Fuck yeah, I remember you, you gorgeous doll, he wanted to say, but he just nodded his head and grinned. He had done a year with Jordan Powers at Juvenile Hall when they were thirteen.
“Jordan told me you was a cop or something. Y’must be on a case. Not a damn murder, I hope.”
Athena chattered on, the patrons at the Château Rouge fading around them.
Then Cravitz blurted out, “You sure have grown, Thena.”
“Yeah,” the young woman said, blushing. “I’m an old woman now. Downside of twenty-five and sinking fast.” Athena pulled nervously at her hair. “Oh my god, I must be a wreck. I been runnin’ all day.”
“No, no,” Cravitz said, “you look… cool.” The last time Cravitz had been this close to Athena she was sweet sixteen, and he was twenty-her brother’s hoodlum friend. On that day, while she was giggling among her cousins and dressed in her great-grandmother’s antique silk gown, he saw her budding into womanhood before his eyes.
“You staying at the Château Rouge?”
“Just for the weekend. I write for Ebony. Can you believe it? We’re doing a story on black Hollywood. So I figured I might as well catch the Halloween bash at the Château Rouge.”
“You got a date?” Cravitz heard himself asking. “Oh my,” she said. “Are you asking me?”
“‘Might give you a shot,” Cravitz said evenly.
“Y’know, Jordan is still a thug. He’s gonna kick your ass when he hears you’re trying to get with his little sister,” Athena said.
“Jordan don’t want none a this,” Cravitz replied, spreading out his arms above her head and standing the full measure of his 6’5” height. His dark magnificent head hovered over her.
“I’m in room 313,” she said, then disappeared in the crowd.
Cravitz took his usual route, up the rear stairwell to his brother’s private suites ten floors above. He’d watched his brother work the combination many times.
He cracked the safe within minutes, removed a liner from a trash can, and stuffed the dope inside. Then he drove wearily out to the safe house in La Caja.
Yippie was elated when Cravitz arrived. He put the dope in his briefcase. Esmeralda was poised on his nightstand.
“I think we can keep your dumbshit brother out of the slammer this time but you gotta get that Vegas bitch out of there,” Yippie said. “If Vargas finds out Cash is dealing again…”
Cravitz said he would, and told his friend he’d see him in the morning.
Cravitz took the streets home. Halloween decorations were up everywhere. Hollywood was crowded with phony vampires, angels, wolfmen, and movie stars.
Back home in View Park, he changed into his costume-Priest, from Superfly, replete with pimp hat, Jheri curl wig, platform shoes, polyester shirt, bell-bottom trousers, and rose-colored shades. Then he picked up Athena Powers, who was dressed as a sexy Belle Starr, with bells on her six guns and spurs, and starry skies painted across her sheer silk blouse.
That night the main ballroom at Satin Dolls became Ground Zero of Afro-Hollywood. The Flo Boyz played. At midnight Dwight Trible sang, the great jazz pianist Nate Morgan performed, and everyone joined in for “Happy Birthday, Quick!”
Finding his brother, Cravitz explained he needed a few more hours to decide. Cash never suspected he was already jacked.
Athena Powers and he danced until 2. Then she invited him back to her suite and Belle Starr easily convinced Superfly to break his fast on pussy and booze.
“Where you goin’?” Athena protested when Cravitz got up at 4 and changed back into his jeans and a funky shirt and strapped on his big gun.
“Got to check on a buddy,” Cravitz said.
“Can’t it wait?” she asked with a sly smile.
“Can’t,” Cravitz said simply.
They made love one more time and he was on the road to La Caja at 6.
3.
About 6:06 that morning, back in the safe house thirty miles north, undercover detective Yippie Calzone was awakened by whispers.
Quick as a cat, Yippie snatched up Esmeralda from the nightstand and turned.
In the flash of glass and buckshot that erupted through his window at that instant, Calzone witnessed the fiery unraveling of his final moment.
He had no time to say oh shit or oh fuck or goddamn or God bless or forgive me or what the hell or anything.
He tried to move, but his legs felt aflame. His big arms twitched and flopped against the bed. He gripped Esmeralda hard, and a shot rang out.
Esmeralda recoiled and banged against the nightstand. Yippie’s hand jerked flat, and Esmeralda, blood-splattered but voluptuous even in this light, laid upon his quivering right palm, her buxom body sparkling silver, her hair-trigger demurely cocked.
Yippie could dimly feel his own heartbeat; and then, faintly, the renewed whispers of his assailants.
Dogs barked. He heard a distant siren, the droning of helicopters.
He tried to move his fingers. They felt heavy and wet and hot. Just below them, he felt Esmeralda tingling, her body cool, waiting.
Lights went on up Orchid Street-on Sagebrush Road and Terra Vista, the next streets over. Neighbors came out onto their porches.
Still lurking at Yippie’s window, the killer could feel his own hot sweat, each drop a burning heartbeat. As for his heart, he felt it drumming in his chest, confident and strong.
He chuckled and stood up. He was dressed, as were his fleeing cohorts, in a ninja outfit.
“Butterbrains,” he muttered, watching them struggle over the back fence.
He could hear neighbors, slightly louder now, calling out in alarm.
The killer lifted the sawed-off shotgun through the jagged gaps in the wood and glass.
Three more blasts followed for good luck.
A curtain of fire lit the room.
Rooster-tails of splatter dripped down the walls.
Esmeralda slid from Yippie’s big fingers and clattered onto the floor.
The good cop was dead.
A dozen neighbors were milling around the front gate gossiping anxiously when Cravitz drove up twenty minutes later.
He fumbled with the keys, unlocked the gate, and hurried inside.
Unholstering his Beretta, Cravitz moved through the shadowy rooms and hallways. Then he went into Yippie’s bedroom. Ignoring the bed, Cravitz looked around at the shattered window, the floor covered with splinters and glass, the streams of blood and flesh drying on the walls. He walked to the window and peered into the yard. He could make out a few footprints in the dust.
Cravitz gathered himself and turned to face the bed where his old friend lay.
He walked over and stared down at the body.
His hard gray eyes began to work, running along Yippie’s corpse.
Displays four shotgun wounds, three penetrating and one grazing. Hard to figure the sequence in this light.
He lightly touched his old friend’s forehead.
The lacerations and abrasions from the wounds formed linear patterns. The skull was shattered. His buddy must have been rising up when the killer struck. Cravitz got down on the floor and retrieved some black threads he noticed among the splinters.
He wrapped the threads in a handkerchief and left the lion’s share for the cops. On the edge of the shattered window sill, Cravitz noticed a bullet hole.
He got a shot off. So where’s Esmeralda?
Cravitz turned sharply and stared at the bloody nightstand. The briefcase with the dope was gone too. There was a pool of blood gathering just below Yippie’s outstretched hand.
“Esmeralda fell there,” Cravitz said out loud. As he looked closer, he realized the killer had stepped in the splatter. “I know who did this.”
Thirty minutes later L.A.P.D. Homicide detective Manuel Maximillian “Manny” Vargas and his partner Will Dockery arrived. Cravitz, who’d met the detectives through Yippie, walked them through the murder scene.