“Who, what, when, where, and why?”
“Rafi Nadir, ex-police uniform, fifteen years ago, Los Angeles. And why? God knows I ask myself that plenty. I was a half—
Chicana woman on the force. You can imagine what that was like then and there. They put me patroling the streets of Watts.”
“Oh, great, playing the race card. Blacks versus Hispanic cop.”
“And the gender card: macho men versus woman in uniform.” She stared into the bottom of her empty beer mug. Alch got
up. “I’m buying this round.”
“Big spender.”
Around them families came and ate and went and came again.
Alch returned to the table, thinking he should have suggested a bar and grill. Except that this family chain restaurant was oddly apropos to their business.
And it was business. This was all about being dedicated cops and alienated ordinary citizens.
“You like Dos Equis?” she asked as he set the frosty mug in front of her.
“Beer is beer, but some is better than others.”
“Same could be said of people. Rafi’s Arab-American. An odd-man-out minority. At first, to me, he seemed sympathetic, supportive.”
Alch nodded.
“He had a future, Morrie. You know there are certain professions that demand your body and Soul. Police work. Medical work. Newspaper work, maybe.““Not banker, lawyer, accountant.”
“Nothing greedy. Nothing where you make much money.”
“Ask me about doctors nowadays!”
“Back then. When we were young.”
Alch nodded. He liked thinking about that, about then. When his back and his feet didn’t hurt, but things a lot more
interesting did, in a good way.
“Anyway, Rafi was on my side. It wasn’t fun being me on patrol. You know how they haze the new guys? Imagine how they can haze the new female. So, Rafi and I I… we were partners in prejudice: his ethnic origins, my ethnic origins and my gender.
“We lived together.” She checked him for disapproval level. “Bet your family loved that.”
“My family didn’t know that. I was on my own then. God, I was in my mid-twenties, I should have been on my own, but girls raised in ethnic cultures are always a bit retarded when it comes to knowing about real life. They like us to be helpless and innocent.”
“I’m betting that’s where Mariah comes in.”
“No. That’s where I left. I got a promotion, and he didn’t. It wasn’t much of a promotion, but it was something. That’s when I found out I was pregnant.”
“So? Things happen.”
“Not with a pinprick in a diaphragm, Morrie. Right then. Right after I got promoted! He knew I was raised Roman Catholic. He knew. What was I going to do? Abort? How was I going to handle more responsibility and weirder hours with a kid? I’d have to quit. Get some part-time brain-numbing job. Maybe stay at home, off the streets, change those diapers until I croaked of ammonia fumes.”
“He punctured your diaphragm to get you out of the picture on the job? He didn’t want to just dump you?”
She shook her head, then took a deep swallow of beer. “He wanted to own me. He wanted me barefoot and pregnant and
dependent on him. I saw it all through the pinprick of light in my little rubber artificial birth control device. That’s what the Church calls contraception. ‘Artificial.’ Like false fingernails or something. And getting pregnant is ‘natural.’ Maybe in my case it was God’s punishment for using birth control, I don’t know. It sometimes felt like that. Rafi had forced me into an impossible position, an impossible decision. I just knew I had to get out of there, right away, and never let him find me again.”
“And he didn’t. Until today. So what did you tell Mariah?”
“That her father was a cop. Who was killed. Helping a mo-torist on the freeway, ploughed into by a drunk driver.”
“Dead hero. Guess there wasn’t a convenient foreign action going on at the time.”
“No, there was just convenient lies.”
“That’s bad, Carmen,” Alch said. “Very bad.”
“I know.”
“That’s why you’ve been so jittery lately. You knew this Nadir guy was in town.” “I’ve been jittery?”
“Well, more like wired and jittery. Like-”
“If you say ‘on the rag’ I’ll choke you, Morrie.”
“Sounds like my Vicky talking. But I noticed something was wrong. Hell. We all did.”
She suddenly put her head down on her folded arms. “So it didn’t work. My soldiering through. I demoralized my own
troops.”
“Not … demoralized.” Alch twisted his neck, trying to see her face. “Maybe you motivated them.” “Huh?” She looked up, her face red from the lowered position.
“We’re all human, Carmen. Maybe we like to see a little of it in our bosses. Our ‘superior’ officers.”
“You’re enjoying this?”
“No, I’m enjoying getting to see that you’re human too. Just like the rest of us. You set yourself an impossible standard, you know. This Rafi Nadir can’t hurt you any more than you’re willing to hurt yourself.”
She straightened up. Thought that over. “What would you do now?”
“Figure out a way to tell my daughter the truth before somebody who didn’t like me had a chance to tell it to her first.” A long sigh, a longer swallow of beer.
“You’re right. Mariah comes first and foremost. I thought I was protecting her, but I suppose I was fooling myself. She’ll
like knowing her father’s a failure?”
“She’ll want to know her father, and make up her own mind. You can’t stop that. You can only supervise that.”
“Not good news, Morrie. Not what I had hoped for at all.”
He nodded at her. “Believe it or not, that’s a step forward, Carmen, not a bad step forward. At all,” he echoed her. Deliberately.
She glared at him-the Molina he knew and liked and who scared the hell out of him sometimes, in a good way he could rely upon-and then slapped a fin down on the table.
“I pay for my own beer.”
“Sure. But my advice is free. You can’t buy experience.” She left.
Alch reflected that this was the first time he’d ever had the last word with her.
Chapter 45
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“What a bitch!” he said.
What a bummer of a beginning, Temple thought with a sigh.
She and Rafi Nadir shared a table near the front of Les Girls, the better to avoid the performers attempting intimate relationships with a stainless-steel pole onstage.
“Why couldn’t she have been a real girl? Like you?” he asked.
“How am I different?” Temple asked. Let me count the ways.
“You’re-” Rafi’s eyes grew unfocused. “You’re nice. A guy feels good taking care of you. And you’re spice. You think you
can take care of yourself. I like that. I like … knowing you can’t, always.”
Temple figured this was as real as it got with Rafi.
“You’re conflicted,” she returned in fine Dr. Phil form. “You like girlie girls, but you also need women who don’t kowtow to anybody. You only think you like me, because you don’t know me. Do you?”
He blinked, sipped his Sprite on the rocks. ifig, bad Rafi Nadir.“You’re just trying to keep me away from her:’ he said. “Of course. You’re a bum combo, brother.”
“Brother? That’s how you think of me?”
“I have five.”
“Really?”
“Yes, really. They hassled me and overprotected me and probably saved me some grief more often than I admit, and at times I could have strangled every one of them.”
“That’s it! Why don’t you broads appreciate what we guys can do for you?”
“Because we need what we can do for ourselves.”
“Without us.”
“Maybe. But it’s better with you guys.”