Little Scarlet (18 page)

AT ABOUT SIX,
three black men — one old, one young, and one in between — all dressed in clean white pants and white T-shirts, came out with bent-up pewter bowls that they placed around the large table. They also put out steel-ware cutlery and blue and green plastic tumblers. The residents had just started to rise and move toward the table when a door behind Lewis’s desk opened and a big white man came out.

He was very fat. So much so that his eyes were almost shut from the flesh pressing from all sides. After taking in his girth I realized that the man was also tall. Taller than I am and I’m six one, at least I was when I got drafted. They tell me that you shrink with the years of worry we go through.

That fat man didn’t look like he ever worried about anything.

“Hey, Bill!” Lewis shouted.

Ten or twelve of the residents echoed the snake’s greeting.

Bill smiled. He wore a green jacket and black trousers. His shoes reminded me of catcher’s gloves and he carried a cane whose tip never touched the ground.

His hands were enormous with fingers that might have been babies’ limbs. His dense brown hair only covered the sides of his head and his crown rose from the thicket like a battlement or a moon.

I was fascinated by this massive Caucasian the way some white children in Germany were amazed by me and my black skin.

Maybe he felt my gaze. He turned his head toward me and strode toward my couch. I rose to meet him — half out of respect and half from fear.

“Bill,” he said introducing himself.

“Willy,” I said, but I was so impressed I almost said Easy.

“Short for William?” he asked.

“Yes sir.”

“Me too. We have the same name, you and me.”

I thought that there wasn’t anyone in the world who could do for a name what he could. He could have been Emperor Bill, Conqueror Bill, Bill the Magnificent.

Even though he turned out to be important to my investigation, Bill’s effect on me had to do with something else. He had all of the charisma of Mouse in a package that was appropriate for such grandeur. A giant who dominated all that he saw, was aware of everything in his world. I was sure that Lewis’s greeting was normal fare in Bill’s life. He would command respect without asking for or even desiring it. I had only been in his presence for a minute or two and I’d already forgotten that he was a white man.

“Down on your luck, Willy?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess there’s a lotta others got it worse. I’d like a place to sleep, though.”

“Done,” he said. “Come, sit with me.”

I followed the big man to a seat at the table and sat on his left side. Lewis took the chair to his right and then the rest of the men took their seats. The men in white brought out a large tureen and went from man to man, ladling out a stew of potatoes with beef, lamb, and chicken. They also put down cheese sandwiches as they went.

The food was good. Very good. I ate heartily, realizing that I hadn’t eaten much or slept at all since Detective Suggs had drafted me into service for the LAPD.

“Where you from, Willy?” Bill asked.

“Galveston,” I remembered. “From down around the docks.”

“Never been there,” he said. “What do you think of this place?”

“L.A.?”

“No. The shelter.”

“We sure could use it,” I said. “You know, it was better bein’ poor down south. At least there you could go back to the country and find a barn to sleep in, catch some fish, sumpin’. Here they would just as soon see you starve.”

“Amen,” Bill said, and it didn’t seem forced. “How long have you been in town?”

“I been in and around L.A. for years,” I said. “It’s just that I can’t seem to catch hold of enough money to make a go of it. But I ain’t give up yet.”

Bill turned his attention to his other guests after that. He talked to everybody, even the man who talked only to himself.

That man was named Roderick, and when Bill asked him how he was, Roderick said, “Somebody wants to know how you doin’, Rod.” And then he answered, “I’m doin’ pretty good, they keep them doctors off and don’t let ’em put them needles in my eyes.”

That made me think about Geneva and Geneva reminded me of Nola Payne. Before you know it Harold was on my mind.

The dinner went on for about forty-five minutes or so. I didn’t want to be too obvious about Harold because someone there might warn him off. So I just ate and marveled at Bill the Shelter King.

I was walking through a full meat locker, wearing only a T-shirt and cotton pants. It was freezing in there. The carcasses were black women hanging from hooks. I recognized all of them but couldn’t put a name to anyone. Women I had known from Texas to California as lovers and co-workers, neighbors and friends. They were naked and hard, beyond hope for any heaven or afterlife. They were hung in rows that went on forever and it came to me that I might be in hell. There wasn’t much light but I could see. And as long as I kept on walking, I thought, I wouldn’t freeze.

Then I came across Nola Payne. Her reddish hair was plastered down over her eyes. I stopped even though I knew I ran the risk of freezing. I almost brushed the hair from her face but then I understood that if I touched any one of the dead women He would know I was there.

I turned around and saw Bonnie and Juanda side by side on hooks. They were both cramped and uncomfortable looking as if they had been frozen in quarters too small for them to spread out in. I felt crystalline tears form in my eyes and I reached out…

The moment I touched Bonnie a heavy hand fell on my shoulder. It spun me around and there was Bill, King of the Underworld.

“Don’t mess with my dinner, Easy,” he proclaimed.

I shouted and sprang up out of the cot where I had fallen asleep. My heart felt as if it had grown two sizes too large for my chest. And the despair I felt was beyond anything I had ever imagined except when I was a child and my mother died while I slept.

The room smelled of sixteen men down on their luck. There were snores and farts and sighs and darkness. I knew where I was but for a moment I couldn’t remember how I got there.

Slowly it came to me.

After dinner I talked with Lewis for a while. He asked me about Jackson Blue from every angle he could think of. How long had I known him? What kind of gig was he into? Where was he going? And even how was he dressed?

I realized that the men that had been after Jackson must have put out a bounty on the Coal Coyote’s hide.

I tried to mask it well enough. I said that I saw him now and again in Compton, that he was involved with a counterfeiter that printed down in L.A. but distributed his product in Frisco and Vegas. But that was all hearsay, I added. I also said that Jackson was wearing the outlandish styles of Carnaby Street, elevator shoes and bell-bottoms, ruffled shirts and a feather in his hat.

After that I retreated to the dormitory cot, where I pretended to sleep for a few minutes.

When I awoke it was very late.

I rose up from my cot and moved through the maze of sleeping men toward a strip of light that betrayed the door.

“Do you see that man, Rod?”

“Uh-huh, yeah I do.”

“I wonder where he’s goin’?”

“It ain’t none’a your business, mister. Keep your eyes to yourself.”

I smiled at Roderick’s conversation with himself. He wasn’t crazy, just obvious and out loud. I would have had the same thoughts if I had seen someone walk by my bunk in that dark and hopeless room.

THE DOOR BEHIND
Lewis’s desk was unlocked and the light switch was on the left. The filing cabinet stood against yet another boarded-up window. It was locked but that didn’t matter. I had lifted a steel spoon from the dinner table and the bolt gave with very little pressure.

I started with the 1964 file of residents’ names. There were one hundred eighty-three sign-in sheets, filled in on both sides, one side for each evening. I scanned the far left side for the letter “H.” I found quite a few Henrys and fewer entries with the name Hank. Harvey made a better showing than I would have figured. Howard was the most common name and there was one each for Hudie, Hildebrandt, and Hy. There were six Harolds. Brown, Smith, Smith, Lakely, Ostenberg, and Bryant.

I was writing down the last name when I felt the breeze on the back of my neck. Instantly the temperature dropped down to what it was in the freezer of my nightmare. I knew before I spun around that it would be Bill and not Lewis facing me.

He was wearing an impossibly large white terry cloth robe and somehow he seemed to have gotten even taller and broader.

“Hey, Bill,” I said with hardly a waver.

“What are you doing there, Willy?”

“Lookin’ up names.”

“What for?”

“There’s a man I need to find and I was hoping that he spent a night or two here with you.”

It was the calmness Bill showed that frightened me. It carried all of the certainty of a powerful predator eyeing a snack.

“I don’t keep any money in here, Willy,” he said.

I handed him the list that I had scrawled. I had only written the last names.

He glanced at the list and said, “You’ve been lying to me, haven’t you, Willy?”

I didn’t respond because I didn’t know which lie he was referring to.

“This handwriting,” he said. “It’s not done by some man who can’t quite catch hold. I’ve told Lewis to look at the way the men sign in. He doesn’t understand but I bet you do.”

“He murdered two women,” I said.

“Who did?”

“The man I’m looking for.”

“And you think he stayed here?”

“I’m sure of it,” I said. “He was just the kind of man who would need a place like this from time to time. If it was raining too hard for too long or maybe if he was too sick to hustle up a meal.”

I had a small pistol in my pocket, that and the letter from Gerald Jordan. I didn’t want to shoot anybody but if Bill got mad I knew that my only defense would be homicide.

He crushed the list in his hand.

“Get out of here, Willy,” he said. “I don’t know who you are or what it is you’re really after but my guys here have the right to their own private lives. I won’t help you.”

He was standing in front of the door.

Realizing that I wouldn’t move until he did he took a step to the side. I went by him quickly and, just as swiftly, he followed me until I reached the front door of the shelter.

I went through and turned to him.

“I’m sorry, Bill,” I said. “I know that you’re doing a good thing down here and I didn’t mean to cause you trouble.”

I think he smiled briefly before closing the door. That made me wonder if he knew that I’d submitted the names on that list to memory, making his gesture more perfunctory than it seemed.

I thought about that all the way through the early-morning streets, so dark and empty. Somewhere out there Harold was hiding. But soon I’d find him. I didn’t think that he’d survive our second meeting.

Los Angeles is a desert city. Plants don’t grow except for the sufferance of irrigation. The soil is hard and yellow and the sun shines more than three hundred days a year. It doesn’t rain much and there’s no snow at all. People come here to escape the necessity of seasons. They talk about the weather like it was their personal pot of gold.

They come here for the daylight and the warmth of the sun, flocking to the beaches and planning barbecues. Los Angeles is a town of baseball and football, croquet and golf. The city is oriented toward the heat of the sun. And when the night comes, people curl up in their beds and dream about the morning and all the promise of light.

L.A. is not a town for night owls. You come for the acreage and the vistas but in order to pay for that, most people work so hard that night is only a place to rest.

Those people who finally understand that perfect weather only means that you could work even harder often become disillusioned. After that they either move back to where they came from or they drop out and live in the shadows.

Those folks need a nightlife. And where there’s a need there’s always an offering.

Stud’s All Night Holiday was one such offering. It was a bungalow built to be a school. But there was a property dispute and lawsuit and finally the city backed off. I don’t know how Ronette Lee got hold of the lease but every night she ran a bar/coffeehouse/restaurant from sundown till sunup out of that would-be school.

It was off the road but the cops knew she was there. They knew but didn’t bother her because she filled the needs of all the people who needed respite — and also she was a good tipper.

THE CLASSROOM HAD
a dozen round tables and a bar. A door behind the bar led to another classroom, where Ronette’s daughter, Maxine, cooked and stewed.

The women didn’t get along. That’s because Ronette hated men and Maxine couldn’t get enough of us. And that was only the beginning of their discord. Maxine didn’t like the taste of salt, so Ronette criticized her cooking. Ronette wanted to move back to St. Louis but Maxine hated the cold. I had never heard either one of them say a kind word to the other but I rarely saw them apart.

At four a.m. there were maybe a dozen souls at Stud’s. When I entered I waved at Ronette and made the gesture for coffee. For someone else the signal might have meant beer. But Ronette knew I had given up alcohol.

Benita Flag was sitting at a small table alone and miserable. Her shoulders sagged and her hair was a mess. When she looked up I could see that her makeup had been running with her tears.

Sadness is a kind of beacon for me. That’s why I frequented the late-night spot.

“Hey, Benny,” I said, moving a chair to her table.

“Did you see him?”

“Yeah.”

“Is he okay?” she asked. Her voice was rising toward hysteria. I realized that she really was worried about his well-being.

“Oh yeah,” I said. “Mouse is fine. You know any kind of social upheaval makes for business opportunities. And Raymond is definitely what you call an opportunist.”