Lion Plays Rough (17 page)

“That's probably not the best reason not to kill me you could think of.”

Very few people knew who my father was or that he was in prison. For years, Teddy had been working to get him out.

Finally I spoke again. “I haven't seen my father in over nineteen years. From what I've heard, he hasn't exactly been on a character improvement plan.”

Peabo seemed to radiate disapproval. In the two years since I'd allowed myself to believe my father might be innocent of my mother's murder, I still hadn't visited him. Teddy, though, had gone, getting Jeanie to drive him there. Some paralyzing dread was holding me back. For the past year, I'd worked to get the Innocence Project and other nonprofit organizations to look at the case, but none had agreed to take it on. Teddy had represented my father himself, but I thought he needed a lawyer who wasn't his son.

Finally he said, “You think because your daddy's white and I'm black we couldn't have no friendship inside? Is that what you're saying?”

“Friendship is just a funny word for it.”

“He helped a partner of mine, a younger guy who got a bad deal. Most jailhouse lawyers—most
white
ones—they wouldn't help a brother, but your dad didn't care about skin color. Got my friend out, too. Filed a brief with the state Supreme Court and he won. Shit, you should be proud; your pop the best jailhouse lawyer in California.”

It was the first I'd heard of this. Our father had been an attorney, albeit an unsuccessful one, before his arrest and conviction. His practice had consisted of petty plaintiff's litigation, personal injury, insurance defense.

I'd preferred to believe we had nothing in common with him, that Teddy and I were sui generis. Now I also was wrongly accused. Thrown together with a man who'd known and seemed to respect him, I couldn't avoid understanding how my father must have suffered. And I couldn't avoid thinking of the monstrous mistake I'd made in cutting all ties with him, a mistake I still hadn't had the courage to face. I felt again as if I had to vomit.

At the same time, I didn't want to talk about my father with this man who'd tried to kill me. “Did you see what happened to my cellmate?”

“He in here somewhere. Got his nose broke, and a nasty crack on the head, but, far as I know, he'll live.”

That was good news. I hadn't lost another client. “Was he what started it?”

“Black guy taking a swing at him was what started it. Guess he figured it was open season, but he guessed wrong. Them white boys was all over him. Taking care of their own. It's almost enough to turn me cynical.”

“So how did Campbell and Damon figure you were going to get away with doing me the way you did Jamil?”

“Man, why do you keep talking to me about Jamil?”

“He was my client. I just want to know which rule he's supposed to have broken. For my own piece of mind. You see, I got a little sideways on this one. Nikki was part of it. She set me and Jamil up, made it look like we crossed your boss. That was my fault. Now I can't stop thinking that Jamil's the one who paid the consequences. You're not the one who gave the order. You're just a soldier.”

He'd turned his head away from me. “That boy went out of this world a tormented spirit. He couldn't hack it in here. Couldn't do the time. Nothing anybody could have done for him. It's been bothering me, that I didn't do nothing for him.”

“Sure you did. You gave him a hand up before he took a swing.”

He shook his head. “You're wrong. I ain't done that.”

“Who killed him then, if you didn't?”

“If I had to guess, it was Chopper. The one who slugged you. They was cellmates. But I haven't wanted to think about it too hard. Because if that's how it went down, we got to make a reprisal, but there ain't enough of us inside to do that. All the best old soldiers in prison, and these kids, the best you can say is they ain't afraid of nothing.”

“Not Jamil, though.”

He shook his head. “No, you're right about that. That boy was afraid of his own shadow.”

“Someone set him up.”

“Someone told the cops to check his ride for a gun, if that's what you mean. No doubt about it.”

“I'm not looking to rat you out to save my own skin. Because they can't pin Nikki's murder on me. There's the simple, obvious fact that whoever killed her would have left bloody footprints to his own front door. Which lets me out. So help me understand. What did Jamil do that he shouldn't have done?”

Peabo took a deep breath, let out a sigh. “Man, me and everyone else told him to get rid of that gun.”

“What do you mean, get rid of it?

“You do a job; you ditch the gun. Ain't nothing would have happened to him if he hadn't kept driving around with it. That made him vulnerable, but Jamil, he was a weak link.”

“You mean he couldn't do the time?”

“You could say that. Among other things. It was his fear, man. He wasn't no killer. It was eating him up inside. A little fear's a good thing, in my mind, long as you don't let it control you. But he couldn't keep it in.”

At last I heard what he was telling me. “You're saying he did the shooting. The one the gun was tied to.”

“Course he did. Jamil do anything anyone tell him. Don't start cryin' on me. You must have known your client was guilty.”

So there had been no planted gun, no frame-up, no conspiracy. Jamil had been guilty all along. Everything I'd wanted to believe about him was a lie, as no doubt he'd have told me if I'd let him give his side of the story the day I visited him here. Lavinia had put down the bait, and I'd obligingly swallowed it.

I kept on thinking. “So Damon turned in his own man and arranged for you to kill him in here.”

“Damon? Nah, he want to kill a man, he'll do it. I told you, it wasn't me. If Jamil didn't hang himself, the only one who could have done it was that Chopper. It wasn't Damon's thing.”

“Then whose was it? Campbell's?”

“You're talking about the only clean cop in Oakland.”

“How about Lavinia Perry?”

“I don't know no Lavinia Perry,” Peabo said.

He turned away from me and pretended to sleep.

Chapter 22

After two nights in the infirmary, I was transported downtown with a busload of other prisoners to the county courthouse, where I experienced the chaos of Monday morning arraignments from the other side.

Jeanie was there, and had worked out a deal with Cassidy Akida. Instead of arraigning me, Cassidy announced the decision of the district attorney's office not to charge me for the murder of Nikki Matson. I was processed out and released. They could always arrest me again, but Jeanie didn't think it likely, not unless new information came to light. “It'll make a good war story someday,” she said as she drove me home.

I felt humiliated and abashed, angry and exhausted. I needed to sweat out the experience on my bike, I thought, then take a shower. I felt infected with the taint and the stink of Santa Rita. “I don't want to talk about it,” was all I said to Jeanie.

“I'm here if you change your mind,” she said as she dropped me off. “Just know that.” Her solicitude unnerved me, completing my sense of failure. I couldn't get out of the Prius fast enough. Still woozy from the knock on the head, I ought to have gone straight to bed, but I needed the open road. I went upstairs and changed into my biking things.

“I'm home,” I called to Teddy, who was in the bathroom. “I'm going out for a ride.”

“Okay,” was all he said. No welcome home, no how are you? Just that.

The apartment bore all the usual signs of his habitation, but it was in better shape than I might have supposed. In my absence no disasters had struck, no fires or floods, no accidents requiring a trip to the emergency room. It was more or less clean, if disorderly, Teddy's physical surroundings reflecting the functional disorder of his brain. The stereo was playing full blast, green lights shooting across the equalizer, but no sound came from the speakers. Teddy, not remembering how to turn it off, had simply pulled out the speaker wires. In the laundry hamper I found our unopened mail.

I made it as far as the front door, my bike on my shoulder and my biking shoes on my feet. As I looked out at the street my legs began to feel weak; the trees seemed to swim in the heat waves rising off the blacktop. I felt a wave of dizziness. It was a joke that I'd thought I was physically up to it. Not to mention that whoever had tried to run me off the road three nights ago was still out there. Just because I'd survived the weekend didn't mean I was safe.

My knee hurt from the fall at the jail, I told myself as I turned away from the double glass doors and wheeled my bike onto the elevator. That was why I wasn't going out. I knew better, though. They'd gotten to me.

When I came back in, Teddy didn't ask me why I'd changed my mind. I took off my biking gear, throwing the clothes in the hamper even though I hadn't sweated in them, and took a shower.

When I got out he was in the kitchen getting ready to make a sandwich, consulting the sheet tacked to the wall. The carafe of the coffee maker was filled with orange juice, I noticed; in the microwave I found watery ice cube trays. I took comfort in the familiar task of rectifying my brother's cognitive mistakes, my anxiety eased by his dependence on me.

“I guess you heard all about it,” I said.

“Heard about what?”

“Nikki's dead.”

“Nikki . . .”

“Nikki Matson. The lawyer. The one I was visiting the other night before they arrested me.” Though I hadn't been ready for a conversation with Jeanie, I wanted to discuss it with him. I felt an unreasonable frustration. I needed a reaction more like he'd shown that night, interest and sympathy in what happened to me, gratitude for my return.

“Someone chased you,” he said. But it was as if the events we were speaking about weren't real to him. Only the task he'd this minute begun was real. He'd taken out a slice of bread but now was off track, staring down at the mustard jar and the meat, a butter knife in his hand. The knife was for the mustard, but as I watched he used it clumsily to slit open the deli bag of meat. Talking to me meant he didn't have enough concentration left over to make his sandwich.

“Whoever was chasing me, I think he went back up there and killed Nikki.” I wanted his attention; I wanted to tell him what Peabo had said about Campbell being the only clean cop in Oakland, and his reaction when I'd mentioned Lavinia's name. But Teddy had his own preoccupations. He opened the jar and spread mustard on bread, then spread mayo on the other side of the same slice. Then he draped meat across the bread and studied the result with a frown. Not right, but not completely wrong.

“Aren't you glad I'm not going to be charged with murder?” I asked.

“Real glad, Leo.” Teddy didn't look up, still studying the sandwich.

Teddy had always been a creature of routine. Now that I'd returned, normalcy was reestablished. For him, at least, it was as if there'd been no interruption. Or maybe his weekend alone had made more of a difference than I supposed; maybe he was beginning to realize that he could manage his own life.

I asked him if there were any messages, and he took out his memory book and studied it. “Oh yeah,” he said. “Car called. He wants you to call him back.”

~ ~ ~

I was too depressed to call Car. I turned my phone off and spent the rest of the day on the couch with the TV on, rousing myself every now and then to get another beer. Teddy's pistol lay on the side table in easy reach. If he saw it there he didn't say anything. He puttered around the apartment, then went out for his weekly odyssey on the AC Transit bus to his rehabilitation group.

We shared a delivery pizza for dinner. I was on the couch again, dozing around midnight, when I heard the distinct click of the pistol's hammer and felt the weight of someone sitting at the foot of the couch. When I opened my eyes all I saw was the gun. Then the face behind it came into focus, and I recognized Car.

He uncocked it, flipped the cylinder out, sighted down the empty barrel, then snapped the cylinder back into place and set the pistol on the coffee table. “Bang. You're dead. Shot with your own gun.”

Allowing myself to breathe, I sat up. “Car. Jesus.”

“You'd think someone was trying to kill you, keeping a pistol lying around like that.”

“Someone is.” And I told him what had happened after I left Nikki's.

He listened impassively, his face betraying neither belief nor disbelief. Every once in a while his eyelid twitched as if in amusement. Finally he said, “Well, if that's the case, you're making it easy. Passing out drunk on the couch with a gun practically in your hand. Where's Teddy? Sleeping?”

“I guess.”

He moved his foot and knocked over several empty beer bottles on the floor. They went rolling and clattering in different directions. “Shit, Leo, you are truly a mess.”

“What are you doing here?”

“I've been leaving messages all weekend. I thought you wanted my help on this thing. I got tired of waiting for you to call back.”

“They arrested me for Nikki's murder. I spent the weekend in jail. You must know that.”

“Well, you're out now.” He kicked a bottle as it came rolling back. “So how was it? You get it in the ass?”

“I wish I knew what your problem was,” I said, but in fact, I was just going through the motions. I was almost glad to be hassled, I realized, as if the events of the weekend were just a series of ordinary misfortunes.

“Come on. Get up,” he urged. “This place smells like ass. I'll buy you that drink I owe you.”

What I wanted most was to crawl into bed and stay there for about three days, but my curiosity got the better of me. It was so unusual of Car to make any overtures that I figured he must have found something good, and that the glint of it had somehow rubbed off on me.

We walked over to Grand Avenue and the Alley, a dive with ramshackle wood paneling. Near the main bar was a piano covered in Plexiglas with microphones around the perimeter where people could sit and sing their requests. When no one cared to sing, the gravel-voiced piano man took the floor.

We sat in one of the uncomfortable booths as far from the piano as we could get, where the volume was just right for not being overheard.

“You remember that Jeremy Walker business you asked me to look into? That wild-goose chase? Well, I may have found your goose.” Car downed half his vodka tonic in one swallow and wiped his mouth. “So it turns out your buddy Campbell isn't too popular these days. At least in some circles. My guy was happy to talk, but he's going to have my nutsack if I repeat anything.”

“I'm listening.”

“You asked about your client who got gunned down walking to work at the post office over a year ago. Well, my guy says that Campbell was working the case pretty hard. Evidently he'd just picked it up again recently. When he was looking through the file, one thing stuck out. Campbell had written up a warrant for the cell phone records and pulled the CAD printouts for another police officer.”

“Campbell was investigating this cop for Jeremy's murder?”

“Ex-cop now. He resigned last year. Sgt. Christopher Lucas. White guy. Narcotics. And here's the good part. Guess who Lucas was fucking at the time of his resignation.”

“Campbell's wife. Sgt. Lavinia Perry.”

“Hey there.” It was like we were playing basketball and I'd made a lucky shot. He lifted his drink to me, finished it, and signaled to the waitress, who ignored him. “Maybe you knew him. He had this dog that went everywhere with him, big thing like a bear. Violated just about every department regulation.”

I thought of Trigger, the dog Lavinia had when I walked with her on the Berkeley Pier.

“Also, he was cited twice for carrying a knife on duty. Big fucking thing he used to wear under his vest in back.”

I just nodded.

Car went on, “Like I said, Campbell's not too popular. You don't go after another cop on a murder case, even if he is fucking your wife. And if you do, you don't handle the case yourself. You give the file to the FBI and let them run with it.”

Car went to the bar for another drink. He was in a celebratory mood. As soon as he was gone, the waitress came. I ordered another round, figuring that he'd put away as many vodka tonics as I set in front of him tonight.

When he came back I shoved the extra drink across the table. “I picked up some other rumors,” he said. “Looks like the feds may be looking into the possibility that certain cops have been moving in on the drug trade, trying to set themselves up as suppliers. My source couldn't say whether Lucas was one of them.”

“What about Lavinia?”

“He didn't tell me it couldn't be her.”

“Say Lucas was one of these rotten cops. And Lavinia was in on it, since she was sleeping with him. And Campbell found out. And he was trying to make a connection to the murder of my client last year.”

“I don't suppose you can carve off a piece of the drug trade for yourself without killing a few dealers along the way,” Car said. “It would look at first like the dealers were killing themselves off, tit for tat. The kinds of murders that solve themselves. Just wait, and next week this week's shooter goes down.”

“Only problem with that theory is that Jeremy wasn't in the drug trade.”

Car shrugged. Thinking of what Campbell had said in the interview room, what Peabo had said about Campbell being just about the only clean cop in Oakland, I went on, “Maybe there's a war going on and the rest of the department is content to let it look like the dealers are killing each other off. But Campbell didn't like the murders of black men being treated like they don't count. It didn't matter to him that the dead men were drug dealers. He'd want whoever is responsible brought to justice. Especially if it was a white ex-cop.”

“Maybe.” But his flat voice made clear that I'd gone further into the realm of speculation than he was willing to follow.

It was plausible—maybe—but it didn't explain any of what had happened next. There was no connection I could think of between a rogue cop moving in on Oakland's drug trade, Jeremy getting gunned down on his way to work a year ago, and the deaths of Nikki and Jamil. I couldn't think of a single reason why someone I hadn't even met might want me dead.

Unless he thought I knew more than I did, or that Jamil or Nikki had told me more than they did before they were killed. That would be the ultimate irony, I thought, being targeted for knowledge I'd never acquired.

Thinking of the picture Kristofferson had shown me, Nikki's body in the bath, I was instantly gripped by fear. My only security lay in finding the truth, finding Lucas. “I don't suppose we know where this guy is, this ex-cop Lucas.”

“Like I told you, he resigned last year, and he hasn't been heard from since. It's a safe bet he isn't too far away, though, if all these guesses you're making are right.”

“And probably the only person in the department who really wants to find him is Campbell.”

“There may be an attitude in the department that this guy, Lucas, if the rumor about the federal investigation is true, is doing the cops' work for them, what they'd be doing if they didn't have one arm tied behind their backs. They figure he'll get what's coming to him before long.” Car shrugged again.

“So the only person who could possibly help me get out of this jam is the man whom I've irremediably pissed off.”

“That's one way to put it.”

I stared unhappily down at the table. I found myself wishing it were Damon who was trying to kill me rather than, perhaps, an ex-cop with a trail of bodies behind him. When I considered the two of them side by side, I could almost accept Campbell's description of Damon as a prominent businessman, an important member of the community.

Car changed the subject. “There's something else I've been meaning to bring up.” It was as if he'd been working himself up to something. “I heard about this place that's going to come up for rent, up in the hills. Real quiet place, kind of like Teddy's old house in the woods, only not so far out. On the bus line. Friend of mine is looking for someone long-term. He's a good guy, great landlord. Real hands-on.”