I was wearing a dark blue sailor’s cap pulled down over my forehead, and sunglasses so dark that the midday world looked like twilight.
Somewhere there was an answer about the intentions and the whereabouts of Uhuru Nolicé. Maybe it was at the liquor store. Maybe this apartment was filled with the light of truth.
Balled up in my right hand was a small leather sack filled with nickels. I knocked with my left and took in a deep breath.
The man who opened the door was four inches shorter, fifty pounds lighter, and at least twenty-five years younger than I. He looked at me wonderingly. Maybe there was something familiar about my jawline or stance from Benoit’s Gym.
“Cedric Reed?” I asked.
“Yes?”
“Did you lose your wallet?”
In order to reach behind him to feel for the billfold Cedric had to turn and lower his head, just a little.
Getting as much torque as I could in my hips, I hit him in the left temple with the fistful of nickels. The first blow stunned him; the second sent him stumbling backward and to the floor. If I was Mouse I would have shot him in the knee. If I was Fearless Jones I would have taken my chances with fisticuffs even though Cedric was a professional welterweight boxer.
We all had different ways of dealing with the world. The men who made it were the ones who figured out what worked best for them.
While Cedric floundered on the floor I closed the door and found the pull-cord for the overhead light. I also took a pistol from my waistband. There was blood dripping from the boxer’s head and his eyes were rolling around looking for the cause of his sudden inebriation.
“Stay down,” I told him.
The loopy boxer turned his attention toward my words like a man grabbing for a rescue line. He looked in my direction but saw little.
“You made me wrong, man,” he slurred.
The words might not have made sense in that situation but I knew what he meant.
“Why you shoot at me, brother?” I said, gesturing with my gun hand.
Instead of answering he tried to get up.
I kicked him in the forehead with the heel of my left shoe.
“Oh no!” he cried.
“Stay down and tell me why you shot at me.”
“I didn’t,” he said. “I didn’t. I didn’t shoot no gun. I was drivin’ the car. Bobo the one. Bobo the one that fired. An’ he was just tryin’ to scare you.…”
“Get up in that chair,” I commanded.
The small room had four chairs in it. Every one of them was from a different breed of furniture. There was straight-back oak, partially padded walnut, full sofa, and the folding variety made from gray metal piping and dark brown leather. There was a TV tray like at Davis Walton’s house but no television at all.
“Get up in the chair,” I said again.
When he didn’t move I kicked him in the pelvis with the hard toe of my shoe. He squealed from the pain but he got up into the sofa chair. The blood and cries of pain did not move me. Cedric drove the car that carried the gun that could have killed me.
“I need a doctor,” he told me when I leveled the pistol at him.
“You gonna need a undertaker you don’t answer me quick.”
“What you want with me?”
“Why you and Bobo shootin’ at me, man? Do I know you?”
“Uhuru Nolicé,” Cedric said as if the name alone were a political manifesto.
“Bob Mantle?”
“That’s right!” Cedric claimed, coming more than halfway to awareness. “Bob out there standin’ up for us.”
“Us?”
“Seventeen months, two weeks, and three days ago I was stopped by the cops when I was out in Compton drivin’ wit’ my girl. They pult me from the car, took out they guns, an’ say, ‘Niggah, get down on your knees!’ Here I haven’t done nuthin’ an’ these men want me to beg in front’a my girl. I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t get down on my knees. I wasn’t even speedin’. I hadn’t had one drink. I told them that I was okay standin’ an’ happy to put my hands ovah my head. An’ you know them mothahfuckahs beat me so bad that the next time I saw Elda I was in a hospital bed in three casts. The only reason the judge didn’t put me in jail for assault was because I had to be wheeled into the courtroom. So when I hear that Bob Mantle kilt three cops down around where them four pigs done beat me I went out and drank a toast. And if you workin’ for them cops I wanna be brave too. I wanna say sumpin’ too. We wasn’t gonna to kill ya. I hit a bump an’ Bobo’s aim went off. We didn’t even mean to hit your car.”
“Who said I was workin’ for the cops?”
“Tommy said you smelled bad.”
I pulled back the hammer on my gun because Cedric was getting excited enough to make a mistake. That sat him back in his chair.
“Did Bob say that he killed those policemen?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
“To you?”
“Not to me personally. He on the run. But Bobo heard it from Angela Dawson who got it from one’a her girlfriends that Bob was on the hunt for the man in blue.”
That was how we made myths back then. Something happened and then somebody said something; that story passed from mouth to ear until a whole cloth was woven from smoke and wishes.
“Stand up, man,” I said.
Cedric obeyed the cocked pistol.
“Turn around.”
“Why?”
“Mothahfuckah, turn around or I will shoot you in the gut.”
He obeyed and I fastened a handcuff to his left wrist.
“What the fuck!” He whirled around and I held the barrel of my pistol three inches from his left eye.
“Turn around or die, Cedric.”
He hesitated but there was no girlfriend around to impress. I attached the other cuff to his right wrist so that his hands were held firmly behind his back.
“Bobo should’a kilt you, niggah,” Cedric said.
“Yeah,” I agreed, “and maybe I should kill you—but I won’t. What I’m gonna do is leave the key to these cuffs on your front stairs. Wait a minute or two after I go and then you can go out there and figure out how to free your hands.”
“You scared’a me?”
“You bettah believe it, C. You’d bettah believe it.”
I uncocked the pistol and hit Cedric on the right temple pretty hard with the butt. He went down on his knees and groaned.
I walked out of his house dropping the small steel key on the top stair as I went. I kept half a dozen pairs of handcuffs to use when necessary. I didn’t mind losing one pair for a little satisfaction.
27
By noon I had made it to the dead end of Tucker Street, in Compton. I parked on the unpaved patch of land that neighborhood kids used for a baseball diamond after school. Then I struggled through a dense stand of avocado trees, eucalyptus trees, and thorny bushes. After all that I arrived at a yellow door that was crusty with green lichen.
I was ready to knock but the door came open before I could manage that feat.
“Easy,” she said.
Mama Jo was taller, blacker, and might have been stronger than I. She was wearing a brown robe that was homespun and heavy. Somewhere around twenty years my senior, Jo came from another era than most other citizens of the modern world. She lived in a realm where true knowledge passed between those that were a part of history, not subjects to it. She was a healer and a seer, a fortune-teller and a repository of tragedy and love. For years she had lived with a black raven, a small cat that looked and acted like it was a lynx, and two armadillos that wrestled day and night.
“Come on in an’ take a load off, baby,” she said.
The floor was packed dirt and the walls were made from woven straw, adobe, and other, less identifiable materials. I sat in a chair framed by tree branches and fitted with unshaven animal hide. There were no windows in Jo’s house but there was always a slight breeze moving through.
Jo sat down on an ancient bench behind which stood her
alchemist’s table piled high with hand-blown bottles and earthen jugs, twigs, blossoms, powders, and various crystals. She had a fireplace, above which was nailed a mantel. There were thirteen thick round candles glowing on that ledge, giving off a good deal of the light in the shadowy room. Thirteen candles that had been skulls the last time I was there.
Jo saw what I was looking at and what I was thinking.
“Coco thought that it was too grisly havin’ them armadilla heads an’ Domaque’s skull on display like that,” she said. “So I had Martin Martins come out here and build me a little shed out back to hold D and his friends.”
Domaque Sr. was Jo’s husband, the love of her life, who had died young. She’d named her unspeakably powerful and deformed son Domaque Jr. Jo loved both men, dead and alive, more than the ground any prophet ever trod upon.
“That’s why I came,” I said.
“To see the vault?”
“Helen Ray,” I said. That was Coco’s given name.
“Coco, baby,” Jo said, raising her voice ever so slightly.
From behind a heavy burlap curtain printed with indecipherable sigils she came. Coco was what the culture of America calls a white woman. In her early twenties she had thick peltlike brown hair and sun-kissed skin. She was wearing a raw silk shift that barely came down to her knees. I had once seen her naked but that was only because she was a hippie and didn’t mind what people saw. She was as beautiful and potent as Jo in her own way. That was why, I supposed, Jo had taken her on as an apprentice and a lover.
“Hello, Mr. Rawlins,” she said in a remote tone. Like many young people who had suddenly changed direction in their lives, she saw the rest of the world as if it were at a distance.
“Coco.”
She sat down on the table’s workbench.
“What can we do for you, Easy?” Jo asked.
Coco shifted closer to her.
“I need to find out some information up in Santa Barbara and Coco here is just the one to ask my questions.”
“I’m busy,” Coco said, barely even glancing at me. “I have my work here with Jo and I’m studying for the SATs to get into UCLA. I’m going to do premed.”
“Coco,” Jo said in a tone that could have been the double beat of a steel hammer on a helpless iron nail.
Moving only her shoulders, Coco shied away from the witch.
“The only reason you here is because’a Easy. The only reason you know me is because’a him.”
“He didn’t bring me here for you,” Coco argued. “He just wanted to help that boy. I was doing him a favor.”
I could have been a fly on the wall or maybe on the other side of the wall, as far as their argument was concerned.
“You been in this house wit’ me for six weeks, Coco, an’ you still don’t know that everything in the world depends on everything else. You ask me to teach you but then refuse to learn.”
“That’s not true.”
“Easy Rawlins is my best friend in the world an’ here you cut your eyes away from him an’ say you ain’t got the time.”
Coco took in a breath as if she were about to say something, but there was nothing to say.
“When my friend come in here an’ ask for sumpin’ I give it,” Jo added. “I give it because he have never refused me since he was younger than you are now.”
For a moment I remembered the sweaty evening when Jo showed me that I really didn’t know anything about physical love. She was the first woman since my mother who proved to me that I wasn’t alone in the world.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Rawlins,” Coco said softly. “What can I do for you?”
“I need you to talk to some people for me,” I said, “college students up at UCSB. You need to look half-hippie and half-student.”
“Most of my clothes are in storage up at Terry’s.”
The first little while on our trip from Compton to the hills above the Sunset Strip, Coco was turned toward the window, looking out on the streets of L.A.
Her youthful, gorgeous body reminded me of something I had almost forgotten after my near-death experience some months earlier. But it was her staring out the window that grabbed my imagination.
Since I moved to L.A. in the late forties, the center of my life had moved from sitting rooms and street corners, booths in bars and cafés—to cars. I was always getting into or out of some automobile as a passenger or driver. A big part of my life was spent getting the keys for or driving my car. My constant friend was the radio, and most of my conversations were not face-to-face but side by side in the front seat or through the rearview mirror of some jalopy that I would drive until it gave out and I had to buy a new one.
I was like some kind of futuristic hermit crab being carried by my temporary husk from place to place rather than feeling the sun on my head or my feet on the ground.
“I didn’t mean to be rude to you, Mr. Rawlins,” Coco said when we were nearing our destination.
“Come on now, girl. I know when I’m bein’ shined on. You wanted me gone.”
“And I’m sorry for that.”
“Then I accept your apology.”
“So what is it you need me to do?” she asked, the past forgotten.
I told her about Rosemary Goldsmith, Bob Mantle, the LAPD, FBI, and State Department.
“The only reason I took the job was so I could send Feather to that school,” I said at the end of the tale.
“So you want me to ask around and find out where she lived?” Coco asked.
“I’ll be close at hand,” I said. “Jo would string me up if I got you hurt.”
“How long have you known Jo?”
“I met her in ’thirty-nine,” I said, “twenty-eight years ago. She hasn’t hardly changed a bit.”
“I’m in love with her.”
“Yeah.”
“Do you think there’s something wrong with that?”
“No.”
“Then why did you say it like that?”
“Helen,” I said. “I don’t prejudge people and I don’t judge ’em. You’re a free woman in the free world. Whatever it is you want, that’s just fine by me. And you know I wouldn’t even think about criticizing Jo.”
I was pulling up into a driveway cut through a huge hedge in front of a cockeyed mansion on Ozeta Terrace. Terry Aldrich’s big house was built slowly and over time by a dozen or more architects. It was both round and square, with pieces missing and additions tacked on. Terry was a young man, seventeen and quite ugly. His rich father had moved back east and sent his son regular checks so that Terry could finish high school while they lived separate lives.
“I guess I’m just a little sensitive,” Coco said. “I’ve never been with a woman before. I feel like everybody is looking down on me.”
“I’ll pick you up in the morning at eight?”
“What are we going to do up there?” she asked.
“I don’t know. I guess we could start by you going to the registrar’s office and telling them that Rosemary is your cousin or something. I have her picture. You could go to the student center and ask around if the administration turns us down.”
“Why can’t you go yourself?”
“Yeah,” I said, “right. I’ll pick you up at eight.”
28
I got back to my office at twelve minutes past three. That gave me time to sit without watching out for some two-ton steel automobile ramming into me; time to sit in a chair that wasn’t vibrating.
I read the newspaper for relaxation as much as anything else.
The Buddhists in Saigon couldn’t winnow down civilian opposition to a single opponent against the military strongmen Thiêu and Ký. Two U.S. bombers had been shot down over China; the U.S. government claimed that they went off course after a bombing mission in Cambodia. In Santa Barbara, 782 people had signed a public petition against the war. The McCone Commission had reported to Governor Ronald Reagan that “the most serious and immediate problem facing the Negro … is the lack of employment.
” A young black man had been convicted for draft evasion but failed to show up for the decision. Another defendant failed to show up for prosecution in an antiwar march in Century City. Mace, the chemical paralyzer, was used for the first time to quell Negro disturbances in New Haven, Connecticut. Two Southland soldiers had died in action in Vietnam. And, finally, the Burbank Board of Education set the high-school miniskirt limit at two inches above the middle of the knee.
There was nothing about a liquor store robbery on La Brea.
When the phone rang I was thankful for the distraction.
“Easy,” Melvin Suggs said before I could muster a hello.
“How’s it goin’, Mel?”
“Crazy as a motherfucker in a room full’a beauty queens.”
“Um.” What else could I say?
“Chinese clerk at the liquor store says he was robbed by a woman.”
“Not Bob?”
“Oh, Bob was there. He stood at the door looking scared. She had a sawed-off shotgun and pushed it up under Mr. So’s jaw.”
“What did she look like?”
“Your girl.”
Damn.
“And Bob didn’t do anything at all?” I asked.
“Just stood with one foot out the door and one foot in. The girl hit Mr. So upside his head and cursed him for being a traitor to his people. Then she stole his wallet.”
I was considering the ramifications of Melvin’s discoveries more like a lawyer than a private detective. I thought that if Uhuru-Bob made it to court he might have a case against the rich white girl.
“Easy,” Melvin said, to bring me back into the conversation.
At that moment the door to my office came open and five very dark-skinned men in bulky suits walked in. It was over ninety degrees outside but they were wearing wool. I recognized three of them.
“I gotta call you back, Mel. Somethin’ just came up here.”
I cradled the phone and got to my feet just as the leader approached the desk.
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