Drive Me Crazy (11 page)

The office and cars for Wolf Classic Limousines were on Century, right outside LAX.

I parked my car in the reserved underground section Wolf had for employees. Employee parking was on P2, one level below the spots he had for sedans and town cars.

Lisa’s ugly-ass Hummer was there. Wolf’s Lamborghini wasn’t. They slept in the same bed but never rode in together. Nobody in L.A. rode together. Barren car-pool lanes told you that this was a city filled with selfish people. Maybe just people who didn’t have any friends.

I put on my work face and went in to grab the keys and paperwork on the sedan I’d been assigned. The paperwork told me that I was picking up Thomas Marcus Freeman. I grabbed a marker and made a sign, my client’s last name in block-style letters. While I did that I talked to a co-worker, Sid Levine. Thin boy who always wore the same jeans with a different T-shirt. Pimply face and orange spiked hair. He was a young cat, a UCLA student who maintained the computer systems. Time to time he came in at four in the morning to man the phones until the receptionist made it in. He could get some studying in while he clocked in a few dollars.

I told Sid I’d seen the Hummer in the garage, then asked, “Where’s the boss’s wife?”

“She had an early pick-up.” He put his C++ book to the side, pulled up the sleeves on his tattered Old Navy sweatshirt. “A Michael Jackson impersonator.”

I laughed. “Heard they weren’t getting too much work these days.”

“Not with all the child molestation charges.” Sid shrugged. “I think this cat worked as one of Michael Jackson’s decoys or something.”

I redirected the conversation again. “So, the boss’s wife is actually working.”

“Surprised me too.”

Everything seemed normal. Too normal. Like Disneyland. I kept talking to make it look like my asking about Lisa was no big deal. “What’s that screen on your computer?”

“Updating the GPS software. Wolf got a new car in. Making sure GPS is on point. Easy stuff, grunt work.” He showed me that one of Wolf’s cars was in Sherman Oaks, another heading down the 5 to San Diego. “Wolf knows where all of his property is at all times.”

I nodded. Wolf’s system was tight. That electronic surveillance let him know if his drivers were exceeding the speed limit or if his car was going outside of boundaries. Reminded me of men and women on house arrest. They had the same electronic leash strapped to their ankles. They stepped too far beyond the front door and Big Brother was notified.

I said, “A man has to protect his investments.”

“He’s expanding his fleet big time. Gonna go head-to-head with Davel.”

Sid talked about stretch limos, luxury cars, SUVs, fifteen-passenger vans, cargo vans, minibuses, even a couple of additional Cessnas that Wolf was acquiring to beef up his arsenal.

Jealousy made me clench my jaw tight.

A lot of the cars were already out there, picking up and dropping off. The system showed six cars were in the lot across the way. I’d only seen three sedans and two stretch limos when I pulled in. I peeped toward the front to see who had pulled up since I got here.

I held my breath and waited for Lisa to come inside. Nobody walked in.

I asked, “Where is the boss’s wife driving the impersonator?”

“Mrs. Wolf rolling a limo to San Diego. She’ll be gone at least four hours.”

I sipped a cup of coffee, then stuck my head inside Wolf’s office, double-checked to see if he’d just shown up. Lisa’s face stared back at me. Her image and the pictures of Wolf’s kids were on his desk. His deceased parents were in bigger photographs on the wall.

This could’ve been my office. Those could’ve been my pictures.

“Nobody would suspect you.
” Lisa had guaranteed me that a few months ago.
“We don’t have any connection. If you kill him, you’ll be scot-free with thirty thousand in your pockets. ”

That was before the suits. Before I became a hypocrite and took this job.

 

 

That day I was at the laundromat, clothes in the dryer, my stomach growling, and I was trying to decide if I was going to head down to Yum Yum Donuts to buy a chocolate twist. That was down on Crenshaw and Rodeo nestled inside a shopworn strip mall that held Conroy’s Flowers and Hamburger Haven. It was a corner where the homeless parked their baskets and squatted on the concrete, where beggars hustled at the Shell station and tried to come up on some spare change by offering to wash car windows with nasty water and dirty newspaper.

I stepped outside of the laundromat, moved through the drizzle and saw her.

I’d seen her kicking it outside, dressed in a black business suit, leaning against a black town car, umbrella in hand, talking to two members from Los Angeles’s most notorious gang, the LAPD. This was one of their resting spots, on the backside of Conroy’s facing Yum Yum.

She saw me just as I made it to the doughnut shop. We caught eyes. I recognized her.

I knew she was the daughter of the man who used to be chief of police in Compton, then mayor of the same city. A man who had a reputation that would make Suge Knight cringe. He was to Compton what Tom Bradley had been to L.A., only he had a lot of scandal.

The black-and-white pulled away, sirens blaring as they hit the strip hard and fast, screeching and swerving. Quiet as it’s kept, cops were the worst drivers in L.A. Lisa hit the remote on the car she was driving, stepped over loosened asphalt, and came inside Yum Yum. I’d copped a table facing the parking lot, had a crossword puzzle and a pencil in front of me. She grabbed a chocolate twist and an orange juice. Spoke to me. I did the same. I put my crossword puzzle away and offered her a seat. She told me her name was Lisa. I already knew that.

Lisa said, “You know who you look like?”

“Somebody on the wall at the post office?”

She laughed. “Alonzo Mourning. That’s why I kept looking at you.”

“Quit trippin‘. I don’t look anything like Alonzo.”

“You do to me.”

She asked me what I did. Back then I was doing what I could. Installing water heaters, fixing relief valves, installing smoke detectors, landscaping, didn’t matter. I didn’t like living life the hard way, but I took it the way it came. Some days it was steak. Some days ground beef.

She said, “Saw you down by Slauson last week. You were going in the post office.”

“Yeah. I went up there to see if I could get a job licking stamps.”

She laughed. “Licking stamps. Sounds ... interesting.”

“Work is work.”

“What kind of work you do?”

“Right now, anything I can find. You know how hard it is to get a legit job when you have a felony on your record. Everybody keeps looking at you like you’re a criminal.”

She laughed.

We talked. No rapid fire, crudely poetic, vernacular dialogue. Just talked like two people who had roots in the concrete jungle. Only I had gone to public school and she went from being a Montessori baby to a private-school child. Money was never an issue in her home, not like it was in mine. Didn’t take much talking to realize she was headstrong and political, just like her parents. She flipped through a
Watts Times
and got on the subject of how deregulation had killed black radio in L.A., then about how Wal-Mart was killing the revenue at the mom-and-pop stores on the strip. All in all, it was the type of small talk people had when they were feeling each other out. She was trying to see what kind of man I was. I’d already put a hint of my past on the table. A man who wanted to work but had no real job. I saw her five-carat issue sparkling on her left hand. She leaned away, kept her body language professional, but the way she gazed at her ring, then looked at me, told me that her and hubby got along like Shaq and Kobe.

She said, “You fix things that are broken?”

“I’m a decent handyman.”

She put her business card on the table. Told me to call her on her cellular.

I understood.

Seven days later she was in my bed. We’d talked a few times, then I asked her to meet me up at the Ladera Center, thought we could chill on the patio outside of Magic Johnson’s Starbucks, where the community went to flirt and loiter. That was a no-go. She wanted to come to my crib, didn’t want to do anything in public. She parked in the back alley, did that so her ride couldn’t be seen, came into my place, kissing me, taking her clothes off, taking charge. Hunger in her eyes and the way she moved her body. My apartment wasn’t too far from LAX. She could swoop this way, stay an hour or two, and get back home before she had any missing hours.

She told me, “Wanted you so bad.”

“I could tell. Man, I could tell.”

“Haven’t had sex in at least two months.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Hubby’s never really sexual. His ex-wife told me the same thing happened with her. They had kids and he works a lot. The funny thing is, I used to think he was unusual, but a lot of married people complain about the same thing. Same exact thing.”

She rambled, guess she did that because she had some sort of sexual remorse. She justified what we’d done, told me that her husband had had an affair. I didn’t ask for the details.

We sat up, ate snacks, and talked about politics. Smart woman. That excited me.

She told me, “We lost the revolution.”

“When did we lose? I didn’t even know we’d reached halftime.”

“Game was over when the white man figured out how to make us stop fighting.”

“How did he do that?”

“He gave us a few jobs. Our people got a little change in their pockets and forgot about the Middle Passage. My daddy understood that. Understood people. He used to tell me that black people weren’t loyal to the black community, not on the level we should be, not on a level that makes a real difference, not like the Jewish people on the other side of town. We’re loyal to whatever improves our own economic condition on a personal level, not as a culture.”

“I’m not buying that.”

“Well, when a black person prefers to buy a new car over a house, you tell me. Image over substance, immediate gratification over economic longevity.”

Then she invited me to her pad. The house her husband had bought. Bold, even for me.

Lisa squatted in Hancock Park. Lounged in an eight-bedroom estate that was built back in the forties. The kind of place that had an enclosed tropical backyard set off with five different types of palm trees, a steam room the size of a small home, and a guesthouse larger than most three-bedroom apartments. All that and a swimming pool that was bigger than my rented nest.

Hancock Park was the real deal. Old money. Bankers. Music moguls. Real celebrities.

Lots of dirty money. Blood money. Honesty never got anybody to the top.

Her supersized crib was on Plymouth, north of Wilshire and south of 5th, on a strip of two-story Spanish- and Mediterranean-style homes that looked like mansion row. The streets were wider, the yards bigger. An area where it seemed like you could shake the palm trees and watch hundred-dollar bills float to the ground. This side of town made the affluent black people congregated in areas like Baldwin Hills and Ladera Heights look like paupers. The girl who grew up on the other side of Wilshire had done well, had come up like a motherfucker.

We talked about her husband. His name always came up. I made sure it did.

“He bounces to Vegas once, maybe twice a month.” She told me that. “Flies up there for the weekend. Does the part-time daddy thing.”

“Racking up the frequent-flier miles.”

“He has his own plane.”

“He charters?”

“No, he flies. Has a Cessna Skyhawk. Leather seats. The whole shebang.”

“How much that set you back?”

“About two hundred thousand.”

“Damn. Can’t you get a used one? With fabric seats?”

“He keeps it parked at Hawthorne Airport.”

I ran my tongue over my teeth. “He can fly you anywhere.”

“I have my pilot’s license too.”

“That’s tight. Mansion. Planes. A damn Lamborghini.”

“One plane, not planes.”

“Y‘all are balling out of control.”

She tisked. “Money doesn’t buy happiness.”

“Well, it’s nice to be able to pick where you’re gonna be miserable.”

We were in her heated pool. Naked. Adam and Eve. Swimming laps under the moonlight, her husband gone to Las Vegas to see his kids. I’d parked a block away and crept down in the darkness, didn’t get there until close to midnight.

She said, “I wish it was like this all the time.”

“What you mean?”

“Just me and you.”

“That would be cool.”

“I want to divorce him.”

“Why don’t you?”

She clasped and unclasped her hands, told me that her husband had her in an airtight prenuptial agreement. She walked and the fairy tale ended, she’d have to give up everything except her socks and drawers. All she would be entitled to was what she came in the front door with. Wouldn’t even get to keep her half of their season tickets to the Lakers. Compared to what she had now, what she brought to the table was a sack of crumbs.

I looked around at her world. Sat on the edge of her pool and looked at a tropical paradise filled with guesthouses, steam rooms, swimming pools, and maids that showed up three times a week to dust and cook and clean and pick up every crumb that was left on the floor.

We moved the party to the back of the grounds. I followed Lisa’s naked sashay, water raining from her skin, and we stepped into a Jacuzzi big enough for fifteen people. Waterfalls were all I could hear. Warm water all I could feel. Lisa went underwater, took me in her mouth. I touched her hair while she made love to me, touched her hair and gazed up at the waterfalls, at the enclosed yard, then at the house, through glazed-over eyes I stared at that castle.

She came back up smiling.