Farewell, Amethystine

17

I made my way down a small dead-end alley on the west side of the 2120 Building. It was 12:13 a.m. and I was hyperaware of the surroundings. I knew where the side entrance of the building was located, but there was no way of knowing if someone had seen me going back there or if there was nighttime security roaming the halls.

The side door was metal and unusually small. None of the keys I’d taken from the cabinet in the hopper room worked on it.

But I wasn’t through. Where Saul had given me master keys, Whisper had provided us both with snap guns.

Highly illegal for people like me, the snap gun worked on almost all cylinder locks by searching out the tumbler sequence. One shot and I was in.

I searched out the stairwell and made it to the fifth floor. The maintenance elevator was there, waiting for Docherty’s crew. The car was locked but I had keys.

Indirectly, Purlo had told me that Curt was here. When he quoted Mr. Epsilon talking about seeing from the ocean to the west to the mountains out east, he was parroting a cartoon that I’d seen with Jewelle at a real estate conference we’d attended. Mr. Epsilon was the cartoon mascot of the company that managed the 2120. Purlo didn’t think that I’d understand the reference because you never saw Black faces at conferences like that — almost never.

I took the elevator to the thirty-seventh floor so the motor sounds wouldn’t alarm anyone on the thirty-ninth and final floor.

The first person I encountered was on the landing of floor thirty-eight. He was lying in a heap formed by his own body. I shined a flashlight on him. The cigarette he’d been smoking had fallen on his burgundy sports jacket and burned through to the skin. I doubted if he felt it, though. His dark eyes were open wide but seeing nothing, feeling nothing, due to the gunshot wound behind his right ear.

The driver’s license from the wallet in his breast pocket told me that his name was Aaron Oliver, that he was born on July 9, 1949, and that he was a resident of Nevada.

I sat on the stairs above the slain man for a few minutes, wondering if I should continue the climb. Going over the facts as I knew them, the only sensible answer was for me to make my way back down to the ground floor, go back to the roof of my mountain home, and thank my lucky stars. Maybe I would stop at a phone booth along the way and notify the police.

Having the right answer, I climbed up to the thirty-ninth floor anyway.

It was mostly dark and completely silent. There was no fixture or furniture except for a cubicle erected in a far corner next to a window wall. From this collapsible compartment a weak light shone.

I was armed with the pistol Lihn had provided, and I was scared.

“Anybody here?”

I took my finger off the trigger, not trusting the clench in my hand.

“Anybody here?” I called again. It was almost a plea.

Half a minute passed, and I started the long trek from the floor entrance to the far corner.

The office booth contained an empty desk, a swivel chair set back away from it, and a dead body slumped on the floor between the two useless furnishings.

The body was still warm. It was a youngish white man wearing dark trousers and a short-sleeved white shirt with ample blood on the back collar. The wallet had the young man’s California license with his photograph and name — Curt Reginald Fields. Under the body was a sealed envelope, spattered with his blood. Scrawled on the letter, in pencil, was the name Amethystine.

I slumped down on the floor next to the recently murdered man. The wail of Atwater Soupspoon Wise, the Topanga bluesman, came back to me then. I was dressed like a sharecropper and those words sang to me. The twelve-bar blues washed over blood spilt, blood coming from wounds of work and war, wear and tear, and senseless, drunken brawls. And it wasn’t only blood. There was pigs’ fat being rendered into candles, the stench of chitlins stewing all day on a woodstove, sewing needles made from the stripped tin of bean cans. I remembered foraging for berries in the deep woods and fighting a man over a few pennies. I cut him bad.

It was just after 1:00 when I came back to myself.

The rotary phone had a lock on the finger loop of the number 3. I used my pocketknife to snap it off.

“Yes, who is it?” a young woman answered.

“May I speak to Anatole, ma’am?”

I heard the receiver knock against wood and then a few whispers.

“Who is this?” the police captain demanded.

“It’s me, Anatole.”

“What do you want?”

“Thirty-ninth floor of the 2120 Building.”

“What’s there?”

“A dead man. Actually, two dead men.”

“Who?”

“Curt Fields on the thirty-ninth and Aaron Oliver in the stairwell outside the thirty-eighth,” I said. Then I hung up.

Within fifteen minutes there were one and a half dozen cops on the thirty-ninth floor. When there’s a dead man on the top floor of the second-tallest building in Los Angeles, they send eighteen cops. Down where most of my people live they never send more than two, unless there’s target practice to be had.

The first three officers to arrive put their hands on me.

Pushing away, I said, “Hey, man, what’s happenin’ here? I’m the one called you guys.”

They got hold of me then.

“Calm down,” one of them said. “We’re going to put you in cuffs.”

There were more police arriving and I could see the futility of resistance.

“What’s your name?” a plainclothes officer asked.

“I’ll wait for Anatole.”

“You’ll tell me your name,” the tall and thin detective threatened.

“Yeah,” I said. “You keep thinkin’ that.”

“I know who you are,” he said, “and who you think you are. But it’s a new day. Commander Suggs is in the wind, and your ass is ours.”

I actually felt a moment of concern, not for me but for my friend Mel.

After that confrontation two uniforms were tasked to stand by me while the rest studied the crime scene. I didn’t like being cuffed in that room filled with white men with guns.

Anatole arrived about a quarter hour later. It felt longer than that.

“What’s this man doing in cuffs?” the captain asked the detective who’d staked a claim to my ass.

“We didn’t know why he was here, Captain,” the man answered, using a much softer tone than he had with me.

“I left a clear message that Ezekiel Rawlins was the one called me.”

“I, uh, I didn’t get that message.”

“You’re saying that dispatch didn’t tell you?”

“Um, I don’t know. I mean when I heard a murder maybe, um...”

“Get out of my face,” McCourt told him. Then he turned to my personal guard and said, “Release him.”

Before the cuffs were off, Anatole had moved to the second dead man. He studied Curt and his environs over a five-minute span that would have been hours for any normal investigator. Then he came over to me, near a far window.

“You touch him?” was his first question.

“Yeah. He felt warm and so I tried to see if he was maybe alive.”

“Man’s got a bullet in his head,” Anatole doubted.

“I saw men in the war live with that kinda injury, others died from a scratch on the butt that got infected.”

I liked mentioning my war experience when talking to cops. That way they knew they had to take me seriously.

“You find anything?” Anatole asked.

“No.”

“Nothing?”

My hands said, What don’t you get about no?

“Nordell,” the captain said, summoning one of the uniforms.

“Yes, Captain.” Nordell was older than the other cops. At about five nine, his face was formed from loose flesh and hard living.

“You search him?” Anatole asked, indicating me with a gesture.

“Yes, sir.”

“What you find?”

“Wallet, ID, some change, a pistol, and this.” He held up the snap gun. “You want me to have the pistol checked out?”

Taking the snap gun from Nordell, Anatole said, “No. Give him his stuff, the pistol too.”

“You sure, Cap?”

“Oh yeah.” The big man was looking into my eyes. “I’m sure.” He didn’t like me, but over the years of our proximity he had begun to harbor a grudging respect.

I wasn’t worried about being found out, because Amethystine’s letter was nestled in my boxer shorts.

When Nordell left, Anatole held up the illegal lockpick and said, “Give me a reason not to charge you with suspicion of murder.”

Taking the burglar tool from his hand I replied, “If you don’t arrest me, I’ll find Melvin for you.”

That slowed him for a moment or two.

Then he asked, “What were you doing up here?”

“Looking for Curt.”

“Why here?”

“That man I told you about, Purlo? He let it slip.”

“What’s that mean? He was holding him here?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Where’s Mel?”

“I’m workin’ on that one.”

“What you got now?”

“Tomorrow I have a meeting with someone knows him.”

“Mary?”

“No. Not Mary.”

“Who?”

“Look, man, I’m tryin’ here. Right now, I got to go to this man’s wife, mother, and father and tell ’em that he’s dead. So, don’t push me.”

“I’m not pushing, just asking some questions.”

“Yeah. Me too.”

McCourt heard something in my voice, something that I might not have been aware of.

“Look,” he said. “I want to help. Where can I find this Purlo guy?”

“I honestly don’t know. I heard his name, asked around about him, and then he calls me outta nowhere. Tells me to meet him at a parking lot in Canoga Park and mentions a cartoon character that I only know from this building.”

“That’s not enough.”

“No? A name like Purlo, obviously bent, and you can’t get some kinda lead on ’im?”

Anatole stared at my forehead. I had enough time to count to thirty-seven.

“All right,” he said. “Okay. You can go. But I expect you to be in reach if I need you.”