Shetani's Sister (16 page)

“We're making a trip to the desert at daybreak,” Shetani said as Eli doused the car lights.

Eli tapped his fingertips together. “Cap, 'scuse me for askin'…What's gonna go down?”

Shetani smiled. “I missed the chance to punish that pig, but Pee Wee, the other one that wasted Tuta, is got to go.” He frowned at the flabbergast on the faces of the twins. Shetani slid out of the car. He stuck his head inside the car. “Can you guys keep a sacred secret?” The twins nodded. “Maxine was really and truly my baby sis, returned from death to be with me. She would want me to punish the ones responsible for sending her back to the grave. So siphon four or five gallons of gas from one of the vans. Get a coupla shovels from the gardener's shack.” He turned away.

The twins watched him enter the house, with mouths agape. Eli said softly, “Cazo, you thinkin' what I'm thinkin'?”

Cazo sadly shook his head. “Sure am. Cap is done gone ravin' crazy.”

Eli's hand shook as he lit a cigarette. “We ain't never had no part in icing no woman, 'specially a sister.”

Cazo sighed. “We like Pee Wee.”

Eli said, “You thinkin' what I'm thinkin'?”

Cazo, seated behind Eli, extended a giant paw across the seat and said, “We ain't gonna let him kill Pee Wee.” They shook hands and left the car.

Inside the mansion, Shetani froze as he was about to enter his bedroom. He heard the juvenile voice of Tuta say, “Albert! I've missed you so much.” He spun and went down the hallway. He invaded and searched the bedrooms where his stable slept in pairs. “Hey, baby girl, this ain't the time to play games. C'mon and give me a hug.” He paused outside Petra's room. He distinctly heard the voice behind the door giggle and say, “Big bro, don't get salty. This is fun!”

Soundlessly, he eased Petra's door open. Petra raised her eyes from a book to stare fearfully at him. “Are you all right, Master?” He walked to the side of the bed. “Yeah. I want you to go to the morgue when you wake up. Make the ID of Tuta's body as her stepmother. I don't want peckerwoods handling her. Get a South Central undertaker to cremate her.”

Petra nodded. He smiled. “I'm gonna be Pee Wee's undertaker.”

Shetani turned away and left the room. He went down the basement stairs to check on Pee Wee. He heard the voice croon, “Big bro, please don't be mad 'cause you can't see me. I love you.”

He went to Pee Wee's cell and stood glaring at her. “Sweet Master, are you still real mad at me?” she said in a sugary voice. They stared at each other for a very long moment.

“I'm going to bury your stinking ass in the desert this morning,” he said in a chillingly casual way, before he turned and went up the stairs.

Pee Wee's heart thumped crazily, and her eyes were bright with fear in her sweaty black face. She screamed in a whisper, “I gotta escape. I gotta kill him!” She feverishly started again with a hairpin to pick the padlock that secured the chain on the cell door. An hour later, Petra, lying sleepless in her bedroom, decided that she would help Pee Wee to escape before daybreak.

It was 1:00 a.m. in San Francisco's Fillmore District. Rainbow, the eyewitness to Crane's murder of Lovely Leon, checked out of his hotel and drove a used Chevy toward the highway for New York. He had not come forward to finger Crane, because he feared crooked cop pals of Crane would kill him before the trials. Also, he was wanted for grand theft in Pasadena. He couldn't get the death of Leon out of his head, and his peace of mind was impossible with his soul brother's killer scot-free.

On the outskirts of the city, he decided to get some relief from the internal pressure. He pulled into a gas station. He called Hollywood Station for the head dude of the hooker squad.

Rucker had just booked a hooker and was leaving the desk when Rainbow's call came in. Rainbow blurted, “Sir, I don't think you gonna do nothing about it, 'cause Leon was a nigger. But I saw one of your squad cops blow my buddy away. Leon hipped me who he was when we dug him leaving a motel with a snow-blonde ho. Leon said his name was Blaine or Crane or sumpin' like that.”

“You got me wrong, fella. I want to see the killer punished, whoever he is. I need you. Where are—”

Rainbow hung up and went to his car. Rucker stood, holding the receiver, his mouth open. He rushed to his car. He had gotten a good look at Rainbow the day Leon stopped his Cadillac at a red light and spoke to him. Rucker had heard traffic noise in the background during Rainbow's call. He decided to search Hollywood for the eyewitness.

At that moment, Opal Lenski got out of a cab at Rucker's house. She had flown in from New York for a brief visit with Rucker. She desperately needed the comfort and therapy of his arms. Her sick mother had suffered convulsions. Opal had panicked and called in a medical doctor who recommended immediate hospitalization. Opal's Christian Science church, outraged by her breach of faith in God as the supreme doctor, had expelled her.

Opal keyed into the darkened house and went to Rucker's bedroom. She felt more relaxed after she showered and slipped into a seductive pink negligee. She turned on the TV to a romantic late movie. She glanced at one of Rucker's holstered guns slung across the headboard. She placed the holstered weapon on the carpet as she propped herself up in bed. Shortly, she dozed off.

Ten miles away, in a suburb of L.A., Crane lay sleeplessly in his bed at a rehab center for drug abusers. He couldn't rest, couldn't kick his cocaine habit, with the Leon murder gun, his gun, in Rucker's possession. He had to retrieve it and destroy it. He slid out of bed and paced the floor of the small, neat room for several minutes. He paused at a window overlooking the clinic's parking lot. He was certain that Rucker had taken the murder gun home for safekeeping. He was also certain that workhorse Rucker would be in the streets of Hollywood on Saturday night until nearly dawn.

He glanced at 2:30 a.m. on the face of his wristwatch. He stared at a group of parked cars belonging to the clinic's night shift. His heart galloped. He saw an old Ford with its driver-side window down. He knew that, blindfolded, he could hot-wire the Ford to life. He decided that Rucker was too good a cop to be allowed custody of the gun another day. A thousand possibilities could trigger Rucker's whim to give the gun a ballistics test.

He was going to retrieve his gun now, Crane told himself as he speed-dressed in street clothes. He stepped out of the window onto a flower bed. He stood stock-still in the fragrant quiet for a long moment before he sprinted across the parking lot to the Ford.

He stuck his head beneath the dashboard and lit matches to see his way to bypass the ignition. Within minutes, he was tooling the well-tuned machine toward L.A.

A half-mile from Hollywood, he suddenly pulled the Ford into a quiet side street and parked beneath a streetlight. He got out and opened the car trunk. He pawed through a jumble of junk and soiled clothing. He found a floppy denim hat and jammed it down over his head. He got behind the wheel and peered into the rearview mirror. The super-large hat almost obscured his face in shadow. He felt that now he would not be recognizable in Hollywood by cruising detectives and cops in black-and-whites who knew him.

He was about to move away when a panic attack struck him. He stiffened on the seat and burst sweat. Tension, like steel mallets, hammered his chest. The cacophony of his heartbeat convinced him he was dying. He pushed his head out the window and sucked air, his luminous gray eyes bulging. It was several minutes before he recovered. Then self-pity claimed him. He sobbed, jerkily, like a little kid, as he remembered his wonderful mom and dad and what a happy ten-year-old boy he had been.

He wept wildly at the memory of that awful day when a tractor trailer overturned and crushed his parents to death as they drove home on the freeway. He and his cousin Ralph Rosen had just returned from a day at the beach when the police gave him the news. He remembered how Opal Lenski, sister of his mom, had taken him in.

Finally, he dried his tears and remembered how Rucker had helped to make him a good cop in the tough 77th Division. Coke and Petra lust stroked his genitals as he moved the Ford toward Hollywood. Defensive, random rage and hate seized him. Coke! How he hated the poison that had virtually destroyed him, he ranted to himself. He hated Millie, his no-suck, overweight, unglamorous wife. She was to blame for everything. It had been her shortcomings, in bed and otherwise, that had set him up to murder, and to fall for Petra, he audibly lied to himself.

As for Petra, he would be thrilled to blast out the blue windows of her rotten soul with his pistol. He was going to retrieve the murder gun, go back to the clinic, and kick his coke habit forever. Then he was going to be one of the best cops there ever was, he vowed with clenched teeth.

Crane parked the Ford several houses away from Rucker's home on the quiet street. He went down the sidewalk and moved swiftly across Rucker's front lawn to the rear of the house. He stooped beside a basement window and dislodged a decorative brick from a flower bed. He knocked a small hole in the window above a latch with a corner of the brick. He replaced the brick and slid into the basement. He ascended the short flight of stairs and popped open the spring lock on the door with his pocket knife.

He entered the kitchen, and moved quickly into the living room, and up the stairs to Rucker's bedroom. He stood paralyzed at the entrance as he stared at Opal's back. He smiled in thought. Aha, even old straitlaced Russ can kick up his heels.

He moved to search a chest of drawers across the room. He had soundlessly searched half of the drawers when Opal stirred and turned on her back. Crane stood frozen, staring at his aunt's face in a spot of moonlight. His hand shook as he pulled out a drawer. It made a rasping sound that reverberated in the silence.

Crane locked his eyes on Opal. Her eyelids fluttered as his hands rummaged through the drawer. He lifted a gun from the drawer and went toward a beam of hallway light near the bedroom door. He tore his eyes away from Opal's form to check the gun's serial numbers. It was his gun!

He stepped into the hallway. He noticed that he had left the last drawer pulled out. He couldn't leave it that way, he reasoned. Rucker would know when the gun was taken. If everything was in order, days could pass before the gun was missed.

Crane tiptoed back to the dresser. He stared at Opal as he carefully started to push in the drawer.

Her eyes suddenly popped open. The glitter of the gun in the shadowy intruder's hand terrified her. She reached for Rucker's holstered gun on the carpet. She shot him as he whirled away, toward her, heading for the hallway. He felt the slug burn into his chest and slam him against the door frame. His legs looped and twisted like rubber pretzels as he half fell down the stairway.

The front door seemed so far away, so enveloped in a black fog. He unlocked the door and stumbled across the porch, hemorrhaging great gouts of blood from his mouth. He tumbled onto the lawn, and died after a convulsive sigh. He clutched the murder gun tight in his fist, like treasure, agleam in the moonlight.

Inside the house, Opal trembled as she stood looking down from a bedroom window at Crane's body. She collapsed on the bed. She was so upset, she failed several times to get 911 on the lighted telephone dial to report that she had shot a burglar.

Rucker, cruising the east end of Sunset, heard of the shooting at his address on his police radio. He arrived on-scene a minute after the first police unit. The two young uniformed cops with flashlights stood staring down at Crane's corpse.

Rucker parked and rushed to join them. His knees wobbled, and he gasped. “Oh no!”

One of the cops who knew Rucker said, “Sir, he's a goner…Uh, do you know him?”

Rucker muttered, “I know him.”

An instant later, Opal sobbed from an open bedroom window, “Oh, Ruck, I'm so glad to see you.”

Rucker raced through his house to the bedroom. He switched on a light. Opal ran into his arms.

She blubbered hysterically against his chest. “Ruck, I shot that man! I woke up to see him standing over there. He had a gun. It was horrible!”

Rucker sat on the side of the bed and cradled her on his lap. He gently massaged her shoulders and back as he fought back his own tears. A moment later, she felt his chest heave when his tears broke free.

She looked into his face. “Ruck, I'm so sorry to upset you this way.”

He held her close. “Opal, it's not your fault,” he whispered into her hair. They clung together for a long time before the hubbub of arriving homicide detectives and a coroner's wagon forced Rucker to break the embrace.

He let her down gently on the bed. He kissed her forehead and got to his feet. He leaned over and blotted her eyes and face with a handkerchief. “Hon, please be strong enough to bear the pain of knowing the identity of the man you shot,” he said quietly, as he dried his own tears.

She bolted upright on the bed with gigantic eyes as he moved to open the dresser drawer where he had kept Crane's gun. He quickly searched the drawer, and then went through the rest of them. He went back to sit on the bed. He held her hands. “Hon, that was Leo you shot…He's dead,” he heard himself mutter in an oddly unfamiliar voice.

The shock of it rapidly waggled her head in denial. Her eyes rolled toward the ceiling. She dug her fingernails into Rucker's palms. She wailed, “No. No. It wasn't Leo over there. Why would Leo sneak in here in the dark with a gun?”

He took her hands to his mouth. He kissed them. “Dear, Leo killed a black man with his service revolver. I, uh, didn't know he was the killer when I took his gun to safekeep until his release from cocaine treatment. He broke in tonight to get the murder gun, the one you saw him with.”

Rucker paused to squeeze his throbbing temples. “I risked a lot to protect him from disgrace and ruin.” Rucker heaved a sigh and stood. He waved his palms helplessly through the air. “Now everything, the pain, the risk, all of it was for nothing…Homicide will be up here to talk to you. The truth clears you—be strong.”

She nodded and half whispered, “Leo would be alive if I hadn't needed your arms so much that I came to L.A. tonight.”

Rucker said, “Stop that, Opal. You know that nobody bucks fate.” He turned and left the room.

At 4:00 a.m., Petra sat on the side of her bed, smoking a cigarette and planning. She had decided to let Pee Wee escape and to leave Shetani at first opportunity. She was convinced that he had become insane and was no longer worth her loyalty, respect, and trust. In fact, of late she feared for her life, she reminded herself. She'd go back to New York, to a wealthy white trick who adored her.

She'd put the street down. The trick would bankroll an escort-service front for well-heeled tricks. Her startup girls would be the ones she would steal from Shetani.

She stood up and smiled at her bewitching snow-blonde reflection in a door mirror. The crazy black sonuvabitch wouldn't be able to fuck with her once she fled into the white world with the protection of powerful white men, she assured herself.