Brock downed his shot and then held up two post-like fingers to indicate to the waitress that he now needed a double.
“Craig was Delphine’s boyfriend,” Brock said while nodding something to the waitress. Then he looked at me. “On her last day at work he picked her up and drove her away.”
The waitress came and set down a nearly full glass. Most other men might have gotten a little tipsy drinking like that. But for somebody like Brock whiskey was fuel.
“All right,” I admitted. “That looks bad for Craig and Delphine. But where it gets hazy is when I get the blame.”
“Craig hired you,” Brock said just before guzzling half his liquor.
“How would you even know that?” I asked.
“Craig told me with his own bloody mouth.” I didn’t need to hear any more on that subject. “And if you’re working for them, then you’re workin’ against me.”
“I can see how it might look like that on the surface. But I told you: He said he didn’t even know the girl. He didn’t give me a name or a picture or nuthin’.”
“Maybe you’re right, soul brother. But common sense says that if you fall into a hole, either you climb out or you die down there.”
It was unsettling that I had just recently imagined being at the bottom of a pit about to cave in. It felt like the thug was in my head.
“You got a ladder I could use?” I asked him.
“Three hundred twenty-six thousand dollars.”
Melvin Suggs said that the San Bernardino heist was only eighty-six thousand dollars.
“That’s how much this girl stole from you and your friends?”
Brock stared at me so hard I had hope he might bust a blood vessel.
“You can stare until bullets come out your eyes, brother. But I have no idea how you think I know anything about your money.”
The bent businessman hadn’t finished staring yet. I might have been even more afraid if I didn’t know that Mouse was across the street, at the top of the building next to the Stephanopoulos Talent Agency. He had a high-powered rifle and assured me he could hit anything within a fly’s width.
A housefly, Mouse had said. Not no fat old horsefly.
I was craving another cigarette.
“Craig told me that he got into a knife fight with a . . . a big black man out in those woods,” I said. “That man belong to you?”
“What did he look like?” Brock asked.
“I told you. Craig thought he was black but it was night with no light except for the moon through the trees.”
“A knife you said?” Brock asked.
I nodded.
“Our man Alonzo was shot in his own bed.”
“Look, man. I don’t need you to incriminate yourself and then turn around and worry about me tellin’ your secrets.”
“I didn’t shoot him.” Brock actually grinned. “I didn’t have anything to do with it.”
“So the girl you asked me to look for, that Donata Delphine, she’s the one you think stole your money?”
“I don’t think. I know.” He punctuated that claim by downing the last of the whiskey.
“And why is it again that you came to me?” I said. Turnabout is fair play.
“We knew that you were working for Craig and he was a friend of DD’s.”
“So because of that you think they gave me your money?”
“You might know something and not even know that you do.”
“Like what?”
“What did Kilian tell you?”
“Come on, man. I told you what he said. He might’a killed a black man in the woods and that man was beatin’ on a white girl.”
“He didn’t tell you her name?”
“He said he’d never even seen her before he came up on them fighting.”
Brock’s stare had softened—from caveman’s club to a clenched fist.
“You went to the place where he killed the man?”
I told him about an orange grove, a cabin, and not one shred of evidence.
“I believe you, Easy,” he lied. “But my partners won’t be so understanding as me. If you worked for Craig they will want you to answer for it.”
“So the only way I can get out of it is by finding the woman you call Delphine.”
“That’s about the size of it.”
“How long you givin’ me?”
Holding out a hand as if offering to pull me out of that hole he said, “Forty-eight hours. Forty-eight hours or the same thing happened to Craig happens to you.”
“Something happened to him?”
“He tripped on a pistol and shot himself in the eye.”
Once again there was murder in my heart.
33
A few blocks south of Sunset, Mouse and I stopped at a block-wide supermarket. He was buying groceries for Lihn.
Groceries for Lihn. In my experience Mouse wouldn’t so much as boil water for coffee, but here he was in full domestic mode looking for skim milk and natural cornflakes.
While we cruised the fruit and vegetable section I said, “Tell me sumpin’, Ray.”
“What’s that, Ease?”
“Did your boy Alonzo have anything to do with a big black man with straight hair who was good with a knife?”
“You see any coconuts around here?”
“They probably up there with the citrus fruit.”
“You mean the lemons and oranges?”
“Uh-huh.”
Mouse drove that shopping cart like he was in the Daytona 500.
I caught up to him at a small bin of about a dozen coconuts. He was holding one in his hand looking at it with great concentration.
“How you tell if this bitch is ripe?” he asked. “Usually if sumpin’ hard it ain’t ready.”
“Hand it here,” I said.
He gave me the coconut. I tapped it with a finger and got that hollow sound.
Passing it back to my friend I said, “This one’ll do.”
“Ketch,” he said but I thought he said, Catch.
“You gonna throw it?”
He looked at the palm fruit and smiled.
“Naw, man,” he said, dropping the thing into the shopping basket. “Reynolds Ketch. Ketch with a K. He live over on Hoover.”
“Where?”
“You know the Hoover Car Wash down near Eighty-Third?”
“No. But I could find it.”
“He live across the street in a group of bungalows. They painted not blue and not green.”
“Thanks, Ray.”
“What you think is a bettah meat, Easy? Pig or sheep?”
“In my line’a business I prefer to sup on snake.”
So far I had been to two domiciles that contained dead men, their mortal clay waiting at that one last station on the way to hell. I didn’t want to go to one more makeshift mausoleum, but there was a breaking point coming and the best arsenal to have backing me up was information.
I drove east on Santa Monica Boulevard for a while and then went south, hooking up with Sixth Street, which I followed downtown. From there I took Hoover Street all the way into the hood.
The LA riots were almost four years gone but the devastation was still apparent. Burned-out businesses and more pedestrians than populated the streets of the rest of the city. Men and women who were the heirs of slavery trod down the avenue looking as if they were still bearing up under the heavy loads of another man’s wealth.
Reynolds Ketch’s apartment complex was right where Mouse had said it would be. The single-story courtyard of eighteen or so small apartments was painted turquoise and maze-like in its construction. A bank of mailboxes in front of the warren told me that the Ketch residence was number nine.
The doorway was flanked by a bushy bougainvillea with its red flowers burning brightly on the left, and on the other side stood a skinny loquat tree crowded with not-quite-ripe fruit.
I knocked on the door but nobody answered. I was wondering how I could break in when a voice called ou
t, “Who you lookin’ for?”
Directly across the concrete path was unit fourteen. Standing in the doorway was a very old, quite emaciated black man wearing jet-black sunglasses. He was leaning against the doorjamb, and his attention was aimed in my direction, if not directly at me. The plants on either side of his front door were big, healthy bird of paradise. There must have been sixty or more orange, blue, and red blossoms, each one of them seeming just about ready to take flight.
“Reynolds Ketch,” I said, amplifying my voice in case his age had made him hard of hearing.
“You’ont have to yell. I’m blind, not deaf.”
“Sorry, sir. I guess your hearing is so good that you heard me knock.” While speaking I crossed the concrete pathway to the old man’s front apartment.
Gauging the magnification of my words, he closed the screen door before I got there.
“What you want with Reynolds?” the old man asked.
“I’m Easy Rawlins. What’s your name?”
“I’m Shep. Shep Williams. Used to be Shep and Zula but she died seven, no, no, eight years back.”
“Sorry to hear that, sir. Were you married a long time?”
“Seem like forever. We had forever and now it’s gone.”
His tone of voice was oddly objective, like some celestial being commenting on the inevitability of mortality.
“I’m looking for Reynolds because a friend of mine wanted me to give him something.”
“What’s that?”
“A crate of blood oranges from his tree.”
“I like blood oranges. They more tart than most’a the store-bought ones. I cain’t see orange but I could taste it.”
“Have you, um, heard Reynolds lately?”
“Not for a few days, Mr. Rawlins.”
I regretted using my real name. In my business you wanted to leave as little a footprint as possible.
“Any idea where I might find him?” I asked.
“Sometimes he goes out of town for a few days, but then again he might be with his mama. She’s old and he helps her out now and then. He might not be a good man but he is a good son.”
“Something wrong with Reynolds?”
“Sometimes God ask the question and we give the wrong answer,” he said.
I pondered this reply for a moment or two. It made a great deal of sense though I couldn’t have explained why.
“Where does Mrs. Ketch live?” I asked.
“At the Poinsettia Court over on Hooper. Her name is Miss Lily Dasher.”
Poinsettia Court was another single-story courtyard of maybe twenty small apartments. Another maze with a different layout. Lily Evangeline Dasher was number eleven.
Half a dozen throwaway newspapers were piled at the threshold. And there was so much junk mail jammed into the slot of the door that some envelopes had fallen among and on top of the papers.
I was sure that no one was home but still I knocked out of deference and was surprised when a sixty-something black woman yanked the door open.
She was short and skeletal but there was life burning in those eyes, glistening off that black skin.
“Yes?” It was more an accusation than a question.
“Is he still breathing?”
“You’ont look like no cop.” That was back in the day when the word cop was a slur.
“No, ma’am.”
We measured each other. I was more than half convinced that she was armed with something. After an intensity that I don’t believe Big B Oldstein could have matched, the woman stepped aside and said, “Come on in, then.”
The living room was the size of the smallest cabin on a second-rate ocean liner. With all the shades and curtains pulled, it was dark enough to be below the waterline.
Miss Lily Dasher stood next to a recliner chair that was upholstered in cracked brown pleather. I had my back to the front door wondering if she was going to offer me a seat or whip out a gun and shoot me.
I wasn’t nervous, not exactly, but I had learned over time that because most women are physically weaker than most men, they, members of the fairer sex, were braver, forced to be more courageous and therefore more dangerous. A poor black woman knew that going up against a man was a life-and-death situation, so she had to be ready to risk it all. And there was something about Lily, her dark house, and the mention of the police. For her this was something serious and I didn’t know if she saw me as a possible friend or a definite threat. Because of all that I kept a close eye on my hostess’s hands.
For two or three minutes we maintained the silent standoff, and then, as if at the end of some test of strength, Lily collapsed onto the recliner. She was breathing hard. There was perspiration across her forehead.
“Renny called me in the middle’a the night outta nowhere,” she said, her gaze cast down upon the pitted parquet floor. “I drove out to some roadside gas station that was closed and found him in his car with a knife in his chest.” She looked up at me. It seemed like she’d aged a decade since letting me in.
“I brought him home,” she said, putting great weight on the words. “Brought him home to die.”
The third death. The charm. I thought of Mouse telling me that I had more luck, both good and bad, than anyone he knew.
“Where is he?” I asked.
Lily turned her head away from me. At first I thought that she was embarrassed or maybe feeling guilty about her and her son. But then I realized that she was looking toward a closed gray door.
“In there?”
She nodded.
I’ve seen a lot of death in my time. From the Louisiana backwoods to Houston. From the European theater to the streets of LA. The fact of death never bothered me, but the anticipation was another thing altogether. Knowing that there was a dead man on the other side of a closed door made me hesitant. I had to take a breath before putting my hand on the knob.
“Oh God,” Lily said when I turned that handle.
Another breath and I pushed the door open.
The bedroom smelled of infection. Reynolds Ketch was laid up in the bed, his shirt cut open and the knife still protruding from his chest. His dead eyes made Lily’s fever look like a light frost.
Then he took in a gurgling breath.
I am not ashamed to say that I nearly ran screaming from that bungalow.
There was a straight-back wood chair set near the head of the bed. I imagined that Lily sat there whispering prayers rather than calling a doctor or, at least, a friend.
I sat there next to that impossible specimen of life.
“Ketch?”
He turned those hot, confused eyes on me.
“Help,” he whispered.
“What you need?”
“Call the, call the hospital. Mama won’t do it.”
“Okay,” I said. “I will if you tell me what happened to you.”
Death peered at me through Ketch’s eyes and decided that I could be trusted.
“It was that mothahfuckin’ Alonzo. He ripped me off. Took all’a the money from where we hid it. But I knew. I knew where he went with that girl’a his. He’idn’t know that she had me up there too. He got her pregnant and I took her to that free clinic they got on Fairfax. She were mad at him and so when I took her out to Blood Grove she had me stay. I knew they were up there and I went to kill him and then make her pay me my money. But Alonzo wasn’t there and when I was talkin’ to her this white boy jumped in. We fell and I stabbed myself. When I came to the white boy was on the ground and Donata was gone. I made it to my car and then to a phone booth to call Mama. But she wouldn’t take me to no doctor. She said if she did we’d both get in trouble.”
I had about a dozen questions. I wanted to know how Lily got all the way out to Orange County and why she would let her own son die. But Ketch didn’t have the time and I didn’t need answers.
He said other things that I didn’t understand. After a while he drifted off into a feverish sleep.
“We got to call the cops,” I said to t
he heist man’s mother.
“His fate lies with the Lord,” she replied, refusing to look me in the eye.
“That’s true,” I agreed. “But God’s watchin’ whether the cops come or not. No one can escape the judgment of God.”
I didn’t believe any of that but I knew those words would sway her.
Shaking her head Lily Dasher said, “That boy never did do right.”
In some way I knew these words meant I could do what I felt was necessary.
“McCourt,” he said, answering the first ring.
“I got another body for you, Anatole. This one’s still breathing.”
34
I left Lily Dasher’s house before the police came. That was okay because, even if my name got mentioned, McCourt would call Suggs and the chief detective would tell his minion to lay off me—for the time being.
I got back up to Sunset around dusk. The hill upon which that part of the Strip stood looked down on the rest of the city like a lazy predator idly wondering how to approach a herd of unsuspecting bovines.
The Chateau Marmont was a lovely, old-style, rambling kind of hotel. It turned its nose up at Los Angeles below and catered to wealthy and beautiful residents who did illegal things alone and with others in the upstairs rooms and the cottages out back. It was the kind of place where a man of my hue could be turned away at the front door for little to no reason. At places like the Chateau I’d have to come up with a trick just to get the doorman to answer a simple question. I could pretend to be a janitor looking for a job or maybe a chauffeur picking up a client. I would have needed to come up with some kind of subterfuge if I didn’t already have a backdoor man.
A few years earlier Bo Tierce, of Riverside via Mississippi, had already languished nineteen months at Folsom State Prison. Bo had been convicted of a trio of crimes: B and E, assault and battery, and rape. This because he had a record for burglary and he’d been working as a gardener for the mansion next door a few months before the crime.
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