Blood Grove Read online

  “Pursuit of what?” I asked, thinking of the Bill of Rights.

  “The report of a brother who stole a Rolls-Royce.”

  Our eyes met over his lie. Then he recognized something.

  “Say . . . you’re that nigger, right?”

  O America, my America.

  “Which one did you mean?” I asked, even though I knew the answer to his question. He recognized me as the sometimes special adviser to Commander Melvin Suggs—the third-highest-ranking cop in the LAPD rank and file.

  “Don’t you get smart with me,” L. Bowen said.

  I had license and registration on the dashboard. There was also the legal-ownership document signed by Charles Zuma in my breast pocket. These I handed to a man who had somehow managed to despise me with no personal knowledge whatsoever.

  L. Bowen and his partner, E. Simmons, pored over the documents while discussing my fate. I didn’t hear what they said but I imagined that they were considering whether or not they could roust me without incurring the ire of the LAPD brass. Finally L. returned my papers.

  “You were three miles over the speed limit, but we’ll let you off with a warning this time,” he said.

  “The Beverly Hills limit or the hot pursuit one?” I asked. I shouldn’t have.

  They had me get out of the car and put my hands on the roof of the Rolls while they patted me down. They gave me a ticket, knowing I’d never pay it.

  The whole process took about half an hour. If I added up all the half hours the police, security forces, MPs, bureaucrats, bank tellers, and even gas station attendants had stolen from my life, I could make me a twelve-year-old boy versed in useless questions, meaningless insults, and spite as thick as black tar.

  6

  I made it to Sunset Boulevard without further incident. Driving west down the Strip was slow going, but I liked the streets filled with hippies, head shops, and discos. There was what they were calling a cultural revolution going on among the youth of America. They wanted to drop out and end the war, make love for its own sake, and forget the prejudices of the past. These long-haired, dope-smoking, often unemployed wanderers gave me insight into what my country, my country might be.

  There was an extra added benefit driving by the hippie hoi polloi that day. The young people ogled my fancy ride. Some of them, most of whom were white, gave me the black power fist and even mouthed, “Right on, brother.”

  I liked that car way too much.

  The crowds ended after five or six blocks, and I was speeding along the boulevard, now lined with mansions and big trees, vast green lawns and no pedestrians to speak of. The speed limit picked up and hardly anyone noticed my car because I was going deeper and deeper into the land of wealth.

  After about three miles there was a northbound, nameless turnoff that became a dirt road in six or seven minutes. That slender lane went another seven or eight miles with a solitary yellow Rolls-Royce its only traffic.

  After twenty minutes or so of deep ruts and hairpin turns over wooden bridges across dry streambeds and past a pond or two, I pulled up to a high iron gate. A man came out from a bamboo hut set before the barrier. He was maybe five nine, hirsute, with ocean-blue eyes and swarthy skin that had been kissed by the long-suffering sun of Sicilian history. Under curly black hair and a generous mustache one might have thought him to be in his forties, but I knew that Cosmo Longo had just turned thirty-two on May third.

  The sentry broke into a big smile and walked toward me as I exited the car.

  “Easy!” he announced to the woods and earth, sky and a far-off sliver of the Pacific Ocean that could be seen between two westerly crags.

  “Cosmo. How you doin’ today?”

  The Southern Italian immigrant wore heavy black trousers with a button-up fly and a white T-shirt, the fabric of which was quite a bit thicker than its American cousins. His bare feet were bigger than most shoes.

  “Carving a crucifix for my aunt in Cefalù.” He pulled out the moderate-size red garnet stone that he was slowly fashioning into the religious icon. It was both ornate and primitive, something reminiscent of another homeland, one I had never known.

  “Beautiful,” I said.

  The manly sentry grinned and nodded; then he said, “She got here about fifteen minutes ago.”

  He produced a key from a dark pocket and used it on the man-size gate contained within the larger metal structure. He ushered me through and we came to a nearly vertical granite mountainside that supported a funicular. The right side of the double-car conveyance was made from brass-tinted glass, polished copper, and ebony wood. It was beautifully detailed, which was fitting for its destination.

  I looked up at the hillside to our left and said, “I bet Gaetano is in that big oak halfway up.”

  “Not even the right hill,” Cosmo said, gleeful at my bad guess.

  There were always two Longo guardians at Brighthope Gate. One sat in the bamboo hut waiting for tenants, visitors, workmen, and, of course, unwanted guests. Another of the brothers hid somewhere in the surrounding hills with a high-powered rifle guarding his blood and the entrance.

  Cosmo pulled open the sliding door to the funicular and ushered me in. Once I was safely bunged inside, he engaged the mechanism that pulled my car up while the counterweight, the leftward chamber, came down again.

  The angle was steep, one hundred degrees, and the view through tobacco-tinted windows was magnificent. To my right sprawled the Pacific Ocean, a sleeping giant at the end of the world. To the left lay the ever-growing landscape of LA, spreading out toward the distant hills so far that the borders faded into a smoggy haze.

  At the top of the rise was Brighthope Canyon. Not actually a gorge, Brighthope was a shallow bowl carved out of the top of a coastal mountain, a lush depression that contained six houses connected by cobblestone pathways laid out three-quarters of a century before. You can’t see most of the buildings, as they are hidden behind and under trees and other vital vegetation. Only a stunning blue-and-white Victorian mansion is apparent. This baronial home was the capital of the little village, where sixty-three-year-old Orchestra “Sadie” Solomon lived with her gay soul mate, Reynard Khan, a man of seventy-one years. Though Reynard never touched Sadie, he stayed at her side for decades.

  They, or I should say she, owned the entire property. Sadie, and her father before her, gave out free “ninety-nine-year-until-death” leases to all the tenants. The previous occupant of my place had been named Norman. He died at the age of one hundred and two. Norman lived there for so long that no one remembered his surname.

  I inherited his house after being introduced to Orchestra by the minor real estate mogul Jewelle Blue, my friend and Jackson’s wife. Reynard, who kept his sexuality a secret back then, was being blackmailed by a young man with a camera—George Lund. George, in concert with a beautiful young man named Laurent, got Reynard on his knees. It was my job to help him back up again without making my involvement known. It was a complex coordination, but my police contacts, Melvin Suggs and Anatole McCourt, were more than happy to bust, and bust up, the extortionists. As far as Reynard was concerned, the problem merely went away. Orchestra was extremely grateful for my sensitivity. I also think she could imagine turning to a man like me for assistance from time to time.

  So she decided to offer me Norman’s house, which had been abandoned for six years.

  I accepted Sadie’s offer because I’d been worried about my daughter’s safety in some run-of-the-mill house on the city streets of LA. My job as a detective could be byzantine and even, at times, downright deadly. It often felt that I passed through life like a mad surfer negotiating a monstrous tsunami. Living on the mountaintop, protected by five Sicilian bodyguards, at least Feather could feel like she was living a normal life—smelling the flowers and considering the thoughts of Euclid and Shakespeare from classes at school and W. E. B. DuBois and Sojourner Truth from my library and that of Jackson and Jewelle Blue. And besides, no other neighborhood that I could afford wou
ld allow a man to raise a garden in his front yard and on his roof too.

  The exit at the top of the vertical railway was a large irregularly shaped concrete platform studded aplenty with semiprecious stones, iron discs stamped with the shapes of dozens of wild creatures, and various religious emblems rendered in every metal from copper to zinc to gold.

  A long, curved, and sloping path of blue brick led down from the platform to the cobblestone walkway that meandered between the half-hidden houses. Under the shade of three cypress trees I came upon Oktai Lorenz, a Spaniard with coppery skin and black, mildly Asiatic eyes. Oktai was in his fifties, a professor specializing in the history of war at UCLA, and a collector of butterflies. He stood six foot four and was built to practice the subject he taught.

  “Mr. Rawlins.”

  “Señor Lorenz.”

  “How go the hostilities down below?”

  “Simmering, but nowhere near a boil.”

  “Very good,” he said as I passed.

  The Bowl of Brighthope was in many ways as eccentric as the little black shantytowns I had known in my days wandering around East Texas and southern Louisiana.

  7

  A few minutes after leaving Oktai I came to the house that would be in my name and then my daughter’s name for the next ninety-eight and a quarter years.

  It was three tall stories high and cylindrical, painted mission white, and sporadically draped with ivy and passion fruit vines. There were windows, both large and small, at odd intervals and of different shapes. The path leading to the front door was paved with white marble tiles flanked on one side by nine five-foot dwarf peach trees and on the other by plum. The lawn that once ran around the structure was now made up of rolling rows of beans, tomatoes, yams, potatoes, onions, garlic, the beginnings of an asparagus patch, and Louisiana hot peppers. I puttered in the garden every morning I could. And if I was away, one of the Longo clan made sure that the weeds were tamed and the plants and trees watered.

  On the roof of the house, in large terra-cotta pots, I was cultivating twenty-seven different types of rosebushes.

  Coming home never failed to make me smile.

  I walked up to the plain-faced and thick ironwood door like it was an old friend welcoming me in.

  My friend was ajar.

  The foyer of our home had no walls but was simply a dais that stood three feet above the rest of that level. The entire first floor of our turret house was without partition, just a supportive pillar here and there. It was a kind of rambling living room that broke down into sections according to how the furniture was arranged. If we gave a party the entire level came together. But most times there were little areas where Feather entertained her friends and I mine.

  The most amazing thing about this room, and the whole house, was a stream that ran a crooked path across it. The creek bed was rudely hewn out of mountain stone. The water originated from an underground well in a higher, neighboring mountain. It was fresh enough to drink and the stream itself was quite slender until it reached the koi pond near the open-air terrace at the far wall.

  I followed the twisted pathway for its forty-one steps. This led to the sunlit verandah and the circular seventeen-foot-wide and three-and-a-half-foot-deep pond. There were more than eighty koi frolicking in the water. The fishes were white, black, blue, yellow, cream, orange, red, and many combinations of those colors. The huge bright-colored koi sashayed and flitted through the water like angels of a more primitive, more sophisticated time. Some were well over a foot long. My shadow reminded them of food so they crowded the surface near my feet.

  The little yellow dog, Frenchie, toddled up to the edge of the water imagining a wriggling fish between his teeth. But Frenchie was too old and not big enough for that. At one time he hated me, but the years had mellowed him, and while he rarely greeted me, he no longer snarled at my scent.

  Beyond the koi pond was the outer terrace, which was larger than my first apartment when I was fourteen and living on my own in Houston’s Fifth Ward. It, the patio, was paved with blue and red tiles from Mexico and walled by a thick green-glass barrier that stood about four and a half feet high.

  She was standing there wearing a pale pink dress that came down to just about the middle of her well-developed calves. With one hand on the ledge of green-glass brick wall she was gazing down along the coastal mountains where they tumbled into the ocean.

  “The door was unlocked again,” I said.

  She turned her body without moving her feet, smiled, and said, “Hi.”

  That one movement cinched it. The daughter of my heart was becoming a woman.

  “The door,” I insisted.

  “Daddy, we’re on a mountaintop and we know all our neighbors. If somebody knocks, I don’t ask, Who is it? I just open up.”

  I was thinking about Craig Kilian and the door to our offices, which we kept unlocked during business hours. I remembered him jumping across the desk at me.

  “Sometimes our neighbors have guests,” I said, “and even though we know the people around us, that doesn’t mean we know everything about them.”

  “You’re just being paranoid.”

  “That may very well be, but I still need you to respect me and do what I say.”

  Feather turned fully around, taking my words seriously.

  “I do respect you,” she said.

  “But you got to lock the door behind that.”

  “What happened today, Daddy?”

  I took in a deep breath. Both my adopted children, Jesus and Feather, were in many ways more intelligent, definitely more mature than I.

  Jackson Blue, who had read and retained every important book the central library had to offer, once told me that when a child is orphaned at an early age a large part of his psyche remains fixated there.

  “It’s like the boy just turns into a man instead’a growin’ up into one,” he said.

  I’d been on my own since the age of eight.

  I told Feather about Craig Kilian and how he had a breakdown from hearing a sonic boom. When I finished she smiled and said, “I’ll be sure to lock the door from now on.”

  It took a minute for the fears and anger to settle, then another to appreciate that Feather saw it as a duty to calm me when I worried about her.

  “You want me to make you some orange tea?” she asked.

  I nodded.

  “Let’s go upstairs.”

  All the staircases in Roundhouse, as we had dubbed our domicile, ran along the curved outer walls. Twenty-four-inch steel-braced snakewood stairs jutted out from the white, adobelike walls, accompanied by curved brass banisters that were anchored twice—on one floor and then the next.

  The second floor was our kitchen/dining room area. The eight-burner stove had two-foot-wide slabs of oak on three sides, creating a table of sorts. The whole structure stood in the center of the cooking area. There was also a huge utility oven and broiler embedded in the central wall.

  I sat at the stove-table while Feather puttered with the kettle, loose tea, and cups.

  “What you do today?” I asked her, recovered from my fear of an open door.

  “Matteo drove me down to Dawn Westerly’s house. Her dad put in an Olympic-size pool so we did laps for an hour and a half.”

  Matteo Longo was, among other things, chauffeur to the residents of Brighthope. Exceptionally tall, he was a pale-skinned man who had the scars and craters of adolescent acne spread across his face. He loved telling jokes and so had a better understanding of English than his father or any of his brothers.

  Matteo had driven me to work that morning.

  “How many laps?”

  “We didn’t count.”

  “How you gonna win the gold medal if you don’t count?”

  “Daddy,” she said in faux exasperation.

  She put a pot of the steeping tea and a white ceramic diner mug in front of me and said, “Let it sit for six minutes.”

  “I’m supposed to count that, right?”

&n
bsp; She rolled her eyes and took the stool next to mine.

  “So what are you dressed for now?” I asked the thirteen-and-a-half-year-old brown-cream-colored girl.

  “Don’t you remember? You said I could go over to Anita’s house tonight.”

  “Which one was that?” I asked, trying my best to sound as if I didn’t recognize the name.

  “You know. Anita Kolor. Her parents have that house on Malibu Beach.”

  I knew Anita, her mother, Mary-Margaret, and her money-manager father, Keith Kolor. Saul Lynx did a background check on them when it became clear to me that Anita and Feather were becoming friends.

  “Oh, right,” I said. “You know I’m a little nervous you hangin’ out with all these wealthy kids from that fancy school’a yours. I mean, I don’t want you thinkin’ that we’re rich just ’cause’a this house.”

  “It’s an expensive school, Daddy. That’s where rich kids go. That’s why you sent me there.”

  “They got those kids with scholarships and grants,” I offered as a possible alternative.

  “Five,” Feather said, holding up the full complement of fingers on her left hand. “Six including me. Kenisha Richards, Bob Cho, Lana Sizeman, Bic Roan, and Pookie. I know them all. I hang out with two of them. So are you saying that they should be my only friends?”

  “I thought you played tennis with Anita,” I said, rather than having the argument, which belonged in my head.

  “Yeah,” she agreed. “I do. But we’re supposed to have an early dinner and then I thought maybe you or Matteo could drive me over to Aunt Jewelle and Uncle Jackson’s house after. I’m babysitting and spending the night. And maybe I could talk French with Uncle Jackson.”

  The cowardly genius, Jackson Blue, was fluent in eight languages—not including computer binary and pure mathematics. There was a time when I wouldn’t have turned my back on Jackson, but, in spite of common logic, some people do change. His wife, Jewelle, once married to my deceased property manager, Mofass, was one of the strongest-willed and most brilliant people I had ever known. Jackson made something of himself through love of Jewelle and depth of mind.