Little Green (30 page)

I arrived at the 77th Street precinct at a little past eight. The good thing about the police is that they’re open twenty-four hours a day. It often seemed to me that the constabulary was a modern-day church—always there … waiting for your confession.

“Yeah?” the desk sergeant asked when I approached his desk.

I had a valid carry license but left my gun in the car. The police in L.A. were a skittish lot. Even the sight of a pistol on a black man’s person might call down a hail of gunfire.

“I’d like a powwow with Melvin Suggs if you don’t mind, Sergeant.” I might have even smiled.

“Rawlins, right?”

“Yes, sir.” I was feeling very Southern and civilized, the way that the ex-slave-owning, Jim Crow–enforcing white Southerners liked to pretend to be. I was a new man with a new life and three-quarters of a pack of Camels in his breast pocket. But the world I lived in had not yet registered the changes in itself or in me.

The wait was nearly forty-five minutes.

I was expecting Suggs to come from the swinging doors behind the desk sergeant’s post, but instead he came through the front door wearing a burnt orange–colored suit and shiny black shoes. His pressed shirt wasn’t even white; it was lemon with little cherry dots here and there.

“This way,” he grunted as he rushed past me through the swinging doors.

We climbed three stairs and turned right through a door marked
EXIT
. This brought us to a stairwell that went up and down and to a door that probably went outside. I followed as Suggs rushed up the stairs all the way to the fourth floor.

There we crossed a large room filled with booking desks, alleged felons, and their captors.

It’s a strange thing to see a powerful man’s hands chained behind him, almost poetic in a brutal sort of way. Maybe those fists had beaten some hapless pedestrian to the ground, or the fingers had choked the life out of a woman that he loved so much he couldn’t let go; but now those fists and fingers were like bunches of dark plantains hanging down around the crack of his butt, helpless in every way possible.

Melvin led me to a desolate corner of the booking floor where there was a brown door painted on in black letters that read, “offlimits”; no caps, no punctuation. Through this door and up half a flight we came to a solitary and dusty office, dimly lit through a window by an outside security light. Suggs ushered me in, shut the door, turned on the desk lamp, and then collapsed into his squeaky-wheeled chair.

I took my seat across the desk from him and lit up a Camel.

“I thought you’d be here at work,” I said. “I didn’t mean for them to get you out of bed.”

“Do I look like I was in bed?” he asked. “I told the desk to call me if you came in. I’m interested in this Rose thing.”

“You still got them here?” I asked.

“Transferred downtown. They’ll be out by eleven in the morning unless you decide to come in, with your friend, and make a complaint.”

“My friend’s shy.”

“Yeah.”

That might have been the end of our talk, but we both wanted something, maybe some things.

“You sure that Handel works for Rose?” I asked.

“For the past eight years,” Suggs replied. “Why?”

“I don’t know. I just heard that he might be working on his own, that’s all.”

“Hm,” Suggs said, sitting back. “Yeah … that fits.”

“Fits what?”

“Handel didn’t call the Rose lawyer, and the guys he had with him were from Vegas. Neither one had ever been busted in L.A.”

“Yeah,” I said to myself. “That’s what I thought.” Because Rose didn’t ask about Easy Rawlins. It seemed that he would have wanted to know about another black man that he’d sent Handel to brace.

“What you got on Rose?” Suggs asked. Then he yawned.

“First I need to know some things.”

“Like what?”

“I know that Haman has two guys around him named Bobby and Mitchell, and you say this other guy is Keith Handel. Is there anybody else he’s got?”

Suggs pulled a thick and dusty folder out of the desk and opened it up in front of him. He paged back and forth for at least three minutes.

“He’s had quite a few cohorts over the years. He works for a downtown mobster named Lofty, Aaron ‘Lofty’ Purdy from Cincinnati. It says here that there’s a Giles Lehman that he’s tight with. Giles and
Keith are his underbosses; at least, that’s what the organized crime unit calls ’em. I say that they’re just midsize thugs in a broke-nose jungle.”

“You got an address on Lehman?”

“Why?”

“I’d like to strike a deal with him,” I said.

“What kind of deal?”

“That’s my business.”

“I need more than that, Rawlins.”

“Do you have in that folder that Haman Rose runs a Laundromat down near Venice and Lincoln and sells grass in laundry bags?”

“No.”

“How about that he pays the cops down there to leave him and his business alone?”

Suggs had become subverbal, shaking his head and looking like he just licked a lemon.

“This is fact?” he asked.

“I don’t know. It’s just what I heard along the way.”

“Okay,” Suggs half agreed. “So if I sting this place I get Lehman too.”

“I need to talk to Lehman first.”

“Why?”

“From what I hear Giles Lehman and I have a lot in common.”

“I’m still the law, Easy. I can’t let you just go out and do whatever you want.”

“I know that, Melvin, I do. That’s why I’m giving you this. But if you’re gonna want any more help I need that address.”

It only took six or seven minutes for him to pass me the numbers.

G. Lehman lived on Renvert Street in Culver City.

The Gator’s Blood felt like it was permanently in my system by then. I didn’t even need to drink it anymore. I was tired but it didn’t feel like I was about to die. It wasn’t the first time that the blue sofa in my office stood in for a bed. I napped the night away, dreaming about a man on a raft sailing between two islands, both of which were in flames.

I woke up four or five times but always, when I fell asleep again, I was somewhere in relation to that man and his hapless voyage. He wasn’t worried, this intrepid sailor. He knew that sooner or later, when the flames died down, the combatants would also be dead. All he had to do was keep from landing too soon and paradise would be his.

Giles Lehman’s apartment occupied the middle floor of a turquoise-colored triplex in the center of the city-suburban block. I made my way up the inner stairwell somewhere around eight the next morning. I used the brass knocker to announce myself to a dead man.

That was the most logical conclusion. The only man missing was Lehman, Giles. The blood on those burlap sacks said that somebody had died. And Giles was the only man not around.

Knocking was a useless gesture, I knew, but there was a certain decorum that had been drilled into me since childhood. I would knock before breaking and entering; that’s just what a civilized man was supposed to do. The knocker hammering against the cheap, wood-veneered frame door made a hollow sound.

I was counting to twelve out of deference. When I reached nine she pulled the door open, the smell of alcohol reaching me on her first breath.

“Who the fuck are you?” She was a synthetic blonde, and lovely at one time, maybe even recently. Taller than most women and shorter than I, she wavered, unsteady from a nightlong bender, holding on to the doorknob and sneering.

“I’m looking for Giles,” I said, half in truth. “I owe him some money and he said I could come by in the morning as long as it was after seven.”

Details—give someone enough of them and it sounded like you were telling the truth. Add to that the possibility of money and even racial differences began to lose importance.

The woman was fortyish and grief-stricken. She’d been crying in her drinks and alone in a way that was contradictory to clear thinking. She stared at me, slowly culling through the words and the meanings they held in her jumbled and pickled brain.

“What’s your name?” she asked after a lot of teetering and squeezing of eyelids.

“Sam,” I said. “Sam Sellers. Did Giles tell you about me?”

“I … I don’t remember. How much money do you owe him?”

“I’m sorry, ma’am, but I don’t know you. Is this even Mr. Lehman’s apartment?”

She grinned and was maybe trying to look sexy. She got lost in this role for a moment or so and then said, “My name is Shawnie. Shawnie Lehman.”

She held up her left hand, which had a gold band on the ring finger.

“That just means you’re married,” I said. “It could be to some other man.”

She invited me in, letting go of the knob and waving at the same time. All that motion was too much for her inebriated coordination, and Shawnie Lehman tumbled into my arms.

“Oops,” she said, pressing against my chest to keep from dropping to the floor.

I got an arm around her waist and carried her to the sofa in the sun-bright sitting room that lay behind her. I put her on a walnut-footed coral couch that was shorter than its modern-day heirs. I sat in a plain white chair at the side. The floor was made from a golden-hued wood that I could not identify. It was a pleasant room, with a painting of flowers in a vase on the wall and a vase filled with dying roses on a stand between two large windows.

“Sam?” she said.

“Yes?”

“That’s your name?”

“Yes, it is.”

“Who sent you here? That pimp?”

“What pimp?”

“What do you want?” She was near tears.

“Are you okay, ma’am?”

“No. No, I’m not. Giles isn’t here. He’s not coming back either.”

“He left you?” I felt like an ass misleading her, but what choice did I have?

“I got a bottle of good whiskey in the kitchen, Sam. Why don’t you go out there and pour us both a shot?”

“It’s kinda early, Mrs. Lehman.”

“It’s all the same fuckin’ day, Sam.”

I went through a doorway she gestured toward and found myself in a stubby little kitchen with bright yellow tiles and a table with its own benches built into the wall next to a window that looked out on a plane of red and green roofs.

The less than half-empty Sterling’s whiskey bottle said that the spirits were twenty-five years old. I poured her a glass and me one too. I had no intention of imbibing, but she had to believe I was drinking with her if I was going to get what I wanted.

When I came back into the sitting room, a glass in each hand,
I was met by a mostly erect Shawnie. She was holding a small-caliber pistol and grinning like someone who just pulled a good prank.

“Okay, now, Stan,” she said. “Tell me what the fuck it is you’re doing here.”

“The name is Sam,” I said as I leaned over to put the glasses down on the maple and blue-and-white-tiled coffee table in front of the short sofa.

Between my words and actions I used a backhanded swipe to grab the gun from her fingers.

“Hey!” she complained, “that’s mine.”

I sat down on the same white chair, flipped out the cylinder of the .25 pistol, removed and pocketed the bullets. Then I handed her the gun and said, “Here, you can have it. I just don’t want to get shot.”

“You think you’re pretty slick, don’t you, Stan?”

“Sam.”

She slumped down on the couch, picked up a glass, and drained it.

“What do you want?” she asked.

“So many things that you’d think I was Little Lord Fauntleroy on Christmas Eve.”

I smiled and Shawnie grabbed hold of the second glass, putting it away like a pro.

“Giles is gone,” she said to the empty glass. “Him and Keith and that pimp thought they were so smart. Giles always thought he was some kinda mastermind. Make a big hit and go out to Vegas, that’s what he said. Now I called down to the Laundromat and they told me he left town.…” Shawnie slammed the shot glass down on the table tiles and it shattered between her fingers. “You know what it means when they tell you someone’s left town?”

I nodded and then looked down.

Her hand was bleeding.

I went back to the kitchen, got two hand towels and a glass of water. When I returned she was up again, pointing that pistol at me again—at least, I was pretty sure it was the same gun. The fingers
curled around the butt and trigger leaked blood on the golden wood. There might have been ammunition in a hiding place, but I didn’t think that she’d had the time or the coordination to reload.

Anyway … why should she want to shoot me?

She pulled the trigger on an empty chamber and there I was; a dead man who cheated the call once more.

She kept pulling the trigger as I walked up to her, put down the napkins and glass, and took the gun away again.

This time I sat next to her on the sofa, dampened one cloth, and washed off the bloody fingers. I felt around for glass in the cuts but found none. I wrapped the second towel around the little wounds and closed my fist gently around her hand.

“Hold it like this until the bleeding stops,” I said.

“Thank you,” she replied in such a way as to ask my understanding of her attempt at murdering me.

“Nuthin’ to it,” I said.

“I loved that fool,” she uttered. Her eyes were the color of okra, striated green and bark with no glint or sparkle.