She wasn't listening to me. She was busy with her finger inside her panties. I watched as she wiggled and moaned and got herself off. Then she put her finger on my lips. "Be brave."
"Be cool, Wilma." I knocked her hand away, getting heated from anger, not from sex. "Just 'cause you alibied me don't mean you can clown me."
"You're clownin' yourself, Zelmont. You won't admit you're not going to get back into pro ball. And no club will let you coach for them either. It's in front of your eyes, but you refuse to see." She sat up, looking at me directly "I'm talking about millions, Zelmont. Untraceable millions in cash."
I started putting on my clothes. "We gonna knock over Stadanko's safe in his office, Wilma? Or maybe he keeps the ducats at his pad out there in the Palisades. Then what? Keep running for the rest of our lives?"
"You're used to running," she cracked in a nasty tone.
"You got a mouth on you." I got my pants zipped up.
"I got eyes too, Zelmont. Stadanko hired my firm because he knew Brad, our senior partner. He brought in Brad a few years back when he was in trouble over campaign financing. After we negotiated the Barons deal Stadanko was going to cut us loose, but I convinced him having a woman of color as the team's lawyer would be good for his image and deflect criticism."
I had to get out of there. "History was always boring to me, Wilma."
"Stop thinking small, Zelmont." She talked to me like I was a child. "We can do it so the U.S. Attorney General comes down on that goof Stadanko while we make off with his goods. And Chekka and his Little Hand punks will run and hide if the feds show up."
I couldn't get what she was talking about. How in the hell were we going to rip off Stadanko? "He keeps all his millions laying around, huh?"
She got impatient again and popped my bare chest with the back of her hand. "Of course not. But it won't be hard to figure out where he hides it. He's a peasant at heart. Stadanko may have a hands-off excuse the pun relationship with his cousin, but as you'd say, he must know where the Benjamins are kept." Her top lip curled up like a wolf's and I got a tingling in my spine.
"We got to be cool," I said.
"No, you be cool. Go home and soak your hip in liniment so you can get up tomorrow and do your road work, old man."
I gave her a little shove to let her know I was nobody's chump. Then I shook a finger at her. "Ease up, Wilma."
"Oooh, so tough. That how it got out of hand with Davida? She challenge your bad-boy 'tude one time too often? That why you had to choke her and it got out of hand." She laughed, but not happy-like.
"Whatever it is you're sellin', you're crazy if"
"Get the fuck out of my car," she said, cutting me off.
"When I'm ready, bitch."
"Get out, or your little mixed-race pal will hear how you threatened me with rape and murder. It won't take much for him to believe that about you."
I felt like knocking her ass around for giving me that looking down stare. Sitting there only in her panties, she still seemed like she was queen of the city. But I kept my hands to myself, 'cause she was a lawyer and about as tame as a shark on a leash. I got my shit and booked for my ride several floors down.
Back at the pad I had some V.S.O.P. and tried to put what she said out of my head. I was going to make a comeback. I was going to sacrifice, work hard, and get a slot on the Barons. I'd been playing football one way or the other since I was nine and my uncle slapped me for crying after I got tackled for the first time in Pop Warner. Uncle Nate was an asshole, but he taught me one thing: if you want something, ain't nobody going to get it for you unless you get it yourself. And once you got it, make goddamn sure you hold onto it.
Chapter 5
All morning I'd been ducking the call. She'd left a message last night when I'd got back, but I knew I wasn't going to return it too soon. Before I was up she'd called again around 7 and again after 8 as I rolled over. My head was pounding and my muscles ached. The hip, though, felt good. I got my workout clothes on, including a rubber top to bring on the sweat. I drove over to the Canyon, and after warming up with some calf extensions I hit the hill. By the time I got to the top, my hangover was damn near burned off, and the hip only throbbed a little.
As I stood getting my breath, in my head I could hear the first message Davida's mother had left on my machine. Her English had never been too good, and it was worse now 'cause she was all broken up.
"Zelmont," she'd said, and I could tell she'd been crying. "Zelmont, tell me what has happened to my favorecida. Zelmont," she pleaded, "diga me."
Her favorite, Davida had told me. Alicia, her mother, had four kids, three husbands. Two were boys and had been in trouble from day one, growing up in the Pico Aliso projects in East Los. Mario was a glue-sniffing punk who'd been kicked out after she caught him bungholing his boyfriend in a maintenance shed when he was in high school. The other one, Rey, was a stone knucklehead who ran with some gang, a bunch of punks under the protection of La Familia, the Mexican Mafia. Right now he was doing a dime in Corcoran for some bullshit or another. Her sister Isabel, who knew how to fill out a dress, had been the only one to turn out normal.
Davida may have been nothing more than a glorified pom-pom girl, but by her mother's standards she'd done something with her life. Moms wasn't too crazy about her going around with a brother, especially one with my record, but she figured I was better than some of the others her daughter had been with. Alicia had to settle for not much her whole life. But Davida had put it in her mom's head she'd get her out of the projects once she got that Top 40 hit. Hell, she believed it too.
There was a mist hanging on the hills, and I couldn't see my house. Like the fog was a wall, a warning that if I didn't get some real money soon, the house would always be lost to me. I jogged down the hill, my upper body sweating inside the rubber top. For some reason, I still felt a chill.
Back home, the red number on the answering machine told me that Alicia had called two more times. I peeled off the top, wiping myself down with a towel. I got some orange juice, sat down, and grabbed the phone. I figured best to get this over with.
''Hola,'' she said.
"It's me, T." 'T' was what I had taken to calling her.
"Zelmont," she cried, then ran off a string of words in Spanish.
"T, you gotta relax, okay? Davida would want you to keep it together." In the background I could hear other voices, no doubt her neighbors.
"What happened?"
"I don't know, T. The first I knew of it is this cop who came to see me last night."
"Yes, the chino negro," she said. "Oh, I don't mean"
"No problem. What'd he say to you?"
"That he wanted to know about her friends, people she knew in the record business. He asked me about you and her." She lost it and started to cry. "Zelmont, what will happen now?"
"The cops will look for her killer, T. They'll probably find him." I didn't really think so, but I needed to tell her something so she'd let me alone.
She didn't say anything, and it was making me nervous. I knew what she wanted to ask me but couldn't. "Is there anything you tell the police, Zelmont? Anything that will help them find who did this bad thing to our Davida."
"I'm helping them anyway I can, Alicia, you know that."
"Yes, yes, of course. Mario will be here this afternoon. Will you come by?"
"I may not make it this afternoon, T. I've got some legal things I need to take care of, you know, football stuff. Important. But you say hi to Mario for me, and I'll be by soon, okay?"
"All right, I understand." She then told me she'd call back with the funeral time and I hung up. I guess I shouldn't have been lying like that to a woman who just lost her daughter, but going over there, sitting around crying and carrying on, lighting candles to the Virgin of Guadalupe… Jesus.