Articoli correlati a Inner City Blues: A Charlotte Justice Novel
In the midst of the Los Angeles riots, Detective Charlotte Justice, one of the very few black women in the LAPD, delves into the shooting of a former radical by an African-American doctor, in the debut of a new mystery series. Reprint.
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Recensione:
"Fast-paced, more twisted than a pretzel . . . The tale Woods spins around [Charlotte Justice] is as much about race and racism in L.A. as it is about crime."
--Los Angeles Times
"[WOODS] SETS SCENES THAT SNATCH YOU IN AND HOLD YOU. . . . Detective Justice can hold her own among such tough-broad law and order types as Kinsey Milhone, Kay Scarpetta, and Christy Love."
--The Dallas Morning News
From the Trade Paperback edition.
Estratto. © Riproduzione autorizzata. Diritti riservati.:
--Los Angeles Times
"[WOODS] SETS SCENES THAT SNATCH YOU IN AND HOLD YOU. . . . Detective Justice can hold her own among such tough-broad law and order types as Kinsey Milhone, Kay Scarpetta, and Christy Love."
--The Dallas Morning News
From the Trade Paperback edition.
Messing Up My Cha-Cha
Twelve years, eleven months, and fifteen days into living out my Top Cop fantasies--Christie Love with a better hairdo--my Nubian brothers down on Florence and Normandie had to go and pitch a serious bitch and mess up my cha-cha. Since May of '79, when I stood in the graduating class at the Police Academy, I had survived my years with the LAPD with little more than a few bruises, a shoulder prone to dislocation, and a couple of badly torn fingernails.
Survived the early years in patrol cars with partners whose every joke began "There was a white man, a Mexican, and a nigg . . . uh . . . black man . . ." Survived my first assignment as a gang detective in Southwest, where I learned more about L.A. homeboys in the first three months than I had in three years of graduate study in criminology. And let me not forget the edu-mo-cation I got when I went over to South Bureau Homicide, where I saw more dead bodies in five years than detectives in other parts of the country see in their whole careers.
I had survived stun guns and choke holds; Afro puffs and Jheri curls; floods, fires, and medflies; the '84 Olympics and the Whittier quake. At thirty-eight, I weighed thirty pounds less than I had in high school, had all my teeth, and had never, until getting caught near ground zero on a fine spring day, seriously been in fear for my life.
But thanks to twelve decent, Gates-fearing residents of Simi Valley and its pro-cop environs, I spent the days leading up to my thirteenth anniversary in the Department back in uniform dodging bullets, new jack Molotov cocktails, and more Pampers tossed through broken grocery store windows than I care to remember.
As I watched the city I loved go to hell in a handbasket, I kept reminding myself that the Los Angeles I wanted to protect and to serve was basically composed of law-abiding citizens, not mad looters dragging microwaves down Pico Boulevard--near my house, no less.
There was a deadly carnival atmosphere in the air. Gang members and grandmothers, who usually gave each other a wide berth, were united in their rage over the verdict and the stench of despair that had hovered in the air since Watts blew up in 1965. But unlike the Watts riots, which were confined by segregation to a much smaller area, the alliance of the poor and the befuddled yearning to live large was everywhere, of every color and economic class, all wanting to bring down some particularly offensive part of the system in their corner of the city. So it didn't matter if it was beating Reginald Denny in South Central or looting a jewelry store in Long Beach--anything and everything was fair game.
I had to do something to keep the peace, so even though it was against Department policy, I'd finagled a way to stay on duty almost forty-eight hours. And while it was the most stressful thing I'd done since joining the force, I was getting through it okay. But it was Friday, May 1, the day after the National Guard set up housekeeping in shopping centers all over the city, that the last straw, blown in on a warm Santa Ana wind from a most unexpected direction, broke this camel's back.
A motley crew of twenty of us--street cops and desk jockeys from Parker Center, South Bureau, and a couple of the divisions--had been deployed by bus to a strip mall on Rodeo Road. Spelled exactly the same as Rodeo (as in Ro-day-o) Drive in Beverly Hills, the running joke in some parts of town was how far apart the two streets really were. Rodeo Drive's sleek boutiques and Mercedes-Benzes epitomized the Southern California good life, and the chief of police and residents there made damn sure everyone knew Beverly Hills was not in the City of Angels. I bet most of the tenants on Rodeo Drive didn't even know about their poor relations that runs through what black folks call "the Westside," less than five miles southeast as the crow flies.
My Rodeo--although pronounced the way the cowboys do--was no less treasured than Beverly Hills's. Shopping centers and moderately priced planned communities on the western end of the street gave way to soul-food joints, strip malls, and solidly middle-class homes to the east. At the corner of Rodeo and La Brea was a busy commercial district. I bought my first forty-five (record, that is)--Fontella Bass's "Rescue Me"--at the record store that sat on the corner, and down the street on La Brea was the Baldwin Theater, where I went on my first real date.
Rodeo forked to the left at Dorsey High School and through a neighborhood of postwar tract houses whose identical twins in what white folks call the Westside would command at least a hundred thousand more. A little farther east were blocks of vintage Spanish homes, including the original residence and beautiful rose gardens of Mayor Tom Bradley and his wife, Ethel.
Two streets separated by a few miles and lot of money, in those days the Rodeos were competing in a grimly fought battle to see who would survive the hell of the last forty-eight hours. With a chief of police who served as a former aide to Chief Gates, I was betting well-staffed and well-patrolled Beverly Hills's Rodeo would be the hands-down winner this time around.
That day my Rodeo looked more like a war zone than a major thoroughfare through middle-class black L.A. Its smoldering rubble was a symbol of the largest civil insurrection in modern American history, and I had been powerless to stop it.
I couldn't stop the torching of my record store, up in flames that first night along with several black-owned businesses.
I couldn't stop the multiracial looters who scrambled for merchandise at the Fedco store, giggling like kids fighting for candy from a pi-ata.
And I couldn't stop what faced the score of us who pulled up in our armored bus, a day late and a bullet short, to another devastated strip mall whose windows gaped at us like a toothless drunk and whose erstwhile customers were removing their and everybody else's dry cleaning without presenting a ticket.
It was a little after three in the afternoon when we arrived, and by four we had apprehended and restrained a rainbow coalition of looters with the plastic handcuffs we were using faster than Kleenex in flu season. After the suspects were transported by prison bus to the emergency holding facility, I threw myself onto our bus and stretched out in the first row.
Opposite me was my new partner/trainee and the only other female on the bus. Genoveva Cortez was an entry-level detective--a Detective I or D-I, we called them--and a recent transfer to headquarters from South Bureau. Cortez was a lot like me when I got my first assignment at Parker Center, the LAPD's headquarters, over eleven years ago--intelligent, assertive, naive as hell. But my first assignment at Parker Center was as a grunt in Press Relations, not the LAPD's renowned Robbery-Homicide Division. And my baptism by fire came by assisting the Press Relations commander with the media on a VIP homicide, not trying to work homicides while the whole city went up in smoke at the rate of three fires per minute.
Cortez was dealing with it, though. Made me understand why they chose her to be the second woman to join RHD's homicide unit, which up until my arrival was a very exclusive--as in white-only--boys' club. But homicides--even the demanding, high-profile ones RHD handles--have a way of ignoring gender and color lines. And female homicide detectives had made contributions everywhere else in the Department--why not RHD? So it was finally determined, after much gnashing of teeth and wringing of hands, that even the LAPD's creme de la creme had to change to keep up with the times, ugly as they were.
But the kind of thing Cortez and I were doing during the riots was without precedent, even if we were of the right "persuasion" for the job. That was because there were so many riot-related murders to investigate that the homicide detectives in the Bureau and divisional operations were completely overwhelmed. And so it was somebody downtown's bright idea to loan out Robbery-Homicide Division detectives--including Cortez and me--on a temporary basis, to provide detectives to process as many homicides on the scene as we could safely and quickly manage.
I guess it's like the song says--some girls have all the luck. Shopkeepers murdered in their burned-out stores. Looter-shooters killing each other over CDs. Gang members whacking their rivals, High Noon style, just because they could get away with it. In forty-eight hours, Cortez and I had personally investigated nine crime scenes in what is usually the South Bureau's jurisdiction, more than we would usually handle in RHD in a year.
And we weren't getting much sympathy from our bus mates, either. "You downtown divas work so many celebrity cases you forget what it's really like in the streets," Mike Cooper snorted. "This shit is what we gotta deal with all the time."
He suggested we cruise King Boulevard. "Bound to be some more 'bidness' for you ladies over there," he said with just a hint of sarcasm in his voice.
As the bus made its way east, Cortez and I sat staring at each other across the aisle, our heads propped up against the windows. My reflection played back to me in the glass behind Gena's head gave the illusion we were cheek to cheek. Gena was darker than I, the deep sheen of her hair and eyes marking her as a Latina much quicker than my pale skin and light brown hair would tip some people off that I was black. And while I knew Gena was a full seven years younger than I, you wouldn't have known it that day. We were too tired to talk, too tired even to acknowledge each other. We looked more like chimney sweeps than cops.
At first I only half-heard Mike Cooper's voice. A detective out of South Bureau, Cooper worked what used to be called the gang detail, before some acronym-happy police administrator christened it CRASH--Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums. As he droned on, I looked behind me to see what all the hoopla...
Twelve years, eleven months, and fifteen days into living out my Top Cop fantasies--Christie Love with a better hairdo--my Nubian brothers down on Florence and Normandie had to go and pitch a serious bitch and mess up my cha-cha. Since May of '79, when I stood in the graduating class at the Police Academy, I had survived my years with the LAPD with little more than a few bruises, a shoulder prone to dislocation, and a couple of badly torn fingernails.
Survived the early years in patrol cars with partners whose every joke began "There was a white man, a Mexican, and a nigg . . . uh . . . black man . . ." Survived my first assignment as a gang detective in Southwest, where I learned more about L.A. homeboys in the first three months than I had in three years of graduate study in criminology. And let me not forget the edu-mo-cation I got when I went over to South Bureau Homicide, where I saw more dead bodies in five years than detectives in other parts of the country see in their whole careers.
I had survived stun guns and choke holds; Afro puffs and Jheri curls; floods, fires, and medflies; the '84 Olympics and the Whittier quake. At thirty-eight, I weighed thirty pounds less than I had in high school, had all my teeth, and had never, until getting caught near ground zero on a fine spring day, seriously been in fear for my life.
But thanks to twelve decent, Gates-fearing residents of Simi Valley and its pro-cop environs, I spent the days leading up to my thirteenth anniversary in the Department back in uniform dodging bullets, new jack Molotov cocktails, and more Pampers tossed through broken grocery store windows than I care to remember.
As I watched the city I loved go to hell in a handbasket, I kept reminding myself that the Los Angeles I wanted to protect and to serve was basically composed of law-abiding citizens, not mad looters dragging microwaves down Pico Boulevard--near my house, no less.
There was a deadly carnival atmosphere in the air. Gang members and grandmothers, who usually gave each other a wide berth, were united in their rage over the verdict and the stench of despair that had hovered in the air since Watts blew up in 1965. But unlike the Watts riots, which were confined by segregation to a much smaller area, the alliance of the poor and the befuddled yearning to live large was everywhere, of every color and economic class, all wanting to bring down some particularly offensive part of the system in their corner of the city. So it didn't matter if it was beating Reginald Denny in South Central or looting a jewelry store in Long Beach--anything and everything was fair game.
I had to do something to keep the peace, so even though it was against Department policy, I'd finagled a way to stay on duty almost forty-eight hours. And while it was the most stressful thing I'd done since joining the force, I was getting through it okay. But it was Friday, May 1, the day after the National Guard set up housekeeping in shopping centers all over the city, that the last straw, blown in on a warm Santa Ana wind from a most unexpected direction, broke this camel's back.
A motley crew of twenty of us--street cops and desk jockeys from Parker Center, South Bureau, and a couple of the divisions--had been deployed by bus to a strip mall on Rodeo Road. Spelled exactly the same as Rodeo (as in Ro-day-o) Drive in Beverly Hills, the running joke in some parts of town was how far apart the two streets really were. Rodeo Drive's sleek boutiques and Mercedes-Benzes epitomized the Southern California good life, and the chief of police and residents there made damn sure everyone knew Beverly Hills was not in the City of Angels. I bet most of the tenants on Rodeo Drive didn't even know about their poor relations that runs through what black folks call "the Westside," less than five miles southeast as the crow flies.
My Rodeo--although pronounced the way the cowboys do--was no less treasured than Beverly Hills's. Shopping centers and moderately priced planned communities on the western end of the street gave way to soul-food joints, strip malls, and solidly middle-class homes to the east. At the corner of Rodeo and La Brea was a busy commercial district. I bought my first forty-five (record, that is)--Fontella Bass's "Rescue Me"--at the record store that sat on the corner, and down the street on La Brea was the Baldwin Theater, where I went on my first real date.
Rodeo forked to the left at Dorsey High School and through a neighborhood of postwar tract houses whose identical twins in what white folks call the Westside would command at least a hundred thousand more. A little farther east were blocks of vintage Spanish homes, including the original residence and beautiful rose gardens of Mayor Tom Bradley and his wife, Ethel.
Two streets separated by a few miles and lot of money, in those days the Rodeos were competing in a grimly fought battle to see who would survive the hell of the last forty-eight hours. With a chief of police who served as a former aide to Chief Gates, I was betting well-staffed and well-patrolled Beverly Hills's Rodeo would be the hands-down winner this time around.
That day my Rodeo looked more like a war zone than a major thoroughfare through middle-class black L.A. Its smoldering rubble was a symbol of the largest civil insurrection in modern American history, and I had been powerless to stop it.
I couldn't stop the torching of my record store, up in flames that first night along with several black-owned businesses.
I couldn't stop the multiracial looters who scrambled for merchandise at the Fedco store, giggling like kids fighting for candy from a pi-ata.
And I couldn't stop what faced the score of us who pulled up in our armored bus, a day late and a bullet short, to another devastated strip mall whose windows gaped at us like a toothless drunk and whose erstwhile customers were removing their and everybody else's dry cleaning without presenting a ticket.
It was a little after three in the afternoon when we arrived, and by four we had apprehended and restrained a rainbow coalition of looters with the plastic handcuffs we were using faster than Kleenex in flu season. After the suspects were transported by prison bus to the emergency holding facility, I threw myself onto our bus and stretched out in the first row.
Opposite me was my new partner/trainee and the only other female on the bus. Genoveva Cortez was an entry-level detective--a Detective I or D-I, we called them--and a recent transfer to headquarters from South Bureau. Cortez was a lot like me when I got my first assignment at Parker Center, the LAPD's headquarters, over eleven years ago--intelligent, assertive, naive as hell. But my first assignment at Parker Center was as a grunt in Press Relations, not the LAPD's renowned Robbery-Homicide Division. And my baptism by fire came by assisting the Press Relations commander with the media on a VIP homicide, not trying to work homicides while the whole city went up in smoke at the rate of three fires per minute.
Cortez was dealing with it, though. Made me understand why they chose her to be the second woman to join RHD's homicide unit, which up until my arrival was a very exclusive--as in white-only--boys' club. But homicides--even the demanding, high-profile ones RHD handles--have a way of ignoring gender and color lines. And female homicide detectives had made contributions everywhere else in the Department--why not RHD? So it was finally determined, after much gnashing of teeth and wringing of hands, that even the LAPD's creme de la creme had to change to keep up with the times, ugly as they were.
But the kind of thing Cortez and I were doing during the riots was without precedent, even if we were of the right "persuasion" for the job. That was because there were so many riot-related murders to investigate that the homicide detectives in the Bureau and divisional operations were completely overwhelmed. And so it was somebody downtown's bright idea to loan out Robbery-Homicide Division detectives--including Cortez and me--on a temporary basis, to provide detectives to process as many homicides on the scene as we could safely and quickly manage.
I guess it's like the song says--some girls have all the luck. Shopkeepers murdered in their burned-out stores. Looter-shooters killing each other over CDs. Gang members whacking their rivals, High Noon style, just because they could get away with it. In forty-eight hours, Cortez and I had personally investigated nine crime scenes in what is usually the South Bureau's jurisdiction, more than we would usually handle in RHD in a year.
And we weren't getting much sympathy from our bus mates, either. "You downtown divas work so many celebrity cases you forget what it's really like in the streets," Mike Cooper snorted. "This shit is what we gotta deal with all the time."
He suggested we cruise King Boulevard. "Bound to be some more 'bidness' for you ladies over there," he said with just a hint of sarcasm in his voice.
As the bus made its way east, Cortez and I sat staring at each other across the aisle, our heads propped up against the windows. My reflection played back to me in the glass behind Gena's head gave the illusion we were cheek to cheek. Gena was darker than I, the deep sheen of her hair and eyes marking her as a Latina much quicker than my pale skin and light brown hair would tip some people off that I was black. And while I knew Gena was a full seven years younger than I, you wouldn't have known it that day. We were too tired to talk, too tired even to acknowledge each other. We looked more like chimney sweeps than cops.
At first I only half-heard Mike Cooper's voice. A detective out of South Bureau, Cooper worked what used to be called the gang detail, before some acronym-happy police administrator christened it CRASH--Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums. As he droned on, I looked behind me to see what all the hoopla...
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- EditoreFawcett Books
- Data di pubblicazione2002
- ISBN 10 0449007251
- ISBN 13 9780449007259
- RilegaturaCopertina flessibile
- Numero di pagine318
- Valutazione libreria
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