He nodded and winced.
“You Axel?” I asked him.
“Yeah. Who’re you?”
“Friend of Domaque.”
“I’m sorry ’bout him. It was just the money was all. The money they said we could get. I shouldn’ta done it. Shouldn’ta.”
Axel coughed and dribbled blood down into his beard.
“You better save your breath,” I said.
“Help me.”
“You got a phone?”
“They pult it outta the wall.”
“Why’d they shoot you?” I asked.
“So to keep the money and be sure I didn’t tell.”
“You told them about Domaque?”
“I’m sorry about that. I really am.”
I looked around for something to use to stop Axel’s bleeding. His home was just one big room, messy, unadorned, and pretty bare. There was a white-enameled wood stove in one corner and a bed in another. Next to the bed was a pile of clothing that he probably chose from now and then when he needed to change. I took out two long-sleeved shirts and shredded them to make a bandage that I could tie around his chest.
“What are you doin’ here, Mister?” Axel asked while I worked on his wound.
It wasn’t bleeding much. The hole, below his right nipple, was even and pretty small.
“Tryin’ to find Merry and Dean. They framed Dom and Dom’s my friend.”
“They’re in L.A.,” the old man said. “Spendin’ my money and laughin’ at us fools.”
“Where exactly?”
“He’s a surfer. Likes the water. So they’re down near the ocean somewhere, that’s for sure.”
“Did they live around here?”
“In a trailer on Bibi Wyler Road. Bibi Wyler Road,” he said again. Then he coughed up a great deal of blood and died.
I WENT BACK DOWN to the Esso station and called the cops, then I got a map and made my way to Bibi Wyler Road.
There was only one trailer on the three-block street. It was abandoned. There were clothes strewn around but no mail or written material of any kind. In one pants pocket I found an empty billfold with a photograph folded into the “secret compartment.” It was of a blond girl with a sharp smile standing arm in arm with a brutish-looking man whose black hair went down to the collar of his shirt.
I considered asking the neighbors about the occupants of the trailer but then I decided that the fewer people who saw me the better. After all, there had already been three murders in Santa Maria and the only suspect was a black man.
I GOT HOME in the late afternoon and played with my children. Bonnie watched me from the back door. I think she was worried but she didn’t say anything.
That night I dreamed about fishing in the ocean with Domaque and Raymond. We were in Jesus’s boat far out on the ocean. Mouse was catching one fish after the other, reeling them in to Domaque’s squeals of delight. I had my line in the water with bait on the hook but no fish nibbled or bit.
“Don’t worry, Easy,” Mouse said to me. “As long as you got friends you can eat.”
Those words soothed me and I clambered down into the bottom of the boat and slept on a rocking sea of deep silence.
“GOOD MORNING, MR. RAWLINS,” Ada Masters greeted. It was the next day and we were in the main hall of Sojourner Truth junior high school.
It was 5:30 A.M.
“Good morning to you too but you know you shouldn’t come to the school so early, Mrs. Masters,” I said. “It’s not safe for a woman alone.”
I was one of the few people who could tell it like it was to our new principal. She liked me. I liked her too.
“I’m not worried, Mr. Rawlins. And this is my school. I like to walk around and see what it looks like before children come in. How are you?”
Somehow Mrs. Masters knew that I had been in a funk. Her pale blue eyes saw past my façades. The suit she was wearing cost more than most other women’s wardrobes but you had to know something about clothes to tell that. We were perfect partners for the maintenance and care of the body and spirit of Truth.
“Doin’ pretty good,” I said. “Pretty good. If I don’t fall off, the horse I’m on might make me a winner.”
AFTER THE CUSTODIANS had left the maintenance office for their daily rounds, I pulled out the telephone and phone book. I made calls from eight o’clock until almost eleven. It was the thirty-second call that paid off.
“Why yes, Mr. Auburn,” Herschel Godfried said. “There was an eight-chambered thirty-eight caliber pistol and it did have a bulblike handle. It was a Lux-Tiger design from about 1895, an English design. The only one I know of in southern California is owned by Grant West in Pomona.”
Mr. West had sold the pistol in question to Harold Stout, a businessman who lived in Beverly Hills.
I left work at 1:45 and made it to Stout’s address by nine to two.
It was a large house on Doheny, only about two-and-a-half miles from my home.
He might have lived within walking distance from me but Stout was rich. I could tell by the pink marble that made up his walls and the manicured lawn surrounded by dozens of different varieties of rosebushes. I could tell by the imported stained-glass windows and the ugly Rolls-Royce parked in the driveway. The front door was heavy oak, at least ten feet high and five wide.
The small woman who answered the door wore cotton pants the color of a rotten lemon and a pink-and-white polka-dot shirt. Her hair was strawlike in both color and texture. She looked like she belonged in a trailer park drinking lemonade laced with straight alcohol.
“Yes?” she asked.
“Jay Auburn looking for Harold Stout.” If she had heard me over the phone she would have thought it was a white man speaking.
“Harry’s very sick,” she said. “He can’t talk.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “What’s wrong with him?”
“Same thing’s wrong with all men,” the white woman said in a husky voice. “Thinkin’ about a woman’s butt and then wonderin’ why they got shit for brains.”
I laughed hard, not so much at her joke but at the shock of hearing such language from a white woman in those sedate surroundings.
“My name’s Alice,” the woman said. “You wanna come in, Jay?”
“Can’t think of anything better,” I said.
THE ENTRANCE HALL had yellow stone floors lit by slender three-story windows, which also threw light on the curving, cream-colored staircase leading to the higher floors. To the left was a dining room with a table set for fifteen, and a maroon carpet. To the right was a sunken living room with yellow sofas, chairs, and carpeting.
Alice led me into the living room.
She offered me scotch but I demurred. She poured herself a shot. It wasn’t the first one she’d had that afternoon. She asked if I had a cigarette. I gave her a Chesterfield and lit it. She steadied my hand with her fingers. Her hands were large and powerful, callused and misshapen by a life of hard work or hard time.
“I knew a girl got lynched just for touchin’ a nigger,” she said after her first lungful of smoke. “Selena was her name. The boy was Richard Kylie. You know, they had known each other since they were babies. They wanted each other all the more since it was a crime. She told me about their first kiss. Said it was so sweet it was like drinkin’ water from Jesus’ own hand. Said that all he had to do was kiss her neck and she’d shout out for the Lord.”
“I wish you would keep from saying the word ‘nigger,’” I said. “It hampers conversation.”
“It bothers you?” She sounded surprised. “It’s just a word back where I come from. I’m a cracker, you’re a nigger, Pablo’s a beaner, and Chin’s a chink. But okay. I don’t have to use the word, though.”
I nodded, thanking her for the restraint.
“Richard fucked Selena every day for six weeks,” Alice said, continuing with her story. “Every time she told me about it she was more upset. At first she was just playin’. It was taboo and sweet to her evil side. But
sometimes her and Richard would steal away for a whole day. She’d say she was in school and he pretended to be lookin’ for a job down Minorville. You know, Jay, when a man make a woman feel like she turn inside-out, she cain’t help but be in love with him—nigger or not. Oh, excuse me.”
I took a breath. Alice was missing an upper front tooth but other than that she started looking good. Forty maybe. She had a tight body in her button-up cotton blouse and her yellow pants. I was almost glad for the insults; they meant that I would never let my guard down for the sex-crazed southern woman.
“I need to know something about Mr. Stout’s gun collection,” I said.
“Shoot,” she said, and then she laughed, realizing the pun.
“Did he have a Lux-Tiger?”
“A what?”
“It’s an English pistol,” I said. “A thirty-eight. Holds eight cartridges and has a handle looks like a rubber squeeze pump.”
“Oh yeah,” Alice said. “You know, Jay, you could fuck me right here on this couch and Harry wouldn’t even hear it.”
“What if he came downstairs to go to the toilet?”
“He don’t go nowhere without me helpin’ him.”
“I see. Well, maybe in a little while. You see, I need to know about that pistol first.”
“What for?”
“It showed up at a friend’s house and I was wondering if it was stolen.”
“It sure was,” Alice declared. She had a wide mouth and healthy teeth except for the missing one. That made me think that someone had socked her, at least once.
“What happened to it?”
“That girl took it. That whore.” She winked at me even though her words were angry.
“Who was that?”
“Doreen Fitz. Little whore drove Harry out of his mind. She had a boyfriend come up here and beat the shit outta Harry. That’s partly why he’s laid up now. They took all kinds of stuff from him. Rings and money and that old pistol. Harry loved that gun. He liked that it was so fat but hardly had no kick.”
“Are you Harry’s wife?” I asked.
“No. Just his cousin from Arkansas. Just his cousin come to make her fortune by pickin’ his bones. You could share some of it with me if you want.”
“You’re stealing from him?”
“Have you ever seen a sharecropper’s farm, Jay?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said.
I thought about all of the poor black and white people I’d seen straining over hard dirt, going deeper into debt with each passing season. I saw all that pain in her callused hands.
“You wanna go up and see Harry?” she asked.
IT WAS A BRIGHT BEDROOM with a picture window that allowed strong sun to beat down upon the occupant. He was a tall man but slender as a child. Even though he was under the sheet you could see the outline of his skeleton. His eyes were intelligent and the only part of him that moved. When he saw me a worried look crossed those eyes.
“Hey, Harry,” Alice said. “I brought a nigger up to look at ya. I fucked him on your couch. He nearly broke me in two.”
“Mr. Stout, my name is Jay Auburn. I’m looking for the people who stole your Lux-Tiger. Alice is just joking with you. She has some sense of humor.”
Stout was looking deeply into my eyes, pleading with me.
“Did Doreen Fitz take your pistol?”
With a supreme effort Harry Stout nodded.
“She had a boyfriend named Dean?”
Again he made his head move.
“Do you think that they might still be around?”
He didn’t nod that time but it might have been because he was exhausted.
Alice took a drag on her cigarette and coughed.
I went to the window and pulled the drapes closed.
“Hey,” Alice complained. “He needs a little color.”
“Keep the drapes closed and take care of him like you’re supposed to,” I said. “Do that or your free ride’ll be over.”
“What the hell do you mean?”
“I’m a cop,” I said. “Looking into a murder right now but I’m calling social services the minute I get back to the precinct.”
“You can’t come in here without telling me you’re a cop. That’s against the law.”
“Sue me,” I said. “Tomorrow morning a social services agent, Saul Lynx, will be here. You better either be taking care of this man or be on your way.”
THERE WAS ONLY ONE D. Fitz in the phone book. The number had been disconnected. But I went over to the house anyway. The address was on South Robertson, the left half of a two-family home composed of salmon stucco.
There was a concave entranceway with the doors to both apartments facing each other. I knocked on the D. Fitz number I got from the phone book.
An old woman came to the door.
“Oh,” she said instead of a greeting.
“Miss Fitz?”
“Who?” she asked instead of replying.
“I’m looking for a Doreen Fitz.”
“No,” she said. “Not me.”
“She moved out,” a man’s voice said from behind me.
I turned to see a tall and elderly white man. He had kind eyes and stooped a bit but still he had the posture of a soldier. His smile was mild. It wasn’t joyous or even happy. The expression was more relief than anything else. Remembering him in the narrow doorway he seemed like he was in a coffin, made up for death.
The door behind me slammed.
“You know Doreen?” I asked.
“Why, yes I do. I tried to help her out when I could.”
“World War One?” I asked him.
“Yes sir,” he replied.
MR. PALMER—that was the veteran’s name—invited me in for coffee. He led me through a living room that was twice the size of a dressing room at the May Company department store, through a transitional space that was so small that it could have no name or purpose, and into a small kitchen that was connected to a screened-in porch.
The porch had two redwood chairs and looked into the boughs of a tall magnolia. It was cool out there and I relaxed.
“… wasn’t a bad girl really,” he was saying about Doreen.
We had been out there for an hour or more. Every once in a while the little white woman from the other apartment would come out onto her little porch to see if I was still there.
Palmer told me about the war and the trenches, about the mustard gas and wild dogs that fed on soldiers who had fallen alone. He had three children, two dead wives, and had come out to California after the war because the war had taken too many friends from his small Iowa town.
I told him about my leaving the South for pretty much the same reasons, except that most of my friends had died in Houston rather than on the battlefield.
It was a nice talk. He was the perfect host; a lonely old man who didn’t worry about race or wildness in girls. I guided him into a discussion about Doreen, telling him that I had a friend who knew her in Santa Maria and who worried that she might have been in trouble because of a guy named Dean.
“It was that Dean who got to her,” Palmer agreed. “He was handsome and drove a motorcycle. Girls like that. They think they want a wild man until they drop their first kid. Then it’s fuddy-duddies like you’n me they want, Mr. Auburn.”
I liked being called a fuddy-duddy.
“My friend wanted me to drop by and see if Doreen had moved back here,” I said.
“No,” Mr. Palmer said. “She never came back. But I send her mail on to an address down in Venice. I think it’s Dean’s brother. Here, I’ll get it for you.”
The veteran weighed no more than a hundred and ten pounds but he had to use all of his strength and a lot of leverage to get up and out of his chair. While he was gone the old lady next door spied on me from her kitchen window.
I felt that I deserved her distrust. There I was lying to the friendly old man. If it wasn’t for Domaque and my blood debt to Mouse I would have left then.
“It�
��s a place down in Venice,” Palmer said when he returned. “I drove her down there once before the state took my license. They say I can’t see well enough. Anyway, it’s a small place not far from the water. But his brother isn’t a friendly fellow. I wouldn’t go there alone if I were you, Mr. Auburn. If you know what I mean.”
It was his only reference to race. Even then he might have meant I’d have trouble because of my fuddy-duddy status.
I had an extra cup of coffee and swapped a few war stories. He walked me to the door as evening came on.
“Come back and see me again sometime, Jay,” Mr. Palmer said as I left. “It’s nice to talk to somebody smart now and then.”
I DROVE DOWN TO THE ADDRESS Mr. Palmer gave me. It was on a small street a mile or so south of Pico. The house was smaller than the gaping garage, and the lawn was covered with rusting cars and motorcycle parts. I saw three men and one white-blond girl sitting on a bench, drinking whiskey from a quart bottle. One of the men and the girl had been in the photograph I took from the Santa Maria trailer.
The men were a rough-looking lot. They had long greasy hair that came down past where their collars would have been if they wore proper shirts. But they wore T-shirts and leather jackets, dirty jeans and heavy boots.
I drove by quickly and then headed back toward Compton.
I MULLED OVER THE PROBLEM of Dean’s brother’s place all the way. Mr. Palmer was probably right about me walking up there alone. Even in a gesture of friendship those men would have probably shown me the door—with a tire iron. And I didn’t want Doreen or Dean to know I was looking into them, not until I had a plan.
I needed backup but there was only one man I knew who could take that ride. And it scared me to death even to consider his help.
ETTA ANSWERED THE DOOR when I got there. Her eyes turned to stone when she saw me through the screen.
“How did you find us?” she asked in a whisper.
“Why’d you lie to me, Etta?” I replied.
“Who is it?” Mouse called from somewhere in the house.
“Nobody,” Etta said.
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