Before I could answer the question Montana put her lips to the john’s ear and whispered something.
“Wha’?” he said. “I didn’t know that. How you expect me to know that?”
He looked at me with worried eyes while teetering backward and to his left, moving toward a late-model Cadillac. In the few seconds it took Montana to sashay up to me, the businessman was in his car.
“What did you say to him?” I asked the bar girl.
The Cadillac engine roared to life.
“That you were my boyfriend.” She took my left hand and swung it from side to side like a country girl might after a barn dance. “You here to collect on that forty dollars?”
The Caddy and its businessman were gone. The lot seemed preternaturally quiet, the last spasms of love spent.
“Donata Delphine,” I said.
“You give her forty dollars?”
“I haven’t met her yet.”
“Yet?”
“There’s a few questions of mine that she might could answer.”
“What kinda questions?” She was still holding my hand gently. I liked that.
“Montana,” I said as a request.
“You remember my name at least.”
“I need to know about Delphine. I’ll gladly give you four more twenties if you can point me in the right direction.”
“Is that what you thinka me? Like I’m just some whore that wants to get paid?”
Two of the cars in the lot started almost simultaneously. As the automobiles pulled away two young women walked past us. They didn’t speak because they could see that we were still in the negotiation phase of our relationship.
Montana was staring into my eyes, searching for the answer to her question.
“What do you want from me?” I asked.
She considered a moment and then said, “I want you to give me somethin’. Something special.”
I frowned, trying to decipher this request.
“And not money and not no kiss or nuthin’,” she said. “Somethin’ that’s gonna mean somethin’ to both me and you.”
From my shirt pocket I took a WRENS-L business card and a cartridge pen. I wrote a number on the back of the card, then waved the stiff paper around until the blue-black ink dried. I gave this handwritten promise to her.
“What’s this?”
“Two things,” I said. “First, it’s my business. You call the number on the front and you can get to me almost any day. That’s during business hours. If I’m not there someone’ll take the message and I’ll get back to you quickly.”
Montana was about to say something snide but she stopped when I held up a daunting forefinger.
“On the back of the card is another number. That’s my private answering service. You can reach me at that number twenty-four hours a day. If it’s an emergency just say so and they will call me direct. Leave a message as long as your arm. They will write down every word.”
I think it was the message length that got to Montana. She wanted a connection that she could rely on and that was it.
“What if I called you right now?”
“Florence Pratt will write down the message and either wait for me to call or, if it’s trouble, she’ll call me.”
Another car fired up and drove off. No young woman walked past us that time. Maybe it was real love for those passengers.
“She calls herself Donata Delphine but her real name is Roxanna Coors from San Diego,” Montana said. “She the kinda whore don’t mind how mean a man like Alonzo could get.”
“He beat her?” I asked.
“Like a three-egg omelet.”
“She have any other boyfriends?”
“Girls like us aren’t there for friendship. No man wanna girl that look like we do to be their buddy. A friend’ll tell you the truth now and then; we just say what you wanna hear. I mean, would you ask a friend to get down on her knees and spread her ass?”
That image conjured a door through which one could imagine the pain a life on your own offered. I understood what she meant too well to dally on her question.
“Donata have any regular customers that wanted her to compliment them?”
“Not that I could tell. A lotta men pass through here. Some become regulars but not the way you’re talkin’ about—not really.”
“When was the last time you saw her?”
After pondering a few moments she said, “Must be at least four weeks.”
“Anything special happen around then?”
“Not that I know. You got a cigarette?”
I handed over a Lucky and lit it for her. She took a deep draw and exhaled the smoke against my chest.
When the mist evaporated I asked, “You know where I might find her?”
“You sure this number will work?” she asked, indicating my business card.
“I am. Don’t you believe me?”
“I don’t know. A man like you could lie in his sleep.”
“And a girl like you would be lying right there next to me.”
A real laugh escaped her lips.
“She talks about Chateau Marmont sometimes,” Montana admitted. “Says that she likes the bar up there because sometimes famous actors pick her up. She told me they know her at the front desk and they only take ten percent.”
That was all I could ask for, but neither one of us wanted to leave right then.
“You ever hear the names Craig Kilian, Kirkland Larker, or Mona Strael?”
“Uh-uh. No. They got some answers too?”
“Time’ll tell.”
“You can give me that kiss now, Easy Rawlins.”
31
Mouse and Agosto were sitting outside the sentry’s hut playing dominoes under the weak light emanating from the doorway. It was three minutes shy of 5:00 a.m.
“Who’s winning?” I asked.
“No scores. Just tiles,” the son of Sicily replied. “We play through the box twice. Your friend said he wanted to wait.”
“I thought I was gonna call you, Ray.”
“You sounded bothered, brother,” he said, standing from the little crate they used as a card table. “Thought I’d drop by and make sure you were okay.”
Mouse and I hadn’t seen much of each other over the past few months. I was busy working and my partners didn’t like having him around. We hadn’t been together much but our kind of friendship was a life sentence. Only one thing could sever that.
“Come on up,” I said. “I need to get a little sleep before we talk business.”
Mouse nodded.
“Thanks, Aggie,” he said to the Longo brother. “Next time we can play chess.”
Both men shook hands and for some reason I felt pride in them.
Raymond wore dark clothes and had a canvas sack slung across his left shoulder. He lit a cigarette as the funicular rose over LA. Under a dawn mist the city lights glittered like some phosphorescent tides I’d seen.
“You got more luck than any man I ever known, Easy.”
“I wouldn’t call my life a lucky one, Ray.”
“I’idn’t say lucky. I said luck. Good or bad it clutters around you like chickens squabblin’ over a busted sack’a grain. You got this house on top of a mountain and chirren been hurt by life so bad that it would have killed a grown man. It’s somethin’ else . . . your kinda luck.”
“What you got in the bag?” I asked.
“Maybe everything,” he said.
We had a guest room on the second floor of Roundhouse. I put Ray in there and then went to undress for bed. I managed to get my shoes off but then I lay back. I do believe that I was asleep before head hit mattress.
It wasn’t what you’d call good rest. I was in a small room filled with people who were hogging up the air. They had faces but for some reason I couldn’t make them out. They were talking but the words didn’t make any sense. On top of that I didn’t know why I was there. I looked around for a door but couldn’t find one.
“
Easy,” somebody said. The other inmates of the dream were busy hiding their faces and mumbling. It was hot in there and the air was thin. I was looking around for an exit again when I felt a sharp, sharp pain in my chest.
I looked down and saw that there was a dagger buried up to the hilt in my heart. Blood was leaking out, slowly. In an instant I understood that the knife was blocking the flow of blood and, if it was pulled out, I’d bleed to death in a room full of strangers.
There was a hand on the hilt, a woman’s hand. She was black and beautiful: someone I had searched for my entire life. Her eyes were full of questions and, I knew, her mouth would be full of the answers I needed if only I could get her to talk.
“I’m sorry,” she murmured.
“About what?” I gasped.
“This,” she said, looking down at the dagger and the blood across her brown knuckles.
“Is this love?” I asked, feeling foolish even using the word.
That’s when she pulled the blade from the wound. Blood gushed from my chest and I was more afraid than I’d ever been. Lurching forward, I reached for her as she backed away. I tried to yell for help but my breath was gone.
I sat up in the bed in violent genuflection. I was still gasping and my chest actually hurt. I hadn’t moved in my sleep. For long moments I sat at the edge of the bed trying to glean meaning from the dream.
After failing at that I showered and shaved, put on my own dark clothes, and took a pistol from a locked drawer.
Ray’s bed was empty and made.
I found him downstairs sitting next to the koi pond—reading a book!
“Ray?”
When Mouse looked up, the second surprise was that he was wearing glasses. He took off the rimless spectacles and smiled in a way that I’d never seen. It was the glasses that shocked me most; the fact that he bought them, that he wore them in spite of his fierce vanity.
“Bettah close your mouth or the flies’ll get in,” he said. It was this old familiar phrase that calmed me a bit.
“What are you reading?”
“The Souls of Black Folk,” he said.
“W. E. B. DuBois?”
“Is it so amazin’ that I’d be readin’ a book?”
“Yes. It is. I’ve known you more’n forty years and I have never seen you read anything but a racing form. I didn’t even know you could read. You never went to school. And why would you be reading DuBois? That’s a book most people got to build up to.”
“Not just that,” he said. He gestured at the rucksack sitting next to him. “I got Up from Slavery in there too. Booker T. Washington wrote that one. He a southern boy down to his nuts and Boisy from New England. You know them two mothahfuckahs like oil an’ water.”
“I don’t get it, Ray. What’s come over you?”
“Well,” he said. “I told you how I started runnin’ jobs, right?”
“Yeah?”
“That means I have to stake out people an’ places in order to make the plans. Used to be I could sit in a chair on the porch hours on end an’ not do nuthin’. But since I got older I get, you know, impatient. I told Jackson Blue about it and he gave me these two books here. He said readin’d calm my mind. And damn if it don’t. I had to buy me some glasses but then things started to make sense.”
“Like what?”
“I really had no idea that anybody was thinkin’ like this except for me in my secret mind.”
His secret mind.
“Your mouth hangin’ open again, Easy.”
“Ray.”
“Yeah?”
“I wanna talk to you about this but first there’s business to take care of.”
Mouse still had his thumb holding his place in The Souls of Black Folk.
“Shoot,” he offered.
“Do you know anything about a man named Oldstein, Brock?”
Mouse put his book down on the ledge of the pond.
“Big B,” he said. “He’s just about the ripest pile’a bad attitude you’re ever likely to step in.”
“I think he came over to kill me the other day.”
“I doubt that.”
“Why?”
“Because if Brock want you dead. You dead.”
“It was a special circumstance.”
“Must’a been.”
“He a heist man?” I asked.
“Naw.”
“So he’s not connected to Alonzo?”
“Not that I know. Tell me about it.”
I explained about Kilian and the girl he was after, how Alonzo fit in and then Donata Delphine. I gave him every pertinent detail.
“So,” I ended. “What do you think I should do?”
“You should stop thinkin’ an’ start killin’.”
I never thought I’d be happy to hear Raymond suggesting murder. But at least some part of my friend was still in there somewhere with the uncharacteristic reading glasses, classic Afro-American literature, and new love.
“That might be the only option,” I said. “But I want to try something else first.”
That afternoon found me sitting alone in the coffee shop across from the Stephanopoulos Talent Agency. I had a cup of black coffee and chose that time to have my one cigarette of the day. I lit the Lucky, not because I craved it, but the way things were going it might have been my last.
Somewhere around 3:30 I saw Oldstein/Brock walking toward the door across the street.
I ran outside and yelled, “Big B!”
The man-boulder turned his head and beheld me. He considered a minute, then nodded. He waded out into Sunset traffic as if he were the only thing on the boulevard. Cars stopped for him and not one horn sounded.
That gangster might have been many things, but all of them came from not being a coward.
32
The café was called Sheila’s Snack Bar and it served liquor. Eddie Brock Oldstein preferred scotch. I ordered a Coca-Cola for the first time since returning from the war. I was angry at the soda company for allowing their German CEO to produce Fanta beverages to get around the spirit of the embargoes America had set up against the Nazis. But my protest took a back seat to the fact that I needed something unnaturally sweet to cut the fear that a natural force like Brock instilled.
I sipped on my soda and Brock downed his whiskey in one gulp.
After he’d gestured for a refill I asked, “What’s your problem with me, man?”
“Who said I had a problem?”
“You come up to my office in the early morning with two thugs. That’s a problem.”
“I thought you were up there,” he said.
“So? What you got against me? I’ont even know you.”
“My money in your pocket.”
“You haven’t paid me a dime.”
“Not what I owe but what was stolen from me.”
“Why would you think I had anything belonged to you?”
“Because you were working for that worthless piece’a shit Kilian.”
Were.
“Look, man,” I said. “Craig came to me with some crazy story about a man and a woman fightin’ in the woods. He said that he thought he killed the man and wanted to find out if that was the case and if the woman was okay. I looked into it and couldn’t even prove that anything had happened. That’s it. Period. No money. No even mention of you or anybody like you.”
The waitress, probably not Sheila, brought Brock his second drink.
He held the glass up to his chin and stared at me like a hunter might spy quarry mostly hidden by a thick scrim of woods. No clear shot yet, his finger was still on the trigger.
“If you didn’t know what Kilian was up to, then how’d you find me?” He posed the question with misplaced arrogance, like a checkers champion at a chess match. My heartbeat shifted to a slightly higher setting. So far everything I’d said was true. Maybe I’d left out a detail or two, but that was merely omission. Now I had to lie. Luckily I had an answer prepared.
“You’re built like a brick shi
thouse, Mr. Oldstein,” I said.
It helped me to see his massive shoulders tense up. While I was paying attention to the threat, the lie passed more easily through my lips.
“Don’t get all bothered, brother. I just mean I asked a few shady characters I knew if they’d heard the name Eddie Brock. And when I described what you look like I was given a few choices. One of them ran the Stephanopoulos Talent Agency.”
“Who told you about me?”
“You all big and bad, Brock, but even a little motherfuckah could stab me in the back. No names.”
“All right. But I do need to know the name of the girl Kilian was after.”
“I have no idea. Up until right now I thought the whole thing was likely a figment in a shell-shocked vet’s mind.”
“Why’d he come to you?”
“How should I know? The man he thought he killed was black, maybe.”
“Maybe?”
“Yeah. It was late at night in the woods. Maybe he wasn’t. But if you askin’ where Kilian got my name, I got no answer.”
Brock studied me a little further. His stare alone, I believed, had broken many a man. But I was better than that. I was just scared shitless.
“I gotta different story to tell,” he said when I refused to crumble. “I had a girl worked for me was smarter than a store-bought pair’a tits. She could juggle three sets of books would make any accountant scratch his head. After the first year she was workin’ on all my businesses and with some of my partners’ money too. She got knee-deep in our shit, ripped us off, and ran. We tagged a nigger named Alonzo to get to her, but she must’a paid him off or somethin’. Now he’s on our list too.”
“Too?” I said. “You plan to kill her?”
“Not before she gives us our mothahfuckin’ money.”
“Okay,” I said, holding up my hands, trying to look innocent. “She took your money and bought off your boy. But I don’t see where you could imagine that I have anything to do with it. Craig neither. From what he told me he didn’t even know the girl.”
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