“Hey, boy. Hey, boy.” Mouse was talking to the enraged dogs. “Here, look what I got for ya.”
From the greasy paper bag he pulled three steaks. With these he enticed the junkyard guardians until there was almost no complaint whatsoever.
“You just pulled some steak out your ass?” I asked.
“Naw, man. I got these from Arnold, the cook over at the Eye. Had him take three rib eyes cooked rare out to my car.”
“We go in here?” I asked him.
Ray walked up to the hatch that had been cut into the side of the tin shack.
He slammed on it mightily and then called out, “Alonzo! Hey, Griggs!”
One of the dogs barked a little but soon gave up.
Mouse tested the door handle.
“Do’s unlocked.”
I reached forward and pulled the portal open.
“Anybody in here?” I called. “Alonzo?”
Mouse found the light chain and a cluster of five or six two-hundred-watt bulbs flooded the squalid room, giving off a concentrated yellow glare. The space was larger than it seemed from the outside because the occupant had broken through the wall of the larger building.
There were crowded workbenches and junk piled on the floor. Nothing was painted, papered, or tiled. You could see motes of dust rising and falling on the air, illuminated by the garish light.
There was a bunk in the farthest corner.
That’s where the dead man lay.
“Shit,” Mouse muttered upon seeing the naked black corpse. “I guess the story about his dick was true.”
He was well endowed.
Other than the single maroon sock on the left foot, he was naked. There was a hole in his chest a little to the right of where his heart should have been. The grin on his lips was insincere. Maybe, I thought, it was a grimace he made trying to stay alive. His right eye was shut, as if he was winking at one last joke, but he didn’t die laughing. It was a fact that he tried to live. I could tell of his struggle by the fallen, wadded-up pillow he’d used to try to stem the flow of blood. There were pints of the vital fluid on the thin mattress and down on the concrete floor below.
“He a stupid mothahfuckah.” Mouse shook his head, sneering at the dead man.
“Why you say that?”
“He in the business like me, you know? But he do all this cowboy shit without information or any real kinda plan. You know a clean job should have no gunplay at all and at least enough for a year’s salary for every man in the crew. Griggs and his boys’d knock over a bank for twenty thousand dollars. Less.”
“He was a bank robber?”
“Not only banks.”
“Raymond, why didn’t you tell me all this before?”
“You said it was about a fight. I didn’t wanna put a live man’s business in the street. You know I’d kill somebody did that to me.”
I tried to think of something to say, some criticism, but he hadn’t failed to tell me anything that I could complain about. I wasn’t looking for a heist man.
On a rough pine wall above his death cot were tacked dozens of pictures of him being entertained by many, many naked women. Nine or so feet from the dead man was a thirty-five-millimeter Nikon camera on a tripod. A wire led from the camera to a place very near the dead man’s blood.
“Damn,” Mouse said. “I guess after fuckin’ all them women all he had to do was look at a picture and bust a nut.”
My friend was the kind of man who cracked jokes with the noose around his neck.
“I don’t think he’d given up on the flesh,” I said. “From the looks of it he was with a girl just before he got shot. He was about to snap a photo but instead caught a bullet.”
“You think she shot him while he was fuckin’ her?”
“That would be a difficult move,” I surmised.
“Maybe she had some help.”
This notion sent me to the camera, but its back had been pried open and any film was gone.
“Well, at least you fount your man,” Raymond said. “I hope he didn’t owe you no money, though. You’d have to collect it with a dump truck.”
“I don’t think this is the guy I’m lookin’ for.”
“Why not?” Mouse said. It was almost a challenge.
“The Alonzo I was hired to find had long straight hair and he’d been stabbed pretty bad a few days before—in the chest.”
“Maybe he was shot but whoever had the story figured it was a knife man done it.”
“The person who hired me was the one that stabbed him.”
“Oh.”
There was a desk beyond where the empty camera stood. It had a flex desk lamp, stacks of blank paper, and also pages with notes on them. I turned on the light and started going through papers, looking for some clue. There was a journal filled with men’s names and addresses (mostly PO boxes) along with what they liked: in the ass, regular, big titties, long dicks, and many combinations of these and others—including race, sex, size, and hair color. There was a box of nine-by-twelve envelopes on the floor addressed to men all over California and, to a lesser degree, the country.
There was an overabundance of information but nothing that resembled a hint as to why a man who should have been Craig Kilian’s victim was not.
I’d spent nearly half an hour going through the office looking for something that would connect Craig and this Alonzo. I say I was looking rather than we were because Mouse had gone outside to play with the dogs. He let them out of the pen and roughhoused with them while I searched.
I found a pair of trousers that Alonzo must have shucked off before climbing into the cot. In the right back pocket there was a thin ostrich-skin wallet that contained twenty-seven dollars, his driver’s license, three Social Security cards under different names, and a few business cards. There was also the snapshot of a young white woman in a demure pose. On the back of the photograph, in what I suspected was the dead man’s scrawl, was written DD, with an AXminister exchange phone number.
Donning a pair of cotton gloves I found in the dead man’s desk, I dialed the number on Alonzo’s phone. No one answered.
Mouse and I parted ways in the alley.
“Easy, your life is way harder’n mine and I’m what they call a career criminal,” he said before opening the door to his chartreuse Caddy.
“Thanks for helpin’, Ray.”
“Call me if the reaper at the do’, man. I like the way you do business.”
17
I stopped at a twenty-four-hour gas station on Sepulveda. The attendant filled the tank and checked the oil. He washed my windshield too. It was 12:47 in the morning but I didn’t hesitate to make the next call from a phone booth at a far corner of the lot.
“Hello?”
“Hey, Jackson.”
“Easy.” You could hear his smile over the phone.
“You up?” I asked.
“You know I am, brother. Between midnight and five a.m. is the only time I get for my personal studies.”
Jackson’s “studies” consisted of an in-depth examination of dozens of professional scientific and social-psychological journals that wrote about the latest research, inventions, and theories concerning their particular subject of interest. I once asked the cowardly genius why he’d spend so much time studying things that scientists around the world got paid for.
His answer was, “Capitalism.”
“So now you a communist?”
“No, Easy, I like my money like any other niggah do, but it’s the way we get it fucks with the flow’a knowledge.”
It always tickled me when Jackson started talking like a ghetto professor. I was reminded that understanding was not the property of any race or class, religion or revolution.
“How does an economic system fuck with what you know?”
“The production line, brothah. Man, woman, or child, you work on the production line. And when you on that line you only know your one specialized task. Attach the left front tire to the Ford; put the d
oodad in the big box. You a blind man strokin’ a elephant. And it’s not just Detroit puttin’ a car together. You work for Psychology Today an’ you prob’ly don’t know shit about the latest breakthroughs in quantum mechanics.”
Another thing I loved about Jackson was that he’d reel out some very complex notions and expect you to keep up.
“So?” I asked some years ago when we had this conversation.
“People know mo’ and mo’ every day, Ease. It’s exponential. And that mean that there’s things out there like jigsaw puzzle pieces that if you see where they connect, then you will know sumpin’ that nobody else in the world do. It’s like gold jus’ layin’ around waitin’ for somebody to pick her up.”
Jackson could give a great lecture, but that early morning I had more immediate things on my mind.
“Feather still there with you?” I asked.
“She sleep in the second guest room. You know that girl is a balm to Jewelle’s heart.”
“One of the drivers over my place will pick her up around ten,” I offered. “That okay?”
“No problem, man. Question is, are you okay?”
“Why?”
“Christmas Black dropped by my office today. He asked if I had been keepin’ up with you.”
“And what’d you say?”
“I said I’d rather chase a tornadah. I got the feelin’ that you and him were kinda mixed up in sumpin’.”
“I hope not.”
“Excuse me, mistah,” a strained voice said.
Standing outside the booth was an old black person. I wasn’t sure if it was a man or a woman. Whatever, they had their worldly belongings in a rusty supermarket cart.
“Talk to you later, Jackson.”
“You got a dollah, mistah?” the vagrant asked when I cradled the phone.
His or her skin was darker than mine and they were a full six inches shorter. The world had come down like a sledgehammer on the street drifter’s life. I recognized the damage because I’d been dodging that blow from the time I was a child.
After giving the urban nomad five bucks I called another night owl—Anatole McCourt.
The big, brawny, and beautiful Irishman was the special assistant to Melvin Suggs, who was, in turn, the real, if not the acknowledged, number two to the chief of police. Anatole stayed in the office late every night and then had his private line forwarded to his home phone after that.
“McCourt,” he answered on the first ring.
“Lieutenant.”
“Mr. Rawlins. I’ve been hearing a lot about you. Something about a stolen Rolls-Royce car.”
“You doin’ GTA now, man?”
Anatole didn’t like me very much. His early experiences as a uniform in South Central gave him the idea that the citizenry there were the enemy, in opposition to the invading army that he represented. But I don’t think he was racist. He just didn’t trust anyone who knew how to profit from flaws in the system. It was natural for him to feel that it was his job to block my progress.
“What can I do for you, Rawlins?”
“There’s a junkyard in Inglewood called Cafkin’s. I was out at the Dragon’s Eye in Hollywood and I heard somebody talkin’ ’bout how there’s a dead body out around there.”
“Murdered?”
“Dead is what they said.”
“Who said?”
“I don’t know, Lieutenant. Some white guys. I was out in the parking lot with one of the girls. We went into this little crevice she use and the men gathered round just outside and started talkin’. They didn’t see us and we waited till they were gone before coming out.”
“Did you hear a name?”
“Griggs. They said the name was Griggs.”
I liked the idea of shaking things up at the sex club/restaurant. Maybe that would help me later on. Also I wasn’t happy about leaving a murder victim moldering in his own juices.
The last call was to Asiette.
“Allô?” she said.
“Hey, baby. Did I wake you?”
“Where are you?”
“On my way home.”
“I’ll meet you at the funicular.”
Gaetano Longo stood at the base of the mountain that was my home. He was a bearish man, big and seemingly lumbering. Seemingly. I’d seen him move quick enough to catch a dancing rooster with just one grab.
“Signor Rawlins,” he said in a rumbling voice that sat on top of a growl. “It was too cold and so she stayed in the car. Feather doesn’t come.”
“She’s with her godparents.”
The Sicilian grunted and gave me a nod. He didn’t want Feather to be in trouble and he didn’t want me to bring wanton women home when the child might see or hear.
Asiette was sleeping under a blanket behind the wheel of her indigo Citroën. When I knocked on the window she opened her Liz Taylor eyes. She emerged still wrapped in the blanket. Then she opened the cloak, showing me that she wasn’t wearing anything other than a smile.
In the house she dropped the cover and pulled me to her. She looked at me with intensity and said, “I am so sorry, Easy.” Then she kissed me.
“For what?” My throat was a little constricted by the osculation.
“I was trying to make you jealous with Stefano.”
I lifted her in my arms, kissed lips and neck, shoulders and breasts.
We didn’t make it upstairs. There was a large sofa near the verandah and the koi pool. After her next campaign of kisses I tried to return the favor but was too weak to go on. She rose up over me, kissed both eyes, and said, “Dors, ma cher. I will wake you in the morning.”
But I awoke first. Lifting the blanket she brought along I looked at her body. She was a strong woman, slender but solid. Her skin was the color of cream with a few drops of vanilla extract blended in.
Asiette Moulon taught me new ways to see the world when I had thought I’d seen it all. But she was too young despite this gift of wisdom.
“Easy,” she said. “Do you want to kiss her now?”
18
Later in the morning I saw Asiette down to her French car and kissed her lightly on the lips.
“Do you forgive me?” she asked.
“Ain’t nuthin’ to forgive,” I said, reaching down into the roots of my language. “Man like me got to be ready when the woman is.”
“I love you,” she said. I don’t think she’d ever said those words before—at least not to me.
“And I you. More than you know.”
I took that bittersweet moment to drive down to the third address Craig Kilian had given me. It was an apartment house off East Olympic that had once been a mansion. There was an immense dark-needle pine tree growing in the yard and a porch that completely surrounded the front and sides of the four-story structure.
The portico was inhabited by three souls: a man of about fifty years with sixty extra pounds of belly, a sharp-featured woman who looked older than she probably was, and a girl of nineteen or twenty sitting on the banister wearing jean shorts and a tight red blouse. They were all what America calls white people.
I ascended the stairs, nodded at the congregation, and then moved toward the fancy glass-and-hardwood front door.
“Can I help you?” the man asked. He stood up from a redwood lounger and took a step in my direction.
“No,” I said honestly.
It’s too bad that frankness is not an asset in American race relations.
The man frowned and asked, “What are you doing here?”
The woman, who was short and wiry, gazed at me like a small bird eyeing an oversize grub.
“You ask everybody walks up your stairs about their business?” It would have been easier to explain the circumstances, but Easy is my name, not my nature.
“I’m asking you,” the man claimed.
Now the teenager was watching. I swear I saw her nostrils flare.
“I’m gonna walk through that front door and go to apartment three fourteen to have a friendly chat with
Craig Kilian. If you wanna try and hinder me in any way I welcome the distraction.”
That set his head up straight, like a puppy dog that had just got his first whiff of wolf.
I passed through the front door without further conversation.
The building must have once been a fabulous mansion, but the job of breaking it up into apartments was necessarily jerry-rigged. The hallway on the first floor started out wide, but then, when it turned abruptly to the left, it became a slender passage with only two apartments. The stairs had been halved in some way, making me wonder how anyone moved their furniture in. The second-floor hall consisted of two left turns. The second of these revealed a group of little kids playing various games under the watch of a woman who should not have looked that tired so early in the morning. There had been quite a bit of noise before I walked by, but silence reigned as the brood of children watched mutely until I passed. They started howling again when I turned the first tier of the third-floor stairs.
The next floor was one great empty space with eight apartment doors along the encircling walls. No one was out and there was only one door open. Intuition told me that that door belonged to Craig—intuition was right.
I knocked on the open portal and called out, “Craig?”
Taking a step inside, I saw him at the end of a longish passage. He was just standing there, barefoot, in the middle of the sparsely furnished room, staring at the floor.
“Craig.”
He looked up as I approached. When he saw me his eyes tightened. At first he was wondering if I was friend or foe, but then there came a glimmer of recognition. A wavering smile crossed his lips.
“Mr., Mr. Rawlins,” he said.
I entered the room and was immediately assaulted by a seven- or eight-pound brawny black puppy. The beast struck my shins with its paws and tongued my fingers for every lick of salt it could find.
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