“How many in the crew?” I asked.
Mel didn’t like his flow interrupted but he said, “A witness happened to be driving by just as three Negroes wearing construction clothes were winching what he later realized was an armored car into the back of a big rig.”
“Would’a had to been a semi,” I said, adding, “hardly worth the weight on a serious crime like that for less than thirty thousand dollars apiece.”
“Is there any dollar amount that would make it okay for someone to murder a man?”
“Aw, c’mon, Mel. You know what I mean. You think I could do something to help you and San Bernardino find these guys?”
“And so we come to Craig Kilian,” Suggs replied.
I felt a chill at the back of my neck and wished, absurdly, I had killed that long-ago German soldier.
“What about him?”
“He was shot dead at close quarters and nobody heard a thing,” the head cop opined. “We found a stack of hundred-dollar bills from the armored car job in an envelope in his closet. The wrapper was from the bank the car was delivering for.”
I loved being a PI. The work suited me. It didn’t matter much that Suggs was wrapping a chain around the box he thought I was in. The case was starting to come clear and I liked that.
“I have no idea about any money from a robbery,” I said. “The kid wanted me to find a girl named Dee Dee. I couldn’t and went to his place to tell him so.”
“You happen on the name of Alonzo Griggs,” Melvin said, holding up his left thumb. “He’s been suspected of midlevel bank robberies and heists throughout Southern California.” That brought out the point finger of the same hand. “Now your client shows up dead and you’re the one that found him.” The fuck-you finger accompanied that little sarcasm. “You wanna tell me right now where this Dee Dee is buried?”
Melvin Suggs was the best cop I had ever met. He was dogged, courageous, and as honest as a man steeped in crime can afford to be. He worked for the most racist police department I had ever encountered (and that’s saying something for a southern boy) but still managed to do what was right more than fifty percent of the time. Any lie I told him was likely to come out sooner or later.
“Look, Mel. Craig Kilian came to me almost a week ago with a story about having gone camping out at Blood Grove.”
“Where’s that?”
I told him everything up to, but not including, Eddie Brock’s visitations and Lola’s real name. Melvin let me go on as his oatmeal congealed.
“But the Alonzo that the kid told you about was shot,” Suggs said. “There wasn’t a knife wound on him.”
“I know.”
“Why didn’t you come to me?”
“Blood Grove ain’t your jurisdiction.”
“There had been a murder.”
“I didn’t know that. The kid said that when he woke up in the morning there was no body, not even any blood. All I had was the questionable testimony of a shell-shocked vet. What the fuck would you do with that?”
“If there was a murder I would have acted.”
“And the first body I found I called your man.”
“You didn’t tell Anatole you were looking for that man already.”
“Like you said, the man I found was shot. As far as I knew this was a completely other Alonzo and a heck of a coincidence.” The ice under my feet was getting a little thin.
Suggs sat back and stared at me. I was absolutely sure that he was thinking about ordering a slab of ham.
“Talk to me about the heist,” he said at last.
“The first I’ve heard of it is here at this table.”
“How do you expect me to convince anyone of that?”
“You know me, Mel. I’m good at what I do. If I thought that there was one shred of evidence, much less a stack of hundred-dollar bills lyin’ around, do you think I would have left it for the LAPD to find? And then call them to come find it?”
That was the first smile I got out of him.
“So what have you come up with?” he asked.
“I told you.”
“You told me the facts as they happened—maybe. What I’m askin’ is what do you think they mean?”
I liked Melvin, couldn’t help it. If they fired him from the force I’d bring him into the agency. I liked him but I didn’t trust anyone except maybe my children.
“Kilian obviously lied about something,” I said. “I don’t know about any heist, but the fact that that money made it into his apartment says that there was more involved.”
“Uh-huh,” he said, expecting more.
It was one of those crossroads Sorry and Robert Johnson had warned me about. Me putting the cops on Brock, a man I was sure had his fingers in a lot of pies, would be like shaving my head and then drawing a big white bull’s-eye on the back of my skull.
“I found a picture at Alonzo’s that might have been the girl Kilian was looking for.”
“You held back evidence?”
“Look, man, either we talkin’ or I’m walkin’, all right?”
Melvin looked around to make sure no one was watching and then nodded.
I took the picture I got from Alonzo Griggs’s wallet and handed it over.
“So this is the girl the dead vet was lookin’ for?”
“I suspect so but I don’t know for sure. I showed it to the kid and he acted like he didn’t recognize her. But I had the feeling he was hiding something.”
“What else?”
“I should be askin’ you that.”
“What does that mean?”
“Come on, Mel. We talkin’ here, right?”
Policemen hate giving civilians information. It’s like a river flowing upstream, birds migrating north for the winter.
“The SBPD have a couple’a their guys here in LA lookin’ for the black crew that took down the armored car. One name they floated was Alonzo Griggs.”
“Why didn’t they come question me?” I asked. “Is that why you’re here now?”
“They haven’t heard your name.”
“Wouldn’t Anatole tell them?”
“I told him to keep it to himself. The three SBPD detectives got a room at city hall. Some deal they got with the mayor. Chief Brown doesn’t like that they’re given special treatment and has asked me, personally, to find the perpetrators and make the arrests before they do.”
“So now you got me in the crosshairs.”
“I’m just sayin’ that you got a problem that dovetails with mine.”
We were both pretty quiet there for a moment. Now I had two police departments, two dead bodies, maybe three more dead bodies, a gang of desperate heist men, a gangster, and a grieving mother pressing up against me.
All that might have gotten me nervous if it weren’t for my participation at the Battle of the Bulge.
My expression must have communicated that thought because Suggs smiled and handed me a card. It was his regular business card but on the back he had scrawled, If Ezekiel Rawlins presents this card to you call the number below . . .
“I see you expected me to take you up on this,” I said.
“You get six percent of all monies recovered and I forget about your little misdemeanors.”
I went home to get Feather and then drove us both up to a motel I knew in Isla Vista. There we swam in the ocean; I for forty-five minutes and she for two and a half hours.
Exhausted, we went to Benny’s Seafood Shack and ate shellfish until the sun went down.
Our room had two single beds and we were both dead tired.
“Daddy?” Feather called out from the darkness.
“Yes, Genevieve?”
“I’m not gonna use that name.”
“Okay. What were you going to ask?”
“I think my life is just about perfect.”
“Me too,” I said, and then I was asleep.
27
The Stephanopoulos Talent Agency was on the south side of Sunset Boulevard a few blocks east of L
a Cienega. The Gruen chronometer said it was 11:07 in the morning when I parked John’s green Pontiac across the street from there. It was a cheaply constructed building, three floors high with the front walls made from glass. The visual effect was something like the plastic ant farms that children used to watch emmets aimlessly tunneling, their hearts thundering for a queen that does not exist.
There might have been eighteen employees and of them there were only women visible. No elevators, so you could see them climbing and descending the stairways, sitting at desks, and walking from here to there. The women were of all races. That was the late sixties and rock ’n’ roll had taught us that difference sold. These women were office workers but they were hired for their age and looks as well as their secretarial skills. This made sense to me because the business concerned itself with beauty. That’s what they bought and sold.
Fourteen minutes passed before I got out of the car. The lag was because I had learned to reconnoiter a place before going in. That way you knew what to expect, or at least had a good idea how things worked. Most detectives learned that skill on the job, but I had been practicing my entire life. Poor blacks from the Deep South had to keep on the lookout for trouble; either that or fall into its trap.
I walked in the front door and up to the high podium-like reception desk. A young woman with impossibly long eyelashes looked up from a paperback book she was reading, giving me an insincere smile. She had Asian blood and also some Caucasian flowing in her veins. There was something darker there too but I couldn’t quite tell what.
“Can I help you?” She dog-eared the book and laid it facedown.
“What you readin’?” I asked.
The question threw her off her game a little. It wasn’t the kind of question that should be on my mind. At least not the first thing I’d ask.
“Myra Breckinridge,” she said with a twist to her lips that added, Something you wouldn’t know a thing about.
“Oh, that book by Gore Vidal. Came out last year, right?”
“Um. Did you read it?”
“Only skimmed,” I said. “There was too much sex for an old man like me.”
The young woman’s practiced smile turned into an honest grin.
I looked up at the high wall behind the reception desk. There were dozens of photographs tacked there upon a huge corkboard. Mostly women in various glamorous, and sometimes naked, poses. But there were also a few young men models—and one older one.
“I’m Sata,” the literate receptionist offered.
“Easy Rawlins.”
“That’s a good name. How can I help you, Easy Rawlins?” Sata looked me up and down. I assumed that was habit for a modeling agency: most people who went in there were either in the market—or on it.
The picture with the older gentleman wasn’t him alone. Five young miniskirted women stood around him smiling and touching. Somewhere in his early forties, he wore sunglasses and a tight-brimmed Stetson. But that didn’t fool me.
“Who’s that?” I asked Sata, “one of your brawny man models?”
“That’s Brock Oldstein. He’s the owner.”
“I’d like you to tell Mr. Oldstein that Easy Rawlins came to see him about Donata Delphine.”
“Oh,” the child of many continents said. “Um, Miss Delphine doesn’t work here anymore.”
“Then it’ll be a short conversation.”
Sata had become wary of me, showing that Miss Delphine was persona non grata and that I now fell under that shadow.
“May I have your contact information please?” The receptionist’s language turned proper and her shoulder—cold.
“Mr. Oldstein already has my number . . . and now I have his.”
Sitting in the driver’s seat of the borrowed Pontiac, I was slowly coming to consciousness about the case I should have turned down. It’s like I had been knocked out and in the middle of a dream while coming to—there was reality and then there was the dream.
In the year 1929 at the age of nine I arrived in the Fifth Ward. I was already a man and on my own. I’d jumped a boxcar outside of New Iberia and spent one day and two nights in there with dark, desperate men. I never talk about that ride . . .
After that I spent more than a week wandering the streets of the Fifth Ward asking people if they knew my grandfather, Winston Marquette, a man I had never met.
Eleven days I wandered. My mother’s father most probably lived in that district somewhere, but even if he had moved, someone might remember where to. Finally, on my twelfth morning without breakfast, I came upon a woman they called Mad Mary.
“Winston Marquette!” she ejaculated. “That niggah can drank some wine. He used to come up to see me when I had a nice place. We’d drink and then he’d have me callin’ out to Jesus, thankin’ the Lord he give me a body could feel so good.”
Mary was weathered like a seaward wall that had taken every gust and squall the Gulf of Mexico had to offer. Her hair was coarse and half gray, her eyes still looking for that bottle of wine and a chance to praise Jesus. I remember taking her hand and squeezing it.
“I’m looking for Mr. Marquette,” I said. “He’s my grandfather.”
“You poor child.”
Along with pity Mary gave me a possible destination.
“There’s a gang’a big palm trees on t’other side’a the northbound railroad tracks, that’s where Crackers Street is at. If you take Crackers across the tracks it comes Algo and if you take Algo up past three cross streets you’ll see a brash blue house on your left. That there is Juanita Ferris’s house. Behind that is a dirty yella shack. That’s where the bastid Marquette used to live at. Maybe he still do.”
Everything she said was true. The cluster of palm trees, the cross streets, the ugly blue house, and then the dingy yellow one. She was right about my grandfather too—he was a bastard. He told me that I could sleep on the front porch but that he didn’t have any money to feed me or to put clothes on my back.
My grandfather and I did not get along that well, but his friend Sorry dropped by now and then to drink corn whiskey and play chess. Sorry always took the time to ask me how I was doing. After I had regaled him with my adventures and experiences he’d give me little tidbits of advice.
Sitting there across the street from the Stephanopoulos Talent Agency I remembered one day when I was tending an onion patch I kept out next to my grandfather’s place.
“What kinda onion you sow, Li’l Easy?”
“Spanish onions, Uncle Sorry,” I said. I must’ve been eleven at the time.
“You learn anything lately?” Instead of a cane the bent old man had an eight-foot driftwood staff. He leaned on it while looking down upon me.
“Me an’ Billy Ray and Raymond Alexander was runnin’ down this gulch like. First Billy did it runnin’ through these thick bushes down there. Then Mouse, we call Raymond Mouse, he ran down the same way. I was the last to go and I made it through but I guess there was a bumblebee nest down there and that big black bumblebee barnstormed me an’ hit me in the fo’head so hard that I was knocked out for fi’e minutes.”
Usually when I told a story Uncle Sorry would smile. But that day he was dead serious.
“And what did you learn from that, Ezekiel?”
“I will never be last again.”
Old Sorry’s nostrils flared and he said, “Come here, boy. Come here.”
I was a little bit afraid but that old man was one of the few people I trusted so I walked right up to him. He was fishing around his pockets for something and finally came out with a five-dollar gold piece. That was a fortune for a full-grown black man back in those days.
“I want you to keep this money with you for all the rest’a the days of your life,” he said. “Keep it so that you nevah forget the lesson that bee taught you.”
“Why cain’t I spend it?” I asked.
“Because the lesson is more important an’ it’s hard for us poor mortals to remember everything. It’s just not possible.”
I still have that coin in my wallet. Just knowing it’s there reminds me of the lesson that bee and Sorry taught—that some things we must never forget. I was thinking about Sorry; tall and thin with a high forehead and skin as black and shiny as tar. That old man who parented me was in my mind’s eye when Mr. “Eddie” Brock Oldstein walked into the front door of the Stephanopoulos Talent Agency.
I could see him through the window talking to little Sata. When she told him her news he turned to look out the window. I don’t believe he saw me but he knew I was there.
At that moment I understood I could not take the next step of this job on my own.
I eased out into the boulevard headed west. A few blocks away I went into Manning’s Drug Store and used the pay phone to call my home phone. No one answered so I dialed another number that was answered by Matteo Longo, assigned driver for the residents of the Bowl of Brighthope.
“Did you take Feather anywhere today, Matt?”
“Down to the house where I took the hippie.”
Terry answered on the first ring.
“Yeah, she’s here, Easy. She’s getting high with her brother out back.”
28
I had no right to be angry with Terry. He was a hippie and hippies had a different set of rules than straights did. Hippies believed in free love and getting high, world peace and sharing what you have with those who don’t. If I didn’t want Feather to be exposed to all that, I shouldn’t have put Milo there and then given her the phone number.
A very young woman wearing only a red-and-yellow tie-dyed T-shirt opened the front door of the mansion/commune; a white girl with thick, tousled black hair. She was about to ask me what I wanted but instead yawned, then stretched. The hem of the shirt rose to the top of her thighs. If she knew what she was revealing she didn’t care.
“Yeah? Can I help you?”
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