Little Green (6 page)

“Excuse me a minute, Mr. Rawlins,” she said as she went.

There were so many plants out on the platform that all I could see above them was the sky. Succulents, ferns, and a couple of potted pines made up most of the greenery. Plants that were simple to pot and grow.

A rattling from a distant place in the apartment caused me, for no identifiable reason, to wonder exactly what I was doing there. This inner question brought me to a memory of when I had been wounded six days after the Battle of the Bulge. A sniper had been aiming somewhere else, missed the mark, and the ricochet grazed my shoulder.…

“Here we go,” Timbale said.

She came back into the room carrying a plastic tumbler in each fist. The liquid contained in the semiopaque containers was reddish in color.

“Don’t have no fresh-squeezed lemonade,” she said. “Kool-Aid will have to do.”

She put the glass down on the TV stand next to me. I let my whole body list forward to pick up the plastic tumbler.

“What you got to do with Ray Alexander?” There was no give in her voice.

“He has retained me to help you find Evander, if that’s what you want to do.”

A spasm of anger went through her thin body. A little red sugar water sloshed out and down her knuckles.

“You really are a detective?” she asked.

I took out my wallet and showed her the license I’d procured after helping the police with a crime that they would have never solved on their own.

She read it, nodding her head angrily, and then passed the little card back.

“I was at work,” she said. It was the beginning of a story that she had gone over again and again, hoping for a different ending. “At Proxy Nine, where I’m a nighttime security guard—”

“Proxy Nine?” I asked. “The French insurance company?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“Nothing. I mean, I got friend named Jackson Blue that works there.”

“I never heard’a him. He work days?”

“Mostly.”

“Anyway,” Timbale said, “I was at work at a little after nine o’clock and Evander called me. He always calls around then. I could tell that he was outside, because I heard traffic, and so I asked him where he was. He didn’t wanna say, but finally he told me that he had gone up to the Sunset Strip to see what all the hippies looked like and met up with these people that invited him to go to this club.”

“Which club?”

“He didn’t say.”

“Mr. Alexander said that it was a girl that asked him.”

“How he know that?”

I raised my palms and shrugged.

“It was a girl,” Timbale agreed. “He didn’t wanna tell me at first, but after I kept askin’ he said. Her name was Ruby, but she was a white girl. I told him I didn’t want him to go, but he wouldn’t listen. He’s almost twenty years old and got a job workin’ for the Tolucca Mart grocery store on Robertson. At least, he did have that job. They told me that they had to fire him when I called to see if he had been there.”

“Had he been there?”

“No. Nobody done seen him since he called that night.”

Timbale Noon had cried all her tears in an earlier life. At this late stage the best she could do was frown and shake her head over one more blow to her attempt at happiness.

“Can you find him, Mr. Rawlins?” she asked, looking up.

“I can sure look.”

The smile that crossed her lips and faded was like one of those rare flowers that blossom once a year for twenty-four hours and then wither.

Before I could ask another question the screen door flew open,
followed by the clatter of feet. Two girls, a teenager and a younger one, burst into the den.

“Hi, Mom!” the younger girl exclaimed. “Did Evy call?”

“No, baby,” Timbale said.

She reached out and pulled the child onto her lap. The girl was a little too old for this, maybe nine. She was lighter in color than her mother but still a strong brown.

The adolescent girl was probably thirteen. She eyed me with some suspicion. She was already starting to have the hard visage of her mother.

Both children were clad in simple one-color dresses, red for the small one and ocher for the older. The hems on both came down below the knee. I thought they might have had different fathers, but the imprint of Timbale was strong on both of them.

“This is Mr. Rawlins, LaTonya,” Timbale said to the girl on her lap. “What do you say?”

“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Rawlins.”

“And this is Beatrix,” Timbale said, introducing me to the older girl.

“Do you have a daughter named Feather?” Beatrix asked.

“Yes, I do.”

“I thought so. She’s gonna go to Louis Pasteur with me in the fall. I saw you with her once at the Christmas choral they had at Burnside Elementary.”

“You two go on now,” Timbale said. “Me and Mr. Rawlins have to finish talking and then I’ll make you a snack.”

LaTonya bounded off. Beatrix moved away more slowly, stopping at the doorway to the foyer, where she looked hard at me again.

“Beautiful children,” I said when they were gone.

“I have made a whole lotta mistakes in my life, Mr. Rawlins, but I’ve had my share of blessings. Evander was my biggest mistake and a godsend too.”

“Does he have any good friends that might have an idea where he’s gone?”

“He’s a real bookish boy. Most’a my friends complain about their kids bein’ on the phone day and night. Beatrix does a lotta that, but Evy ain’t never on the phone.”

“Maybe the girls know about people he knows,” I suggested.

“I already talked to them about it. They said that he talked about the hippies sometimes but he never went up there.”

It would have been better for me to question the girls myself, but I could see that Timbale would not let that happen.

I took a business card from the wallet that was still on my lap and handed it to her.

“Do you have a picture of Evander?”

The workingwoman put her hand in the solitary pocket and pulled out a three-by-five photograph. After gazing on it for a moment she handed the picture over to me. It was the color photo of a smiling broad-faced boy wearing a graduation cap and gown. There was something familiar about that face but I thought, at the time, it was the look that Timbale had stamped on all her kids.

“Isn’t he handsome?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

I took a deep breath and stood up with nary a waver.

“I’ll go up to Sunset tonight and canvass the whole boulevard.”

She winced at my vow. Maybe she worried that a dead man was only good for finding corpses.

At the door I stopped and asked her, “What’s the trouble between you and Mr. Alexander?”

“No trouble. It’s just if I ever see him I will send his narrow high-yellah ass to hell.”

People have often told me that walking downhill is harder than climbing up. That might be true, but it felt a lot easier descending the stairway from Timbale Noon’s second-floor apartment.

Before I got to the bottom I heard LaTonya laughing carelessly. I stopped for a few moments, listening to the squeals of childhood’s abandon. It seemed very far away.

Maybe it was the sugar from the Kool-Aid and not the evocation of my name, but walking back to the car was easier than I expected. I jerked the handle to pull the car door open, then lowered into the passenger’s seat with great concentration.

“Well?” Mouse asked.

“Why does that woman hate you, Raymond?”

“Lotsa people hate me. You think I know all their stories?”

“I think you know hers.”

“It ain’t nuthin’, Easy, and it sure don’t have to do with Little Gr—I mean Evander goin’ missin’. You gonna close that door?”

“She corroborated everything that your friend Lissa told you.”

“A carburetor?”

“She said that he went missing up on Sunset some days ago. Other than that all I got was a graduation photograph.”

“Lemme see it,” Mouse said, less a demand than a request.

I took the picture from my inside jacket pocket and passed it over.

He held it at a distance from his face great enough to show that his vision was deteriorating.

While he gazed intently at the photograph, his face gave up no inkling of what it was that he felt.

“Mind if I keep this, Easy?”

“I need it.”

“You seen it already,” he argued. “You not gonna forget.”

“When I go around lookin’ for him I’ll need to show that picture to people.”

“All right then,” he said reluctantly. “Here you go. Now shut that door and let’s get outta here.”

“I’m walking,” I said.

“Easy, we already in the car. I know you only a few blocks away but you been hurt, man.”

“If I’m gonna do this for you I have to test my limits,” I said. “Why don’t you go down to Meaty Meatburgers on Fairfax and pick us up some food. I’ll meet you at my place.”

With that, using the full strength in both arms, I lifted myself out of the car. I leaned over to peer inside and said, “I’ll see you in twenty minutes,” then levered myself into an erect stance and slammed the door.

I knew that neighborhood quite well. A block west of the intersection of Pico and Stanley there was a huge metal structure, a hollow, nine-story-high building made from metal plating that had been painted dark yellow, almost the same color as Beatrix’s dress. This was an oil well that plumbed the dark liquid out from under us.

There was no crossing light at the Stanley corner, so I walked past Spaulding down to my street, Genesee, where there was a light.

It was really only three blocks from Timbale’s front door to mine, but the fact that I didn’t know her was no surprise. Neighbors don’t necessarily know one another that well in L.A. We spend most of our time in single homes and one-person cars. In the late sixties we moved as often as fleas leaping from one dog’s head to another one’s butt. There was no walking to or from parks or local bars where
neighbors might hang out. If you went somewhere it was either to work or family. And if you partied it was rarely with neighbors.

By the time I made it to the southeast side of Genesee and Pico I was sorely challenged by the exercise. I could feel the exhaustion in the veins across my chest. A bead of sweat came down the side of my head, and I was happy that the traffic light was red. I leaned against the lamppost and sighed.

“Hey, you!” somebody said.

The voice came from behind me, but I didn’t have to turn to know who it was.

I didn’t have to turn, but I did so to greet the two dark blue-clad policemen who were coming at me like twin hyenas on a wounded wildebeest.

“Officers.”

The luxury of fatigue left me. I was a soldier again and this was the enemy. The enemy doesn’t ask you if you’re too tired to stand your ground. The enemy has many wounds of his own and he hates you for every one.

“Let’s see some ID,” the one on the right said.

They were both young and white and male and had been after me as long as all three of us had lived.

I handed over my driver’s license and said, “Name’s Easy Rawlins. I live up here ’bout half a block on Genesee.”

“Have you been drinking, Easy?” the cop on the right asked. I could distinguish him by the mole on his right cheek and the ivory hue to his teeth, which he showed in a false smile.

“I have not.”

“We’re going to have to search you,” the other cop said. “Put your arms straight out to your side.”

“I thought you were asking if I was drunk?”

“You might have an open half-pint in one of your pockets.”

I did as they told me. I didn’t like it, but there was other, more pressing business on my mind.

They went through all my pockets and patted me down to the
ankles. One of them, the one without the mole, had very bad halitosis. My walnut-sized stomach throbbed in anguish at the smell.

“Okay,” the mole-festooned cop said when all they found was my wallet, the graduation photograph, seventy-nine cents, and some lint. “Now we’re going to have you walk a straight line for us.”

“Hey,” a new voice proclaimed. “What you botherin’ this man fo’?”

It was a light-colored black man who worked at the auto garage on the corner. He’d been watching, I supposed.

“This is none of your business,” the unblemished cop informed the newcomer.

The mechanic was small, wearing gray overalls. He was the color of an old piece of vellum made from cowhide.

“He wasn’t doin’ nuthin’,” my would-be defender said. “He just walked up to the corner and rested against that pole. He ain’t drivin’ no car, so who cares if he had a drink?”

“I won’t be warning you again,” the mole-flecked cop said. He had unsheathed his baton.

“Yeah, nigger,” the partner agreed.

I was getting worried about the well-being of my good-intentioned advocate when yet another voice joined our impromptu chorus.

“What did you say?” This from a tall white man, also in gray overalls stretched tight over his big belly. “What did you call my mechanic?”

“Hey, Sammy, what’s goin’ on out there?” yet another voice chimed in.

The garage was a low, whitewashed wood building that encompassed a big open space like a hangar for a small plane. Instead of a front wall the garage had a huge gate that was rolled up when the shop was open. I’d noticed the place when driving on Pico or Genesee but never patronized them. I took my car to my old friend Primo in East L.A.

“This cop just called Bertie a nigger,” the boss man said. “Just like that. Maybe Bertie isn’t as crazy as we said.”

More men came out of the garage. Now there were nine of us standing on the corner.

“This guy was just walkin’,” the man I now knew as Bertie said. “And then this one here up and calls me a niggah.”

There were many fears registering in the white policemen’s eyes: the fear of a complaint lodged against them; the fear of a small roust escalating into a minor riot; the fear of them losing control in a situation that they were not prepared for. But most of all they were afraid of their fellow white man. I didn’t matter. Bertie didn’t matter. But if a white business owner and his white employees stood up against the cops then they were transformed from law enforcement into what they really were—hired help.