Southland (16 page)
It was a crime that the cousins lived three blocks apart and yet never spent time together. But Curtis clearly didn’t think so, at first. When Alma came home the first day of his suspension, dragging in the extra chair from the garage, Cory and Jimmy were trying to build a model plane on the living room floor, two sets of hands in a festival of plastic and glue. Curtis was watching television, sulking and ignoring them. The next night, the two younger boys were stirring up ant hills with long sticks (Alma quickly put a stop to it), and Curtis was sitting on the back stairs, looking bored and grim. Both nights, he hardly spoke at dinner and ignored the worshipful glances from Jimmy, who still copied him, putting napkins on the ends of his ears of corn to keep from burning his fingers, eating all of one thing—the greens, the cornbread, the chicken-fried steak—before moving on to the next. The third evening, though, as Alma came in the front door, she heard three voices, together, like smoke rising and mingling off of three separate fires. When she entered the living room, she saw the parts of the model plane again, except this time Curtis was sitting with the two younger boys, holding the square instructions card in his hand. “No, that part goes there, little man,” he said to Jimmy, and then he laughed when his cousin tried to jam the wheel on upside down. When Jimmy finally got it right, he looked up at Curtis hopefully. “That’s i
t!”
Curtis exclaimed, reaching over to rub his head, and he was rewarded with a huge, happy grin. Alma smiled, and, not wanting to disturb their play, she tip-toed into the kitchen.
For the rest of Curtis’s suspension, the three cousins were inseparable. Curtis stopped complaining about not seeing his friends, and instead found new ways to entertain the boys. They built a small platform tree-house, crooked and holey and not strong enough to support all of them at once. They constructed another plane. They worked on their fastballs, Curtis acting as catcher as the little ones heaved pitches from a makeshift mound. Alma watched Curtis grow almost physically to become the older boy the younger boys needed. Even Cory seemed to look at him differently. The brothers had always been a bit removed from each other, unwilling or unable to span the nine years that separated them, but now Cory, seeing Curtis through the eyes of his cousin, was tagging along after his brother like a puppy.
The two weeks were over in a flash. Then Curtis went back to school, Cory back to his normal babysitter, and Jimmy to another babysitter, who Alma had found for Estelle. At first, Curtis talked of how relieved he was to have Jimmy gone, and to be able to forget about Cory. But after a couple of days of seeing his friends again, he surprised Alma by declaring them “tired.” He stared at the empty space at the table where the extra chair had been, remarking that it now seemed kind of quiet. The next afternoon she came home and found Jimmy in the living room wrestling with Curtis and Cory. Her oldest son looked up at her sheepishly, tugging his shirt back into place.
“I went and got ’em,” he said. “Ain’t no use having ’em stay at someone else’s house if they can just hang out here.”
Alma smiled and went into the kitchen to start their dinner. Then she went out to the garage for the extra chair.
H
IS FATHER’S generation. That was the way he thought of men that age—fifty-five or sixty. They belonged to his father’s generation. The phrase both less powerful than it should have been, and more powerful, too, because Lanier didn’t know his own father. Hadn’t laid eyes on him, in fact, since he was four. So he took his knowledge and ideas of the older men around him and tried to construct an image of his father. Most of the men he knew of that age were either bitter or resigned. They were already grown by the time the Movement came along, many of them crushed, dry and fine, like powder. The bitter ones hated all their dealings with the white world, and abused themselves or their loved ones to forget it. The resigned ones shuffled in the shadows of their lives, looking up only to see the step directly in front of them, or to find the mouth of the bottle. A few stayed optimistic, like Carrier, the finance man at Marcus Garvey, by dint of will or God or just plain foolishness. And the even rarer men who really succeeded; who made their way in the world without anger or alcohol, Lanier could only wonder at. Where was Marvin Lanier in this spectrum? The one place he knew for sure Marvin wasn’t, was with them.
Robert Thomas was a man of his father’s generation, and on Tuesday evening, after all the kids had gone, Lanier drove up to Hollywood to find him. Thomas, he thought, might know something about Nick Lawson and the murders. It made sense that none of Lawson’s brethren had ever come forward to turn him in, but maybe what Thomas wouldn’t do on his own, he’d do if somebody asked him.
Lanier wondered how Jackie was doing. He hadn’t talked to her since Friday, when they’d driven around Crenshaw together. He wondered what she’d done with the weekend, whether she was as busy with school as she claimed to be; or whether she had something fun to divert herself with—a hobby, or a man. His own weekend had been uneventful. On Saturday he’d tried to get his house in order—cleaning, doing laundry, paying overdue bills—and searched his drawers and his own memory for anything related to Curtis or Frank. That night he sat in front of a rented movie that he hardly paid attention to, drank three beers, and went to sleep. On Sunday he’d gone to his friend Carl’s house to watch football. Although he didn’t like to admit it, he was always happy and a bit relieved when Monday came and he could go back to work, where there was always something to do and where he didn’t have to think about himself. Yesterday, also, he’d asked Allen to pull up Derek Broadnax’s name on the police database. Allen had discovered a string of drug convictions and petty crimes dating all the way back to 1966. Then the record stopped abruptly in 1984. There seemed to be no record of his death anywhere, so he’d either moved away or cleaned up his act.
After Lanier reached the Hollywood Station and parked his car, he walked into the receiving area, where about a dozen people, mostly Latino, were sitting quietly on green plastic chairs. He went to the front desk, cleared his throat to get the attention of the young desk sergeant—the man’s name tag said “Davis”—and asked to see Captain Robert Thomas. The desk sergeant called Thomas’s extension.
“Yes, sir,” said Davis. “A man here to see you, sir. A James Lanier. I don’t know, Captain Thomas, but…” Lanier saw the man’s eyebrows lift, wiggle, and settle down into a troubled furrow. “Certainly, sir. I’ll send him right in.”
He hung up the phone, mumbling to himself, and Lanier wondered what Robert Thomas was like, to instill such fear in burly young men.
Davis gave Lanier directions to Thomas’s office and Lanier walked down the hall. The station was bustling with men and women on phones, shuffling people being led along in handcuffs. Lanier reached the door that Davis had directed him to, turned, and stopped at the doorway.
It was a small, cramped office, not much bigger than his own. The desk was large and wooden, faced by two nondescript metal chairs. Behind it sat a middle-aged black man. He was on the phone and he waved Lanier in. Lanier sat in a chair and set his briefcase down, and while the older man took notes on a pad of yellow paper, Lanier tried quietly to study him. Robert Thomas, he knew, was in his late fifties, but he looked about ten years older. The lines on his face were long and deep. His large, round eyes were baggy and pink-tinged. His hair was almost completely white, which made his rich brown skin look darker. Even sitting he was obviously tall—his chair seemed entirely too small for him—but his movements were slow and seemed to take great effort. Lanier wondered if he’d ever run across Thomas in Crenshaw. His voice on the phone was strong and stern, business-like, not-quite-pleasant. When he hung up, though, he stood, held his hand out across the table, and offered a friendly smile. “Bob Thomas,” he said. “You must be James Lanier.”
Lanier shook his hand—Thomas’s grip was firm and strong. “Yes,” he answered. “Sorry to barge in on you like this, but after our conversation last week, I figured I’d have to show up in person to convince you my intentions were good.”
Thomas waved him off and sat down. “No problem.
I’m
sorry. You get the strangest calls sometimes, people trying to get information for articles, college term papers, Lord knows what else. But then I guess I should expect it, considering how strange the job is.” He pointed at the phone. “That call was about a complaint we have, a guy taking deposits for a rental. He told people he needed a twenty-five-dollar deposit in order to run a credit check, and then they never heard back from him again. Turns out he didn’t own the place. He’d just broken in and he was using the deposit money for crack. What a bunch of gutter slime we have to deal with these days. You civilians out there don’t know.” He shook his head, and Lanier said nothing. “Anyway, I asked about you a couple of days ago,” Thomas continued, “when I talked to Captain Ray at Southwest. He told me his division deals with your office and he had a lot of nice things to say.”
Lanier nodded. “He’s a good man. He volunteers for us. But how do you know him? He didn’t come to Southwest until a couple of years ago.”
Thomas picked up a mug of coffee; it left a luminous ring on his desk. “We were at Rampart together for about ten years. That was the one pit stop I made between Southwest and Hollywood.”
“How long were you at Southwest?”
“About seven years. I started there in ’59, right out of the Academy. It was called University then.” A fly buzzed around his head and he batted at it absently. “It was a rough seven years, though, I’ll tell you that. I can’t say I was sorry to be transferred.”
Lanier nodded. “It must have been tough, especially back then.”
“It was,” Thomas answered, but he was watching the fly, which flew straight up, bounced off the ceiling, and circled around the room.
Lanier paused for a second. “And you didn’t have a choice but to work at Southwest, did you? Didn’t all black officers have to work in black neighborhoods?”
“Yep,” Thomas said. “And that area, as you know, was already pretty much black by the sixties. My first few years on the job, there was no way a white man could be arrested by a black man. Or even
work
with one, for that matter—we were all paired off together, you know.” He pushed his chair back and pointed to a framed picture on the wall behind him. It was a black-and-white photograph, tinged yellow by age. In it, two black officers, in cap and uniform, were standing in front of an old-time, box-like police car. “This is me,” Thomas said, “back in 1964. And this here’s my partner, Oliver Paxton.”
Lanier stood up and leaned across the desk to get a better view. In the photograph, Thomas’s face looked much the same as it did now—except it had no lines and his hair was still black. His body, however, was tight, lean, and powerful. The man beside him was slightly smaller, and fairer-skinned. Thomas’s features were not totally discernible in the picture’s bad light, but Paxton’s were clear—the bright eyes, the high cheeks, the large square jaw. Oliver Paxton was smiling at the camera. Robert Thomas was not.
“That’s a great picture,” said Lanier, sitting down again, and as soon as his pants made contact with his chair, he knew he’d seen Thomas in Crenshaw. When or where, he couldn’t recall. But the face—he’d seen that face, he’d seen this man walking around the neighborhood. He wasn’t sure the memory was good.
Thomas nodded and threw back the rest of his coffee. “Ollie’s wife took it in front of the station one morning. The department wasn’t about to pay, you know, for some picture of its nigger cops.”
Lanier looked at him. The older man’s words were bitter, but the tone of the voice was calm. “Y’all went through a lot,” he said.
Thomas half-smiled. “We sure did. Had to work ten times as hard as the white cops to get any kind of respect. And then the recognition was grudging, you know, like we were a necessary evil. I tell you, there were a lot of racist cops back then, but on the other hand, some of the first few black men on the force didn’t do much to change their views. Some of those Negroes were so ignorant I don’t know how they got through the Academy. They came from nothing, you know, and acted like it. Made it real hard on the rest of us.” Thomas took a sip of his coffee. He’d thought he was escaping them, blacks like them, by joining the department. When his father—his respectable, college-educated father— moved out to Los Angeles and couldn’t get a machinist’s job, the Thomases had to live in a small apartment off of Central, among the Southern migrants they found course and uncultured. There they stayed for all of Robert’s childhood, his father dazed by the one-two punch of Jim Crow and the Depression, piecing together odd lawn and rail-laying jobs to keep food on the table. And Robert, rather than hating the white men who were too offended by his father’s skills to hire him at the work he was trained in, had instead despised the Southern masses with whom his family was lumped together. He swore that some of the kids he’d grown up around were the same ones he saw later, on the street.
Lanier heard what he said, as well as the bitterness behind it, and tried not to judge him. This man had gone through things, he reminded himself, that he could only imagine. He’d been a pioneer, Jacques Cousteau, first man on the moon. A success who’d had to twist himself to get as far as he did, like so many members of his father’s generation.
“This is my wife,” Thomas continued, pointing at a picture of a proper-looking woman who was so fair-skinned that Lanier had to look twice to confirm she was black. “And these are my children. Robert Jr. is an entertainment lawyer and Cassie is in international development.” Thomas couldn’t help but smile. He was proud of his wife, one of the first black women to get a graduate degree from Pepperdine; and of his children, who never felt constrained by their color. When they’d first moved into their all-white neighborhood years before, none of the other children would play with them. But he hadn’t played with the local children, either, when he was growing up. They were unkempt and wild, his parents thought, the products of adults who were loud and whiskey-soaked. Sometimes, when he watched the children play with the crude wooden toys that their fathers had fashioned; or heard their shouts during stickball; or watched them chase each other across his front lawn, he regretted the division of the living room window, and wondered what it would be like to be out there with the children, who still carried Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Texas, in the lilt of their beautiful voices. But this wondering only lasted a second.
“Nice,” Lanier said politely, still looking at the picture. Then, “What happened to your partner? Is he still on the job?”
Thomas sat back in his chair. He picked up his mug and set it down again. “No. He quit and moved back east somewhere. I think he became a schoolteacher.”
The fly settled on Lanier’s left knee. He let it sit there for a moment before shooing it away. “Second career,” he said. “He must have left pretty young.”
“I think he was in his twenties. It was some time in ’66 or ’67.”
“After Watts.”
Thomas nodded. “After Watts.”
Lanier tried not to look too eager. “Do you think that had anything to do with it?”
Thomas shrugged. “Who knows? It could have. That was a pretty bad time, you know. Worse than ’92 ’cos it was such a surprise.”
“Was it?”
“It was to me. Although I guess it shouldn’t have been. Ollie said he’d been expecting it for years. But it was rough, all right.” He leaned forward. “That’s what you’re here about, right? Something related to Watts.”
Lanier nodded. “There’s an incident I’m trying to look into. I thought you might know something about it.”
“There were a lot of incidents during the riots. What makes you think I would know about this one?”
Lanier leaned forward a bit more. “Because people did. Cops too. But not a lot of them are going to want to talk.”
“What’s the story?”
Lanier took a manila folder out of his briefcase and placed it on the desk. “You ever heard of Frank Sakai?”
Thomas thought for a moment. “No.”
“He owned a little store on Bryant, off of Crenshaw.” He opened his folder and took out a photograph of the store in its present condition. “This is what it looks like now—but the damage is from ’92.”
Thomas took the photograph. He wrinkled his brow and then nodded. “I remember now,” he said. “The Jap with the grocery store. What happened, did somebody kill him?”
Lanier struggled to keep his face impassive. “No, but someone
did
kill four black boys. Locked them in the freezer. Two of them worked there in the store and the other two were younger. They weren’t found until everything was over.”
“Who found them?”
“The owner. And maybe one of the other employees.”
“And you think a cop was involved?”
Lanier nodded. He took another picture out of his folder, one he’d gotten from Allen, and handed it across the desk to Thomas. “I think it was this guy. Nick Lawson.” Lanier hated to look at Lawson, even through the medium of photography. The face was older, filled out from when he had known him, but the particulars were the same—the thin nose, tight lipless mouth, the brows that came together in a flat and angry
V.
Lawson must have been in his fifties in this picture, but he still had the crew cut he’d worn when Lanier had spent his days avoiding him; had watched him taunt and hassle his friends.
