Charcoal Joe (10 page)

“Easy?” she said when I had almost reached the exit door.

Asiette walked up to me and smiled.

The white guard standing at the door, Jim, shifted a bit. I was very much aware of his discomfort because when I was a boy and then a young man down in Texas and Louisiana, Asiette smiling like that could have gotten me killed.

“You still here, girl?” I asked lightly, pushing down the fear.

“I was waiting.”

“For what?”

“You said that I could 'elp you later.”

We took my car.

She moved close to me and put a hand in my lap. This was another danger. Any policeman that saw us was at liberty to stop the car. In a courtroom that cop would say that he was suspicious of white slavery from just seeing us cruise down Wilshire Boulevard.

I was aware of the risk but not as much as her hand upon my upper thigh.

“I feel that,” I said as we crossed Western.

“I do too,” she whispered. The pressure of her hand increased ever so slightly.

“Are all French girls so bold as you?”

“You were there,” she said.

“That was wartime,” I said and then grunted softly.

“I like you.”

“Why's that?” I asked.

“You are so patient.”

“Patient?”

She squeezed and pressed down. “Yes.”

“How do you mean?” I asked, trying to keep a clear mind and both eyes on the road.

“When the white men insult you, you do not lose your tempair. When I tell you I want to see you, you say okay but there is no 'urry and that makes me want you more.”

At the house she asked me if I had a shower; she wanted to clean up after a long day at work.

“Upstairs,” I said.

“Come with me,” she offered. “I will wash you.”

That shower was the best part of a mostly nice visit. The physicality seemed particularly familiar; an intimacy far beyond what I usually experienced on the first night of sex with a new friend.

Holding my erection, Asiette guided that intimacy into the bedroom and for quite a while my worries retreated—the spontaneous, if temporary, remission of a broken heart.

There came the single note of a silver chime in the middle of my sleep.

“Easy?”

“Shhh.”

I pulled on my boxer shorts, went to the window of the second-floor hall, and looked down. There were three of them standing at my front door.

“Easy.” She had come up behind me already wearing her little black dress.

“Back stairs,” I said.

One of the deciding factors in buying the new house was the fact that the upstairs had a back way out. It was a little doorway that looked more like it led to a closet than a set of stairs.

Asiette and I went through, locking the door behind us. We got to the back porch where I kept a .45 revolver on the doorsill. Before we made it outside I heard a window break and another silver chime.

Clad in only boxer shorts, I led my barefoot lover toward a dense stand of Texas privet at the northwest end of my yard. The eight-foot-high, twelve-foot-wide hedge stood against a fairly tall redwood fence.

Both hidden and cornered, I cocked my pistol and waited.

Asiette stood by me, silent and still.

For three or four long minutes we stood in the shadow of the hedgerow.

A light came on in one of the upper windows of the house.

After a few more minutes the back door came open.

Three men entered the backyard. Two of them had handguns. The nightlight above the garage illuminated the invaders. They were white men in dark clothes, two large and one not so big. They ambled around awhile, looking for me no doubt.

One came close to our hiding bush. I aimed the hidden muzzle at his head.

The moment passed. The men got together, said words I couldn't make out, and then went back into the house.

“We're gonna wait a quarter hour,” I whispered to Asiette.

She nodded her assent.

My breath came cold and clear as I wondered who those men could have been; who might have sent them?

“Asiette.”

“Yes?”

“They could still be in the house waiting for me. I'm gonna go in through that back way and see. You stay right here. Don't do nuthin' till I get back. If they kill me they'll think I was alone. If I kill them or they ain't there I'll come back.”

She nodded and squeezed my left forearm.

Ever so slowly I moved from the hiding place to the back door that led from the house. It took me two minutes to pull that door open and five to creep up the stairs.

They had broken the lock of the back-exit door.

Though the house was silent and cool, the palm of my gun hand was sweating.

The lights were still on upstairs but the rooms were empty.

I went to the top of the stairs looking down on the first-floor foyer and waited five minutes, ten.

The silence seemed final. My nostrils were open wide. I was thinking that the only way those men would have been this quiet was if they had heard me coming up the back stair. But they outnumbered me. This wasn't a squad of crack commandos, just a bunch of thugs who broke out windows and shook locked front doors. They wouldn't have had the patience to sit in silence in the dark.

Convincing myself that this logic was good only took three minutes, or maybe seven. I came downstairs ready to shoot. But they weren't there. The house was empty and the thugs gone.

“Asiette,” I called into the shrubs.

Seeing her emerge from the dark shrubbery in that black dress, barefoot and pale, made me realize that we'd survived. I took her in my arms and hugged her too tightly.

She didn't complain.

She put on her shoes while I dressed in T-shirt and jeans. After gathering my wallet, car keys, and Mama Jo's letter from yesterday's suit, I took a deep breath and said, “We better get to it.”

The hardest thing either one of us did that night was walk down to my car. I had parked at the curb because Asiette's restless hand on my thigh made turning into the driveway a little difficult.

There didn't seem to be anyone lying in wait for us in some unfamiliar car, but I had my gun out and to my side when we scurried down the slight incline of my front lawn. I had given Asiette the keys because I wanted to be ready for the firefight if it came.

Three blocks away we changed seats and I drove.

“I 'eard music,” Asiette said after a few more blocks. “Before those men broke in, there was a bell.”

“That's you,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“Jackson convinced the head of the home insurance department of P9 to give people a break on their rates if they got this new burglar alarm that he read about.”

“The bell?”

“Yeah. Then Jean-Paul bought the alarm company and gave Jackson a bonus. It could be a chime like I got or a loud alarm. Jackson convinced me that because of the company I keep I might want a heads-up. I guess he was right….I'm sorry to put you through all that.”

“That's okay, I don't mind.”

“You don't?”

“Not really. I 'ave seen my father kill German soldiers on the road late at night. I 'ave seen what the Nazis do when they break down a door and drag people into the street.”

Just at sunrise we got to her apartment building on Olympic in Santa Monica.

My breathing was almost normal by then.

“Easy?” she said with her fingers on the door handle.

“Uh-huh?”

“I want to see you again.”

Our kiss good-bye reiterated that claim.

I got to the office a little after five, took my bath from the restroom sink using a red washrag and a bar of Ivory soap. After that I went to my private office to change. There was a brown suit and a pale green shirt in the closet, hanging there just in case.

In the kitchen I made scrambled eggs, pork sausage, and coffee strong enough to open my eyes.

It didn't surprise me that the men who invaded my home didn't know about WRENS-L. It was a new company and my name was nowhere in evidence. The agency name was listed but there was no address given, not even on our business card. Saul, Whisper, and I decided that we didn't want clients picking us out of the yellow pages and walking in from off the street. Enough people knew who we were to keep the boulder rolling downhill.

I had already decided to move houses by the time the second silver chime rang. They could kill me, that was all part of the job, but Feather had to be safe.

Working on my third cup of coffee, I tried to imagine why three white toughs would be after me. I was hired to prove, or disprove, a young man's involvement in murder—but who even knew that?

There was a time that if white muscle came at you then there were white men behind them. But that truth was no longer absolute. Black and white worked together in the new world of integration.

As Mouse often said, “Even crime got a bottom line.”

“Mr. Rawlins?” Niska Redman said in a tentative voice from the front of the offices.

“In the kitchen,” I called.

She came in wearing a light rose-colored dress that fell in an elegant line from her shoulders to her knees. Her eyes showed some worry.

“What's wrong?” I asked.

“You never get in before me.”

“Is it seven already?”

“Six forty-five.”

“I better be goin' then.”

“Why are you here?”

“This is where I work.” I stood up.

“That's a nice suit.”

“Tell Whisper and Saul that I'm down in the coal mines.”

When I moved to go past the young woman she said, “A man called you yesterday afternoon.”

“What'd he say?”

“Nothing.”

“He had to say something.”

“He asked for you and when I said you were out he said to tell you that Mr. Stapleton had called.”

“That's all?”

She nodded.

“Do you know who he is?” I asked.

“No.”

The county courthouse was a well-appointed and large white stone building that loomed over a gentle park where retirees and winos stopped to rest on the redwood benches now and then. Homed and homeless, they were all on their various roads to oblivion.

A big brown bus from the county jail pulled up on the side of the structure just as I was about to enter the building.

The door to the bus came open and five uniformed guards assembled to flank the long line of men in gray prisoner garb and street clothes. The captives were chained hand and foot and to one another. They were being led toward some side entrance that I couldn't see.

As I watched the men shuffle out of sight, I wondered if one of them was Seymour Brathwaite; but most were young and black or brown with their heads bowed down. He could have been any one of them.

“Easy.”

Fearless Jones was almost always a source of happiness and inexplicable pride. Wearing the same cheap suit he had on the day before, he was bright-eyed and clean-shaven, ready to go to work.

“Fearless.”

“Poor guys chained up,” he said. “White people don't know that when black folk see a parade like that we thinkin' 'bout a whole different circus.”

There was no need for further comment so I said, “You ready, man?”

“Am I black and blue?” he replied with a smile.

“Hey, Dora,” Fearless said to a dour white woman who sat behind the only small window cut into a lacquered cedar wall that was forty feet wide and over thirty feet high.

The nameplate on the ledge before her read
MRS DUBITSKY
. I wondered about the missing period and the fact the Fearless knew her first name.

Dora Dubitsky had at least ten years on me. The flesh of her face was succumbing to the pull of gravity and her glasses had a severe glint to them, mostly obscuring her eyes. The sour turn to her mouth seemed to say that she hadn't smiled in a very long time. But when she looked up and saw Fearless she actually grinned.

“Mr. Jones,” she said, leaning forward as if intending to walk right through that wall. “How are you?”

“I woke up this morning,” he said. “Them stairs and railin' for your father holdin' up?”

“He loves them,” she averred. “Now he can get out of the house with no problem. But he told me that you wouldn't take his money.”

“Just a few hours' work for one of my elders. You cain't put a price on somethin' like that.”

Fearless couldn't do long division but he could build a house with a hammer, a saw, and a few nails.

“This my friend Easy Rawlins,” Fearless said.

Dora's smile diminished but not so far as a frown.

“He's here to get out a client of Mr. Sweet's,” he continued.

“Name?” she asked me, not unpleasantly.

Fearless earned his day rate just cutting the red tape at that window. Dora filled out the forms for me and gave me the release card to get Brathwaite out of lockup.

“What did you do for her?” I asked when we were waiting for the prisoner to be brought down to room 1001-B, the prisoner-release room.

“I seen her a lot 'cause Milo send me down to get thems that he's worried about; you know, so they see me and know I'ma be the one be aftah them if they run. One day Dora was on the phone soundin' all worried. I aksed what was wrong and she said it was her father, that he was old and couldn't get out the house. I said did he need a nurse 'cause I had a girlfriend right then did that kinda work. She said what he needed was some steps out the front'a his house. Said the ones he had broke and the landlord was draggin' his feet. By the time I got my prisoner released I had made plans to fix her father's front porch.”

“And you didn't take any pay?”

“He's a old man, Easy. You know it's good luck to do somebody his age a favor.”

“Rawlins,” a man's voice called.

It was one of two courthouse policemen. Standing between him and his partner was a bespectacled and slender brown man wearing green cotton trousers and a once-red T-shirt that had faded almost to pink.

I stood and handed the guard that called my name the card Dora gave us. He studied the three-by-five pass and then nodded.

“See you at trial,” he said to the prisoner.

Seymour winced and adjusted his glasses. The lenses were rather thick and bifocal. He rubbed his wrists and then looked at Fearless.

“You got me out?” Seymour asked.

“Mr. Rawlins here,” Fearless said.

Seymour then turned to me. He had an angular face and a short Afro that looked like it hadn't been combed since the time of his arrest.

“Who are you?” he asked me.

“First you say thank you,” I told the younger man.

“Yes of course,” he said, adjusting his glasses again. “I'm just confused. They arrested me and questioned me all night and through the next day. I called Mama Jasmine. I didn't think she'd be there but she was and she told me that she'd get a lawyer. He came later but he didn't say much. Neither did I. I didn't do anything wrong.”

Giving up on the thank-you, I asked, “When was the last time you ate?”

“Yesterday.”

“Then let's get you fed.”

“Who are you?”

“I'm Mr. Rawlins and this is Mr. Jones. We're representing a client that wanted us to get you out of jail and help with the defense.”

“Oh,” he said; a man who gets an answer but still does not understand.

Across the street from the courthouse and its Park of Lost Souls was an old-fashioned diner named Dolores. I'd already eaten and all Fearless ordered was a fried egg over easy and a glass of grapefruit juice. I knew this was because I was paying but I didn't argue. Seymour, who didn't look to be much older than twenty, ordered strawberry pancakes, scrambled eggs, bacon, and a pot of coffee.

I let him eat about halfway through the meal before starting the interrogation.

“How do you know Charcoal Joe?” was first on the list.

That caught Fearless's attention but Seymour looked bemused.

“Who?” he asked.

“He's the one who asked us to try and prove that you didn't kill Peter Boughman,” I said.

“Is that one of the dead men's names?”

“You don't know?”

“The police didn't tell me. They didn't tell me anything. They just kept asking why I broke in and what had I done with the weapon.”

“And you don't know Joe?”

“No.” The young postgrad student stared at me through those thick lenses.

“What about the name Rufus Tyler?”

“Rufus,” he said, pondering. “He's a friend of Mama Jasmine's. He would bring us a turkey on Thanksgiving sometimes. Once, when I was little, we all went to Redondo Beach together.”

Something about the topic killed the young physicist's appetite.

“Well,” I said. “Mr. Tyler has asked us to prove that you didn't kill Boughman. So I need to ask you a few questions.”

“I'm really very tired, Mr. Rawlins.”

“So tired that you're willing to spend the rest of your life on a cot in San Quentin?”

That gave him a face as sour as Dora Dubitsky's.

“What can you tell me about the night you were arrested?” I asked.

“I was looking for Mama Jasmine. I had called her but she didn't answer. Then I went to the high house but she wasn't there. I asked her husband about it—”

“Uriah?”

“Yes. He said he didn't know where she was but I didn't believe him.”

“Why not?”

“Mr. Hardy never liked me too much. It was like he was jealous that I got to stay up in the high house with Mama Jasmine while he lived down the stairs.”

“So how does that get you to the house at the beach?”

“Mama Jasmine has lots of jobs,” he said. “She does catering and flower arranging and there's a few clients she has that have her do cleaning. She'd been a housekeeper down at the Malibu house ever since I can remember. Sometimes when the owners were on vacation she'd stay overnight. She'd sleep on the couch and leave the beachside sliding doors cracked so she could listen to the waves. I stayed down there with her a couple'a times when I was little.”

“Jasmine was the housekeeper in the house where Peter Boughman was killed,” I said, just to be clear.

Seymour nodded.

“Was she there that night?”

“No.”

“Okay. Tell me what happened.”

“The door was open and I went in. I called out in case there was anyone there and then I saw them on the floor. One guy was on his back in the middle of the floor. There was blood on his face and chest. The other one was on his face on the floor. There was blood all over and his hand was against the sliding glass door that looked out on the ocean.” Seymour looked nauseous. “I tried to see if I could help either one but they were dead. I went around the house afraid that I'd find Mama Jasmine too but she wasn't there. I was about to call the police when they came in the front door with their guns out and shouting. They made me lie down on the floor in the blood, and later they said that I had a dead man's blood on me as if that proved I was the killer.

“Excuse me,” he then said, “but I have to go to the toilet.”