I went out to the main room perplexed.
“Did you find what you were looking for, Ezekiel?”
“Naw.” I shook my head. “I mean, yeah… ” She frowned when I said that. I knew she wanted to correct me with “Yes.”
JOHN MCKENZIE’S bar had grown over the years. He’d added a kitchen and eight plush booths for dinner. He even hired a short-order cook to burn steaks and boil vegetables. There was a stage for blues and jazz performances. And waitresses, three of them, serving the bar and the round tables that surrounded the stage.
John still owned Targets but Odell Jones’ name was on the deeds. John had had too much trouble with the law to get a liquor license, so he needed a front man. Odell was ideal. He was a mild-mannered man, semiretired, two years shy of sixty, and twenty-two years older than I.
Odell was sitting in his regular booth toward the back. He was sipping at a beer and reading the Sentinel—L.A.’s largest Negro publication. We hadn’t exchanged words in over three years and it still broke my heart that I had lost such a good friend. But when you’re a poor man struggling in this world you rub up against people pretty hard sometimes. And the people you hurt the most are poor sons just like yourself.
Once I was deep in trouble and I asked Odell to lend me a hand. How was I to know that his minister would end up dead? How could I blame him for hating me either?
“Easy,” John greeted me. His dark face was stony and expressionless.
“John. Gimme a fist of little Johnnie Walker.” That meant four fingers.
While he poured I asked him, “You hear anything about them girls gettin’ killed?”
“I knowed all them girls, Easy. Every one.”
I thought again of Bonita Edwards. I slugged back half of my drink.
“All of ’em?”
John looked me in the eye and nodded.
“Even Robin Garnett?”
“I don’t know nuthin’ ’bout no Robin what-have-ya but I know that white girl got her picture in the paper. That was Cyndi Starr an’ they ain’t no lyin’ ’bout that.” He looked at a stool next to me. Maybe a stool she’d once sat in. “Yeah, Cyndi—the White Butterfly.”
“The what?”
“That was her stage name. She was a damned stripper, man.”
“And you say her name was Cyndi Starr?”
“That was her name, least that’s what they called her. You know, she was just like all these other girls. It’s only these white people makin’ all that fuss. They coulda been sayin’ somethin’ ’fore she got killed.”
“You sure, John? Paper says she went to college in West L.A. They said she lived with her parents out there.”
“I read it. But just ’cause you read it in the paper don’t make it true. If she went t’ college she studied takin’ off her clothes fo’men to watch’er, an’ if she lived wit’er parents they lived right down here on Hollywood Row.”
“You mean she lived down here?”
“Uh-huh, right down on the Hollywood Row. An’ that ain’t all I know either.”
“Yeah?”
“That other one, that Juliette LeRoi, she was down at Aretha’s right around the night she got killed.”
“How do you know?”
“I know ’cause she got into a fight wit’ some boy or sumpin’. Coy Baxter told me that the boy was so messed up that he had to go to the emergency room at Temple.”
“Aretha’s, you say?”
John nodded again.
I asked him a few other questions and he answered them as well as he could.
MY CAR STARTED up with a roar. I hit the gas and felt the tug of gravity as she pulled toward the corner. I turned the steering wheel and felt the swing of the back end as I straightened out for the main drag.
That’s when I saw the woman. She was jaywalking and pushing a baby carriage.
I hit the brakes and felt the back end fishtail. I got a panorama of the shops and stores on the east side of the street. The car turned completely around. By the time I was facing the young mother again, she was yelling, “Motherfucker! Motherfucker! Who in hell! Fuck you!” and things like that.
Another car behind me hit his brakes. The squeal seemed to go on forever, but it didn’t hit anything. The woman stopped screaming and gathered her baby up in her arms. She ran for the sidewalk, leaving the carriage in the middle of the street.
My heart was beating fast. The woman was trying to calm down the hollering baby.
I started my engine back up and drove off thinking about how my life had gone out of control.
— 9 —
BONE STREET WAS LOCAL HISTORY. A crooked spine down the center of Watts’s jazz heyday, it was four long and jagged blocks. West of Central Avenue and north of 103rd Street, Bone Street was broken and desolate to look at by day, with its two-story tenementlike apartment buildings and its mangy hotels. But by night Bones, as it was called, was a center for late-night blues, and whiskey so strong that it could grow hairs on the glass it was served in. When a man said he was going to get down to the bare Bones he meant he was going to lose himself in the music and the booze and the women down there.
The women, in the late forties and even into the early fifties, were all beautiful; young and old, in satins, silks, and furs. They came in the back-room clubs fine and sassy, and daring any man to wipe the snarl from their lips. They’d come in and listen to Coltrane, Monk, Holiday, and all the rest, drinking shot for shot with their men.
It was a bold and flashy time. But by that evening all the shine had rubbed off to expose the base metal below. The sidewalks were broken, sporting hardy weeds in their cracks. Some clubs were still there but they were quieter now. The jazzmen had found new arenas. Many had gone to Paris and New York. The blues was still with us. The blues would always be with us. The blues will always be with us.
Sonny Terry, Brownie McGee, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Soupspoon Wise, and a hundred others passed through the hotels and back-street dives that still cluttered Bone. In the old days the jazzmen came in fancy cars like Cadillacs. The bluesmen came by Greyhound, sometimes by thumb.
The women were still there. But their clothes didn’t fit right anymore. Their eyes were more hungry than wild. All the promise after the war had drained away and a new generation was asking, “Where’s ours?”
Rock and roll waged a war over the radio and in the large dance clubs. Bone Street was forgotten except by those lost souls who wanted a taste of the glitter of their day.
Aretha’s was in an alley halfway down the 1600 block of Bone. It had other names over the years, and different addresses too. It was a legal bar, more or less. But the waitresses were all scantily clad girls and the police found it proper to shut Charlene Mars down every once in a while. Charlene ran Aretha’s, or whatever it was called at the time. Over the years it had been named the Del-Mar, the Nines, Swing, and Juanita’s. The name and the address changed but it was always the same club. The girls had different names too and even different faces, but they did the same work.
That year they wore a very short black skirt over a one-piece brown bathing suit and black fishnet stockings. The room was long and narrow with a very high ceiling and a stage at the far end. Down the left side of the room ran an oak bar tended by Westley.
Westley and Charlene had started as lovers. She was skinny and he wore fine clothes. They both loved jazz and, along with John from Targets, had the best hornmen and vocalists in the country. But a lot of whiskey and fine men, and fine women, moved through their lives. Charlene bought a small house in Compton, where she took care of her retarded brother. Westley, a tall large-handed man, took to sleeping in the bar.
The whites of his eyes were yellow and he stooped over. His arms were as strong as iron cables.
He looked at me and nodded at an empty table, but I walked up to the bar.
“Hey, West.”
“Easy.”
“Johnnie Walker,” I said.
He turned away to grant my request.
The room was dark. The phonograph played a light and lively version of “Lady Blue.” With no introduction a buxom woman, well into her fifties, jiggled out onstage. She wasn’t wearing much and all of that was a shiny banana yellow against high-brown skin. She carried a long yellow plume, which she waved along with her breasts and thighs.
There were eight small tables opposite the bar and a cluster of them before the stage. Black men and women sat here and there. Fragile ribbons of smoke rose from gaudy aluminum ashtrays. A waitress moved petulantly from table to table. “You want sumpin’ else t’drink?” was the question I heard her ask most often. The answer was almost always “No.”
This was the early crowd, not huge tippers. They were kind of a warm-up act for the customers, mostly men, who came later.
Charlene sat right up next to the stage, sipping at a lime-colored drink. She had always claimed that the girls never did anything that they didn’t want to do, but I’d known women who’d been fired from there because a customer had complained that they were “unfriendly.”
I took the whiskey and moved toward the stage. Closer up you could see the makeup that the banana dancer wore. Her face looked like a carved wooden mask.
“Easy Rawlins!” Charlene squealed.
I took her hands and kissed her moist face.
“Charlene.”
In a fit of improvisation the banana dancer moved downstage and brushed the back of my neck with her plume.
“Sit’own, baby.” Charlene pulled an empty chair away from a table where an old man had his head resting on his hands.
“Kinda slow, huh?” I asked.
She pawed at me with a pudgy red-fingered hand. “It’s early, Easy. Fern just do her li’l thing out there to get the stage ready for the young girls tonight.”
I smiled and finished my drink. Before ordering another one I lit a Camel and inhaled deeply.
I didn’t have a plan. I wasn’t a policeman. I didn’t have a notepad. Maybe we’d talk about the night that Juliette LeRoi was murdered. Maybe not.
“Could I get you somethin’, mister?” the waitress asked. She was a high-yellow woman with straightened hair that came down and curled around her ears, like black modeling clay. She had light brown skin and freckles. Her large lips were in a permanent pout. She stood very close to me.
“Ask Westley what he had, Elaine, an’ bring that,” Charlene said for me. Then she said, “I thought you was married, Easy Rawlins.”
I was watching Elaine move toward the bar.
“What would you do if you got married, Charlene?” I asked.
“Same things I do now, I guess.”
“I mean, you got all this property an’ stuff. What would you do if your husband didn’t have all what you have?”
Charlene had big round cheeks that crowded her eyes when she smiled. “We’d have to sign us some papers before we got together. You know a po’ niggah get next to that much money an’ he’s liable to go crazy. You know he’d be just like you.”
“What you mean?” As I spoke Elaine returned and put the glass down in front of me.
Charlene took the waitress by the wrist and pulled her so close that the young woman was almost on her lap. She turned Elaine toward me so that I could get a good look at her. Elaine looked down at her breasts and smiled. Her long fake lashes enchanted me. I didn’t know whether to take a drag off of my cigarette or a sip from my glass.
“Just like you, Easy. Here you are lookin’ at Elaine. Now just think if you saw my deeds an’ my cash register an’ then this here girl’s titties an’ legs… ”
I couldn’t take my eyes off what Charlene was talking about. Elaine looked up at me. She was smiling but her eyes were cold.
I actually felt myself beginning to sweat.
Charlene slapped the girl on the butt and pushed her toward the bar. Elaine brushed me with one of those thighs as she went by. She even put a hand on my shoulder before walking away.
“Man got nuthin’ cain’t never get enough, Easy.”
“What about a woman?” I asked. My throat was tight.
“What you worried ’bout?” Charlene smiled a warm, friendly smile. “You don’t make enough to have no problem like that.”
“I got a house,” I said. “I got a car and a job that pays me a paycheck. That’s enough fo’some women, ain’t it?”
“I guess.” She nodded. “Some women will take the dirty underwear right out of the hamper before they go. But unless you got sumpin’ worth takin’, Easy, I wouldn’t be worried ’bout it. An’ if you is worried, maybe you should cut it off now. That why you here?”
“Say what?”
“You wanna start playin’ ’round?” Charlene’s business wasn’t a subtle one. “’Cause you know Elaine likes you.”
“Naw.” I shook my head and smiled. “I just wanted to ask you that question, that’s all.”
“Okay. But if you need anything, you know where t’come to. Gettin’ people together is my business.”
“Business good?” I asked.
Charlene nodded. She was watching two men come in. Westley was watching too. He could pour and look at the same time.
“’Cause I thought things mighta gotten kinda hard for you.”
“Why?”
“After that thing with Julie LeRoi.”
“What you mean?”
“Hey!” I put my hands in the air. “It’s just that people been talkin’ ’bout how she was here the night she was killed an’ how the man that killed her was probably here, an’ then he killed all them other girls.”
“Caintnobodyprovethat,” she said in machine-gun talk.
“Hey, like I said, it’s just what I heard.”
“Listen.” She held a fat finger up to my face. “That Julie LeRoi was a tramp. She come here tryin’ t’get her rent money. Now you know she be in five places in any night an’ out on the corner if that don’t work.”
“But I heard she was here with a boyfriend.” I snapped my fingers trying to remember something I didn’t know.
“That boy Gregory?” she exploded. “He was her john. It’s just that another one wanted her too an’ he had more muscles, that’s all.”
I nodded, sipped.
“I see,” I said, very seriously. “Anyway, it’s cool now, right? Nobody’s scared.”
“Don’t let ’em fool ya,” Charlene said and pointed down the long room. “They all scared. Scared t’death. But what could they do? Poor woman all alone needs men fo’sumpin’. Maybe it’s that night’s rent an’ maybe more, but she need sumpin’. An’ these men is hungry too. Hungry fo’drink an’ hungry fo’love.”
I let her wisdom settle for a moment, then I said, “Well, I better be goin’.”
When I stood up I felt the room bob a little as if I were on a ship.
“See ya,” I said.
“Bye, Easy.” Charlene smiled. “You take care now, baby.”
I paid Westley on the way out. At the bar I tapped Elaine’s shoulder and gave her a rolled-up dollar bill. When she smiled in the stronger light of the bar I noticed that she was missing one of her lower front teeth. That one simple, human fact excited me more than all of Charlene’s bold talk.
When I staggered out of the door it wasn’t only the whiskey that had me drunk.
— 10 —
THE BARS AND CLUBS on and around Bone Street were many. I wouldn’t have been able to hit all of them in one night, but I didn’t have to, because I was looking for a special kind of joint. A place like Charlene’s that catered to love-starved and sex-starved men, and sometimes women. A place that offered a little more than whiskey and blues. There were just a handful of clubs that fit those needs.
There was the Can-Can, run by Caleb Varley. At one time Caleb had a regular revue. But he had to cut back to a piano player and two sisters, Wanda and Sheila Rollet, who danced around artistically in golden glitter and glue. Then there was Pussy’s Den, a pickup bar where B-girls had a couple of drinks before heading for an
apartment, an alley, or an hourly motel.
DeCatur’s still had Dixieland musicians.
The Yellow Dog and Mike’s were one step down on the evolutionary scale. These were bars where the criminal element hung out. Gangsters and gamblers. Men who had done hard time for every crime you could think of. But there was a place for them, there were women for them too. Mostly your larger women. The kind who could take the punishment; either physical or grief. Both of these bars had back rooms where doctors sometimes came to patch a gunshot or knife wound. Where lawyers met clients that couldn’t be seen going into an office in the daylight. And where women got on their knees for five minutes and five dollars, for a man who might not have seen a woman in five years.
I had been out of the bar scene since I got married, so most people were happy to see me. They were happy to talk. But nobody knew a thing.
I saw a fight in DeCatur’s. A young boy named Jasper Filagret decided to take his woman, Dorthea, off the streets. He came in blustering and he went out bleeding. Dorthea left ten minutes later with another man. She had her fingers in his pocket while he rubbed the knuckles of his right hand.
I ran into an old acquaintance at the Yellow Dog. Roger Vaughn was his name. Roger was only five-six, but he had the shoulders of a heavyweight. He’d been drunk in a bar on Myrtle Street some years before. He’d wanted another drink but the bartender wanted to go home to his wife. He told Roger that he had to go and Roger said, “After one more drink.” That’s when the six-foot barman made his mistake. He grabbed Roger and Roger socked him, twice. The bartender was dead before he hit the floor. Roger did seven straight years for manslaughter. If the bartender had been a black man Roger wouldn’t have done half that.
“Easy,” Roger Vaughn said. He was hunched over his table with his big hands around a tumbler full of beer.
“Roger. You out at last, huh, man?”
“Not fo’long,” he said, nodding in a way that made him seem wise.
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