would suspect you. ” Lisa had guaranteed me that a few months ago. “We don’t have any connection. If you kill him, you’ll be scot-free with thirty thousand in your pockets. ”
That was before the suits. Before I became a hypocrite and took this job.
That day I was at the laundromat, clothes in the dryer, my stomach growling, and I was trying to decide if I was going to head down to Yum Yum Donuts to buy a chocolate twist. That was down on Crenshaw and Rodeo nestled inside a shopworn strip mall that held Conroy’s Flowers and Hamburger Haven. It was a corner where the homeless parked their baskets and squatted on the concrete, where beggars hustled at the Shell station and tried to come up on some spare change by offering to wash car windows with nasty water and dirty newspaper.
I stepped outside of the laundromat, moved through the drizzle and saw her.
I’d seen her kicking it outside, dressed in a black business suit, leaning against a black town car, umbrella in hand, talking to two members from Los Angeles’s most notorious gang, the LAPD. This was one of their resting spots, on the backside of Conroy’s facing Yum Yum.
She saw me just as I made it to the doughnut shop. We caught eyes. I recognized her.
I knew she was the daughter of the man who used to be chief of police in Compton, then mayor of the same city. A man who had a reputation that would make Suge Knight cringe. He was to Compton what Tom Bradley had been to L.A., only he had a lot of scandal.
The black-and-white pulled away, sirens blaring as they hit the strip hard and fast, screeching and swerving. Quiet as it’s kept, cops were the worst drivers in L.A. Lisa hit the remote on the car she was driving, stepped over loosened asphalt, and came inside Yum Yum. I’d copped a table facing the parking lot, had a crossword puzzle and a pencil in front of me. She grabbed a chocolate twist and an orange juice. Spoke to me. I did the same. I put my crossword puzzle away and offered her a seat. She told me her name was Lisa. I already knew that.
Lisa said, “You know who you look like?”
“Somebody on the wall at the post office?”
She laughed. “Alonzo Mourning. That’s why I kept looking at you.”
“Quit trippin‘. I don’t look anything like Alonzo.”
“You do to me.”
She asked me what I did. Back then I was doing what I could. Installing water heaters, fixing relief valves, installing smoke detectors, landscaping, didn’t matter. I didn’t like living life the hard way, but I took it the way it came. Some days it was steak. Some days ground beef.
She said, “Saw you down by Slauson last week. You were going in the post office.”
“Yeah. I went up there to see if I could get a job licking stamps.”
She laughed. “Licking stamps. Sounds ... interesting.”
“Work is work.”
“What kind of work you do?”
“Right now, anything I can find. You know how hard it is to get a legit job when you have a felony on your record. Everybody keeps looking at you like you’re a criminal.”
She laughed.
We talked. No rapid fire, crudely poetic, vernacular dialogue. Just talked like two people who had roots in the concrete jungle. Only I had gone to public school and she went from being a Montessori baby to a private-school child. Money was never an issue in her home, not like it was in mine. Didn’t take much talking to realize she was headstrong and political, just like her parents. She flipped through a Watts Times and got on the subject of how deregulation had killed black radio in L.A., then about how Wal-Mart was killing the revenue at the mom-and-pop stores on the strip. All in all, it was the type of small talk people had when they were feeling each other out. She was trying to see what kind of man I was. I’d already put a hint of my past on the table. A man who wanted to work but had no real job. I saw her five-carat issue sparkling on her left hand. She leaned away, kept her body language professional, but the way she gazed at her ring, then looked at me, told me that her and hubby got along like Shaq and Kobe.