"Excuse me."
The voice made me jump.
"What?" My voice strained and cracked as I turned to see the small man.
"Who are you looking for?"
He was a little white man wearing a suit that was also a uniform.
"I'm looking for, um … ah …," I stuttered. I forgot the name. I had to squint so that the room wouldn't start spinning.
It was a habit I developed in Texas when I was a boy. Sometimes, when a white man of authority would catch me off guard, I'd empty my head of everything so I was unable to say anything. "The less you know, the less trouble you find," they used to say. I hated myself for it but I also hated white people, and colored people too, for making me that way.
"Can I help you?" the white man asked. He had curly red hair and a pointed nose. When I still couldn't answer he said, "We only take deliveries between nine and six."
"No, no," I said, trying to remember.
"Yes we do! Now you better leave."
"No, I mean I…"
The little man started backing toward a small podium that stood against the wall. I figured that he had a nightstick back there.
"Albright!" I yelled.
"What?" he yelled back.
"Albright! I'm here to see Albright!"
"Albright who?" There was suspicion in his eye, and his hand was behind the podium.
"Mr. Albright. Mr. DeWitt Albright."
"Mr. Albright?"
"Yes, that's him."
"Are you delivering something?" he asked, holding out his scrawny hand.
"No. I have an appointment. I mean, I'm supposed to meet him." I hated that little man.
"You're supposed to meet him? You can't even remember his name."
I took a deep breath and said, very softly, "I am supposed to meet Mr. DeWitt Albright tonight, any time after seven."
"You're supposed to meet him at seven? It's eight-thirty now. He's probably gone."
"He told me any time after seven."
He held out his hand to me again. "Did he give you a note saying you're to come in here after hours?"
I shook my head at him. I would have liked to rip the skin from his face like I'd done once to another white boy.
"Well, how am I to know that you aren't just a thief? You can't even remember his name and you want me to take you somewhere in there. Why you could have a partner waiting for me to let you in …"
I was disgusted. "Forget it man," I said. "You just tell him, when you see him, that Mr. Rawlins was here. You tell him that the next time he better give me a note because you cain't be lettin' no street niggahs comin' in yo' place wit' no notes!"
I was ready to leave. That little white man had convinced me that I was in the wrong place. I was ready to go back home. I could find my money another way.
"Hold on," he said. "You wait right there and I'll be back in a minute." He sidled through one of the cream-colored doors, shutting it as he went. I heard the lock snap into place a moment later.
After a few minutes he opened the door a crack and waved at me to follow him. He looked from side to side as he let me through the door; looking for my accomplices I suppose.
The doorway led to an open courtyard that was paved with dark red brick and landscaped with three large palm trees that reached out beyond the roof of the three-story building. The inner doorways on the upper two floors were enclosed by trellises that had vines of white and yellow sweetheart roses cascading down. The sky was still light at that time of year but I could see a crescent moon peeking over the inner roof.
The little man opened another door at the other side of the courtyard. It led down an ugly metal staircase into the bowels of the building. We went through a dusty boiler room to an empty corridor that was painted drab green and draped with gray cobwebs.
At the end of the hall there was a door of the same color that was chipped and dusty.
"That's what you want," the little man said.
I said thank you and he walked away from me. I never saw him again. I often think of how so many people have walked into my life for just a few minutes and kicked up some dust, then they're gone away. My father was like that; my mother wasn't much better.
I knocked on the ugly door. I expected to see Albright, but instead the door opened into a small room that held two strange-looking men.
The man who held the door was tall and slight with curly brown hair, dark skin like an India Indian, and brown eyes so light they were almost golden. His friend, who stood against a door at the far wall, was short and looked a little like he was Chinese around the eyes, but when I looked at him again I wasn't so sure of his race.
The dark man smiled and put out his hand. I thought he wanted to shake but then he started slapping my side.
"Hey, man! What's wrong with you?" I said, pushing him away. The maybe-Chinese man slipped a hand in his pocket.
"Mr. Rawlins," the dark man said in an accent I didn't know.
He was still smiling. "Put your hands up a little from your sides, please. I'm just checking." The smile widened into a grin.
"You could just keep your hands to yourself, man. I don't let nobody feel on me like that."
The little man pulled something, I couldn't tell what, halfway out of his pocket. Then he took a step toward us. The grinner tried to put his hand against my chest but I grabbed him by the wrist.
The dark man's eyes glittered, he smiled at me for a moment, and then said to his partner, "Don't worry, Manny. He's okay."
"You sure, Shariff?"
"Yeah. He's alright, just a little shaky." Shariff's teeth glinted between his dusky lips. I still had his wrist.
Shariff said, "Let him know, Manny."
Manny put his hand back in his pocket and then took it out again to knock on the door behind.
DeWitt Albright opened the door after a minute.
"Easy," he smiled.
"He doesn't want us to touch him," Shariff said as I let him go.
"Leave it," Albright answered. "I just wanted to make sure he was solo."
"You're the boss." Shariff sounded very sure of himself; even a little arrogant.
"You and Manny can go now," Albright smiled. "Easy and I have some business to talk over."
Mr. Albright went behind a big blond desk and put his bone shoes up next to a half-full bottle of Wild Turkey. There was a paper calendar hanging on the wall behind him with a picture of a basket of blackberries as a design. There was nothing else on the wall. The floor was bare too: plain yellow linoleum with flecks of color scattered through it.
"Have a seat, Mr. Rawlins," Mr. Albright said, gesturing to the chair in front of his desk. He was bare-headed and his coat was nowhere in sight. There was a white-leather shoulder holster under his left arm. The muzzle of the pistol almost reached his belt.
"Nice friends you got," I said as I studied his piece.
"They're like you, Easy. Whenever I need a little manpower I give them a call. There's a whole army of men who'll do specialized work for the right price."
"The little guy Chinese?"
Albright shrugged. "No one knows. He was raised in an orphanage, in Jersey City. Drink?"
"Sure."
"One of the benefits of working for yourself. Always have a bottle on the table. Everybody else, even the presidents of these big companies, got the booze in the bottom drawer, but I keep it right out in plain sight. You want to drink it? That's fine with me. You don't like it? Door's right there behind you." While he talked he poured two shots into glasses that he had taken from a desk drawer.
The gun interested me. The butt and the barrel were black; the only part of DeWitt's attire that wasn't white.
As I leaned over to take the glass from his hand he asked, "So, you want the job, Easy?"
"Well, that depends on what kind of job you had in mind?"
"I'm looking for somebody, for a friend," he said. He pulled a photograph from his shirt pocket and put it down on the desk. It was a picture of the head a
nd shoulders of a pretty young white woman. The picture had been black and white originally but it was touched up for color like the photos of jazz singers that they put out in front of nightclubs. She had light hair coming down over her bare shoulders and high cheekbones and eyes that might have been blue if the artist got it right. After staring at her for a full minute I decided that she'd be worth looking for if you could get her to smile at you that way.
"Daphne Monet," Mr. Albright said. "Not bad to look at but she's hell to find."
"I still don't see what it's got to do with me," I said. "I ain't never laid eyes on her."
"That's a shame, Easy." He was smiling at me. "But I think you might be able to help me anyway."
"I can't see how. Woman like this don't hardly know my number. What you should do is call the police."
"I never call a soul who isn't a friend, or at least a friend of a friend. I don't know any cops, and neither do my friends."
"Well then get a—"
"You see, Easy," he cut me off, "Daphne has a predilection for the company of Negroes. She likes jazz and pigs' feet and dark meat, if you know what I mean."
I knew but I didn't like to hear it. "So you think she might be down around Watts?"
"Not a doubt in my mind. But, you see, I can't go in those places looking for her because I'm not the right persuasion. Joppy knows me well enough to tell me what he knows but I've already asked him and all he could do was to give me your name."
"So what do you want with her?"
"I have a friend who wants to apologize, Easy. He has a short temper and that's why she left."
"And he wants her back?"
Mr. Albright smiled.
"I don't know if I can help you, Mr. Albright. Like Joppy said, I lost a job a couple of days ago and I have to get another one before the note comes due."
"Hundred dollars for a week's work, Mr. Rawlins, and I pay in advance. You find her tomorrow and you keep what's in your pocket."
"I don't know, Mr. Albright. I mean, how do I know what I'm getting mixed up in? What are you—"
He raised a powerful finger to his lips, then he said, "Easy, walk out your door in the morning and you're mixed up in something. The only thing you can really worry about is if you get mixed up to the top or not."
"I don't want to get mixed up with the law is what I mean."
"That's why I want you to work for me. I don't like the police myself. Shit! The police enforce the law and you know what the law is, don't you?"
I had my own ideas on the subject but I kept them to myself.
"The law," he continued, "is made by the rich people so that the poor people can't get ahead. You don't want to get mixed up with the law and neither do I."
He lifted the shot glass and inspected it as if he were checking for fleas, then he put the glass on the desk and placed his hands, palms down, around it.
"I'm just asking you to find a girl," he said. "And to tell me where she is. That's all. You just find out where she is and whisper it in my ear. That's all. You find her and I'll give you a bonus mortgage payment and my friend will find you a job, maybe he can even get you back into Champion."
"Who is it wants to find the girl?"
"No names, Easy, it's better that way."
"It's just that I'd hate to find her and then have some cop come up to me with some shit like I was the last one seen around her— before she disappeared."
The white man laughed and shook his head as if I had told a good joke.
"Things happen every day, Easy," he said. "Things happen every day. You're an educated man, aren't you?"
"Why, yes."
"So you read the paper. You read it today?"
"Yes."
"Three murders! Three! Last night alone. Things happen every day. People with everything to live for, maybe they even got a little money in the bank. They probably had it all planned out what they'd be doing this weekend, but that didn't stop them from dying. Those plans didn't save them when the time came. People got everything to live for and they get a little careless. They forget that the only thing you have to be sure of is that nothing bad comes to you."
The way he smiled when he sat back in his chair reminded me of Mouse again. I thought of how Mouse was always smiling, especially when misfortune happened to someone else.
"You just find the girl and tell me, that's all. I'm not going to hurt her and neither is my friend. You don't have a thing to worry about."
He took a white secretary-type wallet from a desk drawer and produced a stack of bills. He counted out ten of them, licking his square thumb for every other one, and placed them in a neat stack next to the whiskey.
"One hundred dollars," he said.
I couldn't see why it shouldn't be my one hundred dollars.
When I was a poor man, and landless, all I worried about was a place for the night and food to eat; you really didn't need much for that. A friend would always stand me a meal, and there were plenty of women who would have let me sleep with them. But when I got that mortgage I found that I needed more than just friendship. Mr. Albright wasn't a friend but he had what I needed.
He was a fine host too. His liquor was good and he was pleasant enough. He told me a few stories, the kind of tales that we called "lies" back home in Texas.
One story he told was about when he was a lawyer in Georgia.
"I was defending a shit-kicker who was charged with burning down a banker's house," DeWitt told me as he stared out toward the wall behind my head. "Banker had foreclosed on the boy the minute the note was due. You know he didn't even give him any chance to make extra arrangements. And that boy was just as guilty as that banker was."
"You get him off?" I asked.
DeWitt smiled at me. "Yeah. That prosecutor had a good case on Leon, that's the shit-kicker. Yeah, the honorable Randolph Corey had solid proof that my client did the arson. But I went down to Randy's house and I sat at his table and pulled out this here pistol. All I did was talk about the weather we'd been having, and while I did that I cleaned my gun."
"Getting your client off meant that much to you?"
"Shit. Leon was trash. But Randy had been riding pretty high for a couple'a years and I had it in mind that it was time for him to lose a case." Albright straightened his shoulders. "You have to have a sense of balance when it comes to the law, Easy. Everything has to come out just right."
After a few drinks I started talking about the war. Plain old man-talk, about half of it true and the rest just for laughs. More than an hour went by before he asked me, "You ever kill a man with your hands, Easy?"
"What?"
"You ever kill a man, hand-to-hand?"
"Why?"
"No reason really. It's just that I know you've seen some action."
"Some."
"You ever kill somebody up close? I mean so close that you could see it when his eyes went out of focus and he let go? When you kill a man it's the shit and piss that's worst. You boys did that in the war and I bet it was bad. I bet you couldn't dream about your mother anymore, or anything nice. But you lived with it because you knew that it was the war that forced you to do it."
His pale blue eyes reminded me of the wide-eyed corpses of German soldiers that I once saw stacked up on a road to Berlin.
"But the only thing that you have to remember, Easy," he said as he picked up the money to hand me across the table, "is that some of us can kill with no more trouble than drinking a glass of bourbon." He downed the shot and smiled.
Then he said, "Joppy tells me that you used to frequent an illegal club down on Eighty-ninth and Central. Somebody saw Daphne at that very same bar not long ago. I don't know what they call it but they have the big names in there on weekends and the man who runs it is called John. You could start tonight."
The way his dead eyes shined on me I knew our party was over. I couldn't think of anything to say so I nodded, put his money in my pocket, and moved to leave.
I turned back at the door to salut
e him goodbye but DeWitt Albright had filled his glass and shifted his gaze to the far wall. He was staring into someplace far from that dirty basement.
4
John's place was a speakeasy before they repealed Prohibition. But by 1948 we had legitimate bars all over L.A. John liked the speakeasy business though, and he had been in so much trouble with the law that City Hall wouldn't have given him a license to drive, much less to sell liquor. So John kept paying off the police and running an illegal nightclub through the back door of a little market at the corner of Central Avenue and Eighty-ninth Place. You could walk into that store any evening up until three in the morning to find Hattie Parsons sitting behind the candy counter. They didn't have many groceries, and no fresh produce or dairy goods, but she'd sell you what was there and if you knew the right words, or were a regular, then she'd let you in the club through the back door. But if you thought that you should be able to get in on account of your name, or your clothes or maybe your bankbook, well, Hattie kept a straight razor in her apron pocket and her nephew, Junior Fornay, sat right behind the door.
When I pushed open the door to the market I ran into my third white man that day. This one was about my height with wheat-brown hair and an expensive dark blue suit. His clothes were disheveled, and he smelled of gin.
"Hey, colored brother," he said as he waved at me. He walked straight toward me so that I had to back out of the store if I didn't want him to run me down.
"How'd ya like t'make twenty dollars fast?" he asked when the door swung shut behind him.
They were just throwing money at me that day.
"How's that?" I asked the drunk.
"I need to get in here … lookin' fer someone. Girl in there won't let me in." He was teetering and I was afraid he'd fall down. "Why'ont you tell'em I'm fine."
"I'm sorry, but I can't do that," I said.
"Why's that?"
"Once they tell you no at John's they stick to it." I moved around him to get into the door again. He tried to turn and grab my arm but all he managed was to spin around twice and wind up sitting against the wall. He put up his hand as if he wanted me to bend down so he could whisper something but I didn't think that anything he had to offer could improve my life.
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