoulders, nor a single line to suggest the passing of time in the smooth face. Only the down­ward pull of her shoulders and the depth of the sigh she released gave hint to the fact that she was old enough to have borne a mas­sive burden for a good many years.

  Angelique and Luisa walked in front, Grayce and Roberta fol­lowed, letting Jacaranda Estates’ distinctive cobbled pathways lead them home. At its inception forty years earlier, Jacaranda Estates was an island, an oasis. An anomaly. It was a planned community of duplex and triplex clusters, in a culture accustomed to ranch single family homes or stucco-and-tile apartment complexes constructed around kidney-shaped swimming pools. Jacaranda Estates was ex­perimental, developed by a Black man and a Mexican man who be­lieved that Black and Mexican Angelenos should and could learn to share the similarities in their rich heritages instead of continuing to mistrust because of the differences between them. After all, rea­soned the pioneers, whether you were Black or Brown didn’t matter; both spelled Colored for the Anglos.

  The four women walking slowly away from the death scene were the last of the original Jacaranda Estates residents. Observing them, a stranger would believe the old experiment a failure, for the two Mexican women walked and talked together and the two Black women walked and talked together. What no external observation could discern were the ties that bound them to one another, ties that were powerful and permanent. For them, that small experi­ment had not only worked, it had defined their lives. Now they lived in fear, each of them, that something awful would happen to one of them. Not that one of them would have a heart attack or a stroke or develop breast cancer—that kind of thing happened as part of the natural order. After all, they were closer to seventy than any of them cared to admit. No. It was the unnatural that unnerved them.

  Grayce and Roberta followed Luisa and Angelique up the walk­way and into the duplex where Grayce lived upstairs and Angie lived downstairs, then the three stood aside while Grayce inserted and turned the three keys required for entry. They always came to Grayce’s around noontime if they weren’t otherwise occupied, for tea and talk and to plan the numerous activities that filled their days and evenings.

  It was dark and cool within, the draperies having been drawn against the heat of the day. Grayce swung them open, brightening the room if not their spirits. Luisa put on water for tea and laid out the big mugs they liked and plates for the fresh fruit that Grayce, their self-appointed health and fitness guru, insisted they eat at least once a day. Roberta stood in the window. She wanted to watch the removal of Sadie Osterheim’s body. Angelique settled into the sofa, punching the television remote control. Grayce studied them, struggling to push from her imagination the sight of one of them sprawled lifeless in the grass. Struggling, as they all were, to push ugliness from their minds and to restore the calm and peaceful or­der of their lives.

  “There’s nothing worth watching on TV this time of day,” Roberta said to Angie, still looking out the window. “One dumb talk show after the other.”

  “It’s almost twelve o’clock. We should see if they say anything about what’s happening to us on the noon news.”

  “Dammit, Angie!” Roberta exploded but still did not turn her at­tention from the window. “When are you going to understand that they don’t care about us? Just another old Black woman, just an­other old Mexican woman.”

  “She was an old white woman!” Luisa interjected with an unchar­acteristic raised voice.

  “She’s just as dead,” Roberta intoned in a lifeless voice. “And no­body cares. Just look at ’em. And look at her, still lying there. And those little bastards. Those hoodlums. Standing there watching her death.”

  Grayce trotted from the kitchen through the dining room and into the living room. “They’re still out there? The police didn’t run ’em off?” She squinted into the distance, able to discern blurry shapes in the vicinity of the playground but needing Roberta’s veri­fication that those shapes were indeed the hoodlums they believed responsible for the reign of terror in Jacaranda Estates.

  “Oh! And look!” Both Angelique and Luisa joined the other two at the window, drawn by the edgy excitement in Roberta’s voice. “That Jennifer what’s-her-name is having a set-to with that police detective. Look at her! She’s all up in his face!”

  “Johnson. And she looks madder than a litter of wet cats.” An­gelique, clearly impressed with Jennifer’s display, pulled Grayce in closer. “Can you see, Grayce?”

  “No,” she s
ighed, turning from the window and returning to the kitchen. “And I suppose I shouldn’t complain about what I can’t do and focus on all the things I can do.” Grayce’s introspection was cut short by a simultaneous whoop from Roberta, a gasp from Angelique, and a whispered prayer from Luisa.

  “I like this girl! Will you look at her?” Roberta was doing a little dance at the window, wiggling her butt and punching the air with her fists as if she were at her aerobics class.

  “Will you look at them,” screeched Angelique, punching Roberta’s shoulders. “They’re running away!” She jumped up and down and punched Roberta some more.

  Grayce hurried back to the window, wiping her hands on a dish towel and demanding information, which rushed at her from three fronts.

  “You could tell she said something really ugly to that cop ’cause I think he would have hit her if that other cop hadn’t pulled him back.”

  “Then she headed for the playground, holding that microphone like it’s a weapon.”

  “It is a weapon. People hang themselves with their own words every day.”

  “Then they started running, cowardly little bastards!”

  “And she started running after them! Chasing them!”

  “But she couldn’t run as fast as them—”

  “So now she’s walking back this way.”

  “Where are you going, Grayce?”

  “To invite Miss Johnson to lunch,” she replied with grim determi­nation, rushing out and slamming the door, being grateful as they all were that they had something to focus on other than the ugly horror of murder; hopeful that perhaps, finally, somebody cared enough to help them understand what had gone so terribly wrong.