Lela groaned. “How, why has this happened to my baby? She was so pretty, so talented. Oh, I wish I could’ve found out who destroyed her and dumped her in that alley when I claimed her body! I would have blown his brains out!”
Cassandra said softly, “Lela, I knew who was responsible when you were in L.A.”
“What!” Lela exclaimed.
Cassandra nodded her head, averting her eyes. “Yes, I knew. He pads in the penthouse in my hotel. I didn’t tell you because I know you. I knew you’d kill him and get into trouble. So, I tipped off the cops instead. Horace Jenkins aka King Tut was busted early this morning with enough dope to bury him in the joint until he’s an old man. I brought the L.A. Times to show you the story. Forgive me, Lela?”
Lela dropped her arm from Cassandra’s waist and stared meanly into Cassandra’s eyes. “I’ll forgive you that. You called to tell me Toni was in the morgue, but why didn’t you call me to tip me she was a pimp’s slave and a junkie? Why, Cassandra? Why!?” Lela whispered savagely. “I could have brought her home and saved her.”
Cassandra averted her eyes, lips atremble. Then she raised her stricken eyes, radiant with pain in her satiny tan face as she stage-whispered shakily, “Lela, I wanted to let you know about her when Tut opened her nose and turned her out . . . but Toni begged me not to. She was so miserable! So pitiful! Swore she could kick Tut and dope if I gave her a chance. She wanted to come back home to you clean. She told me that the night she OD’d. The night Tut dumped her in that alley. Lela, please try to understand why I didn’t call you about Toni while she was alive.” Cassandra broke into wild sobbing.
Lela said, “Forgive me, baby. I understand. Let’s go home to stay forever, if you wish.”
Cassandra blotted tears with a tissue and exclaimed, “Fantastic! I don’t have to go back to L.A. until week after next to open a gig.”
Lela kissed her cheek. “That’s great, darling! I need you, and I’ve got a slew of outfits that will fit you.” Lela put her arm around her waist and led her to the street.
Cassandra paid the waiting cabby, and got her overnight case before they drove away in the Mercedes. They exchanged sad, knowing glances as they passed a blistered, fire-gutted storefront with an askew smoke-blackened sign on its facade. LESEUR’S CLEANERS AND DYERS. Lela’s hands shook on the steering wheel to remember how Lily, her mother, and Marcus, her husband, had been shot dead by arsonist bandits two years before at closing time. She heaved an anguished sigh as she recalled how her stalwart father, Benny, had become a pathetic alcoholic after the tragedy.
Moments later, Lela parked in front of the beige stucco house, in the heart of the ghetto, where she began her life. They strolled down the walk toward the front door. A fetal-ball wino slumbered on a sun-bleached wicker chaise that gleamed starkly in the blue wash of full moon. The chaise was ringed by a glitter-litter of empty short-dog bottles.
Lela went to his side. “Freddie, wake up!” she said as she gently shook him and slapped his spittled cheek.
He grunted and slumbered on.
She pulled his greasy topcoat up over his withered shoulders and looked down at the snoring derelict for a long moment, remembering how he and other close cronies of her father, their dreams deferred and clobbered, had once squabbled drunkenly on the wicker lounge over checkers, baseball, and politics.
She was tinged with pain as she remembered the summer day, the year before, when she found her father, a suicide, sprawled on the wicker lounge. “Damn! Will the Leseur jinx never end?” she asked herself with a shudder as she turned away to join Cassandra on the walk.
Lela glanced back at the grizzled septuagenarian. “I fixed the old angel a cozy place in the attic, but I guess he’s a pneumonia buff.”
They laughed feebly, then keyed in and entered the living room of the old house. Lela eye-swept her mother’s dust-mantled vintage furniture she sentimentally had refused to replace, and the carpet cluttered with her teenage son’s record player and albums. A faded poster of her idol, Huey Newton, on a thronelike chair, graced the wall over the fireplace.
“Excuse this joint, Cass,” she said as she removed her coat and took Cassandra’s.
Lela’s face hardened as she sniffed the reefer-reeked air.
“Excuse me, Cass!” she said as she dropped the coats on a sofa, then stomped toward Marcus Junior’s bedroom at the rear of the house.
Cassandra dropped her bag to the carpet. She let herself down on a sofa and lit a cigarette.
Lela froze at Marcus’s bedroom off the kitchen when the corner of her eye snared the flash of a streaking white housecoat in the backyard. She glared through a kitchen window at Amazon Pat Williams, a sexpot twenty-five-year-old welfare divorcée mother of twin girls as she disappeared into her next-door backyard. Out of control with fury, Lela snatched up a rolling pin and charged out the kitchen door into the backyard. She stormed to the locked screen door of Pat’s service porch and battered it with the rolling pin.
“Pat!” she hollered. “Pat! You rotten bitch! I want to pick a bone with you!”
She danced a frantic rigadoon of rage in the boiling silence of nonresponse for several moments before she smashed a gaping hole in the screen with the rolling pin. Quickly she reached in and unlocked the door, stepping into the service porch. Then she violently rattled the doorknob of the locked kitchen door, bashing the wooden club repeatedly against the door until Pat opened it, on chain.
Pat’s sable eyes were electric with excitement and fear in her dollish yellow face, framed by a mass of disheveled, inky hair. The frightened eyes of her thigh-tall twins stared up at Lela through the aperture.
“Pat, I’m going to harm you the next time you violate Marcus and my house! Don’t rap with him. Don’t even look at him again. I dare you, bitch!”
“Lela, I’m not guilty, and I’m going to call the police if you don’t split—now!” Pat warned as she slammed the door shut.
Lela went to a kitchen window and eye-locked Pat shakily dialing a wall phone. Lela’s impulse to shatter the window with the rolling pin was squelched by the piteous faces of the squalling little girls.
Instead, Lela shouted through the glass, “Slut, call the police so I can get you busted for carnal knowledge of, and smoking dope with, a minor!”
Pat faltered, replaced the receiver, and left the kitchen with her twins in tow.
Lela gave up and went home, hurling the rolling pin into the sink as she went to stand in the doorway of Marcus’s bedroom, trembling with rage. She stared at breeze-billowed curtains at an open window. Pat’s escape route was confirmed by a red slipper on the carpet below the window. Lela trod her way through an assortment of hundreds of pounds of dumbbells and barbells. She went to the side of the bed and stared down at his six-four frame and head completely swathed in covers. His spurious snoring issued to hype up her rage. She leaned to whistle a thick leather belt from his jeans draped across a chair at the head of the bed. Then she yanked the covers off his nude body.
He stirred on his stomach, and she whacked his buttocks with the belt. He yelped and instantly rolled away to his feet on the other side of the bed.
“What’s happening, Mama!?” he bellowed in a surprisingly deep baritone voice for a seventeen-year-old.
She gazed, sloe-eyed, at his nude splendor. His Apollo body, his voice, the long dangle of his hammer-headed womb sweeper reminded her of his late father. She was panged, swooned by erotic déjà vu remembering how Marcus Senior had orgasmed her into near convulsions of ecstasy in this very bedroom when her folks were away.
Junior’s Ken Norton quality biceps writhed like milk chocolate pythons as he flung out his long arms toward her. The upturned palms of his gigantic hands jiggled melodramatic, confused innocence that infuriated her, galvanized her to knee herself across the bed. Her face was demonic as she pursued him about the room. He tripped, fell on his knees, trapped in a corner, covering his face with his arms and hands.
“You won’t cut that worn-out
slut loose, will you?” she screeched over and over again as she welted his back and buttocks with savage slashes of the belt until she stank of emotion sweat and her whip arm spasmed, cramped with fatigue, and dropped limply to her side.
Dry sobs humped his back as she released the belt to the carpet and staggered from the room into the kitchen. Cassandra put an arm around her shoulders.
Lela muttered, “I’m going to run through the shower. Please make some coffee.”
Thirty minutes later, recovered Lela and Cassandra sat smoking and sipping coffee in housecoats at a breakfast nook table. Cassandra opened the L.A. Times to the drug bust story on King Tut, Toni’s pimp destroyer, then passed the paper to Lela.
At that instant, Marcus, in a white terry cloth robe, opened his bedroom door. “Hi, Cass!” he said with a snowy-toothed smile.
“Hi, baby,” Cassandra replied.
He came to embrace Lela from behind, leaned, and whispered into her ear, “Mama, I’m sorry I upset you. Pat’s got my nose open. But I’m gonna cut her loose for you. No jive.”
Lela turned her head to kiss his lips. “That makes me happy, and I’m sorry, too, darling, that I lost my temper. Angel, please don’t disappoint Mama again. I love you!”
“Me you too, Mama,” he said as he went to embrace and kiss Cassandra’s cheek.
Lela said, “Baby, dear, shower off that slu . . . uh, woman’s sti . . . uh, odor. I’ll put some lanolin on your back before I go to bed.”
“A’ight, Mama,” he said as he left for the bathroom.
Lela read the L.A. Times’s account of King Tut’s drug bust. He was stopped by a uniformed squadron of officers when his chauffeur, Al “Skeeter” Lewis, ran a red light. Their nervous over-response to the relatively minor moving violation prompted them to search his gold Rolls after citation and a “no warrant, no want” radio checkout. They were taken into custody when three kilos of heroin were found in the Rolls’ trunk.
Ironically, LAPD narcotics detectives had already focused on Tut on the basis of an apparently credible anonymous phone tipster (Cassandra). They had, just an hour before Tut’s arrest, secured a search warrant for his hotel penthouse. They would have made the bust had not the traffic fluke occurred. Tut was now at liberty on a hundred thousand dollar bond on just drug charges. There was no evidence to support the allegation of the phone tipster that Tut was responsible for the OD death of Toni Leseur.
Lela had a genuine smile on her face for the first time since Cassandra notified her of Toni’s death as she put the paper aside.
“Oh, Cass! Now I feel so much better about Toni. Too bad that snake isn’t going to the gas chamber. But, he’s a cinch to rot in the joint caught dead-bang with all that smack. Here’s hoping he gets fifty years and then cancer from head to feet, if he survives the bit.” Lela chortled as they banged coffee cups together and toasted Tut’s ruin.
Marcus entered the kitchen and moved on into his bedroom.
Then, a paranoid notion suddenly seized Lela. She remembered the fierce rivalry that started between Cassandra’s foster mother upon the car crash deaths of Cassandra’s father, Sid, and mother, Carla, who had been Lela’s best friend from childhood.
Lela stared across the table and thought of Cassandra’s sulky anguish when later, on several occasions, the choicest boys gravitated to prettier, sexier Toni. Could Cassandra have harbored conscious or unconscious hatred through the years for Toni in sufficient volume to have played a role in Toni’s ruin and death, Lela reluctantly asked herself.
Lela broke the heavy silence with a question. “Cass, since you live in that Tut bastard’s hotel, I assume that you knew him, uh, at least by reputation before Toni met him?”
A transient frown flickered across Cassandra’s face, not from secret guilt, or the question’s content, but rather from a barely perceptible raw edge in Lela’s voice and her piercing stare. “Why, yes, Lela, I met him first at a party he threw that first month I went to Hollywood and moved into his hotel. Why?”
Lela gnawed her bottom lip thoughtfully. “Cass, when you and Toni started dating, I spent a lot of energy cautioning you both about bullshit fast types . . .”
“That’s the truth, Lela,” Cassandra said with narrowed eyes.
Lela paused to light a cigarette, then violently exhaled a gust of smoke and shrugged her shoulders in dramatic confusion. “Then, why, pet, did you accept an invitation to a pimp’s party? Huh?”
Cassandra’s mouth twitched. “Look, Lela, I don’t know where you’re coming from with this quiz. But, I’m going to run down for you some realities of the ‘now’ Hollywood and how I wound up as Tut’s guest without getting hip he was a pimp until he hit on me that night of the party. Tut fronts as a theatrical agent, has a boss suite in a Sunset Boulevard high rise with a receptionist-secretary. The whole flash bit. Even if I were a blue-eyed Farrah Fawcett type, the rat race to hit big is crowded and tough. Lela, you can’t imag—”
Lela waved a hand to cut her off and said, “I took a brief flyer in Hollywood as an actress, remember? I scored for two-bit parts in two ‘B’ movies in a year and a half before I woke up and settled down with a husband.”
Cassandra nodded. “Yes, I know, but that was years ago and rough, I know. But, Lela, Hollywood was when I met Tut, and is now absolutely infested with pretty faces and bodies of every conceivable color and type. All of them clawing for and fantasizing about that big golden dream shot into movies, commercials, or even permanent booking into some Jewish fat cat’s bed in Malibu. Would you believe my rent and groceries backup while I struggled and dreamed happened to be a one-eyed black runt mechanic in Watts with filthy fingernails and banty legs?”
Lela shrugged, “I can believe that the shade of a straw can be a blessing when you’re stranded in the Mojave Desert in July.”
They laughed stingily. Lela scanned Cassandra’s face as she flicked lighter flame to her cigarette.
Cassandra said, “Thanks, darling.” She exhaled. “I went to Tut’s party that night because I needed an agent like a wounded hemophiliac needs blood. And, darling, I was wounded by frustration. And as I said, Tut had that con front. Oh, I pulled Toni’s coat that he was a fake that first week she left you and moved in with me.”
Lela nodded. “I can dig how you met him. Now, tell me how he shot down intelligent Toni and became her boss right under your hip nose. Huh?” Lela pressed with cold sarcasm.
Aggravation hardened Cassandra’s face. “Lela, Toni was broke. I was broke. We were running on the rim. I wasn’t in L.A. when he shot her down. Toni and I, like nearly everybody else in tinsel town, snorted a taste of coke. In our case, when it was laid out freebie by the host or hostess of parties we attended to make the right contacts.
“Toni was wild about the dust! Well, anyway, while I was away doing a singing gig in Cincy, Tut cut into her and jammed her nose with some pure crystal coke. Then he flashed his monstrous bankroll for her, all in thousand dollar bills. Then he shoved a wad of them into her bosom to keep. Temporarily. She went to his bed. He conned her that he had fallen in love and she was so beautiful that he wanted her as the nonworking queen of his stable.
“He stashed her in a suite below the penthouse, and for a month he kept his promise while he kept her nose dirty with coke laced heavy with pure ‘H’. Horse, not Tut, turned her out and became her real boss. She was scratching and nodding and flipping car tricks at Sunset and La Brea when I got back to L.A. two months later.
“She was visiting me in my pad her last night after her street gig. Tut called down to tell her that a shipment of dynamite smack had just come in. She split to the penthouse excited as hell. The next time I saw her was in the morgue after the L.A. Sentinel carried a description of a black girl found in a Watts alley OD’d. I was certain I’d find Toni there from the paper’s description of that tattoo of a blue swan on her left wrist. Now, Lela, may I get out of the dock?”
Lela said, “All right, after you tell me how you became the greatest psychic the
re ever was.”
“What!” Cassandra exclaimed. “One of us needs help, Lela. And it ain’t me.”
“Nor me, Cass. Just tell me how you could know all of the fine details of how that dirty nigger trapped my baby,” Lela intoned.
Cassandra heaved a sigh of exasperation, stood, and leaned in to eye-lock Lela. “You just read about ‘Skeeter’ Lewis. He’s Tut’s chauffeur and around-the-clock flunky. He told me! We’re tight, and secretly, he hates Tut. Satisfied, Lela? Now hear this! Toni was a finer fox than me, and it gave me lots of pain boo-koo times. I envied her. Goddamn, I envied her! But I loved her like a blood sister, Lela. I would have died for her! Can you believe that, Lela?”
Lela averted her eyes, stood, and whispered against Cassandra’s cheek as she embraced her. “Yes, baby, I know you loved Toni. I’m sorry. Will you forgive me?”
Cassandra dinged to her and smiled. “Why not, play mama?”
They disengaged. Lela went to the threshold of Marcus’s bedroom door, eased it open, and eye-signaled Cassandra to her side. They peered at Marcus fast asleep on the bed in his robe with a beatific smile on his delicately sculpted lips.
Lela whispered, “Cass, isn’t he his father’s double?”
Cassandra nodded and smiled. “He’s a heart stomper, all right.”
“I don’t think I’ll awaken him to lanolin his back. Cass, after losing Mama, Papa, my sweet hubby, and Toni, if anything happened to him . . . !” Lela paused to squeeze Cassandra’s arm until she winced. “I’ll cash in my chips. I just can’t take another death blow!” Lela continued in a deadly serious voice as she closed the door and they turned away.
They went to collect Cassandra’s bag and coat in the living room, then embraced each other’s waists as they walked up the staircase leading to upstairs bedrooms to get a few hours’ sleep before Toni’s funeral in the morning.
Embattled ex-Watts resident Horace Jenkins, now notorious from coast to coast as King Tut, paced his penthouse terrace in Hollywood beset by maximal tension. He was inspired to his duck-to-water hijack of the provocative moniker by one of the three mud-kickers in his painfully modest stable. Lured by the street bell ring of the moniker, seven choice white girls swooned into his stable. This shortly after the perceptive mud-kicker had been electrified by his startling resemblance to a magazine picture of the mummified monarch’s death mask.