Little Green

by Walter Mosley

  “So he can go up?” the guard asked Graham.

  “I … I guess so.”

  “Come,” the young Frenchwoman said to me.

  “It is so beautiful in California,” she said as we waited for the executive elevator half a block or so away from the front desk. “Too bad people like Loring Graham cannot count their blessings instead of trying to be bosses all the time.”

  The silvery doors slid open.

  One thing I liked about Proxy Nine was the interior of the elevators; they were utilitarian, floored with linoleum and encased by walls of dull chrome.

  “What’s your name?” I asked as she pushed the button for the thirty-first floor.

  “Asiette,” she said. Her light eyes were violet—strikingly so.

  “Beautiful name.”

  “Merci.” Her annunciation contained a pert curtsy.

  “Do you know Jackson?”

  “We are supposed to call no matter ’oo comes,” she replied.

  “Yes, you said that, but do you know him?”

  She grinned and I felt like part of the family.

  “Oui,” she admitted. “Monsieur Blue comes down to the employee cafeteria a few times each week and sits with us. Most of our officers ’ave never seen the basement—except for Monsieur Villard, but that is different. ’E really is the boss.

  “But because I ’ear you say ‘Jackson Blue’ I look and I see that you are ’ere and I think maybe Loring should just call but ’e does not and so I do.”

  She was wearing a close-fitting black-and-white herringbone skirt that came down to her knees and a thin, dark blue woolen sweater, proof against the air-conditioning. I smiled because she was dressed the way her mother did when she was the same age.

  “Something is funny?” she asked.

  “No, just thinking about Paris during the war.”

  “You were there?”

  I nodded. “The people were so happy to have us. I really felt like a hero.”

  “I was in Dijon then, too young to remember.”

  “You are a child of that country, though.”

  The elevator doors opened and I gestured for Asiette to go first.

  “Merci, mais non,” she said. “They didn’t ask me to come, only to make sure that you got ’ere. Do you know where you are going?”

  “Yeah. Pleasure to meet you, Asiette,” I said, and we shook hands before the doors closed on her smile.

  I looked at the elevator for a few seconds before turning. I had been raised to be wary of change in the world. The more things change, the more they stay the same, people had always told me. But maybe that wasn’t so.

  I stopped at the threshold of Jackson’s secretary’s door and said, “Knock, knock.”

  “Mr. Rawlins,” the elder white woman said. Crystal was gray-haired, wearing a rose-colored dress suit. He accent was mildly English. This might have been her birthright or her education. Either way it took me another step away from America. “Come in, come in. Mr. Blue is with the technicians working on some computer matter. I don’t pretend to understand what they do. If it was up to me I’d do everything with pencil and paper, maybe a typewriter now and then. I mean, what’s the big hurry?”

  “I completely agree. Can I have a seat?”

  “Please.”

  There was a burgundy sofa set across from her mahogany desk. I set my laundry bag on the floor and sat back comfortably. It was as good a place as any to wait. Crystal’s office was big enough for most vice presidents, certainly larger than my little detective’s room down on Central.

  I sat back and she said, “Nice weather outside?”

  “A little hot.”

  She nodded and went back to whatever project she was working on before I got there. That was fine by me. I needed a moment to think about why I was there. Talking to Jackson was always a pleasure. He was a genius, the smartest man I ever met. He could see patterns connecting the sunshine and a child’s laughter with nucleic acids and the theory of relativity.

  Jackson’s province at P9 was its worldwide computer system. He was also a confidant to Jean-Paul Villard, president and CEO of the insurance giant. The amount of money I had in that laundry bag wouldn’t mean much to somebody like Jean-Paul. I needed a pair of eyes that would be unimpressed by Evander’s lucre.

  “Easy?” Jackson was standing in the hallway outside Crystal’s door looking at me with the most frightened eyes I had seen since before my untimely demise.

  He wore a medium gray suit, bright white shirt, and a burgundy-and-blue tie topped off with spectacles that I knew were just clear glass. Jackson worked hard to give the appearance of a nonthreatening black man. The craziest thing about his charade was that it seemed to work.

  “What is it, Jackson?” I asked with only a hint of the exasperation I felt.

  I realized one day that Blue and I were friends simply because I knew him so well. I understood him better than his girlfriend or his mother. Jackson’s fears were more profound than the greatest intelligence. I often felt that he had to be as smart as he was just to keep his head above the waters of continual and needless anxiety.

  “Say,” he commanded, “ ‘forgive me my sins,’ and then say, ‘lived.’ ” He was so frightened that he sputtered a little.

  “Forgive me my sins. Lived.”

  When I pronounced this nonsense he relaxed—some. After a minute he came into the receptionist’s chamber. Crystal and I watched him peering at me as if he expected the words I said to cause spontaneous combustion.

  When I didn’t burst into flame he knitted his eyebrows in concentration and then, finally, made his decision.

  “Come on in, Easy.… Yeah. Come on.”

  Jackson’s office was immense, wider than five tall men laid down head to foot and longer than ten. Wilt Chamberlain couldn’t have touched the ceiling on his best jump. One wall was a library’s worth of bookshelves, filled to overflowing, and the opposite wall was replete with oil paintings of famous jazz musicians who had, at one time or another, been to France. The Oriental carpet was royal blue, almost metallic gold, and bloodred. Half the way through the room, before his ebony wood desk and the picture window beyond, sat two canary yellow sofas facing each other over a big glass box used as a coffee table.

  In contrast to his workspace, Jackson was skinny, tar black, and shorter than most women he ever dated.

  “I understand the ‘forgive me my sins,’ ” I said, sitting next to my friend on a yellow cushion. “I guess that’s something Lucifer, or his minions, can’t say, but why lived?”

  “That’s like a backwards signature.”

  “Devil …”

  “You got it, brother. The devil spelled backwards is lived.”

  I laughed heartily and slapped Jackson’s shoulder. He was still wary of me, but that was a natural state for him with almost everyone.

  “I got a problem, Jackson. Mouse hired me to find this kid named Evander Noon.…”

  “Timbale’s son.”

  “How’d you know … Oh, right, Raymond got you to hire her.… But she won’t talk to him, so how did she know to apply for the job?”

  “Lissa MacDaniels,” Jackson proclaimed.

  “That’s her friend?”

  “Yeah. Mouse had me hire Lissa, and then Lissa told Timbale about the security job.”

  “So you know about Evander?” I asked.

  “Only that he’s her son. I never met the woman.”

  “Mouse went through all that just to get her a job?”

  “Yep.”

  “Did he tell you why?”

  Jackson shook his head. “I’idn’t ask. You know doin’ a favor for Mouse is like money in the bank, like your own personal block’a gold in Fort Knox. And as you well know—you don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.”

  “Jackson, I need to talk to Jean-Paul.”

  Without hesitation the skinny little man jumped up and walked back toward his broad black desk. I followed and gazed out of his window while he w
orked the dial on his phone.

  The farthest mountains south and east of the city were snowcapped, and the sky was as blue as it gets.

  “Jean-Paul?” Jackson said. “I got Easy ovah here, man. He said he needs to talk to you.… Huh? No, I don’t know what he wants, but you know he almost died, so it’s got to be serious. And I was thinkin’ that he might be able to help us wit’ that thing I was tellin’ you about.… Yeah, yeah … Okay. See you in a minute then.”

  Jackson looked up at me with conspiracy in his eyes. That look said, For a dead man you sure can get into mischief.

  33

  Still looking at me, Jackson got up from behind his desk.

  “Let’s get comfortable, Easy,” he said. “You know I don’t like bein’ stuck behind a desk; makes me feel like I’m my own worst enemy sittin’ in that chair.”

  Back on the yellow sofa Jackson kicked off his black shoes, revealing blue, green, and yellow argyle socks. He pulled these dressy feet up under him, settling into half lotus, his back resting against the window-ward armrest of the office couch.

  He took off his useless glasses to scrutinize me.

  “I’m not a ghost, Jackson, just a very lucky man who survived a hellacious car crash.”

  “Then why you ain’t in bed?” he asked, flinching a little at his own question.

  “Like a shark.”

  “Got to keep movin’,” he agreed tentatively. “You wanna drink?”

  “You know I don’t drink.”

  “They said you went off that cliff drunk. Now you back on the wagon?”

  “Either that or the bottom of the hill.”

  That got Jackson to smile.

  “And you just come by to say hi to me and JP?” he asked.

  “Evander’s in trouble and I promised Ray that I’d dig him out.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  The light knocking on the half-open office door announced Jean-Paul Villard. The Frenchman was olive-skinned with dark, dark brown eyes, almost black. The little mustache he’d sported the last time we met had been shaved off. His hair was longish compared to the crew cuts of his corporate American counterparts. If the police asked me to describe him I would have said that he was about five-nine, welterweight and wiry.

  That day Jean-Paul was wearing a black suit designed for a slight build. His shirt was slate gray with no tie, open at the neck.

  Seeing the understated French CEO I understood what my old friend and I were doing—or, more accurately, what Jackson was doing. The whole act, from half lotus to his honest questions, was a holding pattern until his boss arrived. Jackson was born to be another man in another country, where his worth would have been realized from the start. When Jean-Paul hired him at P9, Jackson felt not only friendship but a kind of patriotism for the man and his company. Black men of our day were never told, The sky’s the limit. Our limits were more like the inner lid of a coffin. Our potential was purely physical and necessarily short-lived. We could aspire to Joe Louis but never Henry Ford.

  “Come on in, JP,” Jackson hailed.

  Villard closed the door and approached us, an irresistibly charming grin on his lips.

  “Easy,” he said, holding out a hand.

  I rose and shook his hand, smiled and nodded.

  “Jean-Paul.”

  “Sit, sit, my friend,” he said.

  Jean-Paul perched on the glass box table between Jackson and me.

  “I am so ’appy that you are not dead, Easy,” he said.

  We’d only met once, but the French businessman was very friendly toward black Americans, especially veterans of World War II. He’d first met them at the liberation of Paris and he, like Asiette, was contemptuous at the particular nature of racism in the United States.

  “How’s Pretty doing?” I asked.

  Pretty Smart was a beautiful young black woman who had fallen for Jean-Paul, or at least his wealth, when he and Jackson helped me smoke out one of her boyfriends who was the subject of a complex investigation.

  “Coming along,” he said. “She does not understand that a Frenchman and the Negro American woman are so very much alike. I mean …” He moved his head from side to side. “I mean, she understands, but it makes her uncomfortable.

  “But, Easy, what is it you need from me?”

  Instead of talking I dumped the money from the laundry bag onto the glass table.

  Jackson Blue, in spite of all his success in love and in business, was amazed by the immensity of the pile.

  “L’argent,” Jean-Paul said, unimpressed. “What does this mean?”

  I told both men the story of Evander and his misadventures as far as I understood them. I skipped over the fact that the luckless boy’s mother worked for P9. That bit of information didn’t seem salient for JP.

  “I need to put this money somewhere until I figure out what it and the blood mean,” I said. “You’re the richest man I know, and so I thought maybe you would have a secure place to store it until I put the rest of the pieces together.”

  The Frenchman was looking into my eyes. From the age of sixteen he had been a part of the resistance in Paris; this service lasted over the entire occupation. Villard was a man who studied other men.

  “Yeah?” I said in response to his stare.

  “You trust me?”

  It was the only question worth asking, and so I smiled.

  “I don’t know you hardly at all, Mr. Villard, and in part that’s why I came here. This money is no threat to you, and what do you care about a little pile of cash when you own this whole building?”

  There was knowledge in my answer, understanding of myself in relation to the man sitting across from me. We both knew that knowledge is the deepest kind of trust.

  “I could put it in my private safe if you want,” he offered.

  “I want.”

  Jean-Paul smiled without showing his teeth and cut a glance at Jackson, who still had his feet folded under his thighs. This brief, wordless exchange told me a great deal about the relationship between the two men. There was intimacy, conspiracy, and friendship there, but also the hierarchy of roles.

  Jackson let out a quick breath and said, “Easy,” and I knew that my particular therapy for the reversal of death and dying was about to be expanded.

  “You ever know a guy named Charles Rumor?” Jackson asked.

  “Sneak thief, cheat, and liar,” I said. “An ex-girlfriend of his once told me that the only true thing he ever uttered was his snoring when he was asleep, and not always then.”

  “That’s him.”

  “I knew Charles back in Galveston before the war,” I said.

  “He up here now. We used to run together before I got straight.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Uh-huh. Mostly it was a floating blackjack game, but we also used to go do target practice in the San Bernardino Mountains. He had this collection of pistols and liked to shoot beer cans and bottles, stuff like that.”

  “Hm,” I grunted, just to keep the patter going.

  Jean-Paul had clasped his hands together and was looking down at the floor.

  “Anyway, that’s it; at least, that’s all I thought it was. Had to be seven or eight years ago. You know men like shootin’, Easy. I’d pop them bottles and cans off a wood railin’ up there. When I hit six I’d reload and shoot again. When we were finished I just dropped the piece in a bag and we’d drive back to visit these two sisters he knew.”

  “Jackson,” I said to underscore the stupidity of his actions.

  “I know, Easy. I know. I know I’m a fool. I mean, what has Rumor evah done that wasn’t only for him? But I didn’t work it out until three weeks ago.”

  “And why then?”

  “A white dude name’a Huggins called me one day here at work. He said that he could make me ten thousand dollars for just one afternoon of my time. I told him to get lost, but then he said that I’d get paid ten percent up front just to listen. I didn’t see anything wrong with it. If he aksed me to do
sumpin’ against P9 I’da just said no and taken a thousand for the time. So I goes down to meet ’im at this little bar on Temple. It was pretty fancy, a white place, and they didn’t wanna let me in, even though I was dressed in a business suit an’ everything. But when I mentioned Mr. Huggins the waters parted and I was shown to a private room in the back.

  “There was this big blousy dude in a brick red suit introduced himself as Theodore Huggins. He was with another man that he called Johnny Portia. This dude looked just like his name, sporty and sharp. His suit was as dark as green can get, and his smile coulda been used for a dentist’s ad.

  “Huggins works for Portia, and Portia is a vice president of TexOk.”

  “The oil company?” I asked.

  Jean-Paul looked up.

  “Yeah, man,” Jackson said. “Portia told me to look up in the old newspapers back in ’sixty-four when a cop broke in on some burglars and one of the crooks shot him in the leg. He told me that the gun used in that shooting had my fingerprints on it, that he had got that gun from Charles Rumor. He said he would give it to the cops if I didn’t sign an investment note for twenty-three million dollars to a company that works for TexOk’s experimental drillin’ up in Alaska.”

  “But you work in computers,” I argued, as if I was at the table with Portia and Huggins.

  “I ’ave allowed Jackson some power as an officer of the company,” Jean-Paul said. “ ’E would be an asset for business because people underestimate ’im, and that is always good in negotiations.”

  “So you made it that just one man can make a loan like that?” I asked Jean-Paul.

  “Of course not. There must be three officers signing the document. This Portia must ’ave two of my men in ’is pocket.”

  “So you could’ve done this?” I said to Jackson.

  “Yeah, I could. Of course, then I’d be on the run. But if the cops got hold’a that gun that I know only I touched with bullets that I loaded it with, that’s attempted murder, twenty-five years minimum—if the cops don’t kill me first.”

  “And how,” I asked, “does Portia make money on this investment?”

  “At first I didn’t get it, Easy,” Jackson said. “But when I looked into it I found out that Portia’s sister’s husband owns the exploratory company. Jean-Paul found out that the place they’re lookin’ at probably won’t pan out, so the company goes bankrupt and they put a good half’a the money aside.”