Charcoal Joe (2 page)

“How you doin', Brother Easy,” Mouse greeted.

I stood and we shook hands. We were old-school American men and so did not hug.

“Cain't complain,” I said with an irrepressible smile. Even the presence of one of the most dangerous men alive could not extinguish my delight with life. “Have a seat.”

My visitors' chairs were made from a yellowish wood that was carved to accommodate the human form.

“Damn, niggah, you done burnt a cross in the white man's lawn an' made him like it,” Mouse said as he sat back. Light-skinned and light-eyed, he was wearing a straw-colored suit with a Stetson of a wheat hue, a shirt that might have been dyed in blueberries, white silk socks, and patent leather black shoes.

He crossed one leg over the other and grinned at me.

“It's just an office,” I said.

“Ain't another Negro in thirty blocks got a office around here, man. You know you just walk right in the lion's den and say, ‘Pussy, lay down or get the hell out.' ”

“Whisper with me.”

“Tinsford's a good man,” Mouse half agreed, “but you the one.”

“LaMarque dropped by a few days ago. He said that you, him, and Etta went down to Ensenada to do some fishin'.”

“Caught me a honest-to-God swordfish. Eleven foot long. Mothahfuckah fought harder than any man I ever killed. Shit. It was easier when I had to bite out that man's windpipe when I was handcuffed behind my back.”

Mouse was a colorful man, his beauty defined by the distance one had from him.

“I never knew you to go fishing,” I said, in an attempt to lighten our conversation. “Not since we were kids down in Houston.”

“Etta want me to retire.”

“Retire?”

Retirement was a huge word for Raymond “Mouse” Alexander. To my knowledge he had not held a legitimate job in all his forty-seven years. He might have pretended to be working for a company he planned to rob. He applied for a few jobs after the one stint in prison he ever served. But Mouse never punched a clock or looked at any man as his boss.

His money-making activities over the previous several years had been working with an international heist ring as a gunman, strong-arm, and wild card when the circumstances went south. He did two to three jobs a year and once told me that he made more than the president of Bank of America.

“Yeah,” Mouse said, giving me a half shrug. “Etta said that a full-grown man shouldn't be making his family worry so hard when he go off to work. I told her that cops and soldiers do that every day. But she come back sayin' that cops retire after twenty years and I been a outlaw since I was five.”

Mouse snickered. The truth is often funny.

It struck me that my lifelong friend might have been there to ask for a job. This notion further diminished my good mood. Both Whisper and Saul had told me that they would not be able to enter a partnership that included Raymond.

“So,” I ventured tenuously, “what would you do if you retired? I mean would you take on some other kind of work?”

“I got me quite a pile saved up,” he said. “And I been thinkin' about what you did.”

“Meaning what exactly?” I can honestly say that at that moment there was no cheer in my heart.

Mouse looked me in the eye and smiled. He was a psychopath who had read maybe three books in his entire life but Raymond knew human nature as well as any psychoanalyst with a lifetime of experience.

I believe that he knew what was bothering me and reveled in my discomfort.

“Milo Sweet gonna purchase twelve rental properties for me and hire Fearless Jones to maintain the buildin's and collect the rent. Every unit'll be in Etta's name and I'll sit on the front porch livin' the life of Riley.”

It was the best solution that my friend could have come up with. He needed a taxable source of income while Etta, his wife and my onetime lover, had to have a nest egg.

Mouse grinned. A ruby festooned one of his front teeth. There was a thick ring of gold and onyx on the baby finger of his left hand.

Our eyes met again and he waited.

“You the one come to me,” I said at last.

“You evah hear of a brother named Charcoal Joe?” Mouse asked.

“Heard of him,” I admitted. “I don't really know anything about him though. Plays poker and the horses. Got more luck than a rich man askin' for a bank loan.” There were a few darker stories about Joe but I had no facts to credit them.

Mouse smiled again. “You always got the right words, Easy. Even if you don't know a thing, you never say nuthin' wrong.”

I nodded, accepting the compliment, and waited.

“Joe's what you call a mastermind. He makes things happen where no one else could see the possibilities. He the one told me that doin' what I did here in L.A. was bound to lead to heartbreak. He connected me with the man in Cincinnati make my work possible all ovah the continent. Joe is connected like a spider on his web. One time there was this dude gunnin' for you—”

“Me?”

“Yeah,” Mouse said, “man named Grindman, Cully Grindman. He'd been hired by another man, a man named Bashir. Anyway, Grindman aksed a waitress in a restaurant near your old office if she ever saw you in there, said you was a old friend and he wanted to say hi. That was Stella Rogers. She aksed one of Joe's people if she should get involved. Joe turned around and told me—now Grindman and Bashir in a graveyard out in East L.A. sharin' space with Sadie and Tesser Klieger.”

Mouse was pretty good with words, too. Bonnie had a friend who worked with her as a stewardess on Air France, Ojayit Nadkarni. Ojayit's fiancé, Bashir, had beaten her twice and so she needed to get away. I got Jackson Blue to get her work on one of P9's company jets. She took the job and moved to Chicago.

I thought that was the end of it.

“So you see,” Mouse continued, “in a way Charcoal Joe done saved your life.”

“Grindman was a hit man?”

“Yes he was.”

I didn't need to ask why Mouse hadn't come to me with this information. For him killing was simply a tool of the trade, hardly worth discussing. And we were friends. Where we came from this was the kind of thing that one friend did for the other.

“And what can I do for Mr. Joe?” I asked.

“Last night a white man named Peter Boughman and some other guy called Ducky were shot dead in a house down on the beach at Malibu. Ducky was killed outright and Boughman was tortured before they shot him in the eye and the heart.”

“And Joe is involved?”

“Not directly. But he has a friend who has a son who went to that house, by accident, and fount the body. His bad luck was that somebody heard the shot and called the police, who got there before Seymour, Joe's friend's son, could call them himself.”

“Seymour what?”

“Brathwaite. Dr. Seymour Brathwaite.”

“I thought you said he was a kid?”

“Twenty-two-year-old doctor of physics. Doin' what they call postgraduate work at UCLA.”

“White guy?”

“Not unless Sidney Poitier's a white guy.”

“And what's in it for your friend Joe?”

“What was in it for him when he saved your ass?”

“The police arrested this kid?”

Mouse nodded.

“They book him for murder?”

“Yes, sir.”

“So what can I do?”

“There wasn't no gun.”

“They arrested him for what then?”

“Murder, conspiracy, breaking and entering, and resisting arrest.”

“Again, what does Joe want from me?”

“He wants to talk to you about the circumstances of the case and to hire you to do what he needs done.”

“Like put a couple of bodies in the Jewish graveyard in East L.A.?”

“Naw, Easy, he know that ain't your speed.”

“If he doesn't want me to break the law, what does he want?”

“Whatever you ain't got words for you got a question, Ease. I'm tellin' you that my friend wants to meet with you and talk with you about a friend's son been arrested for murder. Ain't no question to that.”

“When can I see him?”

“Tomorrow out in Venice.”

“Why not today if he's so worried?”

“He's in the Avett Detainment Facility out there. The next visitors' day is tomorrow. Hours start at eleven.”

“What's he in jail for?”

“ 'Bout two months ago a man saw Joe's automobile and made what the lawyer called a disparaging remark about its color, which was brown. Joe's reply was two shots over the man's head. They arrested him for discharging a firearm within city limits. He got around ninety days.”

I was silent for the moment, biding my time. I couldn't say no to Mouse. He'd saved my life and had put his on the line for me many times. He was mostly evil and definitely a killer but black men in America had learned centuries ago that the devil not only offered the best deals—he was the only game in our part of town.

“All right,” I said after the proper pretense of waiting. “I'll go down there in the morning. Who should I ask for?”

“Rufus Tyler. Prisoner number six-two-seven-three-one-one-L.”

While I wrote down the name and number Mouse pulled a thick wad of cash from his breast pocket; this he placed on my cherrywood desk.

I looked down at the wad and asked, “What's this?”

“Fi'e thousand dollars.”

“Give it back to Joe,” I said. “I haven't agreed to take the case yet.”

“This money is from me, Easy. I'm the one hirin' you.”

“Cheddar or blue?” I asked, taking the cash.

“Say what?”

“I just wanna know what kind of cheese is in this trap.”

After our business was concluded Mouse and I sat around for a while talking about property and the philosophies that surrounded its ownership.

“So you always gotta be fixin' shit?” he asked me at the butt end of his sixth cigarette.

“Things have to be repaired,” I said reasonably. “If the roof is leaking or the furnace breaks down, the landlord is expected to put that a'right.”

“Expected by who?”

“The tenant, the city.”

“If my pipes bust I fix 'em myself,” he said indignantly.

“You own your house, Raymond. The tenant pays rent. He's just passing through. Anyway, Milo will look after the details. You just sit back and let Etta collect her due.”

Raymond scowled, crushing out the butt. Before he could take out number seven I stood and said, “I got to go out to Pasadena and see Saul.” For the past six months I had only smoked one cigarette a day, but every time Raymond lit up I was tempted to break that regimen.

I went to the walnut filing cabinet next to the door and took out a pine-tar barbecue starter-nugget that I'd purchased to assist my partner in crime-solution.

Raymond was on his feet by then.

“You'll go see Joe tomorrow?”

“Did you pay me?”

“Call me if you need some help.”

“If I had to call you, you wouldn't need my help.”

Mouse grunted a laugh and slapped my shoulder.

I had to walk home to get my car.

Raymond offered to give me a ride in his dark gray Lincoln but I wanted away from the smoker; anyway, walking the nearly deserted sidewalks of West L.A. had become a favored pastime.

Pico Boulevard was always a pleasant stroll. Even in 1968 the police still slowed a moment when they cruised by; but rarely, in daylight, did they actually stop black and Mexican pedestrians; not on the main arteries at any rate.

I went all the way to Point View and turned right, hoofing it three more blocks to my fancy two-story home.

I didn't even go inside, just took my deep maroon 1961 Super D/500 Dodge from the driveway, wended my way north to Sunset, and then took Coldwater Canyon Road across the mountain and into the Valley.

By the time I got to Pasadena it was almost ten. Saul Lynx was sitting in his dun-colored Studebaker half a block down from 213 Crest-Martin Way. I was going to rap on the passenger's-side window but the door came open before I got there.

Looking in, I saw my partner throwing newspapers, paper bags, empty soda bottles, and some official-looking papers from the front seat into the back.

“Hey, Easy,” he said as he levered back and forth, making room.

“Is your house this much of a mess?” I asked him.

“Melba keeps a clean house,” he said. “I'm pretty neat too. It's just these stakeouts collect junk and trash.”

I climbed in and closed the door. Crest-Martin was a lovely street, wide and lined on both sides with oak trees. The homes were for the most part single-family dwellings built for kinfolk to grow old and die and to grow up and apart. The children were at school, mothers out shopping or watching the morning shows on TV. The men were at work; all except Bruno Medina, a package delivery man who permanently damaged his back on the job at Washburn Distributors. Bruno was collecting $935 a month in lieu of his salary and receiving another $1,600 to pay his medical costs; bills footed by Reliant Insurance Company.

Harry Harada had sold Bruno the policy, signed off on the payments seven months later, and then hired WRENS-L Detective Agency to prove fraud. If we could catch Bruno and then turn him against Karl Reuben, the doctor who ran a string of at least nineteen insurance cheats, we stood to get a bonus from the insurance consortium Harada represented, and with that the likelihood of future jobs.

“Want a buttermilk doughnut?” I asked Saul.

“From Toluca Mart?”

“Center's still warm.”

The private supermarket made the pastries three times a day and Saul loved them.

Saul was a smallish man in a light green cotton suit, tan shirt, and a loosely knotted dark brown tie; the tie he wore more times than not. His nose was his one outstanding feature—protruding and somehow shapeless. Otherwise he was almost as nondescript as Whisper. Most people, when referring to Saul, would say, “You know, the guy with the nose.” His cap, languishing on the dashboard, was camel brown. His pale skin now and then ignited the brilliance of his green eyes.

Between bites of a chunky doughnut and sips of lukewarm coffee he asked, “What you doing out here, Ease?”

“I told you I wanted to help.”

“But you said after two weeks.”

“Mouse came to see me.”

“Oh.”

“He hired me for a job.”

“A detective job?”

“You ever hear of a guy named Charcoal Joe?”

Saul stared a moment, took a bite of fried dough, and said, “One time I had a missing-persons job; a girl named Doris Frye. She'd gone up to the Sunset Strip with some girlfriends and disappeared. Then one night, when I was parked in a car, in front of the house my information had guided me to—two big guys grabbed me and dragged me somewhere nearby. They threw me on a wet concrete floor in the subbasement of a house that was boarded up.

“When I looked up I saw this little, older black man standing in front of a wooden easel jabbing at a brown piece of paper with a charcoal stick. My hands and feet were tied and so I was quiet while the little guy drew. Maybe six minutes later he turned the easel around. It was a pretty good portrait of me. I might have been impressed if I wasn't scared shitless.

“ ‘You have a nice face,' the old man said. ‘Big nose though. What's that nose doin' in front of my friend's house?'

“I couldn't think of a plausible lie and so I explained that Don and Lena Frye had a daughter named Doris and that Doris was last seen being dragged out of a club on Sunset. She'd gone up there with friends, two of whom had been drugged and grabbed but they managed to get away. I had information that Sam ‘Meatmarket' Boll had taken other young women and pressed them into prostitution.

“The man stared at me for one long minute then looked up at his henchmen, who were, by the bye, white men, and then he turned away. I was taken back to my car and told to go home and wait there.

“Early the next morning there was a knock on my door. Doris Frye was there all strung out on heroin. I told Lena and Don that there was a clinic I knew and within two months Doris was back home, more or less in one piece.”

“That sounds like a big-city fairy tale,” I said, wondering what kind of floor I was destined for.

“Yeah. Two months later they found Boll between two big rocks in Laurel Canyon. His skin had mummified and so they could still tell where his throat had been cut.”

Saul took the last bite of his doughnut and I handed the bag over to him.

With nothing to add or ask about Mouse's friend I said, “I'm gonna ask Bonnie to marry me today.”

What Saul had and Whisper lacked was the ability to smile. A beautiful Jimmy Durante grin crossed his face.

“That's great, Easy. You think Jesus and Benita will come down for the wedding?”

My adopted son along with his common-law wife and daughter had moved to Alaska so he could get professional experience as a fisherman. Juice got a job on a salmon boat and hoped to get his own one day.

“Maybe,” I said, looking down the street at Medina's red and dark brown ranch house. “Any movement on your guy?”

“No.”

“How many days now?”

“Nine.”

“Cops stop you?”

“I been pretending to sell insurance up and down the street. Harry gave me all the papers and told me what I should say. I got three housewives to consider life policies on their husbands. One gave me tea and kissed me good-bye.”

“What's the backyard like?”

“Two of the houses that border his on the next block are empty all day—two twenty-one and two twenty-three. But an old lady named Dawson lives in two twenty-five. You want to keep out of sight from her.”

“You got your camera?” I asked.

Reaching between his legs on the floor, Saul came up with a Nikon that had a six-inch telephoto lens.

“Keep it ready.”

Staying away from the Dawson domicile, I walked up the driveway of the rightmost house behind Bruno's. Peeking through the high redwood fence, I saw that my mark had a lush backyard and that all the windows of his home had the shades pulled. A major drawback for insurance cheats is that they can't afford to be seen.

I forced two red planks apart and squeezed my way through to Medina's yard.

There were three big green plastic cans filled with leaves and branches next to the back of the house. I took out a sturdy branch and went from one closed window to the next, pressing against the inner frames to see if any of them was unlocked—the fourth attempt was the charm. Ever so slowly I pushed the window up maybe three inches. Then I dumped out one of the plastic green cans, took the pine-tar nugget and started it smoldering. I dropped the starter in the bottom of the empty receptacle, moved that under the cracked window, and dumped the contents of another can over it.

After that I moved quickly, jumping the fence to Bruno's neighbor's yard and then out through the driveway to Saul's car.

He was in the passenger's seat now so I slid in behind the wheel. We were both grinning. Five minutes later the front door to Bruno's house flew open and he came running out with nary a limp. He was followed by a plume of fairly dark smoke.

Dense smoke from a leaf-and-wood fire is a wonderful tool for getting a man on his feet. He was standing straight up without the help of crutches or a cane, there in the front yard of his Pasadena home. It was then that he felt naked, exposed. He looked around and saw Saul snapping pictures out the passenger's window of his car.

Bruno was well named. He was the size of a brown bear, and now that he was cured he could move with nearly the same speed.

“Hit the gas, Easy!” Saul yelled.

Luckily Saul had already turned the engine over so all I had to do was press the pedal and steer. For six or seven seconds it seemed as though the hairy behemoth might have caught us. But we picked up speed and there was no traffic to hinder us.

Saul took a dozen shots of the big man chasing us.

“Damn, Easy,” Saul said as we drove off, “I never knew how good it could be to have partners.”

“Yeah,” I agreed wryly. “Now we can get into three times as much trouble in half the time.”