MAIN EVENT. A Good Place to Get Started --- a.k.a "Table of Contents"
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MAIN EVENT. A Good Place to Get Started --- a.k.a "Table of Contents" |
| MY GLASS HOUSE | THE PREVIOUS EVENT | THE NEXT EVENT | THE WRITERS/GUIDELINES | |
CYA JEFFERSON - They have a saying in the 'hood: "Don't let your mouth write a check that your body can't cash."
Geoff was thinking about this saying as he looked at his own body in the full length mirror in his bedroom after his shower this morning. His body, he thought, was like a road map showing all the times his wise arse mouth had written some mean checks.
There was the dark spot from the flesh wound he had gotten rescuing the ass of that East Indian drug lord from St. David's, Goodman Singh---that was because of Singh's wife being such a fine specimen of how Bermudian sisters could make a man crazy. Then there was that long strip of scar tissue from his last job for the Jamaican, Johnny Conch. And those welts on his hips and thighs from how Tommy "Bells" Ferragallo had played him for a chump taking down that Fujanese madman, leader of the Fuk Ching, Ah Cay.
All of them made the nicks and scars from his time on the Oakland PD look like after-thoughts. And now that phone call early this morning made Geoff feel tired, even though he had slept all night. Tried to sleep, more like it. Brother wanted him to come back to Oakland. Oakland!
The one city in the whole damned world where he would not just be another black dick on another case, but you know, Mallory, that pig who went bad. One who had become a gunsel on the private take. And didn't you know he was like that all along? I did.
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Event # 207: CHANGING THE GUARD
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Geoff had just been out in California in '94, but that was San Francisco, not the Oaktown, now The Scene of the Crime. That phone call this morning had brought back all of the old bile, the judge finding him guilty of man-slaughter, IAD putting his head in their trophy case, his deciding to leave the States once and for all and cash-in on his being the son of a Bermudian citizen. Sally Mallory who had been smart enough to increase the size of the gene pool, yatta-yatta-yattah. Shit! Geoff had convinced himself last year that he was not going to drag his screwed life history over the coals any longer. What's this then, bhai?
He wrapped the towel back around his loins, cover some of his graphical history, etched in flesh. Music. Loud. That's what he needed. He popped the James Carter CD into his deck. New boy outtah Detroit. Hottest reeds player since 'Trane as far as Geoff was concerned.
Oakland. Okay! Fuck it!
No way he was gonnah let Jefferson down. Not Jefferson, whose ex- Geoff had met at the Schooner tavern, down off Valencia at twenty-sixth, in San Francisco, then done her like she was new bread, back in '94.
Obviously, Jefferson did not know.
Geoff felt bad about not having even dropped the bitch a postcard since. Where had the time gone?
Geoff was coming to his senses when the phone rang. He had been down at the bowling alley tossing a few darts with some of the locals. Low profile chill and heady porters before heading back to his cottage in Warwick. He had reached for the pack of Pall Malls like he did every morning before stumbling into the shower, clear-headed this morning because he had foregone the bleeding Scotch whiskey, trying to take it light for a change. Phone rang. No big deal, he thought.
"Mallory here."
"Oh wow, man! It really is you! Inspector Bland in Toronto said you had gone back to Bermuda but I didn't believe it."
"I know you, mate?"
"What's wrong wit' you, niggah? This is Roy Jefferson! You been gone so long you don't recognize my voice, mutherfucker? We homies, ain't we?"
Geoff stiffened. "Jefferson? Roy Jefferson, OPD?"
"Former OPD, just like you Mofo. I'm with SFPD now. Got sick of them ass-holes and finally pulled a gig over in The City."
Did he know?
"But I need a good private eye now. Thought of you. Ken Bland says you're a pistol."
"Why would a cop need a P.I., Jefferson?" He wasn't callin' about Lena, so why was he calling?
"What would you do if some crazy dudes from East Oakland wanted you dead and you had no way of putting a hand on 'em?"
"I'd find some crazier dudes," Geoff said.
"I'm callin' you, ain't I, niggah?"
"I'm out of that mix, Jeff. I ain't been in Oaktown in years. 'Cept for maybe a barbecue. You got people closer to home you can draw on."
"Not that I can trust. Not that I know will get the job done."
"Don't believe the hype. I ain't no bad-ass no more, Jefferson. I'm a provincial little island dick."
"Fuck you, Geoff! You don't wannah help me, niggah, just say it! Don't try to front me, okay? I know all about yo' ass. You been 'bout as low-profile as Madonna. All them big buck clients of your'n! You willing to work for the fuckin' Mob, but you won't help a brother? That's cool. Say so straight up. Don't play me."
Guilt trips like that should roll like water off a duck's back, Geoff thought, stubbing out his smoke as though that would take the acrid taste out of his own mouth. Of course it did not. "I'm in Bermuda, Jefferson. And I don't come cheap."
"I pay you what you cost if you take this job, Mallory. Name it. Just tell me you'll take the case. That's all I want, square business."
"Give a number where I can reach you," Geoff said. He wrote the telephone number down and then rung off.
****** Maybe you lay a man's ex-wife you owe him something? Geoff did not want to think that Lena was weighing on his mind so much, after only one wild night, that that was the only reason he felt he should take Jefferson's case.
Rule of Thumb: don't take a friend, or former friend, as a client. Still, it was Jefferson. Another cop---when Geoff was a cop. Geoff's whole rep was based on working for scum, drug dealers, mobsters, though he had done his share of the key-hole gigs---no notoriety in that, but bread and butter on the table when things got lean, Scotch in the cabinet, some excellent negatives (like he gave the rubes the originals; right.)
Geoff had chased divorce cases, especially during those first lean years on the island, like lawyers chase ambulances. He did not have so much pride that he was willing to lose weight over it. What Dr. Dre say? "It's a cold world. Niggahs gottah supply they own heat."
But now Geoff resented everybody assuming that he was an amoral gunsel, a paladin, willing to do anything for enough long green; but the rep had made him. He admitted in his heart of hearts that his rep as a crazy niggah who would do anything for a price had made his career as a private dick. Did not mean he was really that way... He read Shakespeare, Bertrand Russell, novels and Thucydides to remind himself that he had a brain. He had morals, standards. There was a line Geoff Mallory would not cross. He had found a way of skirting it so far, that was all. A lot of what goes down is grey, Geoff always reminded himself.
Why had fucking Jefferson called him, searched his ass out?
Why now? Why when Geoff had finally come to terms with the rep, with the fact that he was even a pariah here at "home", as his mother, Sally would say, Bermuda: where he was not despised for being black; but he was despised for putting his own cousin, a copper, in Highgate Prison for graft; where he couldn't spit without overturning another family scandal, so now it was him that was scandalous for being a dick, for being therefore obsessed with sussing out the truth no matter who's arse it exposed; where he could have his lovely little isolated pastel pink cottage on that hillside in Warwick which no respectable Bermudian would visit any longer, but his drunken cronies would, and all of his best cases came from "foreigners" and people Stateside who had seen the rap sheet of the "Bermudian" operative. He was American, dammit!
You will never belong anywhere, Blood, he told himself, staring at the mirror over his mantel, sucking down another Scotch this morning. And nobody wants a brilliant niggah willing to kill until their own ass is in jeopardy. Then everybody wants you. And once you done the deed, they don't want to see you ever again.
He knew he should not be drinking this early. But Jefferson had fucked him up, just when Geoff thought he was getting his own life together, at last. Suddenly, despite the perennial sunshine and soft breezes of this pastel island, it was a bad day. The only good thing was James Carter on the box creating The Real Quietstorm and reminding Geoff of Manhattan, sophistication, jazz clubs in Detroit, the high life. That young blood can blow!
And Geoff did not want to go back to Oakland. Not Oakland. It was probably the one town in the States where he would have as much to fear from the police as from the gangstas. In and of itself, that spelled short odds. And why would somebody from the flatlands be after Jefferson, CYA Jefferson, as they used to call him when he was not around?
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