The Exchequer hotel and bar was a small building wedged between a lamp store and a hospital for the elderly. Lined out on the sidewalk were the aged inmates of that old folks’ prison. They sat in wheelchairs and on benches, looking out over Melrose as if it were the river Styx. I turned my head now and again as I passed them, thinking that one day, if I made it through this life, I would end up like them: discarded and broken at the side of the road.
There was one child-sized woman wearing a thin blue robe over blue pajamas. Her sagging, colorless eyes caught mine.
“Mister,” she mouthed. Then she waved.
“Yeah, honey?” I crouched down in front of her.
“When you were a boy you were so beautiful,” she whispered.
I smiled, wondering if my boyhood was showing in my face.
“Just like your mother,” she said.
“You knew my mother?” I asked. Maybe she thought some black maid in the old days was my relation.
“Oh yes,” she said, her voice getting stronger. “You’re my grandson—Lymon.”
Her eyes, when I first saw them, were beyond despair, verging on that stare that a dying man has when all hope of life is gone. I had seen many men during the war, shot up and dying, whose eyes had given up hope. But now the old lady’s eyes overflowed with delight—her white grandson, me, filling their field of vision.
She reached out a hand and I took it. She leaned forward and I accepted the kiss on my cheek. I kissed her gray head and stood up.
“I’ll come back a little later, Granny,” I said. Then I walked off to meet with a gangster.
THE HOTEL LOBBY WAS SMALL and simple. Not elegant or tawdry, but plain. The registration desk could have been a bell captain’s station. The rug would have to be changed in a year or less. The only outstanding features were the light fixtures set high up on the walls. They were in the form of nude women finished in shiny gold leaf. Above their heads they held big white globes of light.
“Help you?” the small man behind the desk asked. He was white and bald, about my age—which was mid-forties at the time. His eyes, nose, mouth, and ears were all too small for his small head. His miniature features showed disapproval and distrust of my presence. I couldn’t blame him. How often did white people see black men in fancy suits in 1964?
“Lookin’ for Mr. Haas,” I said.
“Who are you?”
“You don’t need to know my name, man.”
The desk clerk ran his tongue up under his lower lip and looked over at a doorless doorway. He nodded toward the dark maw and I went.
“WHAT’S UP, ROCHESTER?” a white man with big ears asked me. He was standing at the bar.
“Could be your ticket,” I said.
While he considered my words, I took a step closer to get within arm’s distance, so that if he decided to go for a weapon, I could stop him before he stopped me.
“Fuck you,” he said.
“Now that’s better,” I replied. “Are you Mr. Haas?”
“Who wants to know?”
“Ray,” I said. “Ray Alexander. I need to talk some business with the man.”
“Wait here.”
Big Ears wore an ugly, copper-colored iridescent suit. As he shimmered away from me into the gloom of the bar, I wondered if I had gone crazy somehow without warning. Jackson Blue was right; I was way out of my prescribed world there at the Exchequer.
I had fallen back into bad habits.
“Can I help you?”
It was yet another white man, this time a bartender. His words offered help, but his tone was asking me to leave.
“Mr. Haas,” I said, pointing toward the gloom.
A shimmering copper mass was emerging. Big Ears came up to me. “Come on.”
* * *
IT WAS POSSIBLY the darkest room I had ever been in that wasn’t intended for sleep. A man sat at a table under an intolerably weak red light. His suit was dark and his hair was perfect. Even though he was seated, I could tell that he was a small man. The only thing remarkable about his face were the eyebrows; they were thick and combed.
“Alexander?” he said.
I took a seat across from him without being bidden. “Mr. Alexander,” I said.
His lips protruded a quarter inch; maybe he smiled. “I’ve heard of you,” he ventured.
“I got a proposition. You wanna hear it?”
Ghostly hands rose from the table, giving his assent.
“There’s a group of wealthy colored businessmen, from pimps to real estate agents, who wanna start a regular poker game. It’s gonna float down around South L.A., some places I got lined up.”
“So? Am I invited to play?”
“Five thousand dollars against thirty percent of the house.”
Haas grinned. He had tiny teeth.
“You want I should just turn it over right now? Maybe you want me to lie down on the floor and let you walk on me too.”
Haas’s voice had become like steel. I would have been afraid, but because I was using Mouse’s name, there was no fear in me.
“I’d be happy to walk on you if you let me, but I figure you got the sense to check me out first.”
The grin fled. It was replaced by a twitch in the gangster’s left eye.
“I don’t do penny-ante shit, Mr. Alexander. You want to have a card game it’s nothin’ to me.” He adjusted his shoulders like James Cagney in Public Enemy.
“Okay,” I said. I stood up.
“But I know a guy.”
I said nothing.
“Emile Lund,” Haas continued. “He eats breakfast in Tito’s Diner on Temple. He likes the cards. But he doesn’t throw money around.”
“Neither do I,” I said, or maybe it was Raymond who said it and I was just his mouthpiece in that dark dark room way outside the limit of the law.
The old folks were gone when I emerged from the hotel. I missed seeing the old lady. I remember thinking that that old woman would probably be dead before I thought of her again.
FEATHER WAS ASLEEP in front of a plate with a half-eaten hot dog and a pile of baked beans on it. Astro Boy, her favorite cartoon, was playing on the TV. Jesus was in the backyard, hammering sporadically. I picked up my adopted daughter and kissed her. She smiled with her eyes still closed and said, “Daddy.”
“How you know who it is?” I asked playfully. “You too lazy to open your eyes.”
“I know your smell,” she said.
“You have hot dogs?”
“Uh-huh.”
“What you do at school all day?”
At first she denied that anything had happened or been learned at Carthay Circle elementary school. But after a while she woke up and remembered a bird that flew in her classroom window and how Trisha Berkshaw said that her father could lift a hundred pounds up over his head.
“Nobody better tickle him when he’s doin’ that,” I said, and we both laughed.
Feather told me what her homework assignment was, and I set her up at the dinette table to get to work on her studies. Then I went outside to see Jesus.
He was rubbing oil into the timbers of his sailboat’s frame.
“How’s it goin’, Popeye?” I asked.
“Sinbad,” he said.
“Why you finishin’ it before it’s finished?”
“To make it waterproof inside and out,” he said. “That’s what the book says to do. That way if water gets inside it won’t rot.”
His face was the color of a medium tea; his features were closer to the Mayans than to me. He had deeper roots than the American Constitution in our soil. Neither of my children were of my blood, but that didn’t make me love them less. Jesus was a mute victim of sex abuse when I found him. Feather’s own grandfather had killed her mother in a parking lot.
“I got a lot to do the next few days, son,” I said. “Could you keep close to home for Feather?”
“Can I have a friend come over?”
“Who?”
“Cindy Needham.�
��
“Your girlfriend?”
Jesus turned his attention back to the frame. He could still be a mute when he wanted to be.
* * *
I MIGHT HAVE CLOSED my eyes sometime during the night, but I certainly didn’t fall asleep. I kept seeing Raymond in that alley, again and again, being shot down while saving my life. At just about the same time John F. Kennedy was assassinated, but I never mourned our slain president. The last time I saw Mouse, his lifeless body was being taken to the hospital with a blanket covering his wounds.
TITO’S WAS A RECTANGULAR BUILDING raised high on cinder blocks. The inside had one long counter with two tables at the far end. Only one of the tables had an occupant. I would have bet the .38-caliber pistol in my pocket that that man was Emile Lund.
More than anything he looked like an evolved fish. There were wrinkles that went across his forehead and down along his balding temples. His eyes bulged slightly and his small mouth had pouting, sensual lips. His chin was almost nonexistent, and his hands were big. His shoulders were massive, so even though he looked like a cartoon, I doubted if anyone treated him that way.
The fish-man had been making notes in a small journal, but when I opened the door he looked up. He kept his eyes on me until I was standing at his table.
“Lund?” I asked. “I’m Alexander.”
“Do I know you?”
“You wanna talk business or you wanna talk shit?” I said.
He laughed and held his big fins out in a gesture of apology.
“Come on, man. Don’t be so sensitive. Sit down,” Lund said. “I know your rep. You’re a man who makes money. And it’s money makes my car go.
“Mona,” Lund said to the woman behind the counter.
She was wearing a tight black dress that probably looked good on her twenty years before. Now it was just silly, like her brittle blond-dyed hair, her deep red lipstick, and all the putty pressed into the lines of her face and neck.
She waited for a bit, just to show that she didn’t jump the minute someone called her name, and then walked over to our table. “Yeah?” the waitress said.
“What’s your pleasure, Mr. Alexander?” Lund inquired.
“Scrambled eggs with raw onions on ’em, and a bottle of Tabasco sauce on the side.” It was Mouse’s favorite breakfast.
The waitress went away to pass my order on to the cook. Lund made a final note in his small journal, and then put the book away in a breast pocket.
“So, Mr. Alexander,” he said. “You wanna play cards.”
“I’m gonna play cards,” I assured him. “I need a little seed money and some insurance against Roke Williams and the cops.”
“From what I hear about you, you never buy insurance,” the fish said.
“Man gets older he gets a little more conservative, smarter—you know.”
The fish smiled at me, tending more toward shark than sardine. I took it in stride. After all, I wasn’t the moderate custodian/landlord Easy Rawlins, I was the crazy killer Raymond Alexander. I was dangerous. I was bad. Nobody and nothing scared me.
The waitress came over with my eggs. I doused them with the hot sauce and shoveled them down.
“When do I get to see your game?” Lund asked me.
“Tonight if you want.”
“Where?”
“We got a garage over on Florence.” I took a slip of paper from my pocket and put it on the table. “That’s the address.”
“What time?”
“Nine-thirty would be too early. But anytime after that.” My eggs were gone. I never liked raw onions and eggs before but I loved them right then. “You could sit in if you wanted to.”
“Maybe so,” he said. “Maybe so.”
I WENT FROM TITO’S to the 77th Precinct.
Sergeant Andre Brown was in his small office. He was the highest-ranking black policeman in the station. And we had developed a sort of friendship.
Earlier that year there had been a gang killing of a student from Truth, and rumblings about bad blood between the gangs. I was able to point Brown in the direction of some bad eggs, making it possible for him to break up the trouble before it flared into a war.
Brown was in his thirties, tall and thin, with a thick mustache and a surprising deep laugh. He was a very clean man. Perfect nails and skin. His office had every book in place and every file in order. His graduation ring was from UCLA.
“Mr. Rawlins,” he greeted me.
“Sergeant,” I said. “How are you?”
“Fine. Just fine. I hear you had some problems at the school.”
“Yeah.” I sat down and stretched out my legs across his small office. “Yeah. That’s kinda why I’m here.”
Brown stood up and closed his door. This was something he’d never done before.
“Before you say anything,” he said, “I have something to discuss with you.”
“Okay. Shoot.”
“The captain took me aside a few weeks ago and we had a talk about you.”
“Yeah?”
“He told me to watch out for you. He said that you’ve been involved in some criminal activity and that you have been known to keep company with a hard-core criminal element.” He looked at me, indicating that it was my turn to speak.
“I don’t know what he said, but I’m no criminal, and I haven’t been involved in any crimes,” I said. That wasn’t completely true, but it was close enough for Brown and I knew it. “It’s true that I’ve known some pretty bad men, women too. If you go out your door down here you’re likely to meet some bad folks, cain’t help that. But what your captain might have meant is that I used to be in the business of doing favors.”
“What kind of favors?”
“People, black people, got all kinds of difficulties, you know that. A kid gets mixed up with the wrong crowd, a car goes missing. Calling the police, many times, just makes something bad that much worse. In that kinda situation I would come in and give a little push. Nothing criminal. Nothing bad.”
“Like an unlicensed private detective.”
“Exactly like that. But you know I’ve been outta that business since coming to work at Truth.”
Brown smoothed out one side of his mustache with a long slender finger while he peered into my eyes. “Okay,” he said at last. “All right. What can I do for you?”
That was my first experience with the second half of the twentieth century; the first time a man, black or white, holding a professional office, had given me the benefit of the doubt. He wasn’t running a scam. He wasn’t trying to get back at the police department. He simply saw my value and believed in my character.
“Have the kids in the gangs been messin’ ’round wit’ numbers or some other kinda gamblin’?” I asked.
“Not that I know of. I’m pretty sure not. Last group of kids I busted didn’t have five dollars between them. Why?”
“I might know who set that smoke bomb at Truth.”
“Who?”
“I won’t be sure till tomorrow morning,” I said. “The minute I know I’ll turn it over to you.”
Andre leaned forward in his chair. He was considering pushing me but decided against it. “Okay,” he said.
We shook hands as equals, and I went off feeling like a new man. I was walking tall and flush with pride. But in spite of all that I wasn’t even certain of my own name.
I WENT HOME to make sure that Feather and Jesus were okay, and then I made it back down to Florence. Bernard’s Automotive Repair was managed by my oldest L.A. friend, Primo. He lived in the first house I ever owned. I still owned the house, and Primo never paid me a dime, so it was easy to get his keys to the garage for the night.
I unlocked the side door and turned on the radio in the mechanics’ office. I switched on the office light and left the rest of the garage in darkness. Then I set myself up in a corner to the left of the door. Between my knees I had a baseball bat. On my lap was the .38. That was eight-fifteen.
IN THE DARK I HAD TIME
to ponder my situation. There I was, waiting for more trouble than most citizens ever know. I had taken on Mouse’s name and I was acting like him. It felt good, way too good. I expected Emile Lund to come in that door and see the light and hear the music. He’d be with one or two henchmen, but I had the element of surprise. I was a fool, I knew I was a fool, and still I didn’t care.
Raymond Alexander had been the largest part of my history. My parents were both gone before I was nine. My relatives treated me like a beast of burden, so I ran from them. I fought a war for men who called me nigger. The police stopped me on the street for the crime of walking. Raymond was the only one who respected me and cared for me and was willing to throw his lot in with mine, no matter the odds.
I was sitting in that drafty corner because I didn’t want Mouse to be dead. Somehow by using his name I felt that I was making a tribute, even a eulogy, to his meaning in my life.
THE IRIDESCENT GREEN HANDS on my watch said 11:03 when the door cracked open. Lund walked in alone. That worried me. If he’d come with a friend, it would have meant that he was cautious. A cautious man is more likely to be reasonable when facing a baseball bat and a pistol.
Lund was wearing jeans and a windbreaker, further proof that he was the man who bombed my classroom. I let him take two steps before pressing the gun barrel against the back of his neck.
“Hold it right there, man,” I said in a husky, threatening tone.
Lund grunted and spun around, pushing my gun hand to the side. While he was concentrated on trying to disarm me, I hit him in the head with the bat. It was glancing blow and merely slowed him down. I hit him on the nose with the butt of my pistol, and he slowed a bit more. Fear was working its way into my gut because I realized that even though I was using Raymond’s name, I’d never be able to inflict the kind of pain that he dished out. I pushed the angry gangster and he fell hard.
“Hold still, fool,” I said.
But he ignored me and reached under the windbreaker. He was disoriented, so it was easy for me to kick the pistol out of his hand. He tried to crawl toward the gun, so I kicked him in the ribs. By this time I was getting sick. Nothing seemed to stop Lund. He struggled up to his knees and spat as if that would hold me off long enough for him to get his bearings. Blood was cascading from his nostrils, a high wheeze coming from his throat.
Six Easy Pieces er-8 Page 3