Charcoal Joe (18 page)

The phone rang a few minutes before one in the morning. Augusta and I were sitting in the living room drinking chamomile tea and laughing about our assorted misadventures. She was curled up in my big yellow bathrobe on one of the stuffed chairs.

If I sat very still my ribs hardly ached.

Lifting the receiver, I thought of Eugene Stapleton saying,
Our kind of business is demanding and it doesn't run by a clock.

He was right about that.

“Hello?”

“Are you finished with my girl, Mr. Rawlins?” Doris asked.

“It'd take me a few weeks to be finished but I guess I'm done for the moment.”

“Then pay her one-fifty and tell her to put on some clothes. Stuart Short is in a car in front of your house.”

I definitely had to move.

I walked her out to the black Caddy parked directly in front of my house. Stuart Short—who was six-three, two hundred fifty pounds at least, and the color of an overcooked bran muffin—was standing next to the passenger's door. He wore a black suit and even sported a chauffeur's cap.

“Mr. Short,” I said, extending a hand.

“Mr. Rawlins,” he countered, taking the offer.

When I opened the door for Augusta, Stuart headed for the driver's side.

She kissed my lips and said, “Thanks for the surprises, Easy. And watch out about Uriah. He the kind'a coward wouldn't think twice about shootin' you in the back.”

I believe that it is my psychological makeup that makes me a good detective. I'm 90 percent pragmatist and the rest superstition. Augie's warning about being shot in the back felt to me like a portent. I didn't necessarily think that it would be Uriah to shoot me or even that I'd be shot; the fear was that there was a trap I wouldn't see waiting to be sprung. Maybe the danger was in my past, not my future; it could have been the men grabbing me at Seymour's. But whatever it was, the trepidation left me wide awake like some leaf-eating forest creature who just heard a branch snap outside his lair.

I washed the dishes and then put a load of laundry in the machine on the back porch. While waiting for the cycle to finish I read the newspaper. I put the clothes in the dryer, decided on the suit I'd wear the next day, folded the dried clothes, and then went to the living room and picked up Styron's
The Confessions of Nat Turner
. Jackson Blue had already read it and told me, “Ole Willie Styron made the mistake of gettin' into a public debate with Ossie Davis. They had Jimmy Baldwin moderate. I guess Styron thought that he was too smart for some black actor but old Ossie tore him a new one. He made Styron understand that the plantation days is ovah an' there's black men out here know they own stories.”

I only read the first paragraph. I remember that it was a lovely and peaceful meditation of a man floating in a boat….

I was that man drifting down a tributary of the Mississippi in southern Louisiana in the spring. It was near the Gulf I knew because there were gulls and pelicans everywhere. Huge fish moved slowly just below the surface of the water, and lazy alligators lounged on the banks. I was wearing the horizontal black-and-white stripes of a convict and there was a manacle, cut loose from its ball and chain, attached to my ankle.

I was an escaped prisoner headed for Mexico, the Caribbean, or maybe even South America. I tried to recall what my crime had been, what the circumstances were surrounding my escape. A little voice was telling me that I had to get cracking on my getaway, but the day was so beautiful and sleep beckoned me.

The Americas were not my home. Maybe nowhere was. It came to me that I was free for a brief moment on that peaceful watercourse; that if I couldn't enjoy such a lovely respite then life was not worth living.

This sober thought brought me awake on the raft and then on the couch in my living room. I was a free man on a dangerous path. What more could anyone ask?

I showered and shaved, thought about my reflection in the glass and Bonnie, wherever she might be. I put on the medium-gray two-piece suit over a dusky orange T-shirt. The shoes I chose were made from black leather and had rubber soles; this because Augie's warning might still come to pass.

I drank strong black coffee at the eight-sided dinette table while loading fresh cartridges into my .45. I got the short, wide-bladed pocketknife from the tool chest in the garage just to feel like I had an extra edge.

I took the car down to the Safeway at Fairfax and Pico, did the shopping for the week, then came home to put away the larder.

At 11:59, I walked out the front door just as Fearless Jones's Edsel pulled to the curb.

Many of my black friends complain about our brethren always being late for appointments; they call it CP time. But the black men I knew were never late. Mouse was a career criminal and you can't make it long in that profession without shaving time down to the microsecond. Jackson called his watch a chronometer because he saw time as an exact, if variable, mechanism by which all phenomena were judged. And Fearless Jones was simply a man of his word; whatever he promised, that's what came to pass.

Fearless drove us to the Star-Hobard. He went to the diner to have some tea while I made my way up to the third floor of the low-rent motel.

I went down to the door of 3G, seeking to avoid Mania the elder, but she answered that door too.

“Ook del ta doe mon,” she said, looking me in the eye.

“Your daughter,” I said slowly.

“I'm here, Mr. Rawlins.”

The older white woman's brown daughter came up next to her. She put her arm around Mania the elder's waist, gently pulling the confused lady away.

“Aspell pea-no taspin,” the younger woman said.

“Tappa is papa?” The old woman seemed confused. I thought that even her grasp of the nonsense language was fading.

“Aspell, aspell,” my translator said while guiding her mother toward the inner door to 3F.

Once the woman was gone, Mania the younger said, “Come in, Mr. Rawlins. Come sit on the sofa.”

The settee was turquoise-colored vinyl, hardly more than a padded bench. Mania plopped down in half lotus on a chair that hailed from the same family. She wore a mottled green housedress that was loose on her but still quite fetching. There was something about the young woman that was both down-home and alien.

She was considering me in the way that bomb squad cops look over a cardboard box that might contain an explosive device. While she pondered I noted the beauty underneath her exotic looks.

“Did you get to that journal?” I asked, just to pretend that there was something normal about our meeting.

“I called Mr. Natly,” she replied.

“About me?”

“What are your intentions about Julia?”

“Who is Julia?”

“The woman that wrote the journal you gave me.”

“You see?” I said. “I know a hundred percent more than when I brought it to you.”

This answer confounded the young translator. She was expecting something more…devious.

“You haven't answered my question,” she demanded.

“Because I don't know,” I admitted. “I didn't even know who wrote it. A young man I'm trying to help says that a woman he didn't know gave this to him to give to his mother. He didn't and she didn't say that she wrote the journal, so just the fact that it was a woman who wrote it is a revelation.”

I like reading and I like words. When speaking with people I have come to understand that what I say is informed by the tone I use. So I can say anything and make myself understood by the context and the placement of the words. But during this case I found that the fact I spoke a language that educated people understood made them look at me differently. That's how it was with Miss Mania Blackman. The use of the word
revelation
seemed to tip the balance in my favor at the courtroom bench in her mind.

“A woman named Julia wrote the diary over a three-month period,” she said. “The last three months. She started it when she met a man that she called John. I don't think that was his real name. Anyway, John was a bad boy but she loved the way he talked to her and the innocence of his smile. John was in trouble and he was trying to find a way out. He wanted to run off with Julia but didn't have the money.

“Julia never trusted John. It was just that he made her happier than any man ever had and so she stayed with him even though her head told her to leave. And after a while she knew that even if he was using her, even if he was going to make her do bad things, that she would do them because there might never be a love like that again in her life….”

There was great feeling in Mania Blackman's rendition of the personal memoir. I remember thinking that it would take a woman to convince another woman about the possible depths of love.

“He made her do something that was very dangerous,” Mania continued. “She was frightened and afraid that she would die.”

“And she did what he asked?”

“The second-to-the-last entry says that she was going to meet a man on John's behalf,” Mania replied. “That was ten days ago. Then there was no more until seven days ago.”

“What did that say?”

“ ‘No one knew that the green-eyed serpent could climb trees,' ” Mania recited, “ ‘but the little owl hid her crystal eggs because she had a dream that the moon had green eyes and a pointy tongue. And where could she hide the eggs where a snake would not look? Inside the red apple of wisdom.' ”

“Ummmm, that's all?” I said.

“She was using the fable to tell someone she knew where to look for something.”

“What?”

“Whatever it was that John made her steal.”

“Is there anything in there that says what John looks like?”

“She says that he's tall and fair and from someplace other than Los Angeles.”

“That's fifty thousand surfers right there,” I said. “And I only know one full-grown man that was born out here. How about his eyes? Women like men's eyes.”

“She says that they were beautiful.”

“Blue or brown?”

The young translator shrugged and shifted in the seat.

“Where were they gonna run to?”

“I could only say that it was out of California.”

“That could be anywhere.”

Mania's smile, through Jo's tea, made me forget for a moment why I was there. I think she saw this shift in my gaze.

She smiled and said, “The one thing I got from her writing was that she was no longer young.”

“That's something.”

“Can you tell me what your intentions are now?” she asked.

“Without knowing who the men were and what was being stolen or whatever—I can't say. My only concern is with my client, and he's the young man that gave me the journal and said that he didn't know the woman who gave it to him.”

“Your eyes are both kind and hard,” she said out of nowhere.

“You sure I can't pay you for this?” was my reply.

She thought for a moment and then said, “Kiss me once, lightly on my lips.”

I stood up, leaned over, felt a stitch in my side, and did as she requested. She arched her body upward to meet me. After the first kiss I leaned over a little farther but she put her hand softly against my throat and said, “Not yet.”

I called Melvin Suggs from an outside phone booth on the first floor of the motel. I didn't mention his name and he called me Mr. Sugarman; then we set a meeting at a popular hot-dog stand halfway between us.

But before meeting the cop I had other duties. There was the little red diary in my pocket and pertinent information only partly translated from a foreign language in my head. And then there was Fearless.

“How's it goin', Easy?” he said when I came to light on the stool next to him at the counter.

“I really don't know,” I answered.

“This here is Marybeth Reno and she's from Reno too.”

“Hi.” Skinny, freckled, and redheaded, the young waitress smiled and did a little shoulder dance to show me how happy she was to be not only seen but noticed.

I said hello and even shook her hand, ordered coffee black, and watched her go to perform my wish.

“You came in yesterday,” the young woman said when she returned. “Tina served you.”

“How'd it go?” Fearless asked me.

Marybeth took this as a cue to move off.

“I think I might be in trouble if I don't move just right,” I said.

“I knew that when you said ‘Charcoal Joe.' ”

I sighed and then asked, “How's Seymour?”

“He's gettin' kinda restless. Can't say I blame him.”

“Tell him to keep his head down and if we're lucky he won't even see the inside of a jail again.”

“Okay. Marybeth wants to go see that space odyssey movie, that
2001
. I told her that me an' Seymour would take her there when she got off. Maybe he'll relax a little goin' out.”

“Maybe he likes redheads,” I added.

Fearless dropped me off at my house and I drove to Pink's to meet Melvin. He was sitting out front at a wooden picnic table with two chili dogs and a paper tub of cheese-and-chili fries. Melvin was always early if the meeting place offered liquor or food, earlier still if they served both.

“You hungry, Easy?” he asked when I settled across from him.

“Not really, Melvin. Every time I think about eating I wonder if this is gonna be my last meal and then I lose my appetite.”

The top cop grinned and bit into a chili dog.

“That other guy we shot died,” he said. “Doctor said it was shock that killed him. Can you imagine that? Here you can take the bullet but you can't survive the scare.”

“Two dead men,” I said, “four if you count Boughman and Brown. It's a regular Roarin' Twenties out here.”

“The prosecutor told Gregory Chalmers, the brain of the three, that he could try him for the murder of his partners; said that the fact that they were in the act of the commission of a felony, a kidnapping at that, meant first-degree murder and a death sentence. Greg asked for witness protection so we knew we got ahold of something.”

“Has he said anything yet?”

Melvin put down the nub of his dog and gave me a hard stare.

“You and me are friends,” he said. “You've done me a good turn here and there and I respect you. I do. And I know that people in my department plow black men like you into the dirt every day. I often wonder how you can even stand it. But even with all that, why should I share sensitive internal department intelligence with you?”

“Because, Melvin, I will open doors that you don't even know are there. Because I'm better at what I do than anybody you got on your team.”

He popped the nub in his mouth and picked up the second dog before he was through chewing.

“Chalmers says that Stapleton was in charge of taking mob money and moving it out the country,” Melvin said. “But the Cinch was losing power with the men he worked for, and so instead of moving the money he decided to rob Boughman and run. Boughman was setting up a meeting to trade the cash for diamonds. Boughman was worried about Eugene so he hired muscle, John Brown, for protection. The Cinch said he had an in and so he brought Chalmers and his men in on the deal. They'd kill both Boughman and Brown.”

“So then what happened?”

“The four of them were waiting for Boughman at the meeting place but he never showed up and then, the next morning, Boughman and the bodyguard turned up dead and there was no money anywhere. The eastern mob puts out a notice on the Cinch and so, instead of retiring to Rio, he's running around looking to save his ass. That's why his men were on you. Because he thought he could get a line through Seymour.”

“So Stapleton's still in Los Angeles,” I said as if I didn't already know.

“He was when he sent Chalmers after you.”

“Who gave Stapleton the wrong address?”

“That's not clear.”

“But it's enough to get my boy off the hook,” I concluded.

“It might could be,” Suggs half-agreed.

“It is,” I countered.

“It would be if we could lay our hands on Stapleton and he corroborated Chalmers's testimony. But you know that man is in the wind searching for the mob's millions, and we still don't know what part the kid might have played.”

“He's just a college kid,” I said. “There's no connection between him and mob money.”

“The prosecutor needs a man to pin the charges on. They wouldn't even call Chalmers to the stand unless they were sure it was going to pay off.”

I weighed the benefit of telling Melvin that I had a line on the Cinch; that I'd met with the man and had his phone numbers. I could set him up for a fall, free my client, and move to a new house with numbers the bad men couldn't calculate.

But from what he was saying there was no solid proof on Stapleton. As a matter of fact Gregory Chalmers's account gave the man an alibi. And even if he could get something on the Cinch, Melvin couldn't promise that he'd put him out of commission; he couldn't keep that man from plotting my demise from his prison cell. Suggs would make me all kinds of promises—and believe them too. But in the end Stapleton could make a deal and Seymour might still find himself the only defendant accused of murder.

“So what can I do, Melvin?” I asked. “You know that Seymour is innocent. You know that because this shit is way beyond some burglar killing another burglar.”

“That's why I'm eating this chili dog,” he said. “I came out here to tell you what's what because of the work you've done. I came out here to see you face-to-face, to tell you that your boy's got an uphill climb in his future.”

Melvin was my friend but the world we moved in didn't rate friendship very high. The difference between friends and enemies in our neck of the woods was that a friend said that he was sorry when he had to slip the knife between your ribs.

I picked up Feather from Saturday afternoon softball practice at Ivy Prep and took her out for pizza. We talked about how bored she felt waiting for somebody to hit the ball her way and about her coach, the algebra teacher Miss Simon. She loved taking care of Jewelle's baby and was getting homesick for her own bed.

“Are you okay, Daddy?” she asked me when I pulled into Jackson's driveway.

“Sure. Why do you ask?”

“I called Juice and he said that when you need to be alone that you might be in trouble and want to protect me.”

“It's just that I'm keeping really late hours, baby, and I don't want you home alone or waking up in the middle of the night with nobody there.”

“It's not about Bonnie and Joguye?”

“They left Los Angeles already,” I said. “Uncle Raymond and Mama Jo took care of that.”

“Joguye's gonna be safe from those men that want to kill him?”

“Yes he will, but you got to do me a favor, baby.”

“What?”

“You can't ever mention him or Bonnie to anybody. Okay?”

“Okay. And, Daddy?”

“What?”

“I love you.”

The office was empty by the time I got there. It was Saturday but because all three of us were working, Niska did her semi-regular Saturday morning hours. She'd left three pink slips of paper on my desk.

I might need you and Saul's help in a day or two, Easy,
Whisper wrote. From anyone else that might have sounded like a request for a hand moving some boxes. But from Mr. Natly this was a serious business.

Harry got the pictures to the consortium. They want a formal meeting with us next week,
Saul said.

Miss Kuroko called,
Niska wrote,
she said to call her anytime before 8:00 at the office.

“Three two nine eight,” she answered. Milo and Loretta had decided that on weekends she'd answer his phone with the last four digits of the number. I'm not really sure why but it didn't matter to me.

“Hey, Loretta.”

“Easy. How are you?”

“I think you might know better than me.”

“The man called Ducky, John Brown, was, plain and simple, a killer for hire. He went to prison for beating his mother's boyfriend to death when he was fifteen. He spent six years for manslaughter and came out west. The rest of his life has been spent killing and hurting people for money. He's never planned any other kind of crime and he doesn't, or didn't, ever hurt anyone for personal reasons other than his mother's boyfriend.”

“What about Boughman?”

“He's a very bad man,” she said. “I spoke to Adolpho Venturino about him. He once defended Mr. Boughman on a manslaughter charge.”

“Successfully I imagine.”

“The main witness for the prosecution went missing. The others lost their memory. After that, Boughman used Adolpho for everything.”

“Damn.”

“Is that all you needed?” she asked.

“No,” I lamented. “I need addresses, names of friends and business associates, and anything he might be into.”

“You know that he's dead, right?”

“I do. But often our actions in life go on beyond the grave.”

“I don't have much. Venturino owes Milo a favor so I asked if he knew an address for Mr. Boughman. He said that his residence was listed as the Hotel Leonardo in Santa Monica but that he also had a wife that no one knew about who has a house in Coldwater Canyon. Her name is Denise Devine.”

“Kids?”

“I don't know. Boughman only told Adolpho about her because he wanted her taken care of in case he died unexpectedly.”

“Has he gotten in touch with her?”

“He's gathering the information first. He won't call before Monday.”

“Give me the address,” I said. “Do you have a phone number too?”

“Yes…but, Easy?”

“Yeah, Lore?”

“These are serious men. They kill people.”

“I'll be careful.”

“Sometimes careful is staying away.”

“If you took that advice to heart you'd have quit Milo years ago.”

I wasn't sleeping much. That night I didn't even go home. I smoked my one cigarette and wondered if it was worth it trying to quit when the odds of my survival were so low.

At midnight I called Fearless.

“Hello?” he said.

“How was the movie?”

“Crazy, man. Ape-men and astronauts. Spaceships flyin' all over and a computer wanna kill ya. And then, at the end, there was this big unborn baby floatin' out in the stars. Marybeth came home with Seymour. They out back right now tearin' up the sheets.”

“I appreciate all that you're doing for me, Fearless. I don't think I'll need you tomorrow but Monday morning at eleven we have to go see Joe out at Avett Detention.”

“You the boss, Easy.”

“Thanks, man. You can't believe how much I appreciate it.”