Charcoal Joe

by Walter Mosley

  —

  Augie was standing next to the deep tub when I came upstairs with her eggs and ketchup. The mirror was fogged up and she had only taken off her bright blue high-high heels.

  “I thought you’d be in the tub by now,” I said.

  “I didn’t know if you wanted to watch me take off my dress,” she said. “A lotta men get mad if you just naked. They wanna show.”

  “I get my excitement making eggs in butter.”

  She shrugged and then pulled off the flimsy dress like it was a T-shirt.

  Augie’s body was like a teenager’s too. I was sure that Doris, Big D, would sell her as underage-and-willing to any new client.

  “You want to get in with me, Easy?”

  “No thanks.”

  “That’s not what your eyes is tellin’ me.”

  “Get on in there.”

  Augusta moaned as she lowered into the hot water. I was absolutely sure that no client ever made her cry out like that. I handed her a fork and the plate of eggs.

  “Oh my God this is delicious,” she said after three fast forkfuls. “You could cook too? Damn, Mr. Rawlins, you should take me outta this life and make me your wife.”

  I put the lid down and sat on the commode, there next to the bathtub. She finished her eggs in quick order. I took the dish and set it in the sink.

  “This is perfect,” Augusta said, luxuriating. “If you wanna call me and go out on a real date I will definitely say yes. But you can’t tell Big D.”

  “I won’t. You look better than you did the last time I saw you, girl,” I said.

  “That was two years, right?”

  I nodded.

  “I was still doin’ aitch back then. Got pregnant, kicked the habit, and now I go to beauty school in the daytime and work three nights for Doris.”

  “I guess I was lucky that you were on the job tonight.”

  “I was workin’ but you know I would’a come in anyway if they told me it was you. We all like you down at the office.”

  She closed her eyes and lay back.

  That was a very peaceful moment. Augusta had dumped her flimsy dress on top of her blue high heels. The water from the bath faucet was dripping. Somewhere there was a distraught woman grieving over the violent death of Arnold Mayhew.

  “Are we gonna fuck?” Augie asked. I looked up to see her intelligent eyes focused on me.

  “Not tonight.”

  “You don’t like me?”

  “No,” I said. “I mean…I like you fine but I called for you because I had a few questions.”

  “Questions about what?”

  “They used to call you Jailbait, didn’t they?”

  “Still do sometimes.”

  “And they used to just say JB sometimes too, right?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Then I wanted to ask you about Uriah Hardy.”

  “That nasty old man? Why you wanna know about him?”

  “His wife’s foster son, Seymour, got into some trouble and I’m trying to get him out. I tried talking to Uriah but he just stubborn.”

  “Stubborn? Uriah Hardy is livin’ proof that some people cain’t win for losin’. Here he got everything an’ all he is is mad at Jasmine Palmas. She give him a house, a allowance, freedom to see any woman he want, and a new car every three years. Niggah don’t know what side his ass is buttered on. That’s why she introduced him to Big D an’ paid half what we cost so he keep usin’ us. Jasmine wanted to hear if he was schemin’ against her.”

  “Jasmine paid for Uriah’s prostitutes?”

  “Half herself and the other half came outta the allowance she give him.”

  “I was told that Jasmine was a housekeeper,” I said. “How’s a cleaning woman get all that money?”

  “The only kinda cleaning woman Jasmine Palmas is is the kind that clean up.”

  “What kind of business she in?” I asked.

  “I don’t know and I don’t ask.”

  “And what did she get out of you?”

  “She just wanted to know if Uriah said anything about her.”

  “Did he?”

  “Did he? The second time I was with him, after he made me do all kindsa disgustin’ stuff, he wanted me to rob Jasmine. Told me he had the key to her place and that he would tell me when him and her and her foster son would go out for dinner. I was supposed to use the key and take a albino-crocodile-skin bag she use. He said he’d gimme fi’e thousand dollars for that bag. I was usin’ pretty heavy back then but I wasn’t so out of it that I wanted to cross Doris and Jasmine too.”

  “Doris knows Jasmine?”

  “Jasmine was her number one girl way back. One day she went to a job with Charcoal Joe Tyler—after that she never worked again.”

  “Why would Uriah need you to steal the bag if he already had the key?”

  “That way he could say that he was with Jasmine when the house got robbed.”

  “Did he tell you what was in the bag?”

  “Naw. He said that it’d be locked and if the lock was broken he’d kill me. But I didn’t care ’cause I wasn’t gonna steal it in the first place. I told Doris and she told Jasmine. Jasmine had the lock changed and Uriah never talked about it again.”

  “Was he suspicious?”

  “I was strung out back then and so I did whatever nasty thing a client wanted; and Uriah wanted a lot. I think he suspected but you know nine men outta ten think with they dick. I was half price and on time. He never talked about Jasmine no mo’.”

  “What about Jasmine’s foster son?”

  “What about him?”

  “He told me that you gave him your card.”

  “That’s why you called, huh?” she said. “Damn.”

  “Seymour?”

  “He was just a child, Easy. You know, havin’ a crush one minute, watchin’ Mighty Mouse the next. I give him my little card to make him feel important.”

  “Did he ever call you?”

  “One time he did. It was pretty late and I was watchin’ TV or sumpin’. He said that his mother wasn’t home and he was scared and was wonderin’ if he should call the police. I told him that I’d call her friends and see where she was but before we got off the phone she come in. She was mad that Seymour had my number, and Big D told me the next day that I wasn’t gonna see Uriah no mo’. Cain’t say that I cried.”

  34

  The phone rang a few minutes before one in the morning. Augusta and I were sitting in the living room drinking chamomile tea and laughing about our assorted misadventures. She was curled up in my big yellow bathrobe on one of the stuffed chairs.

  If I sat very still my ribs hardly ached.

  Lifting the receiver, I thought of Eugene Stapleton saying, Our kind of business is demanding and it doesn’t run by a clock.

  He was right about that.

  “Hello?”

  “Are you finished with my girl, Mr. Rawlins?” Doris asked.

  “It’d take me a few weeks to be finished but I guess I’m done for the moment.”

  “Then pay her one-fifty and tell her to put on some clothes. Stuart Short is in a car in front of your house.”

  I definitely had to move.

  —

  I walked her out to the black Caddy parked directly in front of my house. Stuart Short—who was six-three, two hundred fifty pounds at least, and the color of an overcooked bran muffin—was standing next to the passenger’s door. He wore a black suit and even sported a chauffeur’s cap.

  “Mr. Short,” I said, extending a hand.

  “Mr. Rawlins,” he countered, taking the offer.

  When I opened the door for Augusta, Stuart headed for the driver’s side.

  She kissed my lips and said, “Thanks for the surprises, Easy. And watch out about Uriah. He the kind’a coward wouldn’t think twice about shootin’ you in the back.”

  —

  I believe that it is my psychological makeup that makes me a good detective. I’m 90 percent pragmatist and the rest
superstition. Augie’s warning about being shot in the back felt to me like a portent. I didn’t necessarily think that it would be Uriah to shoot me or even that I’d be shot; the fear was that there was a trap I wouldn’t see waiting to be sprung. Maybe the danger was in my past, not my future; it could have been the men grabbing me at Seymour’s. But whatever it was, the trepidation left me wide awake like some leaf-eating forest creature who just heard a branch snap outside his lair.

  I washed the dishes and then put a load of laundry in the machine on the back porch. While waiting for the cycle to finish I read the newspaper. I put the clothes in the dryer, decided on the suit I’d wear the next day, folded the dried clothes, and then went to the living room and picked up Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner. Jackson Blue had already read it and told me, “Ole Willie Styron made the mistake of gettin’ into a public debate with Ossie Davis. They had Jimmy Baldwin moderate. I guess Styron thought that he was too smart for some black actor but old Ossie tore him a new one. He made Styron understand that the plantation days is ovah an’ there’s black men out here know they own stories.”

  I only read the first paragraph. I remember that it was a lovely and peaceful meditation of a man floating in a boat….

  —

  I was that man drifting down a tributary of the Mississippi in southern Louisiana in the spring. It was near the Gulf I knew because there were gulls and pelicans everywhere. Huge fish moved slowly just below the surface of the water, and lazy alligators lounged on the banks. I was wearing the horizontal black-and-white stripes of a convict and there was a manacle, cut loose from its ball and chain, attached to my ankle.

  I was an escaped prisoner headed for Mexico, the Caribbean, or maybe even South America. I tried to recall what my crime had been, what the circumstances were surrounding my escape. A little voice was telling me that I had to get cracking on my getaway, but the day was so beautiful and sleep beckoned me.

  The Americas were not my home. Maybe nowhere was. It came to me that I was free for a brief moment on that peaceful watercourse; that if I couldn’t enjoy such a lovely respite then life was not worth living.

  This sober thought brought me awake on the raft and then on the couch in my living room. I was a free man on a dangerous path. What more could anyone ask?

  —

  I showered and shaved, thought about my reflection in the glass and Bonnie, wherever she might be. I put on the medium-gray two-piece suit over a dusky orange T-shirt. The shoes I chose were made from black leather and had rubber soles; this because Augie’s warning might still come to pass.

  I drank strong black coffee at the eight-sided dinette table while loading fresh cartridges into my .45. I got the short, wide-bladed pocketknife from the tool chest in the garage just to feel like I had an extra edge.

  I took the car down to the Safeway at Fairfax and Pico, did the shopping for the week, then came home to put away the larder.

  At 11:59, I walked out the front door just as Fearless Jones’s Edsel pulled to the curb.

  Many of my black friends complain about our brethren always being late for appointments; they call it CP time. But the black men I knew were never late. Mouse was a career criminal and you can’t make it long in that profession without shaving time down to the microsecond. Jackson called his watch a chronometer because he saw time as an exact, if variable, mechanism by which all phenomena were judged. And Fearless Jones was simply a man of his word; whatever he promised, that’s what came to pass.

  —

  Fearless drove us to the Star-Hobard. He went to the diner to have some tea while I made my way up to the third floor of the low-rent motel.

  I went down to the door of 3G, seeking to avoid Mania the elder, but she answered that door too.

  “Ook del ta doe mon,” she said, looking me in the eye.

  “Your daughter,” I said slowly.

  “I’m here, Mr. Rawlins.”

  The older white woman’s brown daughter came up next to her. She put her arm around Mania the elder’s waist, gently pulling the confused lady away.

  “Aspell pea-no taspin,” the younger woman said.

  “Tappa is papa?” The old woman seemed confused. I thought that even her grasp of the nonsense language was fading.

  “Aspell, aspell,” my translator said while guiding her mother toward the inner door to 3F.

  Once the woman was gone, Mania the younger said, “Come in, Mr. Rawlins. Come sit on the sofa.”

  The settee was turquoise-colored vinyl, hardly more than a padded bench. Mania plopped down in half lotus on a chair that hailed from the same family. She wore a mottled green housedress that was loose on her but still quite fetching. There was something about the young woman that was both down-home and alien.

  She was considering me in the way that bomb squad cops look over a cardboard box that might contain an explosive device. While she pondered I noted the beauty underneath her exotic looks.

  “Did you get to that journal?” I asked, just to pretend that there was something normal about our meeting.

  “I called Mr. Natly,” she replied.

  “About me?”

  “What are your intentions about Julia?”

  “Who is Julia?”

  “The woman that wrote the journal you gave me.”

  “You see?” I said. “I know a hundred percent more than when I brought it to you.”

  This answer confounded the young translator. She was expecting something more…devious.

  “You haven’t answered my question,” she demanded.

  “Because I don’t know,” I admitted. “I didn’t even know who wrote it. A young man I’m trying to help says that a woman he didn’t know gave this to him to give to his mother. He didn’t and she didn’t say that she wrote the journal, so just the fact that it was a woman who wrote it is a revelation.”

  I like reading and I like words. When speaking with people I have come to understand that what I say is informed by the tone I use. So I can say anything and make myself understood by the context and the placement of the words. But during this case I found that the fact I spoke a language that educated people understood made them look at me differently. That’s how it was with Miss Mania Blackman. The use of the word revelation seemed to tip the balance in my favor at the courtroom bench in her mind.

  “A woman named Julia wrote the diary over a three-month period,” she said. “The last three months. She started it when she met a man that she called John. I don’t think that was his real name. Anyway, John was a bad boy but she loved the way he talked to her and the innocence of his smile. John was in trouble and he was trying to find a way out. He wanted to run off with Julia but didn’t have the money.

  “Julia never trusted John. It was just that he made her happier than any man ever had and so she stayed with him even though her head told her to leave. And after a while she knew that even if he was using her, even if he was going to make her do bad things, that she would do them because there might never be a love like that again in her life….”

  There was great feeling in Mania Blackman’s rendition of the personal memoir. I remember thinking that it would take a woman to convince another woman about the possible depths of love.

  “He made her do something that was very dangerous,” Mania continued. “She was frightened and afraid that she would die.”

  “And she did what he asked?”

  “The second-to-the-last entry says that she was going to meet a man on John’s behalf,” Mania replied. “That was ten days ago. Then there was no more until seven days ago.”

  “What did that say?”

  “ ‘No one knew that the green-eyed serpent could climb trees,’ ” Mania recited, “ ‘but the little owl hid her crystal eggs because she had a dream that the moon had green eyes and a pointy tongue. And where could she hide the eggs where a snake would not look? Inside the red apple of wisdom.’ ”

  “Ummmm, that’s all?” I said.

  “She was u
sing the fable to tell someone she knew where to look for something.”

  “What?”

  “Whatever it was that John made her steal.”

  “Is there anything in there that says what John looks like?”

  “She says that he’s tall and fair and from someplace other than Los Angeles.”

  “That’s fifty thousand surfers right there,” I said. “And I only know one full-grown man that was born out here. How about his eyes? Women like men’s eyes.”

  “She says that they were beautiful.”

  “Blue or brown?”

  The young translator shrugged and shifted in the seat.

  “Where were they gonna run to?”

  “I could only say that it was out of California.”

  “That could be anywhere.”

  Mania’s smile, through Jo’s tea, made me forget for a moment why I was there. I think she saw this shift in my gaze.

  She smiled and said, “The one thing I got from her writing was that she was no longer young.”

  “That’s something.”

  “Can you tell me what your intentions are now?” she asked.

  “Without knowing who the men were and what was being stolen or whatever—I can’t say. My only concern is with my client, and he’s the young man that gave me the journal and said that he didn’t know the woman who gave it to him.”

  “Your eyes are both kind and hard,” she said out of nowhere.

  “You sure I can’t pay you for this?” was my reply.

  She thought for a moment and then said, “Kiss me once, lightly on my lips.”

  I stood up, leaned over, felt a stitch in my side, and did as she requested. She arched her body upward to meet me. After the first kiss I leaned over a little farther but she put her hand softly against my throat and said, “Not yet.”

  35

  I called Melvin Suggs from an outside phone booth on the first floor of the motel. I didn’t mention his name and he called me Mr. Sugarman; then we set a meeting at a popular hot-dog stand halfway between us.

  But before meeting the cop I had other duties. There was the little red diary in my pocket and pertinent information only partly translated from a foreign language in my head. And then there was Fearless.