Farewell, Amethystine

1

“Naw, naw, man. Shit no. They wanna kick her outta that school because she a Black woman want the Constitution to practice what it preach. All kindsa white revolutionaries and, and, and activist teachers up there at UCLA and they don’t make a peep about them.”

“But, Raymond,” Tinsford “Whisper” Natley rumbled, “they say she’s a Marxist, a communist.”

“So? It’s a free country, ain’t it?” my friend challenged.

Raymond Alexander, Saul Lynx, Whisper, and I were sitting around the conference table in my office at the back of WRENS-L Detective Agency.

Mostly on Monday mornings we got together to discuss events in the news. Monday was a good day because the rest of the week you couldn’t trust that we’d all be around. At the top of the week around 9:30, 10:00, my partners would migrate back with paper cups of bitter coffee in hand.

For the past couple of months, Ray, also known as Mouse, had shown up for this informal meeting every other week or so.

This was an unexpected wrinkle. Saul and Tinsford had once asked me to keep him away from our workplace, because Raymond was a career criminal who practiced everything from racketeering to first-degree murder. But that request changed on a Wednesday morning in the late fall of ’69.

I was out, going around a few SROs in Inglewood, looking for a missing husband, while Saul was at Canfield Elementary School because his son, Mo, had gotten into a fight. That morning, as every morning, Niska Redman occupied the reception desk and Whisper was in his office.

Somewhere around 11:00 my friend Mouse dropped by. Niska brought Raymond to LA’s best detective’s cubbyhole of an office. There she introduced the man who needed no introduction.

Weeks later Whisper told me that he said, “Easy’s not here, Mr. Alexander.”

“I’m not here for him, brother,” was the heist man’s reply. “It’s you need to hear what I got to say.”

Without even sitting down, Raymond told Whisper that a man named Desmond Devereaux was planning to kill Natley because he got DD’s brother arrested for a killing in Oxnard.

“And how would you know about that?” Whisper was a small man, even smaller than Ray, but he was someone you knew to take seriously.

“He sent a guy ovah to ask me about you.”

“Why would he ask you?”

“Because e’rybody knows I know Easy and that’s just one step away from you.”

Tinsford sent Niska home, left messages for me and Saul, and then went out with the deadliest man I knew, to take care of business.

They were gone for two and a half days, after which they never spoke about DD again. I hadn’t heard another word about the man anywhere.

Ever since then Raymond has been welcomed into our Monday morning talks.

As usual it was a rollicking conversation. Each of us had a favorite story in the day’s newspaper. We laughed at the rumor coming from the Turkish countryside: some people there thought that the newest flu epidemic was somehow caused by the moon expedition. The U.S. had similar issues with Russian spy satellites. White parents in Mississippi had a sit-in complaining about even just the word integration. But it was Angela Davis and UCLA’s attempt to oust her from her teaching position that got Raymond and Tinsford riled.

“But,” Tinsford complained, “the communists want revolution.”

“So did Thomas Jefferson.” Raymond wielded the name as if it was a weapon. For the past few months, he’d been spending his spare time reading heavy tomes of history about politics and race.

But Tinsford had been reading his entire life.

“Jefferson was influenced by the French Revolution, not Karl Marx.”

“Angela was influenced by the Frankfurt School,” Raymond said. I knew right then that he was going to be a whole new kind of threat in the coming decade.

“What school is that?” Saul asked.

“It’s these college professor guys from Germany,” Mouse said. “This guy Herb Marcus, somethin’ like that, works with them. They want things to change, and Angela does too. That’s why the trustees tryin’ to fire her.”

“Mr. Rawlins?” Niska Redman, our office manager, was standing at the door.

“Yeah?”

“That woman, Miss Stoller, the one Mrs. Blue wanted you to talk to. She’s here.”

Niska was tallish for a woman at that time, maybe five nine, and brown like the lighter version of See’s caramel candy. She usually tried to be serious because of her job, but you could tell that she was always ready to laugh.

“Well, guys,” I said to my friends, “I guess it’s time to get back to work.”

And that was it. Saul and Whisper went to their offices. Mouse left for a world of bad men, bank robbers, and bloodletters.

Niska backed up into the hall, allowing the men to file by, then she returned followed by a woman two shades darker than her.

“Amy Stoller,” Niska announced.

The potential client was wearing an ivory-colored dress that had a high collar and a knee-level hem that flared just a bit as if maybe responding to an errant breeze.

Already standing to see my friends out, I took a step in the potential client’s direction and held out a hand.

“Easy Rawlins,” I said.

“Nice to meet you.” She obliged the gesture with a firm grip.

“Have a seat,” I offered, motioning at the three chairs set before my gargantuan desk.

I’d started WRENS-L Detective Agency with a quasi-legal windfall I’d come upon years before. Saul and Whisper came in as partners, but they made me take the big office. I’d accepted the allocation with only mild trepidation. I wasn’t humble among friends or clients. But as an orphan in Houston’s Fifth Ward, I’d learned that, in the world at large, if people knew you had something, they were liable to take it.

I made it behind the desk. Ms. Stoller waited for me to sit down before she settled in. This struck me along with something else about her, a subtle scent she wore that was reminiscent of the bouquet of some ancient forest, welcoming but having hardly any trace of sweetness.

She was in her mid- to late twenties with satin brown skin and amber eyes on a face that was wide and unusually sensual. Her mouth was also wide, promising a beautiful smile. Stoller’s eyes being lighter than her skin meant something that I couldn’t put my finger on. But that wasn’t a bother, not at all.

“It’s a very nice office,” she said. “Kind of like the master bedroom in an apartment, or even a house.”

“The whole building used to be a rich man’s home till the furniture store downstairs bought it.”

She let her head tilt to the left and gave up half a grin.

I knew that this was a very important moment but had no idea if it would be for the good or not.