Blood Grove

by Walter Mosley

  Pitman’s mien was rueful sorrow. In a bind for quick cash, he said yes when it should have been no.

  I knew that moment all too well. Most black men of my generation do; men born as second-class citizens, living third-class lives. The grandsons, great-grandsons, and great-great-grandsons of slaves. Those men would be sitting around a card table late at night drinking hard liquor for temporary relief of the pain that hard lives and hard labor bring. They talk about sex first and then naturally come to discuss their children and those children’s mothers. On some nights, like the one Pitman was remembering, the men who didn’t have good mothering, who didn’t listen in the pews to what the minister was laying between the lines, who didn’t believe in law because they had never been the recipients of justice—those men crossed a line in their minds. One of them says, why not? Why not do that thing that they think we do anyway? Maybe it’s stealing a bag of coal that won’t be missed or allowing that beautiful white daughter to enter when she comes knocking. Maybe it’s running your car over some soused-up peckerwood stumbling down a country road in the dark of night, alone.

  Why not is the question and most often drunken oblivion is the answer. But sometimes, sometimes you wake up in the morning with that question still in your mind. Why not? They took everything else. Why not take something precious that’s theirs?

  That’s how it starts and most often it’s the beginning of the end. Pitman knew all these things in that long tunnel of silence he was in. I knew it too. The guards were kidnapped, probably killed. That’s a capital crime; that’s shackles, bars, brutalization, forced labor, and a sudden return to the lives of our ancestors.

  Pitman was a white man but he knew these truths as clearly as any descendant of slavery. He cleared his throat mightily.

  “What are you getting at?” he wheezed.

  “Come on, man,” I said. “Alonzo, Plennery, and a man named Ketch offered you some thousands of dollars to let them use a big truck and maybe to store it someplace. You might have convinced yourself that it was just a truck but you know that when the cops get hold of it, you will be on trial too. You’ll be up in Q with the niggers and spics, more aware of bein’ a white man than you have ever been in your life.”

  Pitman began to sweat. It was like I had become the narrator of his nightmares. His breath was labored and his rage transformed to despair.

  “Look,” Pitman said, trying to wrest back control. “We were workin’ on a block of new row houses down in Compton. We got a steel-gated work area down there with a double-reinforced series of storage units inside meant for construction vehicles. Plennery told me that I could make um, some, some money if I filled out the paperwork for him to drive one of those vehicles with Alonzo as the nighttime guard.”

  “What kind of vehicle?” I asked.

  “I left that blank on the request form.”

  “What else did they need?”

  “One of the storage units for the more expensive equipment. Yeah. One’a the lockups.”

  “And what’s in there now?”

  “Nuthin’. I looked just a few days ago. There wasn’t nuthin’ there.”

  43

  We all—Starr, Pitman, myself, and a company jack-of-all-trades named Bob Bester—took a ride out to Compton in the golden limousine. The chauffeur had turned on the air-conditioning, but sweat dripped off Pitman’s brow anyway. He didn’t want to be in that car. I couldn’t blame him.

  Starr had called a special connection he had at city hall to tell them what he expected to find at the Compton installation. I called Anatole and Melvin but they were out together on a triple homicide that happened in Hollywood the night before.

  Nineteen sixty-nine was an interesting year. There was strong anti-war action from the colleges and universities and all kinds of black political insurgence. The sleeping giant of white guilt was awakening and there seemed to be some kind of hope for the future. If you were innocent enough, or ignorant enough, you might have believed that things were improving in such a way that all Americans could expect a fair shake.

  But of my many flaws, neither innocence nor ignorance played a part. We were on our way to the scene of a movable crime; a crime committed by black men. I was already guilty simply because of the color of my skin. It was even worse because my brethren had committed the crime. My head would be considered for the chopping block no matter how guilty the liberals on the Westside, or in Washington, felt.

  I was as frightened as Rinaldo, but he didn’t have the great luck of being on the battlefields of World War II. The fear of being huddled in a foxhole with two-hundred-pound shells exploding all around gave the beating heart perspective that no peacetime experience could equal.

  The Compton installation was even larger than its Valley counterpart. We pulled in through double gates and drove the equivalent of a block and a half to a triple-gated area where a dozen or more storage areas were used for cargo, construction paraphernalia, and, of course, earth-moving vehicles. The storage units were constructed from iron slabs that formed the walls and roofs for containment. Starr wasn’t fooling around protecting the tools of his trade.

  “It’s twenty-six-A,” Rinaldo said when we exited the car. “But like I told you, there’s nothing there.”

  We walked down one path, turned left on another, then went quite a ways to get to 26A.

  There was a huge, complex lock at the center of the garage-like door of the unit. The metal door was slatted, fifteen feet in width and twice that in height.

  Bob Bester went up to the lock. He was maybe five ten, with a thatch of white hair, the gait of a male ballet dancer, and a grin that was irrepressible. He was a strongly built man, like an old-school middleweight with some pop.

  He took a crazy-looking keychain from a pocket and used six or seven odd-looking devices on the door. After these machinations a small slat slid open. Bob stuck his arm in up to the elbow, did some kind of blind manipulation, then yanked his hand out. A few seconds after that the slatted wall began to rise, each iron plank folding neatly and loudly into the one above.

  This revealed a big empty garage with a dirt floor.

  “You see? You see, I told you. There’s nothing here,” Rinaldo said. “I never saw nothing either. I don’t know what they did.”

  Pitman was right as far as any vehicle or object was concerned, but there was something there: a weak scent. An odor with which I was quite familiar.

  “There any units out here that don’t get opened very often?” I asked Bob Bester.

  That man might have been some kind of genius. He looked at me with gray eyes that were almost white. Slowly understanding filled those glossy orbs. Then he nodded, giving me a little smirk.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah. The hazardous materials containment unit. That’s where we keep explosives, corrosives, and stockpile toxic waste.”

  “Why don’t we go over and take a look in there?” I suggested.

  This unit was smaller, protected by yet another iron barrier.

  Bob Bester performed his magic and the garage door lifted. The pall that flowed out caused the two men to cough. Pitman, who was already in a heightened state of distress, actually vomited.

  Bester handed me a handkerchief upon which he had drizzled a few drops of camphor. Putting this over my mouth and nose, I walked into the dim cavern.

  The armored car was there. The back door was closed but the lock had been broken. The three guards were in different parts of the otherwise empty vehicular safe. They had fallen where they were shot.

  A bright light suddenly illuminated the scene I was already trying to forget. You could see clearly that the dead men were decomposing where they lay. Foul-smelling puddles had formed under each one of the deflated bodies.

  “Nobody move!” a voice boomed.

  Eight or nine men in unfamiliar uniforms were rushing in. They toted serious-looking rifles. The invaders would have been frightening if it wasn’t for the fact of the smell of death. Try as they might, the arme
d troops could not hold their rifles steady when their lungs filled with the miasma of the dead.

  The heavily armed cops were from San Bernardino. A special military-like team of officers that our mayor had let in, in order for them to find the men who took their armored car and its guards.

  They identified Leon Starr, shook his hand, and told everyone that they had to wait in an office that could be locked—everyone except me, whom they clapped in chains and dragged off to yet another room.

  “What was your job in the heist?” the mustachioed young man who led the strike team asked. His name was Borland and he had no patience with trash like me.

  “I’m working with the LAPD, brother,” I said. “I’m the one who located the car.”

  He slapped me hard enough to hurt an office worker. For somebody of my persuasion it was just the promise of things to come.

  “The fact that you knew where it was proves that you’re one of the gang,” he said.

  “It proves that I have a logical mind.”

  He used his fist that time. I was seated on a three-legged stool and so fell to the concrete floor.

  “Get up!” Borland yelled.

  My hands were cuffed behind my back but I knew from the timbre of his shout that he didn’t give a damn about my restraint.

  I staggered to my feet and he gave me an uppercut to the gut.

  “Stop that this minute!” a familiar voice commanded.

  Behind Borland and his two assistants were Anatole, Melvin, and four LAPD uniforms.

  Borland turned his head to regard them, then swiveled back and socked me on the jaw.

  I was on the floor when Anatole McCourt took the three steps that brought him from the door to Borland. The blow the Irish cop threw was so fast and so hard that my torturer had to be unconscious before he hit the concrete.

  44

  I don’t think there had ever been another moment in my life where I felt so much glee and so much pain at the same time. McCourt lifted me to my feet with one hand—he was that strong.

  “One of you men get him out of these cuffs,” he barked at Borland’s officers.

  The command was obeyed immediately because Anatole was not the kind of man you ignored.

  Suggs was at my side holding my left arm. I guess I was a little unsteady on my pins.

  “What’s going on here?” Suggs asked the man working to unlock my chains.

  “Nigger knew where the armored car and the dead men were,” the guy behind me said.

  Anatole gave the man a questioning look.

  “What did you say?” the head cop asked.

  “We knew that the, that the crew was nig—was Negroes and this one knew where the car was hid. He musta known we were closin’ in and figured to get to the money before we did.”

  “But you said that there wasn’t any money,” Melvin challenged.

  My hands came free and the cop behind me backed away.

  And then a really amazing thing happened.

  Borland climbed to his feet and Anatole hit him again! The jab traveled no more than six inches but the San Bernardino cop collapsed in a heap. Anatole turned his head toward the other out-of-town cops, daring them to complain.

  They had nothing to say.

  Rinaldo Pitman was arrested, charged with conspiracy, and held over for other, yet-to-be-filed charges.

  When the three of us were alone in the unit boss’s office Anatole McCourt asked, “Why weren’t they questioning him?” It was unclear if he was addressing his question to his boss or me.

  “He just saw three of his uniformed white brothers dead in probably the worst way he could imagine,” I said. “And there I was, of the race that slaughtered them. He was just gettin’ his pound’a flesh.”

  “But you didn’t do it,” Anatole said.

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  “It always matters.”

  “So what you got for us, Easy?” Melvin interrupted.

  “This isn’t even the case I signed up for,” I told the cop, once again treading water, guarding myself from men who didn’t see themselves as threats. “Like I told you already, Craig Kilian thought he stabbed a black man named Alonzo.”

  “Only the guy’s name was Reynolds Ketch,” Anatole interjected.

  “Probably, yeah. The three of them—Ketch, Griggs, and Plennery—did the heist.”

  “Who’s Plennery?”

  “He’s the third heist man.”

  “And where’s he now?”

  “In your jail system somewhere. He assaulted a citizen and then a cop. Him and Griggs worked for the construction company so they could get a truck big enough to move the armored car. They planned on taking the car here and hiding it so the police would think the guards ran off with the money themselves; at least that’s the way it looks to me. Even with the witness the plan would have probably worked if I wasn’t trying to find that girl for Craig.”

  “That Donna somethin’,” Melvin said, nodding. “Where’s she now?”

  “Donata Delphine, also known as Roxanna Coors.”

  “Yeah,” Melvin said. “Her.”

  “Only things I can tell you about Delphine is where she wasn’t. She ran away from Alonzo, her job, and LA as far as I know.” I hoped Mel couldn’t tell I was lying. Luckily I got a little help from his subordinate.

  “You have that friend,” Anatole stated. “That Raymond Alexander.”

  “Yeah?”

  “He’s known nationwide as a heist man.”

  “Alleged heist man.”

  “This is a heist.”

  “This is a travesty,” I said. “Any good thief worth his salt would never go after a payload under half a million. Too many men and moving parts.”

  “Let’s get back to Delphine,” Melvin said.

  “Commander Suggs,” a strong voice declared.

  At first I was happy for the interruption. Melvin could smell that Roxanna/Donata was the linchpin of the crime. And even though I’d already given him what he wanted, he was still a cop and wouldn’t let any detail slide.

  When I turned to see who it was who spoke I was mildly surprised. He was a tall, skinny man in an olive-colored suit, tan shirt, and no tie. Eggshell white, he had a military haircut and sallow cheeks. His eyes were ten percent larger than would be expected and his face was smaller than it should have been.

  For all his deformities this man projected confidence and intensity.

  “Yeah?” Melvin replied.

  “Joe Cox,” the new player said. He walked forward, extending a hand for Mel to shake. “FBI. We’re taking your prisoner.” There was no ask in his deep voice.

  The armored car was moving money between banks. And banks were the province of the federal government. With that thought in mind I was already beginning to miss Officer Borland and his brigade of San Bernardino bullies.

  Mel told Cox that I was not a prisoner but rather a confidential informant they’d used to find the armored car and its hijackers. That just made it easier for the feds to detain me.

  I was chained again and dragged off to a more or less nondescript black Ford sedan.

  Special Agent Cox and his minion, Special Agent Donahue, had staked out an interrogation room at the downtown LAPD precinct, made available to them by the mayor.

  “What was your job in the crew?” Cox asked.

  I was continually impressed by that deep voice emanating from such a thin body.

  “I was looking for a man that my client thought he might have grievously injured,” I said for the fifth or sixth time. “He thought the man’s name was Alonzo but really it was Reynolds Ketch. Both men are now deceased. It was only after the fact that I realized they were involved with the armored car job.”

  “The police reports say that your client,” Donahue said, “was also involved in the robbery.”

  “Maybe he was. I don’t know. I was informed of that theory after my client had been murdered.”

  Donahue was a big son of a bitch. Not Anatole’s siz
e but an intimidating presence still and all. It was a toss-up whom he disliked more—me or skinny Cox.

  “Where’s the money?” Cox asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Who ordered the murder of the guards?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “You understand that the federal government is not afraid of exercising the death penalty.”

  “Half the people on the street where I was raised were of the same mind.”

  These questions and maybe six or seven like them occupied every moment of every hour that I was shackled to a chair in that room.

  The interrogation lasted seven or eight hours. I wasn’t allowed to go to the toilet nor was I given any water, which, thinking back on it, was probably a good thing. I was physically uncomfortable but what bothered me was that they wouldn’t let me make a phone call. Feather would be worried.

  When Cox and Donahue gave up for the day I was transferred to a holding cell in the basement of police headquarters.

  “I’d like to make a call,” I asked the police escort the FBI agents turned me over to.

  They didn’t speak; just brought me to a steel door painted lime green. The door opened, seemingly of its own accord, and the silent cops pushed me through.

  There was a prisoner already in the room, sprawled out on one of two cots and reading a Santa Anita racing form.

  Hope springs eternal.

  He looked up from his studies and said, “This here is my bed.”

  I sat on the other and looked around the eight-by-ten cell while my roommate read.

  Prison is many things. It’s a daily challenge to survive, a self-contained community awash with potential allies and enemies, and anger, even hatred, so deep that it would have warmed the cockles of hell.

  My cellmate was a tan-colored man, his face containing the elements of many races. He was once handsome but a hard life had worn down his features until they only hinted at some underlying humanity.