“I took on a job today,” I told my daughter.
“The one where the guy had the mental breakdown in your office?”
“He’s a vet and I feel for him. But that means I might not be able to pick you up.” This simple refusal saddened me.
“That’s okay. I already asked Matteo and he put it in the book. I was gonna ask Uncle Jackson if he’d take one Tuesday afternoon a week to do French with me and Pookie.”
Michelle “Pookie” Fontelle had been born in Lafayette, Louisiana, and came to Watts with her mother, Morona, at the age of nine. Pookie was a math savant and maybe an even better artist. Morona had survived situations that would have destroyed most men, just to get her daughter into that school. And it was obvious that Feather wanted to get her fourteen-year-old friend in a dialogue with her “uncle.”
I sighed and shook my head slightly.
“What’s wrong? You don’t want me to go?”
“Why are you wearing that dress?”
“You don’t like it? Aunt Jewelle picked it out for me.”
“It’s just kinda grown-up for a girl your age.”
“I know, right?” She smiled, stood up, and twirled for me. “But the Kolors are having a cocktail party and Anita asked me to wear something pretty. She said then she wouldn’t feel funny.”
When I was a young man in Houston, women could wrap me around their fingers. All a girl had to do was whisper my name and I was ready to throw down. Feather had that impact on me, but I was sure she’d rather die than lie to me. All this instilled a feeling that I couldn’t exactly describe.
I was trying to put that feeling into words when the phone rang.
My demure and sophisticated daughter leaped up from her stool again and ran for the wall phone yelling, “I’ll get it!”
I could relax. For the next little while Feather would be a child again and I would be released from the parts of my mind that were shrouded in fears for her safety.
“Hello? Connie? Uh-huh. Yeah, girl. He did? I mean, why would he even think she would go out with him?” She broke into hysterical laughter. “My daddy would say that he couldn’t help it. But I think he needs somebody to help him help it . . .”
Her words, tone of voice, even the way she stood was different. I shook my head again and took the second stairway to the third floor, where our bedrooms were. Then I scaled the straight-up fireman’s ladder through the portal to the roof.
The circular crown of Roundhouse contained my twenty-seven rosebushes in their simple clay pots. From the moonlight-colored Musk Rose to the deep red Maiden’s Blush, from pale coral Bourbon blossoms to the passionate yellow Molineux.
I visited my rosebushes every day. They glowed for me, sang in colors for me. And they offered me a place and time where I could smoke my one cigarette of the day. Lucky Strike, LSMFT, the finest cigarette a workingman could hope for.
The added benefit of a single smoke a day was that the first cigarette is by far the best. That first deep drag is both elegant and ecstatic. Mmm.
8
The rose-garden roof of Roundhouse was the place I felt most comfortable. At the highest point in Brighthope Bowl, the sky above it was almost always blue. The rosebushes rustled against one another in the upper breezes and I was alone. For me there’s a deep satisfaction in solitude.
I leaned over the turret edge and saw the sire of the Longo clan, Erculi, ambling toward Orchestra’s blue-and-white manor. He looked fifty but was nearer seventy and always dressed in gray gardener’s clothes. He and his four sons worked on the property, holding simple titles like groundskeeper, machinist, housepainter, and chauffeur. But the Longos were anything but simple. In Sicily they had gotten into a beef with a rival clan. Reynard told me that there were thirteen deaths among the Longos and the Trifilettis before Erculi decided to migrate his immediate male kin to America. Reynard said that in his lifetime Erculi had killed thirty-one men.
Thus far I had kept Erculi and Mouse away from each other. No reason to tempt fate.
Returning to the kitchen a good half hour later, I saw that my daughter was still on the phone. “Are you still on that thing?”
“It’s Aunt Jewelle,” Feather said, holding her hand over the mouthpiece. “I think she wants to talk to you.”
“JJ,” I said into the receiver.
“Hey, baby,” the real estate mogul murmured, almost shyly.
Jewelle loved men but she didn’t trust ninety-nine point nine-nine percent of us, including both her husbands. I was one of the few she believed would be there for her on her own terms—even if she didn’t know what those terms might be.
“I hear Feather’s tryin’ t’make your house into a hotel.”
“Daddy!”
“You know we love having her, Easy,” Jewelle said. “And her friend sounds like she should know a man like Jackson.”
“Take her if you want her, but she will empty your refrigerator and your cupboards. That girl and her friends are bottomless pits.”
“Daddy, stop.”
“Okay then,” Jewelle said. That was code. Maybe she didn’t know it, but whenever she said Okay then, that meant there was trouble on the horizon.
“What’s up, girl?”
“Nothing.”
“Oh yeah, it’s sumthin’ all right.”
“Um . . . well. I have been having this little problem since I bought an empty lot on Flower downtown. Jackson says that it’s a perfect place to start a research center.”
“Researchin’ what?”
“You know, computer stuff. He says that because of the mechanics of computers they need to keep the memory cold so that it won’t catch on fire or melt. And there’s what he calls a stone substratum under that property that would be perfect for the refrigeration units and also pretty much earthquake-proof.”
Grinning, I remembered a time when Jackson and a friend of his named Toto would burglarize liquor stores for spare change and cheap wine.
“That all sounds aboveboard,” I said.
“It should be, but there’s this white man named Oliver Shellbourne. He owns a lotta the land down around there. He likes to see himself as a tough guy and so doesn’t want some black chick getting in the way of his future sweatshops and shopping malls.”
“He’s blocking the sale?”
“No. I bought the land from a friend of Jean-Pierre. Shellbourne couldn’t go up against the head of P9, but now he’s getting somebody to make threatening calls to my office. I don’t want to tell Jackson because he’ll go to either JP or somebody like Mouse, and you know what’ll happen then.”
While in the French Resistance, Jean-Paul Villard once executed a Nazi sympathizer. He left the man’s corpse, detached penis in mouth, in the town square. Mouse was somewhat north of that.
“He doesn’t call himself?” I asked.
“No. It’s just some other rude white man.”
“What’s he say?”
“I can’t repeat it.”
“Oliver Shellbourne?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. I’ll take care of it,” I said. “I can’t tell right when, but soon.”
“Thank you, baby,” she said, and that was all I needed to smile.
I traveled with Feather down to the base of our mountain and saw her off with Matteo on her busy adolescent life. After they had driven off I stood there for a while girding myself for the transition from domestic bliss to wartime.
Little Anzio was not the kind of place that someone in a fancy Rolls-Royce had ever frequented. The ad hoc veterans club was down on Western in the middle of a block where there were two forbidding alleys, a strip club with no bouncer out front, another bar next to a liquor store, and a seven-story sweatshop that hired Chinese and Mexican women to do some kind of labor from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m.
The bungalow that housed Little Anzio wasn’t designed to be a bar. There were large picture windows across the front obscured by full-length battered green-and-ocher window shade
s. The front door, at the left side of the one-story building, was made from metal and painted rust red. You could feel the heft of that hatch when pulling it open.
The barroom smelled equally of sweat, old skin, and the fumes from more cigarettes than Nat King Cole had smoked in an entire lifetime. The fluorescent lighting was bright, almost blinding, and there were twenty or so customers—all men. Most of these were from about my age upward to eighty, but there was a scattering of youngsters too—ex-servicemen who had spent their time in Korea, Vietnam, and other, less publicized campaigns. They were of all races, an unusual detail for gatherings of military men in the turbulent sixties.
“Who the fuck are you?” a man barked. He was standing with his back to the waist-high oak bar—a good nine paces away.
He was glaring at me. I glanced back.
“I asked you a question,” he said. He wasn’t really shouting, but his voice was both focused and sharp.
He was a white man, in his middle forties and a decade or so from peak shape. But I imagined he remembered the dance well enough.
Still, I didn’t answer.
He pushed himself away from the bar and took the first few of the nine steps. The five or six other men standing at the bar watched his progress.
“You deaf?” he asked, his voice still gruff and definitely threatening.
“No, I’m not.”
The vets turned their attention to me, wondering, I supposed, if a fight might break out.
“It’s just that,” I added, “my mother taught me that I am not required to reply to rudeness.”
“Your mother?” he said, taking three more steps.
I let my right foot move back half a span so that my left shoulder pointed forward. That would make him think I was retreating and allow the best torque for a right hook, should the need arise.
But before the blowsy barfly could take steps seven and eight, an elderly gentleman moved spryly between us. The dance was becoming more social.
“Hold up, Bernard,” the older man said, gesturing with the point finger of his left hand. I got the feeling that our interrupter was right-handed and so was using the same ploy as I.
“Outta my way, Cletus,” Bernard said.
“This man is a guest in our little club and he hasn’t done nothing to you.”
Cletus was also white, somewhere between seventy and eighty. That could have made him a survivor of World War I, what they once called the Great War.
“He won’t answer my questions,” Bernard said.
“I wouldn’t answer you neither, you talked to me in that tone.”
In 1969, even in California, it was still an unusual experience for a black man to be defended from a white man by a white man.
I squared up my shoulders and said, “My name is Easy Rawlins. I was a master sergeant for most of the last big war. I went in under Patton and came out with not one mark on my body or against my name.”
The spite in Bernard’s fat face showed that he was stymied. I added further insult by holding out a hand in friendship.
“Go on, Bernard,” Cletus urged. “Shake the man’s hand.”
Reluctantly Bernard grabbed my hand and then let go.
“Let me buy both you men a drink,” I said.
The malice in Bernard’s visage leavened somewhat with this offer.
The bartender was a sallow lad named Meanie. He supplied our drinks with a professional air.
“Yes, sir, I went to war August 1, 1914,” Cletus Brown was telling me after we were served. Bernard, whose last name was Michaels, sat on the other side of him brooding over his rye.
“But I thought we didn’t declare war on Germany until 1917,” I said.
Cletus Brown smiled at me. The few teeth he had left looked strong enough to tear military-grade beef jerky.
“That’s right, son,” he said. “That’s right. I had to go over to France and enlist there. I learnt the language, picked up a Bergmann submachine gun, and never looked back.”
We were standing at just about the center of the bar, which was little more than a big oak box. On the other side of sulky Bernard, at the far end of the drinking table, a shaggy-haired white man was leaning against the wall and conversing with a light brown Negro—both of whom were on the young side. The two were talking but the white one was giving me furtive glances now and again.
“. . . the Germans hated freedom,” Cletus was saying, “and my people, all the way back to the American Revolution, have fought for liberté, égalité, fraternité. The war for freedom is a calling that not everybody hears . . .”
A tall, olive-skinned man walked up and put a hand on Cletus’s shoulder.
“That’s our Lieutenant Brown,” the new visitor said. “Oldest, bravest, and most honorable man in this room.”
The older man’s chest pushed out.
I appreciated the new player’s respect while suspecting his motives.
“Easy Rawlins.” I held out a hand.
“Norman Toll.” He took the offer and gave me a hearty shake. “What you doin’ here, Master Sergeant?”
It was the same question Bernard had asked and it came from the same place—an innate distrust of newcomers.
“I was asked to come by a young man named Craig Kilian. He said I could get some information from a guy name of Kirkland Larker.”
“What kind of information?” Norman Toll was a few years older than I and certain of himself the way white men in America had been ever since they identified themselves as the master race of this magnificent land.
“Craig’s business.”
The veteran impresario was not happy with my answer but he accepted it.
“Corporal Larker,” he called to the white man watching me from the end of the bar.
“What?”
“This man wants to talk to you. He says it’s got something to do with Private Kilian.”
Kirkland Larker stared at me about three seconds longer than was civil. Then he pushed away from the wall. I honestly thought he was going to run. But after a sniffle and snort he walked my way in more or less military fashion.
When he reached us Cletus went down to the other end of the bar and Bernard, after ordering another rye and Coke on my tab, made a crablike move a few feet away.
“Corporal First Class Kirkland Larker,” Toll said, “I’d like to introduce you to Master Sergeant Easy Rawlins.”
We shook hands and Toll wandered off to a distant table.
“Drink?” Meanie asked Larker.
“On me,” I added.
“Tequila straight up,” Kirkland told Meanie.
“I’ll stick with bourbon,” I added.
Alone the corporal and I studied and sipped at our drinks. I was in no hurry and he seemed worried. The whiskey wasn’t bad. And the bartender hadn’t charged me as yet.
I liked Little Anzio. It was just another of LA’s ten thousand hidden jewels. But more, it seemed welcoming. If you overlooked Bernard’s need for confrontation, it was an ideal spot for a man like me—on an off day.
But this was no Sunday afternoon.
“You know my name?” I asked the afternoon tippler.
“I never met you or anything.”
“That’s not what I asked,” I said. “Craig Kilian came to me and said he needed my help. I wanted to know where he got my name and he gave me yours.”
Kirkland stood up a little straighter. He was in his early thirties and lean. Maybe he played basketball or something to maintain a modicum of muscle tone, but violence did not appear to be his first instinct.
“Did you talk to Craig?” he asked.
“I’m here.”
“Are you going to help him?”
“Help him what?”
“He said he got into some, you know, fight or altercation or something and it was with this black guy. It sounded like he needed help.”
“What kinda help?”
“He didn’t say specifically, just that he had this fight or something a
nd he needed to find out if the guy . . . I don’t know, maybe if the guy was gonna cause trouble.”
Kirkland seemed a little shifty, but that didn’t reveal what he did or did not know or, for that matter, what his motives were.
“The question is,” I said, “how did you know to give him my name?”
Kirkland looked into my eyes, hesitated, and then said, “Chris . . . Christmas Black.”
My idea of the perfect private detective was a man who never let what he was feeling or thinking show on his face. This goal wasn’t difficult for someone like me because that was business as usual for black folk reared in the South. No matter what you learned, you were never to let it overwhelm what your job was, what your responsibilities were. But the name Christmas Black put a weight on my mind. He was the soldier’s soldier. In his days in the military they dropped him hundreds of miles behind enemy lines, where he killed who needed to be killed and then lived off the land till he was back in his barracks.
Christmas Black was a warrior and so anything having to do with Craig Kilian had the potential to be war.
I am proud to say that even though I was thrown off by how Kirkland had gotten my name, I was still aware enough to notice that my witness was leaning back from me.
I stepped quickly away from the makeshift bar, only an instant before Bernard Michaels swung an empty Coke bottle at my head. He put his full weight behind the cowardly attack and so tumbled off-balance, hitting his head on the hardwood edge of the bar. He fell to the floor in a heap, bleeding from the scalp and out for the count.
“I saw everything,” Norman Toll said as he ran up to us. Other vets were looking after Bernard.
“He was trying to hit you from behind,” Toll added. “A coward and a sneak.”
I heard the words and shared the sentiments, but my eyes were on Kirkland.
“Did you see him?” I asked the corporal.
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