Farewell, Amethystine

18

I slept on the sofa in my office from about 2:45 till six the next morning. After splashing water on my face, I walked down to Pico and Robertson to the twenty-four-hour supermarket, Toluca Mart. They made fresh nugget-like and glazed buttermilk doughnuts every morning. Two of those with twelve ounces of black coffee and I was ready for the day.

I made it to the six-story brick building on Temple. The front door was unlocked because the people I was going to see all got to work by 6:45.

Taking the stairs to the top floor, I knocked upon the huge oaken door festooned with bronze signage that proclaimed MOFASS ENTERPRISES. The 2120 might have been open six days a week, but Jewelle’s real estate business worked seven.

A minute passed before a young Black woman pulled the heavy door inward. She had the features of a dark-skinned Mongolian princess — almond-shaped eyes, straightened hair, and all.

“Yes?” she asked, holding the partly open door almost like a shield.

I was still dressed for custodial labor, and they didn’t deal with janitors at that office.

“Jewelle in?” I asked civilly.

“No, she’s not. What do you want with her?”

“How about Amethystine?”

She received this question as if it were a surprise wake-up slap.

“And who are you?” she asked, looking me up and down.

“My name is Rawlins and I have an appointment with either my friend Jewelle Blue or her associate... Amethystine Stoller.”

The doorwoman studied me, and my unexpected language, longer than was polite.

Finally, she said, “Wait, wait here.”

She closed the door, after which I made out the clacking sound of a bolt being thrown.

One of the things about the TV age is that people around the nation were slowly being brainwashed. This is what I believed then and now. They turn against their own and themselves because of impossible renditions of goodness, beauty, intelligence, and, worst of all, humanity.

That young woman — I never knew her name — couldn’t find it in her heart to forgive my poverty-scented invasion of her perfect soap-opera world.

Jewelle Blue, whose office it was, had only well-dressed women working for her. Mostly Black women, with a few Latinas, Asians, and sometimes a native woman. They were of all ages but the same in their professionalism and, usually, their good manners.

When the door opened again Amethystine stood behind it. Her smile bore the deep satisfaction of a real woman, truly happy to see the face of a child who had survived one more day.

“You scared our receptionist,” she said.

“Was it my clothes?”

Amethystine’s grin widened and she stood aside, making way for the pauper prince.

The entrance area of the office was a broad room where five women sat clacking away at IBM typewriters, putting the final touches on leases, contracts, letters of complaint, and making and answering calls.

On the floor below, Jewelle had the teenage daughters of some of the women looking after the younger children of others.

Everybody got paid and fed, trained, and, most often, promoted.

Jewelle would have never called herself a feminist; she liked the broad shoulders and sharp stench of men too much for that. She simply knew how she was raised to work, to serve, and to receive what her work, and others’, deserved.

Amethystine guided me down a long hall of private offices where more office workers plied the real estate trade. Three doors down we came to her workplace.

“Go on in,” she said. “Take a seat.”

Her manner was down-home/formal.

I did as she said, feeling a double tremor in my chest. One quaver was for the feeling that seeing her gave me. The second came from the news in my pocket.

Amethystine closed the office door and went to sit behind her oak desk.

I looked around the room in the time it took her to settle. It wasn’t a big office, more like a cubbyhole inhabited by an underpaid clerk in a Dickens novel. There was a window, but it looked out on the dirty-white plaster wall of another office building less than six feet away.

My perusal of these environs ended at her. She was wearing a violet pants suit accented by a large-collared pink button-up blouse.

Her not-quite-smiling visage brought to mind some kind of philosophical farmer standing amid an infinite field of patience. This equanimity called up a feeling of guilt in me. Not that I was culpable or insincere, but more like I bore a sin as old as Adam’s and now I was about to blame Eve.

“So?” she asked, smiling.

“Your husband is dead.”

The look on her face was like the crumbling wall of an already overflowing dam. She did not speak. “What, what happened?” “You know the 2120 Building on Wilshire?” “Yes, yes.” “He was working on the top floor. Somebody shot him, killed him. I found this.”

I took the sealed bloody letter from my pocket and held it out across the expanse of her desk. For long moments she stared at the death note. Her eyes flicked up at me, sharing a pain that all warm-blooded creatures know.

Taking the bloodstained envelope, she studied it for a moment, then took a letter opener from the green blotter. After unfolding the handwritten one-page letter, she read it many times over before setting it down. Then she got up from the desk and went to the window.

Looking out at the plaster wall across the way she said, “You didn’t read it?”

“No.”

She turned and asked, “Why not?”

“Because. Because it felt, I don’t know, private.”

Walking back to the desk, she picked up the dispatch and held it out to me.

The letter was written in pencil. I read it twice, shoved it back into the envelope, and tucked it away.

“I need to hold on to this in case I have to prove a point at some time.”

“You’re sure he’s dead?”

“Yes, I am.”

She pulled out the chair from the desk and sat down heavily.

“I called the police,” I told her.

“What can they do?”

“Nothing, but we have to start making a story for ourselves.”

“Why? We haven’t committed any crime.”

“Innocence don’t make you innocent in the eyes of the law.”

She looked up at me and winced. “Do you trust me, Easy?”

I pondered the question a second or two and then asked, “Who’s Sturdyman and what does he have to do with all this?”

“I never heard the name before.” She hesitated and then said, “I have to tell Curt’s parents.”

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s go.”

She opened the bottom drawer and pulled out her purse.