Charcoal Joe (14 page)

I followed Fearless in his new-old Edsel down Wilshire, then 6th Street, until we got to a huge house made of stone on Highland.

I tailed him into the driveway through to the warrens behind the mansion. There we passed through a green yard that was big enough to be a small Parisian park. At the farthest reach of the property, behind a huge oak tree, we came to a concrete apron that separated the six-car garage from a smaller structure that was probably designed to be the servants' quarters.

Fearless and I parked side by side next to the house.

“How you rate this place?” I asked Fearless.

“Owner is a man named Diggs,” my primal friend said. “He had some trouble with a guy. I stayed up in the big house for a while, you know, answerin' doors and makin' sure he was safe. He knew a lawyer and the lawyer knew Milo. Anyway, when the trouble was over Mrs. Diggs offered to let me stay back here till I save enough for my own place.”

Fearless rapped twice on the oversized front door, then three times fast. After that he used his key to let us in. The house was larger than it looked from the outside. The room we entered was big enough to be a living room and a dining room too.

There was a large square table with eight chairs on the left, and two sofas and a padded reclining chair on the right.

Seymour was sitting in half-lotus on the mechanical chair reading a large tome. When we walked in he peered at us through his spectacles and then performed a weedy rocking motion to get himself up and out of the chair. If I had seen him do only that, I would have known that he was not a killer.

“Hey, Sy,” Fearless said.

“Hello, Mr. Jones, Mr. Rawlins.”

He approached us toting the heavy book.

We all settled at the dining table, which looked to be made from teak.

“What you reading?” I asked the gawky young man.

“It was in the den in the back,” he answered.

“And what is it?” I insisted.

“Oh…yes, sorry,
The Descent of Man
.”

“Darwin,” I commented, remembering the racetrack and my speculations about evolution.

“You've read it?” Seymour asked. The surprise in his voice irked me.

“In a book club,” I said. “There's only three members: me, a downtown librarian, and a man I think you know—Jackson Blue.”

“From P9?”

“The same.”

“You
know
Mr. Blue?”

“How is Jackson?” Fearless asked.

“Got a shadow a mile long and scared of every inch of it.”

Fearless chuckled and asked, “You guys wanna drink?”

I asked for ice water and Seymour demurred.

When Fearless was gone he asked, “You really know Mr. Blue?”

“Why wouldn't I?”

“He's an important man.”

I was looking at the slender, four-eyed murder suspect, trying not to let my anger get the better of me. I wanted to ask if what they taught him in college was to hate himself or did he just get that way on his own?

Fearless came back with my water glass and the anger seeped away.

“I need to talk to you about a few things,” I said.

He pressed the point of a finger of his left hand against the bridge of his glasses, pushing them up on his nose and, with the same gesture, pushing his head back an inch or so. The movement reminded me of a puppy seeing something that might be a threat.

“Okay,” he said.

“Your onetime foster mother gave me eighteen thousand dollars to get you outta hock,” I began. “Where does a woman you say is a part-time housekeeper get that kind of money?”

“I, I don't know.”

“But you know that some street-talkin' men like me and Fearless shouldn't be acquainted with an important man like Jackson Blue,” I pointed out.

“She…she borrowed it, I guess.”

“From Rufus Tyler?”

“I don't know.”

“How long you live with her?”

“Till I was about twelve. Then the Burton family up in Walnut Creek, in the Bay Area, took me in. There was a better high school up there and it was a whole family of scientists. I finished high school when I was fifteen, then went to Stanford for six years.”

“Why would Jasmine still be so involved with you if you haven't lived with her in a decade or more?”

“I always thought of her as my mother,” he said, pressing on his glasses again. “I spent holidays with her, and she, and she trusts me.”

“Trusts you with what?”

“She loves me, okay?”

“Why were you down in Malibu looking for her?”

That stopped the boy for a few moments or more.

“A woman came to see me,” he said at last.

“What woman?”

“I never saw her before. She was white but she had on a red scarf and wore dark glasses. She spoke with some kind of accent…Eastern European or something. She wouldn't give me her name but she said that she was a friend of Mama Jasmine's and that she
had something
for her.”

“What was that?” I asked.

“I asked her why not go to Jasmine,” Seymour said instead of answering my question. “She said that Mama Jasmine was missing, that she hadn't been home and nobody knew where she was.

“I hadn't called her since a few days,” Seymour added.

“What did the white woman give you?”

“I didn't say she gave me anything,” he argued. “I said she said she had something for Mama Jasmine.”

“This is not high school debate club, son,” I said.

“I talked to Mama Jasmine today.” There was great consternation on the young man's face. He looked as if he was about to cry.

“And what did she say?” I asked, even though what I wanted to know was the nature of the gift from the unknown white woman.

“She said that she was leaving town for a while and that I should, I should listen to you.”

I took a moment then to order the clues that passed through the young man. Jasmine Palmas worked cleaning a house owned by Rufus Tyler; a house that Jasmine's son went to, finding Peter Boughman and John “Ducky” Brown. Something a mysterious white woman said led Seymour to that house; a woman who maybe knew Jasmine and had something for her.

“How old was the white woman?” I asked.

“Old like Mama Jasmine.”

“Did you ask Jasmine about her when you talked today?”

“No,” he said, but that surely wasn't true. “I meant to but I was so happy to hear her and she wanted to know about what happened in jail and at the beach house.”

“Uh-huh. And what did the white woman give you?”

I could see behind his spectacles that he wanted to change the subject yet again.

“A little red diary,” he said instead.

“Did you look inside?”

“No.” He pressed his glasses.

“Not at all?”

“It fell open one time when I was hiding it. It was written by hand in blue ink but I can't tell you what it said.”

“Why?”

“Because I didn't even know what language it was in. Most of the letters were out of the alphabet but the punctuation was weird and the words didn't even make any sense.”

“Does Jasmine speak another language?”

“No.”

“What did you do with it?” I asked.

“First I called Mama Jasmine but she didn't answer. Then I called Uriah.”

“What'd he say?”

“That Mama J had been gone for a few days. I could have called her or gone over there but…”

“What'd you do with the diary?”

“I sewed it into the curtains behind my desk.”

“You sewed it?”

“Yeah. Mama Jasmine always said that men should know how to sew and cook and women should be able to shoot and run fast.”

“Why would you feel that you had to hide something like that?”

“I don't know,” Seymour said, honestly confused. “She, the woman, told me that I shouldn't give it to anybody but Mama J. She said that no one else should know about it.”

“So you played James Bond and sewed it into the curtains.”

Seymour didn't answer that.

“Where'd Jasmine say she was going when you talked to her today?”

“She wouldn't tell me. She just said to do what you told me to.”

“Okay,” I said. “Let's forget about the book and Jasmine for a minute. What about Uriah?”

“What about him?”

“Do you wanna go to the gas chamber, Seymour?”

“Of course not.”

“Do you wanna run and hide with every policeman in this country lookin' at your mug shot with a warning that you're armed and dangerous?”

“I don't even own a gun.”

“You think that PhD you got makes you immune from your skin?”

That question actually stumped him for ten seconds or more.

“Uriah is married to Jasmine but they don't share the same bed,” he finally said. “As long as I've known her he's lived in the low house and we were on high. He came to Easter and Christmas dinner most years and he fixed things that broke. If he ever saw me coming down the stairs or coming back from school he'd stop me and ask about Jasmine.”

“Ask what?”

“Who she was talking to? If she had any men friends up in the house. Things like that.”

“You say he lived in the bottom house as long as you can remember,” I said.

“Uh-huh.”

“How old were you when you came to her?”

“Um…I don't really know. Mama Jasmine says that I came to her when I was just a baby. My parents were killed in a train wreck in Illinois on their way home.”

“What else about Uriah?”

“He used to have prostitutes come on the weekends sometimes. Mama Jasmine didn't like it but Uriah used to say that he wouldn't be with those whores if she'd let him up in her bed.”

The college man enjoyed the rebelliousness his de facto foster father had shown.

“How did you know they were prostitutes?” I asked.

“One of the nice ones told me. She gave me a card and said men called that number when they wanted a girlfriend for the night.”

“What did the card say?”

“It was a real red lipstick kiss with the letters JB and a phone number.”

“What else?”

“It didn't say anything else.”

“I mean about Uriah.”

“He drinks a lot too,” Seymour added.

“Did you ever see him with Rufus?”

“I hardly ever saw Mr. Tyler. And, no, I never saw him with Uriah. The two Thanksgivings he came to dinner Uriah wasn't there.”

“So the diary is still in the drapes?” I asked then.

“What does it matter? You can't read it.”

“I can't know Jackson Blue either.” The young man hesitated so I added, “Didn't Jasmine tell you to trust me?”

He nodded, reluctantly.

“Then what's the problem?”

“I don't know. It feels private.”

“That might be so but your execution will be on the six o'clock news.”

“Why do you keep trying to scare me, Mr. Rawlins?”

“Because you're not scared enough for your own good.”

“I already told you that I didn't kill anybody. They can't find me guilty of something I didn't do.”

“Did they arrest you?”

He nodded.

“Did they make you lie down in blood?”

He looked away.

“Did they book you for murder and set your bail?”

“But I didn't do it,” Seymour insisted.

“You're the only suspect,” I said. “The police don't have any other potential defendants they're looking at. The only person looking for somebody else is me.”

This time Seymour took off his glasses and rubbed his right eye with the heel of his free hand.

“My apartment is on Weyburn a little west of Westwood Boulevard.”

He gave me the numbers, directions, and a key to the door.

“Is there anything else you can tell me?” I asked. “I mean did you see anything or hear anything at the beach house?”

He put the spectacles back on and pressed them hard—but to no avail.

I sighed and shook my head.

“Well,” I said at last, “I guess I better go over to your place and get that diary I can't read.”

“Want me to come with you?” Fearless offered.

“No. I want to think.”

“I could be quiet, brother. You know you got thugs comin' up out the ground. You might need me.”

I knew he was right but my frame of mind was askew since he'd saved me in the parking lot.

I wanted to feel like a man.

“Mr. Rawlins?”

“Yeah, Seymour.”

“There's a red box containing a three-volume set called
The Feynman Lectures on Physics
. Could you bring that back too? I'm supposed to start teaching over the summer and those lectures are considered the bible of physics.”

“I saw it at Jasmine's house.”

“I gave her a copy when she wanted to know what physicists did. Actually I gave her two. She lent the first one to a friend. But there's one at my apartment too.”

“I'll look around for it,” I promised.

In those cases where there's a black man on the hot seat I usually spend most of the investigation in the black part of town. His family and friends, loved ones, and those that hate him are usually there. The crime he is suspected of has almost always been committed in the hood. Since the days of slavery black folk have been crammed into slave quarters and ghettos, same-race marriages and schools segregated by neighborhood. In prison our cellmates were black, and in death it was almost always a congregation of black faces that laid us to rest.

But Seymour Brathwaite did not fit the profile. His IQ along with an indecipherable series of events had put him smack-dab in the middle of white America. He had not sought to be there. He had not been trying to escape the harsh realities of racism. And so he felt that he belonged there as well as in the “high house” with Mama Jasmine. And because he didn't feel privileged or even aware of his unique status, Seymour had also accepted the unconscious prejudice of the world he passed through so ignorantly. He expected to receive a fair trial from color-blind justice, and he just supposed that people like me would not consort with important men like Jackson Blue.

Weyburn was a street that was almost pure white in 1968. The address was to an unimpressive lime-and-pink ranch-style house in the middle of the block.

I parked directly in front of the house and got out feeling like a man with a purpose. There was a pistol in the trunk. I considered for a moment but then decided against retrieving it. Somebody might see me, and all I was doing was going into an empty apartment in a part of town where the crime rate was nearly nonexistent.

I walked to the front door of the front house and pressed the button. I didn't want the landlord to think I was invading his castle grounds. After a minute had passed I knocked and pressed the button again. I went through this two-tiered process three times before going down the driveway and into the backyard.

Like Fearless, Seymour lived in a bungalow behind the white man's house, only on a smaller scale. This backyard was somewhat ramshackle and there was no green except for the overhang from trees in the neighbors' yards.

Seymour's place was up a tier of seventeen stairs, because it was situated on top of the garage rather than across the way from it.

I had the key from Seymour but knocked anyway. I'd known too many men that had been shot opening strange doors unannounced.

The apartment was a solitary room, about half the size of Fearless's living/dining room. There was a bed and a couch, a table and a desk. The kitchen was an electric coffee percolator and two hot plates set on a solitary shelf that jutted out from the wall. The bed was unmade and there were clothes, shoes, and underwear on the floor. The big cabinet he used for a closet was open and most of its contents were piled at the bottom, overflowing onto the pine floor.

The messiness of the apartment made me like the postgrad student more. He was just another hapless young man bumbling through a life on a path that he was absolutely sure of.

I noticed these details as I was looking around for a back door. Men in my trade (and black men in general) usually like to know where the exit is before they get down to the business at hand. Whether it was a new lover or an old friend, in a new house it was always good practice to have an escape map in your mind.

Seymour's house had no second door. The windows were too small and the jump too high for a man my age.

I decided to stay anyway.

I located
The Feynman Lectures
first; this because it was out on top of the desk.

There were also textbooks, notebooks, notes scribbled on at least a hundred slips of paper, and dozens of pens and pencils all under a cover of rubber dust from hundreds, maybe thousands, of erasures. There was a coffee cup with the dregs dried into a cracked cake at the bottom and a single-slice pizza box with the contents long gone.

A small black ant was inspecting the edges and corners of the inside of the pizza box; I felt a close kinship to that little emmet.

On a white ceramic plate behind the desk there was a banana that had turned black and a red apple gone soft. There were a few more little black insect detectives at work there.

I looked at the muslin curtains drawn over the window behind the desk. My goal, the foreign-tongue journal, was somewhere up near the top. I would pull it down but first I decided to look through the desk.

The five drawers were all filled to the brim, jumbled with everything from crossword puzzle books to articles cut out of newspapers and magazines. There were a few tennis balls, a stapler, a small tape recorder, and paper files of various colors. There was a box of three Trojan condoms, unopened, and a magazine of naked white women that left nothing to the scientist's imagination.

And there was a letter.

Dear Seymour,

I know that you're very busy with college and that physics paper you want to get published. You're a man now and men have to work hard to make it in this world. But you don't live that far from here and I miss you dearly. You are the son of my heart and the most important person in my life.

I'm writing to tell you that soon I'll be leaving Los Angeles. I'm going to South America where I can get a house for little money and live off my savings. I won't be moving for a while yet but I want to see you many times before I leave.

I've only stayed in America so long because of you, because I wanted to be sure that you had everything that I never did.

I love you,

Mama Jasmine

Seymour had already mentioned Jasmine's leaving the country, but he didn't say South America. I might have thought more about it but just then the only door burst open.

I recognized the two big white men in their dark clothes. I had last seen them through the hedgerow in my backyard in the wee hours of the morning.

I lamented my decision not to pop the trunk while scanning the desktop for another weapon. There wasn't even a letter opener. Maybe there was something on the kitchen shelf but that was one step too far away. Seymour didn't have a baseball bat or even a baseball. The only defense at hand was piles and piles of paper.

I grabbed a great stack of handwritten notes and threw them at the intruders. The momentary flurry of wispy paper gave me time to pick up the straight-back pine chair from behind me. I threw it in the general direction of the men and then vaulted over the desk using my left hand as the spring and my left hip as the slide. I landed more or less steady and moved forward with no thought in my mind except the annihilation of my enemies.

I did pretty good hitting the bald one with a left hook and his nearly bald partner with a right cross. The second man had taken the brunt of the flying chair so I turned to the first, bringing up a knee intent on hitting him anywhere between the groin and the nose.

I don't remember if my knee connected because of the sharp blow to the back of my head. The pain brought to my mind the odor of a ripe cheese. The autopilot that had driven me through the worst slums in Houston, Texas, and all the way through World War II made me pivot and hit the man who'd used a sap on the back of my skull. He fell back a step and a half. I remember thinking that if he went all the way down to the floor I had a chance at survival.

But he didn't fall and his friend, who had somehow come up beside me, laid a haymaker fist against the left side of my jaw.