Farewell, Amethystine

16

The next morning, I got up early and dressed for an honest day’s labor, donning rumpled and stained tan canvas work pants and a threadbare white T-shirt that had splotches and flecks of drab green paint here and there. For my feet I chose dark brown and hardy boat shoes that Jesus used to wear when he was working on his first boat, years before. Then I put on a pair of glasses that had clear panes for lenses. I got that trick from Jackson Blue, who believed that white people were less suspicious of Black men who wore glasses.

I was down on the kitchen floor by 5:30, but Jesus was already there, coffee made.

I got to the 2120 Building by seven. Elmer was the only guard I recognized. He took me to a room on the fifth floor. The sign on the door read CUSTODIAL STAFF.

“Mr. Warren,” Elmer said to the only man in the room, seated at a fifteen-foot-long folding table.

“Yes, Mr. Simon?”

“This here is Ezekiel Rawlins. He’s been okayed by the personnel office to work for you.”

The head janitor looked up at me, biting the inner flesh of his left cheek. He was a pale white man with gray hair and a gray uniform too.

“Welcome, Mr. Rawlins. You can call me Doc.”

“You a doctor?” I asked while pulling out a chair.

“My parents named me Docherty.”

“Never heard that name before.”

“Mother liked it. Said that if I ever had a nickname, it would be Doc.”

I liked the guy.

“You’re half an hour early, Mr. Rawlins. Staff gets in at seven thirty. Want some coffee?”

On a diaphragm-high shelf across the back wall I saw a Pyrex jug on a hot plate.

“I’ll get it,” I said.

Once I was seated and drinking, the boss man asked, “You know how to strip wax buildup off a floor, Mr. Rawlins?”

“You got a buffer, or do I have to get down on my hands and knees?”

“You got the job,” Docherty said.

A few minutes later the staff started trickling in. Including me there were twelve janitors working under the white-on-gray man. Mostly Black men, most of them under thirty. It was interesting how the plantation model had survived a century after its demise. I heard all their names and shook most of their hands, but I only remember Morty Mattan and Dorothea Lamprey.

Morty was very dark-skinned, mid-twenties, good-looking, and strong. A recent transplant from Alabama, he was full of himself, arrogant, ambitious, and willing to bully his way past anyone, white or Black, in order to succeed.

When we were all seated at the long table, a work-world version of the Last Coffee Break, Morty sat across from me.

“What’s your name again, brother?” he asked me.

“Rawlins.”

“And how old are you?”

“Old enough to remember the war in Europe and Africa.” I stared right at him.

“You cleaned out toilets in North Africa?”

“I killed Germans whenever and wherever I fount one.” That claim turned a few young men’s heads.

“And all they let you do now is pick up after them,” Mattan said with the flair of a poet signing his name at the bottom of some sonnet.

“I don’t see you up at the penthouse in no Brooks Brothers suit,” I said, trying to sound like who I was pretending to be.

“Shit, man, I’m at LACC at night, learnin’ how to be a photographer.”

“Oh, come on, now, Mortimer,” Dorothea Lamprey decried. “You only got that camera to get girls to take off their clothes for you to look at.”

A few of the young men laughed at that.

“My name is Morty.”

“I give you ten to one that ain’t what yo mama named you,” Dorothea claimed.

The three women custodians were all past thirty. Dorothea was a few years beyond forty. Well-built and powerful, she was the kind of woman that attracted me.

“All right, everybody,” Docherty Warren announced. “Enough of this nonsense. Time to get to work.”

He told almost everyone where they should begin and what they needed to get done.

At the end of his orders he said, “Rawlins, you’re with me.”

There was a hopper room at the back of the big office. The door’s lock was Sargent and that made me happy. Doc pulled out a chrome buffer with an extra-long extension cord and four round steel-wool scrubbers.

“You get the bucket and the scrubber detergent,” he told me.

I found what he asked for, filled the rolling bucket with hot water and cleaning fluid. Then we took the maintenance elevator to the thirty-second floor.

We went to a very large office space that had been used by the builders when they were finishing the inside of the 2120. The floors had been waxed, rewaxed, waxed again, and scarred by many work boots and the movement of heavy machinery. I slathered water on the linoleum and Doc wielded the buffer left and right, stripping off the old waxes and the new scars.

“This was the main office?” I asked the boss man on a cigarette break.

“Yeah. This is where the magic happened.”

“Why didn’t they take the penthouse?”

“The owners put some folks up in there.”

“Oh? Who was that?”

“I didn’t ask, and they didn’t say.”

A while later I told Doc that I needed to make a call to my kid’s school.

“Can I use the office phone downstairs?” I asked.

“Sure. Go ahead.”

Saul Lynx had collected master keys from every major lockmaker in America. I always carried a ring of them on a job like the 2120. Down in the custodians’ office I used my Sargent master on the hopper room door. The key cabinet was against the back wall. It was no trouble picking that lock. In there I had my choice of the more exotic keys.

I took what I thought I could use and then hurried out of the hopper room, closing the door behind me.

“Hey, Easy.” It was Dorothea. She was sitting at the long table.

Caught, I said, “Ms. Lamprey,” giving a slight nod.

“Come have a seat with me.”

“Doc expects me back upstairs.”

“Tell him you was helpin’ me.”

I went to sit across from her.

As I said, Dorothea was a handsome woman. Her eyes were speaking to me in a language known around the world and down past all the epochs of humankind.

“You called me Easy,” I said to open negotiations.

“That’s what EttaMae Harris calls you, ain’t it? Her an’ Raymond Alexander.”

“I had no idea I was so, uh... well-known.”

“You ain’t no Superman hidin’ behind a pair’a glasses,” she said with a smile. “But I guess one outta a dozen or so ain’t too bad.”

“Bad enough. One sour note and I’m on the street.”

“Why you here anyway?”

“This and that.”

“You lookin’ for sumpin’?”

“I’m not here to steal.”

“For a girlfriend?” she asked, her eye honed on mine.

“If you asked me two days ago I’d’a said yeah.”

“That’s too bad.”

“How ’bout a hundred dollars instead?”

I went back upstairs after giving Dorothea her money. I always carried two or three hundred when going on a job like the 2120. Most often people who recognized me didn’t say anything. Back then silence was second nature to Black people. But if someone, like Dorothea, wanted something, it was good to have that something in my pocket.

Years earlier I had been a custodian for the Los Angeles Unified School District. I had been trying to live the straight life but that was easier said than done. I did learn the job, though.

By the end of the day Docherty was impressed with my work. I liked repetitive jobs and empty conversation, so we got along just fine. He told me that he needed an assistant supervisor and I might be just the right one after serving three months’ probation.

After work, I got two chili burgers and cheese fries at Tommy’s on Beverly and ate in my car. After that I drove down to the central branch of the LA library. The doors were locked by the time I got there, but there was a white guard standing behind them.

“Closed,” he said through the wire-reinforced glass.

“Herbert Mellon,” I responded.

“What about Mr. Mellon?”

“He asked me to drop by.”

“I don’t think he’s here.”

“Extension thirty-six forty-three,” I suggested.

Ten minutes later Assistant Head Librarian Herbert Mellon appeared at the locked door.

“Mr. Rawlins,” he said, a furtive look of fear on his face.

“Don’t worry, Herb. I just need to look up something in the architecture section.”

Mellon was a small white guy with an oval-shaped head. He had a problem with another man over a woman. Because the conflict crossed racial lines I was suggested as an intermediary.

Ever since then he let me in when I needed information.

There was a room on the top floor of the main library that contained blueprints, construction plans, and floor layouts for every building built in LA County since the forties. When I’d perused the information for the 2120 to my satisfaction, I took an elevator to the basement to make a call on a pay phone down there.

“Creek Answering Service,” a woman answered.

“Mary Donovan, please.”

“Your number?”

I gave her the pay phone’s digits.

“I’ll try to find her,” she said.

The basement floor of the central library would have been like The Prince and the Pauper for me when I was a boy — me being the pauper. I was a successful man, but my life was defined by the barbed wires of deep poverty. Sitting there, looking out over the vast marble hall, I felt, once again, like a refugee. In some way, I was sure that this was why I felt such a draw to Amethystine. She knew the same things I did, saw the same worlds.

In the middle of that reverie the phone rang.

“Mary?”

She got right down to business. “TJ called me, but I haven’t heard back from him yet.”

“And you won’t either.”

“Why?”

“Somebody shot him in the head.”

She had to take a moment to absorb this information, gleaning the possible ramifications.

“Tell me what you know,” she said at last.

“We need to meet, lady. There’s too much here for us to solve it on the phone.”

“Where?”

“I’ll leave that up to you.”

“Okay. Good. Tomorrow, eleven thirty, top floor of the art museum.”

“See ya then.”

My next call was home.

“Hello?” she said, sleep in her voice.

“Hi, honey.”

“Daddy.”

“You okay?”

“Uh-huh. We made chili dogs and French fries with homemade catsup.”

“Sounds delicious.”

“Essie liked it, but Benita got a little sick. You comin’ home?”

“Not tonight, I don’t think. I’m downtown and I have some things to take care of in the morning. So I’ll probably sleep at the office.”

“Okay. But call me in the morning, all right?”

“Aye, aye, Sergeant.”