Farewell, Amethystine

21

Manheim’s gym was older than the Olympic Auditorium. The business was owned and run by Frieda Alouette Manheim. She was the widow of Vicario Manheim (aka Turk Stone), a middleweight who would bang a full fifteen rounds with anybody masochistic enough to climb into the ring with him. Turk ended the careers of some boxers even when he lost the bout.

The drafty space was the size of a high school gymnasium. It had a skylight but still felt dark and heavy. It smelled of liniment, sweat, and tanned leather. There were two full rings, with sparring partners in each one, and a few dozen stripped-down men torturing themselves in order to experience the potential ecstasy of coming out victorious in one-on-one combat.

A cacophony of gladiatorial sounds greeted me there. The slapping sounds of dancing feet and leather jump ropes tapping the floor, the impacts of gloved fists on flesh and on punching bags, and a chorus of grunts and exhortations accompanied by the lesser sounds of laughter, approval, and pugilistic instruction. Black, white, and a whole range of brown skins made up the men there. There wasn’t much room for racial hate. These men stored up their rage for any opponent of any color or creed. They were doing push-ups, running the circumference of the vast room, fighting with their own shadows, and hitting, hitting, hitting.

There was no apparent organization to this mob of violence. I had to wander around until happening upon a familiar face.

Pinky Richards was standing at the far side of one of the raised rings. He was watching a skinny white guy dance around a much larger Black opponent. The larger boxer kept missing with potentially devastating punches. The little guy regularly landed blows that had no effect.

“Come on, Oswald,” a flush-faced Pinky yelled. “Try and touch ’im, you don’t need to kill ’im.”

Pinky was nicknamed after the baby finger. He was thin, white if you thought of a perpetual flush as white, and short enough to pass as a middle-school kid. He’d been a flyweight in his twenties and was probably still around the 112-pound limit.

A towheaded boy holding a stopwatch in one hand and a hammer in the other suddenly struck the bell that sat before him.

Pinky shook his head at the big boxer as he went to his corner.

“Hey, Pink,” I said then.

Turning his wily face in my direction, the trainer squinted with his right eye.

“What you want, Rawlins? Frieda’s out back.”

“The big guy a prospect?” I asked.

“If you lookin’ for somebody to swing a sledgehammer at a stake in the ground.”

That was when the big Black bruiser climbed down to pay obeisance to Pinky.

“I’ll do better the next time, boss,” he said.

“This ain’t no street fight, Oswald,” Pinky cried holding both hands up. “You can’t hurt him if you can’t touch him. You have more control over your mitts if you reach out and tap him — anywhere.”

“Okay, boss. Okay.”

“Go throw three-punch combos at the wall. At least it won’t fight back.”

Oswald trotted off, happy that someone at least cared enough to give him instruction.

“So, Mr. Easy,” the life-tired trainer said, “what you need?”

“How about a hundred dollars in your pocket?”

“Who I got to kill?”

“I don’t think it’ll come to all that. Bernard Kirby.”

“Benny don’t hang around nowadays. When the only offers he got anymore was back-alley prizefights, he went into sales.”

“Selling what?”

“Boxes with bruises on ’em.”

“Where do I find him?”

“Where’s my hundred?”

The trail Pinky laid out didn’t lead right to Kirby. First I had to go out to Bellflower to Kirby’s ex-wife, Mona. She was a white woman, around forty, with bags under her eyes that were reminiscent of bruises. She didn’t know where her ex was and didn’t care. But she took twenty dollars to get groceries, she said. For that she suggested Uncle Uno. Uno, while not being related to Bernard, had been a good friend of his father’s.

I was aware of the numbers runner. Uno might have been the only man in generally hatless LA who wore a top hat. It was what they called a low top, with a crown no more than six inches high. It marked him so that no one could fail to identify Uno Pasquale.

I found him on the southern outskirts of downtown LA. He was sitting on a backless wooden stool in front of a barbershop called Leo’s. I saw him from down the block and watched for a while. He was smoking a slender cheroot, looking very satisfied with himself. Now and then, someone would walk up to him, they’d exchange a few words, and then the visitor would wander off.

Uno’s talent was remembering everything he ever heard — word for word. This made him nearly invulnerable as a numbers man.

After maybe seven customers had been serviced, I walked up to the streetside bookie and asked, “How you doin’, Uno?”

He was older than I, early sixties by white-man standards. That is to say, he would have looked even older than that down in my old neighborhood.

After a few moments he found my entry in his large file of names and faces.

“You’re that friend of Blue’s,” he said. “Easy.”

“No flies on you, Uno.”

“Not till they walk across my dead eyes.” He exhaled a cloud of cigar smoke.

“I need some information,” I told him.

Uno was a businessman. He didn’t need me to waste time shooting the shit. Time was money.

“What kind of information?”

“You have a godson name of Bernard Kirby.”

“That’s a fact, not a question.”

“I need to talk to Bernard. He’s got something a friend of mine wants to buy.”

The dandy studied me, and then he asked, “You got a problem with Benny?”

“No, sir.”

“Because he’s the kinda kid gets into trouble at the drop of a hat.”

“That may very well be.” Language adjusted itself in my mouth depending on who it was on the other side of the conversation. “But I’m looking for a transaction, not an altercation.”

“How much?”

“I got a hundred dollars burnin’ a hole in my pocket.”

The teeth in Uno’s smile clenched down hard on that cigar.

“There’s a Ping-Pong palace down next to Chinatown on the westward side. They call it King Pong. In the back room they do poker. A man calls himself Francis Drake runs the game. Benny plays bodyguard there.”

I saluted him by tipping a nonexistent hat. Then I reached for my pocket.

“Not out here, boyo,” he cautioned. “Go inside and give it to the barber in the last chair.”

I went into the small three-chair men’s salon. Everyone at Leo’s was white and so I got a few stares. The first two barbers were clipping away. There were four men and one boy waiting for service. The last barber, a lanky-looking long-haired youth, was lounging on his mechanical chair. When I walked over to him, he looked up and I handed him a fold of five twenty-dollar bills.

That done, I left the shop at a good pace.

“Hey, Easy,” Uno called.

“Yeah?”

“Be careful with Benny. That boy’s got a hair trigger.”

There was good reason for the warning — I knew. Bernard hit a guy in the ring so hard one time that his left eyeball popped out and hung down on his cheek. If they still had bare-knuckle boxing, BK would have had a shot at being champion of the world.

I was always a little nervous standing around in a white neighborhood. That fear was composed of four hundred years of experience crushed down into fifty short years of life.

But in spite of my fear, I stopped at a phone booth and made a call.

I had to go through a switchboard and a receptionist before Anatole McCourt got on the line.

“Captain.”

“Mr. Rawlins. I’ve been trying to get in touch with you.”

“Here I am.”

“I’m gonna have to ask you to come in and answer a few questions.”

“Sure. But first I need you to do something for me.”

We met in front of the county jailhouse in the midafternoon. The big man had on a three-button suit the color of high-desert sand. His shirt was cobalt blue, with a necktie of light- and dark-blue squares.

“Captain. You’re lookin’ stylish.”

“What you got on Mel?” he replied.

“You mean other than you were the one who warned him that they were building an airtight case against him?”

The heir of Viking blood went speechless for a good eight seconds. And even after that he could only utter, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Okay. I’ll accept that for now. But we got other business.”

In another life Anatole and I would have probably been friends, riding side by side running from or chasing down some enemy, or friend. Our temperaments were first and foremost familial and, after that, political as far as politics represented human rights. Everybody, in our estimation, deserved a plot of land where they could sleep and, later on, be put to rest. Any other legislation from officials elected by hard cash, we believed, was a tier or more below human consideration.

We should have been brothers but instead we were stationed on opposite sides of a demilitarized zone that had existed as long as there’d been a New World.

“Come on,” the juggernaut cop ordered.

We strolled up to the heavily armored and guarded front door of hell. Passing that threshold was worse than standing on the street in a white neighborhood. The dampness of the jailhouse atmosphere felt as if it arose from human sweat. The uniforms had an occupying-military feel to them.

I didn’t say a word.

Anatole followed a man he spoke with, and I followed him.

We were brought to a room made from stone, like a basement chamber in a castle-cum-dungeon.

There were a few dozen denizens in that ultra-secure anteroom. Mostly women and their children, there for men who were only possibilities for them right then. Also there were brothers and mothers, a father or two. It wasn’t the first time I was made aware that incarceration was an enterprise and a social gathering that was open for business twenty-four hours a day.

This was the waiting room that led to prisoners with blood on their hands and wounds on their bodies, forgery artists and combat sportsmen, sex therapists and madmen, professional outcasts and those who were so angry that it was eating them up from the inside out.

And it wasn’t only my people, so-called Black people. There were whites and Mexicans, Chinese and Koreans, Hasidic Jews and devout Catholics. The only one missing was God. That celestial being had abandoned this particular multicultural tribe.

I sat down at the end of a long bench and stared at the concrete floor, practicing minding my own business.

“Are you my daddy’s friend?” a voice asked.

It was a girl-child, seven or possibly eight years old. Not yet five feet tall, she had dark skin and maybe eleven pigtails that were tied back. Her face was sleek, like some very cute predator’s — a child of Man, one might have said.

“Who is your father?” I asked.

“Clarence D. Simpson the third.”

Over her tentacled head I could see what was probably her mother — watching.

“I don’t think I know him,” I said. “What they call you?”

“Marla.”

“Marla Simpson?”

Her grin showed one missing tooth. She had on jeans and a red-and-blue lumberjack shirt that looked like it was made for a doll.

“Uh-huh,” she told me. “They arrested him, um, because they said that he was in this big place and some things got stoled. But nobody saw him take nuttin’ an’ nobody could prove it.”

There were angry tears in the little girl’s eyes.

“Is that your mother over there?” I asked, pointing at the woman who was watching me.

“Uh-huh.”

I brought out my wallet, from which I retrieved a five-dollar bill and a gold-embossed business card.

“Give these to your mama and tell her I said she should call the woman on the card.”

Marla grabbed the strange treasure and went running back to her little brood.

I was, once again, looking down at the stained concrete floor when a shadow came over the scene.

It was Marla’s mom. She had on a blue blouse with pearlescent buttons done up along the shirt-edges and a pink skirt that went down to her shins. She was a small woman but gave the impression of uncommon strength.

“What is this?” she asked me, holding out the card I’d given Marla.

“Pinca Novalis.”

“And what’s a Pinca Novalis?”

“She’s a lawyer I know. Her preferred clients are women and children and the men they care for.”

“We cain’t afford no lawyer.”

“There’s not a soul in this room could afford to be in here without a lawyer.”

Marla’s mother was so filled with emotion that she actually started to shiver.

I stood up and offered her my hand.

“Ezekiel Rawlins. My friends call me Easy.”

After a moment’s hesitation she took my hand and said, “Martha. Martha Simpson.”

“Well, Martha, Pinca needs money too. That’s a fact. But she got all kinds of ways for workin’ people to afford justice. If all your husband can get is a public defender, then call Ms. Novalis. Don’t hurt to talk.”

“How do you know if my husband’s guilty or not?”

“I don’t. But the one thing I’m sure of is that it’s maybe one person out of a hundred that’s truly innocent: white, Black, brown, ordained minister, or beat cop.”

“Easy Rawlins!”

I turned away and never saw Martha Simpson again. Coming through the iron door was Fearless Jones in the custody of three jailhouse guards and followed by Anatole McCourt.

Fearless was clad in gray shirt and pants, light-brown shoes, and visor cap, also gray. I might have thought that he came out in a prison uniform if I didn’t know that this was what he wore whenever he did physical work. This told me that Mr. Jones had been arrested while doing honest labor somewhere.

“How you doin’, Fearless?”

“Okay. Got to show this one and that what the rules is. After that jail is just fine.”

It was a secret pleasure to see the two physically toughest men I know standing side by side. Anatole was taller and at least fifty pounds heavier, but I was pretty sure that Fearless had a sharper left hook.

Anatole handed Fearless a folder with his release papers inside.

“The officer that blamed you for assault dropped the charges.”

“Thank you, Captain,” I said. “I’ll have what you asked for in as few days as possible.”

That got me a nod.