Charcoal Joe

by Walter Mosley

  “I had to move my daughter out of our house; our house that was broken into by thugs. I was kidnapped and had a man hold a gun to my head. The only reason I’m alive is dumb luck. I know you’re a tough man and a dangerous man but I do not like getting played.”

  I stopped there. I wasn’t really angry. I had known when Mouse came to the office that the road would be winding, rutted, and most likely, as Willomena Avery had said, a dead end.

  “I understand, Mr. Rawlins,” Joe said. “But you got to believe me when I tell you that I didn’t think that you’d get caught up in Boughman’s business. I thought you’d just use your influence with the cops. I was planning to leave the country but I got my own money. I don’t have to steal from the Mafia to buy my way out.

  “And on top of all that,” he said, “even if I was gonna double-cross somebody it sure and hell wouldn’t be you. You one’a the most dangerous men in Southern California.”

  “Me?”

  “You,” he said with conviction. “You got Saul Lynx and Whisper Natly in the office with you. Raymond Alexander willing to kill for you and you don’t even know it. There’s Melvin Suggs, special assistant to Chief Reddin, and then there’s Fearless Jones, Christmas Black, that insurance millionaire got the whole French Foreign Legion at his beck and call. And if that wasn’t bad enough I hear one’a your friends is that crazy Indian, Redbird. I had a business associate once sent five men after that red man—they never even found one finger. So, Easy, I want you to know that I would not set you up because I know what’s what.

  “I only wanted for you to help Seymour and I’m sorry if it got complicated. But don’t for one minute think that I don’t know what you can do.”

  “Did you know what Boughman was up to?”

  “I knew Peter,” Joe said. “I knew what he did and we’ve done business before but I didn’t have anything to do with what went on there that night. Seymour didn’t either.”

  “And you didn’t know why Boughman was there?”

  “I wasn’t the one let him use the house.”

  “Do you think it was Jasmine?”

  “She could have. Maybe she wanted to make some’a her own money. But I doubt it.”

  “What about Uriah?”

  “Uriah’s a rat-bastard, he sure is. But I don’t see a little coward like him killin’ a man like Boughman. That’s much more something like Stapleton would do. Maybe Uriah told somebody that he saw you up with Jasmine. Maybe that.”

  “Yeah,” I said, thinking about Gregory Chalmers and his friends. “What else don’t I know, Mr. Tyler?”

  Sitting down behind the school table, Charcoal Joe once again laced his fingers, making that equilateral triangle with his elbows. His eyes were pointed in my direction but he was looking inward, thinking about many things and wondering which of these he could share with me.

  “I’m not an evil man, Mr. Rawlins,” he said. “I just don’t care. In my entire life I have only loved my mother, Jasmine, and Seymour. You know there ain’t a man my color like me on this whole damn continent. And so when I do something I have to be absolutely sure that I know every side and every angle. But when Seymour got arrested all my careful planning went out the window.”

  I looked at the swaying shade and the leafy branch that peeked under it now and then.

  “A white woman came to Seymour with a little red diary written in Yiddish,” I said. “She told him to give it to Jasmine. He called his mother but she wasn’t there. He called Uriah but he said that she was gone. So he went down to the Malibu house where Boughman was killed.”

  “Who killed him?”

  “I’m working on that but let me ask you something else.”

  “What’s that?”

  “How is it people are using your house for their clandestine business and you don’t know about it?”

  “They all knew about the house, everyone you mentioned: Jasmine, Boughman, Gambol, Stapleton, and Willomena. Hell, even Uriah had been out there fixing the plumbing. Anybody could have used the place.”

  “Seymour tells me that Jasmine has gone missing.”

  “Not missing. I had my people take her somewhere safe.”

  “Is there a way I can talk to her if I need to?” At that moment I remembered that I’d had sex with Charcoal Joe’s woman.

  “You don’t need to talk to her. She doesn’t know anything about what happened.”

  Hearing the protectiveness in the gangster’s tone, and understanding that he could turn on me at any moment, I decided to change tracks.

  “You gotta mailman in here?” I asked.

  “A what?”

  “Somebody that delivers your messages to the outside world.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Can you tell me his name?”

  Light dawned in the onetime mortician’s eyes. His lips twisted at the memory of a sour taste.

  “Tom Willow,” he said. “The guard that showed you in here the first time.”

  “I hear that he didn’t come to work today.”

  39

  I cut Fearless loose and headed out on my own again.

  One thing about being a detective is that your actions often seem repetitive and even arbitrary; like a little black ant zigzagging her way across the floor, seemingly aimless, maybe even lost.

  My problem was that Charcoal Joe was so convincing. I believed him, and one thing that detectives and lawyers have in common is that they can never afford to believe anyone. So I decided to double back on my tracks and go to Jasmine’s house even though Joe had assured me that she wasn’t there.

  On the way I began to experience a feeling in my chest. It was both electric and respiratory. The feeling pulsed outward through my limbs and contorted my face in the rearview mirror.

  This emotion-based palsy made me shudder and flinch.

  I pulled to the curb near Fairfax on Pico and took in a deep breath. Sitting in the driver’s seat, quiet and alone, I began to understand the physical symptoms I was exhibiting.

  I was, for the first time in a very long time, excited—like a child on the verge of a great adventure. Maybe it had something to do with Mama Jo’s tea, but I was pretty sure that those chemicals had already worked their way through my system. I was set against a whole cadre of bad men, and maybe a woman or two. I liked that, because danger forces you to appreciate life; to understand its frailty, transience, and its incalculable value. But beyond drugs and danger, the thrill in my body was a delayed reaction to the separation between me and Bonnie Shay.

  I loved Bonnie. I was part of her heart the way a dog is a member of the pack. She felt the same way about me. That’s why she wanted to carry my baby with her into hiding. That was why I couldn’t leave her. But Jackson was right; Bonnie was a permanent landmark and I was a wave on the ocean somewhere—on my way.

  Letting her go freed me. The dog of my heart didn’t want that freedom but my soul, whatever that is, yearned for it.

  I was that tiny ant, mindlessly repeating the mantra of life like Niska Redman chanting silently morning and night, or a wild dog on a vast plain howling at the moon.

  —

  Nobody met me at the little gate to the lower home.

  I knocked on Uriah’s door but he didn’t answer.

  I climbed the many, many steps to the high house and Jasmine Palmas’s door.

  It was ajar.

  Without considering it, I took out my pistol and girded for armed conflict.

  —

  The first body was lying facedown in the middle of the floor of the main room of the aerie. He was wearing the same lavender suit I saw him in when he was still alive.

  I knew Tony Gambol was dead by the open wound in the back of his head. Before I did anything else I reached into my left-hand pocket and came out with a black pair of cotton gloves. After pulling these on I decided to have an extra cigarette that day.

  I lit up and sat down on the sofa inhaling noxious fumes, studying the prone form of the deceased gangster, and th
inking that this was why I had to accept the loss of Bonnie.

  She was a queen, not by decree but by nature, trying to save her peoples; and I was a commoner down in the shit.

  —

  Gambol’s body was stiff when I turned him over. I almost had to lift him off the floor to get him on his back. There was a small pistol in his left hand and more than six thousand dollars in his wallet. The gun had been fired but I doubted that he shot himself from behind.

  The back door led to a small outside patio that looked down on the houses for a few blocks over. There was no blood on the wooden platform, no bodies below.

  I went through the bathroom door and then the door to Seymour’s childhood bedroom. This chamber was dark, but not dark enough to fully envelop Uriah Hardy’s corpse.

  He was laid up in a far corner of the small room, his eyes open wide, an innocent look frozen on his face. He was wearing a plaid house robe and had worn slippers on his feet. He’d been shot in the chest multiple times and was probably dead before the killer was through shooting.

  The only thing he had in his pockets was a keychain. If his body had been found in an alley the police might never have identified him.

  For some reason this grim revelation made me smile.

  —

  Jasmine’s house had nothing else to reveal. There was a good chance that at least three people were in the house at the time of the murders: Uriah, who had been slaughtered by the others, and Tony Gambol, who was killed afterward by someone he trusted enough to turn his back on.

  One of Uriah’s keys worked on the door of his lowland abode.

  He was a rat, as Rufus Tyler had said; more accurately, a pack rat.

  There were newspapers stacked everywhere, some that dated back to the forties; and dozens, maybe hundreds, of Life and Look, magazines that prided themselves on telling stories with photographs. One drawer was filled with at least a thousand keys and another had dozens of discarded sunglasses of every size, shape, and hue. Broken lamps, a burlap potato sack filled with shoes—some of which were made by individual cobblers, like the old people in the deep South used to wear when I was a boy. He must have had three dozen chairs, four sofas, and a bed that might have come down from his grandparents.

  I tried to imagine Uriah and the prostitute Augusta in that bed.

  Under the bedframe was a box filled with nudist-colony magazines. At the bottom of that stack was a metal lockbox painted enamel red. I broke three of his four hundred or so butter knives before I could pry the box open.

  Inside there was maybe twenty-two hundred dollars, expired driver’s licenses dating back to 1947, the marriage certificate between him and Jasmine, and a passport for Mr. and Mrs. Leonard Bartel that, if it had ever been used, would have expired twelve years before. There was no picture attached to the document.

  When I sat on the bed the springs squealed like an alley full of tomcats yowling after a bitch in heat.

  A pictureless passport. The criminal element of black Los Angeles seemed to be leaving in droves. Uriah had secreted his escape document with his precious printed materials. He died over it.

  I searched for an hour or two more. There was nothing else of use to me.

  40

  “Have you told anybody about Seymour staying with you?” I asked Fearless from a pay phone sixteen blocks west of the undiscovered crime scene.

  “Nobody, Easy. You know I might not say the right things now and then, but I never talk when I’m not supposed to.”

  “How about him?” I asked then. “Has he been a lot on that phone?”

  “Naw, man, there’s a lock on it,” he said. “Right on the number three. Man who hired me put it on when he couldn’t talk his wife outta lettin’ me stay here. He put on the lock but she give me the key.”

  That last sentence could have been the repeat line from some old blues song.

  “I want you to stay close to him, Mr. Jones. Don’t let him out of your sight night or day. I’ll pay triple time for that.”

  —

  When I got back to the office I was, once again, feeling like Alice falling down that rabbit hole. I had accomplished what I’d been hired for. A good lawyer would have probably proven Seymour could not have committed the crime, at least not beyond a pretty long shadow of a doubt. But now there were gangsters, cops, and mysterious women involved. And they were looking at me for a lost fortune.

  It was almost enough that I could forget the loss of Bonnie Shay to a man who at one time saved my daughter’s life.

  —

  “Did you get Tinsford’s note, Mr. Rawlins?” Niska Redman asked me when I came through our front door.

  “Yeah. How you doin’, N?”

  “Fine. He said that he’s going to need your help and Saul’s too tonight.”

  “What are partners for?” I said, and then moved toward the hallway toward my office.

  “A police sergeant named Trieste called,” she said before I could escape.

  “What did he want?”

  “He said that he needed to talk with you as soon as you got in.”

  “How long ago?”

  “Fifteen minutes. The number is on your desk.”

  —

  I glared at that number as if daring it to dial itself. I never liked talking to cops I didn’t know; I didn’t like talking to most cops I was acquainted with. It was the duty of the police to keep men like me down and out, so scared that we were liable to make a slip, then to clap us in chains and lock us away from love, laughter, and light.

  Keeping all this in mind, I dialed the number.

  The phone rang once, made a funny crackling sound for a few seconds, and then buzzed twice instead of ringing.

  “Station thirty-two,” a man said in a brusque tone.

  “Sergeant Trieste,” I said.

  “Who is this?”

  “Rawlins calling for Trieste.”

  “What are you doing on this line?”

  “Calling Sergeant Trieste.”

  “Where did you get this number?”

  “Look, man, if you don’t want to put me through that’s fine. Tell Trieste or don’t tell him but I called.”

  I hung up the phone feeling both triumphant and that I had dodged a bullet.

  I had a lot on my mind. There was a cache of money in the trunk of my car causing men to kill and be killed with unsettling regularity.

  It came to me that I should talk to the benevolent racist Tom Willow. He was Joe’s mailman—the guy that delivered messages from and to the unique crime boss. Tom might know something useful to me. When I asked Joe about him a dark light had gone on in the artist’s eyes.

  Information only had one Willow, Tom.

  “Hello?” a man with a slick drawl said.

  “Hello,” I replied. “Is Tom there?”

  “Who is this?”

  “A friend of Tom’s.”

  “I’m gonna have to give him a name.”

  “Easy Rawlins.”

  “Hold on.”

  “Hello?” another man’s voice said.

  “Lookin’ for Tom Willow.”

  “Did you just call me?”

  “I don’t even know who you are, man.”

  “Sergeant Bernard Trieste of the LAPD.”

  The phrase it’s a small world is not always a blessing. I considered hanging up but couldn’t see how that would in any way improve my relationship with the LAPD.

  “Where’s Tom?” I asked.

  “Why don’t you come over here to see me, Mr. Rawlins? I’ve been looking for you.”

  “Where are you?”

  “1621 North Sacrosanct Drive, up in West Hollywood.”

  Damn.

  —

  There were four squad cars and as many unmarked police sedans parked on the street, in the driveway, and even on the lawn of 1621. The front door of the terra-cotta flat-roof, faux-adobe home was open. A uniform stood sentry at the sidewalk.

  This cop was just another barrier in my way.r />
  “Crime scene,” he said, putting a hand on my shoulder.

  “Trieste called me,” I said. “Now remove your hand.”

  Anger and fear live right next to each other in the chambers of my heart. I was ready to run or kill.

  “What did you say?” The police officer demanded.

  “I said, mothahfuckah, remove your hand.” Wow.

  The stunned look on that white man’s face was worth the risk. I don’t think he had ever heard a civilian address him like that.

  “Norman!” a strong voice called. “Norman!”

  The second in command turned around. “Yeah, Sergeant?”

  “Send that man up here.”

  “But he—”

  “Send him up.”

  I am quite sure that moving aside for me was one of the hardest things that Norman had ever done. He wanted to make me bleed. I had the same designs on him. It’s wild how people can come to hate each other without having even a passing acquaintance.

  —

  The man at the door was five-nine, in an avocado-colored suit. He was thin and his white skin had a tinge of brick red to it.

  “Rawlins?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Why did you hang up on the relay officer?”

  “Same reason I’d’ve broken Norman’s jaw. People don’t act right on the wrong days.”

  I expected some kind of quip but the thin sergeant smiled slightly and said, “I got something to show you here.”

  He walked me through the living room, down a short hallway, and into a fairly large kitchen. On the floor was the clay of a man surrounded by a goodly amount of coagulating blood. All he wore was a white T-shirt that was fairly well spattered with red; no trousers, no underwear. Also on the floor was a blocky milk bottle, its spilled white contents in sharp contrast to the darkening red. His eyes were open wide. His expression gave no hint that he knew what was happening when he died. The bullet had entered his back somewhere and knocked him forward, turning him as he fell. He was probably unconscious for a while before he was dead.