Shaker: A Novel Read online

  “He couldn’t have died in his sleep. Not with his fucking tongue chewed off.”

  Roy turned to her. She had just smothered his father with a pillow and was talking to Roy like she was having trouble vacuuming up a stubborn footprint. She took a deep breath and looked at Roy a good long while before she spoke again.

  “Go to bed.”

  “I feel sick.”

  “You’ll be fine.”

  “I really don’t feel good.”

  He ran into the kitchen and threw up in the sink. She stood in the doorway silently smoking, watching him rinse his mouth out and then wash out the sink. He stood there, bent over, trying to catch his breath.

  She said, “You wanted him dead.”

  She came over, dropped her cigarette in the sink, and stood over him.

  “Why else did you wait so long to try and save him?”

  Roy looked up at her. “I couldn’t get him out.”

  “It was four feet of water. All you had to do was pull his head up.”

  “I couldn’t get into the car.”

  “You could’ve broken a window.”

  “With what?”

  “So you did nothing?”

  “I called for help.”

  “And then?”

  “The man was there.”

  She smiled at him. Put her hand on the side of his face and said, “We got what we wanted, though, didn’t we?”

  —

  It was a little after three a.m when Roy heard a familiar voice downstairs. His brother was quiet in the crib beside him as he climbed out of bed and walked to the door. Officer Mike was at the bottom of the stairs looking up at Roy standing there in the Kansas City Chiefs pajamas his mother had gotten him a couple of years ago. They were too small and Roy felt stupid all of a sudden in the presence of the young cop.

  “It’s okay, son. Come on down.”

  So it was “son” now. Roy wondered if he should still call him “Officer Mike” or if that was only for that half hour at the Denny’s. He beckoned with his hand for Roy to keep moving. And as Roy descended the stairs, he could see Officer Mike’s partner, a bigger, redder-faced version of Mike, looking up at him. Roy’s mother sat on the edge of the hospital bed, watching Roy’s every move, her eyes red from crying, a tissue clutched in her hand. Roy was young, and not that wise to anything, but in that moment, any idiot could see that he was fucked. How exactly, he wasn’t sure. He just knew that once he got to the bottom of the stairs, there would be no going back up.

  Roy didn’t say a word when they handcuffed him, looked at his mother as they read him his rights. She told him through tears that as soon as she found someone to watch the baby, she’d be down there with a lawyer.

  Down where? Roy wondered.

  —

  The Wyandotte County Juvenile Detention Center was a cement bunker on North 7th Street. Roy sat in the backseat looking at Officer Mike in the rearview mirror, the young cop now giving him a little preview of what was to come.

  “This is where you’re gonna spend some time thinking about what you’ve done and learn to correct your behavior,” he was saying to Roy now. “No more friends, no more going to the movies, no more home-cooked meals.”

  Roy wanted to say that his mother hardly ever cooked, but he didn’t.

  They pulled into a sally port and Mike helped him out of the car. His partner nodded in the direction of a security camera and the door locked behind them while the one in front of them now opened. They walked down a short, bright hall to a room marked INTAKE AND RISK ASSESSMENT. There were racks along the walls with uniforms. Another rack with strange gray garments resembling the heavy apron the dentist draped over Roy when he X-rayed his teeth.

  “That’s a suicide smock,” Mike said, and went over to it and pulled it out for Roy to see it.

  “If the staff thinks you’re in danger of hurting yourself, they might put you in one of these.” Mike tugged at the fabric.

  “It’s one piece and really thick, so you can’t turn it into a noose and hang yourself.”

  Roy wet his pants. It just happened. One minute he was standing there listening to Officer Mike go on about killing himself, looking at that ribbed gray smock and thinking about the dentist that day he went in for X-rays, how the dentist smelled like licorice and how nice he was to Roy, how nice he was to Roy’s mother, and then the next thing he knew, his shoes were soaked in piss.

  They kept him in Isolation that night. His mother came to visit him the following afternoon. She was with an older man in a wrinkled black suit with a sprinkling of dandruff on each shoulder. His mother said he was their lawyer and introduced him as Mr. Solomon. The lawyer said that Roy could call him “Doc,” that everyone did, and got out a pencil stub and a yellow pad of paper and asked Roy to tell him how his father died.

  “I don’t know,” Roy said. “I was in bed.”

  Roy’s mother exchanged a look with Mr. Solomon and said, “Would you give me a minute alone with my son?”

  The lawyer nodded, already fishing a pack of Kools from his suit coat as he got to his feet. Roy’s mother waited for the sound of the visiting room’s outer door to close before turning back to Roy and studying him a minute.

  “How are you doing?” she asked. Then immediately answered her own question, “You’re okay, right?”

  Roy wasn’t sure how to answer that one.

  “Sweetie, you understand that if I go away, it’s to the penitentiary for life.” She let that sit with him a moment, then went on. “If you go away, it’s to the Honor Center at Boonville, for a couple years at the most.”

  “Is that what Doc says will happen?”

  “Think about the Captain. What’s best for him? Should he lose his mother? He’s already lost his father.”

  “Because you killed his father.”

  “You and I both know that he lost him before that, in the pond.”

  “How is he? The Captain.”

  “Fine,” she said. “For now.” She grabbed her purse and fished around inside until she found her own cigarettes.

  Roy watched her and said, “But he’ll be okay, right?”

  She looked up from her purse and said, “That’s really up to you.” She lit her smoke, sat back, and looked at Roy. “He’s at home now. His home. Not some foster hell hole with a dozen other filthy kids. Which is where he’ll go—where you’ll both go—if I go to prison.”

  They sat there in silence a moment. Roy’s mother smoking her cigarette and looking around the room. Roy thinking about his little brother. Thinking about how it wasn’t fair. He was just born into this bullshit. Roy loved him, couldn’t imagine being away from him for a day or two let alone a couple of years. He realized then that the Captain was his only friend. That little baby was all he had that was good. When the two of them were together, he wasn’t so afraid. Why? he wondered. Then it came to him. It was because he was taking care of somebody. The Captain depended on him. There was no room to be afraid.

  He looked up at his mother. She crossed her arms and returned the look, but with nothing on her face. She was waiting.

  Roy finally asked, “What’s Boonville like?”

  Miguel Santiago.

  The mayor had begun saying his name to himself. He would do it all day long. Miguel Santiago. Never aloud, but quietly, inside his own head. Miguel Santiago. He couldn’t remember the exact moment when this little habit—this little tic—had started, but it had been going on for a while now.

  He’d first caught himself doing it in the middle of one night when he’d gotten up to take a leak. He’d been having some trouble in that department, sometimes standing there up to three minutes before anything happened. And not just when he was alone. For years he had avoided public restrooms at all costs. Airplanes had become a permanent no-go without at least two Xanax and/or getting stupidly drunk first.

  On this particular night, the mayor had been swaying over the bowl for what seemed like forever when, out of nowhere, he realized that
he’d been repeating his own name like some kind of mantra. Miguel Santiago…Miguel Santiago…The instant he made this odd discovery, his entire being relaxed and he emptied his bladder in a euphoric rush.

  It wasn’t long before he couldn’t piss at all without first following this ritual. The words Miguel Santiago working like a urinary abracadabra every single time. Even in places like Dodger Stadium where the mayor—unlike the ex–chief of police and previous mayor—had always avoided the public johns because he didn’t want to look like some bladder-shy pussy in front of his constituency. But now, he could suck down a quart of beer and a Dodger Dog, then stroll into the can and surprise the male fans in there by walking right up to the big public trough that had always so intimidated him before, and smile at the voters on either side of him, giving everybody a big “How y’all doing tonight?” as he hosed down the metal backsplash.

  And all it took to get there was that quiet little incantation.

  Miguel Santiago.

  Later, the mayor discovered that his name had power well beyond merely helping him void his bladder.

  Once upon a time, when he felt embarrassed at something he’d said, something he knew to be idiotic the minute it left his mouth, he would punish himself by surreptitiously flipping himself off under the table or behind his back or in his trouser pocket. It was a weird thing he’d been doing since he was a kid. His own chickenshit version of self-flagellation.

  No, the mayor had discovered a much easier way to deal with his shame. Now when, say, at a press conference the mayor might have casually mentioned (lied) that he loved football, and some asshole journo asked him to shout out his favorite player and he couldn’t, the mayor just repeated his own name a few times to himself and, wouldn’t you know, felt better instantly. Shame forgotten.

  So earlier that morning, the meeting had just barely begun when the word “execution” was tossed out, followed by the phrase “possible federal investigation,” and the mayor just sat at his desk, still as a hat rack, serenely running the Miguel Santiago loop over and over in his head (though lately he’d been experimenting with variations such as You are Miguel Santiago, or his new favorite, And now, I’d like to introduce Miguel Santiago!).

  Not that the mayor needed a distraction. For most of the meeting, for most of most meetings, the mayor thought about Savannah, his latest conquest. While the others watched footage on Evan’s little Vaio of some dark-skinned middle school dropout putting a gun to poor Frank Peres’s head, the mayor saw Savannah smiling at him in bed that morning before turning over and sticking her ass in the air.

  “Jesus fuck.” Gordy Savage, LAPD chief, shook his head and said, “Some asshole takes the time to go get his phone so he can tape the whole thing, but not once does he think to call 911?”

  The mayor heard himself saying, “Guy was really lucky.”

  They all looked at him like he was some kind of mongoloid.

  Ladies and gentlemen, the mayor of Los Angeles. Miguel Santiago!

  The mayor cleared his throat and beamed back down into the meeting.

  “I just meant,” he said, “that the guy’s window was in the perfect spot.”

  He flipped himself off under the desk.

  Joy Levine, the mayor’s PR chief, came to his rescue. “He sold the footage to CNN for half a mil,” putting that kind of face on it. Joy, even at seventy-one, was the best-dressed member of the mayor’s staff, turning up this morning in a violet suit with a cream-colored scarf to match high-heeled shoes the same color. The mayor was fascinated by the fact that Joy Levine was black, but married to a white bankruptcy lawyer named Mickey Levine. The two of them together, no doubt, since the sixties.

  Gordy Savage, on the other hand, looked more like he had just come off the back nine at Annandale—which he probably had—than L.A.’s top cop.

  Gordy said, “We’ve already got one of those kids pretty solidly ID’d. I think we’ll have them all by the end of the week.”

  “Have them all, or know who they all are?” The question coming from Evan Crisp, the mayor’s executive assistant.

  Barely thirty and the youngest person on the mayor’s staff, Crisp had an MA in public policy from NYU. His family owned several shopping malls in Glendale and Arcadia. All through college, Evan worked a host of shit jobs in New York City—everything from selling footwear at Shoegasm to working food service at Bellevue—in a futile effort to ward off the inevitable label of Entitled Shit.

  “Hopefully both,” Gordy answered, trying not to look like he wanted to put one of his FootJoys up Evan’s ass. “We’ve got good people on it.”

  “Yes, we’ll get to that in a minute.” Gordy watched uncomfortably as Evan made a note in his leather-encased legal pad with an eight-hundred-dollar Mont Blanc fountain pen. Evan liked to write down everything everyone said. This naturally made everyone uncomfortable. People felt they couldn’t be as off-the-cuff as they might like whenever Evan was around. Especially since Evan tended to use their own words against them down the line. He may not have acted entitled, but he was still, in most minds, a complete shit.

  The mayor looked at his watch. Just after ten. Savannah was well on her way back to New York City by now, back to that little apartment in NoHo on Bond Street. Every room in the place stinking of sex. The minute the mayor walked in and took a whiff, he lost all hold of himself. Just thinking about those three little rooms…Jesus.

  They’d met last summer at a dinner party, on Martha’s Vineyard of all places, at the home of a movie producer named Paul Fine, né Finkelman. They were seated next to each other at a table that somehow sat thirty and, once they were introduced, didn’t talk to another soul for the rest of the night. Except for a few brief moments when Paul Fine announced to the table that Miguel Santiago, the mayor of L.A. and the next governor of California, would like to say a few words to us all. Miguel got up, gave one of his speeches about growing up poor and Hispanic in rich, white, and Republican Orange County. The Vineyarders lapping it all up along with the beach plum sorbet. As they were saying their good nights, the drunk ex-wife of the guy who had once upon a time bought and sold some energy drink company for a few billion, asked the mayor if anyone had ever told him that he looked like Antonio Banderas.

  Only every fucking day of his life.

  “No, ma’am, that’s the first time I heard that one. But I take it as a compliment.”

  “Well you should.”

  Then she leaned in close, nodded toward Savannah, and whispered, “That young lady wants to put her finger up your ass.”

  The comment turned out to be both prescient and an understatement.

  Savannah had a degree in finance from…somewhere. The mayor made a mental note to have Evan find out exactly where. She currently worked for a big investment fund in Manhattan. Shit, he couldn’t remember the name of that either. She had just turned thirty the night before and they’d celebrated downtown at Patina with a rack of lamb for two and a three-hundred-dollar bottle of Opus One. The whole thing billed to the city. Savannah now a “financial consultant” to the mayor’s office.

  Funny thing was, the mayor had always dated older women. Actually much older. Not that long ago, he was in a relationship with a woman who had twenty years on him.

  But Savannah, she was—

  “All it takes is one match.”

  It was Leila, the gang advisor. She was upset. But then, she was always upset. What a fucking joke that had turned out to be. Joy had persuaded the mayor to hire her. Dr. Leila Graham was a sociology professor and provost at USC, but looked more like an ex–fashion model. She was easily six feet tall with long gray hair streaked with black. Leila had spent the last twenty-five years hanging out with gang members and considered them all her family. She had written a dozen books on the subject and actually lived in South Central. The mayor wondered if any of her neighbors knew that the leggy white lady down the block grew up in San Marino, was a onetime Rose Parade Princess, and the only daughter of an heir to the Chandler
fortune and a prominent real estate developer.

  “If we go too fast,” Leila was saying, “we will almost certainly cause an explosion.”

  Evan asked, “How so?”

  “This might not be anything other than a shakedown, turned bad. But…” She let her but hang in the air for a second or two, then raised a finger as she continued. “But if we start accusing particular gangs of executions—”

  The mayor said, “Stop saying execution.”

  “Whatever the language, if we accuse them of something they’re not responsible for, they’ll retaliate.”

  “We know they’re responsible for killing the guy,” Gordy said. “It’s all right there on-screen.”

  “I’m talking about ascribing some sort of political motive.”

  The mayor was getting annoyed. “There is no political motive! The fucking guy got mugged!”

  Leila looked at him, suddenly calm. “Miguel, Frank Peres has accused you quite publicly and on several occasions of taking cartel money for your election.”

  “Because of that one dinner.” He threw up his hands. “Guy grows strawberries! Okay? How was I supposed to know he was part of a fucking drug cartel? And what does that have to do with Frank Peres?”

  “The African American gangs have all been put down,” Leila explained in that faux patient way of hers. “They all work indirectly for the Latin gangs, who are all directly funded by the cartels now. They want nothing more than to get out from under that kind of oppression.”

  “Oppression?” The mayor was trying not to laugh. “Are you fucking kidding me?”

  “You saying they’re not oppressed, Mr. Mayor?”

  “The blacks,” Gordy said, “the ones in gangs anyway, are rappers now. They have their own record labels. They’re making music, if you can call it that.”

  “So?”

  “They’re playing at being in gangs. There’s nothing serious about them. Not anymore.”

  Leila said, “That’s a generalization, don’t you think?”