“Really, this mess started the night of that raid before you were born.”
The younger Hastings knew the story. Her aunt and members of the extended family were living in a house in South Central in the late eighties. This was during the time of the infamous—at least in black neighborhoods—administration of police chief Daryl Gates. That night the cops tore down the door and tore up the house—a home that wasn’t a rental and just happened to belong to a great-grandmother of Pebbles Hastings. The family subsequently sued the department and settled out of court for a sizable sum.
“How do you mean?” she asked.
Her aunt took another sip. “Jerome was doing his rap tapes then, selling them all over town and at swap meets. Back then NWA, Toddy Tee with his ‘Batterram’ song, they was all hot and had started like that so he caught some of that wave.” She winked at Pebbles. “See how I threw in that surfer reference?”
“Uh-huh,” her niece said, smiling.
“Okay, that night the cops bust him with less than an ounce of crack, which he didn’t indulge but used as, you know, bribes to get his tapes played at certain clubs like the one Ro had, the Crimson Lounge. Anyway, they also grabbed some of his tapes, thinking the lyrics contained secret code among gang shot-callers.”
“Who would be stupid enough to believe that?” the younger Hastings said.
“That’s what the cops testified to in court during the suit. But it was just Jerome’s raps on the tapes, at least when he had hold of them.”
“What do you mean?’
“The tapes supposedly disappeared from the evidence lockup at the Seventy-Seventh Division, where there were several renegade members of the CRASH unit. Dudes who were robbing the drug dealers they busted, framing suspects consorting with prostitutes, and on and on.”
Her aunt paused. The niece knew that the now disbanded anti-gang initiative had been the Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums.
“When Jerome started to get a name in the rap game, he became friends with one of those CRASH dudes who liked to bling-bling, an undercover cop who got all caught up in being a gangster his damn self, Jimmy Moore.”
“He did time, right?”
“A bank robbery. He’d been dating one of the tellers. The money was never recovered and he disappeared when he got out, having done his full stretch ’cause he never said boo about where the take was.” She looked over at the two men. “That’s what y’all saw on the mystery show, wasn’t it? That he was last seen in his mother’s Falcon wagon.”
Waid said, “Yeah,” as he and Weathers bolted the rear bench seat into place using socket wrenches.
His uncle remained quiet but when the Falcon was brought up on that show, this being the first time he’d heard of a connection to the wagon and Moore, he’d recalled years before hearing from a chick he knew from back in the day when he ran the lounge. She was a party-girl type, always working an angle. She’d been looking for a car but hadn’t said what kind. But on Astonishing Mysteries they’d re-created a scene with the woman and Moore, a connection Weathers didn’t know about till then as well.
“See, that’s what I’m sayin’,” her aunt commented, “this stuff has all gotten twisted up over the years. The facts have been thrown out in favor of the ghost stories. Hauler’s family did own a Falcon wagon like this one here. But this is not that car. This one used to belong to the retired gardener, Tyler Dircks, who died.” He’d been the elderly man renting a room in the house on Fifty-First Street.
Four years ago when Pebbles Hastings was going out with Scott Waid, they’d asked her aunt about the Falcon. Waid was something of a shadetree mechanic and the niece was also handy with tools.
Another thread of memory flitted through her niece’s mind. “Wasn’t there some kind of thing between this crooked cop and Hauler Kershaw?”
“Not exactly,” her aunt said. “But the cop who talked to Hauler that day they were trailing him through Brentwood, he’d been partners with Jimmy Moore at one point.”
“Another rumor being he’d been in on the robbery?”
“Right.”
“Was he?”