Blood Grove

by Walter Mosley

  “Women don’t have it easy in this world, Mr. Jones,” she said.

  They don’t have it easy and most of them loved Fearless.

  “Ain’t that the truth,” my friend agreed, patting her forearm. “From birthin’ babies to buryin’ their men.”

  Lola took the hand and squeezed it.

  “You think anybody cares about a woman or a girl gets dragged by her hair and fucked or beat up just so a man could pretend he’s a man?”

  Fearless was too well-mannered to answer that question.

  I sipped on my whiskey and waited.

  “You wouldn’t let that happen, now, would you, Mr. Jones?”

  Fearless clasped her hands in his. She looked up at him with moist eyes and I knew that at least her feelings were for real.

  “You know we’re trying to do right by you, Miss Kilian,” he said softly.

  Lola pressed her forehead against Fearless’s steel-band fingers.

  That’s why I had brought my friend. He worked for the detective agency from time to time. Fearless was the best bodyguard money could buy. But it was his power and the honesty in the eyes of most women that I hoped would solve the riddle of Craig and his mother. Lola could sense that Fearless would protect her no matter the odds. And in the face of those odds he was most likely to come out victorious.

  “I know you are, Mr. Jones. I know you are,” she said. “I don’t deserve it. I did introduce my baby boy to that woman. She was just like me. I’d look at her and see myself.”

  Fearless lifted her chin with a finger and asked, “What did she do?”

  “Women like us don’t do things,” she confessed. “Not really. We motivate the men that mistreat us, make them do things.”

  “Like what?” Fearless asked.

  “Rob and steal and, and kill.”

  “She made somebody do all that?”

  “That Alonzo stole an armored car along with all’a Donata’s money and hid it in a garage somewhere.”

  I knew Fearless would open Lola up. I could never tell if he understood that he was part of the interrogation. But that hardly mattered.

  The lights went down and as they did Lola leaned forward to give Fearless a gentle kiss on the lips. I felt a pang of jealousy. It wasn’t that I wanted to kiss Lola but that Fearless was the kind of man who women wanted to taste the moment they saw him.

  “Got my tweed pressed,” a man’s amplified voice crooned. I turned as he sang, “Got my best vest.”

  I didn’t even know there was going to be a show. Four men were on the small stage: a horn player, drummer, pianist, and Frank Sinatra. The musicians were all black men.

  “All I need is the girl,” Sinatra sang, and I was put completely off my game.

  He performed six or seven songs, ending with “My Way.” After that he introduced the band, on loan from Duke Ellington, and thanked the club manager, whose name I’ve forgotten.

  When the lights came up he walked over to our table and leaned down to kiss Lola.

  “Hey, babe,” he said. “Who’re your friends?”

  Then he pulled up a chair and joined us!

  For ten minutes Frankie and Lola chatted like old pals. They had indeed known each other a long time. Thinking about it, it shouldn’t have been a surprise. They both worked different ends of the same circuit.

  When Sinatra got up to go he gave Fearless a quizzical glance.

  “Do I know you?” he asked.

  “You came to LA one time in fifty-nine,” Fearless said. “Your manager talked to my man Milo Sweet, said you needed some black bodyguards.”

  “Yeah, you knocked out that big drunk who was jealous that his girl was giving me the eye.”

  Fearless shrugged and Frankie shook his hand.

  Lola offered to let us sleep at her place after the show. But when I told Fearless that I could sleep in the car he got the message.

  Fearless and I pulled off onto a dirt road ten miles outside of town. There I took the front seat and Fearless the back. There were at least a million stars out that night. Every minute or so you could see the trail of another fallen one. Thinking back on it now, I am reminded of the time when the night skies were ruled by distant suns.

  I woke up with the sun in my eyes and a crick in my neck. If Fearless felt cramped it didn’t show on his face.

  We stopped at a little stand in 29 Palms and had date shakes for breakfast.

  Sitting at a redwood table on the outside patio, Fearless said, “Easy, look over there.”

  Standing maybe a dozen feet from us was a bird that looked like a large rooster if that rooster had grown to twice its normal size. It had very long, featherless legs and turned its head slowly to regard us. It took one long languorous step, then another. The third step came more quickly and by the fifth footfall it was moving at least ten miles an hour. That speed doubled by the eighth span and then the bird was gone.

  “Roadrunner,” Fearless said. “Outrun ninety-nine percent of men.”

  “We should get going,” I said.

  “Tell me sumpin’, Easy.”

  “What?”

  “What you plan to do about Lola?”

  “Why? Don’t you trust me?”

  “Better’n that. I respect you. An’ you know that’s somethin’ rare.”

  “You mean most people don’t think I’m all that?”

  “It ain’t no insult, Ease. It’s just that most people is afraid’a you ’cause you know folks like Mouse an’ Charcoal Joe and that crazy Redbird. But I ain’t afraid’a pain or death so I don’t go there. Other people amazed at how smart you are but my friend Paris is the smartest man I ever met, even smarter than Jackson Blue.”

  “And so why do you respect me?” I asked.

  “Your honesty,” he said with a straight face.

  “Honesty? I lie all the time.”

  “Only ’cause you’re into the shit. Every pig farmer knows that there ain’t no way to clean out a hogpen without gettin’ messed. But you cleanin’ it up and in the end you do the best you can. In the end the truth come out.

  “That’s why I’m askin’ ’bout Lola. She lost her son. That’s enough grief for any mother.”

  When I can afford it I let my heart listen to Fearless. He knew people better than most, and though he couldn’t beat an eight-year-old at checkers, he was rarely wrong about things that mattered.

  “I hear ya, Fearless. I like her too. But she pulled me into this thing with her son and if my count is right there’s at least five men dead behind it.”

  Fearless stared at me like an avenging angel weighing sin. Then he sniffed and stood up.

  “Let’s go, man,” he said.

  40

  Back at the office I showered and shaved, made oatmeal with raisins and cream, then sat at my desk trying to figure out what to do next. I’d learned a few things from Lola and Donata, Reynolds and Mona Strael, but I was no closer to getting my hands on the money that might save my life.

  There was a call I should have made, but a rare bout of procrastination stayed me.

  The hippies were working hard in the yard and greenhouse. I noted a man walking from the black sedan down toward Pico. Taking a pair of binoculars from the window ledge, I studied the man. At least that felt like I was doing something.

  He was maybe five ten with short brown hair, wearing a yellow short-sleeved shirt that had little designs on it but I couldn’t make them out. He had on khaki shorts and incongruous black leather shoes.

  “Hm!” I grunted and then turned to my phone.

  “McCourt,” he answered.

  “You got to Ketch?”

  Anatole paused and then said, “We did.”

  “He still alive?”

  “Don’t ask me how.”

  “So where’s he at?” I asked then.

  “I don’t work for you, Rawlins.”

  “I know. But Suggs wants me to find out some things. Ketch is a big part’a that.”

  “When I sent his name up the l
ine I got a call from the Organized Crime Taskforce.”

  “What they want?”

  “They say that Ketch and two of his friends are on their radar.”

  “For what?”

  “They wouldn’t tell me. Why were you on him?”

  As a rule I don’t share information with most cops. But rules are sometimes meant to be broken.

  “As far as I’ve heard they’re heist men.”

  “LAPD doesn’t have a thing on them.”

  “I can’t be sure about this but I believe they don’t shit where they sleep.”

  It was a fair lead. He could do things with it. He might even end up helping me.

  “Well?” I said after a moment or two.

  “At Mercy,” he said and then he hung up.

  I made it downtown to Mercy General Hospital’s emergency care wing in under an hour.

  Ketch had been given his own room to die in. He had oxygen tubes attached to his nose and two IV stands feeding medicine and sustenance into his veins, drop by drop. There was a big electrical console set up next to him, taking readings through wires that were somehow attached to two fingers of his left hand.

  Four other people were crowded in there with him, each one ministering in their own way. One nurse was standing off to the side writing something on a pink sheet of paper attached to a dark brown clipboard. Another white-suited sister of mercy studied his attachments and readings. In the farthest corner Lily Evangeline Dasher sat rubbing garnet prayer beads in her left hand and muttering prayers or curses under her breath.

  Standing over Lily was a sturdy black man in work clothes designed for heavy labor.

  When I came in, the man looked up and approached me.

  “This is just the family,” he explained, holding up a big hand swollen with muscle developed over many years of physical labor.

  “I’m Rawlins, the one that called the police to come save him.”

  The man’s eyes got wide. I couldn’t tell if the workman was grateful or enraged. He opened his mouth but at first no sound came out. Even his vocal cords were torn over my deed.

  “Tremolo,” he said. “Tremolo Dasher, Reynolds’s half brother. Um . . . how did you know to go to my mother’s house?”

  “I’m a private detective,” I said, taking a business card from my breast pocket. “My client’s a man who said that he witnessed a stabbing. After looking into it for a while I came up with your brother.”

  “Where is this man?” The tone of his words expressed his mood clearly. He was furious at everything, looking for anywhere to vent that rage.

  “Dead.”

  Frustration was so strong in Tremolo that he shuddered, crushing my card in an involuntary fist.

  “If the man hired you is dead, then why you here?”

  “You know the kind of business your brother’s in.”

  “I never had anything to do with that.” He might as well have added, I was the good son.

  “I’m not sayin’ you did. But lookin’ into findin’ him I came across some, uh, some unsavory sorts. I need to find answers or I might end up bein’ the next one need a hospital.”

  “I wanted him to go straight,” Tremolo said through gritted teeth. “I asked him to come work with me.”

  “Doin’ what?”

  “Construction support. I worked for this guy Pitman runs a whole fleet of heavy-duty equipment. I even got Renny to work at one of our sites for a while. After he met that girl I thought he was on the way to goin’ straight.”

  “What girl?”

  “Mona. Mona Steel, sumpin’ like that.”

  “But something pulled him back into the game, huh?” I was treading water, waiting for the wildebeest to come a little closer.

  “One day he didn’t show for work and the next thing I know I get fired, and then, then he’s like this.”

  “How long ago was he working with you?”

  “Why?”

  “Tryin’ to develop a timeline to figure out who might’a done this.” He didn’t seem to like the explanation so I added, “You wanna find out, don’t you? You want justice for Reynolds, right?”

  “He quit over three months ago,” Tremolo admitted. “Him and his buddy.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “A guy named Plennery, Dennis Plennery.”

  Reynolds Ketch chose that moment to die. The machine he was attached to emitted a high-pitched sound like an electric scream. The nurses hurried Tremolo and me out of the room. Attendants and doctors were rushing down the hall and then past us to get to Ketch.

  “Mama. Mama!” Tremolo called through the door.

  I felt bad for mother and son, but I had other business to attend to.

  In a phone booth on the first floor of Mercy General I consulted the detective’s greatest tool of the day—the phone book.

  41

  It was a plain-looking bungalow-style house on Forty-Sixth Street a few blocks west of McKinley Avenue. The siding was composed of dingy, overlapping, lime-colored aluminum slats. The roof was flat and the front door open behind a closed screen. The lawn was mostly bare earth sporting a few swaths of dying St. Augustine grass. No tree or even a bush afforded any shade from the relentless summer sun.

  I was half the way to the screen when a small boy appeared from nowhere and shot me four times with a silver-painted plastic cap pistol.

  “Bang, bang!” the boy yelled.

  I heard a giggle and then saw, off to the left, a girl-child, maybe four, two years younger than her brother.

  “Is your father home?” I asked the grinning girl.

  She had six pigtails with five yellow ribbons and one blue one tying them off at the ends. She was barefoot in a stained but still bright red dress. She shrugged her little shoulders in an exaggerated fashion saying either that her father wasn’t home, or she didn’t know if he was home, or maybe she didn’t understand what I was saying.

  “Daddy’s in jail,” the boy shouted.

  Before I could turn and ask the little assassin if his father was named Dennis Plennery a gruff woman’s voice asked, “Who you talkin’ to out here, Theodore?”

  The screen door slammed open and a young light-skinned woman came out. Looking at her I imagined that Dennis must have been fairly dark because the boy and girl were the dusky color of pecans.

  “Alan Fredericks,” I said to the sensibly protective mother.

  “Penny,” she snapped at the girl. “Get in the house and put on your tennis shoes.”

  The little girl laughed, skipping behind her mother and into the house.

  The boy, Theodore, was moving around the edges of the yard, shooting his cap gun at phantoms.

  “Am I supposed to know you?” the mother dared me.

  “I was Ketch’s friend,” I said. “His mother called me to the hospital.”

  “Hospital why?”

  “He was stabbed. He’s dead.”

  She wanted to ask more, but the reality of death stopped her.

  “Fredericks, you said?”

  “Alan,” I agreed.

  “My name’s Corrine.” She took a step forward to offer a hand. “Why don’t you come in, Alan.”

  “No, Mama,” the little cowboy protested. “He dead. He have to stay out here an’ play with me.”

  The house was larger and more substantial than I expected. The wide living room had buff-colored shag carpeting and ornate sea-green furniture. The coffee table sported a dozen or so small standup frames containing photographs of Corrine and her family. That was the first time I saw Dennis Plennery. Tall and gawky, he held himself like Clark Gable with Corrine playing the role of some starlet on his arm. He was dark-skinned, as I had imagined, topped off with a bushy mustache.

  The flat fan situated in the side window brought a much-needed breeze through the hot house.

  Corrine left the room and returned with two glasses of ice water. She put these on an end table that separated two short sofas placed at a perpendicular angle to each ot
her.

  “You look a little parched,” she said. “Sit down.”

  The way she arranged the glasses meant that we had to sit on separate sofas.

  What impressed me was that she hadn’t lost her composure over the fact that a friend of her husband had been murdered.

  “Where’s Dennis?” I asked.

  “He in jail waitin’ charges on four counts,” she said. “All the money he had and all he got is a fuckin’ cheap-assed public defender.”

  “What they got him on?”

  “Niggah got a wife an’ two kids at home, but he in a bar on Slauson gettin’ in a fight over a bitch cryin’ ’cause her man slapped her one time.”

  “That only sounds like maybe one count,” I said, biding my time again—waiting for what I needed to come to me.

  She raised one finger and said, “First there’s assault because he broke the boyfriend’s nose.”

  Theodore and Penny came into the room laughing and running, hiding and shooting off caps.

  “Boy, what I tell you about shootin’ your gun in the house?”

  Theodore stopped and looked down at the shag floor.

  “Not to do it,” he said.

  Corrine held up a second finger and said, “Then he had a gun in his pocket and, third, a switchblade too. Penny, what did I say about your shoes?”

  “Bu’ I not ou’side, Mama. Shoes is for ou’side.”

  “Go—put—on—your—shoes.” The force of the young mother’s voice ran Penny from the room.

  “What’s number four?” I asked, mostly to derail the mother’s fury.

  “What?”

  “The fourth count they got on him.”

  “Oh. Yeah. Then, when the police came, instead’a just sayin’ that he was protectin’ a woman got attacked, he tell the cops to fuck off, an’ when one put a hand on his shoulder, Dennis pushed him. An’ you know Dennis got a strong arm, so that cop stumbled and fell down.”

  “Resisting arrest,” I said.

  “Niggah just don’t know how to ack.”