But I was an American citizen and I had a right to drive into danger if I wanted to.
TOMAS HIGHT LIVED in a six-story lavender apartment building on Northern Boulevard, a kind of main drag. There were a lot of people out on his block and almost all of them were very interested in me: white women pushing baby carriages and white men having loud arguments on the corner, white teenagers who when they saw me saw glimmers of something that their parents could never comprehend, and of course the police — the white police.
A cruiser slowed down a little to study my profile but then moved on.
Being alone in the late-morning sun was the only thing that saved me from an immediate rousting. More than one Negro at a time in a white neighborhood in 1967 was an invitation to a rumble or a roust.
I came to the front door of the apartment building, wondering if the series of lies I’d constructed would get me over the hump I’d been riding since the age of eight.
I’d tell Hight that I noticed his medals and looked them up, finding his address. I’d tell him that I’d found Christmas but that the man nearly killed me. I was afraid to go to my office and so I didn’t know how to get in touch with his captain. I’d lull the former MP and then, when he began to trust me, I’d pistol-whip him and get the lowdown on what he was doing.
It wasn’t a perfect plan, but it fit my state of mind and my need for an outlet for all that anger.
A big, powerful-looking white man with long, long dirty blond hair flowing from his head and jaw stood up from the stairs to bar my way into the building.
There were crumbs and naps in his beard. He smelled of sweat and incense oils. The mild vapors of alcohol wafted around him and so did a big, lazy fly.
“Can I help you?” he asked in a Texas drawl that I felt all the way down to the soles of my feet. Then my right testicle began aching, and I knew that the dark side of my mind was preparing to go to war.
“Looking for Tomas,” I said, as if I weren’t preparing to kill this big aberration of the hippie movement.
“And who the fuck are you?”
“Why don’t we ask Tomas?” I said airily.
“You messin’ with me, nigger?”
“If I was to mess with you, brother,” I said in the same light tone, “you would never even know it.”
“Say what?”
I put my right hand in my pocket, trying to imagine that I was Mouse, and said, “Stand the fuck outta my way or I’ll kill you where you stand.”
Somewhere inside the machinery of my mind I found the will and the recklessness to kill the man who had commandeered my people’s reformation of his language to threaten me.
His china blue eyes faltered. He was used to being the top dog, but he also knew what I had in my pocket. He knew it and I knew it, and so he moved to the side and went past me down the stairs.
After that performance I knew that I didn’t have much time. I went to the bank of mailboxes, homed in on T HIGHT, and ran up the three flights of stairs to apartment 4C.
The door was an impossible combination of pink and lime, with a lacquered but rusty-looking doorknob. I imagined the long-haired sentry gathering his tribe to teach all my people a lesson through me.
I knocked and, before there was time to answer, knocked again.
There came a sound from down the stairs. I knocked one more time.
Men’s voices, angry men’s voices, were making their way up the stairs.
I tried the doorknob; it wouldn’t budge.
I tried knocking again while looking around for a good defensive position.
I was desperate, but the irony of the situation was not lost on me even then. Here I was after Hight, wanting to bring him down in order to help my friend, but at the same time I was knocking on his door hoping that he might save me from the strangers I could hear saying the word nigger as they mounted the stairs.
Across the way from Hight’s door was an inset doorway with no apartment number on it; a storage room or maybe the super’s hopper. It was only a few inches of protection, but I crossed the way.
My pursuers were half a flight down when I took out my pistol and molded myself into the unmarked doorway.
I was ready to go down protecting myself when a thought came into my mind.
It occurred to me that I was the victim not only of those men but of the conditioning that made me wait for them to come before I acted. I was sure that a group of four or five men was coming up those stairs to cause me serious bodily harm. I was innocent of any crime warranting this attack. Why should I cower in a corner, giving them the upper hand, rather than run down among them, pistol blazing?
I was acting like a guilty man even though I knew I wasn’t. I was being defensive when I should have been on the offense. I had six bullets and all the training I’d ever need.
The decision to slaughter those men came with no fear of law or prison or death.
I was about to run down shooting. The war cry was in my throat.
When the door to 4C came open, my gears changed so fast that I was a little confused. I put the pistol in my pocket before the dark-haired white man came out into the hall. Half a second after that, the long-haired man I had threatened appeared at the top of the stairway.
“There he is.” Long-Hair pointed a gnarly, cigarette-stained finger at me.
There were sounds of rage and indignity issuing from the throats of men I had never met.
“Tomas Hight!” I shouted.
The white man who came from the apartment was tall and well built. His dark brown hair was short but not military. His black eyes studied me briefly and then turned to the five men after me.
“What’s up, Roger?” the man asked my blond, and until then nameless, archenemy.
“Nigger insulted me, threatened me,” Roger replied.
A few of his friends agreed, though they had not witnessed the encounter.
“And you had to get a whole mob for just one nigger?” Hight asked, putting an odd emphasis on the last word.
“He said he was after you,” Roger said, trying to enlist the new player.
“Are you after me?” Tomas Hight asked me.
“I wanted to talk to you about another MP,” I said. “Glen Thorn.”
Tomas squinted as if in pain, then turned to Roger and the suddenly docile pack.
“This man and I have business,” Tomas said. “So get outta here and leave us alone.”
“He’s got a gun,” Roger said in a last-ditch attempt to turn the tide of his potential revenge.
“Then I probably just saved your life,” Tomas said.
It was true. Even Roger seemed to understand that chasing an armed man into a corner was a stupid thing to do.
“Come on in,” Tomas said to me.
I was glad that he wasn’t the man I was looking for. I was elated that he was the man I’d found.
19
Tomas Hight lived in a one-room studio. The walls were pale fuchsia and the furniture mostly forest green and dark wood. There was no bed in evidence, so I figured that the couch folded out. A yellow hard hat sat upright on the oak table with two newspapers under it.
Hight wore a white T-shirt and black jeans. He was barefoot and my hero.
“You have a gun?” he asked me.
I handed him my PI’s license.
He scanned it, handed it back, and asked again, “You have a gun?”
I nodded. “But I didn’t come here looking for trouble.”
It’s worth the time to explain the complexity of my feelings at that moment. Tomas Hight was the quintessential white man, the white man that all other white men wanted to be. He was tall and good-looking, strong and restrained but willing to act. He had saved my butt from a beating or the gas chamber and even brought me into his home, such as it was, even though I may have been armed, dangerous, and depraved. I felt gratitude toward him while at the same time feeling that he was everything that stood in the way of my freedom, my manhood, and my people’s ultimate deli
verance. If these conflicting sentiments were meteorological, they would have conjured a tornado in that small apartment.
Added to my already ambivalent feelings was the deep desire in me to respect and admire this man, not because of who Tomas Hight was or what he had done but because he was the hero of all the movies, books, TV shows, newspapers, classes, and elections I had witnessed in my forty-seven years. I had been conditioned to esteem this man and I hated that fact. At the same time, the man standing before me had actually done me a great service without coercion. I owed him respect and admiration. It was a bitter debt.
My two minds slammed against each other, and I was stunned. This, and the adrenaline from my recent near-death experience, explains my candor in the conversation we shared.
“What do I have to do with Glen Thorn?” Tomas Hight asked.
“Can I sit?”
He gestured at the couch and took an oak chair from under his all-purpose table.
I sat down, hoping that taking the strain off my legs would clear my thinking, but it didn’t.
“Glen Thorn?” Hight prodded.
“I’ve been hired to find a man named Christmas Black,” I said. “He was a Green Beret, a major, but left the armed services for political reasons. I was looking for him when three soldiers, or men dressed like soldiers, blindsided me and tried to force me to find Black for them.”
“One of these men was Thorn?”
“I think so.”
“You say that they were pretending to be soldiers?” Hight said. “Why would you question the uniform?”
If he hadn’t just saved me, I could have given him a whole list of unrelated reasons, but instead I said, “When they said I had to look for Black for them, I said that I charge three hundred dollars for a week’s work —”
“Three hundred!”
“Detectives don’t work every week, but the bills still want paying,” I said. “Anyway, they paid right up, gave me three crisp new one-hundred-dollar bills.”
Hight was smart too. He nodded, showing me that he knew that no soldier, not even a general, rolled out that denomination.
“How did you get to me?” he asked.
I explained about the medals and the library.
“You really are a detective,” he said with admiration in his tone.
I didn’t want his approbation, and yet at the same time it was the most important thing in the world to me.
“Did you serve with Thorn?” I asked, to keep from shooting either Hight or myself.
Hight leaned back in his chair, scowling at me. Something was going on in him, something that had been simmering long before I ever came to his door.
“I worked with a unit of MPs that guarded a warehouse where we stored shipments of supplies coming in from the States and elsewhere. We were guards, you know. We made sure that the black marketeers didn’t get their hands on our goods.”
Where I was at odds with myself over everything, Tomas Hight was absolutely sure of his purpose and his place in the world. He had been doing the right thing in Vietnam, even if Vietnam was wrong. He had done the right thing in the hall, even if I turned out not to be worthy of his actions.
“Thorn work with you?” I asked.
I noticed that there was a small picture frame standing on the coffee table. It was an old pewter frame with the photograph of a five- or six-year-old boy standing up straight and smiling. He stood in front of a pink cinder-block wall. The sun was in his eyes, but he still smiled.
“He was a malingerer,” Hight said with the barest hint of a snarl. “Always disappearing. He was seen removing a bag from a large crate of crockery that came in from Austin one day, and they arrested him for smuggling.”
“What was in the bag?”
“I don’t know,” the Hero said. “The CO confiscated it.”
“What happened to Thorn?”
“Nothing. Not a thing. They transferred him to another unit, and he was stateside in six weeks. I heard he even got an honorable discharge. Can you believe that?”
“I’ve been believin’ nuthin’ but that for four hundred years,” I said.
“What?”
I stood up on steady legs. I knew something more about my employers, and I, even though he didn’t understand me, had shared a common confusion with Tomas Hight.
The boy in the picture looked just like Hight, only smaller. His son? His brother? Him? Why not a girlfriend or parent?
“Where are you going?” he asked me.
“Down to my car.”
“I was just getting ready to go to work. I’ll walk down with you.”
I realized then that I couldn’t escape the kindness of Tomas Hight. He was going down the stairs alongside me with a hard hat under his arm because he knew that Roger and his friends might be waiting down there. He gave me his protection without a thought to race or even if I deserved it. He would have protected a malingerer on the same principle.
At my car, we shook hands.
“Be careful around Thorn,” he advised. “A couple of his friends in the MPs were killed right after he left. And it wasn’t Charlie that did it either.”
20
Tomas Hight stayed on my mind all the way back to the city. He’d saved a life in that hall, but not necessarily my life; it was just as likely that one or more of his acquaintances would have been shot.
I thought about his one-room apartment. I owned two houses and three apartment buildings but still felt that he had more than I did. I thought he was more heroic too, but hadn’t I been the one to stand up first against those men?
It’s strange how you can know something and still not feel it, how you can covet the assets of others though you would never think of trading places with them.
THE ADDRESS TOURMALINE had given me for Christmas Black was on a street named Gray. It was a single block in the area between the black neighborhood and downtown. There were warehouses and small wholesale businesses all over that unzoned neighborhood. The building across the street from Christmas’s house was Cairo Cane Distributors.
There wasn’t a soul anywhere to be seen.
I had waited till midmorning to go to Christmas’s door because he was not the kind of man you wanted to take unawares. Black was at least as proficient a killer as Mouse. Added to that, he was crazy and paranoid; added to that, there really were people after him.
I parked in front of Cairo Cane but didn’t get out immediately. Black’s address was another cottage. The small yard was laid with green concrete. There was an attempt at a porch, though I doubted that there was enough room for a stool on that thin band of wood.
Flowerless flowerpots hung on either side of the front door.
I watched the house for five minutes and no one passed by.
The debacle at Tomas Hight’s house had made me temporarily cautious. I didn’t want to run out into another dangerous situation, and I needed to put the words together that I would say to Christmas when and if I found him.
The minutes went by, and my confidence returned.
For a while there I had forgotten the answer to the unasked question framed by fearful caution. Will I die? the mortal asks from the fear shared by all his kin. Yes, you will die, the answer comes from the infinite experience of our race. I might get hurt, be hungry, get old, contract some fatal disease. When my children uttered these fears, I told them not to worry, that nothing was going to happen. But in my life I knew better. The only way to end fear was to stop breathing, to stop moving forward . . . and there I was on a street named Gray under a bright sun with no one else in sight.
THE FRONT DOOR had been broken down and put back in place hastily. This was not a good omen. I clasped my hands and prepared to back away. I swayed, but my feet stayed planted on that faux porch.
There was nowhere else to go. If I didn’t want to be a detective, I should have gone back to the LAUSD and asked them to reinstate me as a school custodian. Medical insurance, retirement program, two weeks vacation . . .
&nb
sp; Gripping the doorknob with a gloved hand, I levered the half-unhinged door open. This brought me to an entry chamber. The uncharacteristic foyer was probably why Christmas had taken the place. Anyone trying to come in on him would have been stymied by the second door, and at the same time the occupant would have been warned of his attacker.
I wrenched the front door back in place and strode through a short passageway into the living room, as the second door was also broken in.
The room had no windows and so was shrouded in darkness.
That’s where I found the first body.
Actually, I stumbled on his leg as I looked for a light switch on the wall. I almost fell. Then I waved my hand above my head and found the chain for an overhead lamp. When the light snapped on, I was looking into one of Glen Thorn’s bright gray eyes. His other eye had been destroyed by the ice pick that was lodged in his brain.
I looked quickly around the small room. It had pine floors with no carpet and a pair of small brown stuffed chairs. Between the chairs stood a round table with a whiskey glass set upon it. Below the table, taking up most of the floor space, was the body that had once housed Glen Thorn. He wasn’t wearing a uniform now, just black trousers, a red-and-black checkered shirt, and tennis shoes like the kids wore.
There was a pistol in his left hand.
The only neat thing about him, I now knew, was his appearance. I’d seen his filthy house and the literature he devoured. I saluted him because he had fooled me with his appearance. Glen Thorn had taught me something, and that was worth a last good-bye.
IT WAS A SHOTGUN HOUSE with a cottage facade. I went through the next door and found another body. This was the second MP who had accompanied the man who called himself Captain Clarence Miles. This corpse had been strangled, by hand. I could make out the finger marks along his throat and neck. Whereas Glen had no real expression on his face, this man’s eyes and mouth were strained with fear. I would have been scared too if I had been looking into the murderous visage of Christmas Black while he was throttling the life from me.
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