I turned down Lou Dillon Street into the Jordan Downs projects. Sinking feeling didn’t go far enough to describe how I felt. Profound doom came closer. I had been to Etta’s apartment twice before, both times during the day, both times with Guido. Even then it was scary. At night, alone, with half the street lights out, it was insanity.
The air was maybe fifteen degrees hotter in the projects than it had been in the landscaped grounds of the Valley condo. Young people here were hanging outside looking for air, looking for diversion. A lot of yelling, chasing around, empties on the curb.
All the buildings looked alike, popped from the same crude mold: stark two-story cinder-block rectangles laid in ranks, with saggy clotheslines crisscrossing the patchy lawns between them. It looked institutional, like a prison without gates or bars.
The address Mike had given me for Hanna Rhodes’s grandmother was on Grape Street, in the same block as Etta’s apartment. On Grape Street some of the units had been painted purple, the color of the Grape Street Crips set. The color helped me get my bearings. I passed the grandmother’s apartment first, and thought about stopping by, but there were no lights showing. I drove on.
I found Etta’s ancient Bonneville parked in front of her place. Parked on the lawn next to it were a dozen or more teenagers in black Raider shirts and wrap-around sunglasses. They watched me without much interest. I scoped them, measured the ten or fifteen feet between my car and Etta’s front door, and decided it was a possible mission.
I didn’t have the sort of car anyone would want to steal-there were better ones parked all around. But it was my only means of exit so I did not want anyone to mess with it. If I kept my talk with Etta real short, I thought I would be okay.
I wanted to have my hands free, in case, so I left the cake and the Dr. Pepper in the car. I shouldered my bag, locked up, and set off on a rapid jog toward Etta’s with my keys in my hand.
I drew kids like a magnet; I don’t know where they all came from. They started in on me right away:
“You from the County?”
“Hey, give me some money.”
A little pudge came up close behind me, breathing booze in my face. I glanced at him as I switched my bag to the other shoulder, out of his reach.
“Don’t I hear your mother calling?” I said.
“Don’t get smart with me, bitch. What the fuck you doin’ here?”
A bigger boy ran up beside him. “Grab the bitch, take her purse.”
I was maybe two yards from Etta’s when her screen door popped open and a mass of man stepped out.
“Get your ugly nigger asses the hell away,” he boomed. Amid a chorus of obscene back talk, the kids slithered off.
“Thanks,” I said, slipping into Etta’s living room past the man. It was hot inside and sweat poured off his round black face. The name embroidered on his soiled oil company overalls was Baby Boy. He was at least six and a half feet tall, maybe three quarters that big around the middle. He reeked of beer and sex.
Etta lounged on the sofa nursing a forty-ounce bottle of malt liquor. While Baby Boy looked as if he had come directly from work, Etta had dressed for an occasion: silver satin stretch pants, a silky blouse tied in a knot above her midriff roll. Whatever the occasion she had dressed for, I clearly had not been considered in her plans.
“What you doin’ here?” she asked, the way you address a cockroach in your sugar bowl. Her eyes had a glaze.
I stayed by the door, keeping an eye on the car. “I got permission to take a videocamera into Juvenile Hall Wednesday morning when I talk to Tyrone. Thought you might want to ride along. I can pick you up around eight.”
“Wednesday?” She looked over Baby Boy as if measuring him, deciding how much of him would be left by Wednesday morning. Her gaze turned back to me. “What else you want, honey?”
“Did you watch the news tonight?” I asked.
“The news?” Etta’s head bobbled. “I didn’ watch no news. We was busy, wasn’ we Baby Boy?”
“Yes we was.” Baby Boy laughed, a deep rumble like rolling boulders.
“I’m sorry you missed it,” I said. “A few seconds of the interview you did for me got picked up and attached to a piece on Charles Conklin. You were on the six o’clock news, Etta, calling the police motherfuckers.”
“Hey, baby,” Baby Boy grinned. “You was on the TV.”
Etta raised a hand for him to slap. She was bombed but not too anesthetized to drag up a reaction.
“Thought I should warn you,” I said. “The district attorney has attached his star to Charles Conklin’s grievance. If reporters want more of your story, it won’t take them long to find you. They can swarm over you like angry bees. Trust me, it could get intense.”
“Like how?” she asked.
“Relentless questions, film crews dogging you, people looking in your windows, going through your trash, snooping into your personal business. You won’t have any secrets left to tell.”
“As long as Pinkie gets out the jail, I don’ care what they do.”
“Pinkie is Charles Conklin?” I asked.
She nodded. “What I say?”
“Do you believe he’s innocent?” I asked.
“Don’t care about that, neither.” She slurred her words less as her apparent interest level rose. “Where he is now, he don’t pay no child support. He don’t do nothin’ to help bring up the boy. I want his ass out here where he be some use to me.”
“Tell me about Mr. Conklin,” I said.
“Got nothin’ to say about him.” With the bottle, she was waving me away. But she kept talking. “He is scandalous. I told my girl to stay outta his way. He was dealin’, rennin’ my baby on the street, stealin’ cars. He was sent up for messin’ with his own little girl.”
“Roll that by me again,” I said. “The little girl part.”
“He went to jail for messin’ with this little girl,” she said, her pitch rising at the end. “Left my girl with a baby when he got arrested. She was only fourteen herself.”
“Besides Tyrone, he has a daughter?”
“He has a lotsa kids. An’ he don’t take care of none of them.”
“Nice guy. this Charles Conklin.” I began to relax for Mike a little. Even the most egregious sob sister or opportunist, Roddy O’Leary included, couldn’t make a media hero and martyr out of a child-abusing pimp.
Etta refortified herself with a long pull from her bottle. When she put the bottle down again, she seemed surprised to see me still there. “Was there somethin’ else?”
“That’s about it,” I said. “Except, maybe you should get yourself a lawyer.”
“Me?”
“You may need to protect yourself, Etta, if the sleaze TV people come asking you to sign exclusive interview agreements with them. They can be tricky.”
“What did you call that?”
“An exclusive agreement.”
“Is that like the paper you had me sign?”
“No. You signed a release form giving me the right to commercial use of the interview we taped. It doesn’t keep you from giving interviews to other people.”
“If I sign a’ exclusion thing with you, will those reporters you told me about stay away from me?”
“Not necessarily. Anyway, I can’t pay you for an exclusive. The best I can offer is to put you up in a hotel for a while if things get hinky,” I said, hoping I had a credit card that wasn’t coaxed out if it came to that. “You could take a little vacation until the press loses interest and moves on.”
She smiled at the idea. “I ain’t had no vacation in a long time.”
Baby Boy had a gleam in his eye.
I was ready to go pack her a bag, even though hiding her away was a risky idea that could backfire on all of us if the story got hot. I kept talking. “Go to legal aid tomorrow and get a lawyer before you do anything.”