I woke up from the sound of pounding on the door. Two cops were standing outside when I opened it.
“You know Betty Riordan?”
“She's my mother.”
“She's been hurt. We'll take you to the hospital.”
They didn't say much to him about what happened, just that a guy hit her. When I asked why, they just shrugged their shoulders.
They let me off at the emergency entrance and I ran in. The reception nurse avoided meeting my eyes when I asked for Betty. A minute later a doctor came out of a room down the corridor and his eyes found mine. I ran down to him.
“I'm sorry, son, your mother is dead.”
I didn't believe him. I flew past him and into the room. She lay naked on a gurney. Her head had been shaved and her face was black and bloody. I gasped and lost my breath for a moment. When the doctor came in behind me, I pushed by him and staggered out of the room. It hadn't registered in my brain yet.
I didn't know how long I'd been sitting outside on a brick wall when I saw a plainclothes cop come out of the hospital and walk toward me. I hadn't cried. I was cold and stiff and it all seemed unreal.
The cop blew his nose noisily onto a handkerchief before he pulled out a pad and pencil and began asking me questions. Stupid stuff, like name and address and Betty's date of birth. I was answering them like a robot when he threw me a curve.
“How long's your mother been hooking?”
“My mother's not a whore!” I came off the wall with my fists ready.
“Hey, take it easy, kid, I'm just doing my job. The guy who hit her says she turned a trick and tried to rob him.”
“That's a lie! You fucking asshole!”
I came at him swinging and then I was on the ground with my arm in a hammerlock and the cop's knee in my back. I started crying my eyes out.
I stood in the hallway at the Clark County Courthouse when the case was called.
The guy's name was Matt Kupka. I had seen him earlier in the hallway with his lawyer, Jack Stein. I didn't understand much about the legal stuff. I knew that he'd been charged with murder and I wanted to be there to see his face when he was sentenced to fry. I came to court for each of his court dates, but nothing ever seemed to happen in the courtroom. Kupka would sit at the counsel table and shoot-the-shit with the bailiff while his lawyer and the deputy district attorney went into the back room with the judge. This was the third time I'd been to court since Betty was killed and I was anxious to see the guy get punished.
Naomi had heard that Stein was the best lawyer in Vegas, and Charlie Ricketts, the prosecutor, was a dump truck who worked up cases and dumped them just before trial, but that didn't mean shit to meâit was an open-and-shut case. The jerk beat a woman half his size to death, he had a prior incident of assault on a womanâit didn't take a rocket scientist to get a conviction.
Kupka and his lawyer came down the hallway laughing and talking like they were on their way to see Milton Berle at the Flamingo rather than Kupka getting ready to have his ass tossed in the slammer.
They never looked at me. I made sure to glare at Kupka every time I saw them and he avoided eye contact like the plague. I followed them into the courtroom and took a seat at the back. It was one-thirty, after the noon recess, and the usual hangers-on who had nothing to do with their lives but watch courtroom drama were gone.
Stein and the deputy DA greeted each other like old school chums and sauntered back to the judge's chamber. I sat and drilled holes with my eyes in the back of Kupka's shiny head, fantasizing what it
would be like to crack his skull with the two-foot plumber's wrench I kept in my car.
The lawyers came out and the judge took the bench. “I understand the district attorney's office has a motion to make in this matter.”
“Yes, your honor. At this time, we would move to dismiss all counts in the interest of justice.”
“Very good. This matter is dismissed in its entirety.”
“
No!
” My scream ricocheted off the courtroom walls. Everyone froze in midmotion. “Whaâwhat are you doing? He has to go to jail.”
“It's the woman's son,” the prosecutor said.
“Bailiff, take the boy into the jury room.”
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Charlie Ricketts came in a few minutes later. The bailiff came in behind him and stood at the door. He sat down beside me and put his legal file on the jury table, some of the contents spilling out. I hated to be around the guy. He had bad yellow teeth, smelled of b.o., and wore polyester suits that looked like he rolled around a lot when he slept in them.
“Son, it was a very tough case.”
“I'm not your son.” I spoke quietly. I wanted to punch his lights out. The dirt bag was probably no more than thirty and I hoped he didn't live to see thirty-one.
Ricketts shook his head. “Zack, there are some really bad things about this case that no one can talk to you about. You're notâ”
“My mother wasn't a whore.”
“I'm sure you loved your mother, Zack, and she was a good mother, but we have to deal with something called evidence. The evidence in this case is that when the police examined your mother, she was still clutching money taken from Mr. Kupka's bankroll, money we know was his because his fingerprints were on it, too.”
“The newspapers said it was a lousy seventeen dollars.”
“It could have been a single dollar. He caught her robbing him and in a moment of anger, lost his cool andâ”
“Is that how you describe a two-hundred-and-fifty-pound gorilla beating to death a woman with his fists? Losing his
cool
?”
I grabbed one of the pictures that had slipped out of the legal file.
“You don't know my mother. If she found a dollar on the street and
was hungry, she'd look around for the owner of the money. You see her blouse.” I tapped on the picture. “That blouse cost her seventeen dollars. He ripped her blouse and she was just taking back what he owed her.”
“Zack, it's hard on you, sonâ”
“I said I'm not your son, you fucking dump truck. You dumped the case because you're a piece of shit instead of a lawyer. See my face, shithead, remember it, because someday I'm gonna burn your ass.”
Ricketts sighed and looked over to the bailiff.
“Take the little bastard to Juvie. Maybe they'll find a nice home for him where the foster father will fuck him in the ass each time he mouths off.”
I thought I knew all about Juvenile Hall. Hell, half my friends had done time there, but what I didn't know was that kids who lost their parents, even orphaned babies, were tucked in with the incorrigibles. I was there for a week when Suke came to visit me. They wouldn't let Naomi in because she was under eighteen.
“I try to get you out, to stay with me.” She shook her head. “I have conviction for shoplifting, five years ago, but they act like I kill someone.”
“It's okay, I'm going to San Bernardino to stay with my mother's sister.”
She brightened up immediately. “Thank God, you have family.”
“They're not family. I only met my aunt and her husband once. They're white trash. Betty couldn't stand them and neither could I.”
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Betty's sister, Marcy, had acquired none of Betty's good looks or good qualities. She and her husband had picked me up in my own '57 Olds. “Our car broke down and we took the bus to Vegas,” Marcy confessed. I sat in the backseat with their twelve-year-old son and ten-year-old daughter. A guy once told me that the way you get the best out of a litter of puppies is to throw the whole batch into a river and see which ones swim out. These two snot-nosed, whiny little twerps would have sunk to the bottom. After a hot ride across the desert with no air conditioning, if we'd been near a river, I swear I'd have thrown them all in and held their heads under.
“We're not rich people, Zack. We can hardly feed our own, isn't that right, Honey?” Marcy said.
Honey was another real piece of work. He had a day-old beard, watery bloodshot eyes, needed a haircut, and looked like he robbed Salvation Army Dumpsters for his clothes.
“Not rich at all. We'll need every cent the county pays to keep you.
But we love you, boy, because you're family, don't we, Marcy?”
That was it in a nutshell. I came with a government check. Which was why my “loving” family wanted me. The only thing that made the trip worthwhile was that the Olds dropped its transmission three miles from Barstow and we abandoned it. I was glad the car died. I didn't want it abused.
Home was a three-room shack in San Bernardino that didn't even have the dignity of having a whorehouse nearby. Someone had made a half-assed attempt to stucco the walls, but the chicken wire showed through. The place was a pigsty. Betty was no shakes as a housekeeper, but she hadn't been a slob, either. These people were disgusting. My “room” was a rusty army cot with a dirty mattress on a screened-in porch.
“Honey will put in windows this winter,” Marcy told me. “He's handy with tools.”
I looked back to where Honey was hugging a beer in front of the TV. “Yeah, he's real good with a bottle opener.”
“You'll register at San Bernardino High, that's what the county people require, that you be in high school in order for us to get a check. You'll like the young people here. They're much more down to earth than those Vegas types.”
She wasn't kidding about them being down to earthâsome of the country farm boys I saw looked like their knuckles hit the ground as they walked. The girls wore Levis and had wide hips. Only the Mex girls turned me on.
I lasted two weeks with my loving family. The first time Honey had too much to drink and got mean to the kids, I hit him in the nose with my fist loaded with a roll of nickels. The nickels splattered all over and so did his nose.
I left with the clothes on my back and seven dollars in my pocket. I hitched a ride at a truck stop with a long-distance driver who dropped me at the bottom of an off-ramp only a few blocks from Suke and Naomi's door.
The girls were happy to see me and I choked up because I knew their reaction was genuine. Naomi had to baby-sit at a neighbor's and she gave me a hug before she left.
“What if aunt has police come?” Suke asked when we were alone.
“Never happen. Their only interest in me is the monthly check. They'll collect that until someone figures out I'm not around and then they'll be too afraid to let the cops find me. They'll say I ran off the day before and I'll be back.”
They had their apartment almost packed up.
“We move to uncle in Koreatown,” Suke said, referring to the mid-Wilshire area of Los Angeles. “After what happen to your mother, I no like Vegas. And Naomi's boyfriend, he knock her up. Mother say, Bobby no marry nigger-chink.”
“Nice lady. Maybe she'll rot in hell.”
Suke made me take a shower and shaveâ“You stink. Go shower and I make you feel good.” When I came out of the bathroom with a towel wrapped around me, she was waiting in bed.
I climbed into bed and the excitement in my loins began to rise as I looked at her glistening naked body. I still had my towel on and she slowly took it off and started moving her featherlike hands over my body in a hypnotic motion, the tingling sensations giving me goose bumps. She did an around-the-world number, touching every erogenous zone on my body from my head to my toes. My throbbing organ was fully erect when she took my penis in her mouth and ran her warm tongue around it, circling it like she was licking an ice cream cone, before she took all of me in her mouth and starting sucking on
it. My juices came spurting out crazily all over her mouth, as I shot off.
We snuggled under the covers with Suke resting on my arm and I shut my eyes. I must have dozed off immediately. Next thing I knew it was dark in the room and someone was climbing into bed. Suke stirred at my other side as Naomi spread herself against me, hooking her leg over my leg. Her body was lithe and hard and hot. She kissed me on the mouth as she found my penis with her hand and massaged it. It jumped up at command. She rubbed against me, running her pubis up and down my leg, her cunt warm and lush. Then she was on top, taking my erect penis and guiding it inside her wet opening. As she straddled me, Suke spread herself over my face, rubbing her hairy pubic mound against my lips. I licked her and found her clitoris, and pressed the hot button with my tongue. “Mother-daughter, best of all,” Suke gloated. A beginning tremble was signaling my coming orgasm and a few moments later my body shuddered and exploded.