Farewell, Amethystine

15

A little lost, I made my way back to the WRENS-L office.

The forty-three stairs to the third floor reminded me that I hadn’t done my exercises in a few days.

“Hi, Mr. Rawlins,” Niska Redman greeted.

She was sitting behind the big desk facing the door.

“Anybody else around?” I replied.

“No. Whisper’s taking a meeting with a potential client and Mr. Lynx took his wife out for a late lunch.”

“Oh, uh-huh. You know you can lock the door if you’re alone up here.”

She smiled.

“I mean,” I said, “a woman alone has to protect herself.”

“What’s wrong, Mr. Rawlins?” she asked in answer.

“Nothing. Why?”

“You always bother about locked doors when you’re worried about something else.”

“I do?”

She nodded. “Uh-huh. Doors and windows. Unpaid bills and phone messages when the caller doesn’t leave their name.”

I had no desire to talk about my tells, so I asked, “You talk to Tinsford about becoming a detective?”

“He said that if you thought I had potential, that was good enough for him.”

In my office I sat behind the grand desk, not thinking at all. No words or worries entered my mind, just sensations and light through the window falling upon the desk, floor, and my hands. Time passed but I didn’t mark it. The sunlight shifted slightly in the window but I didn’t care. Gravity kept me from floating away but my mind drifted.

When I finally got up, Niska was gone. The day was over.

I drove home to the mountain. Feather and Essie were playing some kind of card game near the indoor koi pond while the two dogs watched.

“Hi, Dad.” Feather greeted.

“Hi, Grandpa,” Essie added.

“My two favorite girls,” I said out of reflex. “Where’s Jesus and Benita?”

“They went down to the boat,” Feather answered, “to clean it up and then get a fish fry. Juice told me that they might sleep on the boat unless we called and told them you weren’t coming home.”

“And we gonna have fwozen pizza,” Essie cried joyously.

“Fwozen?”

“Yeah!”

On the rooftop rose garden the next morning, I was smoking my first and last cigarette of the day. Halfway through the Lucky Strike I decided to make a call.

“Hello?”

“It’s me — Easy.”

“Oh, hi, Mr. Rawlins.”

“Easy.”

“Easy. Why are you calling? Did you find Curt?”

“I want to see you.” These weren’t the words I meant to say.

“When and where?”

“Topanga Canyon. There’s a little outside diner called Minnie’s up in the village there. The people at the country store can point the way. Eleven thirty.”

After a French toast breakfast, I took Feather to school and then drove Essie out to the pier at Redondo Beach where Jesus had docked his fishing boat. The little girl was overjoyed to see her parents.

On the way to meet Amethystine I began to obsess over the wording of my request of her. I want to see you. It was completely wrong and yet absolutely correct. I did want to see her, had wanted to since the last time we’d met.

There was an undeveloped knoll above Topanga Center. On the other side of that hillock was a house that Minnie Moore owned and lived in. That house also functioned as a daytime restaurant. No one knew how a poor Black woman from Mississippi could afford such an exclusive property, but who cared? The fare was soul food, and Minnie was a friendly face among an already happy populace. She had an outside seating area consisting of seven picnic tables set out for people liking her corn bread and fried chicken, pig tails and collard greens.

I was there early. Looking out over the hippie-populated canyon, I felt unusually at ease. The hippies were trying to do the impossible — make a world where everybody was happy as much as their individual natures would allow. They were young and, I knew, sooner or later they’d trade in these Utopian desires for good-paying jobs and the status quo. I knew it, but it was nice to be out there among them with their long hair and pot smoke, their perfect (if flawed) ideals and deep beliefs.

There was a bluesman sitting on a high powder-blue metal stool, playing an acoustic guitar that was connected to an electric speaker. Around my age, but looking older, he played good blues though I didn’t understand most of the words.

After maybe twelve minutes I spied Minnie, a sixty-something tar-black woman, walking with Amethystine over toward my picnic bench.

“Here she is, Mr. Rawlins,” the country-bred restaurateur hailed. “You be nice with her, now.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Moore,” Amethystine said through a sparkling laugh. “I think I can take care of myself.”

“What you folks wanna eat?” Minnie asked.

“You have a menu?” Amethystine Stoller replied.

“In my head and on my tongue,” she said, and then proceeded to tell us that day’s offerings.

I ordered the vegetarian plate — black-eyed peas, mustard greens, white rice, and a small side salad. Amethystine asked for ultrathin fried pork chops, grits, and redeye gravy.

When Minnie left to fill our order, Amethystine took a moment to look around.

“It’s lovely up here.”

“Where you from, girl?” I asked.

“Not no girl, no matter who wants me to be, and I’m from the gulf of Mississippi, where music like this was borned.”

I could have listened to that woman talk all day long. I think there was a smile on my lips and I was nodding.

“So, Mr. Rawlins?”

“Easy.”

“So... Easy, why did you need to see me?”

“Harrison Fields.”

“What about him?”

“He seems, um, bent.”

“I don’t know about that. He’s a gambler... been a dealer, a floor manager in Vegas, you know, a man who loves what numbers can do. For the past fifty years he’s been trying to figure out Russell’s paradox.”

“What’s that?”

She thought about it for at least half a minute, finally saying, “Basically it’s asking, in certain circumstances, how can you have a list of lists that doesn’t include itself?”

I tried to make sense of what her question was asking for, realized that I could not, and so said, “Do you know a guy named Purlo?”

Something shifted in her eyes, but before that change could provide me an answer, Minnie Moore and her assistant, a strapping young Black man, shirtless in overalls, trundled up, him carrying our platters of food.

Minnie watched closely as he placed the orders before us.

“I hope you like it,” she said before they walked back down to the house.

For a while we concentrated on eating.

Amethystine ate heartily and with real satisfaction.

“This is good,” she said. “Real good.”

I stayed quiet. That’s probably why she looked up from the meal to me.

“What you lookin’ at?” she asked, somehow making the question sound flirtatious.

“Just bein’ country, enjoyin’ how much you like the food.”

Flirtation became deliberation in her golden eyes.

“Does Leonard have anything to do with Curt?” she asked.

“Who’s Leonard?”

“Leonard R. Purlo. Some people call him Ron and others say Purlo. I just said Leonard to see how much you knew.”

“You know him?”

“Before I went to work for Jackson, I was a cocktail waitress for a little speakeasy in Gardena. Ron was the floor manager. As a matter of fact, that’s where I met Jackson. He used to study the logic of the different games. After he was finished with his studies he’d have three dirty martinis and watch the girls.”

“You could use those last words for Blue’s epitaph.”

Amethystine showed off her broad grin.

“I watched him watching the games,” she said. “When I figured out what he was doing I brought up Russell’s paradox.”

“You talked about it?”

“Yeah.”

“You studied math at college?”

“Never went to college but I’ve always loved numbers. Numbers and words...”

It was, I think, at that moment, in the middle of her talking, that I fell in love with Amethystine Stoller.

“...I read and think in those two ways,” she explained, “and after that, or maybe before, I take care of the twins.”

“You and Curt got kids?” I asked, already knowing the answer.

“My younger brother and sister — Garnett and Pearl. They’re teenagers now, but they still need lookin’ after.”

I had a thousand questions, but none had to do with Curt Fields.

“How you young folks doin’?” The bluesman was standing there next to our table. It was only then that I realized the music had stopped.

“Hi,” Amethystine exclaimed.

“Ya’ll mind if I join ya a li’l while?” he asked.

“Not at all,” I said, not at all wanting him there.

Smiling, the musician showed that one of his lower teeth was missing.

“Amethystine Stoller,” my business date said. She held out a hand.

“Easy Rawlins.”

“My full name is Atwater Wise,” our guest offered. “But e’rybody call me Soupspoon.”

“That ’cause you always hungry?” I asked.

“Uh-uh. When I was a boy I couldn’t afford no instrument so I played the spoons up and down my legs an’ chest.”

“Your playing and singing were wonderful,” said Amethystine. “Made me think’a home.”

“Thank ya kindly, ma’am, I likes playin’ for the hippies in these hills but it’s always good to have Black folk out there too.”

Our conversation went on like that for a few minutes. Then Atwater Wise got up and went to another table, and another one after that. It struck me that part of his job was to socialize with the clientele between sets.

“So?” I asked Amethystine when we were alone again.

“One night Harrison came to pick me up when Curt had to work late. Harry and Ron hit it off, and before Harry left, Purlo offered him a job.”

“And Curt met Purlo after that?”

“I guess. I mean, I’m really not sure.”

“Purlo told me that Curt was fine, that he was doing some kind of hush-hush job for him. You know what that could be?”

“So you met Ron?”

“Yeah.”

“How?”

“You engaged me to find Curt, right?”

“Yeah. Wow. No, I don’t know what Curt could be doing with Ron. I mean, I guess everybody in business needs an accounting now and then.”

After a long while I said, “I think I might know where Curt’s holed up.”

“Where?”

“I want to check it out before tellin’ anybody. You know, till I’m sure.”

“How long will that be?”

“Soon,” I said. “Very soon.”

She studied me then, her left eye almost closing.

“What?” I asked.

“You could’a got all this on the phone from me. We didn’t need to come up here.”

“No, we didn’t.” I wasn’t going to say any more and she didn’t press me.