Blood Grove

by Walter Mosley

  In my sports coat and slacks she identified me as someone who was either lost or a threat. But Terry told his guests that they had to be polite to everyone.

  “I’m Easy Rawlins. Terry’s expecting me.” I wanted to push that child aside and rush to my daughter but I had been raised on southern manners, so I stood still waiting for her to process what I’d said.

  “Oh,” she said. “I know about you. You’re that detective guy.” She said this and then stared.

  “Can I come in?”

  “Um. Sure. I guess.”

  When she stood aside I hurried across the foyer into the living room. I was headed for the kitchen but that took some fancy footwork. There were at least a dozen sleeping and partially conscious hippies spread out across the floor in sleeping bags, under blankets, and propped up on piles of clothing and knapsacks.

  “Excuse me, excuse me,” I said, using my hips as well as my knees to take steps forward and to the side, between arms and legs, hands and feet.

  “Ow!” one big man shouted, though I was pretty sure I hadn’t stepped on him.

  Bounding to his feet, the long-haired, bearded man confronted me. He was in his middle twenties, big-bellied, and wild-eyed. His black T-shirt read CRAZY HOGG in bone-white letters.

  “What the fuck?!” Crazy said.

  I held my hands out to the side—palms up; an invitation anywhere on Earth.

  Mr. Hogg looked at me and his first name shifted to Sensible.

  “Excuse me if I stepped on you,” I said. “That was not my intention.”

  The kitchen was empty so I went straight through the side door leading to the backyard.

  There I came upon active hippies. Two lean-muscled, long-haired young men were stripped to the waist playing badminton for an audience of three naked reclining girls sunning their skins. My daughter and her uncle Milo were sitting in half lotus with another young woman under a huge avocado tree, heavy with fruit. The young woman was wearing an iridescent gold halter and bright red pants. She was in the middle of taking an epic hit off of a fat joint. This she handed to my little girl.

  I held my breath.

  Feather took the hand-rolled cigarette and passed it to Milo without pause.

  I hadn’t realized that there was murder in my heart until it evaporated. Just then Feather looked up and saw me.

  “Daddy!”

  I took a moment to breathe and then smiled.

  Walking past the naked and semi-naked hippies, I was so relieved that nothing about the case I was chasing bothered me.

  Love is a powerful balm.

  The woman sitting with my daughter and her uncle rolled up onto her feet with such ease that you had to appreciate her strength. She was blond-haired with a big toothy smile, almost as tall as I, with eyes like gray diamonds. She wasn’t so much beautiful as handsome in the extreme.

  Feather hugged me and said, “This is Dagmar, Daddy. She’s from Boulder, Colorado. She says that the college there is one of the best.”

  I held out a hand and the Coloradan shook it.

  “Hi,” she said, looking directly into my eyes. It felt as if she saw all the way to the soul. “You have a really great energy.”

  “You some kinda athlete?”

  “Rock climber.”

  “Glad to meet you,” I said. And that was the truth.

  I greeted my daughter’s uncle and suggested that the three of us go to lunch down at the Hamburger Hamlet.

  “. . . I was surprised myself that she came to Terry’s,” Milo was saying.

  He’d ordered a burger with avocados, Muenster cheese, raw onions, and thick slices of beefsteak tomato. Feather got a salad and I had water.

  “You know,” Milo went on, “when she called and said she was coming down I thought that you’d be with her. It’s some heavy shit comes down at Terry’s. Not a place you’d want a kid alone.”

  “If you don’t mind, watch your language around my daughter,” I said.

  That got a look from Milo. Hippies were rarely asked to watch what they said, and me claiming Feather as mine might have bothered him too.

  “I’m almost grown, Daddy.”

  “Almost being the operant word.”

  Feather harrumphed but she couldn’t repress her smile. She was happy to be with Milo and me. It felt to her like family.

  After lunch I thanked Milo for taking care of my daughter. He had assured me that he’d never let her do dope until she was out of the house. He went back to Terry’s and I drove Feather home to Brighthope.

  “So what were you thinking when Dagmar handed you that marijuana cigarette?” I asked as we cruised down Sunset.

  “What happened to your Rolls-Royce, Daddy?”

  “I lent it to John.”

  “John Malcolm?”

  “John the bartender. Are you gonna answer my question?”

  “I don’t know. I know you don’t want me to smoke. But I really wanted to talk to Uncle Milo. And Dagmar had been playing badminton and came over to talk. She had the joint and shared it with him.”

  “I don’t want you going down to that house anymore. It’s too much for a young girl like you.”

  “Okay.”

  Okay. I wanted her to tell me that she’d never do drugs, drink alcohol, have sex, never leave home, and that she would stay my child forever. But all I could hope for was okay.

  29

  Within the first week of moving into Roundhouse I installed a telephone in a waterproof tin box on the roof. That way I could commune with my roses and talk business in a place that was private.

  There I made a call.

  The phone rang twelve times before I hung up. I waited a minute or two, then dialed the number again. Still no answer.

  There was a new number folded on a slip of paper in my wallet. I hadn’t thought that I’d ever use it, but now that Feather was safe my mind was back on the case. I felt a sense of urgency because looking for Donata Delphine felt like sitting at the bottom of a deep hole that was threatening to cave in.

  “Hello,” she said in her sexy, throaty, act right or I might kill you voice.

  “Hey, Lihn.”

  “Easy. Where’d you get . . . Oh, sure.” She shouted, “Raymond!” Then in a normal tone, “He’ll be here in a minute, Easy.”

  It was an odd interchange. Lihn felt like an old friend from down home, someone who, with just a few words, you understood and who understood you.

  “Hey, Easy,” Mouse said before that feeling about Lihn could adapt into understanding. “What’s happenin’?”

  “I called your house first, but nobody was home.”

  “Etta gone to take care’a her cousin Jillian. You know Jill up north in Richmond workin’ for the post office. But she got the pneumonia and is laid up.”

  “So you moved in with Lihn?”

  “We went to a magic show last night, man. Brothah, that shit was crazy.”

  Raymond Alexander only gave simple answers out of the muzzle of a gun or off the edge of a knife.

  “I think I might need a little help, Ray.”

  “That’s a happy coincidence,” he said. “I might need a little sumpin’ from you too.”

  “Hold tight and I’ll call back soon.” I cradled the receiver and for maybe eleven seconds I wondered about the term happy coincidence. Then I dragged my daughter down to my borrowed car and drove.

  “Where we goin’, Daddy?”

  “Jackson’s house.”

  “Why can’t I stay at home?”

  “I might not get home on time and then all I’d do is worry.”

  Little Anzio wasn’t very crowded at that time of day. Only the bartender and three men sitting at a far table inhabited the down-at-heel saloon. The men were speaking loudly but their words were incoherent, suffering from alcohol, three lifetimes of cigarette smoke, and the fact that each one was trying to outtalk the other.

  The skinny lad named Meanie was still bartending, but due to a lack of active customers he wa
s sitting on a barstool reading the LA Times.

  “How you doin’?” I greeted him.

  He stared at me quizzically for a moment and then said, “Oh yeah, you’re that guy from the other day. The one Bernard tried to brain with that Coke bottle.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What can I get ya?”

  “You keep any schnapps back there?”

  Meanie grinned and said, “European theater?”

  “Yeah.”

  “All you boys that marched into Germany got a taste for their liquor and their women.” He folded the paper and stood up straight. “I got this raspberry stuff in the fridge out back. Won’t take a minute.”

  He left through a side door and I turned my back to the bar. The men in the corner were happily shouting. I was engulfed by one of those beatific moments, certain that everything would be all right for the next few minutes. It was that peaceful lull soldiers experience in wartime. Nobody was shooting at you right then and orders from behind the lines were to hold your position. Maybe there was a letter from home in your pocket or some cards or dominoes coming out of a buddy’s backpack.

  Those oases of calm between battles were moments of grace rarely paralleled in peacetime.

  “Here you go, Mr. Rawlins,” Meanie said.

  He’d returned to his post behind the bar having served up three fingers of the clear liquor in a squat whiskey glass.

  I took a sip. It was sweet and chilly on the tongue but savory and warm going down.

  “Pretty damn good.”

  Meanie smiled.

  “You remember my name,” I said.

  “That’s a bartender’s job. Remembering drinks, names, and tabs.”

  I looked at the young man. Slender, he’d probably been in shape at one time, but now his only exercise came from those duties the bar demanded. When he moved there seemed to be a hitch involved. Like if he swiveled to pick up a bottle with his left hand, the right shoulder resisted a moment before falling into the flow.

  “Vietnam?” I asked.

  “Yeah.” He blinked and nodded.

  “What you do over there?”

  “Same thing. The men in my family been tending bar since they were called taverns and decent women weren’t allowed. I was the daytime bartender in the American officers’ club in Saigon.”

  “That where you got wounded?”

  Meanie took in a deep breath and nodded.

  “In Saigon. Not the club, though,” he said. “We was out whorin’ at this hotel they called Big Fish. They served real bourbon and had the finest bar girls in the city. They only played American and English rock ’n’ roll on the jukebox and after a few drinks the war seemed like it was about ten thousand miles away. The girl I was with was called, um, uh, Duyen. Yeah, Duyen.

  “By the time we were through it was way after curfew. On top of that a midnight convoy was crossing the street and stopped us up for at least five minutes. Marcus was riding shotgun. I was in the back behind the driver, a Mexican guy called Ernesto. This kid come up next to the car. He couldn’ta been no more than ten, eleven. He asked Marcus for a buck. That’s what he said, ‘Gives us a buck, Mistah Yankee. Gives us a buck . . .’ ”

  Meanie stopped talking for a few seconds, his eyes piercing the veil of time. History unfolded before that gaze. It wasn’t good or bad, right or wrong—just a series of events that were as certain as if they had been carved in bone.

  “When Marcus reached into his vest pocket, Lance, the guy to my right, said, ‘Don’t give that little gook shit, Marky. He probably . . .’ That’s when the kid slung this canvas bag he had through the air. It smacked down between Ernesto and Marcus. We all hollered. The kid was makin’ tracks. I saw a white light but didn’t hear the explosion, didn’t hear it, but all my friends were dead.”

  That was the sole purpose of Little Anzio. Vets could tell their stories plainly without pity or disdain. They didn’t even have to hate anymore; just feel the ride and honor the sacrifice.

  “How you like that schnapps, Mr. Rawlins?” Meanie asked.

  “Tastes like springtime in Bavaria.”

  Meanie grinned but that wasn’t the end of it. A story like he told was a gift and it was expected among our tribe to tell your tale—like throwing another log on an eternal flame.

  “We were among the first soldiers to march into Auschwitz-Birkenau,” I said as if responding to a question. “My buddy was a black boy from Charleston, South Carolina, named Oliver Sams. That was at the end of the war and the army had been integrated by attrition. So many whites and blacks had been killed or wounded that we had to come together to make up our companies and squads. We filed past hundreds of living skeletons with the dead piled around them and lying at their feet. The smell of rotting human flesh was strong.

  “After the victims we marched by the officers. The commandant was in a wheelchair. He was out of it. But his number two was in full SS dress uniform standing at attention. He was sneering at us dirty GIs. But what did we care? We’d already won the war.

  “The problem was that we were the first two black soldiers to pass the number two. When he saw me and Oliver he said, ‘Nigger,’ almost like he was a redneck from Mississippi. Oliver stopped and said, ‘What did you say?’ and the number two repeated the word. I watched while my buddy’s hand went to his pistol. He asked what maybe half a dozen times until that gun was in his hand and pointed at the SS man. The German repeated the word and Oliver shot him in the chest somewhere. The Nazi went down on one knee and Oliver took a step toward him. He asked the German what one more time. With gaspin’ breath he said, ‘Nigger,’ and Oliver emptied the clip into him.”

  Meanie had poured me another few fingers of schnapps. I took a sip and again it tasted like spring.

  “When I think about that day I remember the roar that came from the skeletons, the men and women that had seen that man murder thousands of them. They cheered his death. But what got to me was that not one American, black or white, tried to stop Oliver. And Oliver couldn’t’ve stopped himself for love nor money. That whole camp—from the Jewish survivors to that SS man who just couldn’t keep his mouth shut—none of us could do any different.”

  After a few minutes of Meanie cleaning, me sipping, and the men in the corner laughing at one thing or another, Meanie asked, “They said that you were askin’ about Craig Kilian the other day.”

  “Craig’s dead.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. He was shot in his own apartment. Anyway he hired me to find a guy named Alonzo and a woman, probably going by the name Donata Delphine.”

  “You still lookin’?”

  “I took his money.”

  “But there’s nobody to report to.”

  “I like to do the jobs I’m asked to do. That way I feel a sense of accomplishment even if it was all for nothing.”

  The barkeep considered my words in deep self-reflection.

  “Well,” he said. “I don’t know those names, but Kirkland Larker and Craig been thick as thieves for the past two months. If anybody knows, Kirk does.”

  I was thinking about the phrase thick as thieves when I asked, “What’s Larker’s thing?”

  “He got drummed outta the army four years back. Two and a half of them he spent in Leavenworth.”

  “For what?”

  “Thievery. They gave him a dishonorable discharge so the regular VA didn’t like him but he had some friends in the bar. Seems like he was a pretty good soldier when he was out in the field.”

  I showed Meanie the picture Brock gave me, the shot of Donata Delphine.

  “You ever seen her?”

  Meanie shook his head. “No. But Larker had a girl. Real pretty black girl. She dressed fine and filled out those clothes like nobody’s business. Kirk used to say that she was his golden ticket. Said she could get him through any door.”

  “You remember her name?”

  “Yeah. It was an odd one. Mona Strael. I remember because I asked where the name Str
ael came from and she said, ‘Outta thin air.’ ”

  30

  I sat around Little Anzio until closing time, which was 2:00 a.m. I was hoping for Kirkland Larker to show but he never did. Still, I sipped schnapps slowly and talked to anyone who drifted my way. Because I was buying the drinks most everyone took up temporary residence on a stool next to mine. In that way I learned a little bit.

  A guy named Mike told me that Larker offered to help get him a job somewhere.

  “You remember where?” I asked.

  “Not really. It sounded kinda chinky. You know I used to scuba dive near Seoul. But one day I was down there and I saw about ten thousand shrimp swarming a corpse. They’d been at that guy for so long that he was no more than a raggedy skeleton . . .”

  A man calling himself Captain Fell told me, “Kilian and Larker are malingerers,” and that he expected both men to end up in front of a firing squad.

  I didn’t enlighten him as to Craig’s end. I guess I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction.

  It was almost 3:00 in the morning when I pulled up to the Dragon’s Eye. Through the alley on the right side of the establishment was the parking lot. I really had no plan in mind. Feather was at Jackson Blue’s and the two bars were the only places I knew that my quarries might have been.

  There were about half a dozen cars spaced out around the lot. Sounds of something akin to love came from a couple of them. I walked the perimeter, stopped in a dark corner to brood for a quarter hour or so, then headed back for my car. I was just about to put the key in the ignition when I saw Montana coming from around the side of the building followed by a blowsy businessman. She was pulling him by one finger as he staggered behind.

  “Montana,” I called.

  “Oh. Hi, baby.”

  “Who the fuck are you?” the businessman demanded. He wore a blue suit that sizzled in the electric light. He was burnished tan and carried about thirty-five pounds more than a doctor would advise. Maybe at his office that extra weight was seen as strength. But in a back alley it didn’t mean a damn thing.