The laundress nodded but didn’t smile.
“We need to talk to Mr. Rose.”
“Busy,” Loo said.
“But Mr. Terry said that we had to talk to him.”
“Not here.”
“If Haman wants to keep doing business with us he better get unbusy and come on out here,” I said with some feeling.
Loo looked up at me.
Her right eye was dead in its socket with a jagged white scar starting at the temple and slashing down in the direction of the bridge of her nose. Her other eye worked but it seemed flat and largely unobservant, like a specialized organ designed for one purpose, detecting danger.
“You wait here,” she said to me.
With that Loo put down the orange rayon sweater she was folding and went through what I can only describe as a fold in the wall beside the table she was working on.
“That was kind of rough, wasn’t it, Easy?” Ruby said when the laundress had gone.
“I believe that she has lived through worse.”
“But people should be nice to each other,” she argued.
“I’m nice. It’s just that my kind of nice comes from a place where people like it rough.”
This admission elicited a smile from my protector.
I liked her too.
A few minutes later two white men in ill-fitting leisure suits came out from the wall like new characters in a dull and yet unpredictable play. The shirtlike jackets both had four buttons down the front. One suit was tan and the other almost black. The men were different heights; the short one on my left sported a mouse-brown mustache and the other one wore sunglasses. The man with the sunglasses and light-colored suit had a bandage on his left hand that seemed to go up pretty high on the forearm.
“Who are you?” the mustache asked.
“Name’s Joppy,” I said, “Joppy Shag.”
The words rolled off my tongue easily. I remember thinking that I should have told Ruby that name before we entered the laundry. Joppy Shag had been a bartender and a good friend before he betrayed me and was subsequently murdered by Mouse. Joppy had died within days, maybe only hours, of Frank Green’s demise.
“What do you want?” Sunglass Man asked.
Loo worked her way around the two men back into the room, then started folding again.
“I’m here representing Terry Aldrich,” I said.
“So? He knows the procedure.” That was Sunglass Man again.
“He did,” I said. “And then Maurice Potter rolls up to Terry’s and says that Terry gets a ten percent discount on three keys that he will deliver. He took the money but never delivered the dope.”
The thugs looked at each other, and Mustache went back through the fold in the wall.
This departure acted as a kind of punctuation, a semicolon or a dash, in our conversation. Sunglass Man stared from behind his dark lenses while Loo folded and Ruby moved close enough that her shoulder was touching my left triceps from behind.
I noticed that there was some swelling and discoloration around the left eye of Sunglass Man. He’d been banged up pretty bad. I didn’t think much about it at the time, because guys like him, and guys like me, often got dings and bruises from a day’s labor.
Mustache came back in less than two minutes and said, “You two come on back.”
The aperture in the wall was about half the width of a normal door. It went in two feet, stopped at a wall, turned left and then right and then left again, bringing us into a large room that had no particular purpose other than to hold two desks, half a dozen wood chairs, and a console radio, television, and record-player combo.
The television was set on a boxing match with the volume turned off. The record playing was Connie Stevens, and the radio was whispering news in hushed counterpoint to her sweet voice.
Behind the smaller desk sat a wide man in a dark purple suit with a black cashmere long coat draped across his broad shoulders. His face was birdlike but not delicate or fine; it was more like the visage of some ancient predator bird that ran down dire wolves in the times before man made his presence felt.
“What’s this shit Bobby and Mitchell tell me?” Haman Rose said.
I answered, “Maurice Potter collected three hundred and fifty dollars from Terry promising to deliver product from you and then he just disappears.”
“Terry knows that that’s not how it works,” Haman said. His gaze was both suspicious and contemplative.
“Terry had no reason to question Maurice. He said he was representing you.”
“Was he with a nigger?” Sunglass Man asked.
“No,” I said. “The cracker was alone.”
Ruby giggled.
“And your name is?” Haman asked.
“Mr. Shag.”
That got a smile out of the gangster boss.
“Well, Shag,” he said. “All I can tell your boss is that Maurice wasn’t working for me. He attacked my man Mitchell here and his friend too. We’ve been looking all over town for him.”
Sunglass Man was Mitchell. His bruise and wound were making more sense.
“When did Potter tell Terry this lie?” Haman asked.
“A week ago,” I said. “That’s why Terry sent me with Ruby. He’s runnin’ low on product and wanted to know what’s what.”
“And there wasn’t a colored brother with him?” Haman asked.
“Not that I know of. What was his name?”
“You think a man attackin’ me’s gonna tell his name?” Mitchell asked. He was belligerent.
“I don’t know what happened, man,” I said. “All I know is that Terry asked me to come down here and see where his shit is at.”
“We’re looking for Maurice,” Haman said. “But he didn’t work for me and so I can’t help Terry.”
“How much is this Maurice guy worth to you?” I asked.
“Why?”
“I could look for him if it meant a few dollars. I mean, I know a lot of black people who run around up on the Strip. Maybe I know the man was with Maurice.”
“You find me Maurice Potter and I will put twenty-five hundred dollars in your pocket.”
“I’ve seen Potter before,” I said, “up at Lula’s whorehouse behind the Shangri-La club. Can you tell me what the black man looked like?”
“Like a nigger,” Mitchell said.
“You mean exactly like me?”
“He was younger and shorter,” the henchman admitted, “a kid really. He had some heft too.”
“Dark like me?”
“A little lighter.”
“High voice or raspy?”
“He didn’t say a word. His eyes were crazy, though. All over the place, and he looked scared.”
“Is he the one beat on you?” I asked.
“You think you’re funny?” Mitchell took a step toward me. His friends watched with some interest.
“I was just wonderin’ if he was a bad dude or what,” I said, getting into the rhythm of my persona.
“Maurice had the gun,” Mitchell said. “Nigger just grabbed up the—”
“So that’s all you need,” Haman said, interrupting Mitch before he could talk about the money.
“Not much to go on,” I said, “but I could look if you wanted.”
That was a crucial moment. I was like a foreign soldier offering to become a spy for the enemy. They had no reason to believe me or trust me, but, then again, if I was a part of the robbery why would I be there?
“You know this man, Ruby?” Haman asked.
“Yes. He’s been hangin’ around Terry’s lately.”
“Do you know Maurice?”
“I’ve seen him. He’s the one that always wears all green, right?”
“You ever seen Shag here with Maurice?”
Ruby turned to stare at me, thinking hard. This, of course, made me wonder what I really knew about her.
Then she said, “I never saw them together.”
“Did Terry send you?”
“H
e said we could take his Jag but instead we came in a red Barracuda.”
This unimportant detail seemed to satisfy the headman.
“Okay, Shag,” he said. “You go tell Terry that I can’t help it that he threw his money away. Tell him that either me or Keith has to say the rules have changed. I don’t have any dope for him today but he can send somebody down tomorrow.
“And if you find Maurice or his partner I will make it worth your while.”
There were other questions I could have asked, but we had come to the end of our tête-à-tête. Haman Rose was a dangerous man: Ruby and I were in a precarious position as long as we were with him. He had given me a trove of unintentional information and all I had to do was push it just a little, but not in that room and not then.
“I’ll be in touch,” I said. “I surely will.”
47
“You wanna pull into some parking lot and ball me in the backseat?” Ruby asked a few blocks from the Laundromat.
“What?”
“I’m all excited,” she said. “I wanna get it.”
She was sitting on her knees in the seat looking at me.
“I’m old enough to be your father, girl.”
“You were the same age the other night at Terry’s.”
“And I thought you and Terry were a thing now.” I don’t know why I argued; maybe it was my way of biding time on the bigger issues in my life.
“So? People don’t own each other. He doesn’t care what I do.”
“I’ll get you up to his place and you can get together with him.”
“You don’t want me?”
“I want you in all kinds of ways, Ruby,” I said with both feeling and honesty. “I do. But I got a job to do, and maybe there’s a woman I love who I want to be with.”
“That Bonnie?”
I nodded, thinking that she had paid closer attention to my words than I thought.
“What does she have to do with me?” Ruby asked.
I laughed at the brazen honesty of the hippie girl.
“Will you please let me off this hook, child?” I asked. “I’m an old man who almost died a couple of months ago, and right now I’m just trying to do a simple job.”
She smiled and turned around in her seat.
“Sometimes I just don’t understand men,” she said to the world at large.
“What fun would there be in that?” I reached out and squeezed her hand. This seemed to satisfy her need temporarily. That was the least I could do. After all, Ruby had been instrumental in getting me over the hump of my slapdash investigation.
Ruby gave me another wet kiss before jumping out of the car at Terry’s mansion. I watched her running on those young haunches, thinking that I was alive again but not exactly the same man. I would miss the old Easy Rawlins. He was running into the yard behind Ruby, looking for that sweet oblivion that all young men, white and black, thought could save them from the greater darkness that dogged their heels.
I arrived at the 77th Street precinct at a little past eight. The good thing about the police is that they’re open twenty-four hours a day. It often seemed to me that the constabulary was a modern-day church—always there … waiting for your confession.
“Yeah?” the desk sergeant asked when I approached his desk.
I had a valid carry license but left my gun in the car. The police in L.A. were a skittish lot. Even the sight of a pistol on a black man’s person might call down a hail of gunfire.
“I’d like a powwow with Melvin Suggs if you don’t mind, Sergeant.” I might have even smiled.
“Rawlins, right?”
“Yes, sir.” I was feeling very Southern and civilized, the way that the ex-slave-owning, Jim Crow–enforcing white Southerners liked to pretend to be. I was a new man with a new life and three-quarters of a pack of Camels in his breast pocket. But the world I lived in had not yet registered the changes in itself or in me.
The wait was nearly forty-five minutes.
I was expecting Suggs to come from the swinging doors behind the desk sergeant’s post, but instead he came through the front door wearing a burnt orange–colored suit and shiny black shoes. His pressed shirt wasn’t even white; it was lemon with little cherry dots here and there.
“This way,” he grunted as he rushed past me through the swinging doors.
We climbed three stairs and turned right through a door marked EXIT. This brought us to a stairwell that went up and down and to a door that probably went outside. I followed as Suggs rushed up the stairs all the way to the fourth floor.
There we crossed a large room filled with booking desks, alleged felons, and their captors.
It’s a strange thing to see a powerful man’s hands chained behind him, almost poetic in a brutal sort of way. Maybe those fists had beaten some hapless pedestrian to the ground, or the fingers had choked the life out of a woman that he loved so much he couldn’t let go; but now those fists and fingers were like bunches of dark plantains hanging down around the crack of his butt, helpless in every way possible.
Melvin led me to a desolate corner of the booking floor where there was a brown door painted on in black letters that read, “offlimits”; no caps, no punctuation. Through this door and up half a flight we came to a solitary and dusty office, dimly lit through a window by an outside security light. Suggs ushered me in, shut the door, turned on the desk lamp, and then collapsed into his squeaky-wheeled chair.
I took my seat across the desk from him and lit up a Camel.
“I thought you’d be here at work,” I said. “I didn’t mean for them to get you out of bed.”
“Do I look like I was in bed?” he asked. “I told the desk to call me if you came in. I’m interested in this Rose thing.”
“You still got them here?” I asked.
“Transferred downtown. They’ll be out by eleven in the morning unless you decide to come in, with your friend, and make a complaint.”
“My friend’s shy.”
“Yeah.”
That might have been the end of our talk, but we both wanted something, maybe some things.
“You sure that Handel works for Rose?” I asked.
“For the past eight years,” Suggs replied. “Why?”
“I don’t know. I just heard that he might be working on his own, that’s all.”
“Hm,” Suggs said, sitting back. “Yeah … that fits.”
“Fits what?”
“Handel didn’t call the Rose lawyer, and the guys he had with him were from Vegas. Neither one had ever been busted in L.A.”
“Yeah,” I said to myself. “That’s what I thought.” Because Rose didn’t ask about Easy Rawlins. It seemed that he would have wanted to know about another black man that he’d sent Handel to brace.
“What you got on Rose?” Suggs asked. Then he yawned.
“First I need to know some things.”
“Like what?”
“I know that Haman has two guys around him named Bobby and Mitchell, and you say this other guy is Keith Handel. Is there anybody else he’s got?”
Suggs pulled a thick and dusty folder out of the desk and opened it up in front of him. He paged back and forth for at least three minutes.
“He’s had quite a few cohorts over the years. He works for a downtown mobster named Lofty, Aaron ‘Lofty’ Purdy from Cincinnati. It says here that there’s a Giles Lehman that he’s tight with. Giles and Keith are his underbosses; at least, that’s what the organized crime unit calls ’em. I say that they’re just midsize thugs in a broke-nose jungle.”
“You got an address on Lehman?”
“Why?”
“I’d like to strike a deal with him,” I said.
“What kind of deal?”
“That’s my business.”
“I need more than that, Rawlins.”
“Do you have in that folder that Haman Rose runs a Laundromat down near Venice and Lincoln and sells grass in laundry bags?”
“No.”
“How about that he pays the cops down there to leave him and his business alone?”
Suggs had become subverbal, shaking his head and looking like he just licked a lemon.
“This is fact?” he asked.
“I don’t know. It’s just what I heard along the way.”
“Okay,” Suggs half agreed. “So if I sting this place I get Lehman too.”
“I need to talk to Lehman first.”
“Why?”
“From what I hear Giles Lehman and I have a lot in common.”
“I’m still the law, Easy. I can’t let you just go out and do whatever you want.”
“I know that, Melvin, I do. That’s why I’m giving you this. But if you’re gonna want any more help I need that address.”
It only took six or seven minutes for him to pass me the numbers.
G. Lehman lived on Renvert Street in Culver City.
48
The Gator’s Blood felt like it was permanently in my system by then. I didn’t even need to drink it anymore. I was tired but it didn’t feel like I was about to die. It wasn’t the first time that the blue sofa in my office stood in for a bed. I napped the night away, dreaming about a man on a raft sailing between two islands, both of which were in flames.
I woke up four or five times but always, when I fell asleep again, I was somewhere in relation to that man and his hapless voyage. He wasn’t worried, this intrepid sailor. He knew that sooner or later, when the flames died down, the combatants would also be dead. All he had to do was keep from landing too soon and paradise would be his.
Giles Lehman’s apartment occupied the middle floor of a turquoise-colored triplex in the center of the city-suburban block. I made my way up the inner stairwell somewhere around eight the next morning. I used the brass knocker to announce myself to a dead man.
That was the most logical conclusion. The only man missing was Lehman, Giles. The blood on those burlap sacks said that somebody had died. And Giles was the only man not around.
Knocking was a useless gesture, I knew, but there was a certain decorum that had been drilled into me since childhood. I would knock before breaking and entering; that’s just what a civilized man was supposed to do. The knocker hammering against the cheap, wood-veneered frame door made a hollow sound.
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