Guido looked nauseous.
“Mr. Shabazz, did Charles Conklin ever talk to you about the shooting of Officer Wyatt Johnson?” I asked.
“No. The others did. But never Charles.”
“What others?” I asked.
“The little girl who found the body came to me. She told me Charles shot a man. I was the first to call the police.”
“She told you?” I leaned closer, needing to pull something more from him. “And you believed her?”
“Ten-year-old children lie about stealing candy, or did they brush their teeth. They don’t lie about murder, Miss MacGowen. I walked her back to the place where it happened and she showed me.”
Guido chimed in, “What was a ten-year-old kid doing out alone after midnight in the first place?”
“I told you.” Shabazz pointed an accusing finger at Guido. “No structure. The child’s mother worked in the cafe across the street from the filling station where the shooting occurred. Couldn’t afford a sitter and she didn’t want the girl to stay home alone, so the child would walk over after school and sort of hang until quitting time-midnight, one o’clock. The mother did her best to keep an eye on her. She was a good child. Went to church, got through school. Works for the county libraries now.”
“LaShonda DeBevis?”
His face lit into a broad smile. “Do you know LaShonda?”
“I want to talk to her, but I can’t find her. Can you help me?”
“I will ask around.”
“Do you know Hanna Rhodes?”
His smile was suddenly a deep frown. “I never knew much about Hanna. She was a street child, like Charles. Had no safe place to go home to. Have you talked to her? What’s become of her?”
“I’m sorry to be the one to tell you, but Hanna is dead.”
“Dead, you say?” Asked the way a man visiting home after years away inquires about the old neighbors. Reverent pause in recognition of the fact, not necessarily grief or sadness. “How did it happen? Drugs or a man?”
“Maybe a combination of the two. She was shot night before last.”
“Night before last?” Shabazz looked around the spattered lot as if there were some answers inscribed in that chaotic mix of colors and shapes. “So recently? I haven’t seen her around, walking on the streets, for a long time. I assumed she had passed a long time ago.”
“I’m sorry,” I said again, because there was nothing else to say.
He shook himself. “It was inevitable. She was walking the streets selling herself for drugs when she was twelve, thirteen years old. Dead depends on your definition.”
“Were the two girls friends?”
“No. LaShonda’s mother wouldn’t have allowed that. What brought the girls together that night was the weather. It was cold. They had a little fire going out behind the filling station. That’s where they were when the officer was shot.”
“Why didn’t La Shonda go across the street to her mother instead of running five whole blocks to get you?” I asked.
“She was afraid of Charles. All the children were. She knew Charles wouldn’t hurt me.”
I took Guido’s arm. “Do we have batteries?”
“What if I say yes?” Guido asked.
“I want to shoot some background footage at the murder scene.” I turned to Mr. Shabazz, smiled at him. “Want to be in pictures, Mr. Shabazz?”
He smiled his assent. It was his turn to blush-I saw red rise up in his oak-colored face. “What do you propose?”
“Walk us through the scene as you remember it.”
He laughed a nervous laugh. “Do you pay scale?”
“I’ll give you a copy of the finished tape for F.O.I.,” I said.
“Fair enough.”
I turned to Guido. “How much time do we have on the batteries?”
“Easily an hour. If I’d had some warning…”
“Then let’s do it,” I said.
“My pleasure,” Shabazz said. He charged one of his teenagers to watch over the store and, after checking his reflection in the glass door of a soft drink cooler and adjusting his cap, he came out into the glare of midday with us.
Guido had sweated off his breakfast beer by then, so he drove, with Mr. Shabazz in front with him. I sat in back with a camera out the window, taping the route Shabazz had taken that night with LaShonda.
With the viewfinder in front of my eye, I asked, “Did you grow up in the area, Mr. Shabazz?”
“This is Watts,” he said, again as if I should have known better. “There were no Africans in Watts when I was a child. Things changed after the world war. I came here after Korea-the navy discharged me in Long Beach.”
When we got back up to Century, Shabazz pointed to an abandoned lot on the corner of Clovis Avenue.
“That’s the place. The filling station went out about the time Mr. Reagan came into office. There was a body shop in here for a while, but it didn’t last more than a year or two. The corner is notorious.”
Nothing was left of the old station except a few thousand square yards of cracked asphalt and the gutted stucco shell of the office and service bay. A chain-link fence that had been erected around the property had been pushed into rusted, pleated heaps. Campaign posters plastered to anything upright, competing for attention with the ever-present graffiti.
There was enough of the old station building left to offer some shelter. It had obviously seen regular use: the dim interior was cluttered with liquor and beer empties, discarded mattresses, little piles of toilet paper and dried feces. Every surface, even the broken asphalt, was covered with elaborate, overlapping gang tags that defined overlapping gang territories: Eight-Tray Gangster Crips, Rollin’ 90s, Grape Street, Kitchen Crips, Black Bishops, Be-Bop Bloods, Black P Stone.
I had the newspaper account of the shooting of Wyatt Johnson in my mind as I looked around. On the corner of the lot there were two concrete pads, the remains of the public telephones where Johnson would have placed his last call. The distance from the telephones to the restroom where he died was maybe thirty feet. A short last mile.
I knew the scene would look good on tape. Heat reflected off the faded pavement in shimmering waves that, with the heavy smog that was now in place overhead, would give everything a silvered, chiaroscuro effect. Colors would have a thin, hard quality. Very urban.
Guido had been casing the scene, too.
“What do you think?” I asked.
“Depends on the tone you’re aiming for,” Guido said. “This background is fine if what you want is war zone. But I think it’s distracting. Too ominous, you know? The night of the murder there was a functioning business here. This is something else. I say walk it through to get perspective, but keep the background in soft focus.”
“Let’s try it,” I said.
We stood a few yards from where the office had been. I positioned Shabazz so his side was to the building, his back to traffic moving down Century Boulevard. Guido checked it through his lens, repositioned us both a few degrees. Then he hefted the camera to his shoulder and said, “Century and Clovis, Shabazz and MacGowen. Go ahead, Maggie.”
“Mr. Shabazz,” I said, “the shooting death of Officer Wyatt Johnson fifteen years ago went largely unnoticed by the press and by the public. Yet the ramifications of that shooting have been large, affecting lives for several generations. What can you tell us about the events of that November night?”
“It was after midnight,” Shabazz said, seeming very comfortable with the camera aimed at his face. He had a natural sense for drama. His cultured speech took on more ghetto flavor as he got into his narrative. “A little sister came to my house and woke me up out of bed-I have an apartment over my store. She said some brother was shot up at the filling station. She said Pinkie did it. I knew Pinkie to be Charles Pinkerton Conklin, a boy who sometimes stayed at my house before he was sent to prison. She said, ‘Don’t let Pinkie get me.’ “
“She was afraid of him?”
He nodded. “She had reason to be. I suppose on the streets now he would be labeled scandalous. Fifteen years ago we called him a delinquent. Always in trouble.”