“What dog?”
“A little black puppy lickin’ my face. There was no white girl or black man. I didn’t even see any blood on the ground.”
“All gone?”
“Just the puppy and about a thousand white cabbage butterflies flitting through the grass.”
“Was the white woman big and strong?” I asked.
“Nuh-uh. She was little.”
“And how big was Alonzo?”
“A little taller’n me and full. You know, two hundred pounds or more.”
“Come on,” I said. “Let’s get another shot of whiskey.”
4
I sat behind Whisper’s desk, leaving Craig the visitor’s chair. I told him to sip this glass because that was all he was getting.
Some of his story had the ring of truth, maybe even most of it. But more than that I believed in the innate goodness of the shell-shocked soldier.
Goodness is a complex word in my profession. Good men and women can be guilty of terrible crimes, just as there are those with evil intent who can never be found guilty in a court of law. In a book I’d recently read, the main character, Billy Budd, was as good as a man can be, but he murders an evil man named Claggart. Good and guilt often go hand in hand.
“So what do you want from me?” I asked.
The veteran’s first response was as if I had slapped him. His head jerked back and there was a flash of anger in his eyes. But somewhere along the way Craig Kilian had learned to conquer his hot temper. He took a deep breath and shuddered.
“You’re a detective,” he said. “A good one, I’m told.”
“By a man I never heard of.”
“I want you to find out if I killed that man and what happened to the woman. What were they doing there?”
“Which one?”
“You mean they might’a been there for different reasons?”
“No. I mean what is most important? If the man died or if the girl lived and is okay. Or why they were there.”
“If I killed him is the most important thing,” he said. “But I’d like to know it all. I feel like I got to know.”
“Did Alonzo say her name?”
“No.”
“Did she hit you or was she still tied up?”
This question caught Craig off guard. He thought for a minute, a minute more. It seemed as if the answer was a very important thing.
“She was tied up, yeah, with rope, but the rope was kinda loose; she might could’a pulled free.”
I sat back and pondered. This was one of those cases that I shouldn’t even have considered. But there was something . . .
“Why do you need these answers?” I asked.
“Because I can’t sleep. I haven’t had ten minutes since that morning.”
“How many days ago did this happen?”
“Three. Three days.”
“Look, man, you got in a fight, maybe stabbed some guy, and then got knocked out. You woke up and there was no body and no one who could have carried a big man like that outta there. He was probably her boyfriend and she helped him get away. That’s the way it usually is. A man and woman get into a fight. He slaps her around and she screams bloody murder, but anyone gets between ’em and she will turn on them. Knock ’em upside the head with a stone.”
“But why would she do that?”
“Why are young men like you killing women and children in Vietnam?” I offered.
Craig’s eyes furrowed. He was thinking about something. Those thoughts didn’t make it to words. Then he nodded. I felt that I had almost convinced him, almost dodged the bullet of feeling I had to consider taking up his cause.
“Um,” he hummed. “I hear what you’re sayin’, but could you do me a favor?”
“What kind of favor?”
“Will you talk to my, my mother?”
“Your mother?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Why?”
“I think she could explain it better than I can.”
“Was your mother there?”
“No. But she knows me. She can explain to you what I’m askin’ for.”
“What can she tell me that you can’t?” I really was flummoxed.
“Just call her. Call her and you’ll see what I mean.”
There I was, now as at 7:04 in the morning waiting to see when the hippie came out with his long-necked watering can. Something about Craig Kilian intrigued me.
“And how was it you found me?” I asked.
“I already told you. Kirkland Larker. He said that you were a good detective and that you were colored and could maybe get a handle on this Alonzo.”
“But I don’t know any Kirkland.”
“He knows about you.”
“How do you know him?” I asked, looking for a reason, any reason—one way or another.
“There’s a bar on Western called Little Anzio. It’s not official or anything but mostly only veterans go there.”
“Never been inside but I know the place. This Kirkland hangs out there?”
“Yeah. Yeah, that’s where I met him.”
“You don’t even look old enough to get into a bar.”
“I’m twenty-three.”
“How many tours of duty?”
“Three.”
“What kinda missions?”
“The last two were seek and destroy.” As he spoke of war he seemed to get more certain.
“And you met this Kirkland at Little Anzio?”
“He bought me a drink one day. We started talkin’.”
“When was this?”
“Maybe four months ago. Something like that.”
“And you told him about Alonzo and the white girl just a few days ago?”
“Yeah.”
“And that’s the first time he mentioned me.”
“Yeah. I said that I got in a fight with a . . . a black man over a white girl. I said I was knocked out and wanted somebody to find out if she was okay. He made a call and then gave me your name.”
He was going to say, I got in a fight with a nigger. I was sure of that.
I stared and he fidgeted a bit.
“Nothing good can come from me finding this Alonzo—dead or alive,” I said. “Do you want to end up in prison because you lost a few nights’ sleep?”
Craig moved in his chair. It was what can only be described as an undulation; as if there was a creature that had been sleeping inside him suddenly came awake.
“So will you call my mother?”
“No.”
The shock that registered on his face almost made me laugh. He was like an eight-year-old after baring his soul. There was no way in his imagination that I could turn him down.
“If we talk at all I need to meet her face-to-face,” I said. “Can’t trust some voice over the telephone line talkin’ about murder.”
“Oh, okay,” he said. “Sure. That’d be fine. You want me to write down the address? I’ll call her and tell her you’re coming.”
I thought, maybe he should also tell her that I was a fool. Maybe that too.
I took a sheet of paper and a yellow number two pencil from Tinsford’s top drawer. Doing this, I realized he would know that I used his office as well as drank his whiskey. I hoped he wouldn’t mind.
Handing him paper and pencil, I said, “Write it down. Tell her I’ll be by later today. Gimme her phone number too. I’ll call but just to tell her when I’m coming. While you’re at it you might as well give me directions to that campsite too—just in case I decide to look.”
“We could go see my mother right now.”
“I got other business now.”
“You’re not going to the cops, are you?” Kilian tensed in his chair and I doubted if my self-defense training would be enough to handle him.
“And what would I say to them?” I asked. “That some white-boy Vietnam vet says he stabbed somebody named Alonzo in another county, got knocked out, and then, when he came to, the man he stabbed was gone?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
“Write down the directions and your mother’s name, phone number, and address. Tell her I’ll be by later on.”
Craig’s face said that he wanted to argue. Once again he was that eight-year-old boy intent on getting his way.
“Take it or leave it,” I said.
After a moment or two he began to write.
The entrance to our offices opened onto a separate staircase that led up from the street. I walked Craig Kilian to the top of the stairs and watched his descent. Through the small window opposite the front door I kept watching as he crossed the street and climbed into an eggshell-colored Studebaker. Three minutes passed before the engine turned over and the car drove off.
After he was gone I went back inside, making sure the front door was locked. Then I washed Tinsford’s glasses and returned them to their drawer. In the little toilet I did my business, then cleaned up. In the mirror there were the faces of many men: a middle-aged black man in fair shape but worn; a veteran not unlike Craig Kilian; a free agent who only took orders out of love, duty, or, far too often, as a consequence of guilt.
Maybe twelve minutes after my potential client had left I was walking south to Pico and then eastward. Upon reaching La Cienega I headed south again.
The whole time I was wondering about why I didn’t turn down the vet’s request. It would be nothing but trouble to go out looking for a man who got stabbed in the middle of an orange grove. A black man and a white woman that might have been hallucinations but, considering my luck, probably weren’t.
I would have turned him down out of hand if it weren’t for my understanding of the America I both love and loathe.
In America everything is about either race or money or some combination of the two. Who you are, what you have, what you look like, where your people came from, and what god looked over their breed—these were the most important questions. Added into that is the race of men and the race of women. The rich, famous, and powerful believe they have a race and the poor know for a fact that they do. The thing about it is that most people have more than one race. White people have Italians, Germans, Irish, Poles, English, Scots, Portuguese, Russian, old-world Spaniards, new-world rich, and many combinations thereof. Black people have a color scheme from high yellow to moonless night, from octoroon to deepest Congo. And new-world Spanish have every nation from Mexico to Puerto Rico, from Colombia to Venezuela, each of which is a race of its own—not to mention the empires, from Aztec to Mayan to Olmec.
I’m a black man closer to Mississippi midnight than its yellow moon. Also I’m a westerner, a Californian formerly from the South—Louisiana and Texas to be exact. I’m a father, a reader, a private detective, and a veteran.
I’m sure as shit a vet.
From the sand-strewn corpses of D-day (on that day my race, for a brief moment, was all-American) to the Battle of the Bulge with its one hundred fifty thousand dead, to the masses of skin-stitched corpses, living and dead, at Auschwitz-Birkenau. The explosions in my ears, the death at my hands, and the smell of gunpowder and slaughter made me brother to any man, woman, or child who ever raised arms or had arms raised against them.
Because of that bloody history, Craig Kilian was as much my brother in blood as any black man in the U.S. I had to help him because I could see his pain in my mirror.
5
It was just about Eighteenth Street when I made up my mind to go see Kilian’s mother. That decision accomplished, I could then think about my destination.
The pale yellow 1968 Rolls-Royce Phantom VI was in the shop for its quarterly tune-up. I had in my possession a contract that said the car was under a yearlong lease to me for payment of one dollar. If, at the end of that time, Chuck Zuma couldn’t pay at least sixty thousand dollars, I would assume ownership of the automobile.
A block past Sawyer on the western side of La Cienega was the slender entrance to an auto mechanic garage with a red-and-yellow sign that read EXOTIC CAR SERVICE AND REPAIR above the roll-up chromium door. Past the entrance was a workspace that bulged out to accommodate three hydraulic lifts surrounded by deep shelves stacked with automotive parts and tools. The business was a two-man operation. The first of these was fifty-four-year-old Lester Pineman, the original owner, who now spent most of his time sitting on a backless metal stool in a little nook of an office at the entrance. Short, he was fat around the middle with powerful hands and usually had a cigar clenched between his teeth.
“Rawlins, right?” he asked in a gruff voice. I imagined that his larynx was coated with thirty-weight car oil after all those years in the garage.
“Yeah,” I said brightly. I’m always happy when the decision is made and the job is before me.
“Lihn!” Lester shouted.
“What?” came a definitely feminine voice from the bowels of the repair shop.
“It’s that guy about the six.”
From behind a concrete pillar came a short figure wearing a teal-green jumpsuit. She was pulling heavy canvas gloves from her hands and shaking her head so that her thick black hair would fall back. This was Vu Von Lihn, a thirty-seven-year-old refugee from Vietnam. Her story was that, from 1965 to 1967, she had worked for Nguyen Van Thieu and his staff. The distribution of labor between Lester and Lihn was that he chewed the cigars, collected the money, and pontificated while she repaired the fancy automobiles.
Lihn was slight and sleek, sultry and strong—she had a scar like a lightning strike down the right side of her face that had left that side’s eye a useless and pale blue orb. Her lips were thick and sneered naturally, telling you there were some teeth behind any kiss she might bestow.
“Hello, Mr. Rawlins,” she said, walking right up to me and holding out a hand.
“Ms. Vu Von,” I said.
“You can call me Lihn,” she said, almost as if in song.
“How’s my baby?”
She turned away and walked toward the back of the garage. There she, and I, came upon the Rolls. Its long snout and classic cabin just about yelled elegance. It had a rolling chassis and a black hood and roof, with pale yellow sides. Just looking at it took my breath away.
“It’s in perfect shape,” Lihn said. “I did some work on the engine so it will keep its calibration longer than most of these V8 disasters.”
Nodding at the car, I was thinking about the mechanic.
“Tell me something, Lihn.”
“What’s that, Mr. Rawlins?”
“Easy.”
She gave me that dangerous smile and said, “Easy.”
“If you’re only a year or two out of Vietnam, how come your English is so good?”
“My mother sent me to the American school in the mornings in Saigon. My father taught me auto mechanics in the afternoons.”
“Oh. Anything else I need to know?” I asked.
“Don’t let Lester try to charge you. Everything I did was part of the maintenance fee we got from Mr. Zuma.”
I wandered around the car imagining kicking the tires. Then I jumped in behind the wheel, moving my butt around to get comfortable.
“You sure you can manage a right-side drive?” Lihn asked through the open window.
“I once drove an ice delivery truck that had the same setup.”
This explanation made the mechanic smile.
“You talk to Raymond?” she asked me.
When I took delivery on the car I had to bring it down to the garage. My good friend Raymond Alexander followed so he could give me a ride home. When he and Lihn looked at each other, something happened—something deep; kindred souls meeting for the first time. Mouse, that’s Raymond’s nickname, told me I could take his car because he’d be getting a ride with the lady mechanic.
“He was fine the last time I saw him,” I said. “As a matter of fact I can only remember about five times in the forty-two years I’ve known him that he wasn’t glad and happy.”
“God doesn’t make many like him,” she said with forceful obj
ectivity.
“And he only made one Ray,” I furthered.
She smiled again and I was a little bit jealous of my perfect, murderous, maybe even psychopathic friend.
Driving my little piece of heaven up to the front gate, I told Lester that Lihn said I did not owe the three hundred and fifty dollars he demanded. He frowned and chomped on the cigar but I managed to drive away without him swinging a crowbar at the best car I ever had.
I decided to take La Cienega up toward Sunset before heading west for my new home. The car felt like driving a yacht down the street—it was that smooth. The secret ecstasy of finally having arrived at success filled the cab of that Rolls.
I passed Pico and Olympic, finally crossing Wilshire into Beverly Hills. I had even made it a block or two past that when the flashing red lights appeared in the extra-wide rearview mirror. It was one of those wake-up calls that happen in the lives of black men and women in America when they mistakenly believe they have crossed over to freedom.
I pulled to the curb, put both hands on the steering wheel, and sat patiently awaiting the rendering of the calculation of my situation. That equation was a matter of simple addition: Rolls-Royce + black man without driver’s cap + any day of the century = stop and frisk, question and dominate—and, like the solution of pi, that process had the potential of going on forever.
The cops used the classic flanking maneuver. One came to the driver’s-side window while the partner moved up along the rear, making sure that I wasn’t hiding an army in the back seat.
The cop facing me gestured that I should crank the window down. I did so, feeling the pressure of the other cop’s eyes on the back of my head.
“License and registration,” the man outside my window demanded.
He was tall and slender, thirties and tan.
“Aren’t you an LA cop?” I asked instead of obliging.
“So what?” His name tag read L. BOWEN.
“This here is Beverly Hills.”
“We can make arrests outside our jurisdiction if we’re in hot pursuit.” He allowed himself a smile.
Blood Grove Page 3