Charcoal Joe (9 page)

It was late afternoon when I was driving in my car again.

I had already called Jewelle to pick up Feather at her school.

On surface streets I made my way from the west side down to Florence Avenue and San Pedro, there to park in front of a three-story, brown-shingled building that housed a Laundromat on the first floor.

In order to get where I was going I had to walk down the aisle that separated the coin-operated washers from the dryers to a red door that had a sign above that read
STAIRS
.

The second-floor door opened into a short hallway that had two apartment doors on either side. At the far end of that corridor was a bright blue door with a red glass knob.

I always liked that door. Every time I saw it I was reminded of a fairy tale that my father once read to me before he disappeared. It was a story about a curious young man who investigated every corner of every house he was in. The only details I retained from that story were the blue door and a little witch-girl he found imprisoned on the other side.

With my hand on the faceted knob, I wondered if I had grown up to become that curious young man, opening doors and looking for my father.

On my way up the last tier of stairs I decided, not for the first time, never to take another potion from Jo.

The final door in my private fairy tale was black with an iron knob painted white. I didn't try to open this door because it was always locked.

“Who is it?” a sweet woman's voice asked in answer to my knock.

“Easy Rawlins.”

The door came open immediately, revealing a man that was an inch or so taller than I, a shade or two darker, and maybe twenty pounds lighter. He was wearing a cheap, steel-gray suit cut from cotton cloth, designed for some Alabama sodbuster to wear when he went to the bank to ask for yet another extension on his loan payments. The man's shirt was white dress with no tie and had long sleeves that came out of the cuffs of his jacket. His face was angular and well formed. Nobody would have called him handsome, but then again, I knew that there weren't many women who could resist his charm. And Fearless Jones was not a conscious womanizer. He met women and bedded them but he would have paid for the dinner or done the favor they needed without recompense.

“Easy Rawlins,” the black Prince Charming hailed.

“Fearless Jones.”

We clasped hands and smiled broadly. Fearless was a mighty friend to have. He was one of the three people that Mouse claimed he wouldn't want to tangle with.

“Come on in, man,” he invited, as if this was his apartment rather than Milo Sweet's bail-bonds office.

The reception area of the disbarred lawyer's office was smallish but well appointed. There was an ornately carved rosewood desk, and three ash chairs along the wall to the left of the entrance.

From behind the desk Loretta Kuroko was rising to greet me. Tall for a woman, five-ten or so, there was no questioning her beauty. Her dark eyes actually glittered and her long black hair was tied up into a bun, making her extraordinary features seem to jump out at you.

“Loretta,” I said and we kissed.

She was wearing a black silk jacket over a yellow satin dress. Her shoes, I noticed, were bright red and the sash around her waist was deep green, dark enough to be mistaken for black in low light.

“Milo's down at the jail,” she said.

“I thought that he was usually back by now.”

“As a rule,” she said as she made it back to her chair, “but they arrested Thaddeus Melford for manslaughter, and Thad's lawyer needed Milo with him when he argued with the judge over him getting bail or not.”

Loretta was like that blue door; she made me happy. As a child she spent three years in a detainment camp for Japanese Americans during World War II. This experience caused her to hate white people. That's why she went to work for Milo. It's also why she dressed the way she did and used her own Japanese-made furniture for the front office.

“He'll be back soon,” she assured me.

“Come sit with me, Easy,” Fearless offered. “I haven't seen you in two, three years. How you doin'?”

I went to the wall and took a seat next to the reluctant Lothario.

“Cain't complain,” I lied. “Started a new detective agency. We call it WRENS-L.”

“What's that mean?”

“Whisper Natly is one of my new partners.”

“Whisper,” he said with a smile. “Paris an' me did some work with him some years back. He's a real nice guy.”

“Yeah he is,” I agreed. “Saul Lynx is the third partner. We were wondering what name we should use, and Whisper just took the initials of our first and last names and made as close to a word as he could.”

“I like it,” Fearless said, a little uncertain. “It's good to work for yourself. I mean most people who become bosses get all in your face and stuff. Better off without 'em. How's that girl of yours? That Bonnie Shay.”

“She's doing very well, thank you. Happy as a clam.”

Loretta gave me an inquisitive glance. It's hard to hide a broken heart from a woman.

“What you doin'?” I asked, to change the track of our conversation.

“I been chasin' down fools who buy bail from Milo and then run.”

“I thought you did work with Paris Minton?”

“He moved back up to San Francisco.”

“Really? He left his bookstore?”

Paris Minton and Fearless Jones were what I called a perfectly mismatched pair. Paris was as well-read and intelligent as Jackson Blue; he was just as much of a coward too. Fearless was not so smart but his will was indomitable, his heart attuned to truth, and physically he was the strongest man I ever met; possibly with the exception of Jo's son—Domaque. Separately, Fearless and Paris were just two more black men destined for ignominy, but together they formed the perfect genius of the American spirit.

“Me and Loretta open it up on weekends,” Fearless said, answering my question. “He got about ten thousand books in the upstairs storage area so we won't even make a dent before he move back down.”

“He's planning to come back?”

“He says no but Paris got to be down here. He know that between him and me there ain't nuthin' we cain't do.”

That was Fearless: He knew for certain things that he didn't understand.

“You want me to make you some tea, Easy?” Loretta asked in the lull of our conversation.

Before I could answer, the black door came open. In strode Milo Sweet wearing a baby blue three-piece suit, brown shirt, mustard tie, and a brown hat that might have been a derby at one time, before the weight of the world came down upon it. If Milo's skeleton was found in some troglodyte cave, the anthropologist's first thought would be Neanderthal, not Cro-Magnon. Five-seven at the height of his youth and one ninety if he was an ounce, he smelled of the cigar between his lips.

“Easy Rawlins,” he bellowed. Milo's voice was both gravelly and low. His place would have been in the bass section of the church choir—if he ever joined some congregation. His skin was always the darkest in the room, unless, that is, Fearless Jones was in that room with him.

“You had me goin' this morning,” Milo said. “That woman callin' me and sayin' that I in some way represented one of her inmates, and that I had sent Easy Rawlins down to give him some message.”

“Sorry about that, Milo. You know they weren't gonna let me in and I had made a promise.”

“That's okay,” the ex-lawyer proclaimed. “When I heard it was Avett Detention I wasn't worried.”

“Why not?”

“In a corrupt barrel, Avett's still a bad apple. So you here to ask for another favor?”

“Since you were so helpful on the phone I thought I'd come by and do you a good turn.”

Milo grunted and gestured at the door behind and to the left of Loretta's desk.

The bail bondsman's office was three times that of Loretta's space. He had a black desk the size of a baby grand piano. I often wondered how he moved that piece of furniture around but whenever we met, the business I was on kept me from idle chatter.

There was a brown leather sofa under a row of three windows that looked over the palm tree–lined slum streets of South Central Los Angeles.

He had a dozen metal file cabinets of every color and size set in a row and stacked one on top of another. But what I liked the most about his office was the visitor's chair.

It was a gangly light brown seat that reminded you of a two-year-old doe coming out of the woods after an especially bad winter. The legs didn't look like they could bear the weight of Loretta but I had seen Milo sitting on it, leaning back on the hind legs. That was the only chair I had ever seen that seemed to have a personality.

I sat on the chair and Milo leaned back in his.

“What you need, Mr. Rawlins?”

I took out the stack of cash Jasmine had given me and set it on the tan blotter before him.

The whites of Milo's eyes were bloodshot. He wheezed when just walking. He had a smoker's cough that was a fright, but for all that he seemed immortal.

Those godlike glaring eyes fixed themselves on the pile of cash.

“Eighteen thousand dollars,” I said.

Milo had to swallow before asking, “For what? You want me to shoot my mother or somethin'?”

“A man named Seymour Brathwaite has been arrested and charged with double homicide. This will cover his piece of the bail.”

“Bail on murder? Is this a black man accused?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And is it black men they say he killed?”

“White.”

“And they still set bail?”

“Charcoal Joe put his lawyer on it.”

“How'd you get mixed up with him?”

“Mouse called in a favor.”

“Damn, Easy, you travel in some bad company, man.”

“I vouch for the bail, Milo.”

A light entered the Cave God's eyes. He cocked his head to the side and said, “Then I will go down tonight. If everything you say is right they'll let him free in the morning.”

“There's something else,” I said.

“Yeah?”

“The men they say Seymour killed were a guy named Peter Boughman and somebody else they call Ducky. You ever hear of either of them?”

“No.”

“I'd like to know what there is to know about Boughman, and Ducky too if it's possible.”

Up until then Milo had been talking past the cigar clenched in his teeth. But then he plucked out the stogie and gave me a speculative look.

“I heard you started a new office with Whisper Natly and a Jew,” Milo said.

“Yeah?”

“And Whisper done brought that fine young thing Niska Redman to be your secretary.”

“He has.”

“So why not just ask her?”

“Come on now, Milo. I willin' to pay for this and we both know Loretta is ten or twelve IQ points over you. Just give her the job and bill me what it's worth.”

“You ain't no fun, Easy. Don't you know you s'posed to haggle over shit?”

I stood and said, “Eight a.m.?”

“County courthouse, on the dot.”

In the outer office Loretta rose to kiss me again. I had once done her a favor and she wanted me to know that she remembered.

When Fearless got to his feet and stuck out a hand I had a thought.

“Fearless.”

“Yeah, Easy?”

“Now that I started WRENS-L I might, or Saul or Whisper might, need some help now and then. You know…an extra man, a strong back, maybe some bodyguardin'. That means we can pay in cash under the table but not have a full-time man.”

“Okay,” Fearless allowed.

“You'd be our first choice. Pays forty dollars a day, that is if you're not too busy here.”

“Problem with workin' for Milo is that when people know I'm here they don't jump bail too much. Mr. Sweet only pay me my bonus when I bring somebody in, so I'm usually hungry with nuthin' to do.”

“Why don't you meet me down at the county courthouse tomorrow morning at eight? That'll be at least one day's pay.”

I called Jackson Blue's office from a phone booth on San Pedro but he was out. I called Jewelle's answering service but they didn't know where she was. When I tried a third number my daughter answered, “Blues' residence.”

Blues' residence
. It struck me that this would be a good title for a poem or song; maybe even a novel.

“Hey, honey.”

“Daddy!” she cried. “Are you okay?”

There are ten thousand perfectly good reasons not to have children but hearing the love in Feather's voice trumped every one.

“Fine,” I assured. “Just workin' a job. I was thinking that maybe it would be good for you to stay with Jewelle and Jackson one more night, maybe two. I mean if they could put up with a wild child like you.”

She giggled and then laughed. “Cilla York wanted me to stay at her house tonight so I could help her with her French homework.”

A feeling akin to despair rose up in my chest. I didn't want to miss a single moment of my daughter's life. I didn't want to be shot down in some alley over another man's troubles. I'd lost Bonnie but I still had Feather.

“Daddy?”

“Yeah?”

“Can I?”

“Can you what?”

“Stay at Cilla's tonight.”

“Is she nice?”

“You met her and her parents at the school orientation. Mr. York is the one that knew you because he saw you at P9.”

A building that thousands of people walked through every day but Jordan York remembered me, one of two suited black men who ever got past their corporate barricade.

“You can stay if you want, honey, but let Aunt Jewelle take you over.”

“Okay.”

“And tell Jewelle that I'll be picking you up from school tomorrow.”

“Okay.”

“Can I talk to her?”

“I love you, Daddy,” she said and then banged the phone down on its table.

“Easy?” Jewelle said a few moments later.

“Hey, J, thanks for keeping my girl.”

“She's so good with the baby. I think I might want to borrow her some more.”

“If you and Jackson ever wanna get away me an' Feather can take the baby. You know I'm good with diapers.”

“Maybe after a few months. What can I do for you?”

“Where's your old man?”

“Up in Oxnard with a few of the other senior vice presidents. He'll be back at the office soon.”

“Feather wants to go stay at a girlfriend's house tonight. Can you drop her off and maybe go in to see that it's okay?”

“You're a good man, Easy Rawlins.”

Rush hour in L.A. in the sixties wasn't too bad. I took surface streets again, wanting to give Jackson the time to get back from whatever company business he was handling. He'd be coming back on the company helicopter but still I wasn't in a hurry.

P9 was on Wilshire Boulevard in the heart of downtown.

I parked on the street because after 6:00 p.m. downtown was almost abandoned. P9 was one of the few corporations that had people working twenty-four hours a day; this because their investment base was international and their president, Jean-Paul Villard, wanted to keep his position on the multinational playing field.

“Can I help you?” a big white man in a private security uniform asked me.

It was a self-negating question because he put his body in the glass doorway to block my passage. My lower brain perceived this action as a threat, so I had to pause a moment to keep my fists from getting me into trouble.

“I said,” the guard repeated, “can I help you?”

“No,” I replied, cheerfully moving as if I was going to walk around him.

He put a hand on my shoulder and said, “This is private property, soul brother.”

Though shorter, the guard had at least fifteen pounds on me. The tan of his skin was natural coloration, not sun-induced, and his hair was both brown and greasy. His breath smelled of the roast beef he'd had for lunch.

I noticed all these things because in the United States you had to fight for your freedom every damn day; and sometimes that struggle was keeping from hurting somebody—no matter how good that hurt might have felt.

“Jim!” someone shouted. “Jim! Jim!”

Each exhortation got louder.

Finally my nemesis-of-the-moment turned his head.

Running toward us was another uniformed white guard. This one was slender. His movements were herky-jerky, reminding me of a marionette.

“Jim,” he said again, a little out of breath.

“What?” the larger guard demanded.

The newcomer took a gulp of air and then said, “This man is Ezekiel Porterhouse Rawlins and you do not want to have your hands on him.”

I think I must have smiled at that point. There wasn't one person in a hundred that knew me who could recite my full name; but Jackson Blue had put a bulletin downstairs telling the guards and interns to let me by when I came to the door.

The chubby guard regarded me.

“Get out of my way,” I said.

He winced and then obliged.

“What is going on 'ere?” a young woman inquired.

Asiette Moulon was five-three in stocking feet with black hair and gray eyes. Her skin identified her white ancestry, millennia in the making. A Frenchwoman from central France, she was quite fetching in her little black dress.

“Not a thing, Miss Moulon. Jim was just showing Mr. Rawlins in.”

Mr. Rawlins.
Times were changing.

“You are okay, Easy?” she asked me.

“I am lookin' at you.”

“You are,” she said with a smile.

“Yeah. Jim here didn't know me and was makin' sure I wasn't gonna sneak in the toilets and steal the copper pipes.”

She smiled, understanding me better than Jim ever could.

“Come on back to my office,” she said, taking me by the arm.

When I'd met Asiette she was just another intern guarding the front desk from salesmen and hustlers. The only difference was that she loved black Americans because, when she was a child, she first met us as soldiers liberating her nation.

I sat in the same green visitor's chair while she perched on top of the same orange desk she'd had the last time I was there.

“Overtime?” I asked her.

“Just putting my papers away,” she said. “I am very sad, you know.”

“Sad about what?”

“That you 'aven't called.”

“Called?”

“The last time I saw you you said that we would 'ave lunch.”

“Oh….”

“Don't worry. I am not angry. 'Ow 'ave you been?”

Her gray eyes disarmed me somehow. I tried to say that everything was fine but there was a catch in my throat and I was only able to say, “Okay.”

“Can I 'elp?” she asked, hearing the far-off distress in a single word.

“Maybe later,” I said.

Asiette's response was a smile on partially pouted lips.

Jackson's office was on the thirty-first floor of the P9 building.

The most difficult time Jewelle and I had making him take the job was the floor number. His superstitions told him that 31 was just 13 backward.

His secretary was gone by then so I walked to his private door, which was open, and called out, “Hey, Jackson.”

He was seated nearly forty feet away behind a huge white desk, his back turned toward the entrance as he gazed out of the window that comprised the outer wall.

“Easy?” he called out, his back still turned.

“Yeah.”

“Have a seat on the sofas, baby.” He turned and sprang up walking toward me, his gait determined to be that of a man.

Jackson was an odd product of the American ghetto. He was a genius and he was small. Impoverished and outcast, he was also afraid of almost everyone and everything. This fear however could not daunt his intelligence and so he was in trouble more times than not. And even though he was now a corporate kingpin with a six-figure salary, he was still haunted by the fears heaped upon him since the first day he could remember.

Toward the entrance of his office Jackson had two long yellow sofas facing each other over a glass coffee table. I took the couch on the left and he took the other.

“Asiette called,” he told me. “That girl likes you.”

“I need to talk, Jackson.”

“Talk about what?” he said, trying to master his natural dread of anything new.

“Rufus Tyler.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Like that.”

I told Jackson the whole story, leaving out nothing. It's not that I'm so honest or anything but Jackson was too smart for me to lie.

“Mouse on one side and Charcoal Joe on the other,” Jackson declared. “That's the definition of a rock and a hard place.”

“Tomorrow morning I get the young professor out of jail and I was wondering if you knew anything that would help me.”

“Like what?”

“Anything about Joe. I know you still make the rounds of the old neighborhood now and then. Maybe you heard something.”

“Not about Joe,” he said. “But I know that Seymour all right.”

“You do?”

“Yeah, man. Black PhD at twenty-one…I'm into that shit. I could work in my field a hundred days in a row and not meet a black scientist. They more rare than a Negro violinist in a big city orchestra.

“I had him right here on this couch. You know computers read paper cards today, but soon they be on the phone lines and radio waves. I wanted to come up with somethin' that would let a program stay in the air and we could call it down whenever we want. Seymour's a physicist so I wanted to get his ideas, maybe hire him. But he liked the university too much so we didn't get nowhere.”

“You think he could be a murderer?”

“Anybody be a killer, Ease. You know that. Shit, there's grandmothers poison their own husbands after fifty years in the same bed.”

“But did Brathwaite seem bent?”

“No. He was pretty innocent and sheltered. Didn't even talk like a brother.”

“And nothing about Joe?” You had to ask Jackson any important question twice.

“Look, Easy, I don't even mention that mothahfuckah's name. I don't want him and me in the same breath, talked about in the same room. Because if he sets his sights on me and P9 there'd be some fireworks for sure.”

I could see his argument.

“Thanks, Jackson.” I stood to take my leave.

“How's Bonnie?” he asked, before I could take a step.

“Why?”

“Jewelle called and said you two broke up.”

I told him the tale.

When I was through he nodded as if this was somehow expected.

“Did you know about it?” I asked him.

“About the boyfriend? No. But it was obvious about you and Bonnie.”

“Obvious how?”

“All you got to do is look, Easy. All you got to do is look. She like a granite cliff and you the ocean poundin' away. Seein' you together was beautiful, but you know in the end one's unable to leave and the other always got one foot out the door.”

That was the closest I came to crying over losing Bonnie. When he wasn't afraid, Jackson didn't only have a mind, he also had a very smart heart.

“Oh yeah, man,” he said. “Here.”

He handed me a slip of notepaper that was folded in half. Written on the outside was the word
grandmamma
.

I pocketed the paper, sniffed back a tear, and walked down to the elevator wondering if I would live long enough to forget my pain.