Charcoal Joe (13 page)

I offered to go for pizza but Feather was looking forward to making dinner with Jewelle.

At that time Jewelle and Jackson lived in a marble and wood two-story home on Charleville Boulevard just west of Doheny. Adele Morgan answered the door. She was a top-heavy beauty with skin the color of maple syrup, a Diana Ross flip hairdo, and a look in her eye that was all business. She would have been the perfect mate for either a sharecropper or a captain of industry.

“Mr. Rawlins,” she said in a neutral tone that had no invitation to it. But when she turned to my daughter she smiled. “Hi, sugar.”

“May I use the phone, Miss Morgan?” I asked.

The young doyenne considered my question, going through all the rules that came down from her bosses. After a brief assessment Adele decided that I could indeed make a call on the house phone of her employer; further, I was not limited to the local area code.

Feather ran past Adele into the house shouting, “Aunt Jewelle!”

“Do you need privacy?” the assistant asked.

In Jackson's library I dialed a number I had only just learned. Listening to the ring, I sat in Jackson's padded office chair. The ashtray to my left was filled with filterless butts, and the greater part of the desk was covered with books open and lying facedown; maybe a dozen of them. There were biographies, technical texts, a novel or two, and one book written in German. Before I could figure out what the foreign-language title said, he answered the phone.

“Hello?”

“Fearless.”

“Hey, Easy. How you doin'?”

“Every hour feels like another day.”

“Don't I know it, brother. I try an' tell my rich friends that if they wanna live longer all they gotta do is give they money away, because a poor man's day is a whole week longer than somebody got all the edges sanded down.”

“How's Seymour?”

“He called his mama. She told him to stick with you so he relaxed and fell asleep on the sofa. You want me to wake him up?”

“No,” I said, and then I explained my needs.

The Santa Anita Park racetrack parking lots must have had spaces for five thousand cars; and almost every one of them was occupied. I had to go all the way to the far end of Lot 5. There, next to a fence loomed over by a stand of eucalyptus trees, I finally found a space between a blue Volkswagen Bug and a wood-paneled Dodge station wagon.

It was after six when I got to the food court next to the betting windows. Evening races were scheduled for people who had to work before they threw away their money, and so I felt safe in the anonymity of numbers.

There were maybe a couple of hundred tables out on the asphalt eating yard. The daylight was waning but not yet gone, and the mists of desperation and hope rose up off of the thousand or so diners like vapors from an agitated sea.

People were eating, drinking beers, smoking the next in a never-ending convoy of cigarettes, and studying tickets and racing forms. One middle-aged white woman I saw was reading what looked like a Bible. I moved up behind her and saw that not only was it a Bible but it was written in French. Wondering what use a Bible was at a racetrack, I looked up and saw my quarry. On a raised dais that could probably look down on the track were maybe a dozen smaller tables. At one of these sat a small man in a lavender-colored ensemble. He was flanked by two suited bruisers who, despite their business attire, looked like professional wrestlers about to climb in the ring.

I glanced left and right, saw nothing familiar and no one that I recognized, considered a moment, and then approached the dais.

There was a uniformed guard who stood at the base of the few steps up. He was a bronze man who probably called himself white, with broad shoulders and light brown eyes. I couldn't discern his hair color because he was clean-shaven and wore a military-like cap.

This man held up a hand and said, “Private.”

“Here to see Mr. Gambol,” I said.

The security guard studied me a moment, two. I read in his scrutiny the thoughts as they occurred. He wondered if he should send me on my way, let me pass, or if he was required to go ask the gangster-gambler if he expected me.

I waited patiently. His momentary conundrum was my lifelong struggle. I wasn't worried about the way being blocked because I knew that I would get what I needed in the end. It was, I believe, this certainty in my demeanor that made the bronze man move out of my way.

A race had just started and so the special people on the raised hot-dog court were mostly looking at the track. The announcer was calling the race, and a clamor raised among the throngs of hopefuls.

As I approached the table where the man in the lavender suit sat, I wondered if Charles Darwin or any of his acolytes had ever applied the theory of evolution to the obsessive behavior of gamblers; was gambling a survival technique and did success in that selection process change our relationship with luck?

That's as far as I got in my intellectual pondering because the two wrestlers had moved forward to impede my access to their meal ticket.

These men were a bit larger and more threatening than their bronze brother below. Their suits might be described as
the wrong green
and
a blue too light for its tailoring
.

“Can I help you?” the pink-skinned green-suited muscleman asked.

I waited a moment longer than one would expect and the men listed forward.

“Charcoal Joe wanted me to ask Mr. Gambol a question,” I said, both telling the truth and testing the power of my employer.

The olive-skinned bodyguard in the blue suit took a backward step, lowered into the seat next to Gambol, and whispered into the man's ear.

The race ended and the clamor turned into more of a murmuring hubbub. Tony studied me and then said something to his underling who, in turn, motioned for me to come forward.

The man in the light blue suit stood up and held the chair for me to sit in.

Up close I realized that Gambol must have been a jockey in his youth. He had a tough wiry frame on a body not much larger than a chimpanzee's. His skin had been so much in the sun that the tan was permanent, and his pecan eyes had seen things that I wouldn't want to know.

“Joe sent you?” he asked.

“In a roundabout way.”

“Say again?”

“Seems like a young friend of Joe's has been arrested for the shooting death of a man named Boughman. Joe's trying to get the kid off and so asked me to help, seeing that he's in jail at the moment. I asked some friends who this Boughman knew and they pointed me at you.”

Gambol gave away nothing in his expression. I hoped that my own plans were equal to his stoic reaction.

“Who said that about me?” he asked.

“I kiss and tell,” I admitted, “but I never say who I've been talking to.”

“Talk,” Tony Gambol said speculatively. “Talk is a freedom; the freedom of speech. And, as every blond-haired, blue-eyed American child can tell you, freedom is our most precious possession. And, as any businessman worth his salt will say, that which has value also has a cost.”

It was possibly the most elegantly worded threat I'd ever received.

“I take it you can't help me with Boughman?” I asked.

“Never even heard of the man. I mean, I may have seen him. I'm here every day with fifteen thousand other men. Maybe I stood next to him in the urinal, but I don't know him. And if he's dead I guess I never will.”

“What about a woman named Willomena Avery?”

Believe me when I tell you that Tony Gambol was the type of man that you do not want to squint at you. He tightened his eyes at the mention of the woman's name and I knew that there was a toll somewhere on the road not too far ahead.

He forced a smile and said, “Never heard of her either.”

That was the end of the conversation.

“Thank you, Mr. Gambol,” I said, hoping that civility might in some way assuage his ire.

I stood up and walked off the dais, out of the food court, down a path past the bleachers, and out of the gates.

As I walked through the twilight at the far end of the parking lot, the words of a gospel song came to me:
Walk on, walk on with hope in your heart and you'll never walk alone….

I was hoping that those words were true when a man called out, “Hey!”

I turned quickly but they were on me just that fast. Three guys related in physical appearance to the bodyguards Gambol had with him. They were big and brutal-looking, wearing work clothes, not suits. The work, I assumed, was my demolition.

There was pistol in my pocket but they were too close, and though I might have wounded one or even two of them, the end of that conflict would have almost certainly been my death.

“Excuse me,” a voice I knew said.

There came a grunt and a sudden movement behind the men crowding me. One of them fell to the ground. The two left turned quickly, giving me a chance to reach for my pistol. I did this, but before I had a chance to take it out, one more man hit the asphalt. The last standing attacker was able to hit Fearless on the jaw. A lesser man, me for instance, would have been felled by that blow but Fearless didn't even take a backward step. He brought to bear an uppercut that made me wince and even feel sorry for the man who would have most certainly broken a few of my bones.

Fearless let out a hearty breath and smiled.

“Damn, Easy, you got to learn how to make friends, man.”

“I didn't even see you, Fearless. I thought I was out here alone.”

I clasped his outstretched hand with both of mine.

“When I was a boy my Uncle Bob used to take me out in the South Texas swamps to hunt wild boar. All we could use was a Bowie knife. That made the problem twofold. First you had to be quiet enough to sneak up without that hog hearin' you, and second, you had to sink that blade in the jugular before he stomped you to death.”

I gave Fearless a hundred dollars for expenses, an address, and a time to meet me the next morning. Then I jumped into my Dodge.

As I was driving off I could see, in my rearview mirror, the men who almost attacked me. They were gathering themselves up from the ground, leaning on each other and dusting off their clothes. I remember thinking that if I were another class and color, maybe in another nation too, I'd be planning on retirement rather than engineering close calls while concentrating on the safety of others.

Then I thought of all the friends I had who shared my race and poverty, my nationality too. Most of them, even Jackson Blue, had everyday jobs and houses and cars without all the trouble I had. Mouse had once told me, “I couldn't live like you, Brother Easy, uniform bangin' on the front do' and a cougar lurkin' out back.”

I went to the office instead of my home. I had a glass of ice water in the kitchen and then went to my private office, locked the door, checked the barrel of my favorite .45, and lay down on the old blue sofa that was almost as comfortable as John the Bartender's couch.

As I lay there I contemplated disparate facts.

Feather could not sleep in her own bed because of the mess I'd made. Bonnie had married another man as I prepared to ask her to marry me. Seymour Brathwaite could not have committed the murder he was charged with, and the police knew it; but still he was facing the gas chamber. I was lying on my back in an empty office suite, a .45 on the table next to me, wanting to sleep and worrying about predators coming in through the window or breaking down the door.

Somewhere in the middle of all that I remembered that I hadn't had my one cigarette yet that day. This simple thought brought a smile to my lips and pulled me off that couch. I sat behind my fancy desk putting the pistol within reach, took a Lucky Strike from its pack in my pocket, and lit the tobacco stick.

Ah! That first inhalation dispelled all my dark factualizing. My muscles relaxed and I was safe.

The phone began ringing on the third drag. I didn't answer. I didn't want anybody to think I was there. After the eighth ring the tape recorder/answering machine interrupted the call.

“You have reached the WRENS-L Detective Agency,” Niska Redman's sweet voice said. “No one is here right now but we'll be happy to call you back. Leave a message and a number after the tone.”

A gong sounded. It was not unlike the sound of coins being taken by a pay phone.

“Easy…” was the only word I had to hear before grabbing the receiver.

“Jo?” I said.

“You're there?”

“You're on a phone after nine at night?” I replied in kind.

“I was just gonna leave you a message…about Bonnie.”

“What you got?”

“All she has to do is go to this address in Ventura. The people there will send them on their way.”

“Give it to me,” I said.

“No, baby. You said you didn't want to know so I told Raymond to call Jackson and go get them. They're probably already gone.”

The last few words hit me pretty hard. It was like hearing about the death of a loved one; a death that was expected but you thought that there was still time to say good-bye. Luckily I had a few drags left.

“Easy?”

“Yeah?”

“You okay?”

“I will be.”

“I called your house first but nobody answered. What you doin' in your office at this time'a night?”

“Hiding from shadows. What phone are you using?”

“Neighbor down the street named Morris. He got told he only had a little while left to live and the doctors wanted to experiment with that new heart transplant business. I told his wife that I could probably get him up and out with a few herbs. He's fine now and I can use the phone whenever I need to.”

“What about that tea you gave me?”

“What about it?”

“It's like the things botherin' me are there but if a fly passes before my eyes I forget about them.”

“So you know what it does.”

“How long does it last?”

“Long enough, baby. Did you talk to Coco?”

“She read the letter and said that she loved you.”

That information settled for a while.

“Good-bye, Easy,” she said.

“Thanks, Jo.”

When the cigarette was gone I took my pistol back over to the blue sofa and fell into a dreamless sleep. I woke up with an almost clean slate in my mind.

For breakfast I took a slice of sourdough bread, an egg, a dash of vanilla, a tablespoon of sour cream, and a pinch each of sugar and salt and pureed them in an Oster blender. I poured that concoction into a griddle of sizzling butter, then sprinkled diced strawberries on the wet side. Three minutes on one side and two on the other and I had a first-rate griddle cake without all the fuss.

Later I drove past my house to make sure things looked copacetic; at least from the outside. Then I was on my way to Beverly Hills.

At the top of a pedestrian knoll on Rodeo Drive, eighteen minutes after eleven o'clock, Fearless Jones was waiting for me, standing out in front of a store that sold expensive Italian suits. He was drinking coffee from a paper cup and wearing a dark blue suit that was exactly the same cut and material as the steel-gray one from the days before.

“That's it, right?” he said when I walked up to him.

He gestured with his head at a storefront up the block that had a rusted iron and white enamel facade. The storefront window had the ivory words
PRÉCIEUX BLANC
stenciled upon it. Below that, in smaller black lettering, it read
The finest jewels set in silver, palladium, white gold, and platinum
.

The day was warm and the sign said
OPEN
. Fearless and I couldn't stand on a fancy street like that too long before the police were called, so we made our way toward the second name on Melvin Suggs's list.

Fearless pushed the glass door but it was locked. This struck us both as odd because there were salespeople and customers inside.

Then a black man in a security uniform approached the door. He looked at me and I made a gesture clearly showing that we wanted in. He held up the palm of a hand, pushing it forward to indicate that we had to step back. Not until we'd given him a yard and half of space did he unlock the glass door, pull it open, and then step out to meet us.

The guard's uniform was leaf green with black buttons and gun belt. He was shorter than either of us and physically fit in military fashion. Maybe forty; I figured that he had been a cop but retired right at twenty years. Now he worked in white stores so that black customers who were followed and rousted could not complain about racism.

“Can I help you?” he asked the space between me and Fearless.

“I'd like to buy a brilliant-cut half-carat diamond set in platinum,” I said.

My request was unexpected. The apple butter–colored guard's eyebrows knitted.

“Don't mess with me, man,” he said.

“I'm shopping for an engagement ring and I hear the Précieux Blanc's the way to go,” I countered.

“Who told you that?” he asked after thinking a few moments.

“A cop named Anatole McCourt.” I couldn't help but smile behind that name.

“Bullshit.”

“I got his number right here in my pocket, Mr. Ex-policeman. You wanna call him? Or should me and Fearless here paint us some protest signs and march up and down sayin' that you don't serve blacks up in here?”

The guard took a beat and then backed toward the door, opened it, and ushered us in.

The showroom was a perfect square with each wall twenty-five feet or so in length. Inside the larger square there was a second pen with a black-tile floor and waist-high glass cases displaying jewelry of white metal and red, green, yellow, and white jewels.

Three saleswomen stood behind the cases. Three women and two men were being attended by the staff—that is, until Fearless and I stepped in. At that point every white face in the room turned to us.

The security guard watched us too; his back was to the door.

One saleswoman brought a pale hand to her yellow silk blouse, just below the throat. Her fear was palpable. And so our gestures became small and slow. We didn't want anyone calling the police. I mean, I wasn't armed and neither was Fearless, I was sure, but just a pocketknife on a black man's person in Beverly Hills might be cause for an arrest.

“Excuse me,” I said to the frightened redhead. “We were hoping to speak to Willomena Avery.”

“What?” she said fearfully.

“Willomena Avery.”

“I, I, I,” she said.

“I'm Miss Avery,” a voice off to my left said.

Tall, beautiful, and white like some cured woods, she was forty, twice the age of the stammering redhead. She might have been the younger sister of the woman in Melvin's photograph.

Willomena's hair was long and brown and tied into a bun. Her figure was a throwback to the fifties. The dress she wore might have been conservative on a lesser body; it was royal blue.

While I was looking at her, she was regarding Fearless. Her smile showed no fear and her stance told me that she was the person in charge.

“I'd like to ask you a few questions, Miss Avery,” I said.

“About jewelry?”

“No, ma'am.”

“And your name is?”

“Ezekiel Rawlins. This is Mr. Jones.”

“Mr. Jones,” she said, with the slightest movement of her left shoulder.

“Ma'am.”

Then Willomena Avery turned to me. “I'm the store manager. They pay me to sell jewelry, not to answer questions from men off the street.”

A silver bell rang, indicating that two of the patrons were departing. The sales staff looked as if they'd like to follow suit.

Seeing the lay of the land, the guard moved closer to us.

“I'm sorry to hear that,” I said. “Me and Mr. Jones are trying to find out a few things about Peter Boughman.”

The store manager was living proof that beauty is as much an attitude as it is a physical thing. Only her eyes registered the impact of my words; they might have been looking at an unexpected hummingbird hovering overhead.

“Come with me to my office,” she said. And then to the guard, “Um, excuse me, what was your name again?”

“Vincent, ma'am.”

“Yes. Vincent, you may return to your post at the door.”

“Are you sure?”

Avery did not answer the question. Instead turning her attention to us, she said, “Follow me,” and led us between two of the glass cabinets, through a green doorway, and up an especially narrow flight of stairs. At the top of the stairs there was a closed door, also green. This door opened onto a small office.

“Have a seat, gentlemen,” Miss Avery said.

She went behind a blond desk and lowered onto the straight-back wooden chair there. Fearless and I took the padded maroon seats that faced her.

Lacing her fingers together, reminding me of Charcoal Joe, she smiled at us.

“How can I help you?” she asked.

I told her the story about Seymour and Charcoal Joe (whom I called Rufus Tyler), about the murder and the evidence.

“A man I know on the LAPD told me that you were an acquaintance of Boughman's” was the end of my little spiel.

For a full minute after I was done talking Willomena peered at us, wondering, I believed, what she should and should not say. I fully expected her to deny any knowledge and ask us to leave.

“Peter,” she said, as if the name was conjecture. “Peter was involved in some kind of double-cross. He got hold of a great sum of money and instead of moving it down the line he took a sidetrack—a detour which happened to be a dead end.”

“Wow,” I said.

“Have I surprised you, Mr. Rawlins?”

“Your candor is stunning.”

That was the only moment that she seemed surprised. My use of language was as unexpected as a flock of sudden hummingbirds.

“Don't people usually tell you the truth?” she asked with a faint smile.

“I don't know about people but I said the same thing to Tony Gambol and he sent three of his men to beat me senseless.”

“You don't look any the worse for wear.”

“Mr. Jones here was in the background. And you don't mess with Fearless if you want to stay upright and conscious.”

“They call you Fearless?” she asked my associate.

“Just another word for fool.”

Her nostrils flared but I didn't feel jealous. I had met Avery's kind before. In the end I'd have fared better with Gambol's men.

“Tony is closer to the fire,” she said to me. “The only work I ever do, did, with Peter was to turn currency into diamonds now and then.”

“You admit that?”

“In this room with the door shut,” she confessed. “Your testimony wouldn't hold up in court and the people Peter dealt with know what work I do.”

“Do you know who might have killed him?” I asked.

“No. But even if I did I wouldn't say. You know there is no protection for people who cross that line. Is there anything else?”

“I guess not.”

I made to rise and Fearless did too.

“Mr. Rawlins,” the bombshell store manager said.

“Yes, ma'am.”

“Do you have a card?”

“I do.”

I took my wallet from my pocket, then bent down and grabbed a pencil from her desk. I wrote my name across the bottom of the new WRENS-L business card that Niska had ordered for us all.

“Here you go,” I said, handing the card to her.

“If I think of something I'll call you,” she told me.

I wouldn't be holding my breath.