“And that has something to do with me?”
Still looking around, he said, “It was that Uhuru Nolicé. He had a gunfight with two cops and then escaped in a dark green ’fifty-seven Cadillac.”
“You want some coffee?”
“Coffee? The world’s goin’ to hell in a handbasket and you’re talkin’ about coffee?”
“Calm down, Mr. Manning. I got a pot brewing in the kitchen. We can sit out there.”
I got him situated in the many-sided dinette and unplugged the percolator from the wall next to the kitchen counter. I poured us both mugs and asked, “You take anything with it?”
“Milk and sugar.”
Luckily for him my little girl had gone shopping.
The ritual of stirring the milk and sugar into his brew peeled away Manning’s anger only to reveal his rage.
“What the fuck are you doing, Rawlins? I mean what the hell are we paying you for?”
“We? I thought it was Foster Goldsmith footing the bill.”
“You know what I mean.”
Not really, but I decided to let that slide for a moment.
“I don’t know how I’m supposed to stop your own police from shooting it out with a man wanted for kidnapping and murder,” I said.
“You’re supposed to be finding Mantle before it gets in the papers.”
“That’s what you say.”
“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”
“The FBI came to my front door and threatened to put me in federal lockup if I so much as thought about Mantle. And the Secret Service was waiting for me outside his mother’s door, telling me that Uncle Sam had a deep dark hole for darkies like me.”
“What were these agents’ names?”
I told him.
“What were they interested in?” he said. “I mean what kind of questions did they ask?”
Manning’s heat subsided as he slipped into the role of tactician.
“They wanted to know the same things you did,” I told him. “They asked about Mantle and where he might be. They didn’t want me to talk to the LAPD anymore at all.”
“How did the government find out about you?”
“I guess Foster Goldsmith must’ve told them?”
“You went to see Goldsmith?” Tout’s rage started to rise again.
“Yes I did,” I said while staring directly into his eyes.
That was the moment of truth. This was going to be my investigation or the LAPD brass was going to have to find another black man to be their eyes and ears.
The hinges of Tout Manning’s jaw became more pronounced and his eyes tightened. Then he took in a deep breath through his nostrils and asked, “What else?”
I considered the question a moment, then two.
“Like I said, the State Department people knew that I had gone to see Stony Goldsmith. I don’t believe that they followed me there, so he must have called them. He might have called the FBI too—either that or they got some L.A. cop in their pocket.”
“You say the FBI came to your house?”
I nodded.
“You were expressly told to stay away from Goldsmith,” Manning said in the false calm of many a commanding officer I had reported to during the war.
“I’m not your soldier, man. You come here and tell me a man’s daughter is missin’ but you don’t want me to talk to him, well … shit. I know if my daughter was in trouble I’d like to know who was sniffin’ after her.”
“What did he say?”
“He didn’t even admit that his daughter was missing.”
Manning was quiet for a moment after that. He took it pretty well. J. Edgar Hoover and Lyndon Baines Johnson were not enemies that any man in public service wanted to court.
While he was brooding I saw my opening and took it.
“So did any cops get killed last night?” I asked.
“No.”
“Was Bob solo?”
“He had a … a confederate.”
“Who was that?”
“It’s not clear.”
“Huh. Either Bob or his confederate shot?”
“Maybe. That’s not clear either.”
“Was it anything like the first shootout?” I didn’t know what I was after but there was something missing.
“The first night a call was sent in about a suspicious auto at Pluto’s Junkyard on Slauson. The officers called in when they got there, and then nothing until backup came to investigate.”
“But three cops got killed?” I said.
“Yes.”
“Ain’t that unusual? I mean I never see more than two cops in a cruiser unless they on riot duty.”
“I don’t know what happened there. Maybe they were giving a friend a ride. Maybe it was their lunch break.”
“What were their names?”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. Usually if a cop investigates a murder he tries to find out who the victim was and why he was killed.”
“You’re not a cop,” Tout told me, “and you’re not being paid to investigate any murder.”
“How many men were involved on Bob’s side of the first shootout?”
“No witnesses.”
“But you did ballistics tests on the bullets. How many different weapons were used?”
“You’re not being paid to ask me questions, Rawlins.”
“I got to know what I’m up against and what I can use to find Bob. If he got a gang then maybe I could get to him through one of them.”
“We don’t have any information on his confederates,” Manning said in a cold voice. “But Mantle was identified as one of two people who robbed a liquor store on La Brea earlier last night. It was because of the getaway car that the officers fired to stop them.”
“Did they try to arrest him? Did they say halt before they opened fire?”
“This man is armed and dangerous. There’s a shoot-on-sight order out on him.”
“But there are no witnesses to any crime except this liquor store robbery.”
“There was the shootout last night.”
“Your officers shot first.”
“That is our prerogative if the man we’re after is considered a threat.”
“I tell you one thing, man, anybody shoot at me I’m gonna shoot back at him. That don’t make me guilty of nuthin’ except good sense.”
“Is the job too much for you, Ezekiel?”
I had enough trouble with Suggs and his bent girlfriend. I should have bowed out, I should have. But the thought that there was a shoot-on-sight order on a man who might not have been a killer kept me from quitting.
“I need a letter from Frisk saying that he has put me on this case as a private agent.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“Then I quit.”
Manning appreciated the bind I put him in. You could see that he’d like to put out a kill order on me too.
“You stay on the case and I’ll call Frisk,” he conceded. “If I don’t have that letter by tomorrow night you can quit then.”
“Thirty-six hours,” I said.
“Hopefully it’ll be all resolved by then.”
“Resolved how?”
“The bad guys in jail and the innocent saved.”
I knew I was in trouble because I was being told a fairy tale by a cop.
25
“He’s probably right,” Melvin Suggs was saying at the dinette table forty-five minutes after I watched Tout Manning drive away in his festive Volkswagen Bug. “I mean if he’s giving radical speeches, making incriminating statements, and then he’s seen robbing a liquor store, well … If it stinks like shit …”
I didn’t like the way he put it but Mel made a good point. If a man has a gun in his hand and bloody money in his pocket he’s probably not an innocent bystander; probably not.
“You said you still had your shield?” I asked.
“Yeah. They couldn’t take it without definite charges. The union wouldn’t allow that.”
&
nbsp; “So if you called your contact and he told you where this liquor store was, you could go there and ask a few questions.”
“If anybody found me doin’ that I’d lose my shield for sure.”
“Be nice and the guy won’t complain.”
“I don’t see what you can get out of that,” Melvin said. His eyes were clear and his voice more or less steady—he had even shaved. “I mean the regular cops already questioned him.”
“I’m looking for anything I can about the robbery and about Mantle. I’m not trying to solve a crime. What I’m tryin’ to get is some insight into Bob.”
“He’s a thug. What else you need?”
“Look, Mel, I know you’re not used to taking orders from me. And believe me when I say that I don’t see myself as your boss-man. I’m just askin’ you to do some things. I could be wrong. It might be stupid. But don’t worry about any of that. Just know that you’re going to make some money and that in the next few days I’m gonna sit you down with your girl.”
Suggs didn’t think I was looking down on him or trying to reverse roles in some perverse attempt at racial retribution. It was just that he was used to challenging people with the weight of the LAPD behind him. But he was no longer the big man in charge and he needed a humble reminder of that fact.
“What are you going to do?” he asked.
“I’m going to go out and act as if I’m gonna find this Uhuru-Bob and solve the case of the millionaire’s missing daughter.”
“How?”
“Magic.”
Melvin glowered but he didn’t complain.
“I got a name and address on that partial license plate you gave me,” he said instead.
He handed me a folded-up piece of notepaper that was violet in hue. I wondered as I read the name and address if the stationery was a leftover from Mary Donovan’s days in his home.
“If you get a chance will you call me at my office about four?” I asked as nicely as I could.
Melvin grunted. That was the best I could hope for.
After dropping the cop at his car I drove down to Thurman Avenue a few blocks south of Venice Boulevard.
The tiny white cottage was set between two behemoth plaster-slathered apartment complexes; one pink, the other dull emerald, and both shot through with glitter. The little house was maybe twelve feet wide with an extra three feet on either side for a patch of grass on the left and a path on the right. The front door was oak bound by steel straps, and the one window that faced the street had crisscrossed steel bars over it. The little house had no driveway, but instead of a lawn there was a concrete patio where there was parked a dark blue 1954 Studebaker. I went around the car to the solid front door and worked the metal knocker.
“Who’s out there?” a raspy and aged but very masculine voice called.
“It’s Mr. Rawlins, Mr. Walton.”
“Easy?”
“Yes, sir.”
I heard three separate locks being disengaged before the door opened inward.
The man revealed was six-four even though he was a little stooped-over. The color-of-sandstone Mr. Walton was long past sixty-five. He was wearing a blue and white cap that had a jutting sunshade. His right hand gripped a single-barrel twelve-gauge shotgun.
Like Goldsmith’s bunker, the entrance to the house was reminiscent of the opening to a crypt. There were, I knew, three slender rooms one after another—a sitting room then a kitchen and then the bedroom, where Mrs. Davis Walton spent most of her time reading religious literature and listening to the radio.
“What can I do for you, Easy?” Davis Walton asked.
“I thought we might do some business.”
The old man’s eyes were watery brown but resolute. His left eye nearly closed, expressing a natural wariness. Coming from Oklahoma and the Depression, Walton was the kind of man who found it hard to put his trust in anything. My advantage was that I had once been his supervisor when he was a custodian in the public school system and I had never tried to shortchange, cheat, or diminish him.
“Well,” he said hesitantly. “I was takin’ a break anyway. Come on in.”
The rooms of Davis’s house were all exactly the same size: nine feet wide and eight deep. The sitting room had two cushioned chairs, each with its own TV tray, facing a Philco Predicta television set. Davis once told me that he bought the naked TV tube atop its tower console for eight dollars from a Holiday Inn that was going out of business outside Reno.
“I spent more on the gas than I did on the TV,” he’d told me. “But she’s a beauty.”
The kitchen had a two-burner stove and a yellow table with two chrome and green vinyl chairs. There was a two-door pine-veneered balsa wood cabinet on one wall with a painting of long-haired white Jesus opposite.
“Easy Rawlins comin’ in, Ruth,” Davis called at the door to the bedroom. “You decent?”
“Come on in,” a pleasant female voice called.
Davis was so light-skinned someone from Europe might have mistaken him for a white man, but Ruth was black, not brown. She was a small woman with thinning and completely white hair, sitting at an old-fashioned electric sewing machine. She was doing piecework for one of six dry cleaners that paid her low wage in cash.
The sporadic hum of the Singer was both industrial and comforting.
“Hello, Mr. Rawlins,” she said. “It’s so nice to see you.”
“How are you, Mrs. Walton?”
“The doctor give me three months to live four years ago. Said my heart was held together by Scotch tape and spit. But I’m still here and Davis cain’t look for no new wife yet.”
“You know I don’t want no other woman, Ruthie,” rough-voiced Davis crooned. “It done took almost fifty years to teach you how to make a good cup’a coffee.”
“How are you doin’, Mr. Rawlins?” Ruth said, smiling about the love of her man.
“ ’Bout the same as you. They have predicted my death just about once a month. But I found that if I go out the back door now and then it messes with the odds.”
Ruth had a long face and a beautiful smile.
“Come on out to my office, Easy,” Davis said.
He unlatched the three locks on the back door, also oak and banded with steel, and led me out into the yard.
The backyard was eighteen by eighteen feet surrounded by a high pine fence, behind which loomed the apartment buildings on either side and a white one from the back. Like the front yard, there was no lawn, just concrete. In three half-barrel tubs Davis had small lemon, tangerine, and kumquat trees growing. There was also a round redwood table that was shielded by a huge aqua and white parasol.
“I got that umbrella so that people cain’t spy on me from their windows up above. You know they always lookin’ down tryin’ to get some dirt. Some’a the younger ones have jumped ovah and tried to burglarize me but my doors and bars is too much for ’em. An’ they lucky at that ’cause if they did get in I’d shoot first with my twelve-gauge and follow that up wit’ my forty-four. You know just ’cause I’m seventy don’t mean I cain’t kill a man half my age.”
Davis Walton wasn’t seventy. He was more than eighty but had lied to keep his janitor’s job past the required retirement age. He’d been lying about his age for so long, he might have believed that he was a younger man.
“Have a seat, Easy.”
I sat on one redwood bench and Davis took the other. He was ready to do business—which in the eyes of a man from his generation was somewhat like dueling.
“You still own that cabin out in the desert?”
“Yes, sir. Ruthie been too sick to travel but I go out there now and then to hunt rabbit. You know I appreciate the quiet.”
Davis and Ruth were poor people. They were too old to be members of the Social Security system and had spent most of their money raising three sons. She took in piecework and he supplemented that with a small retirement check from the city, and a bank account in which he had squirreled away every excess dime that he’d e
ver made.
“I need to use your place for a few weeks,” I said. “I’ll give you four hundred dollars.”
“What you mean use it?”
“Five hundred.”
“What if somethin’ gets broken or damaged?”
“Six hundred and if you find anything less than it was before I stayed there, then just give me the bill.”
That was the end of our little talk. Davis took a small brass key from a big ring of keys in his pocket and handed it to me.
“This is for the padlock on the door,” he said. “It also work on the generator hut and the outhouse.”
I handed him six Ben Franklins and he led me back through the rooms. Ruth was waiting at the front door to shake my hand. Her touch was akin to a blessing but I walked to my car knowing that I was still damned.
26
Detective work, police work, riot duty—these are all inexact practices. Sometimes you might bust the wrong head or arrest the victim instead of the perpetrator.
I know a man named Charles Banning who is in prison to this day for a crime he could not have committed. I know this because he and I were in San Francisco together at the time he was supposed to have raped, robbed, and beaten the young white woman who identified him. I was in the courtroom for the entire three-day trial. I said my piece but the jury, mostly white people, didn’t believe me. I could hardly blame them. That girl detailed the crime, identified Chuck, and cried so piteously that I believe a jury of twelve black sharecroppers would have sent him off to jail; maybe even to the gallows.
I try to drive up and visit Charles every other month just so he’ll know that I remember; so that he can see his reflection in my eyes and behold an innocent man.
No … detective work is not an exact science. Sometimes, even when you do everything right, you come up with the wrong answers.
I was remembering this dictum while walking beside a hedge of poinsettia bushes. It was summer and there were bees working around the blossoms, gathering raw pollen for the master alchemists back at the hive.
I was navigating through a mazelike court of twenty-seven tiny cottage apartments not far from Avalon Boulevard. It was late morning and so most of the residents were either out at work or looking for a job. When I neared unit 213 at the back of the complex I dropped my half-smoked cigarette on the concrete and crushed it underfoot. The light green door of 213 was flanked by trellises that supported hundreds of bright red snapdragon flowers.
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