"Tell me something. I thought Itsy and Placa were hooked up, but now I hear they busted up a while back. Who was Placa's new tight?"
They all stared at anything but Frank. Zero reaction.
"What if I told you she was twistin' Ocho's girlfriend?"
"You'd be fuckin' crazy," Gloria laughed, but Tonio threw Frank a hasty glance. He licked his lips and wiggled deeper into the chair. Frank smiled inside, knowing he knew.
"De verdad," she continued. "Placa had La Reina tattooed on her leg, right up here," Frank drew a line across her thigh. Tonio didn't look but the other two did. Gloria stopped bouncing the baby.
"Mentirosa," she growled.
"Tejuro," Frank pledged, hand held in the air.
Gloria jumped up in a full and sudden fury, screaming, "Jodida puta! How could she be disrespecting her clica like that? That fuckin' bitchl"
Claudia merely watched her grandchild crawling on the floor and Frank asked, "You knew?"
She waved a hand, "I don't know about that kinda thing. Carmen, she always have to be different. Always want to be somethin' she not. I don't want to know nothin' about that business of hers."
Claudia crossed herself and Frank looked at Tonio for an answer. He wouldn't meet her gaze. She wanted to talk to him, but she wanted him alone. She'd wait. She was running out of time for today. With a grin, she said, "I hope this was as much fun for you as it was for me. I'll see you tomorrow."
She let herself out, pondering how to approach Tonio as she crept through side street traffic to the freeway traffic. She was five minutes late for her meeting with Clay, but his secretary apologized that he was running late too. Frank nodded, quickly disregarding the mental health brochures scattered around as reading material. A bottled blonde, rail-thin and heavily made-up, rattled through a Good Housekeeping. Must have brought it with her, Frank thought, wondering who she was waiting for. Husband? Boyfriend? Frank decided to wait in the hallway, not wanting to bump into whoever came out of Clay's office.
She paced, chumming her thoughts back to Placa. Maybe it was inevitable, but like Noah and Bobby, Frank had hoped Placa would turn out differently. She wasn't the only one who must have thought that; there probably wasn't a cop in Figueroa who at some point hadn't picked up that baby girl padding happily along the sidewalk in a loaded diaper. She'd laugh and wiggle when you held her and always tried to pry your badge off. As an older child she'd become wary, but quick to smile when she recognized you. When she started banging, she'd become hostile and insolent, but still able to summon a trace of civility for the cops she knew best. Despite the rough tagger exterior, there was still a tenuous respect for the past if nothing else. It was that faint memory, of a time before gangs, that cops like Frank and Noah had hoped would jettison Placa out of the life.
Claudia had chipped during Placa's earliest years. When she wasn't in the spoon she took good care of her kids, and with their overwhelming backlog, Child Protective Services never got around to taking them. There were occasional men around, the longest lasting being Gloria's father. He was a ratty punk and Claudia had his name tattooed over her left breast. Frank had broken up more than one bottle-flying, fist-smashing catfight over him and it wasn't unusual to get a Saturday night domestic violence call from Claudia's house. What money he didn't make hustling and fencing cars, Claudia made by selling junk, and doing minor B and E's. She'd been busted dozens of times, from misdemeanors to grand theft auto, and Frank had taken her in at least seven or eight of those times. But there were so many more "serious" offenders on the LA County court dockets. When she shyly appealed to the judge that she had three babies at home that needed taking care of she got off on probation or her cases got tossed or pleaded. At worst, she'd end up at Sybil Brand for a couple months and Julio's wife would take the kids in.
Frank had a softness for Claudia. They ran into each other frequently, and while Claudia was uncommunicative, she was never as openly hostile to Frank as she was to the other jura. The last time Frank had taken her in had been years ago, when she was a Sergeant, and Claudia'd been on the nod. Her hair was dirty and there was no make-up to cover her yellowing skin. Where she'd fallen onto the sidewalk her cheek was gouged and her upper lip was split. Frank had propped her in the back of the squad car and flies tried to cluster around a bloody scrape on her knee. Frank had waved them away, closing the door carefully. Behind the wheel she'd flipped the rearview mirror so Claudia could see herself.
"What happened to that pretty girl I met my first day on patrol?" Frank wondered aloud. Claudia had stared cloudily at her reflection, as if trying to find the answer. Maybe the question had done some good. When she went into Brand that time, she'd been forced into quitting the smack. She was also carrying her second son, and when she came out she'd stayed clean.
It was a couple years later that Frank presented Placa with the metal badge. She'd pinned it on the chubby girl's thin T-shirt and she'd beamed. She couldn't stop staring at her chest. Every time Frank saw Placa after that she had that damn badge drooping off her chest. Until one day Frank saw her playing on the sidewalk, in a bare shirt. When Frank asked her where the badge was, Placa's face darkened and she said some boys had ripped it off and jumped on it till it was flat and crumpled. So Frank had paid the cop with the machine shop to make her half a dozen and the cycle continued until one day Placa didn't want the badges anymore.
"How come?" Frank had asked.
"My tio and brother says they're stupid, only the police wear badges and I'm not a police."
"You could be a police," Frank said, "when you're a little bigger."
Placa considered that carefully.
"Then I could wear a badge all the time?"
"Everyday. And no one could ever take it away from you."
"No one ever takes your badge?"
"Nunca."
"But how big do I have to be?"
"You have to be as old as your brother Chuey."
Then very seriously, Carmen said, "Entonces, I'll wait to be a police. Then I can have my own badge and no one can take it from it me."
She and Frank had exchanged a low-five. Thing was, Carmen never got to be as old as her brother Chuey.
The receptionist told Frank she could go in. Clay rose to meet her and they shook hands. After she settled uneasily into one of his chairs he asked how her week had been.
"Okay," she answered noncommittally, knowing she was buying time. Clay stared over the glasses at the tip of his nose. Frank knew what was expected and Clay always gave her the option to waste the hour or be productive.
"Had a girl get shot up this week. Knew her for a long time. She was a banger, but she was a good kid, good grades. She was a mean OG so nobody gave her trouble. She could get away with being smart. Could have gotten a scholarship to art schools."
Holding her thumb and forefinger together, Frank continued, "She always got this close to convictions. Managed to wiggle out of them like her mother. Would have been fun to see her come up."
When Frank didn't continue, Clay said, "How does her death make you feel?"
Frank tossed a shoulder, shying from the answers. They swirled on the edge of her consciousness, waltzing like women in gauzy ball gowns. It took her a moment to pick out individual feelings and give them names. She walked over to the window. The pane was cool and solid against her fingers, a comforting contrast to the turbulence within. Knowing what Clay wanted to hear, she quickly catalogued and labeled her feelings.