Charcoal Joe (3 page)

I drove us to my car six blocks from the angry man-bear. I had parked that far off because I knew how the trick would play out.

Getting behind the wheel, the sad-sack detective headed for the basement darkroom at our office to develop Harry's evidence. I drove my car to Studio City in the San Fernando Valley, where I had an appointment on Ivy Drive.

There was a diner a few blocks away from my destination and so I stopped there because I was hungry and the place looked nice: a big blue bunker with the red neon words
MARVIN'S EATS
standing up top like soldiers on parade.

The waitress gave me a startled look and then a fearful questioning gaze. She didn't say anything so I asked, “Am I too late for lunch?”

She, her name tag read
INEZ
, was about my age, mid-forties, with golden hair from a bottle, dark metal-framed spectacles, and midriff spread.

“No,” she said. I couldn't tell what she meant and my expression transmitted that intelligence. “I mean yes, we are still serving…sandwiches and soup.”

There were seven square tables and a long counter for solitary customers. At the far end of the red bar there was a pay phone on the wall. I took the seat next to it and ordered a tuna melt with chicken noodle soup, a glass of apple juice, and a cup of black coffee.

After she served the drinks I dropped a dime in the phone slot and dialed a number. Some of the newer phone booths had digital buttons but most stayed rotary through the seventies.

“Hello,” he said after the seventh ring; his voice deep and grumbling.

“Hey, Melvin.”

“Mr. Sugarman, what can I do for you today?”

We had agreed that whenever I contacted Mel at his office, three doors down from Chief of Police Tom Reddin, I would use the pseudonym
Sugarman
. It didn't look good for a police officer in Captain Suggs's position to be sharing information with a Negro like me.

“Last night a man named Peter Boughman and some other guy they call Ducky were murdered in a house down Malibu,” I said. “A young black man named Seymour Brathwaite was arrested at the scene and charged with the killing even though no murder weapon was found. A friend has asked me to look into the crime because he doesn't believe that Brathwaite would have committed it.”

“Sounds like regular police business to me,” Melvin said. Melvin was deeply in my debt but he was a cop before almost anything.

“Be that as it may, can I impose on you to look into the particulars?”

Melvin's silence was his resistance so I added, “How's Mary doin'?”

Mary was the tough cop's Achilles' heel. She was a dyed-in-the-wool grifter but in spite of that he had fallen in love. When she ran away, trying to protect him from the men she worked for, I found her and fixed it so that Mel could keep her with him.

“Give me a day,” he said.

I hung up the phone and a man said, “Excuse me.”

It wasn't the good-mannered
excuse me
of a man who jostled your drink by mistake or cut through a line you were standing in. It was the gun-toting, badge-bearing command given by licensed sentries and officers of the law.

The motorcycle cop, replete with black leather jacket and hard white helmet, was standing next to my stool. I could smell his peppermint breath. He hadn't taken off the headgear because he might have needed both hands to subdue me.

“Yes, Officer,” I said politely.

“What are you doing here?”

“Waiting for my tuna sandwich and chicken soup.”

“I mean,” the cop explained, “what are you doing around here—in this neighborhood.”

“I had business in Pasadena and I live near La Cienega and Pico. My daughter goes to Ivy Prep and so I thought I'd grab a bite before school lets out.”

“You work at the school?”

“No.”

I was pleasant enough but I didn't see any reason to help him understand how a black man's child could go to a fancy private school in the Republican stronghold of the San Fernando Valley.

“Let me see some identification,” he demanded.

“Why?”

“What?”

“Man, I'm just sitting in here, usin' the phone and ordering lunch. I haven't even bent a law. So why would you come in here, in a place don't even have windows, and ask me about my business?”

“Someone called, said that you looked suspicious.”

Inez was standing at the swinging pink door that led to the kitchen—staring expectantly.

I held up my arms to show the policeman what was there. I had on a blue blazer, jade turtleneck shirt, and buff-colored trousers. I had been careful setting the fire and so nothing was singed, stained, torn, or out of place. In the eyes of the law I should have been no threat whatsoever.

“Suspicious of what?”

“ID.”

My daughter was expecting me so I took out my driver's license, PI's ID card, and a special card that instructed LAPD officers to call a certain number before detaining me. That number was the private line of Anatole McCourt, special aide to special aide Melvin Suggs. Anatole was the most beloved police officer in L.A. He was big and strong and honest in a way that made you want to be good.

“How do you know McCourt?” the policeman asked. I never got his name.

“Call and ask him,” I said. “Phone's right here. I'll even give you the dime.”

“Don't get smart with me.”

“One of us got to, man. I gave you everything you asked for—more. So now either call Anatole or take me in and call him from there.”

The nameless cop hated me for a moment or so. He was used to being the boss on the street; especially with people like me—as if there actually were
people like me
. He made a movement with his shoulders that was in lieu of the violence he felt. Then he turned on his heel, stopped to confer for a moment with the waitress, and exited Marvin's Eats.

The woman brought my food and left it with no smile or kind word. And that was a victory for a man like me.

But it wasn't enough.

After my meal, on the way out, I stopped at the register to pay.

“That's three ninety-eight,” Inez said, looking down.

“Tell me something,” I said as I handed her a ten.

When she made no sound I added, “That cop told me that someone here called and said that I looked suspicious.”

Inez met my eyes then.

“What about me looks suspicious to you?” I asked.

She maintained our connection for a quarter minute or more, looking hard and deep. Finally she lowered her head again and said, “Nothing, I guess.”

“Keep the change.”

Ivy Prep was a gated school, surrounded by a large swath of desert soil. The guard, Lee Andrews, let me through with no problem and Feather was sitting on a bench with three white girls in front of the teal-colored main building.

The girls were all talking at once, laughing and swaying with the joys and dramas of their lives.

I pulled up to the parking lot that abutted the main building and waited for Feather to notice me. She didn't like me honking for her, and adolescent girls don't need their parents walking up on them and their friends.

I sat there for a few moments trying to forget the reality of the waitress and that cop; hoping that the world my daughter was headed for would be kinder, clearer, and more understanding. Bonnie and I were going to get married. We'd make a life for Feather and maybe our own children—and society would change; it would have to.

As I came to the end of this series of thoughts, Feather looked up and noticed me. There was a somber cast to her gaze but it wasn't embarrassment or discomfort at my presence. She excused herself from her friends and ran toward the car.

I got out to greet her. She threw her arms around me and hugged me tightly; her embrace catching me at the elbows, pinning my arms like a boxer trying to smother a flurry of punches.

This was unexpected. Feather was mature beyond her years and she loved me deeply—but she was a thirteen-year-old girl and cautious about any expression of love.

“Is something wrong?” I asked when she let go.

“No, Daddy, I'm just happy to see you.”

“We saw each other this morning.”

“I know,” she said, a little discomfited. “I just missed you I guess.”

On the ride home she was quiet but not still. She looked at a textbook now and then, and changed stations on the radio whenever a commercial came on. I remember a song that had the longest title, “Just Dropped In to See What Condition My Condition Was In” by Kenny Rogers and the First Edition. Other than that, there was Otis Redding and Aretha Franklin alongside a slate of white pop artists. I tried to recall just when it was that black singers had begun to be played on white stations.

“Bonnie's coming back from France today,” I said.

“Uh-huh.”

“I'm going to ask her to marry me.”

Feather turned to me with a stricken look on her sweet, light brown face. I thought that she was probably worried about having another female in the house. After all, Feather oversaw the greater portion of our domestic lives. She worked with our housekeeper, Alberta Hurst, on Saturdays and prepared meals at least half of the time. Whenever there was a decision to be made about furniture, parties, or even landscaping, I almost always deferred to her taste.

Bonnie getting in the middle of that might be a problem that I had not anticipated.

“When you gonna ask her?” Feather asked in a dialect she rarely used.

“Today.”

“You want me to go over with you?”

“I don't think I'd have much use for help in a proposal,” I said.

Feather grimaced and looked away.

At home she started making dinner.

I went to the living room and picked up the phone.

Bonnie answered after quite some time. “Hello?”

“You back, huh?”

“I came in yesterday,” she said. “They put me on an early flight because one of the girls got sick.”

“Oh. You should have called. I would have taken you out to dinner.”

“I thought you were busy and I had all these things I had to do. The refrigerator broke down and I had to throw everything out.”

“You need me to pick you up a new one?”

“How's Feather?” Bonnie asked.

“I'm not sure.”

“Why not?”

“She's just acting funny. But you know kids change every day.”

“I'm pretty busy, baby,” Bonnie said. “A lot to clean up still.”

“Can I come over a little later? I could help if you're still cleaning.”

“Let me finish here,” she said. “Then I'll take a shower and drop by you.”

“Should I have Feather add a plate?”

“No. No, I'll just eat something here and drop by after dinner.”

I could hear Feather walking around the kitchen. The little yellow dog, Frenchie, was standing in the doorway to the kitchen staring at me as he always did when I was away for more than half a day. When we first met I'd had vigorous and unexpected sex with his schoolteacher mistress; a few days later she was killed. His canine mind associated the two events and he hated me until I'd almost died and Feather cried by my side every night.

Frenchie loved Feather and so found forgiveness, but upon seeing me anew there was a memory of hate in those button eyes.

I leaned down to scratch behind his ears and then went to a wood chair at the octangular table that dominated the dinette.

The morning had been cool and brisk and filled with joy. I was an independent businessman on the verge of getting engaged. I had partners and friends and loved ones—a future to look forward to. But after smoking out the insurance cheat, Bruno Medina, from his home, after being hired by Mouse to work for a man who might be even more dangerous than him, and then being accosted by a waitress and armed cop for my skin color, after having my daughter hug me for no reason and her dog having to forgive me my sins for the thousandth time—after all that, the only thing I could think of doing was to pick up the keys to my Dodge and drive over to Bonnie's.

On the ride, I relived the time I was driving barefoot and ran headlong off a seaside cliff. I was drunk for the first time in many years and heartbroken over losing Bonnie to another man. Mouse found me and dragged me out of the bushes. My children sat by me for many weeks while I drifted in and out of consciousness. Bonnie came back to me, though until quite recently I had been unable to forgive her infidelity.

Fully shod and sober, it felt as if I was following the same disastrous path, though I couldn't have said why.

He was sitting on her front porch in a wheelchair, all hunched over with a light brown blanket draped across his shoulders. His chin was down to his chest, his head rising and falling on a derrick of labored breaths.

I approached and sat across from him on the white railing I had erected for the sweet pea vines that Bonnie cultivated in the spring.

Joguye Cham looked up at me. His face was older and less arrogant than when last we met. The loss of bravado revealed a strength in his eyes. He gazed at me for a long moment and then sat the rest of the way up. The blanket fell from his shoulders, showing that he wore a dark blue T-shirt and light cotton trousers that could be purchased at any J. C. Penney's store.

“Mr. Rawlins,” he said in a deep voice that denied his decrepitude.

“Mr. Cham.”

The African tribal prince took in a deep breath, found it restoring, and decided to take another.

“I was working to unite my people,” he said as if answering the question
Why are you here?
“My father sent me to Oxford and I studied and I learned how the world worked. I told Bonnie that she would be my princess and that, and that I would make a new world for her in Africa, in Nigeria. I made alliances with big corporations, oil companies. There was money and weapons and a future where I believed my people could rise up and contribute to the world as we have always done for ten thousand years.

“When Bonnie told me that she was going to be with you I said, ‘With that nigger?' I said those words and lost her. I said one word and lost her. Me, an African king, calling you by the white man's curse.

“That's why she left me. That's why she came to you. I went back home and shook hands with the white men who owned the oil company. We were friends. We drank together and smoked together; we had women and mapped out the future.

“And then one day I said, almost in passing, that when I was king of all the tribes I'd set up a central institution that would share the wealth that came out of the ground with all my peoples.”

The dark flesh around Joguye's eyes wrinkled and tightened. I could see that the fingers of his right hand were clutched into a permanent petrified fist. Uncontrollably his left knee was bobbing up and down like a seamstress's joint working a foot-powered sewing machine. There was regret and acceptance in his visage.

“I have a cousin named Malik. His mother was my father's sister. He often drank and smoked and had women with me and the white men I worked with. I was to be the leader and he one of my trusted council.

“And then one day we were in his mother's house. He sent his servants away, closed his doors, and then he came to me with a pistol in his hand….”

The blues, I thought, were not limited to the American South.

“He said to me,” Joguye continued, “that I was stupid, stupid, stupid; that I had said words that could not be taken back, that I had made a vow that could only take everything from our families. I was a fool, he said, and then he shot me. I proved that I could not deal with the white oilmen, he said, and he shot me again. My father had stolen his mother's dowry, he yelled, and he shot me. He was crying and laughing and talking and shooting me until there were no more tears and no more bullets and I was dead on the floor of my aunt's home.”

My mind at that time was looking for a way out of the pain and anger and loss that I and my nemesis both felt. I remember thinking when Joguye said that he was dead on the floor that this was
metaphor,
a word that Jackson Blue once tried to explain to me.

“A simile,” Jackson said, “is when you say something is
like
something else. A apple is like the earth. A piano is like a hippopotamus. You see the similarity an' smile. But a metaphor is when that comparison is as close to true as it can be.”

Joguye
was
dead on the floor, as I had been at the bottom of that coastal cliff.

“My cousin Jane Okeke, who loved me because I always played with her when she was a child, found me in my blood and got her husband to help take me to a white doctor and then to Air France.

“Bonnie came and found me. She took care of me the way I helped when your daughter was sick. She married me and she brought me to America because they are looking for me. As long as I am alive I pose a danger to them.”

I was trying, in my mind, to make the word “married” into a simile; this instead of thinking about finding my gun and finishing the metaphor that Malik had started.

I noted then a livid scar on the left temple of the African. He'd been shot in the head, was confined to a wheelchair, and gnarled in a way that could never be straightened out. I hated him. He had taken more from me than his father had from Malik's mother but there was no recourse.

I stood up from the trellis and lifted the blanket so that it once again covered the ailing man's shoulders, then I walked off the porch and down to the sidewalk. The last time I was in that situation I tried to kill myself—but not again.

Feather must have known about Joguye; that's why she was so upset and loving toward me. She wanted to protect me, but she also loved Bonnie and respected the African prince who had brought her to the only doctors in the world that could cure her blood disease.

I owed Feather everything, and no pain would ever get in the way of that debt again.

“Easy.”