Little Green (25 page)

At that time Jewelle’s rental management operation was on Avalon. Evander and I walked into the storefront office: two men traveling under a whole sky of troubled clouds. A wide counter formed a small foyerlike area as you entered the long room. This counter blocked entrance into the greater part of the office, where there were six desks set up for agents who helped people find places to live.

A young colored woman with curly blond hair and thick red lips stood pouting behind the counter. Two men and one woman were working at three of the desks.

I remember that there was a burly-looking fly hovering near the wall to my right. It was humming peacefully, almost as if it was flying in its sleep.

“May I help you?” the receptionist asked, insincerely, I thought.

“Easy Rawlins,” I said.

“Nobody here with that name.”

“That’s my name. You manage my properties.”

“Say what?” She was amber-skinned and quite pretty. But the sneer on her face told of an unattractive life that she’d survived, just barely.

“Can I speak to the office manager?” I asked.

“Easy, you said?”

“Yes.”

We watched her turn from the blockade and wander to the very back of the room, where a slim, dark-skinned man sat behind a blond desk. He wore a black suit, white shirt, and powder blue tie. He was prim and also discontent, the male counterpart to the receptionist’s scornful visage.

He asked the young woman to repeat my request and then, with great reluctance, he stood and walked to the front. The young woman followed him.

“Yes?” he said. “Can I help you?” He was in his forties, but the weight of those years had yet to settle on him.

“Easy Rawlins.”

“Do you have proof?” He accented the question by shifting his left shoulder and holding out his left palm.

The Gator’s Blood told me to sock him, but I reached for my wallet instead.

He studied the driver’s license like it was a ten-page rental agreement and then handed it back.

“What do you want?” he asked.

“I need to put up my friend Evander here in an apartment for a few days, maybe a week,” I said.

“And?” the prissy real estate agent asked.

“I’d like you to make that happen.”

“Sorry,” he said.

“About what?”

“I’m busy. You can’t expect to walk in here and have us do something just like that. We represent over eighteen hundred units.”

“And twenty-seven of them are mine.”

He answered that statement with a twist of his lips. This reminded me of the gestural disdain cultivated by churchgoers I’d known.

“May I speak to Miss MacDonald, please?” I asked.

“I don’t know where she is.”

“I do,” I said. “May I use a phone?”

Our eyes met and he gleaned something from the tone in my voice. He wasn’t sure what that something was, but it leavened his demeanor from scorn to suspicion.

Reaching under the counter, he came out with a big black telephone that was probably older than the disdainful receptionist.

“I’ll have to dial,” he said. “We don’t allow toll calls.”

“Sure,” I agreed. “Tell the switchboard operator that it’s Easy Rawlins for Jewelle MacDonald. She’ll transfer the call to Jewelle wherever she is. You can talk to her yourself.”

I recited the number and he dialed with equal parts precision and wariness.

We waited while a phone in some other part of town rang.

“Yes,” the thus far nameless office manager said. “I’d like to speak to Jewelle MacDonald. What? … Oh, it’s for …” He looked at me.

“Easy Rawlins,” I said.

“Easy Rawlins,” he repeated. “Yes, yes, I’ll hold.”

The man looked at me with different eyes. I was a sudden surprise in a landscape he felt that he knew inside and out.

After a few moments he said, “Yes, yes, Miss MacDonald? This is Clive Chester at the Avalon office. No, no, he’s here. I was just dialing for him. Sure, right away.”

He handed me the phone like a baton at an intermediary leg of the relay race.

“Jewelle?”

“Easy,” she said with great relief in her mature voice. I always thought of Jewelle as a child. It was a constant surprise when I was reminded that she had turned into a powerful businesswoman. “Jackson told me that you had come out of that coma. He said some crazy stuff about voodoo, but I told him he was nuts. I’m so happy to hear your voice.”

“How you doin’, girl?”

“Great. Business is good and I’m building a little empire around me and Blue. Are you okay?”

“You know me, got to keep on movin’.”

“What do you need to help you on your way?”

“Can you direct Mr. Chester here to find and open a unit in one of my places or elsewhere and to install my friend Evander in it today?”

“Of course,” she said. “Is that all?”

“Yeah.”

“Did Clive give you a problem?”

“In his defense I must tell you that me and the boy look like we just got back from trench warfare.”

“Okay, Easy.” She giggled, sounding once more like the child I’d once known. “Give Mr. Chester the phone and I will make it happen.”

It was a pleasure to watch the office manager sputter and try to
explain himself. In the end he just started nodding and grunting his agreement.

When the call was over he cradled the phone and said, “I’ll just clear up some things here and then drive the young man over to our Colby Street apartments. There aren’t any units available in your places, and Colby is partly furnished.”

“Will you also get your people to put in a phone for him to use and then give that number to Jewelle’s secretary for the answering service?”

“She didn’t mention anything about a phone.”

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s call her back.”

I held out my hand for the phone again. Clive Chester did not move. He was looking for a place where he didn’t have to seem like he was losing the contest. But he was losing, had already lost.

“We can manage a phone connection. The jack’s already in the apartment, and there’s a phone company number we can call.…”

I left Evander on the sidewalk outside the real estate office.

“We will answer all of your questions,” I said to the boy. “Everything from the money to your father’s death. I promise you that. But keep your head down until I tell you it’s safe. And if you call Esther, remind her, if she doesn’t already know, not to tell her mother where you’re staying.”

Three blocks away I stopped at a phone booth and called EttaMae Harris’s home.

“Hello?” she said on the eighth or ninth ring.

“Hey, Etta, how you doin’?”

“Easy Rawlins, oh, Lord, am I glad to hear your voice. You know Raymond brought me up to your place after the accident. It broke my heart to see you like that, baby. I been prayin’ for you.”

“Thanks, Etta. I hear you sent LaMarque down Texas for the summer.”

“Got him on my brother’s farm. You know he needs to get some country in his bones. He got mixed up with the gangs around here and I had to send him away or Raymond was gonna start a war. You know he don’t have the patience of a rabid dog.”

“Yes, ma’am. Holdin’ Mouse back is like trying to put your arms around a tornado.”

“It’s good to hear your voice, Easy. What do you need?”

“Peter.”

“Yes, Mr. Rawlins?” Etta’s manservant said after a short wait.

“Jackson call you, Pete?”

“They’re at the Biltmore downtown,” he said, “suite twenty-one thirty-five. You’re supposed to meet him at seven thirty at a restaurant called Angelo’s. He said you knew where that was.”

Angelo’s was
the
place for Italian cuisine in Los Angeles at that time. The pasta was cooked al dente and the sauces had the full body provided by garlic, red wine, and extra-virgin olive oil. His wife, Angela, baked the bread every morning.

I found Jackson and Jean-Paul sitting with a square-shouldered, square-faced man wearing Brooks Brothers gray. When I entered the semisecluded booth at the back of the restaurant, the stranger rose first.

His glasses frames were rose-gold in color, and his blue-gray eyes reminded me of Clive Chester’s—wary of the new. Once again I was an unknown quantity in a previously known universe.

“Monsieur Merkan,” Jean-Paul said, also rising. “This is the man I was telling you about.”

“Easy Rawlins,” I said, extending a hand.

“You’re the one making these accusations?” he said, not taking the proffered hand.

“I’m the one setting up the proof,” I corrected. “Jackson here is the one who made the allegation.”

The flesh around Merkan’s left eye quivered.

“Shall we ’ave a seat?” Jean-Paul suggested.

“I want to tell you right off that I don’t believe a word of this,” Merkan said as soon as we were settled. “John Portia and Theodore Huggins have been with my company for nearly twenty years. Johnny’s engaged to my niece.”

Angelo came to our table at that moment.

“Easy,” he hailed.

I stood to hug the Italian-born restaurateur. He was a roly-poly man with coarse mustache hairs, an antifascist who had a great love of his native land. Bonnie and I had met him one evening on a date at his place. I started talking about my experiences in Italy during the war and won his favor.

“What do you wish for dinner?”

“Just keep it comin’,” I said.

He nodded and said to my guests, “You are all welcome here.”

He went away, and a slender young short-haired waiter came to serve us red wine.

When the waiter had gone I said to Merkan, “If you don’t believe it then why did you come?”

“Are you questioning me?” Merkan asked.

“Are you calling Jackson a liar?”

My insolence enraged the captain of industry, but I didn’t mind; I had learned in the war, by bitter experience, that all of us, in spite of any constitution or theory of government, were equal, and equally vulnerable to one another.

“What right does either one of you have to impugn the integrity of senior officers of one of the largest companies in America?” he stated.

“Jean-Paul,” I said.

“Yes, Easy?”

“Maybe we should call the police in on this. I know a cop would probably come out. Mr. Merkan can go home to his bags of money and wait for the news of his officers’ arrest.”

“Henri?” Jean-Paul said to Merkan.

“What?” Merkan snapped.

“It is either you or the police. I believe these men, my men. I want to see what is ’appening.”

Merkan didn’t like Negroes; he most certainly had never been on eye-to-eye terms with one. He probably didn’t like the French either. But there we were.

“Fine,” he said. “But when I prove to you that this little shit here is lying, I expect you to can his ass.”

Jackson held up his wineglass, giving a wordless toast. Jean-Paul smiled broadly.

The hotel suite was well-appointed, composed of colors that were muted and austere, gathering light from the chandelier and lamps and magnifying it with oddly subdued intensity.

Jackson and I were sitting in the living room area. He was sipping cognac while I drank Coke from a six-and-a-half-ounce bottle modeled, it seemed, after the figure of Jayne Mansfield.

“I got three microphones hidden around the room, Easy,” he’d told me before we entered. “JP and Merkan will be able to hear everything in the connecting suite.”

“So what do you think about
Cotton Comes to Harlem
now, Jackson?” I asked to keep up his courage while not letting anything important come out with the white men listening in.

Merkan had been joined by two white security men outside the restaurant. They wore suits of a slightly inferior cut to their master’s and carried pistols in shoulder holsters.

“I think that Himes is equal to Ellison,” Jackson opined.

“You compare
Cotton
to
Invisible Man
?”

“Not just that,” Jackson countered. “Chester got thirteen other books and still countin’. Ellison is good, but you know the word
masterpiece
comes from paintin’.”

“So?”

“There ain’t nevah been an artist in history evah painted just one paintin’ and had it called a masterpiece. You got to do a lot of work, get experience before you can say somethin’ like that. I like Ralph’s book, but I think it’s Chester get down to where the shit stinks.
Ellison made a window that the white man could look inta, but it’s Chester made a door so we had a way out the burnin’ house.”

At that moment I forgot about TexOk and fingerprints, about a boy who wanted to kill the man that had gotten me to save his life. Jackson had the ability to set a fire in my mind. He was forever thinking, and a thinking man is always in trouble—especially if his skin doesn’t fit into the color scheme of the dominant culture.

The bell to the suite chose that moment to ring.

Jackson made to rise but I gestured for him to stay where he was.

I went to the door and opened it.

There were five men there to greet me. The man up front and two directly behind him were muscle. I expected that. If Jackson really had shot a cop, which I’m sure Charles Rumor had claimed, Johnny and Theodore would have been fools to come unprotected.

The three white men in cut-rate business suits were probably off-duty cops, or maybe they were ex-cops or underemployed security guards. Their stances indicated that they expected trouble.

I smiled and stepped backward.

“Come in, gentlemen,” I said in greeting.

The two backup guards pressed past me and checked out the rooms. They searched the toilets, bedroom, and utility kitchen—went through all the closets. Nothing. The door to the connecting suite was locked. There was really no reason to be suspicious of that.

Finally the principals came in.

Theodore Huggins was once again wearing the brick red suit and blush pink shirt that Jackson had described. He was tall and blousy. Rumor and Jackson were right: He did look like an animate pile of rubble. Even his grayish complexion reminded me of the mortar used to pave factory walls and chimneys.

Huggins’s hair was close-cropped, black with a few stubbles of white. Johnny Portia had longish, Elvis Presley–like black hair and wore a dark green suit that was tailored to his compact form. He carried a sleek black briefcase with his left hand.