Little Green (29 page)

“How often do you wash your feet?”

“I do it pretty much every day, and then there’s Edgar.”

“What is?”

“I know this guy named Edgar who lives down on Venice. He’s married, you know, but he’s kinda crazy about me,” she said. “Well, maybe not about me, but people like me, and I don’t think he’s weird.”

“And what’s that got to do with your feet?”

“Edgar works at this parking lot over on Pico, and I go there and he washes my feet.”

“Just washes them?”

“Yeah. He gets all excited about feet, and I don’t like it when they get too dirty. He tries to pay me but I only take money if I need it for something. I tell Edgar that we’re there for each other and he doesn’t have to feel like it’s for sale.”

“What’s he like?” I don’t know why I asked. Maybe I suspected that there was more to the story.

“He’s fat with curly hair and short fingers. Sometimes he cries when he’s washing them. It’s like some really important thing but really not about me at all.”

I was quiet for a long while after that. Ruby was a truth that I didn’t need to know. I wasn’t afraid of or repulsed by her, but she was so loose in her approach to life that she flung doors open that wanted to stay closed.

“He’s married and has three kids,” Ruby said after a few minutes had passed. “I always call before I hitch down there. I asked him if he wanted to ball me one time but he said, ‘No, ma’am, I couldn’t do that.’ I really like it that he calls me ma’am and then washes between my toes.”

“We might have to lie to Haman Rose,” I said.

“Why?”

“That guy Maurice used Evander somehow to steal money that I think belongs to Haman. Haman wants to hurt Evander, and I’d rather he didn’t, and so I want to feel him out without letting on that I know Evander. You know how to lie, right?”

Ruby scrunched up her long face as if this notion was some long-ago memory.

“The best kind of lying,” I continued, “is by limiting the truth.”

“What does that mean?”

“Answer anything he says without letting on about me and my interest in Evander.”

The hippie’s eyebrows knitted as she gazed at me the way someone might look at a strange creature in a zoo. Then she nodded and smiled as if she had worked out my species.

“But what if he already knows?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said. Keith Handel knew, but Keith was still in jail—I hoped. “Even if he does, you don’t have to. You just say that I know Terry, and Terry sent us both down there.”

The Laundromat was on Lincoln Boulevard a few blocks south of Venice. It was a broad and shallow front with twenty or so coin-operated washers and maybe half that many dryers. On the right side as you entered was a waist-high counter behind which stood an Asian woman (I thought she might have been Vietnamese but wasn’t sure) who worked folding clothes that customers dropped off to get washed and folded for fifty cents a pound.

“Hi, Loo,” Ruby said to the short, rum-colored woman.

The laundress nodded but didn’t smile.

“We need to talk to Mr. Rose.”

“Busy,” Loo said.

“But Mr. Terry said that we had to talk to him.”

“Not here.”

“If Haman wants to keep doing business with us he better get unbusy and come on out here,” I said with some feeling.

Loo looked up at me.

Her right eye was dead in its socket with a jagged white scar starting at the temple and slashing down in the direction of the bridge of her nose. Her other eye worked but it seemed flat and largely unobservant, like a specialized organ designed for one purpose, detecting danger.

“You wait here,” she said to me.

With that Loo put down the orange rayon sweater she was folding and went through what I can only describe as a fold in the wall beside the table she was working on.

“That was kind of rough, wasn’t it, Easy?” Ruby said when the laundress had gone.

“I believe that she has lived through worse.”

“But people should be nice to each other,” she argued.

“I’m nice. It’s just that my kind of nice comes from a place where people like it rough.”

This admission elicited a smile from my protector.

I liked her too.

A few minutes later two white men in ill-fitting leisure suits came out from the wall like new characters in a dull and yet unpredictable play. The shirtlike jackets both had four buttons down the front. One suit was tan and the other almost black. The men were different heights; the short one on my left sported a mouse-brown mustache and the other one wore sunglasses. The man with the sunglasses and light-colored suit had a bandage on his left hand that seemed to go up pretty high on the forearm.

“Who are you?” the mustache asked.

“Name’s Joppy,” I said, “Joppy Shag.”

The words rolled off my tongue easily. I remember thinking that I should have told Ruby that name before we entered the laundry. Joppy Shag had been a bartender and a good friend before he betrayed me and was subsequently murdered by Mouse. Joppy had died within days, maybe only hours, of Frank Green’s demise.

“What do you want?” Sunglass Man asked.

Loo worked her way around the two men back into the room, then started folding again.

“I’m here representing Terry Aldrich,” I said.

“So? He knows the procedure.” That was Sunglass Man again.

“He did,” I said. “And then Maurice Potter rolls up to Terry’s and says that Terry gets a ten percent discount on three keys that he will deliver. He took the money but never delivered the dope.”

The thugs looked at each other, and Mustache went back through the fold in the wall.

This departure acted as a kind of punctuation, a semicolon or a dash, in our conversation. Sunglass Man stared from behind his dark lenses while Loo folded and Ruby moved close enough that her shoulder was touching my left triceps from behind.

I noticed that there was some swelling and discoloration around the left eye of Sunglass Man. He’d been banged up pretty bad. I
didn’t think much about it at the time, because guys like him, and guys like me, often got dings and bruises from a day’s labor.

Mustache came back in less than two minutes and said, “You two come on back.”

The aperture in the wall was about half the width of a normal door. It went in two feet, stopped at a wall, turned left and then right and then left again, bringing us into a large room that had no particular purpose other than to hold two desks, half a dozen wood chairs, and a console radio, television, and record-player combo.

The television was set on a boxing match with the volume turned off. The record playing was Connie Stevens, and the radio was whispering news in hushed counterpoint to her sweet voice.

Behind the smaller desk sat a wide man in a dark purple suit with a black cashmere long coat draped across his broad shoulders. His face was birdlike but not delicate or fine; it was more like the visage of some ancient predator bird that ran down dire wolves in the times before man made his presence felt.

“What’s this shit Bobby and Mitchell tell me?” Haman Rose said.

I answered, “Maurice Potter collected three hundred and fifty dollars from Terry promising to deliver product from you and then he just disappears.”

“Terry knows that that’s not how it works,” Haman said. His gaze was both suspicious and contemplative.

“Terry had no reason to question Maurice. He said he was representing you.”

“Was he with a nigger?” Sunglass Man asked.

“No,” I said. “The cracker was alone.”

Ruby giggled.

“And your name is?” Haman asked.

“Mr. Shag.”

That got a smile out of the gangster boss.

“Well, Shag,” he said. “All I can tell your boss is that Maurice
wasn’t working for me. He attacked my man Mitchell here and his friend too. We’ve been looking all over town for him.”

Sunglass Man was Mitchell. His bruise and wound were making more sense.

“When did Potter tell Terry this lie?” Haman asked.

“A week ago,” I said. “That’s why Terry sent me with Ruby. He’s runnin’ low on product and wanted to know what’s what.”

“And there wasn’t a colored brother with him?” Haman asked.

“Not that I know of. What was his name?”

“You think a man attackin’ me’s gonna tell his name?” Mitchell asked. He was belligerent.

“I don’t know what happened, man,” I said. “All I know is that Terry asked me to come down here and see where his shit is at.”

“We’re looking for Maurice,” Haman said. “But he didn’t work for me and so I can’t help Terry.”

“How much is this Maurice guy worth to you?” I asked.

“Why?”

“I could look for him if it meant a few dollars. I mean, I know a lot of black people who run around up on the Strip. Maybe I know the man was with Maurice.”

“You find me Maurice Potter and I will put twenty-five hundred dollars in your pocket.”

“I’ve seen Potter before,” I said, “up at Lula’s whorehouse behind the Shangri-La club. Can you tell me what the black man looked like?”

“Like a nigger,” Mitchell said.

“You mean exactly like me?”

“He was younger and shorter,” the henchman admitted, “a kid really. He had some heft too.”

“Dark like me?”

“A little lighter.”

“High voice or raspy?”

“He didn’t say a word. His eyes were crazy, though. All over the place, and he looked scared.”

“Is he the one beat on you?” I asked.

“You think you’re funny?” Mitchell took a step toward me. His friends watched with some interest.

“I was just wonderin’ if he was a bad dude or what,” I said, getting into the rhythm of my persona.

“Maurice had the gun,” Mitchell said. “Nigger just grabbed up the—”

“So that’s all you need,” Haman said, interrupting Mitch before he could talk about the money.

“Not much to go on,” I said, “but I could look if you wanted.”

That was a crucial moment. I was like a foreign soldier offering to become a spy for the enemy. They had no reason to believe me or trust me, but, then again, if I was a part of the robbery why would I be there?

“You know this man, Ruby?” Haman asked.

“Yes. He’s been hangin’ around Terry’s lately.”

“Do you know Maurice?”

“I’ve seen him. He’s the one that always wears all green, right?”

“You ever seen Shag here with Maurice?”

Ruby turned to stare at me, thinking hard. This, of course, made me wonder what I really knew about her.

Then she said, “I never saw them together.”

“Did Terry send you?”

“He said we could take his Jag but instead we came in a red Barracuda.”

This unimportant detail seemed to satisfy the headman.

“Okay, Shag,” he said. “You go tell Terry that I can’t help it that he threw his money away. Tell him that either me or Keith has to say the rules have changed. I don’t have any dope for him today but he can send somebody down tomorrow.

“And if you find Maurice or his partner I will make it worth your while.”

There were other questions I could have asked, but we had come to the end of our tête-à-tête. Haman Rose was a dangerous
man: Ruby and I were in a precarious position as long as we were with him. He had given me a trove of unintentional information and all I had to do was push it just a little, but not in that room and not then.

“I’ll be in touch,” I said. “I surely will.”

“You wanna pull into some parking lot and ball me in the backseat?” Ruby asked a few blocks from the Laundromat.

“What?”

“I’m all excited,” she said. “I wanna get it.”

She was sitting on her knees in the seat looking at me.

“I’m old enough to be your father, girl.”

“You were the same age the other night at Terry’s.”

“And I thought you and Terry were a thing now.” I don’t know why I argued; maybe it was my way of biding time on the bigger issues in my life.

“So? People don’t own each other. He doesn’t care what I do.”

“I’ll get you up to his place and you can get together with him.”

“You don’t want me?”

“I want you in all kinds of ways, Ruby,” I said with both feeling and honesty. “I do. But I got a job to do, and maybe there’s a woman I love who I want to be with.”

“That Bonnie?”

I nodded, thinking that she had paid closer attention to my words than I thought.

“What does she have to do with me?” Ruby asked.

I laughed at the brazen honesty of the hippie girl.

“Will you please let me off this hook, child?” I asked. “I’m an old man who almost died a couple of months ago, and right now I’m just trying to do a simple job.”

She smiled and turned around in her seat.

“Sometimes I just don’t understand men,” she said to the world at large.

“What fun would there be in that?” I reached out and squeezed her hand. This seemed to satisfy her need temporarily. That was the least I could do. After all, Ruby had been instrumental in getting me over the hump of my slapdash investigation.

Ruby gave me another wet kiss before jumping out of the car at Terry’s mansion. I watched her running on those young haunches, thinking that I was alive again but not exactly the same man. I would miss the old Easy Rawlins. He was running into the yard behind Ruby, looking for that sweet oblivion that all young men, white and black, thought could save them from the greater darkness that dogged their heels.