“Ahh.”
Jerrol Bays was the name of the gunman who murdered Sgt. Annette Soames. “Uh.” I shook my head, motioning him to go on.
“Well, then next week my grandma says to me boy, your daddy’s been cut.” Kip’s eyes narrowed at the memory, and he swallowed. “They cut my daddy, and it was my fault.”
“Somebody stabbed your dad in prison?”
“Yeah. He didn’t die, though.”
It took me a minute to internally deal with this information. Carefully, I said, “So they reached into prison and carried out that threat they made to you?”
Kip nodded, and told me the next time Jerrol came around he agreed to work for him. “I thought just until Daddy’s out. Maybe six months.”
“Did your grandma know about it?”
“She didn’t know why he got cut, and I certainly did not tell her I was running drugs!” He moaned. “Oh, that was a bad day.” He pulled himself together and went on. “I go to see my dad up at the Colony, I go with my grandma. He asks her to get me a Dr. Pepper and she goes out, and my daddy says, boy, get out of it. Go to your cousin’s in Phoenix. Don’t tell anybody when you go, and don’t tell them where. I say what about you? He says I’ll be OK. But if you stay, the both of us’ll wind up here or dead. So I tried to go. I got mixed up trying to find the Greyhound.”
“And they caught up with you?”
“Yeah.” Tears welled in his huge soft eyes. “I helped my grandma. I was doing good, and one time I didn’t listen to her. One time.”
Kip Cubitt cried, and I reached for tissues and helped him wipe his eyes and his nose.
We sat together for perhaps an hour longer, speaking little.
Chapter 13 – Amaryllis Educates Rita
Amaryllis shut the door and folded her noble, giraffelike thighs into the bare metal chair that served as her office throne and said, “Now what is on your mind, sister?” Her vibe was not friendly, and I sensed the same desperation beneath the surface, as if she had agreed to see me against her better judgment.
“I saw Kip yesterday,” I said. Today was Friday, going on two weeks after the shooting.
“Did you now.”
“I’ll get to the point. Kip’s in trouble—still. You’re in trouble. And I’m in trouble, just because some caterer got behind on his payments to the roach control company.”
“What?”
“Never mind. Look, the problem, whatever it is, won’t go away by itself. I’ve heard you say that on the radio.”
Amaryllis gazed at her knees, large knobs beneath the flimsy flowered dress she wore today.
I took it that this cluttered office was usually about as private as a dime store, what with people zooming in and out to drop off donations, pick up hygiene kits, cajole bus tokens, get on-the-fly advice. The shut door was keeping everybody at bay for a few minutes.
Some of the stuff people deemed worthy to donate to the ABC Mission were a stack of empty Easter baskets, four stacks of VCR movies (no porn, just crap movies nobody would have wanted in the first place, like You’ve Got Mail, Waterworld, Smokey & the Bandit 3, and Can’t Stop the Music), dozens of bars of soap, a clear plastic football filled with hard candy, a rubber lizard, hardback novels—none of which I’d ever heard of—with dust jackets that must have seemed alluring in 1965 or whenever, assorted used Bibles, bottles of shampoo.
An obsolete-looking laptop was in use on Amaryllis’s desk.
At last she said, “Some kind of trouble is worse than others.”
“But,” I pressed, “no matter what, you gotta attack it, right? You know Kip feels he let you down.”
“Truth is, I let him down.”
I waited, but she didn’t elaborate. “Well, Amaryllis,” I said, “it’s redemption time. Because you and Kip could climb out of this mess and shine a light on it, and now’s your chance. I’m here to help.”
“Why?”
“Mostly to save my own neck. Or you could be passive and let this…evil overwhelm you and Kip and ruin everything you’re doing.”
Amaryllis almost smiled. “Sister, how can you help us? You’re a little blond girl who doesn’t know squat about the way things work down here. I repeat, you don’t know squat!”
That got me mad: her scorn combined with her almost round-shouldered manner of defeat. Coldly, I said, “Yes, I do. I know that a bunch of thugs are trying to take over your operation. Right? They think they’ve got you over a barrel because they can hurt Nathan as long as he’s in prison. They tried to get Kip and his principles out of the way. Why was that? Are you gonna be easier to push around than a kid?”
Amaryllis stared at me, and as she stared, I remembered Gramma Gladys telling me not to be myself when I went to the mission. And I puzzled over that again, because myself was doing OK at the moment.
“I might be a blonde but I’m not a dolt,” I went on. “You’re running what amounts to a safe house here. Some drug boss or somebody thinks this’ll make a nice place to do business out of. Just talk to me, goddamn it! I can help you.”
“How?”
“I have a brain, and I have resources, and I’m not scared.” Only one lie out of three. “Come on, sister.”
Amaryllis studied her knees again, her hands flat on her thighs, and I saw how similar Kip’s hands were to hers, long and thin and graceful. Hers had endured a lot more wear and tear, certainly, the knuckles large, the skin wrinkled and scarred with decades of kitchen cuts and burns.
She cleared her throat and said, “I want to shuck corn.”
“Amaryllis…,” I began wearily—
“Come along, sister.” She unfolded herself from the chair. “There’s half a pickup truck’s worth out there. Corn on the cob for dinner tonight.”
So we stood together in the shade of the building and shucked sweet corn from the rusted tailgate of a pickup that looked like the Joads had driven it in from Oklahoma. We tossed the clean ears into a gigantic food tub on casters, and the husks into one of the cavernous garbage bins.
Hands now busy, muscles engaged in food prep, Amaryllis seemed to smooth out. She began talking in a low voice.
“When my boy Nathan got sent up, he shared a cell with a man named Vargas, Dale Vargas, and I guess Nathan talked so much about the mission that the Whale started thinking.”
“Dale Vargas is called the Whale?”
“Dale the Whale, yes.”
“We had one of those in my neighborhood. Fat guy?”
“The Whale is larger than life in many ways. He’s an organized man, and he’s a bad-ass. Most bad-asses are half-assed, you know what I’m saying? But this one’s smarter than most. Not a fortunate thing.”
The raw corn smelled marvelous, refreshing as a long drink of well water. Good living food. We shucked in silence.
“It’s late in the season for sweet corn,” I remarked. The pearly texture of the naked ears, the feel of the clumpy silk—almost but not quite creepy—parting it with my index finger before making the first pull. “When I was little, I couldn’t break the ends off.” Amaryllis smiled, her gold side tooth glinting. “You’re from where?”
“Farm country, Wisconsin.”
Her smile widened. “You’re used to a shorter growing season, then.” She went on shucking. “Dale Vargas figured out that I, the famous Amaryllis B. Cubitt, have got control of a fair amount of money and goods that come through here. He’s out now He’s a drug dealer, what else? Standard street fare. He’s got big ideas, frighteningly big ideas. You know what? He wants to be the drug supplier for the whole of Los Angeles, the movie stars, everybody. Trying to worm his way in here, and he’s violent, not indiscriminately so, he’s very careful how he uses violence. Well, he has wormed his way in here, to an extent. Keeps trying to get money from me, tried to get Kip to fence stolen things for him on eBay.”
“I have an obvious question,” I said.
“And I will answer. When I said you didn’t know squat, I meant you don’t know the code of the ghetto. W
hy don’t I get the police involved? If I called, they would come, and they would take me seriously, because the mayor likes me, the chief of police likes me, everybody likes me because I do good and don’t try to leverage favors. But see here, sister Rita Farmer: police are dangerous if you’re working outside the regulations. If you have trouble, you can go to the police, but then they’re gonna want to look into your business. If somebody’s got something on you, they can turn the cops’ eyes bright on you. So people tend to handle things their own way.”
“In other words, nobody wants the cops’ help with anything, because they all have their own secrets,” I said. “Sometimes criminal secrets—their own addictions, their own motives.”
“You stabbed me in the arm,” said Amaryllis, “and now I’m gonna break your kid’s legs. You stole my money, now I’m gonna tell Dale the Whale you’ve got it in a shoebox under your wife’s side of the bed. Maybe you’ve got a warrant on you, you’re not going to phone the police about somebody else. Even simpler than that. I cut hair but I’m not licensed, so I’m not going to report that all my equipment got ripped off. My cousin’ll help me get it back.”
We went on shucking. The crisp sounds of it somehow took away the darkness of what we were talking about.
I remembered being little when, at dinner time, my dad would come to the back door from the garden with an armful of sweet corn. I’d push my brothers away to be the one to help him shuck it. (Gina was not to be found around mundane food tasks in that stage of her life.) The summer air would be as heavy and hot as molten iron, but the corn would be cool in your hands. Daddy showed me how to chew the white end of a corn husk and suck the sugar juice from its fibers. Then the corn would go straight into the boiling pot. “Holy mister,” Daddy would say, crunching into it.
“Holy mister,” my brothers would echo.
“Holy mister!” I’d pipe, then be told that girls couldn’t say holy mister.
“Well, shucks!”
Gramma Gladys would beam. “That kid makes ‘shucks’ sound like the dirtiest word you ever heard.” She’d reach over and pat me approvingly.
It seemed Amaryllis was remembering happy days too. “The corn,” she said. “Did you ever see it so big and fine?”
“Tell me more about the Whale,” I prompted.
“I’ve never seen the Whale.”
“What?”
“He swims below the surface. I know him and he knows me. We are quite close, in fact.”
Amaryllis told me that Dale the Whale was a major networker in jail and out, but rarely did business in person. A perversion of guys like Lee Iacocca and Warren Buffett, he considered himself an important businessman who gets ahead using principles of commerce and economics. “But for him everything’s twisted: he uses those principles to—to—” She paused delicately.
“Screw over other people?”
“Amen. He reads business books, those ones people are always trying to get me to read?”
“Like Give Your Mice the Cheese They Need?”
“Yes. Ridiculous book.”
“Seven Pumpkin Seeds: The Zen Way to Grow a Company?”
“That one too.”
“And he’s got underlings to deliver drugs and money and messages?”
My companion nodded.
“Like Wichita and Denny?”
She stopped shucking and, once again, stared at me.
I said, “It’s obvious.”
“Oh, sister.”
“Tell me more.”
Amaryllis sighed, recommenced shucking, and went on talking. The Whale, she told me, is on the “1-2-3 System” from that book by the guy who brought International Acids back from the dead. “He needs capital, he needs location, and he needs manpower. That’s his 1-2-3. On top of everything else, he wants to put money into the collection box, then get me to pay him for jobs he didn’t do.”
Something finally broke on me. “The Khani Emberton money.”
“To make matters worse, yes,” said Amaryllis. “The Whale too, has plans for brother Emberton’s upcoming endowment. He wants that money for himself.”
I laughed incredulously, but Amaryllis only nodded.
I asked, “Has he threatened you over it?”
“He has vowed to get a confederate to kill my Nathan in prison if I don’t give him the money when I get it. Uh—” Her voice caught.
“But won’t the money be, you know…”
She cleared her throat, holding back a thunderhead of emotion. “Be tied up in a legal trust? No. Khani knows me. He trusts me to invest the money wisely.” Her voice was heavy with irony. “It’s uncertain if we will even have a board of directors. If I wanted to, I could draw the money out and use it for any purpose. The Whale himself suspects how vulnerable that money will be. Another reason the police will be of no help: even though the Whale did time, that was a freak occurrence. I understand he never carries anything incriminating on him—no drugs, weapons, messages, nothing. He’s a very clean person in that way.”
“Amaryllis, we have to stop him.” I shut up as the Reverend Bill Culpepper came out and stretched in the sunshine. He strolled over to us in the shade, which had narrowed as the sun moved west, bathing more of that side of the building in afternoon light.
“Sister Amaryllis, sister uh—”
“Rita,” I said.
“Hello,” he said. He stared at me, then at Amaryllis, then at me again with his habitually tired eyes.
Amaryllis said, “Would you excuse us for a minute, sister Rita?”
I walked off toward the scrub-covered athletic fields, then remembering the dog pack, veered behind the building near the alley where the dumpsters were. I sidled into it, realizing that Amaryllis’s and Reverend Culpepper’s voices were aimed directly into it. By a quirk of acoustics, I was able to catch what they said.
Bill Culpepper: “I was unable to clear that business you asked.”
Amaryllis: “Try again, brother.”
Culpepper: “I have tried again.”
Amaryllis: “Then you try a different way, brother, you understand what I’m saying?”
Culpepper: “It could go bad for us.”
Amaryllis: “I have faith in you. You’re a reverend, aren’t you?”
Culpepper: “You ask a lot.”
He went away, and I stood thinking for a couple of minutes. What if Amaryllis is the real Whale here? Well, she’s got connections at all levels of L.A. society.
And standing there, trying to decide how deep to go to help this enigmatic woman, is how I wound up slipping beneath the surface to the second level of justice, with all its dangers, and all its savage satisfactions.
Chapter 14 – A Breakfast Warning; Sheila and Toots
George met me for breakfast at Good Mood the next morning, Saturday. He listened carefully to everything I told him about my visits with Kip and Amaryllis. “So,” I concluded, “we’ve got to learn more, and the mission is obviously the place. It’s like this vortex, with Amaryllis in the center.”
He nodded, chewing his French toast. He swallowed. “Might be a good place to have a look around.” The thick French toast was fragrant with cinnamon. My vegetable omelette was good too.
It put me off a bit that George hadn’t troubled to shave this morning. I’d never known him to skip a day; he was so fastidious. He ate his food steadily.
“We ought to find this Whale,” I said, “and, well…do something.”
George smiled. “I’ll look into him. Do you think he might hang out at the mission?”
“Yes, but Amaryllis said she’s never seen him.”
“That’s hard to believe.”
“Well, I believed her. I think we ought to, like, infiltrate the mission. Somehow.”
George laughed. “Now you want to play spy?”
“Well—yeah. I mean, I can’t think of anything better right now. Obviously somebody’s gotta have a talk with Dale the Whale. If he’s the one hurting all these people, putting a stop to him ou
ght to solve everything.”
“That’s a big if.”
“You mean—”
“I mean there could be a lot of people interested in the Khani Emberton fund.”
At the next table a twentysomething couple was discussing getting wedding tattoos. “But if it’s a Japanese character we can say it means whatever we want,” said the guy. Both had very buff bodies.
“That’s not the point,” she muttered, looking glum.
He said, “The coffee here is excellent.”
It certainly was.
“Rita,” said George, “you’re jumping the gun. Let me look into this Dale Vargas first. We won’t know what we’re dealing with until I do. You just sit tight.”
“I want to go and talk to Amaryllis again.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
He sighed. “Rita, you’re inexperienced. If you ask more questions, she could get suspicious. She might be a truly innocent victim of circumstance. Or not.”
I ate my omelette and thought about that.
“Look,” he went on, “I’ve been an investigator for half my working life, and I’ve learned how to move around undercover.”
My temper flared. “Maybe you could give me a few pointers, since I’m such a complete ignoramus.”
“Rita, come on. I’m not putting you down, I’m being real.” He looked out the window at a bicyclist fastening his wheels to a tree with a lock that looked like it could moor a barge. “That’s the difference between men and women, you women get so personal about everything.”
I got huffier, then realized he was right.
He continued, “Yeah, I could teach you some things about investigating. Mostly, you use a computer.”
“Really?”
“Well, no. Depending on the case, you do have to get out and look around. Talk to people.”
“I bet all it is is common sense.”
“Rita, all anything is is common sense. But you have to have know-how too. You use common sense to fly a helicopter, but you’ve got to know a few things about aviation first! Please.” He drained his coffee. “It’s so easy to make a false move, just a little lapse, and suddenly you go from being in control to big trouble. Or dead.”
The Rita Farmer Mystery series Box Set Page 42