hard, pay them or put the hoodoo on them so they leave us alone. Action, reaction. Most problems have easy solutions.
This wasn’t one of those problems. Jamal had been executed by another outfit. It had been an act of war.
Ordinarily, if a rival gangster hit one of our guys, I’d hit him and make sure his boss got the message. Problem solved. I wouldn’t enjoy it, probably, but I’d do it because that’s the way this thing of ours works.
That wasn’t going to be a quick fix this time. Even with all the juice and testosterone on the street, L.A.’s underworld is surprisingly peaceful. There’s violence, but most of it happens within the outfits, not between them. There’s competition, but overt confrontation is rare. No one wants a war.
I was pretty sure Papa Danwe was responsible for Jamal’s murder, but I couldn’t prove it. My divination spell allowed me to build a pretty strong circumstantial case against the sorcerer. But as powerful as magic is, it also has its limitations. By its very nature, magic is ephemeral, intangible and subjective. My divination might be enough for me, but it wouldn’t count as hard evidence to anyone else. Even among sorcerers, “Wikipedia told me so” isn’t a compelling enough reason to touch off a gangland war.
I didn’t plan on taking Papa Danwe to court, but we would need the support of at least some of the other L.A. outfits if we wanted to make a move against him. We wouldn’t need their help, but we would at least need them to stand aside. There were a dozen major outfits in Greater Los Angeles, and plenty of smaller ones, but only a few really had a stake in South Central. Those were the ones that mattered, and they’d be the hardest to convince.
It was also unlikely that Papa Danwe had done the hit himself. It wasn’t his style. He’d have a henchman to do the dirty work, though it would have to be someone pretty good.
And finally, while I could connect Papa Danwe to the soul jar, and I could connect the soul jar to Jamal’s murder, I didn’t have even the glimmer of a clue about motive.
I’m not a detective. Most gangsters have it in them to do a murder, but it’s a rare thing if one of them is clever about it. Elaborate plots and cunning schemes are for normal people. A gangster usually kills a guy because someone else told him to and he thinks he’s covered. Mistakes get made—gangsters are prone to them—and that’s where I step in. There isn’t a mystery to solve, just an error to be corrected.
Most of what I knew about detective work came from cop shows and buddy movies. Look for clues. Develop a theory and find a suspect you like. Spend time with the family of your partner, who happens to be only a couple weeks from retirement.
Despite my lack of investigative experience, I wanted the killing to make some sense. It didn’t. Why would Papa Danwe be making a move against our outfit? If he was, why did he do it by hitting a guy like Jamal? The kid just didn’t merit the attention. Why squeeze him? He didn’t have the juice to make it worthwhile. And why leave him hanging in his apartment? If Papa Danwe was sending a message, we weren’t speaking the same language.
If I wanted to answer the “Why Jamal?” question, I needed to connect the kid and Papa Danwe. Maybe Jamal crossed him somehow. Maybe he’d even been working for Papa Danwe on the side and the relationship went sideways. Unless Jamal was a random victim, which seemed unlikely, there would have to be a connection. It sounded like a plan.
I stared at the vintage movie posters hanging on the living-room wall. I stared at the wall. I turned on the TV and turned it off. I had a couple more glasses of wine and fell asleep on the couch.
That night, I dreamed that Jamal was on the balcony outside my condo, trying to jimmy the French doors with a crowbar.
Two
When he wasn’t tagging or tying someone up in his apartment, Jamal could usually be found on a playground in Crenshaw, shooting hoops with his homeboys. I parked on the street by the court and went in through a gap in the rusted chain-link fence.
There were seven guys playing full-court, all of them young black males. The oldest might have been twenty-five. A few girlfriends and hangers-on lounged courtside on the cracked concrete. They leaned against the fence and watched the game. They passed a blunt around and smoked. The court and both backboards were decorated with tags Jamal had put down.
The game stopped as soon as my car pulled up, and everyone was watching me as I stepped through the fence. The guy holding the ball walked toward me. He was a six-foot-ten, three-hundred-pound horse named Marcus. He’d come off the bench on a full-ride at UCLA for two years. He would have started his junior year at power forward, but he got collared for dealing crack and lost his scholarship.
“Yo, Domino,” he called. “We need a skin.”
It was going around. “You’ve got four skins and three shirts, Marcus.”
“Nah, D, Shawan gonna go shirts.” He nodded to one of the brothers. The kid jogged over to his gym bag and dropped a tank top over his head.
I was always a skin. Watching a five-foot-seven Mexican-Irish girl in her thirties trying to play ball with these guys wasn’t enough entertainment. Jamal’s boys always needed me to go shirtless. I’d learned a somewhat embarrassing lesson the first time this happened, so I was wearing a sports bra.
I stripped to the waist and handed my jacket and shirt to Marcus’s girlfriend, a young twentysomething with an elaborately styled weave and gold fingernails. She smiled and folded them neatly in her lap. I passed her the shoulder holster with the forty-five and she tucked it under my jacket.
“Don’t take Marcus money, Domino,” she whispered. “We got rent.”
“Yo, D, you been workin’ out?” Marcus asked, laughing and elbowing the kid named Shawan. “You lookin’ ripped, girl!”
“My people weren’t bred to pick cotton.” Casual sexism and racism were social etiquette in Crenshaw. I hear it makes some people uncomfortable.
“Nah, that’s right. Your peeps bred skinny to crawl under the fence.” Everyone laughed.
“I’m only half-Mexican,” I said, and gave up the straight line. “My dad was Irish.”
“Someone get this skinny bitch a potato,” said Shawan. The game was delayed another couple minutes so he could be congratulated for his wit with chest-bumps and fist-pounds.
“Okay, Shawan, I got you. Bitch.” I’d been cheating on the playground since kindergarten. This time, I only used enough juice to make sure Shawan didn’t score and to throw down a two-handed jam in his face on an alley-oop from our point guard. Skins still lost, and I coughed up my twenty so Marcus could make his rent. After the game, I joined them along the fence for Red Bull and weed.
“So what you doing, D?” asked Marcus. “You come down here just to give your money to us poor black folks?”
“Yeah, Marcus, I don’t pay taxes and I was worried your welfare check might bounce.”
“Fuck that, D. I got a job.”
Marcus, like most of the guys on the court, was a part-time criminal. No juice, no serious gang affiliation and no real connection with our thing. They were the handymen of Crenshaw’s ghetto economy. If a small-time rock-slinger turned up dead or incarcerated and his boss needed someone to fill in, he’d have a ready labor pool waiting at the playground.
“Actually, I was just wondering if you knew what Jamal has been up to.”
“You ain’t seen him, neither, huh?” said Marcus. “Word is he got a new ho.” Marcus’s girlfriend scowled and drove an elbow into his ribs.
“Sorry, baby,” he said.
“You know who she is?”
“Nah, girl, like I said, we ain’t even seen the brother. The woman, you know, that’s just what he said she said and whatnot.”
“Any new friends, besides the woman,