“Do you have any idea why?” I popped the top of my Hamm’s beer.
“I was a stripper in Lexington, Kentucky, when I met George Kilian,” she replied, as if this was an answer to my question. “He was helpless, wanted to save me.” She pursed her lips, looking into the paper cup like it contained something precious, but flawed. “I took pity on him.”
She smiled again and I understood that she was performing and I would have to wait for the recital to run its course.
“No one, man or woman, should ever start a thing with someone they feel pity for, Mr. Rawlins; leaves a bad taste.
“I woke up with that bitterness in my mouth for seven months and then I left Kentucky with the clothes on my back, my natural talents, and a baby in my belly. The only thing I ever got out of that whole affair was Craig.”
“So maybe old George was worth it,” I observed.
Lola considered my words but deigned not to comment.
“When Craig was still little I stripped for our daily bread. I even turned tricks for the right attitude and the right price. We stayed afloat but I never did learn how to deal with money. I think that’s why Craig thought he was joining the army. He figured he’d make enough to support me through the GI Bill.”
“That’s why he thought he joined?” I asked.
Smile completely gone, Lola studied the question. The realization slowly dawned that I was now a part of the old dance.
“I helped him make up his mind,” she said with guilt-ridden certainty. “Some men think that every word a woman says was his idea first.”
“Even your son?”
“Especially him. But I would have stopped him if I knew what war did to some people.” She leveled those yellow-jacket eyes at me, expecting . . . something.
“Why did Craig tell you that he wanted us to meet?”
“Homicide.” She said the word as easily as one might have said dishwater.
“You think there was a murder?”
“Maybe not murder. If Craig is lucky maybe not even a killing. But my son is not a lucky man and something happened; something that even if you have to use the word attempted—homicide will follow.”
“Craig’s got a lot of problems,” I agreed. “Loud noises put him in a completely different state of mind. I talked to him less than half an hour and found that out.”
Lola studied me a little closer. If I was a dog I would have either bit or submitted.
The decision made, she stood abruptly and went through a door that revealed a small section of what might have been the bathroom. She rummaged around in there and came out with a wadded-up cloth. Coming back to her chair, she dropped the lump on the table between us.
I knew what I was looking at. I didn’t want to touch it, but that was not the time to be squeamish.
The yellow-and-red tie-dyed T-shirt was about six ounces heavier than it should have been—because of the blood it had soaked up. It was still a little damp and also crusted black from the drying bodily fluid. There was that faint metallic smell mixed with the equally strong odor of some kind of incense oil. I had to concentrate to keep from gagging on the contradiction.
“This is your son’s?”
“He came to me the morning after it happened.”
“Why didn’t you influence him to go to the police?”
“You know what it’s like, blood.” She said blood just like one of my soul brothers hanging out on the corner at Florence and Central, 138th and Broadway, or any of a thousand other places from the Southside of Chicago to Selma, Alabama. “Craig was the kind of kid that always got into trouble. At school, after school, before school started in the morning. The only time he wasn’t in trouble was when he was asleep.”
I imagined that the young man she was describing would have had turmoil in his dreams too.
“What kind of trouble, Mrs. Kilian?”
“Call me Lola, Ezekiel.”
“They call me Easy,” I said. “What kind of trouble did Craig get into, Lola?”
“Disturbing the peace, public drunkenness, assault, assault with a deadly weapon . . . that was only a rock he threw. They got him on GTA but that wasn’t even him. His friend Pickles gave him a ride in a car he said belonged to his uncle. They put Craig in juvenile hall on a nine-month sentence for the one thing he didn’t do. That just made him angrier. I struck up a friendship with the deputy warden, so it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. After that I made Craig think that it was his idea to join the army. I thought it would make him into a man.”
“Did it?” I asked because, even though I thought I knew the answer, I wondered what she would say.
For the first time Lola looked like an honest woman trying her best to tell the truth without defense or manipulation.
“No,” she said. “It only broke him down more. He doesn’t get into trouble too much now, but . . . but it’s all my fault, Easy.”
I could feel the creases in my brow and eyelids.
“What, Easy?”
“We just met, right?”
“Yeah. So?”
“So you don’t know me. I’m just some guy off the street and here you dump, right down on the tabletop, evidence that might could get your son the gas chamber.”
A smile slowly spread across Lola’s generous mouth. That grin contained all the certainty of a mountain goat atop the highest peak. She inhaled deeply and then began to speak.
“A woman like me has to be able to read a man”—she snapped the fingers of her left hand—“like that. It’s not a talent as much as a survival thing, instinct.
“Craig’s a white boy and you can see that he don’t come from nuthin’. And when I say nuthin’ I mean me. I don’t know much, but after a long life of hard knocks I can tell you that most soul brothers will not call a cop unless they absolutely have to. Craig says that you’re a detective. He met you at your office. This could just be a roll of the dice. Maybe you can’t help us. But things will go bad if somebody don’t try somethin’.”
“Why not just let it be?” I asked. “From what Craig says there’s no evidence.”
“That might be fine for you or me, Easy. But Craig is losin’ his mind over it. He can’t sleep. He calls me in the middle’a the night cryin’ and talkin’ nonsense. Two nights ago he said that he was gonna go out and find . . . and find that nigger.”
She reached into the right-hand pocket of the black-and-red house gown and took out a thin fold of a few bills. At least the top one was the hundred-dollar denomination.
“Save him this one time and I will be a better mother from now on. I swear.”
She was looking me in the eye. There was no carelessness there. So I dropped the bloody shirt and took the cash. Six hundred dollars. All brand-new bills.
After counting I looked back up into eyes that encompassed a vast plain of darkness. I expected to see stars if I looked too long, and so I said, “Okay, I give.”
“You’ll help him?”
“I’ll look into what did and did not happen. In the meantime you should burn this shirt.”
11
It was twilight when I rounded the corner from the back of Lola’s apartment complex. My Rolls was still there but a police car had pulled up behind it. I almost turned around to see if maybe there was some fence I could jump over. I did not come from the kind of background where you willingly walked up to cops obviously wondering about you.
“A black man could get shot for sneezin’ too hard,” my aunt, who was not my aunt, Hattie used to say.
“Uh-huh,” her mother, my great-not-aunt Ball, would always echo. “They shoot first and aks questions after.”
But I was a property owner, an independent businessman, and I hadn’t committed any kind of serious crime in months. So I walked up to that Rolls-Royce as if it was what I did every day.
I had unlocked the door and cracked the handle before the officers exited their prowl car, hands on the butts of their pistols. They had a whole raft
of questions, needing me to prove my identity and ownership in triplicate. The question-and-answer period lasted maybe twenty-five minutes, but it’s all been said before so I won’t go through it again right now. They didn’t arrest me so I drove far enough east that only the car was an anomaly, not the driver.
John’s bar was housed on the third floor of a nondescript building at 114th and Central. Most of the rest of the businesses on that block were still boarded up and charred from the riots four years before. One store had a hand-painted sign that read MICHELLE’S HAIR AND NAILS. It seemed to be open for business. There was another place with no sign but it had been freshly painted and gussied up some. Passing by in my noteworthy vehicle I caught a glimpse of what might have been a barber’s chair at the back of the outer room.
Driving around to the alley that ran behind the new generation of black businesses, I parked the bright yellow car in John’s garage. From there I ascended the rear stairway and pressed a black button next to the double-thick, triple-locked rear door. Nine minutes passed before I was identified through some method I couldn’t define and the door came open.
John the bartender was a better version of me. Taller by at least a quarter foot, even darker-skinned, and an inch or two more broad, John was a friend from Texas; from a time when liquor was cheap and life cheaper still.
He got in the whiskey business and ran a series of unlicensed bars around LA, one after the other. The new one, like all the rest had been, was called John’s and you could gain admittance only if he wanted you to.
“Easy, what you doin’ comin’ up the back stairs like some sneak thief?”
“Sneakin’.”
“What you need?” He had already turned around and was walking down the slender, dimly lit corridor toward a distant red door.
“What do most people need when they come to a saloon?” I asked, following in his wake.
“Most of my customers come to drink alcohol.”
“Drink’s only the primer. They really come to be with other fools and talk to you about their foolishness.”
“Any problems Easy Rawlins got is beyond a poor brother like myself,” John opined. He passed through the red door into a bright blue hallway that was half the length of the first.
I laughed and followed until we exited the blue hall through a yellow door leading to the area behind his bar. The drinking room we faced was quite large, brightened by a wide skylight gathering the little sun left in the sky.
There were only three customers. All of them black men intent on their libation. I didn’t recognize anyone.
“Where’s Tiny?” I asked.
Tiny was the three-hundred-pound bouncer who was usually perched on a high stool behind the green, metal-jacketed, third-floor front door.
“Tiny don’t come out till the sun go all the way down,” John said like he was Moses delivering the Eleventh Commandment from on high.
I made my way to the other side of the bar and sat on one of the tall oak stools.
“What’s your pleasure?” John inquired.
He might as well have asked me to explain the theory of relativity. I sat there counting scars the barman’s face had accrued over many years of doing business.
“What’s wrong, Easy?”
“How many years we know each other, man?”
“Might be as much as thirty. Near ’bout anyway.”
“Have I ever given you anything?”
“One or two tight spots and some good laughs.”
I took the keys to my Rolls and put them on the mahogany.
“That’s the ignition and trunk key. You can’t keep it. At least I don’t know if you can. But there’s a right-side-drive yellow Rolls-Royce locked up in your garage out back. Why don’t you hold it for me a couple’a months?”
That was the first and last time I ever saw a boyish gleam in my friend’s eyes.
“What I got to do for that?”
“Lend me your Pontiac for a few days and try not to bang up mine too bad.”
“Bang it up? Brother, the only thing I’m ever gonna do with a car like that is go sit in it, drink a flute of champagne, and smoke the biggest, blackest cigar I can find.”
“Can I use your phone?” I asked.
“You know where it’s at.”
It was nearly 8:00 but both Edmund Lewis and Christmas Black were still at work, making sure that P9’s billions were secure.
“Security,” Edmund announced.
“Easy Rawlins for Christmas Black,” I said.
Edmund had given up stonewalling me and passed the call right through.
“Black.”
“You said call if I needed help.”
“Name it.”
“I could use a good operative to meet me at the end of Filomena Road in the hills above Orange County at six hundred hours tomorrow.”
“Done.”
“You need any directions for your man?”
“If a man can’t get there on that, I got no use for him in my army.”
12
I was in my broad bed by 9:30 and up six hours later. My first waking action was to go to Feather’s door and look in. I did this every morning of our life together. I forgot that she was staying over with Jewelle and Jackson. The bed was made and everything else was neat enough.
I wandered around the third floor feeling odd. It wasn’t that I missed my daughter but rather that I felt her absence. It occurred to me this gentle awareness was not as painful as but even deeper than heartache.
By 5:29 I was at the end of Filomena Road in far eastern Orange County. He was already there, leaning against a black Harvester Scout 800. Despite his clothes the man looked more military than the Jeep knockoff. He wore a short-sleeved dark blue flannel shirt and rugged black jeans. The beret adorning his head was at a rakish tilt, the only true vestige of a military career.
“Chris,” I said. “I wanted a grunt, not a general.”
“I could tell you were in trouble at the office,” he reported. “I couldn’t trust getting a man paid a salary to back you up and I sure didn’t want to send that man to his death.”
He said these words in a neutral tone but I heard the strain of hardship that lay underneath. And he was right. We were, I and almost all of my friends, men and women, living on the wrong side of the danger line.
I gave Christmas Craig’s directions to Knowles Rock and he led the way, forging ahead like a bloodhound.
We ascended at a pretty good clip. On the way I told Black about Craig and his problems.
“You think it was in his head?” he asked. “You know a lotta these army pups today smoke dope and take LSD.”
“I think it’s more shell shock than chemical.”
“I don’t believe in battle fatigue. If you light a man’s bed on fire he’ll remember pretty quick where he is and that he wants to live.”
I didn’t argue because like any good soldier, my friend needed to believe that he could conquer any enemy—including fear.
It took about an hour and a half to cover the seven miles to the camp. Mostly we passed through blood orange groves but at the end there was a pretty steep rise where pine nuts took the place of citrus fruit.
The campsite was in a clearing and there was a cabin, just like Craig said. It was a crude affair constructed from uncured pine boards topped off with a tin roof. There had been a fire in front of the place; not so much a campfire but more like a trash burning. A few wisps of white ash still clung to the ground around blackened earth.
Christmas was already scanning the grounds when I headed for the lodge.
It was a simple room, sixteen feet by eighteen. The only furniture was a gray-and-white-striped wadded-cotton mattress on a single bed frame. The shelves held no larder. The floor was swept and maybe even washed down. There was no evidence of who might have stayed there and nothing of value or intelligence.
When I came out, Christmas was down on one knee using a twig to sift through the meager detritus of the fire
.
I joined him.
“What about the cabin?” the security expert asked. He was looking down, his face enveloped by shadow.
I told him what I didn’t find.
“Motherfuckers,” he said. “Goddamned motherfuckers. Pieces of shit is what they are.”
“They?”
He looked up. Believe me when I tell you that you never want man, woman, or beast to cast that kind of gaze in your direction.
“Three sets of footprints, not counting your client. They swept the motherfucking ground. Cleaned it out the way we did it in ’Nam when the brass didn’t want evidence for a UN review.” Part of the rage was that he was angry at himself. “They got rid of almost everything. That poor kid never had a chance.”
“Three?” I said.
“The woman probably and two men. One of the men was wounded. He could have died and they just wiped out the signs, but I don’t think so. A man and woman left together, then you got two sets of men’s footprints walking through the dirt and grass. Not together. No. The woman and a man left first, then the other two—first one and then the other.”
Looking down, I saw a half-burned red, green, and black business card. No complete words were evident, but there was a curved green line indicative of some kind of snake or lizard that might have inhabited the burned part of the card.
“Motherfuckers!” Christmas’s muted yell was both a threat and a curse.
He stood up violently and stormed over to the outer edge of the clearing. I let him simmer there, not wanting to get in his way.
I was trying to think about what that card meant. It was familiar, but not from some other card. Something else . . .
“What are you gonna do about this shit?” Christmas was standing over me. It was shocking that he could get so close without me noticing. This reminded me of Craig Kilian silently invading my office.
“What’s the matter?” I asked, climbing to my feet.
He stood there looking through me. Then he started to talk.
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