Charcoal Joe

by Walter Mosley

  Hector’s smile was the anticipation of another man’s pain.

  Primo and Hector spoke a moment, then the garage owner turned to Fearless.

  “My friend Hector here says that he’s the strongest man from all Mexico and therefore the strongest man in the world. I told him that he never met Fearless Jones.”

  Hector said something in guttural Spanish that was almost definitely an insult to my plain-looking slender companion. The other Mexicans laughed and nodded. A few of them were making bets. I was sure that every one of those wagers covered how badly Hector would defeat Fearless, because between the two, no matter the contest, Hector’s victory would have to be seen as a foregone conclusion.

  I would have been on their side if I didn’t know Fearless Jones.

  “He look pretty strong,” Fearless agreed. A certain hardness undergirded the usually mild expression on Fearless’s honest face.

  Primo translated for Hector.

  “Cobarde,” the broad-shouldered Mexican said. Coward.

  “I’ll do it,” Fearless said. “But tell my friend here that he only gets one chance. Either he wins the first time or he loses, that’s it.”

  Primo gave Hector the conditions. The strongman spit on the ground.

  They sat across from each other and put their elbows in position. They clasped hands and looked each other in the eye.

  “Hey, Mr. Rawlins,” Peter Rhone said as Primo explained the rules to the contestants.

  “Pete. How you doin’?”

  “Good.”

  “You still at EttaMae’s?”

  “Yeah.”

  I had cleared Rhone when the LAPD wanted him to go down for the murder of a black woman during the Watts Riots. He hadn’t killed her. He had loved her and so when he was exonerated he went to work as a kind of man Friday for Mouse’s wife. He was the one white man in America I knew of who was trying to work off his people’s sins with humility and service.

  Primo raised his hand in the air.

  “Go!” he yelled, bringing his hand down like a hammer.

  Hector heaved all of his strength into the contest.

  If Fearless was merely as strong as he looked, Hector would have probably inflicted a compound fracture on his forearm. But with all of his effort the mechanic couldn’t move my friend’s arm more than an inch. Fearless looked at the combined clenched fist of their hands and then nodded. Slowly, with no obvious strain, he began to press Hector’s arm back into the upright position; he paused a few seconds and then started moving Hector’s arm downward.

  Hector’s eyes opened wide and his amber face became suffused with red. He trembled and redoubled his effort. But Fearless’s arm moved slowly forward. The men watching were astonished, murmuring about the slighter man’s impossible progress.

  Primo was grinning and Peter wandered back toward the little hut.

  Three inches from the barrel-top Fearless stopped, allowing Hector to put everything into pushing him back. Half a minute later the affable Mr. Jones shrugged the shoulder of his free arm and then slammed Hector’s hand down into defeat.

  The beaten mechanic jumped up and spewed a long diatribe in Spanish. Primo raised his hands and said, I supposed, that Hector had accepted the rules.

  Hector then rushed at Fearless, yelling and holding his fists up.

  If a man that strong and with so much rage had come at me I would have shot him or at least hit him with something hard and metal. But Fearless just looked at him. He knew people well enough that Hector didn’t frighten him.

  Primo barked an order and the men went back to work.

  “What can I do for you, Easy?” my old friend asked. He reached into a pocket of his workpants and came out with a half-drunk bottle of beer.

  It wasn’t yet noon.

  “Fearless needs a car and I was thinkin’ we could rent one.”

  “Rent? No.”

  “I gotta buy it?”

  “For what Fearless just did you can have a car. Hector’s been a, what we call a matón machista, a macho bully, on the yard ever since he came. I’d fire him if he wasn’t my wife’s cousin. But now you beat him in front of everybody. Now he can’t say he’s so strong. Come.”

  —

  We summoned Seymour from his backseat and Primo led us to the far corner of the lot. There he pulled a paint-spattered tarp off of a beautifully refurbished 1958 Edsel. It was dark purple with silver piping. It had been waxed and fairly sparkled.

  “This is my gift to you,” Primo said to Fearless.

  “That’s too much, man,” my temporary employee said.

  “Oh, no. For a friend of Easy this is just the right thing,” Primo said and killed the bottle. “He is my best friend outside of Mexico and I owe him a thousand thanks.”

  Primo took a bottle out of another pocket and a bottle opener from a pouch hanging from his belt.

  “Well,” Fearless said. “If you put it like that…”

  Primo popped the cap, took a swig, and said, “The keys are in the ignition. Tank’s three-quarters full.”

  “You go on with Fearless,” I said to Seymour. “Nobody’ll mess with you if he’s around. And they won’t find where he lives either.”

  “What are you going to do?” the young man replied.

  “Try to find out what the cops have on you and who else would want to kill Ducky and Mr. Boughman.”

  “Ducky?”

  “That’s the other dead man.”

  “What about Mama Jasmine?”

  “What about her?”

  “Maybe I could stay with her?”

  “No. That’s too dangerous. You should be someplace where nobody would think to look. Call her but don’t go there. I don’t trust Uriah either. You got a phone, Fearless?”

  “The garden house do.” He wrote down the number on a slip of paper that Primo provided.

  “All right, gentlemen,” I said. “You should be on your way.”

  —

  After they were gone I went to the little hut where Primo was drinking as Peter made entries in a huge bookkeeping ledger.

  “Thanks, Primo,” I said.

  He saluted me with his bottle.

  “Kinda early to be drinkin’, isn’t it?” I asked.

  “Beer is beer every hour of the day.”

  “Drinkin’ too much of it might not be so good though.”

  Primo looked at me with razor-sharp intelligence in his bloodshot eyes. “The older I get the more I know Death, Easy. Most of my friends from the old days are gone. They have gone with Death. I know him and he sees me. He tells me that there’s a place for me in his wagon and I cannot say he’s wrong. For all I know I could die tomorrow and who would deny a dying man his last drink?”

  21

  Behind a high hedge that needed trimming, a couple of blocks north of the Sunset Strip on Ozeta Terrace, stood a four-story house that looked to be constructed by a baker’s dozen of warring architects. There were turrets, empty spaces, boxy additions, and curved walls made from wood and plaster, brick and stone. At the highest point there had been added a maroon geodesic dome that wasn’t there the last time I visited.

  The hodgepodge house was owned by a nineteen-year-old long-haired hippie named Terry Aldrich. Terry’s father was a millionaire who gave his son the house and a ten-thousand-dollar-a-month stipend to stay out of his life. Terry turned the place into a commune/crash pad and bought marijuana by the kilo to keep his residents happy.

  I tried the front door but it was locked. This was new—Terry’s house had always been open to anyone who needed a mattress, a meal, or some marijuana.

  I pressed the button, wondering if there was a bell connected to it, and waited.

  Standing there looking up at the crazy-quilt structure, I was thinking that L.A. was a lot like that mansion. The city was growing at a pace so fast that no piece of it was designed to fit with the rest. Houses were being built in wildfire basins and on mudslide hills. Ultramodern skyscrapers stood next to squat brick o
ffice buildings built before the last three wars. The sun was almost always shining in a sky filled with smog, and people spent their days sitting in automobiles, at office desks, and in front of TVs at night.

  It was a crazy life where housekeeper black women lounged by the ocean in million-dollar beach houses and old black men held private meetings in seaside jails.

  “Can I help you?” someone said.

  He was young and quite beautiful. A shade under five-ten with lustrous black hair down to his nipples, the skinny hippie kid was bare to the waist with no facial hair whatsoever. Despite his movie star appearance the young man seemed wary, even worried.

  “Terry in?” I asked. Terry, the door’s owner, was much taller with longer, stringy brown hair, and a face that a mother would only love because it was expected of her.

  “No. He’s up north.”

  “I’m here looking for Coco,” I said.

  The hippie Adonis looked at my brown suit and the usual prejudices between hippies and “straights” rose in his sneer.

  “My name is Easy Rawlins.”

  That changed everything. The boy’s eyes opened wide and he actually smiled.

  “Easy?” he said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Terry left your name on the kitchen wall so anyone who answered the door would let you in.” The kid backed away, throwing the door open wide. “My name’s Arthur. I been staying here till I can homestead some land back in Wyoming.”

  I crossed the threshold and he closed the door.

  “I never knew this door to be locked,” I said.

  Arthur hunched his shoulders and said, “These biker dudes came in one day and ripped off Terry’s dope. They beat on this one guy so bad we had to take him to the emergency room. So now the door is locked and there’s usually a couple’a vets around in case it gets hairy.”

  I chuckled at the last word but Arthur didn’t get the joke.

  “Coco here?” I asked.

  “Outside the White Rabbit Room,” he said.

  —

  On the third floor of the inelegant mansion I came to a black door with the crude image of a rabbit hacked out in about a dozen white slashes, topped with two bright red daubs for its condemnatory eyes.

  I walked into the long dormitory-like room. There were a dozen or so mattresses along the wall. Only one of these was occupied; this by a copulating couple. He was on top banging away, breathing hard, and she was looking at me as if maybe she were alone and wondering what I was doing there. I half expected her to wave.

  I walked past them and to a window that opened out onto a pizza slice–shaped terrace.

  As I climbed through I had my only ever filmmaking thought: I wondered what kind of movie would have a naked white couple fucking as a black man in a brown suit walked through and then out of a window.

  —

  She was sitting facing the window in the lotus position, upturned hands on her knees and completely naked. Helen “Coco” Ray had brown hair as thick and long as Arthur’s, and breasts that defied gravity like those of a woman wading neck-deep in a swimming pool. She wasn’t really pretty but she was beautiful and stormy and self-assured as only young beautiful women can be.

  Her eyes were closed at first but they opened as I approached her, crunching the terra-cotta sand that littered the balcony.

  “Easy,” she said, not frowning.

  “Hey, Coco.” I pulled up an aluminum patio chair, the seat of which was threaded by a hundred or so strips of leather.

  Her legs spread wide like that embarrassed me a little.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked.

  “I brought you a letter from Jo,” I said, taking the bundle of pages from my inside pocket and handing it to her.

  That brought her knees together and a feeling of relief in my chest.

  Immediately she started reading. I waited through about five pages and stood.

  “Wait please,” she said. It was both a command and a plea.

  I sat back down.

  Coco read and I used the moments to wonder at the geometric connections between Charcoal Joe and Seymour Brathwaite. I didn’t want to get too deep into that labyrinth. Maybe Melvin Suggs could make me a shortcut.

  “Did you talk to her?” Coco asked, the letter on her thigh.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I needed her to do something for me and she asked me to drop this off.”

  “Do what?” Coco asked.

  “Just a job.”

  “Did she tell you about us?”

  “You weren’t there,” I said. “What’s to tell?”

  “She wanted a baby.”

  I smiled.

  “You think that’s funny?”

  “Usually it’s the young woman that wants the baby and the old man that just wants her love.”

  “Every relationship is different,” the sun-kissed white girl said. Her certainty was like a fist.

  “Yeah,” I allowed, “and every one of those is the same.”

  “Do you wanna fuck?” she asked.

  I wondered where this world of women wanting sex had been hiding when all I was thinking about was Bonnie.

  “Come again?” I said.

  “Jo and I decided that the only man we knew that could be the father of our child would be you.”

  “So you talked about it,” I said to deflect the request.

  “Answer my question.”

  I climbed off the chair and lowered to the sand-covered patio so that I was sitting next to the hippie siren. I held out a hand and she took it.

  “I lost a daughter once. Her mother had stopped loving me because I couldn’t be honest. They left and I swore I’d never lose another child. Do I wanna fuck you? Hell yeah. But do I want to give you a child to take away? No, honey, I could not do that.”

  It dawned on me that this was the second time that week someone had asked me to father their child.

  She released my hand and then leaned over to kiss my lips.

  “I’m sorry, Easy,” she said.

  Her eyes said other things and I’m sure mine did too. I thought of a dozen homilies I could share but there wasn’t anything to say. That was the hippie age, and truth was in movement and bodies and actions. History had been obliterated and the future was just a waste of time.

  “Phone’s still in the kitchen, right?” I asked.

  “Uh-huh. Are you gonna see Jo?”

  “Sooner or later.”

  “Tell her I love her.”

  I stood up and walked through the window into the White Rabbit Room.

  The young man was lying on his back with his eyes closed. The girl was tugging at his erection and looking at me with an expression I can describe only as bored.

  22

  Two young men with long hair and beards were smoking marijuana through a hookah at the small dining table in the kitchen. One was black and the other white. They weren’t talking at all and their only movements were to either refill or relight the bowl of the water pipe.

  The white guy had the dope and the brother the matches.

  I was dialing a number on the wall phone, thinking that those hippies were a glimpse into a multiracial future in which I might not wish to reside.

  “Yeah?” a voice muttered in my ear.

  “You got anything for me?”

  “Mr. Sugarman,” the voice said. “Where are you?”

  “Lookin’ at two stoned-out hippie freaks on the Sunset Strip.”

  “Meet me at the China Box in forty-five minutes.”

  —

  I took Sunset all the way.

  It bothered me that Suggs wanted a face-to-face. That meant my investigation had hit either a live wire or a hornets’ nest. Melvin and I were friends but he represented law and order in a city where the police often crossed that line.

  —

  The China Box was an old-fashioned establishment where each table was in a private room down a long aisle of closed doors. A gawky waiter in black cotton trousers and a
pristine white jacket led me to station 22. He opened the door for me. Melvin was already in there eating fried wonton noodles and drinking a glass of ice water.

  “Easy,” he said. It might have been a greeting or a warning.

  I settled in across from him and the waiter closed the door. The dining cubicle was big enough to seat eight but I still felt crowded.

  “I ordered for both of us,” he told me.

  “Okay.”

  “You like the hot ribs, right?”

  “Why am I here, Melvin?”

  The cop was maybe a few years older than I, shorter by four inches and stocky but not fat. His hands were the size of baseball mitts and his eyes the color of a fawn’s soft fur. He had two modes of dress. When he was in love his suits were clean and pressed; when she was gone he was a mess.

  He was looking pretty good that day in a snappy blue suit and a white dress shirt. The blood-colored tie was loose at the collar, denoting the gravity of our meeting.

  “What do you have to do with Peter Boughman?” he asked.

  The door opened and another Chinese waiter, this one short and swarthy, placed a platter of at least a dozen glazed pork ribs between us.

  When he was gone I said, “Never met the man.”

  “So why you on the case?”

  “Seymour Brathwaite’s foster mother asked me to help him out. She doesn’t think he’s done the crime.”

  “Mothers never do.”

  “And they hire me to make their beliefs into truth.”

  Melvin took a rib and denuded it in five bites.

  “Boughman was one tough customer,” he said. “He did it all—from extortion to murder for hire.”

  “So whoever killed him did some widows a favor.”

  “And made a pain in my ass.”

  “Why’s that?” I asked.

  The door opened again. The shorter waiter brought in a broad cork-lined platter with plates of fried shrimp, peanut noodles, and a dose of sweet and sour pork. He set these down between us and backed out of the room.

  “Boughman was slowing down in his elder years. He didn’t do the rough stuff anymore.”

  “Somebody should have told the killer that.”

  Suggs ignored the comment and said, “He was into money laundering. It was goin’ around that he was in the middle of a multimillion-dollar transaction when he was killed.”