South Central Noir

Collections by Eric Stone

Central Avenue

There’s never enough fucking hours in the day. Not if you want to get in a nap. The bedside clock said seven thirty. Vince laid down for a minute around six. He was supposed to have called in a half hour ago. You don’t want to piss off the Lucca brothers. They’re nice enough guys when you do what they want, exactly what they want. They aren’t so nice otherwise.

His mom was out, working the night shift, hoping like hell they weren’t gonna let her go to make room for all the soldiers coming back. She’d left some dinner on the table. He sniffed at it, got a Lucky out of the icebox instead, and lit a Pall Mall before sitting down to make his call.

“Where ya fuckin’ been, Ears? You’re supposed to call half hour ’go. The boss don’ like you guys callin’ in late.”

Ears, shit, why’d they have to call him that? He hated it. The name’s Vince, Vincent, even Vinnie, but just because he has big ears. Hell, his father’s were even bigger. No one had ever called Harold P. Lasker “Ears.” Not more than once anyhow.

But there sure as shit wasn’t anything he could say to Earl about calling him that.

“Yeah, sorry, some trouble at home. Got anything for me tonight?”

“Sure do, Ears, lotta mooks took it on the chin in the sixth at Holly Park last Sunday. Seems some popular tipster got it wrong.”

“Okay, gimme.”

“Gotta pencil and paper, kid? There’s a bunch of ’em.”

Earl rattled off a dozen names and addresses. They were all right around Central Avenue and it was mostly guys who wouldn’t give him too much trouble.

“No names? I like it when there’s names, Earl. Don’t you have any movie stars for me? A singer? Someone?”

“Nope, not this week. Jeez, kid, they can’t all be Jimmy Stewart.”

Vince hadn’t ever actually gotten to work over anybody as famous as Jimmy Stewart. That’d be a story that would buy him a few drinks. He’d had his share of drinks off of pounding on a few B-grade actors, a singer or two, a pretty well-known horn player. Tonight’s list was mostly small-fry, working stiffs, schmos into the Lucca brothers for a few hundred, no more than a grand or two tops. That was never much fun. They were just regular guys trying to get ahead, who’d screwed up.

Still, they were chumps and it wasn’t Vince’s fault they were deadbeats. Maybe he was doing ’em a favor. He’d thump ’em and collect. Maybe they’d learn their lesson and either stay away from the ponies and cards or at least not get in over their heads next time. If someone had knocked some sense into his dad back when he was starting out, maybe the family would’ve been better off.

He got off the phone and cracked open another Lucky. Charly’d know who was where over on the Avenue, so he called him next. Vince was hoping Eckstine was playing somewhere. The singer always brought out swarms of girls. A set or two of that voice and they’d be easy game. On a good night it wasn’t all work.

“Nah, sorry, Vince, no Eckstine tonight. Billie Holiday’s over at that big place on Western. I might drop by there later.”

“It’s all junkies and dykes, isn’t it?”

“That’s the one. If you’re looking for company, it isn’t the place. But she’s got a hell of a voice.”

“And a lot of depressing songs. No thanks.”

No problem — if Eckstine wasn’t playing it just meant less distraction for getting the job done. Vince looked over the list and numbered the names in the order he’d get to them.

The closest one, Bob Wilson, was familiar. The guy almost always had the dough. It was an easy commission. But still, “I’m not your fucking errand boy” is what he’d told Wilson the last time he’d had to hunt him down to collect. He was gonna pop him one this time. Nothing much, just something to get the point across. Vince wasn’t hard to find. The guys who’d come to him were the ones he never gave any trouble.

He wasn’t really in the mood. He had to get up for it. He dumped the rest of his beer in the sink and got out the can of Maxwell House. He packed it down hard into the top of the percolator and filled the tank with half the water it called for. It’d take a lot of sugar to make it drinkable, but he liked it sweet.

He lit the stove, set the pot down on the burner, and went to get ready. He splashed water on his face and combed his black hair so that some of it hung down over an eye. People said he looked menacing that way. He fished a couple of whites out of his sock drawer and swallowed them dry. Once the speed and the coffee kicked in, Vince’d be pumped.

It was too early for the serious night owls. Wilson was one, which meant he might still be at home. If he wasn’t, there was a poker-and-slots parlor in the back of the drugstore over on 67th. He’d be there sometime tonight, although not for long. His credit wasn’t any good until he forked over a payment.

Vince parked his Buick across Wilson’s driveway in case the jerk got any bright ideas. He tramped through the flower bed on the way to the front door. Might as well give the guy some extra grief. There was gonna be the late penalty and at this point a little something more for making Vince come over here so damn often.

Things were likely to be better than the last time Vince had to drop by. Wilson’s wife had left him and taken the kid since then. Nothing he hated worse than having to pound on some dummy while the little lady was hollering at him and a brat was yowling.

It was a small Spanish-style place, one of the few single houses on a street of four- and six-unit buildings. There was a light on in the living room and Vince could hear a ball game on the radio.

He rang the bell and stood back. He didn’t try to hide or anything, not wanting to tip Wilson off that he was going to get a beating.

Footsteps shuffled up to the other side of the door.

“Yeah, who is it?” The peep hatch opened and Wilson looked out from between the bars.

Vince didn’t say anything, just made sure Wilson could see his face.

“Oh, hey, Vinnie.” At least the slob knew better than to call him Ears. “I’ve got money for you. I was gonna look for you when I went out tonight.”

Yeah, like hell he was.

Wilson opened the door and waved Vince in. The place was a mess, empty beer bottles, moldering food cartons, a couple of weeks’ worth of newspapers and racing forms, most of it covered with dust. If the poor bastard was going to chase away his wife, the least he could do is get someone to come in and clean up from time to time.

Vince didn’t really want to sit down. The whites and coffee were buzzing in his veins. He just wanted to collect the cash, put a little hurt on the fool, and get to his next customer.

But he sat anyway, took a couple of deep breaths while Wilson went to the kitchen. It was better if he remained calm. He needed to bust the guy up, but not too much. Dead or disabled doesn’t make anyone a repeat customer.

Wilson came back with two open bottles of Blue Ribbon. It wasn’t Vince’s usual brew, but it would do. Wilson handed one to Vince then walked over to turn down the volume on the radio. He sat on the sofa across from him and took a long swallow of his beer. He set it down on the coffee table too hard. He was trying not to let it show, but he was nervous.

“Look, Vinnie, I’m a little short right now. I been having to send money to the wife. She’s staying at her mother’s. I don’t know what she does with it all.”

Vince took a swig from his bottle, then pointed the mouth of it at Wilson. He didn’t say anything. He scowled and cocked his fingers to look like the bottle was the barrel of a gun.

“No, Vin, Vinnie, it’s not like that. I’ve got the vig and another C-note on account. I just couldn’t pull it all together tonight. That’s okay isn’t it? So long as I’ve got the vig.”

The Lucca brothers weren’t going to mind. That was the point anyhow. Let a sucker lay down some bets, loan him some dough, carry him when he’s late, and keep racking up the interest, a lot of interest. It was a chump’s game. But so long as he could make a payment, and there was some hope he’d be around to make the next, bigger payment, Vince’s bosses were happy. And when they were happy, they made him happy.

He tilted the bottle back toward himself and took another swig. He smiled when he held out his hand. “Okay, Wilson, so give.”

The jerk stood up from the sofa to get into his right front pocket. He pulled out a thin wad of greenbacks and held them out to Vince. “This should cover it. I’ll have the rest next week, promise.”

Vince nodded. “Count it out.”

He watched as Wilson laid the bills out, mostly fives, a couple of tens, some ones. In the end, it was a hundred short of what the guy had said he’d pay. Did he think Vince wouldn’t notice?

“Where’s the C-note on account, Wilson?”

He looked startled, like he’d expected to get away with something and was surprised that he hadn’t. He reached into a back pocket and came up with two old, filthy fifties. He held them back for a moment. “Hey, Vince, can you let me hang onto one of these for tonight? I was gonna go meet some pals on the Avenue. I could use the scratch.”

“Shoulda thought of that before you promised me the hundred, Wilson. Hand ’em over.”

Vince took the two bills, then scooped up the others, folded them all, and put them in his shirt pocket. He set his bottle down gently on the table, took a deep breath, then let it out slow as he stood up. He walked over to the radio, where the ball game was burbling low, and twisted the dial up loud. He turned, walked around the coffee table, and stopped, towering over the stupe.

Wilson had a dumb, surprised look on his face. He had to be an idiot if he wasn’t expecting something like this. Vince just hoped he’d cooperate, make it easy. He’d hurt him less if he did.

“I’m going to have to beat on you a little, Bob.”

Wilson’d been a standup guy. Once he figured there was no way out, he didn’t beg or try to fight back or do much of anything other than protect his puss and the family jewels. Vince considered leaving him be after one quick hard shot to the gut. But what the hell kind of lesson was that? By the time he’d get halfway back to his car Wilson would be nearly over it, sitting on the sofa, opening another beer.

So he followed up the gut shot with a hard jab to the chest that must’ve made Wilson feel like his heart was trying to get out through his throat, then peppered his kidneys with some pokes he’d be feeling for the next couple of days. After that, Wilson was on the floor, curled up, moaning, steeling himself for one of Vince’s pointy-toed Florsheims in the ribs.

But Vince cut him a break. He leaned down toward Wilson’s ear.

“I appreciate you not making it too tough on yourself. I’m gonna leave you alone now. You’ll be okay, might piss a little blood next day or two, but nothing’s broke. Just don’t make me come to you from now on, got it?”

Wilson’s body sagged with relief. He got it. He nodded and cleared his throat to show he did. Vince headed to the fridge, got out two Blue Ribbons, walked back to the coffee table, and popped them open. He put one down on the floor by the beaten guy,

“No hard feelings, Bob,” and walked out raising his to his lips.

George Meyer was as henpecked a slob as there was. He liked playing the ponies, liked hitting the bars, but the little lady made damn sure he was home early most nights. Vince just about had time to find him on his last drink, crying in his beer in front of some couldn’t-care-less bartender wiping down his glasses getting ready for the real drunks to show up.

George was on a budget. His wife counted every penny of his paycheck. It was mopes like that who always got into the most trouble. Get a hot tip on a horse from some jokester and the wife won’t cut loose even twenty bucks to lay down a bet. So he borrows the twenty off some friendly-seeming shylock. Hell, it’s such a good tip, why not make it fifty?

But then his horse comes up lame in the backstretch and so does George. Where’s he gonna get the fifty bucks and interest he owes? So the shark carries him for a week. But a guy like George, he can’t cough up the seventy-five it’s gonna cost him to get square the next week. So the not-really-so-friendly lender carries him another week and the seventy-five magically becomes a hundred and that might as well be ten thousand bucks to a guy like George.

So then the shark lays off the bet to the Luccas. He pays them for his territory anyhow. Then the Luccas, they send someone around, someone like Vince, to let George know it’s now a hundred twenty-five bucks and at the end of the week it’s gonna be one fifty. Week after that it’s up to two. Sure, they’ve got some convenient payment plans, convenient to themselves.

That fucking George. Should’ve just played the twenty. Should’ve gone home and taken the heat from the wife like a man when he lost it. Instead, he’d let it get out of hand and was into the Luccas for six hundred bucks. That was twice as much as he’d ever been into them before and it was a problem.

Vince guessed George would be at the 54th Street drugstore. They didn’t serve booze, but they’d sell a man a setup at the soda counter and there was always somebody hanging around out front hawking half-pints of the cheap stuff.

It was only a little before eight, but George was nursing his last rum and coke at the counter before heading home. He coughed on a swallow when Vince sat down next to him.

“Don’t choke yet, George. I might have to do that for you.”

The short, soft man looked up at Vince through watery eyes. He was still coughing and couldn’t speak.

“George, you’re in deep shit. I don’t want to take you back in the alley, but if I have to, you know I will.” The guy wasn’t bad, just stupid. He should know better than to be in the kind of trouble he was in, and Vince felt sorry for him. But not much.

“Vince, I, I’ve got thirty bucks. If I don’t bring it home the wife’s gonna kill me.”

Vince slumped for a moment. He was good at acting the tough guy, maybe he got it from all the movies he watched, but it took effort. “That’s not enough. You’re about to get it at both ends, George, the wife and me.”

“Wait, wait, Vince, maybe we can work something out.”

Vince waved a fist in front of his face to shut him up. “That’s what we did last week. And the week before and the couple of weeks before that. The Luccas are done making deals, George. They’re not the patient type. Finish your drink and we’ll go for a walk.”

“Jeez, Vince, wait, I, you, you can have my car. You can hold onto it until I come up with the dough. That oughta be worth at least the six hundred.”

The car wasn’t worth anything like that. It was a beat-up old Ford coupe that might go for a couple of hundred if it was nicely polished and parked in the dark when the buyer took a look. Problem was, the car plus thirty bucks still wasn’t enough. The jerk was wearing a watch, but it was a crappy Timex. His wedding ring didn’t look like much either. Maybe the Luccas’d think a good beating was worth another hundred.

George was never going to be good for the rest of the money no matter what happened. Sooner or later the Luccas would have to write off the debt, which Vince knew wasn’t going to happen. Or have Vince kill the guy, which was a line he wasn’t willing to cross. Roughing up a mope was fine with Vince, he understood the necessity. It was business. But offing a guy? Vince didn’t really much care if George lived or died, but leave him out of it. Once he did that there’d be no going back. The Luccas would own him, forever. He’d be stuck doing whatever the hell they wanted him to. So long as he was making money for them and didn’t do anything they could hold over him, he was his own man, mostly.

“Hand over the keys, George.”

The soft guy smiled. “Thanks, Vin.” He handed them over.

“And the thirty bucks.”

He lost his smile. “Gee, Vin, can’t I? You know, the wife, she’s gonna...”

Vince didn’t smile. “No, you can’t, George. Fork it over.”

He pulled out his wallet and took out two tens and two fives, carefully, with two fingers like he was handling something hot. “How’m I gonna get home, Vin? You gonna give me a ride?”

Vince was getting happier by the moment about having to pound on the guy. “No, George, you’re gonna have to figure out how to get home on your own. We’re going out to your piece-of-shit car, you’re gonna give me the registration and sign over the pink slip if you’ve got it.”

He could drag George into the alley once the paperwork was done. There wasn’t much sense in letting the guy know what was coming next. It’d just make him harder to handle.

The car was parked in the alley. That was perfect. It was even more of a heap than Vince had remembered. That wasn’t so good.

“Damn, George, look at this thing. It’s not worth a hundred fifty bucks.”

“It runs good, really it does, Vince. You’ll see. It just needs some detail work, that’s all, really.”

“Shut up and get me the papers.”

George fished the registration and the pink slip out of the glove box. He must’ve been expecting something like this. Who the hell drives around with their pink slip?

“Sign the car over, George.”

“Vince, can’t you just hold onto this stuff? Let me have the car back when I get you the money?”

“No, George, I can’t. This shit barely covers the vig. I’m gonna have a hell of a time convincing the Luccas not to take it out on me.”

“But Vince, I—”

The little guy didn’t see the solid right that took the wind out of him. He doubled over, his eyes going bleary, tears squirting. Vince looked down at him in disgust. His fist had sunk so deep into the blubbery gut that he was amazed it came back out so easily. He waited for George to catch his breath.

The stupe finally straightened up.

“Sign it over and you don’t have to get hit again.” Of course he was going to get hit again, and worse, but for the moment Vince needed him conscious and cooperative.

George’s hand shook like he had the palsy when he signed the pink slip. Vince angled the paper toward a dim streetlight to make sure the signature was legible. The idiot had signed the car over to him. He’d have to go down to Motor Vehicles, register it, then sign it over to the Luccas or whoever they wanted him to. They weren’t going to be happy about the delay. They weren’t going to be happy about any of this. He might even have to take a beating of his own. He folded the papers and put them in his jacket pocket. George was walking away toward the street.

“Hold up a minute, George. We’re not done.”

George turned left into the first punch. His nose popped, exploding blood off to the right. A follow-up left in the ear turned George’s head the other way, putting his jaw right where Vince wanted it for an uppercut. On his way down Vince gave him a quick couple of shots to the ribs. He thought he could hear one crack.

George fell whimpering and gasping next to the right rear tire of a new Caddy. Vince sank a shoe deep into his belly. This time he did have trouble getting it out, the lump doubled up on it. It took another kick to straighten him out and get his foot back.

George’s head made an inviting target, but Vince didn’t want to kill him. He was nearly mad enough to, but not so mad that he didn’t know it was a bad idea. He levered the guy over on his back and gave him a hard stomp on his stomach. Air rushed out of his mouth and he went slack; not dead slack, just unconscious.

There wasn’t any sense beating on a guy who didn’t know it, so Vince paused to catch his breath. George’s head lolled just behind the Caddy’s tire. Almost gently, Vince moved it out of the way. He stepped back to look at the limp man on the ground. He bent down again and pulled on an arm, laid one of his hands where it’d get run over if he didn’t come to in time and the Caddy’s driver didn’t notice him. That was George’s tough luck.

Vince eased behind the wheel of George’s piece-of-shit Ford. He’d take it somewhere and stash it. Then he’d have to come back for his car. It was becoming a lousy night. Vince turned the key and pulled out of the alley onto the Avenue. At least George hadn’t been lying, the car seemed to run pretty good.

If only there hadn’t been a bad taillight. He’d made it about twenty blocks up the Avenue and was looking for a spot to park so he could find the next guy on his list: a two-bit movie producer with a sideline making nudies and a bad slots habit who usually held down a stool at the bar in the Alabam. A car started to pull away from the curb, just across the street and a little up in front of the Downbeat, and he stopped to wait and take its place. That’s when the red light and the short squeak of a siren got his attention.

Vince wasn’t sure if it was meant for him or not, so he pulled into the spot as he’d meant to, turned off the car but waited to see what the cops would do. What they did was move up next to the back of his car, leave their red light flashing, and get out. One moved to the sidewalk, slowly walked up to the rear passenger-side window, and stood there. The other came up to Vince’s side and motioned him to roll down the window. He blinded Vince with a flashlight, then moved the beam down and around, over Vince, onto the seats of the car, before bringing it back up into his eyes.

“You got a taillight out.”

That was a relief. It was a bother, but what cop’s gonna give him too much grief over that? Still, fucking George. Vince hoped he didn’t move his hand in time.

“Yeah? Okay. Sure, I’ll get it fixed. Can you get that light out of my eyes? It’s working too well.”

The cop didn’t like that. “You got a mouth. And you look a little familiar. I seen you somewhere before? Somewhere I shouldn’t?”

Vince wasn’t unknown to the local station house. They knew who he worked for. He’d had his share of scrapes, nothing too serious but enough that when something ugly was going down they’d pick him up sometimes to see if they could sweat something, anything out of him. He knew he was small potatoes, but rousting guys like him was one way the cops could squeeze his bosses for more money, favors, or just to let them know who was really in charge without having to get tripped up in the mess of tangling with the big guys head-on.

“Get out of the car. Hands on the roof, back to the street.” The other cop moved up to the front window, his hand resting on his holster.

A whole lot of things Vince wanted to say ran through his head, but even with the whites and coffee still percolating his blood, he knew better than to say any of them. Keeping his hands in sight he slowly opened the door, got out of the car, and did as he was told.

He could hear the music spilling out the door of the Downbeat. The club was owned by that Jew in Hollywood, the well-dressed one, Cohen. Above Earl, above the Lucca brothers, he was Vince’s real boss. The band sounded crazy. Hopheads most likely. The bass rattled the windows. What was their name? Some of Vince’s friends were nuts over them, said they were the future. He sure as shit hoped not. Stars of Swing, that was it. Some guy named Charlie was the dope fiend on the bass. The girls were crazy over him. No explaining that.

The cop turned him just enough to run the light over Vince’s face, collar, and the front of his shirt. He took a step back and put his hand on his holster. “What’s this? Looks like blood.”

Shit, fucking George again. Vince should have checked himself over after pounding on him. “Cut myself shaving. Guess I was in a hurry to get out and didn’t notice to change shirts.”

The cop just nodded and told his partner to check out the car. The other cop opened the passenger door and got in, ran his flashlight around the bottom of the seats, then opened the glove box. He pulled out the pink slip and looked it over. “This your car? When’d you buy it?”

The slip was typed out to George but signed over to Vince. He didn’t know what George was going to do, maybe go to the cops, maybe his wife’d make him do it, maybe someone would find him. Better not to put himself and George in the same place tonight. “A few days ago. It’s a piece of shit but it runs. Sorry I didn’t notice the taillight.”

The cop shined his light back into the box and came out with a folded piece of paper. He carefully unfolded it, shined his light on it, and held it up so that the cop next to Vince could see. “What’ve we got here?”

The cop shoved Vince hard up against the car and pushed into the back of one of his knees with his knee. “Put your hands behind your back.”

Vince did and was cuffed, quick and tight. “What the fuck? What’d I do? Told you I’d get the light fixed.”

The cop moved him to the open driver’s window, pushed his head down to it so he could look inside and see what the other cop was holding. Shit, George, fucking George, what the hell? Vince hated that shit. It was for losers.

The other cop started tossing the car, looking it all over as the cop with Vince steered him toward the prowl car. “You know reefer’s illegal, pal, even just a little, a felony rap, even on the Avenue.”

Vince snorted. Mary Jane? Two reefers. That was all. There wouldn’t be more. George didn’t have the money or the connections. And it was all over the Avenue, all the time, and for the most part no one gave a shit, not so long as it was a white guy caught holding.

“Okay, fellas, you got me. It ain’t much of nothin’. You let trouble like this slide all the time. You know who I work for, right? I’ll get the light fixed, you can take the reefer, I don’t smoke that shit anyhow. And I’ll make sure you get taken care of soon as I get a little ahead.”

He was looking into the eyes of the cop when he said it and missed seeing the knee coming up toward his groin. He could still hear the cop, though, once he was on the ground breathing hard to try to get through it.

“That’s resisting arrest and attempted bribery, shitbag.”

The reek of vomit and piss in the tank wasn’t helping Vince’s pains. His crotch had settled into a slow dull throb, but his hips, stomach, and shoulders ached hard where he had “fallen” onto the booking cop’s billy while he was being processed. The whites and coffee still working their way through his veins weren’t helping either. Where was a real drink when he needed one?

And what was it with so many guys in the holding tank? He saw someone he knew a little across the cell and slowly picked his way over. “Hey, Tom, what’d they nab you for?”

“Hey, Vince. A bullshit B&E. The ex’s place, trying to get my radio back. Used to be my place. Cops knew it too. You?”

“A little reefer, on the back of a busted taillight. What’s going on? Why the crowd?”

“I hear it’s come down from on high. Clean up the Avenue. Some radio preacher’s got his hooks into the deputy mayor’s wife and now we’re paying for it. And it’s not like the locals mind. They’re just going to hop on board figuring they can use it to raise the going rates on leaving things be.”

Another guy had moved into Vince’s seat on the bench and he wasn’t up to the rumble it would take to clear him out. He found a spot on the concrete to try to mull over the possibilities.

They weren’t good. Normally Earl would have him out in no time. And he’d stay out. The whole ruckus would disappear. But it would cost him. Palms would be greased, strings pulled, favors called in, and Vince’d be in deeper hock to Earl and the Luccas than the schmos he regularly had to brace on their behalf. Though it wouldn’t be anything he couldn’t work off in a few good months.

But this might be different. Vince was small fry, he knew that. And so long as the little guys didn’t cost too much, didn’t rock the boat, didn’t stir up shit for the bigger fish, and brought in more than they took out, all was right with the world. A little trouble every so often, taken care of easily with something the Luccas could scrape out of his cut of things, no problem. It was like any company, just business.

Vince understood the politicians and the high-ranking cops and even the cops on the beat weren’t earning their keep by being stupid. The way to lean on the Luccas was to raise their cost of doing business. They weren’t ever going to shut down, everyone knew that. They didn’t even want to. The “legit” guys were like everybody else, they wanted to gamble, they wanted dope, they wanted women, and they wanted their slice, a fat slice, of the money being made from that.

And the soft part of the Luccas’ business was guys like Vince. Give enough grief to the little guys and it was one of the very rare times that shit could defy gravity and roll uphill. This was going to be expensive, a lot more expensive than usual. And by the time the internal ball of shit rolled back down from the Luccas to Earl and got to Vince, it would gain a whole lot of weight and pick up a mighty head of steam. He’d be theirs, forever, for whatever the fuck they wanted him for. And there were some things he didn’t want to do, wasn’t sure he could do if it came down to it. And if the Luccas owned a guy, “no” was a very dangerous word.

The whole thing gave him the kind of pain that was a lot harder to deal with than a knee in the crotch or falling onto a cop’s billy ever could. His head hurt, throbbing at his temples, pushing on his eyes. His gut churned in a way that made the club-shaped bruise on his stomach seem like a nice bit of decoration by comparison.

Fucking George. Even under the circumstances they probably couldn’t have pulled him in over the taillight. Sooner or later they’d have to give him his call. Then what was he gonna do?

He could call his mom. His mom, his hardworking, dumped-by-his-pop, dragged-down-sad, miserable mom. She’d scrape up the bail somehow, he was her boy. And then there’d be some lazy-ass public defender who’d just be another piece of shit he was going to be flattened by. He’d be sent down, hard, maybe for years. And the Luccas could still get to him inside, still own him, or at least a big piece of him. If he was lucky and kept his trap shut tight, did his time and got out, maybe they’d leave him alone after that. Maybe not.

He squeezed his eyes shut, tried to will his ears closed; anything to not feel the wet, anxious stink of the caged men all around him. Anything to avoid having the walls press closer in on him, to keep the barred ceiling and harsh lights from crushing him.

“Lasker, you got your call.”

The guard cuffed his hands in front of him, led him stumbling down what felt like a very long, bright-lit linoleum-and-plaster hall to the pay phone. He had to borrow the nickel.

Haint in the Window by Tananarive Due

Leimert Park Village

They walked in with a gale of authority, the bells on the door jangling with ferocity that made you jump and feel guilty even if you’d only spent the morning arranging to rent chairs for next week’s Terry McMillan book signing. Darryl noted their flanking formation — one on one side, one on the other — as they eased inside the bookstore, their hands never far from their waistbands. Fingers never far from their triggers. Maybe that was how they had moved when they served in Afghanistan, or wherever else they had moved on the lookout for targets.

Darryl had noticed the uniforms through the window long before the door opened, but he kept his eyes down on his seating chart just the same, as if they hadn’t shaken those bells loud enough to wake the dead. Fucking security guards. A salt-and-pepper team like Lethal Weapon. Or 48 Hrs. In his store with such an imperious air. (His store except on the deed, anyway.)

“Sir?”

When Darryl looked up, the Black security guard, who was closest, smiled an irritated smile, worse than a frown. The white one kept a distance as if he were waiting for Darryl to pull out a sawed-off from underneath his counter: his head tilted slightly down, eyes angled upward. Meant to look scary, maybe, but he was only five eight, so Darryl, who was six feet, wasn’t scared. They looked like they were serving a warrant. Darryl had to remind himself they weren’t really cops. And that he’d never been served a warrant in his life. He managed a damn bookstore.

“Yeah,” Darryl finally answered when he figured they had waited long enough.

“A couple was mugged down at the intersection today.”

Darryl waited for the part that had something to do with him.

The white security guard went on, trying to enlist Darryl’s indignation: “New residents at the Gardens?” The Gardens. Darryl almost laughed at the nickname for the former eyesore he’d walked past his whole life. Residents had been begging for a new paint job for twenty years, but new paint only came with the reopening. The evictions.

“We’re keeping an eye out for a Black male,” the white one said.

I’ll let you know if I see him. It took all of Darryl’s restraint not to say it aloud. He did say it with his eyes, though. The Black security guard glanced away, getting the joke.

The song “Fuck the Security Guards” from Rusty Cundieff’s Fear of a Black Hat was in Darryl’s Friday-night mix, which he played late when there were fewer children in the store. It would be so easy to punch on the sound system and let it blast. Security guards were cops without the training or even imaginary ideals, and a whole gang of them had been hired to patrol the shopping center where Sankofa was nestled since the renovated apartment building across the street began leasing at three times the price. Leimert Gardens, the landlord called the complex now, although it had no garden and the bougainvillea flowers wrapped around the fence had turned brown and died years ago. Darryl had seen these two rent-a-cops before through his picture window at the counter, their necks swiveling as they marched up and down the strip like the street was under occupation. Darryl hoped that the sun was burning them up in those black uniforms that made them look like SS.

“About your height and weight,” the white security guard said without irony. The brother still didn’t meet Darryl’s eyes. “If you see anyone...”

“If I see me?” Darryl said. “Sure. I’ll give you a call. You got a card?” He held out his hand. The white security guard was confused by his juxtaposition of sarcasm and willingness. He finally reached into his front pocket, behind his badge, and pulled out a business card: South LA Security — established 2016. But now his minor irritation had bloomed to anger that turned his earlobes red. When he leaned forward, he stared into Darryl’s eyes almost like a lover — and that was when Darryl knew.

Darryl’s grandmother had called it his Third Eye, claiming it was his birthright. Darryl knew things that were unspoken sometimes, whispers of premonitions. His stomach always knotted when he brushed against knowledge that was none of his business, but he’d learned to use the feeling to avoid problems when he interviewed job candidates or suffered through first dates that wouldn’t lead anywhere except where he’d already been. This time, the feeling was even stronger: the knotting, but also a burning.

This guy was bad news, a violent bully. Okay, maybe he didn’t need a premonition to guess that, but Darryl knew this particular man — RICK, his name tag said, no last name offered — was a security guard because he couldn’t qualify for LAPD, which was a true testament to his instability. And he deeply craved an excuse to hurt a smart-ass like Darryl Martin Jones. To kill someone, if he could get away with it — just to see what it might feel like. Even his smile looked like a trap ready to spring. Darryl pulled his hand back, hesitating to take the card. He wanted no ties to Rick.

“You’ve got a great view of the street here,” the Black one said. “Maybe you’ll see someone you don’t know? Someone who doesn’t belong?”

The door jangled again, and this time a white couple walked inside, maybe in their late twenties, both in hiking sandals and cargo shorts, their toes bare. On an adventure together. They hesitated at the sight of the security guards, but after a quick assessment they decided the space was safe. Darryl noticed how the woman drew her arms around her oversized purse.

“Do you have any children’s books?” she asked Darryl. “Picture books?”

Darryl pointed to the colorful corner display at the front of the store with the child-sized plastic play table. Bright red. Truly impossible to miss. But because his desk was so prominent across from the door, he was the concierge from the moment customers walked inside — no need to look for themselves. “Picture books up front. Young adult’s near the back. Let me know if you’re looking for something specific.”

“Great!” the woman chirped. She seemed to notice how tightly she was clutching her bag and let it fall limp to her hip. “Just looking for something for my niece for Black History Month. This is a beautiful store.”

“Thank you,” Darryl said, his eyes back on the white security guard. He realized he had never taken the business card, which the guard still held out within his reach. He hated the part of himself that felt more at ease with white witnesses nearby. He even put on a show for them. “And we serve beautiful customers. In a beautiful neighborhood.”

Darryl took the security guard’s card. From Rick’s icy smile, he hadn’t liked waiting.

Darryl hoped they wouldn’t come by the store again. But the knot in his stomach, still stewing, told him they probably would — Rick would, at least. Darryl was pretty sure of that.

That day the security guards came inside was the first time Darryl saw the haint.

A less watchful manager might not have noticed, but that wasn’t Darryl, so he saw right away: two books were face out in Protest & Revolution. Instead of the newly published books by UCLA professors he was trying to promote, the two books facing out were Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth and The Autobiography of Malcolm X. He had read both of them in high school, his first and favorites. Truthfully, they usually were facing out — but not today. Except they were. He hadn’t seen a customer in that section in the hour since he’d propped up the other books, so no one else could have done it. And the two books he’d chosen were on the floor. Facedown. As if the two books in their place had popped out on their own and knocked down the upstart competition.

Darryl wasn’t a haint-believing kind of brother, so that’s not where his head went first. He told himself that he must not have noticed one of the customers rearrange his shelf for whatever entitled reason — maybe a “well, actually” commentary on which books deserved to be in the section and which didn’t — and Darryl was muttering about it under his breath for the rest of the day because the fucking nerve. The thing was, the only customers who had been in his store since he arranged those shelves were two white dudes who had gone straight to Biography and then ambled over to the New York Times best sellers, and then the new section at the front where he kept most of his books by white authors, decorated with big enough posters to be seen from the store window: Colson Whitehead, yes, but also the usual suspects: Stephen King, James Patterson, John Grisham, and Gillian Flynn. Whitenip for casual passersby who weren’t drawn to the kente cloth and Essence best sellers that took up most of the window space.

For the first year after the Gardens opened up, newly renovated, three times the price for a one-bedroom, he’d delayed stocking anything except Black and brown authors as usual. But he had to admit that his sales had gone up almost 20 percent since he added the new section. Maybe more, if he were honest. His old customers were moving on and out, and his new customers wanted to treat him like a Barnes & Noble despite the sign clearly marked Sankofa Books & Gifts outside. Even if they didn’t speak any languages from Ghana, where Sankofa meant to go back and retrieve what was lost, they should be able to tell it meant Black.

Darryl had studied enough sales trends to predict that if he had a time machine, he might not recognize Sankofa in five years — assuming it was still here — just like he already didn’t recognize the rest of the street. The books and shelves might still be here, but the spirit of the place could be gone.

Like everything. Like everyone.

Darryl never planned to run a bookstore. He’d noticed how hard Mrs. Richardson was working as he strolled the aisles and vowed that he would never be seduced by a love so fickle. Too many empty seats when the visiting author deserved a stadium. Hardcover books too expensive for customers to afford. He promised himself he would not be swayed by the whine of Coltrane’s sax hypnotizing him from the speaker in the top corner of the east wall. Not by boxes of greeting cards adorned with the blazing colors of Harlem Renaissance artists: Jacob Lawrence. Romare Bearden. Loïs Mailou Jones. Not by hand-painted placards posted to announce the myriad sections, each more glorious than the last: Protest & Revolution and Biographies, of course, but also Science Fiction. Mystery & Thriller. Romance. Comics & Graphic Novels. Each aisle a world unto itself, his mother’s favorite weekend spot, God rest her soul. Lemme take you to school so you’ll see what they won’t teach you, Mama used to say, and they would each disappear into Sankofa as the hours passed outside. Sankofa was the sun on its venerated street in South Central and everything else was in its orbit. Or so Darryl thought.

Sankofa was not only a fortress from erasure, it had been a citadel during the fires. In 1992, when a jury in Los Angeles proclaimed that a Black man’s plight was worth less than a dog’s (since his neighbor had gotten jail time for beating his dog, unlike those cops who beat Rodney King for the world to see), the strip mall across the street had gone up in flames while Mrs. Richardson opened her doors to anyone who needed to sob or rant, or both, behind the safety of her bookshelves. Fruit of Islam guarded the doors, but even if they hadn’t, Darryl’s father and his Uncle Boo — both high school football coaches — would have joined any dozen other men or women to protect Sankofa and its treasures. Smoke rose east, west, north, and south of Sankofa, but not a single page in the bookstore burned.

When Mrs. Richardson offered Darryl a job after school when he was fifteen, it seemed harmless enough. Why not earn his movie and comic book money organizing the boxes, stacking books on shelves, and — after a couple of months of building trust — running the register when Mrs. Richardson had more than one customer, so she could hover and make suggestions? He’d imagined himself becoming a writer, so a bookstore felt like a natural incubator. If he were honest with himself — and honesty was harder to come by now that he was nearly forty — his days working at Sankofa had been some of the happiest of his life.

The problem was, he’d fixed the store, the street, the neighborhood, in time, as if they would always be the way he remembered. But in the Afrofuturism section, Octavia E. Butler had written, “The only lasting truth is Change” in Parable of the Sower for all the world to see, so that fallacious thinking was nobody’s fault but his. Everything changed. The South Central LA he’d grown up in had been different in his grandmother’s time, when it was mostly white. His grandfather used to say that the coyotes and mountain lions and bears that sometimes ventured from the hills were only a reminder that this land had never belonged to humans, period.

The Only Lasting Truth indeed.

Darryl first thought the word ghost the day the boxes tumbled down in the storeroom. The store was empty when he heard the noise, and the cramped storeroom, which housed the bathroom, didn’t have a door to outside. (How many times had the more celebrated authors complained that there was no rear door to sneak into past the crowd?) This was about a week after the wrong book covers had been turned out, which he’d pretty much forgotten, even when the other strange things started happening. Always when he was alone.

On Tuesday, the blinds over the picture window unfurled even though no one touched the pull string. The right half fell until it nearly touched the floor, but the left half got caught midway up, a leering eye. That was a first. Then the Barack Obama book cover he’d hung on the wall was on the floor when he opened the store Wednesday morning, the plastic frame cracked, Obama’s face grinning sideways at him. By then, it was three strange occurrences in as many days, and he’d begun to wonder if someone was sabotaging him on purpose. Low-key.

Then the storeroom. Darryl had part-time helpers who came in after school like he had — although, frankly, they lacked both drive and pride in their work — so Darryl checked the stability of every box himself even if he didn’t stack them. Hardcovers could get bent up in the box, and returning was a hassle, so he ran a tight storeroom. When he heard the crash, he thought a vagrant had snuck in to find a quiet place to sleep... and instead, he found all six boxes from the top of the wire shelf on the east wall tumbled down to the concrete, one of them bashed open and spilling Stephen King paperbacks.

“Hey! Who’s back here?” he called out with extra bass in his voice, picking up his broom, because, again, he wasn’t a “ghosty” kind of brother and the only hauntings he’d heard about were in old houses. Grudgingly, he remembered the security guards’ visit and talk of a local mugger, so he thought maybe his store was a target: he couldn’t guess the angle of knocking down boxes in the storeroom, but it could be a ploy to get him away from the register. He tried to keep one eye on his desk through the doorway, but the storeroom had a lot of narrow aisles to cover, so eventually his desk was no longer in sight as he peeked around corners.

No one. The storeroom was empty. He was about to try to figure out what else could have made the boxes fall when the bathroom door slammed itself shut. The slam was a loud CRACK like a gunshot that made him jump inside his clothes. The doorknob rattled like it might fall off, then abruptly fell still.

“Hey!” Darryl called with far less bass this time, more like a petulant child. “Get your ass out here and get the hell out of my store!”

The door didn’t move. The doorknob didn’t so much as tremble.

Darryl never kept a gun in his store. He had his dad’s old Glock at home, a memento more than protection, but it wasn’t with him now. The notion of an armed bookseller didn’t sit well with him, felt like an oxymoron, so all he had in his trembling hand was a broom handle as he approached the bathroom door. “Come on. No one’s gonna hurt you!” he said, trying to sound folksy and empathetic. Sometimes desperate people only wanted five dollars, or a sandwich. “You need somethin’ I can get you, brother?” (Sexist to assume it was a man, he knew, but whoever it was would have to be pretty tall to reach those boxes on the top shelf. And strong enough to pull them down.)

Stillness and silence.

Darryl knew that most store owners would call the police, but not on his damn watch. And he wouldn’t call those security guards either. He used the hashtag #abolitionnow on his Twitter, so this was how a world without policing would look like. People would need to deal with their own damn problems instead of expecting somebody to come help them.

“All right, then. One... two...”

He didn’t wait for three. He turned the knob and kicked the door open so hard that he tore a foot-sized hole in the wood, which apparently was hollow inside. Shit.

No one was in the bathroom, which was only as big as a broom closet, with no windows, so its emptiness sat in plain view. One gray-white toilet, water low as usual. A sink with a rust trail in the basin from the faucet left dripping over the years. The mirror with a triangle-sized crack in one corner. An old Devil in a Blue Dress movie poster featuring Denzel. Empty.

“What...” Darryl said aloud to his reflection in the mirror, “...the fuck?”

That was the first time the word came to his mind: I’ve got a damn ghost. His grandfather would have called it a haint or a spook. Whatever the word for it, his experiences in the past couple of days finally made sense.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” he said.

And just maybe, he thought, he was.

The Spirituality section gave him clues but no real answers. Yet he’d pieced together enough from ghost stories and horror movies to figure out that any haint going to the trouble of being noticed by human eyes must have a message. But what? And, more importantly, whose message?

He thought first of Mrs. Richardson’s husband, Calvin, who had died of a heart attack behind this very desk back in 2005, but why would he bother coming back after all these years? (All he’d talked about was getting away from the burdens of Sankofa, so it was hard to imagine him returning now.) Same for Calvin Jr., who had never shown much interest in the store before he OD’d on painkillers in 2010. Documentary filmmaker St. Clair Bourne had spent hours at a time visiting Sankofa before he died after brain surgery in 2007, but wouldn’t he be more likely to haunt a movie theater, his beloved medium? Muhammad Ali had done a signing and called the store “the greatest” years ago, though believing it was Ali’s ghost was plain wishful thinking. Like, damn, Ali could haunt anywhere in the world. Same with so many of the others: Prince had surprised him one day and bought a couple hundred dollars’ worth of music biographies, but wouldn’t Prince haunt a recording studio instead? Or, better yet, a keyboard? Could it be E. Lynn Harris, gone so soon in 2009? Or Eric Jerome Dickey, who’d broken his readers’ hearts when he passed away in 2021?

And sister Octavia. Octavia E. Butler had done a book signing for Fledgling only months before she died, on Halloween night, no less. He’d almost sprung for an overflow space but decided to let the customers sit close to each other for the experience. They’d been shoulder to shoulder, beyond standing room only. Some had sat on the floor. Every time Octavia had spoken with her deep, wise timbre, the room had been so silent it might as well be empty. Her books could be grim, yet she’d smiled all through that night. Octavia might be haunting the store, he thought, so he put an asterisk by her name. She just might.

But how many other customers had died since Darryl started working here when he was fifteen, their hair graying, walk slowing, persistent coughs shaking stooping shoulders, breaths wheezing under the weight of cigarettes, heart conditions, and diabetes? Three dozen, easily. And those were just the ones whose names he remembered, whose faces had graced the aisles with laughter and smiles and “What you got for me today?” That wasn’t counting the ones who had just moved away, and that was a kind of death too, so why not?

The more Darryl tried to think of whose ghost might be haunting Sankofa, the more he realized it was a long-ass list. His parents were gone, killed by a drunk driver on Crenshaw when he was thirty. His mother might be the haunting type, but she would never intentionally knock over boxes of books; that was sacrilege. And why nearly twenty years later? His Aunt Lucy and Uncle Boo. His cousin Ray. Dead, all of them. They were ghosts haunting him even when they didn’t make themselves known. But would they follow him to Sankofa?

All he knew was that this haunting felt deeply personal. The haint knew him, and well. The Autobiography of Malcolm X was a good guess, but Fanon too? When he’d read them the same year, back to back? No way that was random. Only his father knew that — maybe. But his father would never have knocked down the Obama poster, not enough to hurt it. They’d had long arguments over what Obama was and wasn’t doing for Black people, and his father had been Obama to the bone. If anything, Dad would have sat the poster in Darryl’s office chair.

Darryl wrote down as many names as he remembered. Tried calling out a few. But no answer came, not even the sound of a flapping page. The more names he called out to the silence, the more a cold loneliness wrapped itself around Darryl’s chest, the feeling he sometimes tried to drink away with half a bottle of wine after work, when there was nothing else for his hands and mind to do except remember that, once upon a time, he’d planned a bigger life. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d even pretended to write.

Old folks called dead people who came back haints, but what was the word for those, like him, who had been left behind?

Darryl was close to telling himself he’d imagined everything when he saw the haint in the window. He? — She? — was standing just below the giant golden script of the backward S in Sankofa on the glass. At first he thought it was someone standing outside, obscured in a blaze of sunlight, but it was a reflection as if someone were standing inside the store. No one else was with him, not on a Tuesday afternoon when it wasn’t Black History Month. About six feet tall. Dark skin. Darryl couldn’t make out the facial features, but the figure’s bulk standing there looked as real as the life-sized Michelle Obama cutout posed beside his desk.

Darryl couldn’t read the expression on the blurry face, though the eyes were staring straight at him. The stare felt ominous, so dispassionate and yet... so urgent. All moisture left Darryl’s mouth. For the first time in his life, he rubbed his eyes like people do in movies to make sure they’re not hallucinating. He wasn’t. The haint was still in the window when he opened his eyes.

“Who...” Darryl cleared his throat, since the word was buried in nervous phlegm. “Who are you? What’s your name? What do you want?” The questions running through his mind for days spilled from his mouth.

The haint only stared from the window, reflecting... no one.

“Why are you here? Tell me what you want me to—”

Bells jangled, and for one glorious, endless breath, Darryl was sure the haint was communicating in a musical language from another plane — until the front door opened and a customer wandered in. (Only the door chimes! The disappointment was real.) She was a blond-haired white woman in a sundress and wide-brimmed hat like a Hollywood starlet. A tourist, obviously. Her nose was sunburned bright red.

“Excuse me... can you recommend a good beach read?” She pointed to the new names in his window display. “How about Stephen King?”

Darryl had glanced away for only an instant, yet of course the haint was gone the next time he looked. Rage coursed through him, but he swallowed it away. Would rage bring the haint back? Bridge the gulf between the living and the dead? The present and the past?

For horror fans, Darryl usually recommended Victor LaValle instead, or Octavia’s Fledgling, or that anthology Sycorax’s Daughters with horror by all of those fierce sisters, but instead he only said blandly, “Which one? I think I’ve got ’em all.”

“Right?” she laughed. Her laugh was a knife twist, though he didn’t have time to explain the long story about how Sankofa was supposed to be.

He pointed her toward his New York Times best sellers section. She bought two King books and didn’t blink at the price. At the register, she chatted about how she was staying in an Airbnb at the Gardens after flying in from Phoenix for a pitch meeting and how the neighborhood was so convenient to everything in LA. Darryl barely heard her. He was thinking about how Mrs. Richardson rarely visited in person after she broke her hip last December, and how she would barely recognize her own store now. And how maybe it was time for him to find another job. Another city, even. Another life.

Darryl stared at the window looking for his haint the rest of the day.

The next morning, every book from the shelves lay across the floor in a sea. Darryl stood in the doorway staring at the spectacle for a full two minutes, nearly in tears. Then he went inside, locked the door, and kept the CLOSED sign turned out. He definitely wouldn’t be selling any of Stephen King’s books today. Or anyone else’s.

He almost called the security service — the card was still propped by his register as an inside joke to himself — but he didn’t want to invite those two assholes near him again, especially not that itchy one. Besides, the more he looked around, the more he realized it couldn’t be the work of vandals.

The evidence was all around him. The door had been locked. No windows broken. Nothing taken from the register. It was as if Sankofa had suffered its own private earthquake, the books shaken away while everything else was left upright. No part of it looked natural.

And the scene felt angry. An attack. A taunt. For the first time, Darryl felt afraid of the haint. (But he definitely didn’t want the haint to know that.)

“Oh yeah?” Darryl said. “Fuck you. This is my store, not yours. What else you got?”

His knees were tense, ready to spring him under his desk in case the haint did have something else. (As he thought about it, a haint might have a hell of a lot else.) Yet the store was still and silent, just like the storeroom before the door slammed.

“You want me to leave? Is that it?” Darryl said. “You’re the one who needs to leave. Get out of here! I better not see you again. Leave me alone!”

Darryl didn’t go to many horror movies because the characters could be so dumb, but he wondered why more people in movies didn’t just tell the ghost to fuck off. Because that would be a short-ass movie, he decided. But that was his plan. And if establishing dominance wasn’t enough, he’d bring in that new tarot reader from down the street to make the banishing more official. “Mess up my store like this?” he said as he went shelf by shelf, replacing the fallen books one at a time, setting the ones with bent covers aside, a growing pile. “You just fucked all the way up.”

He impressed himself with his tough talk, decided he wasn’t scared, but then a soul food cookbook in trade paperback teetering on a shelf behind him fell to the floor, and he screamed like a high school girl. And then laughed at himself. And then... yeah, maybe he cried a little too. Or a lot. All of those Black books scattered in disarray on the floor, the bare shelves looking eager for a new adventure, made Darryl want to curl up in a corner. The store felt closer to the truth today than it had in a long time. Mrs. Richardson said she could barely make rent in the past couple of years. How long before he would be packing up Sankofa anyway? Should he even bother reshelving the books?

But over time, as he filled the shelves aisle by aisle, the despairing feeling was replaced by resolve. Excitement, even. He’d always wanted to move the Science Fiction section closer to the Mystery & Thiller section, and add a dedicated Horror section, and suddenly he had the freedom to recreate the store the way he’d wanted to, no longer bound by Mrs. Richardson’s years of habit. By the end of the day, he’d filled all of the shelves except the New York Times best sellers section. No way he’d put those back. Now he finally had room for the Young Adult section he’d been dreaming of: rows of Black and brown boys and girls who were wizards. Vampires. Basketball champions. They were anything they damn well pleased.

What was that line from the baseball movie? If you build it, they will come.

The tourists could buy Rivers Solomon and Nnedi Okorafor and Attica Locke and Steven Barnes and Nikki Giovanni and Toni Morrison too. They just had to learn. Someone could stay behind and teach them. Then mail orders, which were picking up since he hired someone to update the store’s website, could take care of the rest.

Maybe that was what the haint was trying to tell him. Make the store his.

Darryl was so excited that he climbed inside the window display to start ripping down the posters and signs he had put up to try to catch the newcomers’ eyes. More than he remembered, actually — an entire side of the display, including the prime corner. Gillian Flynn was dope, but why was she in the window at Sankofa when she could be celebrated anywhere?

Darryl didn’t hear the commotion until it was practically in his ear, the shout of a woman who sounded like Big Hat with the sun-broiled nose. “Maybe he went that way?” More of a question than a comment, and Darryl heard stampeding feet from around the corner.

When his attention slipped, his foot followed. He landed against the plate glass hard enough to make him think he might fall through and be shredded. But only a small shard of glass in the center fell out, a sparkling diamond in fading sunlight, and the spiderweb of cracks seemed to cradle him as he tried to straighten himself up.

The white security guard was amped up on imagination and anger when he turned the corner, his gun already aimed, looking for something to shoot. Darryl winced as soon as he saw him, expecting a gunfire blast. But it didn’t come at first.

The security guard squinted against the window’s glaring dusk light to glance inside the window at the New York Times best sellers still scattered across the floor. He noted the CLOSED sign on the door. Then his eyes came back to the man who’d broken the glass — still standing inside the store window. Darryl saw him decide what to do.

“Freeze!” the security guard yelled, because he’d seen it on TV so often, but he didn’t wait for Darryl to freeze. Didn’t seem to care that Darryl’s only motion was raising his hands.

Just before the gunshot — the first one — Darryl noticed a figure reflected in the glass, too far away to be him — and yet, it was him. The same eyes he’d seen from behind his desk now stared at him up close with an expression that seemed to say: Do you get it now, brother?

Grandmama had always said he had a touch of the psychic. He’d had a feeling about this security guard from the moment he saw him. And he still hadn’t read the signs.

“Well, I’ll be goddamned—” Darryl started to say.

Then the bullets came. One. Two. Three.

“He works there!” a woman’s voice screamed from somewhere far away.

Before the brief flash of pain turned to a silent soup, Darryl had time to vow that he would haunt the fuck out of whatever they built where Sankofa used to be.

Just you wait.

I Am Yojimbo by Naomi Hirahara

Kokusai Theatre

On the last day of the Kokusai Theatre on Crenshaw, Eric Montgomery’s boss, Sab, told him that he could keep anything in the lost and found.

“Go to town,” Sab said. His back had become bent over the years, as if two decades in a dark theater had shriveled his body.

“Okay, boss.” Eric tried to sound grateful but he knew what was in that lost and found box. Actually, calling Sab “boss” was being too generous because Eric wasn’t technically paid. He was fourteen and, according to child labor laws, needed a parent to sign off on a work permit. And no one in his family was going to approve of him working at a Japanese movie house in the neighborhood. If he was going to spend his extra time there, that was his choice and not theirs.

“It’s a sickness,” his mother, Jessie, said to her husband, Hal. She adjusted the cat’s-eye glasses that brushed against the curls of her relaxed hair in an attempt to look like Phylicia Rashad. Why would her youngest son be so obsessed with Japan?

“What, you think that you’re part Oriental or something?” Hal had spent two years fighting in Vietnam. He had seen things that he would never share with his family.

Hal was the one, ironically, who had taken Eric and his older brothers to the Kokusai to watch a screening of Akira Kurosawa’s classic The Seven Samurai.

Eric, who was sitting next to his father and middle brother, had been mesmerized by the black-and-white images of the kimono-clad warriors brandishing swords. A small Japanese town populated by old people was being overrun with thugs. It was up to a ragtag group of samurai, including a man who posed as a warrior but wasn’t officially one. That character was played by actor Toshiro Mifune, whom Eric later saw multiple times after “working” with Sab at the Kokusai. His favorite Mifune movie was Yojimbo, in which the Japanese star played a masterless samurai and bodyguard for hire.

It was at a screening of Yojimbo that Eric thought he saw his father’s favorite Laker, Kareem, and mentioned it later at the dinner table.

“You crazy,” the middle brother said.

“Are you sure it wasn’t Mel Ware?” the oldest brother asked. Mel was the local star athlete at Dorsey High School.

“I know the difference between Kareem and Mel,” Eric snapped back.

“Oh, you know Eric and his night vision,” the middle one said.

“Whooo, whooo, whooo,” both brothers let out owl noises, and laughed at Eric’s expense. It was easy to do, the youngest one separated from the other two by an entire war. He was odd; he didn’t fit in with other boys. He didn’t play basketball or football and instead of taping posters of rap stars or athletes on his side of his bedroom, he put up images of Bruce Lee and Mifune.

Eric wanted to go to the local Japanese-language school on Jefferson and 12th Avenue near Saki Liquor. Every Saturday, he saw young Japanese Americans being dropped off and picked up in Toyota Corollas and Honda Accords from places probably miles away from the Crenshaw area. He didn’t care if he would be the only Black kid in those bare classrooms. All he cared about was learning the code, the Bushido code that would set him free.

He heard a little about Bushido from Charlie, a Japanese man originally from a place called Terminal Island. He was a gardener who drove a beat-up brown Chevrolet pickup truck. He installed metal pipes in its bed to hold his tools — a gas-powered blower, rakes, edger, and an extra coil of green hose. Charlie had weather-beaten skin as dark as his truck and tufts of severe hair resembling the steel wool Eric’s mother used to clean dirty pans.

Charlie was Sab’s friend and he didn’t care about child labor laws, either. On Saturday mornings, he’d occasionally pick up Eric to accompany him to do an uncomplicated but vigorous job like collecting hedge clippings on an estate in Leimert Park.

“Bushido is like, you never shame your family. Your name is everything. You show honor until death,” Charlie said one Saturday before he pulled the cord to start his blower.

A week before the closure of the Kokusai, Charlie treated him to a bowl of won ton saimin at Holiday Bowl, a landmark building that reminded Eric of a large boat gliding along Crenshaw Boulevard. The huge orange neon sign, BOWL, towered over the structure, the neighborhood’s replacement for the sun.

“Two saimin, yeah?” The waitress was small, but her arms were strong, expertly balancing the two steaming bowls on her tray. Eric couldn’t tell the ages of the Japanese. The waitress could have easily been either his mother’s or his grandmother’s age. At the next table were an older couple that Eric recognized from their Four Square church. And at the table after that were some students in UCLA gear.

“Don’t let it go cold.” Charlie was already slurping up the noodles with his plastic chopsticks, a few drops of soup broth spilling onto the Formica surface. “Use fork, okay? That’s why Doris brought that for you.”

Eric had wanted to try the chopsticks after watching Mifune devour rice with his, but he listened to Charlie and picked up the fork. The noodles kept slipping off and Charlie admonished him, “Use spoon too,” referring to a plastic ladle that Eric had seen in Chinese restaurants.

Guiding a slippery wonton onto the ladle, he was finally able to take a bite. He had never eaten anything quite so delicious. “I wonder if the samurai ate this,” he said.

Charlie laughed, making sounds from the back of the throat. He didn’t confirm or refute Eric’s musings. Truth was, he had no idea but he would like to imagine that they were eating the meal of warriors.

And now, finally, the day Eric was dreading. The Kokusai Theatre was closing on the day before Halloween, 1986. Sab explained that there weren’t enough Japanese living in the neighborhood anymore. He hoped to reopen in Little Tokyo, but he wasn’t sure if it would happen.

Eric couldn’t be a part of a Little Tokyo incarnation of the Kokusai. He could be a part of this up to now because it was on his home turf.

“Pick up the trash after the final screening. One last time. Moe will be coming to wipe the floor down.” Sab didn’t seem particularly sad about the closure of his operation.

Eric stood in back of the theater and listlessly watched the last offering, Lost in the Wilderness. The movie was about a Japanese mountain climber who was the first man to reach the North Pole by himself. No fight scenes and half of the story was about the man’s wife, stuck at home.

There were only about twenty people in the theater, which was actually more than usual on a weeknight.

In the back row near the door, there was a low rumble of voices that got louder and louder. Eric couldn’t understand the argument because it, like the movie, was in Japanese. Two men were fighting and before Eric could let his boss know, Sab burst in with the janitor, Moe, who sometimes played security guard.

“You, out!” Sab yelled.

Before they could collect themselves, Moe ushered the men out of their seats.

Eric, captivated by the men more than the movie, went out the other door to follow their activities in the lobby. One was a clean-cut Asian man wearing a fresh-pressed collared shirt and a sports jacket. The other one was smaller with wild, angry eyes. For a full second those eyes met Eric’s. He averted his gaze, hoping not to draw attention to himself. But it was too late. Both men were pushed out the door by Moe and they stalked off in different directions.

The lights went up shortly afterward, with a few of the white moviegoers clapping to commemorate the Kokusai Theatre’s long history in the neighborhood. Several of the Japanese customers stayed back to offer their appreciation to Sab.

Eric rolled the trash can down the aisle and picked up strewn popcorn containers and empty giant drink cups. He started from the front row and worked himself to the back. When he got there, his foot stepped on something hard. Eric looked down at a black plastic bag. Inside were two VHS tapes, unidentified aside from Japanese writing on the labels stuck on the spines.

He rolled the trash can back to the lobby and pulled out the battered lost and found box that was stored behind the counter. Inside were a green sweater, a set of keys from five months ago, and three pairs of sunglasses. Eric was about to drop the VHS tapes into the box but then stopped himself. Sab had said that he could keep anything he wanted in the lost and found. He chose a pair of oversized tortoise-framed glasses and held onto the bag of VHS tapes. Even though it was dark, he wore the sunglasses and stuck the bag in his jacket as he retrieved his bike from storage and went out the back door.

Later that night, Eric snuck out of his bed when everyone was sleeping and carefully pushed in one of the videotapes in their VHS machine in the living room. On the TV he was shocked by what he saw. He had seen women’s boobies in Hustler magazines that boys brought to junior high school but he had never seen what this man was doing to the woman’s body with his burning cigarette, first to her nipples and then—

He heard his father stumble in the hallway en route to the bathroom. His heart pounding, Eric quickly ejected the tape and placed it inside his pajama bottom to cover his erection.

The next day was Halloween, but of course the Montgomerys wouldn’t be celebrating it in any way. Instead they walked to church for Friday-night service, Bibles clutched in their hands. Eric didn’t complain about missing out on any parties or trick-or-treating (even though he was too old for it, a few in his class still went out). He felt sick to his stomach about what he had seen on that videotape. It looked like real tears were rolling down the woman’s cheeks, her lopsided mouth crying out for the man to stop it.

While Eric sat in the sanctuary, he prayed for Jesus to erase those images from his mind. But even when he closed his eyes, he didn’t picture his Savior, but the pale naked body of the woman.

On Sunday, there was more church. Hal noticed that his youngest son had seemed subdued the last couple of days, and announced after service that he was taking the family to the coffee shop at Holiday Bowl for a late breakfast. Jessie was surprised but thankful to have a break from cooking for four ravenous males. She worked as a nurse three nights a week and was exhausted.

It wasn’t Doris who served them today, but a younger woman with long black hair tied back in a ponytail. Everyone in the Montgomery party ordered grits and bacon with their eggs, except for Eric. No, he went for his rice and Portuguese sausage. Nobody teased him that morning because they were too hungry to care.

Heading to the restroom before his family left the bowling alley’s coffee shop, Eric saw the woman at a table in the back. He thought that it was perhaps Satan playing tricks on him. But the woman in the video... he recognized her drawn face with a wide mouth that tended to lean right when she spoke. Eric stopped dead in his tracks on the carpet and someone behind him almost crashed into him. “Boy, watch it,” said an old Black man.

Eric kept walking but snuck a look before he turned for the restroom. He was shocked. Her companion was the Asian man — the clean-cut one that looked like a cop.

As he took a piss at the urinal, he thought to himself, What is she doing with him? Is she in some kind of trouble?

He washed his hands with a puff of soap as his mother taught him, and there he decided. He would do what he could to help the woman.

He returned to his parents, who had already left the table to pay the bill at the cash register. “I’ll walk home,” he told them. His older brothers were off to meet up with friends.

“Suit yourself,” his father said.

The man got into a shiny Buick, while the woman took to the sidewalk, walking south.

This was meant to be, Eric thought, and slowed his usual pace to trail the woman. About three blocks down, she entered a mall and walked into a women’s clothing store. Eric noticed that she was wearing a name tag and realized that she worked there.

He lingered at a rack in the corner. He couldn’t even pretend that he was interested in any of the clothing, which was bright and oversized, nothing his own mother would wear. The Japanese woman, carrying a bunch of jackets on hangers in the loop of her fingers, was now one rack away from him. There were no other customers in the store.

“Kon-nichi-wa.” He bowed slightly in front of her.

The woman, whose name tag identified her as Kanako, narrowed her eyes. “Stop following me.”

“You speak English.” He was amazed.

“Fuck you.”

Kanako’s crudeness caused him to step back, almost falling into some blazers with enormous shoulder pads.

A group of five women entered the store, immediately filling the space with a frenetic, nervous energy. It was definitely time to leave.

Did Kanako notice him from the Holiday Bowl? Eric wondered as he walked outside. When did his presence enter her consciousness?

Eric was riding his bike later that afternoon when he noticed several black-and-whites were parked around the Kokusai Theatre. A crowd had gathered to check out the commotion. Eric walked his bike to the front where Charlie was standing. Yellow crime tape hung loosely over the open glass doors.

“What happened?”

“You shouldn’t be here,” Charlie said.

Out in the parking lot, Sab was talking to police officers. And then other men, pulling down the crime tape, emerged from inside wheeling a gurney with a covered body. The large body weighed down the bed and one of the men seemed to be holding one of the arms in place as they eased it into the coroner’s vehicle.

Sab, who didn’t notice Eric’s presence, approached Charlie after speaking to the cops. “He was shot in the head. They think it happened on Thursday night after he was cleaning up.”

“Robbery?”

Sab shook his head. His eyes were even more bloodshot than usual. “I had all the money. Why in the hell would anyone want to kill Moe?”

Beyond the fluttering yellow tape, Eric saw the lost and found box on its side, the green sweater strewn on the floor. That box had been behind the counter, next to a large plastic container of popcorn kernels. Why would it be out like that? There was only one reason. Someone was looking for something.

When Eric got home, he felt nauseous. His brothers always teased him that he was the least street-smart boy in Crenshaw, but he knew that Moe’s murder was related to what he was hiding in between his mattress and their bedroom wall. Whoever killed Moe wanted those tapes.

The next day, Eric was walking home from Audubon Junior High School when a black car idled up beside him. He tried to ignore it but the car stayed on his heels like a hungry cat.

He glanced over to see that the driver was the angry Asian man from the theater. His heart pounding, Eric whipped around the corner, only to have the man jump out of his car to chase after him.

“Don’t make me run.” The man grabbed the collar of Eric’s jacket with his right hand, revealing, with his left, the handle of a knife in a leather case stuck between his lean stomach and pants. Eric noticed that the man was missing part of his pinky finger. He knew what that meant from watching the movie Battles without Honor and Humanity. This man was a real-life yakuza.

“How did you find me?”

“The janitor told me where you went to school.”

Moe sold him out? Eric couldn’t believe it.

“I think you have something of mine,” the gangster said.

There was no use denying it. “I’ll give them back to you.”

The yakuza grinned and began pulling him toward the car.

“No, I have to get them. Meet me at the Japanese senior center.”

“Where?”

“The senior center. Right on Jefferson.”

“Oh, you mean Seinan?” The guy seemed impressed that Eric would even know such a place existed. “In an hour then. You don’t want me to come to your house, right?”

After running all the way home, Eric pulled out the plastic bag from between his mattress and the wall and stuffed it inside his jacket. Their black Labrador barked from behind the metal fence. Eric got back on his bike and wondered if this would be the last time he would see his dog.

When he arrived at the nondescript building, the gangster was already there in his black car. It was almost five and most of the seniors had left for the day.

As soon as he stepped off his bicycle, the man was out of his car and practically pulling Eric behind a wall near the doorway of the center. Eric felt the air leave his lungs. He imagined the knife slicing into his stomach or neck. He hadn’t even thought of bringing any weapon with him, as he hadn’t been able to figure out how to use his nunchucks yet. His oldest brother did have a switchblade from Tijuana that he had been hiding in his underwear drawer. Oh, why didn’t I think of bringing that? Eric wondered.

“Hey, whatsu happenin’ here.” Hearing that familiar voice almost made Eric cry. Charlie was much older than this gangster, but he was tough. Eric remembered hearing that he had boxed with Filipinos on Terminal Island. During World War II, the government had emptied the man-made island and sent Charlie barefoot to Bismarck, North Dakota. “Dis young man is my helper. You have any problems with him, you gotta problem with me.”

Eric unzipped his jacket and the black bag fell to the ground. The gangster scooped it up like a raven grabbing its prey. He had what he had come for.

“If they aren’t in 100 percent good condition, you’ll hear from me again,” the yakuza said, before disappearing into his black car and driving off.

Eric was so shaken that he couldn’t even speak. Charlie pulled the accordion security gates closed in front of the glass door and fastened them together with a padlock, then turned back to Eric. “You be careful who you spend time with. You don’t want to end up like Moe.”

Afterward, instead of going straight home, Eric cruised on his bicycle down Crenshaw. He felt heartsick about releasing the videos into the hands of the yakuza. Where would they end up next?

As he rode his bike by, he scanned the clothing store, barely able to see above the racks. And there, the small head of the woman.

He quietly approached Kanako. “I had to give your tapes away,” he confessed.

Her eyes widened. “I’m going to take my break now,” she called out to a Black coworker. She gestured for him to follow her onto the floor of the mall in the front of an athletic shoe store.

“Now what did you say?” She folded her arms over her blouse, covering her name tag.

“I worked at the Kokusai Theatre. A man left some videotapes on the last day we were open.”

“You stupid kid. Why did you have to poke your head into this?”

Eric was confused. His mind tried to follow what the woman was saying. So she knew?

“You shouldn’t have gotten involved,” she said, the right side of her mouth drooping slightly.

How could he not? He was destined to be her protector. Didn’t she understand?

“How old are you, anyway?” Kanako studied him for the first time and Eric’s face grew hot.

“Fourteen.”

“You’re about two years older than my kid.”

Eric was dumbstruck. He couldn’t imagine Kanako being a mother of someone his age.

The woman’s posture softened, absorbing his surprise. She focused on his Yojimbo T-shirt that he’d purchased from a man selling bootleg shirts from the trunk of his car in the parking lot of the Kokusai Theatre. “You need to be more like him in his movies,” she said. “Mifune really didn’t give a damn about anyone.”

With that, she returned to the clothing store. Eric was paralyzed. Was Kanako right? Was Mifune just like an animal in Yojimbo, scratching his balls through his kimono? But Eric remembered the movie’s final scene: Mifune tearing through the gangsters’ bodies with the sword of a dead man. And a short knife — that’s what he used to stab the arm of the ringleader. Mifune had restored peace to that village. Whether Kanako believed it or not, the bodyguard was the hero.

Eric could have called the cops, but what would they do? Interrogate him, and then he’d be in hot water with his parents. As soon as he got home, he found the hidden switchblade underneath a pair of his brother’s Jockey briefs. He slipped it in his pants pocket and rode his bike back to the empty parking lot of the Kokusai Theatre. In the shadow of the building, he practiced flipping open the switchblade and slashing it toward an invisible enemy. If the yakuza ever came back around his neighborhood again, Eric Montgomery would be ready.

Mae’s Family Dining by Penny Mickelbury

Slauson Avenue

Mae Hillaire worked six days a week, ten to twelve hours a day, every day except the days before and the days of Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s, and her birthday. Most days she didn’t mind because where she worked was the restaurant she owned — Mae’s Family Dining — and the place was always packed because the food was always good and she was always too busy to think about anything but the work. So while she usually didn’t mind the long hours and long days and hard work, on days like today she hated every second of it and edged one step closer to her periodically threatened retirement.

The hoots and catcalls signaled the arrival of three of her regulars who also were performers at the Night Life club. Never sure whether to call them female impersonators or drag queens, Mae called them by the names they called themselves, and right now it was Etta James throwing gasoline on the fire.

“That ain’t what you was sayin’ last night, Deacon Robinson!”

Mae hurried over to the table where Alvin Robinson was cowering beneath Etta’s glare. “Etta, please come and sit down.”

“He’s a hypocrite, Miss Mae, callin’ me all kinda names in here and sayin’ all kinda other things in the club at night!”

“Be careful how you talk to my customers, Alvin.”

“They ought not to be in here with decent people!” the deacon fumed with righteous indignation.

“Nightclubs let church deacons come in, so I can let nightclub performers come in here,” Mae said, and led Etta to the table where her companions were seated and signaled for water and menus. “Y’all know there’s nothin’ I can do about hypocrites and you also know I won’t let nobody abuse you. But y’all got to behave yourselves!” And she left them amid giggles and a chorus of Yes ma’am, Miss Maes.

She’d barely resumed her seat at her station before another ruckus erupted on the other side of the dining room. “Who y’all think you s’posed to be in them stupid hats and military fatigues and boots?” Only one person talked so loud. She got up wearily and walked to the other side of the room.

“Augustus Jackson, you leave them boys alone! And if you can’t leave ’em alone, then just leave! Get outta here!”

“You got no cause to talk to me like that, Mae!”

“And you got no cause to talk to them boys like you was, Gus! You got no right to call them names. They come in here to eat just like you do. Ain’t no difference.”

Gus Jackson stood up tall and straight and it was an impressive sight from behind: He was six feet, four inches of hard muscle earned from years of lifting and moving everything that came and went through the Port of Los Angeles. Everything, that is, the union boys didn’t want to bother with and left for the colored men to handle. The view from the front, though? A belly that entered a room five minutes before the rest of Gus, but he came by it honestly: He ate at Mae’s every day and he always ate two dinners at a time, followed by two desserts, followed by a night of heavy drinking. Today it was liver and onions with sides of rice and gravy, black-eyed peas and rice, and yeast rolls, then the baked chicken with sweet potatoes, macaroni and cheese, collard greens, and cornbread. The desserts would be cobbler and cake. “There’s a big damn difference, Mae!” he bellowed. Too bad his vocal cords weren’t in his gut — they’d be squeezed shut by now.

He took a few steps toward the back of the room and the table where five Black Panthers sat. Mae approached from the other direction. She liked these boys. They were very respectful, always, and she had noticed that their presence spelled increased security outside. They nodded at her. They ignored Gus, which infuriated him.

“They oughta be over in Vietnam like the rest of our boys—”

One of the Panthers started to stand but two of the others restrained him. They all looked at Mae. Everyone in the restaurant was looking at Mae. “Please go sit down and finish eating, Gus.”

“I wore the uniform and fought for this country, just like your husband did—”

“You leave my husband outta this.”

“These boys oughta be doing the same thing.”

“Like your son, Gus? Is your son in Vietnam?” It was a low blow and Mae knew it but didn’t care. She was past caring. Today. Perhaps tomorrow she’d care about hurting someone, but today she didn’t. She watched Gus sag and deflate and shuffle back to his table where his two desserts waited. She sagged and deflated internally but walked briskly back to her cash register station, exchanging smiles and nods and handshakes with patrons on the way. She knew most of these people, and just as she knew who patronized the Night Life club listening to the risqué, raunchy patter of Redd Foxx and Richard Pryor, and enjoying Sir Lady Java and the other female impersonators, she knew which men were WWII and Korean War vets. She knew whose sons were in Vietnam. And she knew who Gus Junior had robbed, sometimes at gunpoint, to get money for his drugs because his parents had put him out of their house: he’d robbed them once too often. Then Velma Jackson put Gus Senior out after he came home drunk one time too many, pushing her past the breaking point. And some of these people in here were pushing her the same way, especially the holier-than-thou church people. She’d had enough of stone casting.

She walked to the front of the room. “A lot of y’all in here owe me money. You eat your fill but say you can’t pay and ask will I wait till next payday or the next one or the one after that. I don’t call you names and I don’t embarrass you in front of people. So here’s my new rule: no more name-calling and no more sitting in judgment of other people. And if you don’t like the people who eat here, then you can eat elsewhere.”

Mae Hillaire didn’t need the newspapers and the television to tell her that the world was changing fast. She saw the proof every day. In the people who came in, yes, but also in the clothes they wore and the things they talked about and the food they ate... or didn’t eat: more and more people didn’t eat pork, and quite a few didn’t eat meat at all, so Mae added more vegetables to the daily menu and more fish a couple days a week. But perhaps the biggest change wasn’t a visible or tangible one, it was the change happening within Negroes. Or Black people, as the young people preferred — demanded — to be called. She thought about the Louisiana countryside where she grew up and wondered how her relatives and friends and neighbors reacted to being called Black these days. When she was a child that five-letter word was worse than a four-letter one and an invitation to fight.

Mae thought a lot about what the young people were saying and doing, and she wished she could discuss it with Samuel. Damn that loudmouth Gus Jackson! She didn’t need him talking about Samuel, not when and where she couldn’t weep for his loss if she needed to, and she almost always needed to, even after the passage of six years. She’d miss him after sixty years. Maybe if she wasn’t in this restaurant all day, every day — their restaurant. It bore her name but opening it was his idea. Ten years ago this month in a little storefront place on Vernon Avenue. He’d truly be proud of what his germ of an idea had grown into — three times the space here on Slauson near Denker, the Southern Pacific Railroad tracks on the north side of the street visible through her picture window.

“Look like you girls gon’ get outta here early today,” Dave Hebert chortled as he burst into the kitchen. “Y’all done cooked up all them chickens already! Melvin said we’ll be sold out when y’all finish fryin’ up these ones.” He didn’t look at them as he spoke. As usual, he was too intent on transferring the money from the cloth sack he carried to the metal box he kept in the storage closet.

Mae finished battering and flouring the last of the chickens and Delilah grabbed up the big metal bowl of chicken pieces like it was one of her children, hauled it over to the stove where Sarah stood; the two women had chicken sizzling in the hot grease before Mae got all the flour off her hands. The three of them would literally run out of the back door as soon as they could. They couldn’t escape the hot, stinking kitchen fast enough. Mae was about to dump the flour into the garbage barrel when Dave emerged from the closet folding the empty cloth bag.

“What the hell you doin’, Mae? Don’t be throwin’ that flour away!”

“I used this flour for three days—”

“And you’ll use it for three more!”

“—and it’s time to change that grease too,” Mae continued. “It’s starting to smell rancid, and the chicken will start to taste rancid—”

“Y’all don’t throw nothin’ away till I say so, you understand me?”

“Yessir, Mr. Dave,” Delilah and Sarah said in unison.

Mae shrugged and nodded. She was damned if she’d ever call him Mr. Dave or say yessir to him. She took off and folded her apron.

“Y’all go on and get outta here. Mae can finish cookin’ the chicken while I talk to her.”

Delilah and Sarah folded their aprons and placed them beside Mae’s, gave her a nod, and exited the screen door into the alley. Mae put her apron back on and rolled down her sleeves: she’d rather be hot and sweating than have blister burns up and down her arms. Delilah and Sarah easily worked the three-deep, cast-iron skillets filled with hot grease and sizzling chicken while Mae got the chicken ready. Not so easy a task for one woman working alone.

“Everybody say this the best fried chicken in South Central, and that’s ’cause of them seasonings you use,” Dave said. He was way too close — directly behind her. If she had to back up out of the way of popping grease, she’d knock right into him.

“I’m glad people like the chicken,” Mae said. She knew she had to say something.

“What seasonings you use?”

“Family recipe.”

“You use it in my place on my chicken, it’s my recipe.”

She turned several pieces of chicken in the skillet on the front burner and two hot grease balls hit her in the face. She backed up fast, almost knocking Dave on his ass. She grabbed a cloth from her apron pocket and dabbed at her face, praying it wouldn’t blister. She turned all the chicken, constantly moving up and back, keeping Dave at a distance.

“You always been above yourself,” he snarled. “Runnin’ off to join the women’s army during the war, comin’ back wit’ a college-boy soldier, then runnin’ away from Loosiana to California, like y’all was too good to stay home.”

Mae didn’t speak. She also didn’t heave one of the kettles of hot grease and chicken at him, which is what she wanted to do. “I can’t give you my recipe,” is what she said, not looking at him, and still figuring out how she could throw hot grease at him without burning herself.

“You gon’ bring me that recipe t’morra, you smart-mouth nigger bitch, or I’m gon’ kill you and your college boy, you hear me? And you know how you better answer me!”

When he was mad all the cracker Cajun poured from Dave’s mouth faster than he could speak the words, and only somebody from Louisiana who’d grown up listening to the patois could understand it. Mae kept her back to him, kept turning the chicken. She’d be damned and burning in hell before she ever uttered the words Yessir, Mr. Dave. She was preparing for the hot-grease shower they’d both take when Melvin Gibson saved them.

He burst into the kitchen and stopped short. “Where the hell is everybody? I got a line out front waitin’ to order! How many chickens is cookin’ and when they gon’ be ready?”

Paying customers. Money. The only things that could grab Dave’s attention. “I sent Delilah and Sarah home early and Mae’s finishin’ these last five. They almost ready. Come on, Melvin, let’s go sell ’em ’fore the people change they minds.”

Dave pushed past Melvin and out the swinging door: White man in front, colored man bringing up the rear. Melvin shot Mae a worried look, then followed. Mae ladled all the chicken out of the skillets, not caring whether it was fully cooked. She wouldn’t be in the kitchen when Dave returned, and she knew he’d take his time enjoying the fact that he was the only white man with a business on this part of Central Avenue in the Black part of Los Angeles, and that he sold the best fried chicken. All the help were colored, as were all the customers, but there were no tables and chairs for them to sit and eat the best fried chicken on this part of Central Avenue.

Mae folded her apron and put it on the shelf in the storage closet, grabbed her purse, and was about to flee when she noticed Dave’s money box sitting open on the shelf. She hesitated only briefly before scooping it up, piling the three folded aprons in its place, and running into the alley, going the wrong way so she wouldn’t have to pass in front of the Chicken Coop — that’s what Dave called the place.

She walked four blocks out of her way before she could catch a bus that would take her home. She stopped in a liquor store and got a big paper bag so she didn’t look so awkward carrying the money box — the heavy money box.

Samuel heard her coming up the stairs and met her, taking the big bag, and he was about to hug her until he took a close look at her face. He pulled her into their rented room and quickly closed the door. “What’s the matter, Mae?”

She sighed deeply and they stood in the middle of the floor squeezing each other for a long moment. Finally Mae spoke: “Dave Hebert, the bastard.”

He held her at arm’s length. “What happened, Mae? You call him a bastard and quit?”

“Worse than that, Samuel.”

His eyes widened. “Did you hit him with something, knock him out?” Then his expression changed. “Did he do something to you, Mae? Did he put his hands on you?”

“No, Samuel. No, I promise you.”

“What then, Mae? What could you do that’s so bad you had to run?”

“I stole his money, Samuel. All of it.”

He looked confused so Mae pointed to the liquor store bag, which heightened his confusion. He released her and opened the bag that he’d placed on the dining table. He lifted the metal box, then opened it.

“Great God Almighty! How much money is in here, Mae?”

“I don’t know how much but it’s all he’s got. He don’t trust banks.”

Samuel looked all around the room, as if he expected Dave Hebert to materialize. He rushed over to the door and opened it, looked out, then slammed it shut and locked it. “Does he know where you live?”

Mae scoffed, “He’d have to give a damn about me to know where I live, which he doesn’t, so no, he doesn’t.”

“What about the other cooks — what’s their names? — Delilah and what’s the other one’s name?”

“Sarah, and she knows where I live ’cause she lives on Normandie and we usually ride the bus home together—”

“Did she see you take this box?”

Mae was shaking her head, then quickly explained the events that led to her becoming a thief. She explained that Melvin Gibson was the only one there with Dave, and that he would leave when the last piece of chicken was sold. Dave would lock the front door and turn out the lights, then he’d come into the kitchen to add the cash from the final sales to his box. “Then he’ll tear up the kitchen looking for it even though he’ll know it’s gone—”

“Then he’ll come looking for you. We gotta clear outta here right now, Mae.”

“And go where, Samuel?”

“I don’t know, but pack your things — NO! Leave all this old, wore-out stuff. I’ll take my work boots and clothes and you just take your personal things—”

“I got to wash the grease stink off me first, Samuel, and outta my hair. I can’t go nowhere smellin’ like this.”

“All right, but hurry up, Mae!”

She ran into the tiny bathroom that wasn’t really a bathroom but just a corner of a room with pipes from the floor below delivering water with barely any pressure. Maybe wherever they were going would have a real bathroom.

Samuel had changed into his one nice suit of clothes and shined shoes when she came out of the shower, and he had her one nice dress laid out on the bed, along with the underwear, stockings, and shoes she wore with the dress. She brought their deodorant, toothbrushes, toothpaste, and shampoo from the bathroom and Samuel tossed it all into a plastic bag, which he put into their one suitcase, where he’d packed his work clothes and boots, and hurried to the door with it. Mae had never dressed so quickly.

“We look like we’re going someplace special, Samuel,” she said, a bit of excitement creeping into her voice to join the dread.

“Maybe we are, Mae, but for sure it’s the first time we went somewhere with more than eight or nine dollars in our pockets.”

“I never stole nothin’ before, Samuel.” That admission killed all the excitement.

“Me neither.” His head dropped and his big shoulders slumped and they stood at the door, Samuel’s hand on the knob.

“I don’t think he knows where to find us, but if he finds us, he will kill us. He won’t even think about it.”

Samuel turned the knob and opened the door, then quickly closed it and hurried to the bed with the suitcase. “Gimme your purse, Mae,” he said, and he stuffed it full of money from Dave Hebert’s cashbox. “No matter what, don’t open this purse,” he said as he snapped it shut. Then he put some bills in his wallet, folded some and put them in his pants pocket, closed the suitcase, and took them back to the door. This time they left. It was still light out, and still warm, though the cool air was coming in from the ocean. Samuel put the suitcase into the trunk of their beat-up ’55 Ford Fairlane and covered it with blankets and put a toolbox on top. Then they got in the car and drove. Mae didn’t ask where they were going and Samuel didn’t say. They were both the kind of people who could get lost in their own thoughts, people who didn’t mind quiet, in fact preferring it over idle chatter and random noise.

Mae watched the street signs as they drove and knew enough to understand that they were driving west, away from Central Avenue, but she wasn’t sure where exactly they were. Then Samuel turned off the busy, wide street and onto streets lined with small, pretty houses, and there were colored people in all the yards and on all the porches. Samuel stopped in front of one of them. There were no people outside the house that needed painting and the yard with raggedy grass and wilted flowers. Mae looked the question at her husband.

“Fella I work with lives here, Gus Jackson. Him and his wife both from Texas.”

Mae frowned. “I never heard you mention him.”

“That’s ’cause I don’t much like him, and you won’t neither. He talks too much, outtalks everybody and knows everything. Loud and wrong is Gus. He’s a fool is what he is.”

“Then why are we here, Samuel?”

“They got an apartment up over the garage that till a couple of weeks ago some family was living in, and Gus couldn’t stop talkin’ about how glad he was when they moved on—”

“Maybe somebody else has moved in since then.”

“Gus woulda said. He couldn’t keep his mouth shut about something like that.” Samuel opened the car door. “Come on, my girl.”

Mae opened her door, got out of the car, and joined Samuel on the walk up the cracked cement walkway to the front door, which opened before they could knock.

“I thought that was you, Sammy! What brings you to my door?”

Gus Jackson was as big as he was loud, but he didn’t open the door any wider and he didn’t invite them in.

“This is my wife, Mae—”

“What y’all doin’ here, Sammy?”

Nobody called Samuel Sammy, and Mae was waiting for her husband to say that when the mass that was Gus got shoved aside and a woman half his size took his place in the now wide-open doorway. “I’m Velma Jackson. How’re y’all this evenin’?”

“Fine, thank you, Miss Velma,” Mae said, extending her hand. “We’re Mae and Samuel Hillaire. Samuel works at the port with Gus and we came to see if you’d rent us that apartment over top of your garage.”

The Jacksons looked surprised, then Gus looked nasty. “Why? You get put outta where you was livin’?”

Mae grabbed Samuel’s arm before he hit Gus. “No, we didn’t get put out but we left in a hurry ’cause I quit my job, walked out without a word ’cause I got tired of that mean, nasty cracker I worked for, and we were afraid he’d come lookin’ for me. So we just left.”

“Come in and sit down,” Velma said.

“What did your boss do that made you quit?” Gus demanded to know, and when she told them, he exclaimed, “That place on Central Avenue, the Chicken Coop? That’s the best fried chicken I ever ate!”

“When did you eat it, Gus, ’cause I’ve never had any.”

The man really was a fool! He launched into some elaborate lie, taking no notice of the look Velma was giving him, when she cut him off, explaining that the place above the garage was in no shape to be rented because Gus’s cousins all but destroyed it.

“That ain’t no way to talk about my people, Velma.”

“But it was all right for you to ask Mae and Samuel if they got put out from where they lived? And your people did tear it up. But I might know ’bout a place—”

“What place?” Gus was snarling now.

Velma, ignoring him, told them about a place on Normandie, around the corner from the beauty parlor where she worked: two stores, side by side, were just closed by the owners who’d lived upstairs and recently moved to someplace called the Inland Empire.

“Try not to talk to the husband. He don’t like colored people and don’t mind lettin’ you know, but the wife — her name is Elaine — she’s all right. At least she’s better than him.”

Mae and Samuel stood up and headed for the front door. “Thank you so much, Miss Velma,” Mae said.

“Yes, ma’am, we really appreciate you taking the time to help us,” Samuel said, shaking her hand.

“We’ll be sure to let you know where we end up, and we’ll have you to dinner when we get settled somewhere.”

Velma hugged Mae. “Will you cook that fried chicken?”

They easily found the side-by-side stores Velma told them about. Samuel pulled up to the curb and parked behind a Ford station wagon that a woman was loading with boxes piled on the sidewalk. She saw them and began speaking before they were all the way out of the car.

“We’re closed,” she called out without looking at them.

“We know,” Mae said. “Miss Velma told us.”

The woman stopped loading the station wagon and peered at them. “Velma from the beauty parlor?”

Mae nodded. “You must be Elaine. We’re Mae and Samuel Hillaire and Velma thought your upstairs apartment might be for rent.”

“She’s such a nice person. Always thinking of someone else.” Elaine wiped her hands on her pants and took a step toward them. “We have some people who want to buy the stores, and if they do, they want that apartment. But please tell Velma I appreciate her thinking of us.”

“We’ll tell her,” Mae said, and began to follow Samuel back to the car, when Elaine announced, “I might know someone with a house to rent a few blocks away.”

Mae and Samuel were at her side so fast she took a step backward, fear in her eyes.

“We’re not here to hurt you, Elaine,” Mae said. “I thought you knew that.”

Elaine hung her head for a brief moment, then gave them furtive glances. “Would y’all mind goin’ to sit in your car while I head inside to call Jimmy Miller and tell him you might want to rent his house?”

Mae and Samuel quickly returned to the Ford while Elaine just as quickly entered the first of the two buildings. “People might get the wrong idea they see us standing outside,” Samuel said sourly.

“I think it’s her husband she’s worried about,” Mae said. “She don’t want him seeing her talking to us.”

Samuel didn’t have time to reply before the woman was back. She thrust a piece of paper at Mae. “Jimmy Miller is at his house waitin’ on you. I wish y’all good luck,” and then she was back to loading boxes into the back of the Country Squire with such intensity that it almost felt as if she’d never paused to talk to them at all. She didn’t look their way and when Samuel pulled away from the curb, the Hillaires didn’t look back at her.

They pulled up in front of Jimmy Miller’s house moments later. It was eight blocks away on 39th, a quiet street lined on both sides with small, neat houses, very much like Gus and Velma Jackson’s 54th Street. Samuel was about to park when a lanky, almost bald white man came out of the house and gestured for them to pull into the driveway. They did and got out of the car, figuring it was safe to do so.

“Elaine told me y’all was on the way,” the man said, and Samuel shook the hand that was offered. “I’m Jimmy Miller.”

“We’re Mae and Samuel Hillaire. Pleased to meet you, Mr. Miller, and we appreciate you seeing us.”

“I just hope y’all like my house. Come on inside and take a look.”

Mae and Samuel looked at each other, then at Jimmy Miller, or at his back because his long legs already had him up the walkway, onto the porch, and at the front door, which he swung open, then stood aside to let them go in first. Three steps in, they knew they wanted to live in this house. It was practically empty and it was spotless — the walls gleamed white and the hardwood floor shone. They could see straight through to the kitchen where there was a stove and refrigerator, and in a room beyond that, a table and two chairs.

“We already know we want to rent your house, Mr. Miller, but what do you want to know about us?” Samuel asked.

“You were in the war, weren’t you, son?”

“We both were,” Samuel said, and Miller’s eyes got wide. He turned them on Mae.

“You were in the Women’s Army Corps?”

“Yes sir, I was.”

“Where did you serve and what did you do?”

“In France. I was a mechanic first, then an ambulance driver.”

“And where did you serve, Mr. Hillaire?”

“In the Pacific.”

Jimmy Miller closed his eyes and took a couple of deep breaths. “We saw some things, didn’t we, Mr. Hillaire?”

“Yes sir, we did,” Samuel replied, and briefly closed his own eyes. When he opened them Jimmy Miller was smiling. A real smile, not one of the phony ones. He told them how much the rent was and they gave him three months’ worth on the spot. He promised to return in a couple of days with the lease. “I hope y’all like livin’ in this house as much as I did,” and he gave them a ring of keys, “’specially you, Miss Mae, ’cause my Mildred never did like it. Never did like California. She left, and now I got to go too, back to Mississippi.” He looked as miserable as Mae would if she had to return to Louisiana.

Mae clutched the keys until her hand hurt and didn’t release them while Samuel drove to a store on Vermont where they purchased enough of what they’d need to spend a first night in their new home. They didn’t talk because they couldn’t. Would Jimmy Miller play a cruel joke on them? Were they both in the same dream?

They hurried back to the place they now called home, locked and bolted the doors, went into the big bathroom, got into the tub, and counted Dave Hebert’s money. Mae began shaking her head almost immediately. “No way on God’s green earth he earned all this money. You know that Louisiana Fish Market down the other end of Central? His family owns it and they fired him ’cause he didn’t come to work half the time and he was drunk when he did go.”

“Then where’d he get almost five thousand dollars, Mae?”

“Gambling or stealing,” she answered, and Samuel knew she was right, and they both felt a bit less guilty for taking this money. Not good about taking it, just less guilty.

“We should open our own business, Mae.”

“Say what, Samuel?”

“A café. Where you’ll fry up the best chicken in town and I’ll make the best red beans and rice.”

The new menu at Mae’s Family Dining was a big hit, especially the vegetable plate and the new vegetable selections to accompany the new meat selections: baked and fried chicken and fish, beef and pork ribs, beef and turkey meatloaf, fried and smothered pork chops. Once a week, offerings of lasagna, beef, and pork ribs always sold out. So did the daily favorites macaroni and cheese, collard greens, and sweet potato casserole and soufflé, and the red beans and rice. Gone from the menu were liver and onions and oxtails. Three complaints about the discontinued items and dozens of compliments on the new menu, and the dessert menu drew nothing but praise: chocolate, coconut, and lemon layer cake, apple and peach cobbler, and nut brownies.

Customers also appreciated the newly installed air-conditioning, maybe more than the new menu, and the combination of the two created a totally unexpected problem for Mae — having to ask people to leave once they’d finished and paid for their food because there was a line of people outside waiting to get in.

“Whoever heard of too much success, Mae?” Velma Jackson, who had become a good friend, enjoyed Mae’s unusual predicament even as she helped her navigate it.

Mae had put up signs all around the room and notices in the menus so nobody could claim ignorance:

So while no one ever claimed ignorance of the notice, quite a few simply ignored it. That’s where Velma stepped in. She patrolled the room, stopping at tables that had been cleared but where people sat talking and enjoying the cool air. Velma would point at the wall of glass that fronted Mae’s. “All those people are hungry and hot too, and Miss Mae would appreciate your good manners by letting some other people sit at this table.”

One afternoon the door swung open with way too much force, and two LAPD cops strode in, both of them white. Silence descended. The larger of the two cops looked around. “Somebody needs to get up so we can sit down, then somebody needs to bring us some menus.”

Mae stood up slowly. First she closed the front door, then she fronted the cops. “There’s a line of people waiting to get in—”

“We don’t stand in no line, and I ain’t gon’ say it again: somebody get up so we can sit down.”

Two customers hurried forward, Dinah Washington and Eartha Kitt, and each of them grabbed one of the cops by an arm and delivered an award-winning performance.

“You can share my table, lover boy,” Eartha Kitt growled, “if you let me sit on your lap.”

“And I’ll make a difference in your night, baby,” Dinah Washington cooed, “I promise.”

The cops snatched their arms away and glowered at Mae. “You don’t get it, do you, lady? We don’t stand in line and we don’t pay to eat. So whoever you are—”

“I’m the lady who owns this place and I don’t give away free food. This is a business, not a hobby, and the line for a table is outside.” She didn’t care how mad the two men were getting. She hated cops and wasn’t afraid to let them know. What could they do, kill her?

“I heard y’all supposed to protect and serve,” Dinah challenged. “Is that right?” She looked around the room where every eye was on her, a familiar experience and she was enjoying it. “Anybody ever been protected by the cops?”

“I got real protected coming home from work one night last month. Matter of fact, I was so protected I couldn’t go back to work for a week!” a man called out.

“I got protected like that once,” another man declared.

“But I ain’t never had one of ’em serve me,” a woman said in a mocking, plaintive tone.

The shorter of the two cops reached for his gun, but Etta James, who had joined her colleagues, grabbed his arm. “Don’t you want to tell Mama all about it instead of shootin’ somebody?”

“I’m sorry you hate LA so much, darlin’.”

“I don’t hate it, Samuel — how could I? I’m here with you.”

“But you don’t really like it here, Mae, I know you don’t.”

Mae held both his large, rough hands in hers. Squeezed them tightly as she looked all around their carefully tended backyard with its fruit trees and the barbecue pit that Samuel had built, and across the yard to the house: their perfect, beautiful home that was everything Mae had dreamed of — and more. The only thing missing was children, and they had accepted that there would be no kids for them and that was all right. Really, it was. They had each other. “I do not ever want to go back to Louisiana, Samuel. I don’t even like remembering what it was like to live there. Being here is like being in some kind of...”

“Magic land?”

Mae grinned at him. He loved LA and she didn’t want to do or say anything to spoil that feeling. “Someplace where you can get in the water and ain’t no gators? I guess that is magic. But I wish I had a wand to wave — I’d warm up that water for sure!”

“No doubt about it, the Pacific Ocean is some kinda cold water. Up here anyway.”

Mae remembered the stories he’s told her about his service in the South Pacific during the war. “Is it warmer down by Mexico?”

Samuel brightened. “You wanna visit Mexico? Why?”

“The one thing I hoped and prayed for when we left Louisiana and came here was that we were leaving evil white folks behind, but they just as mean and evil here, ’specially the police. And that’s true everywhere in this country, Samuel. All the colored newspapers and magazines from all over everywhere — New York and Chicago and Washington, DC, and Atlanta and Detroit — evil, mean, nasty white folks doin’ what they was doin’ in Louisiana: hatin’ us to death.” She looked about to cry. “Are there white folks in Mexico?”

Samuel almost wished they never had to leave the safety and serenity of their backyard but recognized the thought for the foolish wishful thinking that it was. They needed to leave this very minute so he could prepare for his monthly poker game.

They were upstairs above the restaurant. It was a large room — part of it used for storage and the rest held a fully stocked bar, a poker table, a television set, and a radio. Samuel didn’t spend much time here because he preferred being home with Mae, but several of his friends enjoyed the room even though they had to bring their own booze.

“I hope Eddie Lloyd makes it today,” Mae said. “The cops had him pulled over on Florence this morning.”

“Probably ’cause of that brand-new Cadillac. You know how they hate that, a colored man with a new car, ’specially a Cadillac.”

Eddie was indeed the first to arrive. “Mae, Samuel, how’re y’all doing? Ruthie said to tell you hey.”

“How’s Ruthie?” Mae asked.

“She’s fine.”

“How’re you doin’, Eddie?”

“Fine, thanks, Samuel. Tell the truth, I was a little outta sorts this morning, but I’m fine now.”

A steady flow of heavy male feet ended all conversation until all six poker players were present, then a general exchange of pleasantries lasted until they had drinks and snacks and their usual places at the table. Mae bid them good night and retired to the combination bedroom — sitting room next door. She could have gone home but Samuel liked for her to stay, and while she knew that he appreciated her presence and having her ride home with him, he also used her presence to end the games that dragged on too long. She drifted off to sleep while reading.

Mae jerked awake. She thought she heard feet on the stairs, but now fully awake she heard only Jerry Taylor’s silly laugh and Samuel’s challenge to put up or shut up. Mae picked up her book, found her place, and resumed reading Brown Girl, Brownstones. She decided she wanted to visit New York City before Mexico.

Pounding footsteps woke her again and this time there were loud voices — Samuel’s and white men. She quietly crept to the door and peeked into the main room. Two cops! They had their guns pointed at the five colored men around the table. Five men, not six. Eddie Lloyd was gone. So it must have been his footsteps she’d heard earlier.

“I said put the money in a bag, nigger. I’m not gon’ ask you again. And I mean ALL of it, all three hundred dollars.”

Samuel stood up but he didn’t collect the money. He looked at Eddie’s vacant seat, then at the cops. “You think it’s all right to break in my place and steal from me?”

“We didn’t break in, smart-ass,” one of the cops said.

“That’s ’cause Eddie left the door unlocked,” Samuel said. “He set us up. That’s how you knew how much money would be in the pot.”

“You talk too damn much,” the cop said, and without another word he pointed his gun at Samuel and fired.

“One of you get a bag and put the money in it and the rest of you get out before you can’t,” said the other cop.

Jerry Taylor told his friends to leave then went behind the bar where he knew there would be empty paper bags. He brought one to the poker table and gathered all the money. He was weeping when he finished. He gave the bag of cash to one of the cops, then started to lean over Samuel.

“You’re going too, Sambo. Can’t leave no eyewitnesses.”

Mae was shaking. She’d read a story in the Sentinel about some rogue cops out of the 77th who robbed colored businesses. The beauty parlor where Velma Jackson worked was one of them, but the woman who owned it had a slot in the wall by her station where she dropped most of her money, leaving only enough in the register to make change. When the cops came to rob her one Saturday night after closing they netted about twenty bucks. They didn’t believe that’s all a colored shop had after a busy Saturday, but they couldn’t prove otherwise and the woman’s husband was outside in the car leaning on the horn.

And here were two cops come to rob Samuel. She grabbed her .45 — like everybody in Louisiana, she had a gun because snakes and gators didn’t need an invitation to visit.

Jerry was dragging his feet and the cop who’d shot Samuel hit him on the back of the head with the butt of his gun. Jerry tripped down a few steps before gaining his balance and hurrying down the final few steps and out the door. Oh God, she wanted to kill them! She raised the pistol and fired into the ceiling.

The roar in the narrow stairwell was deafening. Both cops fired at her but missed, then dashed out onto the street. Mae hurried down and locked and bolted the door, then knelt down beside Samuel. He was gone — she knew that. The filthy cop shot him in the heart. He probably died immediately and for that she was glad. No suffering for her Samuel. She’s the one who’d suffer now. Forever. But she should be dead too! If only the cops had taken the time to aim, she would be. Then they’d both be dead. There was no one to miss them, so what did it matter?

The phone kept ringing and someone kept pounding on the door. She struggled to her feet and shuffled to the stairs. Good thing there was a railing to hold on to. She stood at the door, listening.

“It’s me, Mae. Jerry. Open the door. Please.”

Mae slid the bolt back, then turned the lock and opened the door a crack. Jerry was there, and behind him, A.C. Jennings, the lawyer. She knew who he was, his picture was in the Sentinel so often.

“I don’t need a lawyer,” she said when she was back down on the floor, sitting beside Samuel, his head in her lap. “Unless you can make that cop pay for murdering my husband.”

Jennings explained that calling the police to report her husband’s murder by an LAPD officer would bring dozens of them to this place — where they’d find evidence of illegal activity including gambling, prostitution, narcotics, along with “proof” that her husband was killed because he assaulted a police officer. They would take possession of this building, close the restaurant, “and maybe even seize your home.”

Mae was too stunned to speak. She just kept watching Jennings, as if he’d walk back his words. Instead, he said, “Your husband died suddenly of a heart attack, Mrs. Hillaire. His good friend Jerry Taylor, an accountant at Golden State Mutual, was present, and is helping you with the details for his funeral.

“But what about the law, Mr. Jennings?”

“The law does not protect us.”

“Then what do you do?”

“I keep good people like you from making bad mistakes. Now please, Mrs. Hillaire, we need to get this room cleaned up—”

“Why, damnit! Why?”

“In case those cops come back or send others. There will be nothing to see.” He asked if she knew why Eddie Lloyd helped the cops rob the poker game.

“He was mad ’cause Samuel wouldn’t sell his hot dogs here. He argued that people wanted a hot dog with chili as much as a fried chicken or fish dinner, but Samuel said no.”

The lawyer was thinking so hard the gears in his brain were grinding. He knew everyone in South Central, whether they knew him or not, and he knew Eddie Lloyd had two hot dog stands — one on Florence and one in Watts. “I wonder if the cops came for Eddie’s stands and he made a deal—”

“He’d keep his money and give ’em ours,” Jerry said bitterly.

Jennings didn’t argue the point. He asked Mae to change out of her blood-soaked dress, shower, and put on clean clothes. Mae, looking sad and lost, clutched her dress with both hands.

“Bernice can help you, Mae,” Jerry said gently.

Mae hadn’t seen Bernice arrive but was thankful for her presence and followed her into the bedroom, where she took Mae’s bloody dress then helped her into the shower. Bernice was the head cook at Mae’s Family Dining and she took charge here with the easy competence that she used to run the restaurant kitchen. While Mae showered, Bernice watched men from the funeral home carefully but quickly wrap and remove Samuel’s body, and then the lawyer’s cleaning crew got rid of every trace of blood. They’d brought pillowcases to collect everything that needed to be disposed of, including Mae’s .45. The cleaning crew even dug the bullets out of the staircase walls.

When Mae Hillaire returned to find Samuel gone, she screamed his name and fainted.

“I can’t hardly believe it, Mae! You’re really stepping away from the daily operation of this place?” Velma looked skeptical, impressed, and a little bit proud. She admired her friend as much as she liked her, and the feelings were mutual. Velma had endured a lot in the last few years and she’d not only survived but she seemed stronger.

First she had nursed Gus through what appeared to be every possible kind of sickness, which required him to move back into their home. When he’d finally had to go into the hospital, Velma was at his side until the end. Mae never saw her shed a tear until A.C. Jennings gave her the details of Gus’s will, which had come as a complete surprise: the house and car now belonged to her, as did the proceeds of two Golden State Life Insurance policies she never knew he had. Tears first leaked from her eyes, then flowed unchecked, accompanied by deep, racking sobs. Mae held her friend.

Jennings, who seemed to have an endless supply of neat, white handkerchiefs, produced them one after the other, until Velma was cried out. She drank the glass of water he gave her, then she apologized.

“You got nothing to apologize for, Velma,” Mae had said.

“Don’t y’all misunderstand me, I’m glad he’s gone. I just wish I could ask him why I had to wait till he was dead to learn that he gave a damn about me!” She pointed at the file on the lawyer’s desk. “I never knew about none of this! He always told me his business wasn’t none of my business, then, when he was dying, he kept wanting to talk about growing up in Texas. Not one kind word for me.”

“Maybe he didn’t know how to speak kind words, Mrs. Jackson,” Jennings had said, passing the file across the desk. “Here’s the deed to your house, the title to your car, the life insurance check — all in your name — and Mr. Jackson’s death certificate, and this is all your business.”

Mae looked across the table at Velma, remembering that day at the lawyer’s office. They hadn’t spoken of it until now.

“How do you know this is the right time to walk away, Mae? What makes this the right time? After all, you’ve been free for a long time, not like me.” With the death of her son in a prison yard fight a year ago, Velma now was completely free. She knew that Gus Jr. had been charged with murdering a man named Dave Hebert, but Mae doubted that she recalled him as the man Mae and Samuel had run away from all those years ago, if they’d even mentioned his name. In a confrontation described as “stupid as shit” by witnesses, a staggering-drunk Hebert had waved a knife at a high-as-a-kite Gus Jackson Jr. and threateded to kill him unless he told where the fried chicken lady was. He’d slashed Gus to show he was serious. The sight of his own gushing blood had killed Gus’s high and he tackled Hebert and stabbed the man with his own knife, killing him. Witnesses said it was self-defense, and Mae had hired A.C. Jennings to prove it, but what the DA saw was that a Black man had killed a white one. What was the white man doing there, Jennings had asked the jury, but the DA got the question dismissed so no one knew how close Dave Hebert had come to finding the fried chicken lady and Mae didn’t think Velma realized that Dave Hebert’s yelling was more than just the crazy talk of a drunk.

Mae sighed. Maybe it was time — not just to release her hold on Mae’s Family Dining but to release her closely held worries too. “It’s about the eights, Velma. The eighth month and years ending in eight: Samuel and I left Louisiana in August 1948. That cop murdered Samuel in August 1958. And it’s now August 1968—”

“Has something happened, Mae?” Velma looked frightened.

“No, no,” Mae said. “It’s just... I’m still not over Dr. King’s murder. It still upsets my stomach like it was yesterday. So... a four-month and an eight-year. Kind of a balance...”

“What will you do with your time?” Velma was surprised when Mae laughed.

“I have discovered the Los Angeles Public Library. If I read two books a day, I still couldn’t read all the books by and about Negroes!” Mae sounded like a little kid in her excitement. “And so many of the librarians are colored women... Negro women... Black women, and they help you find books to read! I wish Samuel was here, he would love going to the library. But we didn’t know about libraries, and we didn’t have time for that anyway. And it’s not just one library, Velma, there’s a bunch of ’em and we can go to whatever one we want!”

“But you can’t read all day, every day,” Velma said.

“I think maybe I could. But I don’t have to ’cause I’m learning how to swim. And there’s more than one pool too! Can you swim, Velma?”

Horrified by the thought, Velma said the only thing she did in water was bathe, and she refused to even consider the suggestion that she join Mae for a lesson. “Besides, the water is too deep.”

“Velma, the water is three feet deep at the shallow end of the pool. Only people who know how to swim go to the deep end,” Mae explained, but Velma wasn’t listening and Mae knew when to quit. She watched Bernice work the room — she was a pro, no doubt about it, and the place would be in good hands with Bernice, her sisters, and their daughters in charge. Mae knew she was doing the right thing.

“Miss Mae, Miss Mae, come here quick!” The summons came from the front door and both Mae and Bernice ran toward the trouble.

“Oh dear Lord!” Bernice exclaimed when she saw the beaten and bloody body of Etta James being supported between Eartha Kitt and Dinah Washington.

“Side door,” Mae said.

“I’ll go unlock it,” Bernice said, and ran through the kitchen and up the stairs into the main room, then down the interior stairs to open the door.

“Velma, call Dr. Harris and tell him I said to please come quickly and to use the side door.”

Getting the unconscious Etta up the steep stairs was difficult, but should anyone doubt it, Eartha and Dinah were men despite the gowned and jeweled brilliance of the show they put on every night, in secret now since a recent law had made female-impersonation shows illegal.

Mae hadn’t been in this staircase since the night Samuel was murdered and the memory made her dizzy. “What happened?”

“That cop. The one whose arm she grabbed to keep him from shooting you that time,” Dinah said, and Mae had to hold the edge of the bar to keep her balance. Not someone else hurt protecting her!

“I am so sorry—”

“You got nothin’ to be sorry for, Miss Mae,” Eartha said. “It’s that damn cop. He come runnin’ outta that liquor store up the block and we didn’t see him in time.” She added that his partner never showed up.

“And people were in line? They saw this?”

“Don’t worry ’bout it, Mae,” Bernice said. “I’ll handle things outside.” She headed for the steps, beckoning Eartha to follow, just as Velma hurried up the stairs, followed by the doctor.

The doctor greeted Mae, then went into the bedroom to look at Etta. “Good God! I’m gonna have to remove the clothes, you know that, right?” Dinah nodded. “And I’m gonna need hot water, lots of it, and lots of towels and some clean sheets.” He peered at Dinah. “You can help me, everybody else can leave.”

“Should we stay up here just in case?” Velma asked, and Mae asked if she’d help Dinah do whatever the doctor needed.

Mae was too busy inside her own head. One of the undercover venues for female-impersonator performances was not far away, at 21st and Vernon, and they’d probably gone for dinner before their show. But what was the cop doing there alone? Mae had too many thoughts in her brain.

I jinxed myself. It’s acting like the eighth month of an eight-year after all, was one of them, followed by an old, old thought: What if I hadn’t stolen Dave Hebert’s money? And as happened every time she had that thought, she heard her Grandpa Oliver’s voice: If a frog had a glass ass, it’d break every time he jumped.

Death of a Sideman by Gary Phillips

Exposition Park

The old man wore ratty sneakers, a kaftan with various food and unidentified stains on it, and a fedora at a jaunty angle on his bald head. He also had a snow-white brush mustache. In his head he was John Travolta from that opening scene in Saturday Night Fever gliding with a dancer’s grace along the city sidewalk.

“I’m staying alive, goddamnit,” he said, loudly and proudly. “Staying alive, yeah,” he sang off-key.

Other pedestrians gawked at this presumed refugee from a retirement home passing by them on this sunny morning. A few took his picture or a brief video clip with their smartphones and wondered how he’d gotten loose from his keepers. One empathetic soul dialed 311. Another considered calling the police but didn’t. For even though the elderly gent was white, they figured that given his agitated state he might come to harm, though the odds were in his favor he’d be treated professionally.

“Can I get a witness?” the old man said jocularly, spreading his arms wide as if he were a pastor welcoming his flock. He encountered a young man and woman walking side by side from the opposite direction, laughing and talking and unaware of his presence until they nearly collided with him as he abruptly stopped in their path. “I mean, damn,” he said, swaying and doing a 360 on the sidewalk.

“Mister, is there somebody I can call for you?” the women asked softly. She was tall, with stylish basketball shorts and a nose ring.

The old man stood alert as if a soldier snapping to at the appearance of a superior officer. “I regret to say we are powerless to act in cases of oral-genital intimacy, unless it has in some way interfered with interstate commerce. Or words to that effect,” he guffawed.

“Time to go,” the young woman’s companion said. The two breezed around him.

He watched them for a moment then stepped into the roadway, heedless of the traffic. A motorcyclist had to act fast to avoid hitting him.

“Get out of the street, you fuckin’ idiot!” the rider swore as he roared past.

The old man doffed his hat to the receding figure and machine, his back to oncoming vehicles. A truck’s brakes screeched and several cars jerked to a stop.

“And away we go,” the old man said, smiling. He managed to make it to the other side of the street and continued on. Rounding a corner, he spotted a group of people lined up for a table at a popular neighborhood café. He stopped again as if also lining up for brunch. Several regarded him and muttered. He simply stood there swaying and humming, though occasionally he’d wander over to patrons sitting at outside tables, invading their space. He would then return to the line. Finally, the owner of the restaurant came outside to talk to him. He was a heavyset, middle-aged man with a head of thick hair.

“Sir, I need to ask you to move along,” the owner began. “You’re making some of my customers uncomfortable. Do you know where you should be? I can call an Uber for you. Happy to pay for the ride, okay?”

The old man fixed the owner with a quizzical look. “I need to be among them, don’t you see? Left to their own devices, who knows what devilment they’ll be up to? This is for their good too, understand?”

“And where is this place you need to be among them?”

“Ha,” the older man replied, wagging a finger at the owner. He backed away and headed farther down the block.

“I tried.” The owner held his hands aloft and went back inside his establishment.

The wanderer took several more turns and was now nearing a residential area. In this section of the sidewalk, the serpentine roots of a large tree had caused a portion of the concrete to rise and buckle. The old man’s feet got tangled and over he went, landing face-first on the sidewalk. He gashed his head but was still alive. A bystander saw what happened and hurried over to help.

“Hold on, I’m calling an ambulance.”

The old man groaned and rolled onto his back, gazing up at the sky. His breathing was labored but his face was untroubled.

The helpful bystander knelt beside him. “You have any ID? Somebody I can call for you?”

“Yes,” the old man answered, “put in a station-to-station call and find out all their also known as... ases.” He giggled.

“I’m sorry, what?”

The fallen man began to tap out a phrase in Morse code on the concrete with his index finger. Three other people had also gathered around and though they noticed his finger moving, they assumed it was a spasmodic response to his fall. An ambulance soon arrived, and after his head wound was attended to, he was carefully loaded onto a stretcher, a neck brace having been snapped in place as well.

The phrase he’d been tapping out was Reason frees us from fear. He would last three more days, tapping out the phrase all the while, and succumb to complications arising from an unforeseen heart attack in the hospital. On a ventilator, his eyes fluttered open seconds before death as he stared at an image only he could see.

“The angel of death is here. And just my luck, she looks like Angela Davis.” He chuckled, coughed up phlegm and blood in his throat, and expired. The words he’d been tapping out were inscribed on his headstone along with his name and birth and death dates. It was among several sayings the ninety-four-year-old man was known for uttering over the years. In the following days, that and other details of Jonah Montgomery Rikemann’s colorful life were related in print and by newscasters and pundits across the airwaves.

Magrady sat off to one side in the World Stage, bopping his head as the quartet grooved. There was a piano player, an upright bass player, a drummer, and his friend Tyrone “Ty” Banshall on the sax. They’d been improvising but had dropped into a Paul Desmond number, “Feeling Blue.” After that they played several more compositions and finished off the night with a tripped-out, jazzed-up instrumental rendition of Jimi Hendrix’s “Voodoo Child.”

Amid the applause, Magrady came over to his friend. “That was wild, man.” He stuck out his hand and the saxophonist shook it vigorously.

“Glad to see you made it out, brother,” Banshall said. “It’s been a minute, like the kids say.”

“Well, it is past my bedtime. But y’all knocked it out the park.”

“Not to brag but I think we did.”

“This is Horace,” Banshall said, introducing the drummer, a stout man with gray at his temples. “This is Magrady. We were in ’Nam at the same time.”

“No shit.”

“Pleasure,” Magrady said, shaking the drummer’s hand. “Me and Ty weren’t in the same unit but a lot of us bloods hung out together away from the bush.”

Magrady looked like a beer truck driver, the hair bristled close on his head mostly snow these days, clean-shaven and neat in jeans and a buttoned-down shirt. His windbreaker was draped on the back of the folding chair he’d been sitting on.

Banshall, tall and lanky, was taking his sax apart to put in its padded case as the piano player came over. This individual was a medium-built Black man decades younger than both of the other two, who were in their sixties. He wore stylish glasses and trendy sneakers.

“You were in the stratosphere tonight,” the younger man said, grinning at the saxophonist. The drummer had walked off to talk to someone else.

“Just following you, youngster. Lee Sorrells, meet Magrady, he was all Sergeant Fury and shit over there.”

“Mostly shit,” Magrady said, the emotion flat in his voice.

“Good to meet you,” Lee said. He and Magrady also shook hands. “See you Friday, Ty,” he added with a nod to the saxophonist.

“For sure,” Banshall answered. Then to Magrady he said, “Gimme a ride to the crib and I’ll buy you a drink.” He made a face. “Damn, sorry, man. Old habit.”

Magrady was some years sober. “Ain’t no thing. I can have tap water with an ice cube.”

“I think I have a bottle of fruity seltzer,” his friend quipped.

The two left the World Stage, exiting onto the wide expanse of Degnan. Shops such as Hot and Cool Café and Eso Won Bookstore lined the next block of the boulevard. As Magrady and Banshall headed south away from the stores, they saw a man and woman in yoga gear each riding a hybrid unicycle-tricycle. The bikes had one large front tire and the two rear ones were canted outward for balance. They each had a seat and pedals but no handlebar. The two expertly maneuvered about.

Magrady and Banshall neared the recently refurbished Leimert Park Plaza which fronted the main throughfare of Crenshaw. The coming of a metro train signaled an uneasy development of the area. Riding in on those rails was gentrification, which often as not meant displacement. The two also passed several pup tents and lean-tos made from cardboard and scrap, evidence of the city’s ever-present homeless population.

The two arrived at Magrady’s car, a twenty-year-old PT Cruiser with a rebuilt engine and faded fake-wood paneling on its sides and rear hatch.

“Haven’t seen one of these in a month of Sundays,” Banshall remarked.

“Haven’t had a car in that long either,” Magrady replied as he unlocked the passenger-side door for his friend. “Even a goofy one like this.” The bus and occasional biking had been his modes of transportation for years.

“I ain’t complaining.”

Banshall put his case on the backseat as Magrady went around to the driver’s side. Off they went to Budlong near 35th Place, not too far west of USC. Banshall lived in what was called a neoclassical wood-sided fourplex built in another era. Back then it would have been called a rooming house. It was set among several humble abodes with well-tended lawns, some with security bars on doors and windows. Magrady found a parking space at the curb in front.

Banshall yawned, working a kink out of his neck. “Remember when this would have been the time we’d be hitting our stride in Soul Alley?” This had been a section of the then-called Saigon of nightclubs and joints where Black GIs hung out. A fleeting relief from the toils of war and antagonisms with their fellow white soldiers on base.

“Man,” Magrady said, shaking his head, “I once got so high there in the Three Clicks that I saw Ho Chi Minh floating through the ceiling with a deck of cards. Bobby Seale showed up and we played Spades.”

They chuckled and headed inside. Upstairs Banshall unlocked the door and, stepping inside, set his keys on a small table with a vase on it. His rooms were comfortable and tidy. There were photos and framed posters here and there chronicling his years in the music business. While not always a headliner, he’d put out a few albums of his own, and worked steady as a session man and a sideman on various tours, including ones with Herbie Hancock and various rock stars. There was also evidence of his playing gigs for causes ranging from police accountability to when Jesse Jackson ran for president in the ’80s.

“It’s okay if I drink in front of you?” Banshall asked. He shrugged off his sport coat and draped it on the arm of his couch. “Damn, don’t mean to sound like a lush.”

“Yeah, pretty sure I can resist temptation.”

After Banshall poured a glass of orange juice for Magrady and for himself a Jameson, neat, the two sat in padded chairs. On the sound system he’d put on KKJZ, the jazz station out of Long Beach. The volume was set low.

Magrady said, leaning forward, “Here’s to the long, bumpy road we’ve been on.”

“And what lies ahead.” They clinked glasses and each took a sip.

“You remember that chick Tempest?” Magrady said.

“Of course, fine as wine, as we used to say. What made you think of her?”

Magrady pointed at something on the end of the mantle. “That’s from when we met her.”

Banshall blinked at the rectangular object as if seeing it for the first time. He got up, staring at it as if it came from another dimension, and plucked it off the mantle.

“What?” Magrady said.

Banshall looked over at him, frowning. “I didn’t know I still had this.”

“You must have forgot, old-timer.”

“I guess so.” Banshall laughed nervously, setting it back on the mantle. “Hey, how about I make us a couple of sandwiches? Got some fresh smoked turkey.”

“Sounds right.”

Before he went into the kitchen, Banshall picked up his glass and drained it.

Magrady settled back listening to a Mose Allison number, half dozing.

“You want mustard on your sandwich?”

Magrady opened his eyes to see the saxophonist standing in the doorway to the kitchen holding a butter knife smeared yellow at the tip. A pained look contorted his face. He took a step back into the other room.

“Ty,” Magrady called out, rising from the chair.

“What about that mustard, huh?” The words slurred out of Banshall’s mouth as he fell to his knees. The knife slipped from his twitching fingers.

Magrady crossed the room in long strides to reach him, taking a knee. “Lie back, man, I’m calling 911.”

“Sure, great.” Banshall’s voice was wispy and fragile.

Magrady made the call, then tossed his phone aside and applied CPR. He compressed Banshall’s chest, stopping, then repeating the action. Long ago, when he gotten clean, again, he’d taken a course at one of the Narcotics Anonymous conferences he’d attended. Magrady also tried mouth-to-mouth as he’d been instructed. Soon, hearing muffled footfalls rushing up the carpeted stairs, he went to the door to let the paramedics in. It was a male and female team and they rushed in with a stretcher and their kit.

“I tried to resuscitate him but he doesn’t seem responsive.”

“Thank you. We got this.”

The two went to work on Banshall. To his face they strapped an oxygen mask attached to a small tank. After several minutes the woman rose.

“I’m afraid he’s gone,” she said flatly.

“Damn.”

“Is this your place?”

“No, his. I was visiting.”

Sometime later Magrady went back to his home, a converted garage turned into what the city called an ADU — additional dwelling unit. This one had been redone legally, though he’d lived in his share of bootleg units and on the street too. Undressed and teeth brushed, Magrady sat on the edge of his compact bed in his boxers and undershirt. Lost in the fog of Banshall’s demise, he worked Icy Hot liniment onto his knee.

Three days later he was in a strategy meeting with his boss, Janis Bonilla, at Urban Advocacy where he was an organizer, when the police came looking for him.

“That’s a cop,” he said to Bonilla. Her compact office had a window overlooking the main floor.

“He looks like any other bureaucrat from Building and Safety,” she said.

“He’s probably here for me.”

“Something I should know, Magrady?” Hardly anyone called him by his first name.

The newcomer was dressed in a suit, light-blue shirt, and colorful tie. He removed wire-framed sunglasses from his bronzed face. He was Japanese American and maybe early fifties, Magrady estimated. The man was talking to one of the other organizers, Jessica Alvaringa. She in turn knocked on the office door, which was already open.

“Yo,” Bonilla called out.

“He’s LAPD and would like to talk to you,” Jessica said to Magrady.

“Thanks, Jess,” Magrady said, already up. “Okay to use the conference room?” he asked Bonilla.

“Sure.”

Magrady went over to the detective and told him who he was.

“Yes sir, I’m Aaron Tsuji with the LAPD.”

“This about Ty Banshall’s death?”

“Where can we talk?”

“This way.”

Magrady led him along a hallway and they went into the conference room, sitting opposite one another.

“What is it about Ty’s death that’s so odd?” Magrady asked.

“What makes you say that?”

“You’re robbery-homicide and about the only thing Ty had of value was his sax.”

“You’ve been in trouble with the law before, have you, Mr. Magrady?”

“I’m sure you looked me up before coming over here.”

“You and the deceased served in Vietnam.”

“We did but weren’t in the same unit.”

Tsuji let that sink in. “Can you tell me about the other night?”

“Not a problem.” Magrady related the events matter-of-factly, then added, “He was dead by the time the paramedics arrived. Ty wasn’t beaten, shot, or stabbed. And you being here means it wasn’t just a heart attack.” He paused. “Was Ty poisoned?”

Tsuji allowed no reaction onto his face but a gleam flickered in his eyes. “Why don’t we go over to the station and see if we can clear this up.”

“Arrest me and I’ll go.”

“You don’t seem to be too upset about Mr. Banshall’s murder.”

“I’ve seen death in the jungle and on the streets, Mr. Tsuji. I’ve been near enough to it that she’s kissed me on the cheek once or twice. Me and Ty were friends but not ace boon coons, if you dig what I’m sayin’. Until I heard from him about the jam session, I didn’t even know he’d come back to town. Apparently he’d been here for a while.”

“Why is it you didn’t drink that night?”

“I’m an alcoholic and a drug fiend.”

Tsuji stared at Magrady for several beats, then stood, extracted one of his business cards, and placed it on the table. As Magrady had assumed, he worked out of the Southwest Division.

“Let me know if you think of anything.”

“I will.”

Tsuji headed toward the door. “I’ll probably be back in touch.”

Magrady resisted making a sarcastic remark as the plainclothesman left. He remained sitting. The booze had probably been poisoned, thus the question about why he hadn’t taken a drink. It wasn’t a virgin bottle of Jameson, Magrady had noticed the night before. He also figured they’d pulled his prints from the glass he’d used, and spoken with the EMTs.

“Well?” Janice Bonilla stood in the doorway.

He told her what was up.

“Why do you think he would be poisoned? Some old beef?”

“It has to be,” Magrady said. “Far as I know, Ty made some good money but he blew through it a lifetime ago. I mean, except I guess for some royalty payments now and then, he probably only had Social Security.”

“Maybe like Robert Johnson, it was a love triangle.”

“Sheet, at his age? A jealous boyfriend did him in?” Or so went the legend about the demise of the famed bluesman.

Bonilla snorted. “Who you tellin’, playboy?” She knew he had a lady friend named Angie Baine who was older than him. She was a former B movie starlet who’d been in films such as Wolfman A-Go-Go and The Atomic Eye. “About a month ago in Rosemead this great-grandmother stuck a knife in the back of her old man as he was playing Scrabble in the facility they lived in ’cause he was ending their relationship. And she was in her eighties.”

“Okay, could be,” Magrady conceded. “That cop Tsuji will sort it out or not. I’ma get to the tenants’ meeting.”

“See you later,” she said.

Several days after the planning meeting, Magrady drove past the rear of a laundromat where a few compact nylon tents and other forms of precarious shelter were arrayed. He parked near his destination, joining Bonilla and Alvaringa, along with various community members and organizers from two allied organizations. They were there doing a direct action in front of a house on Budlong near the intersection of Jefferson.

“This is not the way we solve homelessness in this city, by making more homeless.” Bonilla was talking into a portable mic attached to a speaker. “This won’t do displacing a hardworking single mother and her two children over a matter than can easily be resolved. Needs to be resolved.”

Yells of support issued from the gathered, more than seventy people standing on the lawn facing the speaker. Several police cars rolled into view and parked haphazardly in the street. The officers joined the media who were also present. The family Bonilla was referring to had been evicted from the house, a rental. Not for failure to pay but over what in a higher-income area would have been a minor infraction: an unauthorized repair. But the rental company, a national outfit called Demizro which owned various units in South LA, knew the mother was a housing activist and wanted to make an example. A lot of the housing stock they owned had been acquired during the last economic downturn.

Bonilla continued, “We have to stand up to the likes of Demizro and their mercenary methods. People have a right to shelter just as they have a right to food and water.”

“Hell yes!” went up the cry. Fists pumped the air and placards were held aloft.

“Whose streets? Our streets!” echoed from the protesters.

The cops spread out in a semicircle around the crowd. Two sergeants were among them, one on either end. There were also a few people wearing light-green caps standing around. These were lawyers — legal observers. If there was an attempt to occupy the premises, the cops would have cause to move in. As it was, they still might declare this an unlawful assembly.

“Hey, Magrady,” said a man in one of the light-green caps. He wore a plaid shirt and jeans.

“Mark, how’s it going?” They shook hands.

“Same old, same old.” Mark Josephs was white, in his forties, pleasant-looking with a pockmarked jawline. He was a surfer and civil litigator who’d won a handful of significant cases against the LAPD over the years. “How come there’s a detective over there mad-dogging us?”

Magrady had noticed a silver-colored Chrysler arrive on the periphery with Tsuji behind the wheel. “He’s here to rattle me.” He explained why.

“Huh,” Josephs said. “Let me know if you need my help.”

“I will, thanks.”

Josephs joined two other legal observers talking to one of the sergeants. The protesters were now out on the sidewalk and that, too — obstructing a public right-of-way — could be used by the cops to vamp on them, Magrady reflected. He threaded his way through the gathered as more speakers came to the mic. At one point the uniforms pressed their semicircle tighter, seemingly trying to prod everyone onto the lawn. Magrady and the others tensed. The person at the mic kept talking but everyone’s eyes were on the police. At some imperceptible signal, the officers took a few steps back and everyone exhaled.

Eventually the event wound down, the collective release of energy like air escaping a balloon. Bonilla was being interviewed by a radio reporter outlining their next steps in the fight to keep the family’s home. This involved putting pressure on specific members of the Demizro board.

Hands in his pockets, standing at the curb as people left, Magrady saw that Tsuji was gone as well. It suddenly occurred to him that Banshall probably didn’t have any immediate family in town. He knew his friend had been married but he recalled the wife had died a few years ago. And as far as he knew, the jazzman didn’t have any children. He wasn’t sure how long the county morgue would hold onto his body. If unclaimed, it would eventually be cremated to save space. Since it was still an open investigation, it would probably be Tsuji who would inform the coroner to release the body.

Back at the Urban Advocacy office, Magrady used one of their real estate databases to look up information on the fourplex where Banshall had lived. He discovered that the owner didn’t live there and the other units were all occupied by tenants. The police might have put up their warning tape on Banshall’s door or maybe not. He did recall, however, that the main entry door was kept locked. He smiled, realizing he was working himself into how to get into the dead man’s apartment. He couldn’t exactly say why, but did anyone deserve to die alone? A B&E was out of the question. The front door was heavy and sturdy and the windows on the ground floor were barred. Imagine if Tsuji threw him in lockup for trying to force his way in? He’d look guilty as hell. Not that he gave a shit. He wondered if he called the owner pretending to want to rent the now-vacant apartment, how might that go? Magrady supposed that like a vampire, he was going to have to be invited inside.

The next day before sunup, Magrady sat in his car keeping watch on the fourplex. He saw a man leave the place around seven thirty that morning and a woman leave at ten past nine. The man walked along the street and turned the corner. The woman got into a car. That left the occupant of the third apartment. Maybe they worked from home. What kind of ruse could he try to gain entry? He sat and waited. Magrady had planned and had brought along a sandwich, but despite jonesing for it, no coffee. The latter an effort to not have to pee, at least not frequently. A little before eleven, an older woman exited the premises. She had on a straw sun hat and pulled one of those adjustable rolling carts old folks used to take their groceries home from the supermarket. She stood in front and soon a cab, a Prius, pulled up. The driver got out, collapsed her cart, and put it in the hatchback. She got in the rear. Off they went.

Nearly an hour and a half later the older lady returned in another cab. As the driver helped her get unloaded, Magrady came up.

“Ma’am, sorry to bother you, but does Ty Banshall live here? He’s a saxophone player.” He held up his phone. “We had an appointment today about an upcoming gig, but he’s not answering.”

“Oh my, I guess you haven’t heard.” She was a walnut-colored woman who looked to be in her seventies. She reminded him of those ladies who did the volunteer work at the church of his youth.

“What’s that?” He took hold of her cart to take it up the front steps onto the porch. He nodded at the cabdriver, who nodded back and returned to his car.

“The way I understand it, they had to carry him out of here feet first the other evening. He died.”

“That’s terrible.”

“Yes, I’m so sorry. He was a nice man. Told me his stories like playing in Count Basie’s band.” She’d unlocked the front door and pushed it open. Magrady followed her into the vestibule, hauling the cart up and over the doorway’s frame. She occupied one of the ground-floor dwellings.

“Well,” he said, “thank you for your time.”

“Of course. No bother. Sure will miss him.”

“Me too.” Magrady turned back toward the entrance. She was rolling her cart inside her place, closing the door. Magrady didn’t want her hearing him go up the stairs, arousing suspicion. At the main doorway he placed a waded-up piece of paper in the doorjamb cavity where the lock would catch, then closed the front door, faking like he was leaving for good. He returned to his car to retrieve a hammer and chisel. These he placed in a paper bag along with some cheap cotton gloves he’d bought to make it less obvious he was carrying the amateur burglary kit. He sat behind the steering wheel, listening to a podcast debunking conspiracy theories.

After another forty minutes he went up the steps, unlatched the front door, and moved inside. He heard muffled voices through the closed door of the older woman’s apartment — she was watching her stories on TV.

Up the stairs he went. At Banshall’s door there was no X of crime scene tape. The door was locked. Gloves on, he inserted the chisel between the door and the jamb. Three quick raps of the hammer on the head of the chisel, and the door popped opened. Magrady paused then stepped inside, closing the door quietly behind him. Fortunately, these rooms were not above the older woman’s place. For a moment he felt disoriented, viewing the main room in the light, knowing the recent inhabitant was never to return.

He glanced around, not sure what he was looking for, though he supposed he should try to find a next of kin. But the medical examiner’s office would do that as a matter of course. Yet it seemed impersonal if he didn’t also try. There were a couple of framed photos on the mantle, including one with Banshall in a sport coat with his arm around the shoulders of a woman in a mink coat. Both were smiling.

Staring at his dead friend’s face, he could tell it had been taken a few years ago. Should he try to find the woman? He picked up the frame and slipped the photo free. Nothing was written on the back.

Before putting the picture back together, he took a shot of it with his phone’s camera. He picked up the black wooden rectangle also on the mantle. The thing that seemed to puzzle Banshall by its presence. Magrady had one just like this. It was a commemorative gift given to those who’d worked on a successful political campaign more than twenty-five years earlier. What went down on and after April 29, 1992, were etched memories. The days-long conflagration had jumped off at the intersection of Florence and Normandie. Everyone had been tuned in to their TVs or radios as the not-guilty verdicts were announced that afternoon for the four LAPD officers who beat the living hell out of Rodney King after a chase-and-stop in the San Fernando Valley. The two passengers in his car untouched. In those days there were no smartphones with cameras to chronicle police violence, Magrady reflected. On that evening, it was grainy images captured via a video camera operated by a plumber from his apartment’s balcony. He’d been awakened by the commotion from below.

The memento Magrady held had been handed out by a grateful candidate who’d won a city council seat, running on a platform of neighborhood empowerment zones and racial reconciliation several years after ’92. It had been a contentious race. Banshall had headlined a benefit concert to fundraise for the campaign. The singer had been a woman calling herself Tempest. Magrady had been one of several in charge of the canvassing, the door knocking. Tsuji must have searched the apartment once he got the tox report from the coroner. The detective must have also talked to the musicians who last played with Banshall that night at the World Stage. That might have been another way in which he’d zeroed in on Magrady. But who had Banshall run up against since coming back to town?

Banshall had a good number of vinyl LPs arranged on a shelf in the tidy dining room. Magrady sifted through these but no hidden treasure map fell out. Frustrated and feeling aimless, he was hesitant to leave but he was getting nowhere. Well, he reasoned, he’d try to hunt down the woman, though he had a feeling that was going to be a dead end. Magrady poked about some more but nothing jumped out at him.

When he stepped outside the apartment, he heard the main front door opening. For a blink he froze but knew he had to feign being nonchalant. He descended the stairs as the woman he’d seen in the morning started up them.

“How you doing?” he said, angling past her with his paper bag.

She glared at him but didn’t say anything as she ascended. He didn’t think she took him for a cop. But she was going to notice the broken in door any second. It wouldn’t latch and that was noticeable.

“Hey,” she called out.

Magrady quickened his pace through the entrance and out onto the walkway. Hopefully she wasn’t packing. He jogged as best he could, bad knee and all, over to his car to get away from there.

Later that night, not having had a visit from the law, Magrady leafed through the contents of a large ten-by-twelve gray envelope of mementos. If he couldn’t find out who poisoned Banshall or who might claim his body, he could at least revisit parts of a past they shared. There was a Polaroid of a young, thinner him in the Three Clicks in uniform, a Vietnamese “B girl” sitting on his knee. They were obviously both tipsy. Another picture showed Banshall blowing the sax on the club’s tiny stage accompanied by a guitarist and a drummer, the musicians also in uniform. Hard to believe any of them had been that young.

Magrady kept sifting through the items in no particular order. There was a letter his daughter Esther had written him years ago, begging him to get clean. He was glad they were no longer estranged these days. He scanned some newspaper clippings from the city council campaign, finding his name mentioned in an article from the Sentinel, LA’s Black newsweekly. But it was an article from the Los Angeles Times that he fixed on. It was an interview with the candidate, Tina Chalmers, and she was talking about the death of one of the architects of the gang truce between the Crips and Bloods. This had been an effort begun before April 29 but had gotten traction when it came into effect afterward. The truce eventually broke down, but Chalmers was talking about its merits and the need to redouble that sort of effort.

“Tony Blow does not need to have died in vain,” Chalmers was quoted as saying.

Tony Blow was the street name for a reformed gangbanger who’d been killed. He was controversial as he was the face of the gang truce, even being interviewed on national news. But it was also alleged he was under investigation by the FBI for drugs and guns. Magrady couldn’t remember his real name. He got on his laptop and found a pertinent article about his death. Blow was found shot to death in a rear house on 76th Street off an alley. His murder was unsolved at the time of the article, though believed to have been gang related. Magrady did more checking and it seemed the murder was still open now, decades later. He returned to the original article. Toward the end of the piece, he found Blow’s real name. Then he read it again to make sure.

“I felt no particular emotion about poisoning him. It was just one of those things,” he said, a slight smile on his composed face. “The more it stayed on my mind, though, the more it seemed I should do something about it. He was my father after all. When I knew he was gonna bring the quartet over after our opening night for a little celebration, it all came together.”

Magrady stood in his windbreaker before Lee Sorrells, who sat at a piano. They were in a half-lit space, the back room of McDade’s Wholesale Beauty and Fixture Supply on Avalon Boulevard. Sorrells had an arrangement with the owner and this was where he rehearsed. The space was sparsely furnished, only one other chair and a mini fridge on the concrete floor. High up in the rear wall were three barred windows overlooking an alley. This provided what light there was.

Sorrells thunked a key. “You talk to that detective?”

“No.” Magrady sat down in a chair angled toward the piano. “What am I gonna tell ’em?”

“I’m Tony Blow’s son.”

The murdered gang truce leader’s real name was Anthony Sorrells. When Magrady had read that, he recalled Banshall’s introduction of the members of his quartet.

“It could be a coincidence,” Magrady said. “The last name. But he died violently and now Ty gets murdered.”

The younger Sorrells plinked several keys.

Magrady continued: “Anyway, those supposed coincidences itched at me. I got to thinking about Tony Blow back in the day. I’d met him a couple of times, a charismatic dude. He had real potential.”

The son looked at him evenly.

“Of course, there were also the rumors about him.”

The pianist remained motionless behind his instrument. “So you got online and went down the rabbit hole about my dad.”

“Some of that,” Magrady admitted. That’s how he’d learned about the passing of J.M. Rikemann. Among his achievements, he’d been one of the FBI supervisors overseeing COINTELPRO, the counterintelligence operation to destroy the Black Panthers and make sure Martin Luther King Jr. would not become the Black messiah. Magrady also recalled Daryl Gates, the chief of the LAPD in the ’90s who had his own counterintelligence unit, the Organized Crime Intelligence Division. Several of its officers had infiltrated leftist groups and spied on local elected officials.

The younger man went on looking at him blankly.

Magrady said, “Being old school, I wanted print. I know about this archive in the hood, the Southern California Library. It was started by some Reds,” he chuckled. “The library has all kinds of books on the labor movement, Chicano liberation, and so on. Naturally, there’s several books they have there about ’92. One of them examined the gang truce and its aftermath. The woman who wrote the book talked about this white guy named Rikemann.”

That seemed to catch Sorrells’s attention.

“She stated that in the ’90s, Rikemann, after leaving the FBI and stints in the Reagan and Bush White Houses, was a kind of disruption consultant to law enforcement. An imperialist for hire, she wrote.”

Sorrells snorted. “He confessed to me, Magrady. Ty knew who I was. Kept tabs on me over the years, he said. When he came back to town, he finally wanted to come clean, atone. He sought me out specifically for this last gig.” He paused, regarding the older man. “I guess age makes you think about setting the record straight before it’s too late.”

“It does. Why did Ty kill your father?”

Sorrells’s laughter reminded Magrady of Christopher Lee as Dracula. “From what Ty said, he had Rikemann’s bootheel on his neck once upon a time.”

Magrady wound back to Soul Alley. “Smack. Ty knew a few cats who got into dope over there, using and selling. But I don’t remember him ever being on the needle.”

“He wasn’t. Back in the States, this Rikemann had him by the balls on a federal rap. Not for using but for importing. Instead of putting him away, Rikemann got him to snitch on the civil rights activities he was involved in.”

”There’s a statute of limitation for a drug bust,” Magrady noted.

“Ty didn’t want his past being exposed,” Sorrells said. “At least not back when my dad found out about him.”

“How did your father find out?”

“Rikemann put the squeeze on Ty, threatening to expose him. That motherfucker was paying attention to what was going down after ’92 and didn’t want my dad becoming what he and his kind feared the most: a new Malcolm X. From gangster to Black leader.”

“Ty was supposed to see if Tony Blow would go for the okey-doke,” Magrady said.

“Yeah, but he was changing, according to my mom, about to tell all, like who was part of the coke pipeline he profited from. My mom knew he’d been trying to get a book deal.”

“Damn. So Rikemann supplied your dad?”

“Who better to sell the drugs helping to keep us down than a War on Drugs warrior?”

“From the Golden Triangle to Colombian marching powder,” Magrady said.

Sorrells leaned back from the piano. “Now what, you gonna avenge your buddy the sellout?”

“I don’t really know,” Magrady stammered. “Shouldn’t I?”

Sorrells rose. Magrady remained sitting, a hand in his jacket pocket.

Rikemann’s memoir, which he’d written in longhand, was published about a year after he died. In those pages he named names and made startling allegations further fueling conspiracy theories about intelligence agencies up to no good in the nation’s inner cities.