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, I mean?'
Heads shook.
'Maybe you've seen some new faces hanging around. Maybe some guys in Papa Danwe's outfit.'
'Nah, D, Papa Danwe got most of Inglewood and Watts, but he don't got Crenshaw. Everyone know Crenshaw belong to the Turk.'
Rashan was known as the Turk on the street, at least by those who didn't know him well. The outfit's turf is shaped like a crescent, running from Santa Monica around the southern edge of downtown, up through East L.A. and reaching into Pasadena. Rashan controlled Crenshaw, but there was only a nebulous border separating his territory from Papa Danwe's turf.
'All right, you give me a call if you hear anything else.' Nods all around.
'Jamal in some kinda trouble, D?' Marcus asked.
'I think y'all might need to recruit another player,' I said. 'Jamal won't be going skins anytime soon.'
I left Crenshaw and drove back to civilization. I took Santa Monica Boulevard into Beverly Hills. I've always liked Beverly Hills. The outfits exist by virtue of the fact that most people don't pay any attention to what's going on around them. It's charming. No other place has reached Beverly Hills's level of clueless perfection, with the possible exception of Vegas.
A vampire can walk down Rodeo Drive, window-shopping and pausing for the occasional snack, and no one will even notice as long as he's wearing the right suit. A sorcerer would have to turn a demon loose in Gucci to attract attention.
The art opening was like any other of its kind. When I walked in, the gallery was bustling with the young, rich and fashionable in-crowd. This was L.A., though, so everyone had two out of three working-they were all faking the third.
I was there to meet an associate, a connected probation officer on the outfit's payroll. His name was Tommy Barrow and he was twenty-nine years old. He used his secondary income, drug connections and gangster stories to circulate with the art-opening crowd and chase women who were out of his league.
I spotted him standing by an abstract painting in animated conversation with a salon blonde. Her swimsuit- model body and pouting lips advertised one of the many nearby clinics.
'Hi, Tommy,' I said. 'Who's your friend?' The blonde wore a diamond-and-ruby pendant that nestled in her prodigious cleavage. A red arrow painted on her chest wouldn't have drawn more attention to her neckline.
'Sandy, this is Domino, a friend of ours,' Tommy said, his voice low and conspiratorial.
Sandy's tastefully decorated face brightened and the pouty lips stretched into a sunny smile. 'Oh, so you work for Tommy in, you know, the business?'
I looked at Tommy and raised an eyebrow. He shrugged apologetically. 'Not exactly,' I said. 'You could say we answer to the same boss.'
'Oh, I see,' Sandy said. 'Can I ask what you do, or would you have to kill me?' She giggled, bringing a delicate and bejeweled hand to her mouth but making sure I could still see her perfectly straight and whitened teeth. In the outfit, I didn't get any real sexism from the guys and I didn't deal with cattiness from the girls. I had juice, and that's all that mattered on the street. I only ran into that kind of shit from civilians.
I laughed, turning from her to Tommy, and then back to her. I put the smile away. 'I wouldn't have to.'
She stopped in midgiggle, and I could almost hear the little wheels in her head turning as she tried to figure out if I was joking or not.
Tommy laughed loudly and put his hand on my arm. 'That's a good one, Domino! Sandy, why don't you run along so we can talk business?'
Sandy lit up again and the smile reappeared. 'Oh, okay!' she bubbled. 'It was nice to meet you, Domino.' She bounced away and I turned my attention to the painting on the wall, some kind of abstract brown swirl on a yellow background.
'Looks like shit.'
'It is,' Tommy said, following my gaze to the painting. 'Dog, I think.'
I looked closer. It was. The artist had lacquered it to the canvas.
'Let's go outside for a smoke.'
Tommy nodded, grinning. 'Those things will kill you, Domino.'
I have a purification spell that rules that out, but I didn't mention it. It's the kind of thing that pisses people off. They don't really mind if you smoke as long as it kills you. Out on the sidewalk, I drew a Camel and lit up.
Tommy immediately began scanning the area for attractive female pedestrians. 'So what can I do for you, Domino?'
'Jamal is dead,' I said. Tommy's gaze immediately snapped back to me. I wouldn't be able to keep the murder a secret, and Tommy would need to know eventually.
'When? How?' Tommy asked. His store-bought tan had lost a little color.
'Last night. Probably a hit.'
'Jesus. Who did it?'
'Hard to say. Jamal isn't talking.'
'How did he die? Where did you find him?' Tommy was fishing for all the details that would allow him to spin a good insider report to impress his friends.
