“What’s your name?” I asked him.
Taking his time, marking his impossible next bet with a pencil stub, he looked up at me. That stare lasted maybe half a minute. Maybe he was still trying to pick the right horse.
“Pardlo,” he said at last. “Fenster Pardlo.”
“I’m Rawlins. Easy Rawlins.”
The name earned a brief frown from my cellmate.
“What they got you in for, brother?” he asked.
“The wrong color in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Pardlo grinned. He was missing a lower front tooth and a toothbrush. Something about his faded countenance set my teeth on edge.
“That’s funny, but I know what you mean. What they put on the arrest form?”
“Let’s just say I knew where the bodies were buried. You got anything I could read?”
He had a day-old LA Times under his stained mattress.
Reading the paper reminded me of my ex-girlfriend, Bonnie Shay. She read the LA Times and the New York Times every morning. Two or three days a week she got her hands on the original Times, the one from London. Later on she married a black African named Joguye Cham. Cham was at first royalty and then became a rebel in western Africa, fighting against American and European imperialism.
From nowhere a man began hollering piteously from a distant place outside our cell.
“I won’t do it again!” the man yelled and then he grunted from a heavy blow. “I won’t—” Another blow landed.
I couldn’t hear the thudding fists but I felt them in the man’s howls. After the beating was over the victim whimpered for some time before someone said, “If you don’t stop that snivelin’ I’m’a beat you again.”
And he did.
“Rawlins,” Pardlo said with offhanded speculation. “Easy Rawlins. You’re that guy knows Raymond Alexander, right? The one they call Mouse?”
My sympathies for the man being beaten evaporated. I cut my eyes at Pardlo but said not a word.
“I did a job with him on United California Bank three years back,” my cellmate declared.
A man can’t be proud of everything he do, Uncle Sorry once said to me. All he can hope for is to learn from his mistakes and pray he don’t do it again.
I don’t know what there was to learn when I leaped from the bed and grabbed Pardlo by his shirt. I slammed him into the wall, caught him, and then slammed him again.
“Help,” he gulped.
I hit him in the jaw with my fist and then slammed the right side of his neck with an elbow. I kneed and kicked him and then lifted him from the floor.
“Help!” he shouted, and I threw him clear across the cell.
On the floor Fenster Pardlo was grabbing at his shoe. Too little too late. I was on him with three heavy punches and then I snatched the shiv from his hand.
“Help!” he yelled again, louder than the man we’d already heard.
I pressed the metal edge against Pardlo’s throat hard enough to draw blood. My ears were hot and a rage passed through me that I hadn’t experienced in many years.
The multiracial spy looked up into my eyes with fear that went all the way down to species. There weren’t any words or bargains—just his death written on my face like a verse out of the Old Testament.
I was going to kill him. I had to kill him after all I’d been through. It was just Sorry’s gentle admonition that held me back for a second or three. Just enough time for the police to come through our cell door and throw me off.
They took the shiv and then beat me with their truncheons. But physical damage wasn’t their goal. They dragged the bleeding, banged-up, backstabbing traitor from the cell, leaving me innocent of murder through no fault of my own.
No one had come to the aid of the other man we heard being broken and brutalized. Combat was considered little more than polite conversation between inmates. But Pardlo was a spy. He was there to betray me and so fell under the protection of the law.
45
I hate the FBI. They think they’re so smart that they can’t be wrong. It’s never a mystery to them but a foregone conclusion. They were sure that I robbed the armored car and killed those guards. The only trick was to get my confession. That’s why my heart told me to kill Fenster. I didn’t have to confess. All the snitch had to do was say that I admitted to being involved in the heist and both Raymond and I would end up on the gallows telling jokes until the final punch line died on our tongues.
My heart was beating so hard that it hurt, but I didn’t have the luxury of concern.
I lay there thinking of what might be the key to the money I never possessed but that I owed still and all. The ticket on that debt was my life.
Kirkland Larker kept coming to mind. He brought my name into the mix. He sent Craig Kilian to me. He sat at Dennis Plennery’s table drinking beer, even dated Mona Strael.
Mona Strael.
A key worked its way into the lock of my cell. I hoped my new roommate was as see-through as Pardlo had been.
The door opened and Melvin Suggs came in followed by his number two. McCourt had to bow his head to make it across the threshold.
I sat up and asked, “What brings you guys here?”
“It’s a city jail,” Melvin explained. “There’s no real charge. I got a judge to kick you loose.”
“I gotta get to a phone.”
“Okay, but I already got in touch with Jackson Blue. Him and his wife and child are up on your mountaintop. Your little girl is just fine.”
The Chateau Marmont was easier getting into the second time. The doorman was a dark-skinned brother on that particular day. When I told him where I was going he just waved me by.
Bo Tierce was making drinks at a furious pace and so just smiled and nodded at me. I went on through to the small lounge, where I spied Ms. Strael talking with a paunchy middle-aged white man. While they talked I walked up and waited patiently.
After a moment or two the man turned to me. He should have been wearing Brooks Brothers gray but instead he sported a lavender ensemble that would have made any man not performing on a Las Vegas stage look ridiculous.
“Can I help you?” he asked. You could tell by the timbre of his voice that he was used to being obeyed.
“It’s the lady,” I said.
“Don’t you see us talking here?”
“I know. But it’s a question I believe she wants to hear—about a man named Kirkland Larker.”
Mona stood up.
“Excuse me, Mr. Beam,” she said. “This will only take a minute.”
Out in the carpeted hallway Strael confronted me.
“What the fuck do you mean by walkin’ in on me like that?” she demanded.
“You’d rather me send Mr. Brock?”
“I know people too,” she averred. “I could put somebody on you just as easy.”
“If that’s the way you wanna play it.”
Mona actually sneered. She looked into my eyes, imagining me not existing at all.
“Mona,” a man said. It was Mr. Beam in his garish Carnaby Street suit.
“Go away, Peter,” she said. “Just go away.”
She didn’t even look at him.
After he was gone she said, “What have I done to you?”
“Brock was after money that your friend Donata stole,” I said. “Now, because I worked for Craig a minute and a half, Brock has transferred that debt to me.”
“But you didn’t take it.”
“That’s right. And I truly do wish he had your powers of perception and objectivity. But let’s face it—that man has only two gears—to kill or to maim.”
“And what do you need from me?”
“Where Larker is and where he might think we can find the cash.”
“I can’t tell you that,” she said.
“Your funeral.” I meant it too.
I had taken maybe three steps toward the stairs when a hand grabbed my left biceps. She pulled hard enough to turn me around.
“Please,” she said. “You don’t know what that ape does to women.”
“Then help me. This is the last guy who should get what he’s after.”
“I don’t know where the money is. Plennery and Alonzo took it.”
“Where does Kirkland fit in?”
“He worked at Pitman Construction. Alonzo introduced him to Donata and from there she pulled him into whatever crimes they planned.”
“How did you get mixed up in it?” I asked. I wasn’t expecting the truth but maybe just a lie transparent enough to give some kind of hint at what might have happened.
“I thought you knew.”
“Knew what?”
“Donata was at UCLA too. She was in the actuarial sciences department. We had English Lit together and it didn’t take long before we saw that we were a lot alike. You know what I mean. Not black but . . . you know. She’d been working at the Dragon’s Eye but that was too much for her schoolwork. So I brought her here. We worked the lounge together for a few months. She did three nights a week. In the daytime she worked for Eddie’s modeling agency. When things were slow we talked. One night, a few months ago, she invited me to go out with her and her boyfriend and his white friend Kirk. She said that she thought this friend would like me and if I liked him we could have some fun.
“Her boyfriend was Alonzo but you know that. He gave me some money and we had a good time. Kirkland worked construction. Alonzo got him to get him and his friend Plennery jobs on the yard. A little while after that they pulled him into some kind of robbery they planned. I didn’t know what. I thought maybe they’d steal and sell some heavy equipment.
“Kirk and Alonzo were kinda kinky, you know. Switching partners and takin’ pictures. They had some good cocaine and our semester was over so I really wanted to let go a little.”
Mona stopped talking for a while, her face expressing the bittersweet memories of sex and drugs somehow translating into relief.
“What was your part in the thefts?” I asked then.
“Nothing really. Roxanna wanted to bring Craig out on a double date with me and her and Kirk. We went to that big restaurant at the LA airport.”
“Why?”
“Roxie uses people. That’s how she got Kirk to get Craig to hire you.”
“But what would I have had to do with it?”
“Roxie knew that Craig would just get hurt and she really liked the kid. She moved to the house over on the Westside and told Kirk that she’d cut him in on the money if he made it so that Craig would go on a, you know, on a false trail.”
“So I’m the decoy?”
“You didn’t know anything. Kirk thought that you’d run Craig in circles long enough that he could get his hands on the money and run.”
“Larker knew where the money was?”
“They knew that it was on one of the lots of the Pitman Construction Company. At least that’s what he told Roxie.”
“But it wasn’t true?” A cold breeze seemed to come down that hallway. It wasn’t real but I think Mona Strael felt it too.
Mona brought both hands to the sides of my jaw and peered deeply into my eyes. We held that gaze for long seconds.
“Roxie kinda liked Craig,” she said at last, “but he was crazy for her. That’s just the way it was. Craig was a good guy. He was immature but he was a man too. That’s why someone could push hard on him but he wouldn’t break. That’s why he’d rather get shot than tell where Roxie was.”
I had different notions about the young vet’s demise. In my mind, Brock and a pet thug or two came in on him with guns out. That triggered the kid’s shell shock and he shifted into battle mode. He had practiced hand to hand on some of the best in the world—the Vietcong. That meant that he could inflict serious damage in the shortest possible time.
When push came to shove Brock had to kill him. And once the shots were fired, he and his men had to go instead of searching the apartment. He had just enough time to go through the kid’s pockets and come up with my card.
“So,” I said. “Kirkland is smart enough not to tell Craig what’s what but he does tell you?”
“And I don’t wanna have nuthin’ to do with it,” Mona swore. “I wanna be a lawyer with an office and businessmen clients. I don’t wanna run off with that white boy on stolen money. I’m not like Roxie.”
“You could have just turned Kirkland away,” I suggested. “You could have said no.”
“Say no to a man who killed people as a profession over in Vietnam? A man who’s got armored car money and a gangster’s money too? Say no to a man that says he stole that money for me?”
Mona’s beautiful face had tied itself into a sour knot. I felt for her.
“He said that?” I asked. “He stole it for you?”
“Yes.”
Kirk used to say that she was his golden ticket. Said she could get him through any door; that’s what the bomb-blasted bartender, Meanie, told me that Kirkland had said about Mona. It wasn’t exactly corroboration—but it was close.
“Tell me something, Miss Strael.”
“What?”
“Would you mind if Kirkland gets into trouble over this shit?”
“No,” she said without hesitation. “Not in the least.”
“He told you that he had the money?”
“He said that he could get it anytime he wanted but he was safe from harm because he didn’t know where it was.”
“He had it but he didn’t know where it was,” I parroted. “You got somewhere you could go outta town? A relative or somethin’?”
“Yes. Up in Oakland. My aunt Maude.”
“Anybody down here know about her?”
Mona concentrated a long moment and then shook her head.
“No,” she said again.
“Nobody. You sure? Not no friend or cousin or ex-boyfriend.”
“Maude’s my mother’s sister, but Mama passed.”
I waited a few moments while Mona let the severity of her truths sink in.
Then I said, “Go up there right now, tonight. Tell Bo that your sister’s sick down south and you have to go to her. Tomorrow morning take a leave from school if you have to. Tell them that your grandmother died. Gimme a number to call you and I will when this is all over.”
It was a sign of how scared Mona was that she didn’t voice one complaint. Eleven minutes after my offer she was gone from the Chateau Marmont for good.
The hotel still had those fancy phone booths where you could sit down and shutter yourself in for privacy. I dialed a number and allowed it to ring at least thirty times.
“He’o?” she answered at last.
“Lola, go splash some water on your face and then come back and talk to me.”
“Ho’on,” she gasped.
Maybe three minutes passed.
“What do you want, Easy? Is it about Craig?”
It was her question that resolved the data that flitted around in my mind like confetti.
“You said that Craig used to go up to Blood Grove with that old boyfriend of yours, right?”
“That’s right.”
“Did he ever store stuff up there?”
I could hear her breath through the receiver; great huffs of reluctant air.
“Maybe,” she said after six or seven bellows’ worth. “It was, um, it was where they kept farm equipment.”
“Farm equipment?”
“Yeah, yeah. Not tractors and stuff but little things like pruning shears and long sticks with tin cans on the end to pick oranges with. It was like a, like a little shed. When he was little Craig used to play that it was his fort. Why? Did he leave me something there?”
“Do you know where this shed’s at?”
“I never went out exploring. The men did that.”
By the time I got out of the booth Mona was gone. Bo told me that she had a sick uncle down south and had to go help him. I don’t think he believed the story but he knew my business well enough to start practicing the lie.<
br />
I got cozy in the phone booth again and dialed a number I knew well.
46
“Hi, Daddy,” she said. “Where are you?”
“At the end of this case,” I said. “I’ll be home for the rest of the summer, I promise.”
“Then can we go on a vacation?”
“Sure. Where would you like to go?”
“San Francisco. Uncle Milo says that it’s just amazing up there.”
“We’ll make plans day after tomorrow.”
“Okay. Daddy, I’m tired. I think I have to go back to bed.”
“You do that, honey. I’ll see you later on.”
Jackson got on the line after that.
“What’s happenin’, Brother Easy?”
“You busy?”
Somewhere around 2:00 a.m. Jackson Blue pulled his indigo-colored Jaguar up in front of P9 headquarters.
I was parked across the street when he arrived. He was wearing tan workpants and a white T-shirt that had seen more than its share of wear. I crossed over to meet him. Just as my foot hit the curb a police cruiser pulled up behind the dark, dark blue Jag.
“Keep your hands where we can see them,” one of the cops said. They both had pistols out as they exited the squad car.
Palms up next to his ears, Jackson greeted them: “Evenin’, officers.”
“Keep quiet,” one of the cops ordered.
They were on us but that was nothing new. What was different was that Jackson showed no fear.
“What are you doing here?” the first cop asked me. He was five eight in lifts and the color of butterfat-rich French vanilla ice cream. His eyes glittered.
“Doin’ research,” I answered honestly.
“You want me to go upside your head, boy?”
“Excuse me, officers,” Jackson said. “My name is Blue and I’m senior vice president of P9 North America. I have identification right here in my hand.”
My friend brought his right hand down slowly. When his arm was parallel to the ground I saw that he was holding some kind of identity card.
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