I drove a little way up the block and parked in front of the school’s garden gate.
Two uniforms stopped me there. I identified myself and asked for the sergeant. They pointed out a man standing between two large lemon bushes at the front of the glass-walled garden classroom. He was a tall, weedy man wearing a cheap gray suit with no tie. Mexican definitely, dark Mexican. He was talking to Jorge. I could tell by the way Jorge held his head that they were speaking in Spanish.
When I approached, Sanchez gave me a hard look.
“This is Mr. Rawlins, sergeant,” Jorge said. And to me, “Sergeant Sanchez.”
“What’s goin’ on?” I asked.
There was a start of recognition in the policeman’s eyes; recognition that was quickly replaced by suspicion. Sanchez twisted his head toward a stand of bamboo that Wayne Ito, the gardener, kept toward the back of the gardening plots. I followed him and Jorge as they pushed through the long stalks.
On the other side of the bamboo wall stood Hiram Newgate and the gardening teacher, Mr. Glenn. There were also eight cops—in and out of uniform. Laid out on the ground in front of them was the handsomest corpse I’d ever seen. A tall man in brown tweed with curly dark hair that had been oiled. His shoes were fine-crafted snakeskin and his hands were held up over his head in a feminine pose. I didn’t think he was a white man; his skin was dark olive and his nose was wider than most Caucasians’. I wasn’t claiming him for a Negro either. His racial roots could have been from at least four continents, or a thousand islands around the world.
His left temple was concave and deeply discolored. His eyes were rolled up to the top of his head but, too late, they had seen truth.
“Who is he?” I asked, turning to Sergeant Sanchez. I found him studying me.
“Is the gate here usually locked?” he asked without a trace of an accent. There was an education in his diction; a hard-earned learning that came from the late-night interrogations of used and battered textbooks.
“Always,” I said. “Unless there’s an afternoon class going on.”
“Nobody saw him come in.” The sergeant seemed to be challenging me. “He didn’t sleep here.”
There wasn’t anything for me to say.
“Do you recognize him, Mr. Rawlins? Have you ever seen him around here?” Sanchez was taking me in. Maybe he could smell the residue of the street on me.
He’d gag if he ever got a whiff of Mouse.
“Does he look like somebody who’d be here?” Newgate demanded. “He’s obviously a thief or a crook who was killed and dropped here. Listen, sergeant, we’re going to have to try and keep the children away from here. I have to go organize the teachers. So I hope you don’t mind if I leave.”
“You can go,” Sanchez said. “But I’ll need Mr. Rawlins and Mr. Glenn. I’ll need you men to help us look around here. You might see something out of the ordinary that we’d miss.”
“I’ll get Simona,” Jorge said.
“Where is Simona?” I wanted to know.
“We took her in the classroom, Mr. Rawlins. It was me and her found the body. She took it kinda bad, you know.”
“Okay.” Sergeant Sanchez stuck out his bottom lip and nodded. He was very sure of himself. I’ve always been afraid of self-confident cops.
“I’d like to see her too,” I said.
“Make it fast, Mr. Rawlins. I want to get this investigation going.”
THE GARDEN COURSE at Sojourner Truth consisted of Mr. Glenn’s afternoon lectures on seeds and zygotes and then going out to the garden plot where the students learned to plant and grow radishes. Mr. Glenn, who had majored in botanic biology at UCLA, gave his lectures in a glass-encased room that smelled of earth. There were no desks in the classroom, because the students were graded on a verbal quiz, given one-on-one, and on the health of their seedlings. The only furniture in the room, other than Mr. Glenn’s high metal desk, was four long benches where the students met for roll call before rushing out to the soil.
Miss Eng was sitting, head bowed and alone, on one of those benches. She was crying and holding one finger at the center of her forehead, her eyes still seeing that well-dressed corpse.
Jorge sat down and put his arm around her shoulders. He whispered something, and she rose. She looked at me and smiled, but there was no mirth in her heart.
“I never saw a dead man before,” she said.
“I better take her home, Mr. Rawlins. I don’t think she should drive.” Jorge was looking a little green himself.
“All right. We’re not gonna get much work done around here today anyway. You take care of yourself, Simona, you hear?”
She smiled again and let Jorge lead her away. I lingered for a moment after they were gone. The empty room felt safe. I didn’t want to go back out to the police and that corpse; I was anxious but I had no reason to be. Still, I hung back, checking to see that the floor had been properly swept and that the trash cans were empty.
Then I took a deep breath and went out to Mr. Glenn and the cops.
I went with them around the compound while Sanchez asked questions.
“You get many break-ins?”
“Not too many. Lately somebody got into the music room and took about a thousand dollars’ worth of horns.”
“I mean in the gardening compound,” he said.
“Oh, yeah.” I was offhanded. “The boys like to prove that they could climb a twelve-foot wire gate now and then. Once they get in they like to look around a little.”
“Why don’t you put barbed wire up top?”
“Why should I? They hardly ever break anything and the only thing they could steal is some vegetables.” I was bothered by the murder but all I wanted was for the sergeant to take the body away so that I could get back to work.
“How do you explain this?” he asked.
We’d come upon a slender toolshed that was used by the children to house the spades, hoes, and pitchforks when they were hand-weeding or harvesting.
There was a yard-deep hole dug near the shed. Next to the excavation was a small traveling chest that was caked with dirt. There was a canvas sack in the chest that seemed to be full but I couldn’t guess at what it held.
“I don’t know,” I said, answering the sergeant’s question.
“Looks like a hole,” one of the cops surmised.
“You don’t know anything about this?” Sanchez asked both me and Glenn.
A plainclothes cop was squatting by a shovel that lay near the mound of mud next to the hole. There was a deep dent in the scoop.
“I sure don’t know,” Mr. Glenn said.
I suppressed the “Me neither” that was in my mouth.
“Don’t you think you should?” Sanchez asked me just as if I had uttered my denial.
I didn’t have an answer for him.
“Do you have keys to the garden gate?” he asked us both.
“Of course I do,” said Mr. Glenn. In his brown suit and vest he resembled a limp football, with a hard dome of a forehead under a thatch of unruly brown hair.
“What do you mean?” I asked Sanchez.
“Do you have a key to the garden gate?” He spoke slowly, as if to a small child or an idiot.
“Naw, man,” I said. “I mean, why would you think that the killer had a key?”
I sounded smart—too smart. I showed that I knew what the cop was thinking. It was a mistake that I’d never made in the street.
Sanchez gave me a hard look and then said, “The gate was locked when your janitors got here, and there’s not a scuff on those fancy shoes. Somebody had a key.”
“Lots of people do,” I said. “The principal, my janitors, I do, Mr. Glenn does. There’s a set of master keys hanging up in my hopper room down in the maintenance office. Even the district gardeners have a set for when they drop by.”
Sanchez had his eyes on me.
“Anybody here last night?” he asked. “About four or five in the morning?”
“Not s’posed t’be. Nobo
dy works on Sunday, and nobody works that late anyway.” Idabell Turner flitted across my mind but I turned my thoughts back to Sanchez’s questions.
“Where were you when the body was found, Mr. Rawlins?”
“I went to pick up one of my men. His car broke down and he needed a ride.”
“You always give taxi service to your janitors?”
“He’s my night man. If I don’t have a night man we won’t be ready for the morning. The hour or so gets paid back with a full night’s work. Anyway, I took my lunchtime to do it.”
Sanchez just stared. He was a living lie detector.
I was a living lie.
“You two can go now,” he said. “Mr. Rawlins, tell your people that I’ll be around either this afternoon or tomorrow morning. I’ll need to talk to each one of them.”
“Will do,” I said. I wanted to cooperate. I wanted to do my duty. I didn’t have anything to do with that man’s death. But the way Sanchez looked at me made me feel guilty—maybe he could smell something that I had yet to sense.
CHAPTER 6
WHAT IS IT, EASY?” Etta asked me at the main office. She was there with Raymond. It wasn’t his shift yet and he was waiting for three o’clock to come. He was smoking another Chesterfield and staring off into space. Maybe he was still thinking about church.
“They found a body out in the garden.”
“Murdered?”
“Uh-huh. He had his head caved in out behind Mr. Ito’s bamboo.”
Raymond looked at me but he didn’t say anything.
“Did Simona find’im?” Etta asked.
“Her and Jorge.”
“Uh, uh, uh,” she grunted, swiveling her head for each syllable. “You shoulda had me out there, Easy. You know that young girl don’t know nuthin’ about the dead.”
I shrugged and went to sit down at my desk. I was worried that an investigation by Sanchez might cause trouble for me. I hadn’t gotten my job through the regular channels, and Mouse had come in on my recommendation. If Sanchez suspected either of us he would go to Newgate to ask why he had people like us on the payroll—and Newgate would have loved nothing better than to see me fired.
There was a foul odor in the air.
“Who was it, Easy?” Etta asked.
“I don’t know. Light-colored man. Not white. Maybe Negro, maybe not. Tall, nice suit. His hair was oiled so I don’t know what it was like really.”
“Colored like a deep tan?” Etta inquired.
“Yeah.”
“Kinda thin? With a lean-like face but he got some nose too?”
“You know him, Etta?”
“Sound like your girlfriend’s husband to me.”
At that moment I identified the scent in the air. “You said what?”
“ ’Bout two months ago, at the beginnin’ of the semester, her car was broke down and he had to pick her up an’ let her off. Light-complected guy, tall, straightened hair. He kinda looked like somebody from Hawaii or sumpin’ only his eyes was different.”
“Damn!” I stood up out of the chair.
“Where you goin’, Easy?” Mouse asked me.
“I got to check this shit out,” I said.
“ROGER! ROGER! Return to your seat,” Miss Falana was yelling at the McHenry boy. The flat-faced kid grinned and looked around him as if her words were arrows that had missed their mark.
But when I said, “Miss Falana,” Roger dove for his chair. He knew me from the yard.
The librarian gave me an exhausted and exasperated smile. “Mr. Rawlins,” she sighed.
“Where’s Mrs. Turner?”
The little woman wagged her hands in a beckoning gesture that made her look like a chubby chipmunk.
When I came over to her she whispered, “Mrs. Turner’s dog got hit by a car this morning. She rushed out to take him to the vet.”
“What time was that?” I asked in a regular voice.
She put her hands over her lips to show me, in sign language, that the children shouldn’t hear us. It was a conspiracy of most of the teachers to pretend that they didn’t have private lives.
“She left before first period. She got a call from her neighbor. It was terrible because we couldn’t get a substitute from downtown, so everybody has had to pitch in. You know I can’t handle these problem kids, not like her.”
Miss Falana didn’t like the way men and boys looked at Idabell. She thought that looking like the math teacher did was somehow unprofessional.
I thanked Miss Falana and left.
Before the door closed I heard her shouting, “Roger McHenry, return to your seat!”
I RAN INTO ETTA outside of the maintenance office.
“What you gonna do about that dog mess?” she asked, referring to the smell that was coming from my hopper room.
“Etta,” I said, “I’m gonna head outta here. Listen. Don’t say anything about that dog, all right?”
“I ain’t gonna say nuthin’. But what about that mess?”
“Etta …”
“No.” She shook her head; her face was set and hard.
Mouse had left and the office was empty. I figured cleaning up dogdo wouldn’t take over a minute. But when I opened the hopper-room door I thought that Pharaoh must have had prunes for his breakfast.
It took a mop and bucket with ammonia solution to clean up that room. The dog had gone everywhere. Anything that was paper near the floor had to be thrown away. He had crawled up under the steel shelving and made a mess that took over twenty minutes of frantic cleaning.
I wanted to keep the dog a secret, and Pharaoh understood my plight. He sat back on his tail and laughed at me. He had on a dog grin with his pointy tongue lapping up my misery.
I understood why the dead man had wanted to kill Pharaoh. I was close to it myself. Instead I threw the mutt into a burlap sack that I’d been keeping for rags.
I know it sounds mean to treat a dumb animal like that. And I can’t say that I didn’t get a certain amount of pleasure out of his discomfort. But I had to do him like that. If somebody saw me in the yard with Idabell’s dog it could have caused trouble. That dog was her alibi for something. And I didn’t want to cause her any grief if I didn’t have to.
CHAPTER 7
MANY MEN WOULD HAVE drowned Pharaoh right then. He was no good to anybody. But I had lived a dog’s life and knew what it was to have the big world turn against you.
I drove about ten blocks from the school and then let Pharaoh out of his bag.
At least he wasn’t grinning at me anymore.
I TOOK SURFACE STREETS out of Watts, back toward West Los Angeles and my home. I was trying to live the quiet life with my kids back then, away from the people and problems that I knew during my earlier years in L.A.
It was a nice house. Three small bedrooms and a kitchen that looked out on a bright green lawn. I had rosebushes and dahlias along the back fence and no fence against the southern yard; there I just let my neighbor’s wild ferns and bamboo do the job.
“Daddy! Daddy!” Feather yelled as I came through the door.
Pharaoh leaped out of my arms and went straight for her.
“Watch out!” I shouted. But I didn’t have to worry. Pharaoh jumped up into Feather’s arms and started licking her face. She laughed and giggled. Pharaoh jumped away from her and then leapt back into her arms—then he jumped away again. It was like they had been playmates for years.
“Daddy, thank you,” Feather said. “He’s beautiful.”
“We’re not keepin’ him, honey,” I said. Feather’s instant frown made me dislike that dog even more. “He’s only gonna stay a day or two. I told my friend that you’d want to take care of him.”
“What’s his name?”
“Angina.”
“What?”
“Angina. It’s a French name,” I said. “Means a pain in my heart. Where’s your brother?”
“He went out with Eddie to the store.”
Jesus was supposed to stay with Feather un
til I got home from work. That was his job.
Feather didn’t look anything like me, and Jesus did even less. They were both pickup children that I’d managed to save during the years when my employer was the street. She was seven then with crinkled golden hair and café-au-lait skin. Her eyes were like topaz at that time but they had been changing color over the years. Jesus had made her braids like the horns of a ewe going back and following the curve of her skull.
She had on a green dress that she’d picked out herself, with a puffy pink sweater.
“I love you,” I said.
When I picked her up the dog started barking. She was staring down at him, and I kissed her chubby cheek. I felt something wadded up in her shallow sweater pocket.
“What’s this?” I asked, fingering the lump.
Feather’s expression said, Uh-oh.
In the floppy open pocket was a fold of six or seven twenty-dollar bills.
“Where’d you get this money, honey?”
“Um. I dunno. I fount it.”
When I put Feather down, Pharaoh jumped up between us, barking at me and then turning to lick her fingertips.
“Honey, where did you get this money?”
“In a place.”
“What place?”
“In Juice room.”
Nobody wanted to use the Lord’s name in vain, so Jesus became Juice at Hamilton High School.
Feather led me to a corner in Juice’s closet where there was a cardboard chest that used to hold hundreds of little plastic soldiers. But the soldiers had all died or gone AWOL and in their place were neat stacks of different denominations of bills from one to twenty. Four hundred and eighty-nine dollars in all.
“It’s Juice treasure chest,” Feather said. “But it’s a secret, okay?”
I sat down on the floor. Pharaoh was growling at my elbow. There was too much money there to hope that he would get away from court with a warning.
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