Charcoal Joe

by Walter Mosley

  It was a well-appointed kitchen with copper pots hanging from the wall, and a drain board filled with the supper dishes all clean and lemon-smelling. On the dining table there was an eight-ounce brown glass bottle with a white cloth next to it. I sniffed at the cap, felt a moment of dizziness, and put the sweet-smelling chloroform back down.

  I tried to remember the week before on the first Monday in May, when I was happy and expectant, almost married, and innocent again.

  Irena was in the house somewhere, most likely. So was Eugene Stapleton.

  There was a Fisher AM/FM radio sitting on a window ledge next to the dining table. Across from there was a pantry door that opened into a room just large enough for a man to hide in.

  Without giving it too much thought I turned on the radio and went into the pantry, leaving the door only slightly ajar.

  “I Was Doing All Right,” by Dexter Gordon, was playing on the radio. It surprised me that Stapleton was a fan of black jazz.

  —

  There came the thumping sound of half a dozen barefoot footsteps and then, “Ira?” It was Eugene Stapleton calling from outside the kitchen, probably the living room.

  A few more steps but then they stopped. I could see the table and lamp clearly. I wondered if Stapleton had worked out my simpleminded strategy; if he would shoot through the yellow door and end my career right there.

  Then he appeared, stark naked, reaching for the radio.

  “Ira,” he called out and I threw open the pantry door, pointing my pistol at his chest. He was very hairy with a powerful physique.

  “Hold it right there, Cinch,” I said boldly.

  On TV shows like westerns this always seemed to work. All you had to do was point the gun at an unarmed man and demand he surrender; he grumbles, puts his hands in the air, and you go home to a pot roast and the plaudits of lovers and friends.

  But TV did not take into account forty-plus years of substance abuse and psychological trauma.

  Eugene Stapleton’s eyes opened wider than seemed possible and his face glowed red. He reached over to a shelf on his right and grabbed an honest-to-God meat cleaver.

  Then he roared.

  I don’t mean that he cried or screamed or hollered. That man roared like a lion that hadn’t eaten in a week.

  But I had the gun. I was the man in charge.

  Stapleton kept bellowing as he moved toward me. I shot him because of the sound, which was frightening down to the core of my being. I pulled the trigger four times, fell down to the left, and saw the cleaver dig deep into the doorway just behind where my head had been a second before.

  Stapleton, bleeding from four wounds to his torso, tried to pull the small ax out of the doorjamb. The first pull almost succeeded but then his strength drained away. He fell to his knees and I got to my feet.

  Stapleton looked up at me and with labored breath said, “Where did you come from?” He ran his right hand over his hair, streaking it with blood, then fell sideways onto the multicolored linoleum floor.

  48

  In for a penny, in for a pound, a woman that everyone knew as Aunt Louise used to say in the Fifth Ward of Houston, Texas. She lived in a recess between Foreman’s Bar and Sailors Last Baptist Church. The only furniture she had was a chair and a high stool that she used as a table. Her protection from the hot sun and pouring rain was the overlapping eaves of Foreman’s and Sailors. Aunt Louise gave advice for free but most of the poor people that came to her would leave some bread or beer. I used to spy on her conversations from the alleyway behind, trying to get the wisdom of both the questions asked and the advice given.

  I thought about the penny and the pound as I wondered if someone had heard the shots fired.

  I suppose I could have called an ambulance for Stapleton but I was pretty sure that he was dead; and, anyway, I didn’t think of it.

  The chloroform would have been used by the Cinch and his minion to keep Irena quiet.

  I unlocked the back door, in case someone came and I had to run. Then I took the chloroform and white rag to dose the unconscious man on the front porch. After retrieving my shoes I went through the rooms on the first floor but found nothing.

  Upstairs I searched what must have been Stapleton’s room and another bedroom that hadn’t been used. The third door revealed Irena, tied to a chair and unconscious.

  I turned on the light. She was clad in a satin slip and reinforced bra. There were burns up and down her arms. I figured that her tormentors gagged her while applying the cigarette butts. They wanted the diamonds but only got my name.

  She was moaning and moving her head until I let her breathe a little chloroform. Then I went through the back door, the gate into the park, and down a path I had already traveled to my car on a quiet block.

  I drove back to the hideout, pulled up in the driveway, entered the house, untied the unconscious Irena, and carried her down to my car.

  —

  On the drive to Pomona I had to stop once to dose Irena again.

  We got to her house at about three in the morning. I pulled up into the driveway, jimmied the back door with a crowbar from my trunk, and carried the narcotized Polish killer to her bed.

  I had no proof that Irena had killed Tom Willow and I wasn’t bothered if she got away with it.

  It felt good putting her in her own bed. She’d wake up in the late morning with memories of being tied and tortured. It would feel like a miracle to find herself delivered from that hell, and I liked the thought that at least once in my life I was the author of such a feat.

  —

  I never found out how Irena ended up Stapleton’s prisoner. She might have been trying to betray me, or maybe the Cinch was after her all along. Regardless, I was almost finished with the case. I went to Tommy’s on Beverly and ate two chili dogs and a pint of cheese-and-chili fries. I washed these down with three pineapple sodas, then bought a cup of coffee that I nursed till sunrise.

  I rang Jackson Blue’s doorbell at 7:04. He answered already dressed and ready for the corporate world.

  We drank coffee and he smoked at the kitchen table until eight.

  “Daddy!” Feather yelled from the doorway.

  My daughter ran to me and jumped into my lap. She hugged my neck and said all kinds of sweet loving things that a younger child might have voiced. She’d been afraid while in exile at the Blue residence.

  —

  After dropping Feather off at Ivy Prep, I went to my office to retrieve the diamonds.

  “Easy,” Whisper said as I was looking at the brown paper parcel that Fearless had left me.

  “Hey, Tinsford.”

  “Did you hear about the Lily?”

  I put what was known as the Feynman Bible under my arm.

  “No.”

  “There was a fire. It started on the fifth floor.”

  “Anybody hurt?”

  “One fatality. No one else injured.”

  “Coroner’s report?”

  “The building was wood,” he said. “It burned to the ground. The unidentified body had been burned down to the bones and crushed by the weight of burning timbers. It was ruled a homicide but only because the fire was arson.”

  “Were you planning to kill him?” I asked.

  “No. But when I saw how high he was I figured I couldn’t take the chance.”

  “Okay,” I said, and we never discussed the subject again.

  —

  One of Niska Redman’s pink slips on my desk said that Rufus Tyler called with an address on Don Carlos Drive in View Park and the initials JP.

  —

  I called Fearless but he didn’t answer. Then I jumped in my car and made my way to an area that was sometimes called the Black Beverly Hills.

  The three-story house was on a crest overlooking an undeveloped area that was large enough to be a city park. Two serious-looking black men in dark suits stood at the top of the driveway. They put up their hands and I stopped.

  It was a warm day so my window wa
s already rolled down.

  “What’s your business?” one of the guards asked. He had sideburns that detoured into a mustache on their way down.

  “Easy Rawlins for Jasmine Palmas,” I said with a smile. “Joe sent me.”

  “We expected you yesterday.” The guard had nothing against me personally; he just didn’t like people.

  I elected not to answer his criticism and so, after a stern look, he stood aside and I pulled up next to the house.

  The second bodyguard walked me to the door and knocked for me. I suppose he wanted to make sure that I was Easy Rawlins and not the next candidate for the latest in a long string of beatings.

  The door opened and there stood Fearless Jones, wearing a pretty nice off-white suit.

  “Easy,” he said, smiling broadly.

  “Fearless.”

  “Is it okay, Mr. Jones?” the guard asked.

  “Better’n that, Larry, better’n that.”

  The doorway led into an expansive and very modern living room that had its own bar and an outer glass wall that looked down on Central Los Angeles. Jasmine was there sitting in a conch-shaped white leather chair, wearing a one-piece bodysuit comprised mostly of swirling shades of turquoise and pink. Seymour was on the other side of the glass wall, standing on a deck and looking down on L.A.

  Jasmine rose out of the shell like Black Aphrodite.

  “Easy.” She smiled graciously, walked up three stairs from her sunken part of the living room, and kissed my cheek. Then she gazed into my eyes.

  I hoped that my nostrils weren’t flaring.

  “You called Seymour?” I asked.

  “Yes. Then I invited him and Mr. Jones to come here to wait for you.”

  She was holding my hands with both of hers.

  “Do you want something to eat or drink?” she asked.

  “I haven’t been to bed in two days. Let’s take care of business and then talk about hospitality.”

  49

  The garage for the ultramodern house on the hill was larger and cleaner than any carport I’d ever seen. The floor was white cement and the walls cured wood. With the exception of a few oil stains, it could have been a recreation room waiting for a carpet and a few chairs.

  Jasmine and I were alone and the doors were all closed. I pulled out the sacks of money that Boughman had stolen, and then I handed her The Feynman Lectures.

  “Is this why you wanted Willomena’s address?” she demanded.

  “Indirectly.”

  “It was her?”

  “Boughman was planning to run with the money. Stapleton wanted it too. Somehow Tom Willow got into it and she was just another fly in the honey.”

  The expression on Jasmine’s face made her a good match for Charcoal Joe’s reputation.

  “She’s been kidnapped, tortured, and betrayed,” I said. “Believe me when I tell you that she’s paid the piper already.”

  I could see that I was, in her eyes, still within the aura of the saving of her son.

  “If you say so, Mr. Rawlins. I’ll let it be. Have you already taken your money?”

  “I thought I’d let you do that.”

  She counted out my fee and gave me a small satchel to carry it in.

  When the transaction was done I was ready to go but she touched my chest, arresting me.

  “About the first time we met,” she said.

  “That was somethin’ else.”

  “I’m not a whore.”

  “Neither me.”

  This sense of equality made her smile.

  “I heard that you and Rufus were leaving the country,” I said. “Now he tells me you plan to stay.”

  “We realize that Seymour deserves to have a family he knows.”

  This seemed a good note to end on, so I moved to leave.

  “Joe will want to know who stole the money,” she said.

  “It was the Cinch,” I said.

  “Do you know where Joe can find him?”

  “No. No I don’t.”

  —

  “Mr. Rawlins,” Seymour called as I was opening the door to my car.

  “Yeah, Seymour?”

  He approached me wearing the clothes that Marybeth Reno bought for him.

  “Where’s your girlfriend?” I asked.

  “At her job,” he said. “We’re getting together later tonight. I, uh, I wanted to thank you and to apologize for acting like I knew so much or whatever. I mean…you saved my life out there. My mother told me.”

  —

  I made an assignation with Fearless and then drove down to the Torrance Arms, where I gave Gregory Chalmers three thousand dollars. He was surprised by the gesture. When he’d heard about the death of his former boss he’d suspected me, but there was nothing to connect me with the killing.

  When he gave me a questioning stare I said, “I’m a man who believes in paying his debts.”

  —

  I picked up Feather and drove her home. There we took turns in the bathroom and then dressed up for dinner.

  We met Fearless at 7:15 at the Brown Derby Restaurant on North Vine Street in Hollywood.

  Feather loved Fearless even though she’d only met him twice before in her short life. We talked and ate steaks, told stories about the old days, and relaxed.

  Just before Feather’s strawberry shortcake dessert came I handed Fearless a small brown paper bag containing ten thousand of Charcoal Joe’s dollars.

  “You already paid me for my time, Easy,” he said. “And then there’s that car.”

  “Seymour wouldn’t be in his house if it wasn’t for me. I wouldn’t be at this table if not for you.”

  I didn’t tell Feather about my plans to move us. I didn’t tell her about her grandmother’s neglect. Time enough for the barbs and arrows. For the next few weeks everything would be about her smile.

  —

  The following Monday I walked to work thinking about Bonnie. I was late that morning because Feather had lost a notebook and we had to search the entire house before admitting it was nowhere to be found.

  I drove her to school and then came back home. The walk to work was a pleasure.

  “Good morning, Mr. Rawlins,” Niska Redman said.

  “How are you, Miss Redman?”

  “Fine. He’s waiting in your office.”

  “Who is?”

  “Mr. Alexander.” The timbre of her voice contained that riled-up tone that most women get around the lovable bad man.

  He was sitting in my chair, smoking a cigarette. I took the visitor’s seat and said, “I hope you don’t have any more jobs for me, man. I don’t think I could survive another.”

  “No, baby, I sure don’t. Here I find you work and you don’t come to me when there’s two million dollars to be had.”

  “It turned out to be Joe’s money, Ray. I’d do the same for you.”

  “But he lied to us.”

  “No. He wanted to get his son off the hook but there was money involved too.”

  “That’s okay, Easy. I don’t mind. I just thought I’d drop by because Joe aksed me to tell you that a dude named Gregory Chalmers was killed at the Torrance Arms Hotel. They found him shot to death at the bottom of the fire escape out back. I guess someone promised to spring him and then they shot him instead. Joe says that that was for tryin’ to steal mob money and that you don’t have a thing to worry about.”

  “Not a thing” was my rejoinder. “And even if I did worry, that wouldn’t stop that hammer comin’ down.”

  About the Author

  Walter Mosley is the author of fifty books, most notably fourteen Easy Rawlins mysteries, the first of which, Devil in a Blue Dress, was made into an acclaimed film starring Denzel Washington. Always Outnumbered, adapted from his first Socrates Fortlow novel, was an HBO film starring Laurence Fishburne. Mosley is the winner of numerous awards, including an O. Henry Award, a Grammy Award, and PEN America’s Lifetime Achievement Award. He has just been named the 2016 Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of
America. A Los Angeles native and graduate of Goddard College, he holds an MFA from the City College of New York and now lives in Brooklyn.

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