“Noelle’s on his contact list,” Isaiah said, “but it could have been there for years.” Dodson was at the stove, cooking. Isaiah thought about telling him not to but didn’t. “The phone stores a hundred calls,” Isaiah said. “Most of them are to the fellas. Some to Bobby but they weren’t returned. A few to DStar. None to Noelle and I don’t see an area code from anywhere around Fergus but Skip probably used a burner. The rest are to girls.”
“Maybe they’re fake names,” Dodson said.
“I’d have to call every one of them to find out,” Isaiah said, “and I don’t see any clusters of calls on the day we were hired or went to Blue Hill or when Skip was in my house.” Isaiah did a quick scroll through the texts. There were the usual suspects and more girls. A few to DStar about when he was coming over. No Noelle, no area codes, no clusters.
“Well, I’ll tell you this,” Dodson said. “Charles ain’t making no comeback with these tracks. He copied every MC out there.”
Charles didn’t use email much and there were none that caught Isaiah’s eye. He’d have to go through them again with a search app but this wasn’t a good sign. If there was no connection between Charles and Noelle they were still at square zero.
“Are you listening to this?” Dodson said. “Charles did a diss track.”
Black the Knife, down without a fight
A termite, a flea bite,
Got stage fright, no right to life
Boy’s an absentee, a detainee, no number on his caller ID
Nobody home at the addressee
His time is passed, miscast, outta gas, second class
In foreclosure, never sober, I’m in clover, I’m taking over.
“Makes no sense,” Dodson said. “Cal ever hears this Charles and Bug are out of a job.”
“Maybe they don’t think they’ll need one,” Isaiah said. “Listen to the background vocals.”
Charles had done his own background vocals, overdubbing himself to get a thicker sound; a woman’s voice was weaving in and out, roller-coastering up and down three octaves and yeah-ee-yeah-a-ing.
“Hear the woman?” Isaiah said.
“Yeah, what about her?”
“Before Noelle was Cal’s wife she was a singer.”
“I knew that,” Dodson said. If he wasn’t frying okra he would have snapped his fingers.
They sat at the counter eating gumbo over rice and fried okra.
“This is good,” Isaiah said.
“Good?” Dodson said. “That’s all you got to say?”
The gumbo was different than the version Dodson made back in the apartment. Isaiah tasted traces of honey and white vinegar and some kind of herb that tasted a little like root beer. “The okra’s good too,” he said. They’d downloaded one of Noelle’s songs from iTunes and her voice matched the woman on Charles’s track. It didn’t prove anything but at least there was a connection.
“Noelle needs the life insurance money,” Isaiah said, “and if Charles is going solo he’d need money too. They both hate Cal so they partner up. They lived together, might even have had a thing. The question is, who’s going to take out Cal? They could use Charles’s Inglewood boys but it’s too obvious. They need somebody that can’t be traced back to them. They need a hit man.”
Dodson was disappointed Isaiah didn’t remember about the gumbo but what really pissed him off was not catching the thing about Noelle and what pissed him off even more was that he hadn’t made Isaiah stumble once. “So how do Noelle and Charles hook up with somebody like Skip?” Dodson said. “They sit next to each other at the BET Awards?”
“Through DStar,” Isaiah said. “He delivers to Cal’s house twenty-four seven. He had to know both of them.”
“That doesn’t mean DStar knew Skip.”
“DStar’s real name is Jimmy Bonifant and Skip was talking to somebody named Bonnie when we were at Blue Hill.”
“Who made the deal?” Dodson said, not giving up. “Noelle went out to the desert in her Jimmy Choos, sat down at the picnic table Skip don’t have, and worked out the details with all them dogs barking? I ain’t seeing it.”
Isaiah hesitated. Dodson thought Oh shit.
“She had a go-between,” Isaiah said.
“Go-between like who-Charles?” Dodson said. “Skip sat down with Grandyose at Starbucks and them two unstable muthafuckas worked out a deal? You know that didn’t happen.”
“So it was somebody else,” Isaiah said, softer than before.
Dodson thought, I landed one. He’s hurt. “Maybe it was Bug got together with Skip,” he said. “Skip talked about being in the Olympics and Bug told him how he might be something in Fergus but he wasn’t shit up in here. Be serious, Isaiah. Noelle wouldn’t trust either of them fools to go to the store and buy a soda, now would she?”
Isaiah looked at his gumbo.
“Well?” Dodson said. He’s down for the count.
Isaiah put his spoon down and wiped his lips with a napkin and in those few moments Dodson knew he’d been sandbagged. “No, Noelle wouldn’t trust them,” Isaiah said, “but she might trust her bodyguard.”
“I’m sorry to bother you, honey,” Blasé said, “but I’ve got a little problem. A stalker’s been following me around, popping up everywhere I go. You know the kind, looks at you like he wants to see you in his basement chained to the water heater?”
“I’ve been in that situation myself,” Noelle said. “Had some silverback on my trail. I think Cal sent him to scare me and it worked too. Did you get a restraining order?”
“Not yet. We don’t even know his name.”
“Anything I can do?”
“I don’t know how to say this but-I’d like to borrow your bodyguard.”
“Rodion?”
“Is that his name? Rodion?”
“That’s what we call him.”
“Does he have a last name?”
“If he does he hasn’t told anybody. Why him?”
“You know that club on Melrose, Nirvana? It’s always so crowded you can’t even raise your arms? Byron said he saw Rodion at the bar and it was like he’d just come back from Liberia with a runny nose. Nobody was within ten feet of him.”
“Yes, he is a frightening individual. Consuelo calls him el monstruo feo, which I believe means tell me when he’s gone so I can clean the damn house.”
“Can you spare him, honey?”
“I would if I could but he’s on vacation.”
“Where does somebody like that go on vacation?”
“I don’t know. Maybe he went to Comic-Con. He’d fit right in and wouldn’t have to wear a costume.”
After the gumbo, Dodson went home and Isaiah mulled over his Noelle-Charles-Rodion theory. It sounded good in an argument but he had the feeling that’s all it was, a way to win an argument.
Once, Marcus and Isaiah spent the afternoon at Mount Baldy having snowball fights and sliding down the icy slopes on a cardboard sled. They were having so much fun they lost track of time and got a late start heading home. The two-lane road was pitch dark and windy, clumps of snow on the roadside. Isaiah was eleven years old and a city boy. It made him nervous being out here, driving an old clunker with a broken muffler and a knocking engine. When they got off the mountain and into the high desert, the road straightened out but Isaiah didn’t feel any better about it. Billboards for strip clubs and bail bondsmen going by. The houses isolated, junk in the yards. Marcus said he could hear the domestic abuse. They were coming down a long grade when something in the drive train thumped.