Disturbing the Peace

It’s the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, and Paula Woods’ detective, Charlotte Justice, is looking for justice and dealing it out. Not many shopping days are left till Christmas, but Charlotte has no time for shopping. The only black woman in the LAPD’s elite Robbery Homicide Division, she is part of a task force pursuing robbers responsible for a long string of home invasions. A tonic job, had not the force’s leader, a skirt-chaser named Steve Firestone, assigned her house-mouse duties filing paper. That’s because ineffable Steve has tried to hit on Justice and got nowhere fast; so he retaliates. Also, the jerk, who is part black, wants to forget the tinge in his skin and the kinks in his hair, and she shows little sympathy for his white lies.

The logjam breaks when Maynard Duncan, a 76-year-old black filmmaker and community activist, is found dead in bed. Of what or by whose hand no one quite knows; and the LAPD, which has just put away a Little Angel of Mercy who offed several patients in a nursing home, wonders if Duncan’s death might not turn out to be assisted suicide, or assisted homicide. Who better to clear it up than a black detective? Which Justice duly does, with the help of a Latina partner and little help from her lover, her family or Firestone the galoot.

It turns out that Duncan’s last project, “Stormy Weather,” was a documentary history of blacks in film and television, which Duncan had nearly finished while undergoing chemotherapy. It turns out too that Charlotte’s upper-middle-class family has its own ties to the movie industry. Madly in love with films, the clan views them at the drop of a cassette and talks about them (almost) all the time. They despise blaxploitation films, whether Amos ‘n’ Andys or cliche-ridden contemporary guffaw-jerkers. And they admire Duncan’s creativity: not least the song, dance and rolling dolly shots of his “Murder in Mudtown” (read Watts). Film (and music) buffs will be intrigued, black film (and music) buffs will be enchanted by the chitchat of Justice family reunions and by the way in which Woods uses films and songs as metaphors.

Intrepid investigators dive and drive through layers of secrets, lies, half-lies: what Uncle Syl calls skim milk masquerading as cream. Some witnesses are in the wind; others look good as suspects. There’s the widow Ivy Duncan, there are Duncan’s nurse, the Latina housekeeper, and an unsavory hypocrite out for his own profit. There’s Clayton Henley, who rode post-riot rebuilding efforts to success as pastor of the Peaceful Shepherd Missionary Baptist Church and will make a pretty penny from Duncan’s demise.

Involved with her own feelings, her colleagues’ innuendoes and problems that she faces in the incestuous office environment , Char often gets herself in knots. But she is good at turning over the husks of past misdeeds. Her keen eye, and equally keen reasoning, will lead not to one resolution, but to at least three, including Duncan’s ending. Did the butler do it?

“Stormy Weather” is about other crimes too, but their solutions don’t come so easily. It is about black history in L.A., about black sociology in L.A., about color gradations and color camouflage, about interracial marriages and homosexual entanglements; and about Latino problems too, like those of Charlotte’s partner, or those of Pico Rivera, devastated, crime-infested, just west of downtown. It is about shady deals propelled by shady men, poverty pimps and cell phone-toting vultures who make hay while redevelopment efforts blanket post-uprising L.A. like smog.

The story is also about the unofficial record books of memory that are dusted off and discussed in barber shops or at holiday dinners. And about sexism, and about women’s problems, and their successes too. Duncan’s widow runs a catering business. She’s switched from Southern-fried chicken and collard greens to canapes and caviar, and proves that she can make it in a white man’s world. Yet, in the Justice family, women work in the kitchen, men watch the game on TV. So nothing much has changed on that front.

On the other hand, “African American” ( a term that is absent in this book) appears edged out by the more elegant “black,” and by “people of color,” under whose capacious wing many shades can nestle. Dog-eat-dog, too, is going colorblind. Woods may not think so when she cocks a snook at gated communities where white-collar rednecks try to hold back integration’s tide. She depicts once-segregated saps circling the wagons against encroaching black, brown and yellow bankers, lawyers, entertainment executives and T-shirt moguls, which suggests that people of all colors enjoy American comforts, dream American dreams and, often, realize them.

Whatever their gender, color or tax bracket, no one these days is safe, no one feels quite secure. Woods shows black middle-class neighborhoods that begin by erecting barriers to stop the cruising of their streets and then, after rioting, barricade themselves to avert the fate of poorer, softer targets. Justice considers folk like these foresighted, and “other Angelenos doing the same thing all over the city” equally so. When people have cash to spare, they can spare time for moral passion; also the dollars to keep the barbarians outside their gates, and pay to turn other barbarians into gatekeepers.

Woods, who writes an enticing story, sneaks in such issues more discreetly than she reels off movies, but they document the time and place. For the better. Meanwhile, Charlotte, who knows when to take chances and when to shut her mouth, has hardly aged. Her personal posture hardly sags; her family reunions continue warm and fuzzy; the end is not so happy as to preclude a sequel, yet happy enough to conclude a forthcoming movie. One more cassette for in-family viewing.