Farewell, Amethystine

20

Soon after leaving the Fieldses’ house, I noticed a police cruiser in my rearview mirror. It kept back pretty far, at least a block away. This meant that they were still wondering about my intentions. A passive investigation of this nature was no surprise. I was the perpetual surprise, always showing up at places I wasn’t expected or wanted. It was the job of every policeman in America to make sure that people like me were not up to some mischief. It had been their job since before the Civil War.

I made my way over to Olympic and then took the on-ramp to Highway 10, the Santa Monica Freeway. The police broke off pursuit there. Whatever threat I represented, it was no longer their concern.

After a long life of being hounded, followed, and stalked by men and women of all colors, I had learned to let it go, to move around carelessly and unconcerned, like a very small fish in a tank full of sharks.

The Egg and the Eye, a supposedly omelet-only restaurant, was across the street from the art museum. They sold low-cost art and craft pieces, served eggs of every stripe, and even had a little theater in back where they screened independent films and unusual documentaries. I ordered their prime rib eggs Benny and took out Papillon.

I read and ate until about eleven and then I struck out for the museum.

Back in those days the LA art museum was just a four-story atrium with different eras of art displayed on each level. The basement, for the longest time, had a collection of down-at-heel sarcophagi that reminded me of discarded bathtubs. There was usually only one new exhibit at a time in the collection.

This season the new work was on the third floor. Mary said to meet her on the top level, but that wasn’t for another quarter of an hour. So I decided to wander around. Maybe Feather would like to come with me to see the new exhibit.

It was a modest offering, four paintings by Paul Klee. They were simple landscapes of different subtle and abstract places, all of which were under a red sun that seemed to me somewhat cold. It was as if these were the drawings of some Inuit child, using colors derived from berries and clay, describing various wintry landscapes on clear days.

“Easy.” She’d come up behind me like I’d imagined Fearless Jones had done a hundred times to unsuspecting German sentries — behind enemy lines.

“Hey,” I said. “I thought we were meeting on the top floor.”

“I was early. Thought I’d check out the new pieces. You?”

“Mediocre minds think alike, Ms. Donovan.”

“It’s Mrs. Suggs.”

“You guys got married?”

“Three months ago. In Reno.”

She was turned out in a tight floral minidress that might well have been silk. It was a sexy ensemble dominated by various shades of red. I knew from this choice of attire that she was intent on influencing me. A force unto herself, Mary was criminal in the eyes of the law. But the only judges she recognized were Instinct and Power. She was the living personification of Melvin’s vocation. That was why he couldn’t resist her.

“I need to find your husband.”

Her nostrils flared mere millimeters, but that was enough. If I were a male spider and she the female, I would have had to worry about being slaughtered no matter what happened next.

“Melvin said that you’re one of the most dangerous men in LA,” she offered.

“You don’t need Mel to tell you how the world works.”

Her wariness formed into a sneer.

“No. I don’t.”

“Just like I don’t need to be told about how dangerous you can be.”

“I’m just a defenseless girl, Mr. Rawlins.”

“Tell Tommy Jester that.”

She turned away to regard one of the childlike masterpieces.

I was pretty sure that Mary’s appreciation of that painting was in no way like my own. I might have gotten distracted by that thought if she hadn’t turned back to me.

“Tommy Jester was a pimp,” she declared.

“He ran men?” I was really surprised.

“Women.”

“How did he keep ’em in line?”

She smiled. “When I asked him that one time he said, ‘Kindness — kindness and razor blades.’”

“He’s dead.”

“That’s what you said.” Her expression was like the powerful lens of a seventy-millimeter camera, now and then altering ever so slightly. It was all in the muscles around her lovely, deadly eyes. “How?”

“Shot in an alley down from his apartment,” I said. “Before that you talked with him?”

“Yes.”

“You wanna go out to the park?”

Grassy and passive Hancock Park surrounded the museum and also the fenced-in tar pits where many an ancient mastodon and saber-toothed cat had met their end. Mary and I commandeered an empty bench next to the sulfurous, oil-stained waters.

“TJ had a guy did work for him named Bernard,” Mary said after looking around, making sure that we would not be overheard. “He did odd jobs.”

“Like what?”

The new bride gazed into my eyes with an intelligence that was daunting.

“Bernard took secret films of TJ’s powerful and rich clients. Tommy told me one time that he had done one on Terrence Laks.”

“The underchief?”

She shrugged.

“And you offered to buy the film from TJ?”

“He wanted ten thousand.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah... but what good’s money if you don’t have love?”

I didn’t understand those words coming out of her mouth but, then again, I didn’t need to.

“You reached out to TJ, he called back and asked for the cash, then he called Underchief Laks...”

“Looking for a better deal,” Mary finished my sentence.

“So, Laks might be after you.”

“People been after me since the first grade.”

Talking to Mary was like looking out on an impossibly ever-growing vista. It was both vast and frightening.

“Tell me about Bernard.”

“His last name’s Kirby. That’s all I know.”

“Tall Black guy? Receding hairline?” I pointed at my head with two fingers representing back-slanting horns.

“Yeah, you know him?”

“I know who he is.”

“Then maybe I can give you the money.”

“I don’t think that’ll be necessary.”

“But you’ll talk to him?”

“I’ll look for him. But I need to talk to Mel.”

“I honestly don’t know where he is.”

I chuckled hearing this invocation of truthfulness. I mean, she probably didn’t know where Mel was, but her conniving mind could never have been wholly straightforward or true.

“You drive here?” I asked.

“Taxied.”

“Good. We can take my car.”

“Tell me everything that happened and everything Mel said the last time you saw him.”

We were in a rented room on Figueroa near Sixth Street. The motel was called François’s Lantern and I was well acquainted with the proprietor. We were seated, facing each other, I, perched on an unfinished pine chair and she at the edge of the high queen bed.

“He came home on Tuesday last, just a little bit after three,” she replied. “That was strange all on its own because he usually had a four-thirty meeting with the shift captains on Tuesdays. That’s when he told me about the blackmail—”

“For the first time?”

“Yeah.”

“He didn’t tell ya when it first happened?”

“You think I’m’a lie about that?”

“Go on.”

“He said that Laks wanted to know why he let the prisoner go and so he was going to have to disappear for a while.”

“And he told you it was because of what you did?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay. You need to tell me about that, then.”

“Why?”

“The more I know, the better I can help.”

She took a minute to think through all the possible outcomes of sharing her truth with me.

“My father used to say, what you don’t know won’t hurt you,” she ventured.

“Down where I come from, ignorance is death.”

Her smile was both radiant and, somehow, grateful.

“I killed a man...”

Usually when I hear those words I put my palms up against my ears and hum loudly. But not that day.

“I have a goddaughter,” she continued. “When she was eleven a man named Roman Zell, vice principal of her school... he raped her. The cops said that there was no hard proof. No proof.”

There was nothing I could ask about that. A criminal court might have found her guilty, but no red-blooded human being would. No conscientious objector, off-duty Supreme Court justice, pope, mother, or child would have blamed Mary Donovan for that act. Instead, they would have offered her a chair and a drink, sad soft eyes, and, probably, no questions.

“How’d you do it?”

“Shot him in the head” — she paused — “multiple times.”

“Who’s the blackmailer?”

“I don’t know.”

“Mel didn’t tell you or he didn’t know himself?”

“I don’t even know that, Easy. All I can say is that he’s aware of what I’m capable of. He didn’t give me any details, not even who he let go from jail.”

“So, you’re saying that somebody got Mel on the phone, told him that he knew you killed Zell, somehow he could prove it, and so Mel let somebody outta jail? That don’t make no sense. Wouldn’t Mel ask you before doing anything?”

“He knew what I’d done.” Mary looked away from me, probably thinking about how knowledge causes pain. “Before we got married, he wanted me to tell him about the worst of me. I told him.”

Her sorrow reminded me of Feather when she was seven. The mother of a school friend had died. Feather cared about her friend, so tried in her own way to share Lida’s grief.

“Daddy,” she asked me one night at bedtime, “am I gonna die?”

Life is filled with unanswerable questions.

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s come at this from another way.”

Mary smiled. She needed someone she could trust to scrutinize the predicament. Usually that person was Mel.

“Did anybody see you?”

“No,” she said. “I broke in the house when he was at school. I was dressed like a schoolkid, wore a wig and glasses.”

“Whose gun did you use?”

“I bought one on the street, but after I searched his place, I found one’a his.”

“You shot him with his own gun?”

“Yeah.”

“Multiple times?”

“I was gonna shoot him just once and then put the pistol in his hand. But I was mad and the first shot just creased his head. He came at me and I shot five more times.”

“All in the head?”

“Yeah.”

“Did you tell anybody about it?”

“No.”

“Not even the girl’s mother?”

“Course not. She had an alibi, but I wanted the news to hit her fresh.”

“Did anybody see you leave?”

“I doubt it. But even if they did, they could’a never identified me.”

“You left the gun there?”

Looking up in disgust she said, “Yes, I did. Stupid, stupid, stupid.”

“So maybe there’s some piece of a fingerprint on it,” I said aloud.

“And they wanna hang my Mel over that.”

“What caliber?”

“It was a twenty-two. That’s probably why nobody heard it.”

After another spate of silence I said, “Mary.”

“What?” It was a whisper in the dark.

“You didn’t tell anybody about Zell? No one?”

“That’s the first thing you learn,” she said with conviction. “Never tell.”

“Could somebody have figured it out?”

“There was the detective. I forget his name. But he just asked some questions. And that was only one time. But it couldn’t be him.”

“Why not?”

“He believed my goddaughter’s story. Told me that the prosecutor couldn’t make the case. But that was just one meeting. At my apartment. Nobody ever came again.”

“Okay. I think I could work with that. What kind of clothes did Mel bring with him when he left?”

The question caught her off guard. If the stakes we played for weren’t so high, and the dangers so clear, I might have felt I had scored a point in a lifelong competition.

“Nothing,” she murmured in a way that made you know there was more. “But...”

“What?”

“I was looking through his closet the morning after he left. You know, thinking about him. And something... was off. It wasn’t till you just asked that I realized it was his overcoat gone, missing from the hook on the back of the closet door. It was one of those heavy woolen East Coast coats made for deep winter. Does that mean anything to you?”

“No,” I said, but that was a lie. That overcoat sparked a memory that I would not share with Mel’s Lilith. “Was anything else missing?”

“Not that I remember.” She was eyeing me.

“Anyplace he was talkin’ about? Friends in other cities? He told me that you guys were going to Europe. Did he have a passport?” I didn’t care about any of that. I was pretty sure where Mel was, and I didn’t want to share that knowledge with Mary.

“He got a passport for Paris, but it’s still in the bureau.”

Leaning forward, my friend’s wife put a hand on my knee. “You’re going to look for him?”

“I’m gonna find him.”

Her hand stayed on my leg. Her eyes were in mine.

“What can I do for you?” she asked.

There are times when the straightforward approach is best. She was going to do anything she could to save her man. And, maybe, if I were a dozen years younger, I might have fooled myself into believing that she needed some loving in these hard times. But I was fifty and she didn’t need anything but for me to do what I promised.

“Well,” I said, and paused as if it was a hard question. “I know you know how to take care of yourself, but I’d feel a whole lot better if you let me put you someplace where I could be sure that you were safe.”

Mary retracted the hand and smiled. “Whatever you say, Mr. Rawlins.”

When she went into the bathroom to freshen up, I went outside into the parking lot. There was a pay phone next to the office door.

“Mofass Properties,” a young woman, Maybelline Carson, said over the line.

“Jewelle come in, Maybe?” Her nickname always made me smile.

“Oh, oh, Mr. Rawlins. She here all right.”

After a few clicks she answered, “Easy? How are you, darlin’?”

I explained about Mel’s bride and how she needed to be protected. I also said that she should keep Jackson completely in the dark about her.

“Why?” she asked. “You think Jackson gonna get his nose open behind her?”

“Mary is what they call an apex predator. She would eat that poor boy alive.”

“You are such a sweet man, Easy. Takin’ care of everybody. There should be a statue of you in some park square. Sure, drop her by.”