This elegantly dressed and handsome killer smiled at me. His skull was oblong, making me think of some evolved species of human. But I wasn’t fooled—Art Sugar was as primitive as a man could be.
“Easy Rawlins.”
All of the men were wearing dark suits and shiny black shoes. Two of them sat on my blue sofa; another, Jess Johnson, perched on the walnut visitor’s chair to the right. Art took that chair’s mate, and Whisk Hill stood sentry behind him.
I waited a moment and then reseated myself. I considered reaching for the pistol wired under my desk drawer but nixed the notion.
Art Sugar was the top thug in South Central that year. He and his four associates ran roughshod over the majority of small-time hoods and held the grudging respect of the tougher class of crook. Almost everybody gave Art and his men their due.
And if Mouse was right he was the man that had slaughtered three officers of the Los Angeles Police Department.
He smiled and waited.
“Art,” I said.
“You an’ me can be truthful with each other, right?”
“I don’t know about that,” I said. “Sometimes the truth hurts.”
That put some teeth into Sugar’s smile.
“I got a man in the po-lice department, Seventy-seventh Street precinct,” he said. “He tells me that the Crenshaw precinct has reported that you were involved in a shootout ovah thataway.”
“Not me.”
“He’s lyin’?”
“The term shootout implies at least two guns.”
“In what?”
“There was just one gun and it was firing at me. In order for it to have been a shootout I would have had to shoot back.”
“Uh-huh.” Art didn’t have a proper education and felt a little intimidated when people used language he didn’t understand. You couldn’t do it too much but a word dropped here and there might help give you the upper hand. “The thing is I don’t care about who was shootin’ and who wasn’t. But I heard that you was in Benoit’s Gym lookin’ for Battlin’ Bob Mantle.”
I didn’t say anything because there was nothing to say—yet.
“Listen here, Easy Rawlins, I need you to understand something: I’m not afraid of Raymond Alexander.”
I tried to keep my look from imparting the deeply held conviction that nobody ever says that they’re not afraid of somebody they’re not afraid of.
Art sat back and gazed at me. His four men considered me too. All of those eyes were saying that if Sugar wanted me dead right then, or later on, then I’d be dead and that would be that.
“I see myself as a peacekeeper,” Art said after our nonverbal roundtable. “I like to keep the peace.”
“And me gettin’ shot at is not according to your rules?”
“The cops is all ovah the streets lookin’ for Mantle. They bustin’ up poker games and takin’ party girls to jail before the night even starts. They rousted old Jess here when he was just sittin’ on his mother’s front porch.”
“That’s right,” Jess averred.
“I cain’t have that,” Art added.
“I don’t understand, Mr. Sugar. I asked a question and somebody tried to shoot my head off. What’s that got to do with the cops up in your business?”
“I know what’s goin’ down, Easy,” he said. “I know that rich girl got kidnapped and that the police think it’s got to do with them cops got slaughtered in that junkyard. My man at the Seventy-seventh told me that much. But let me tell you somethin’, brothah: If you and Mouse think you can score on this shit while my business goes to hell you got another think comin’.”
Art was like a wild horse seeing threats behind every bush, smelling it on the breeze. I had to think of something to say that would calm down the situation.
“Raymond’s not even in town, man,” I said. “He’s gone for a few weeks and I was just lookin’ for Bob because his mother wants to know where he’s at.”
In my opinion this was just the right balance of truth and prevarication.
“I don’t budge, Easy,” Art said.
Before Art took over the wrong side of the street, a rawboned Mississippian named Brown held that position. Brown made the mistake of telling Mouse that he had to pay a tithe on his various liquor hijacking gigs. This demand led to a true shootout that left three dead and one wounded. Brown was among the deceased.
That was when Raymond decided to make a full commitment to the national heist syndicate.
All of this was before Art Sugar came on the scene but he, Sugar, was still worried that one day he’d have to square off with my friend.
“I’m not pushin’, brother, and neither is Raymond. I just asked a question and they got mad. They overreacted, that’s all.”
“You know where that white girl is?” the gangster asked.
“No, sir.”
“What about Bob?”
“I hear he got in a firefight with the police down on a Hundred and Ten and Central last night. He’s prob’ly bleedin’ to death in some flophouse right now.”
This was news to the cop-killer and that was a good thing.
“How you know that?”
“I got friends on the force too.”
“They shot him?”
“Think so.”
“So you not lookin’ fo’ him no more?”
“They asked me down at his mother’s church, the Good Shepherd, to find her son. I will still try to do that but I’m just lookin’, not stirrin’ no pot.”
“I won’t budge, Easy.”
“And I won’t push.”
“If you find Bob I want you to tell me before you tell his mother, the police, or the Lord,” he added.
Our eyes were on each other. Sugar was waiting for the right answer and I was counting the seconds that he would think necessary to consider that answer.
“If I say okay does that mean I’m workin’ for you now?”
“No, brothah,” he said. “It means you workin’ to keep yo’self healthy.”
After a moment we both smiled. Then he got to his feet and sauntered out of my office. His cohorts followed suit and soon I was alone again.
I locked the door and went to sit on the blue sofa.
It struck me that I was very calm for a man who just had a brush with death. You would think that being in close proximity to a man like Art Sugar was enough for me to change my life so that I would be safer and live longer. And that would have been true if it wasn’t for John Smith.
John was a shipbuilder, a churchgoing one-woman man, married with three beautiful children. He attended Regent’s Baptist on Sunday mornings and Wednesday nights and never so much as stole a penny.
One day John was walking down the street with his wife, Jane, when his minister, Dorothy Saunders, called out hello from a passing automobile. John turned to wave, took a misstep, and fell to the curb, cracking his skull on the granite edge.
It was a fatal blow but poor John wasn’t blessed with a quick death, no. His brain swelled up in its casing and he never slept, much less lost consciousness. He went mad in an isolated hospital ward, cursing and biting and spitting at anyone who came near. His last words were a curse for God and everything in His kingdom.
Fifteen minutes after the gang of thugs had left my office I was walking down the western staircase remembering John Smith; certain that Death stalked every man at its own pace.
29
“Mr. Rawlins?” a man said. There was an odd accent to his words. It wasn’t Asian or European, New World Spanish or cop, certainly not Black American. The intonation was something like slanting sunshine or a stiff wind.
I turned to see a man with the skin coloring of a copper penny that had been a couple of years in circulation, and straight black hair that was too long for office work but nowhere near hippie. Somewhere in his thirties, the man had dark eyes that seemed to contain centuries. He was maybe five-ten and strong the way good rope is—slender and knotted.
“Yes?” I said as th
e aboriginal American approached me.
“My employer, Mrs. Foster Goldsmith, would like to have words with you.”
“And you are?”
“Teh-ha, but people call me Redbird.”
“Any particular species?”
That got the man named Redbird to smile. I could tell by the cast of his face that this was not a common occurrence.
“The words spirit and species have much in common,” he said.
Teh-ha Redbird wore crinkled but shiny black leather shoes, well-laundered black cotton slacks that had been ironed that morning, and a long-sleeved white dress shirt that was buttoned at the wrists and up to the neck but sported no tie. He was, I could tell by looking at him, more deadly than Art Sugar and all his men put together.
“What does Mrs. Goldsmith want?”
With a slight gesture of his head he told me that he didn’t know or, at least, wouldn’t say.
“And when is this meeting supposed to happen?” I asked.
“I can drive you there now.” It came to me that he spoke English like a language learned by some erudite foreign scholar.
He gestured down the street, where I saw parked the King of Cars: a late-model dark gray Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow. There were five or six gawkers already hanging around the automobile. I wondered if there had ever been such a fancy vehicle parked on that particular block.
“I got my Dodge,” I said. “It’s parked a few cars behind yours.”
“Then you can follow me.”
There didn’t seem to be much room or reason for argument, so I went to my car and Redbird to his. When the small crowd saw him coming they parted without rancor or even the hope of getting a ride. Redbird’s regal bearing demanded such obeisance.
We wended our way on surface streets from the black environs back to Wilshire Boulevard, downtown. We came to a comparatively small but elegant hotel called the Dumbarton. I could tell by the address that we were only eight blocks away from Light Lambert’s anonymous office building.
Redbird pulled his fancy car up to the entrance, where a nylon red carpet connected the front doors of the hotel to the curb. I pulled up after him and got out.
“Yes, sir?” a good-looking, sandy-haired young white lad asked. He wore the gray pants, silky blue shirt, and red vest uniform of the Dumbarton’s valets.
“I’m with him,” I said, pointing at Teh-ha, who was waiting for me at the doors.
“Oh,” the reedy young man said.
“The key is in the ignition,” I told him.
When I strolled up to my guide he turned and walked into the sumptuous hotel.
I followed.
The ceilings were high and the colors all royal and drenched. The paintings looked to be original nineteenth-century oils done by artists who you could find in books but not, as a rule, in your larger museums. There were still lifes and portraits and landscapes. I remember one huge canvas that was mostly grays and blues rendering a large ocean-side port crowded with great galleons and sleek schooners. It made me momentarily homesick for Galveston.
Redbird and I were the subject of many stares from the white patrons and multiracial staff of the hotel but no one spoke to, much less molested, us. We made it to the gilded elevator doors and Redbird pressed the button.
“Mr. Redbird,” a man said in such a way as to demand attention, not to greet or recognize.
The white man was thin except for a slight paunch. His dark blue suit cost more than most Americans made in a month and half (before taxes), and his mustache was thin enough to slice bread. His authoritative posture suggested to me that he was an ex-policeman but not a beat cop. I would have bet for most of his career he’d been an officer, maybe even a captain. He’d retired and now worked directly for the rich people that had bought special favors from him when he was in power.
“Just Redbird,” my guide replied.
“Who’s your friend?”
“Mrs. Goldsmith’s guest.”
“Her guest?”
A silvery bell chimed and the elevator doors opened, making a sound like the sigh of a satisfied lion.
“After you,” Redbird said to me.
“Floor?” the elevator operator asked. But when he saw Redbird he said, “Oh, penthouse.”
The elevator door opened on a small dais of a room—nine feet square. With the lift behind us, a closed door ahead, the only furnishing was a marble stand on which stood a vase packed with a few dozen long-stemmed yellow roses.
Redbird surprised me by knocking on the door to the penthouse suite. I had expected him to press some button or maybe use his key.
A moment later the fancy, carved mahogany door swung inward and a young Japanese woman wearing a little black dress and white gloves bowed as her ancestors had done for centuries, and backed away for us to enter.
The room we entered was huge. More than a thousand square feet, it abutted upon a glass wall beyond which was a patio half again the size of the room we were in. The ceilings were almost the height of Light Lambert’s double-floor office and the furnishings were expensive beyond the imagination of the ordinary upper-middle-class citizen.
I don’t have the most educated eye but I recognized the styles of furniture from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century paintings; mostly wood with royal blue and deep red fabric here and there.
In a large chair with its back turned to the window sat a medium-sized middle-aged white woman with black and gray hair that formed naturally into ringlets. Her beauty was accented by a careless indifference. She wore a one-piece cream-colored dress that would be unremarkable anywhere but in a room where only gowns and service uniforms belonged.
She stood as I approached her and I thought that she seemed like an aging Greek deity; the mother of Titans and grandmother to gods.
“Mr. Rawlins, ma’am,” Redbird said dispassionately.
“So pleased to meet you.” She held out a hand and so I shook it.
“Nice place,” I said.
“Have a seat.”
Redbird pulled up a chair that was nicely formed but certainly inferior to Mrs. Goldsmith’s throne. They held us at the same height, though, and so I wasn’t insulted.
“Mr. Hodge called,” the lady said to the Indian.
He did not respond.
“He said that he asked you a question and you refused to answer,” she continued.
“I answered everything he asked,” Redbird said.
“I’ve told you before that I need you to be courteous to the staff.”
“I give as I get, ma’am.”
At that moment a man from south of the border, possibly Mexico, came up to my chair. He was wearing a tuxedo and a starched white shirt held together at the throat by a hand-knotted black bow tie.
“May I get you something to drink, sir?” he asked with no discernible accent.
I was wondering how old a cognac I could get in a room like that. But I knew better.
“No, thank you.”
The butler looked to the lady. When she shook her head, ever so slightly, he nodded and left the room.
“You can go too, Teh-ha,” she said.
Thirty seconds later we were alone in the makeshift throne room.
Neither of us spoke for a minute or two but the silence wasn’t uncomfortable. It was a lovely room with a regal woman who surrounded herself with people of color. Maybe this was some kind of inverse racism but it didn’t bother me—not at that moment anyway.
“My daughter is trouble, Mr. Rawlins,” she said, ending our respite of bliss.
“It would seem so. Does she have any siblings?”
“An older brother, Clyde, who lives in Verona, and a younger sister, Angelique.”
“Where’s she?”
“Staying with my parents in Concord, Mass.,” she said with faint distaste in her voice. “But it’s only Rosemary who’s troubled. She is my blood, however, and I will do what is necessary to keep her safe. I won’t have her martyred for my husband’s simplistic sense
of patriotism or because the police want some kind of revenge.” Virulent vituperation, even raw hatred, crept into her tone.
“How did I even get here, Mrs. Goldsmith?” I asked.
“Because you’re looking for Rose and I want to make sure that you help her.”
“Who told you that I’m looking for your daughter?”
“My husband runs the weapons manufacturing company. It is even named after him, but it is my family that owns the majority stock. Even though Foster and I live apart, there are people who work for him that report to me.”
“I see.”
“What do you think about the accusations against my daughter and this Bob Mantle person?”
“They had nothing to do with the armored car robbery or the first shootout with the police, I’m pretty sure about that. The killing of the vice principal was probably somebody else but the liquor store robbery—”
“What robbery?”
I gave her the account I got from Melvin.
“Oh, no,” she said whenever her daughter was mentioned.
I ended with, “I’m sorry to be the one to have to tell you these things, Mrs. Goldsmith.”
“Call me Lenore, Mr. Rawlins.”
“My name’s Easy.”
“Easy,” she said with a sad smile. “Easy, tell me what else you have learned about Rosemary.”
As a rule I don’t tattle about my clients’ business to others. But in this case I wasn’t even sure who it was I was representing. Foster denied it and Frisk and Tout said that the money came from somewhere else. So I told Lenore about the various branches of government, Belle Mantle, her husband’s denial about hiring me, and also the ambush that took out my windshield.
“Are you a brave man, Easy?” she asked after hearing about the failed bushwhacking.
“I’m scared of bee stings, back-alley beatings, and bullets too.”
She smiled. “That’s very sensible. I need a sensible man representing my daughter in this thing. Will you be that man?”
“Sure.” I liked the idea of having a client that I could see. “But I can’t promise the results you might like.”
“I just need a wedge against anyone trying to harm Rose. She’s trouble but not really bad. How much will you charge?”
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