Farewell, Amethystine

29

The three swigs of Tranquility knocked me out. I awoke on the Chinese couch around seven the next morning, washed my face in the downstairs bathroom, and made my way to the car. I got it to the N&T Hotel at a few minutes past eight that morning. The woman at the kiosk was strawberry blond and fair to the point of almost being real white. My aunt, Hannah Leroy, would have said that God meant her to be round and smiling.

“Oh, yes, Mr. Rawlins,” she said after I introduced myself. “Tristan and Mr. Suggs are in their rooms. I could call them if you want.”

Very few people knew that Fearless’s given name was Tristan.

“What’s your name?” I asked the desk clerk.

“Aura.”

“Well, Aura, I’d like a room and a bed. Whenever Melvin or Tristan want me, I’ll be ready.”

I closed my eyes but they might as well have been open. My thoughts jumped from Mary to Mel, from Fearless to Mama Jo’s ward — Izzy. There were gangsters and dead men, pimps and boxers. There was the corpse of Curt Fields.

When my mind’s eye settled on Curt, my head’s eyes opened. I sat up and made a call to a number that I had memorized without effort.

“Hello?” she said on the second ring.

“Hey.”

“Where are you?”

Amethystine Stoller was at my door twenty-seven minutes later. She came in and took a long look at me, after which she embraced me much like Izzy had done. But there was a difference. I felt Amethystine’s embrace — way down deep. When she let go I understood how Jo cured Isabelle, why Mel loved Mary, and also the passion that most women had for Fearless.

“Is this because of Curt?” she asked me.

“Is what because of him?”

“I can see you’re hurting, Easy. I can see it. And if it’s this job I got you on, you can just walk away. There’s no saving Curt anymore anyway.”

“Listen,” I said. “You asked me a question and I didn’t really answer it.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. You asked me if I trusted you and the answer is — I don’t know.”

Amethystine’s posture improved on the sky-blue Naugahyde chair.

“Go on,” she whispered.

“It’s all too easy. I mean, Curt’s parents comin’ to you — okay. Maybe even Jewelle tellin’ you about me. That makes sense. But then you workin’ for the man who hired Curt and somethin’ about Curt gettin’ you out of a jam. By itself that’s a lot, but when you add in Harrison knowin’ about Purlo and Shadrach and then him gone from the house as soon as I show up... That takes more than trust. That there’s askin’ for faith.”

I don’t think she wanted to, but Amethystine smiled.

“What else was I supposed to do?” she asked.

“Nuthin’. What’s done is done. The only question is what can you do to make me have faith in you?”

She looked at some spot on my face that wasn’t my eyes.

It was my turn to smile.

“What?” she asked.

“The way you’re looking at me.”

“What about it?”

“It’s like that laser beam Theodore Maiman invented. A coherent ray of light. When Jackson talked to me about it, he called it single-focused.”

Her eyebrows rose in appreciation, wordlessly saying that I knew who I was talking to even if I couldn’t trust her.

“I just wanted you to find Curt,” she said. “I wanted him to be safe. There was no other agenda, as far as you were concerned.”

“Yeah, I know, find Curt. But then there’s Purlo and Shadrach, a casino probably worth millions, and a girl who somehow managed to get out of a jam.”

“A woman,” she corrected. “A woman with responsibilities.”

“I got kids too,” I countered. “Adopted, but mine. One of them is married with a kid of his own. We all got responsibilities.”

We were gazing freely into each other’s eyes by then, like bear-Jo and cub-Izzy.

“Men like me,” Amethystine uttered. “They see something they think they need, they want. And no matter what else happens, they end up wanting to use me...”

“Shadrach or Purlo?”

“My little brother had an infection that required an operation. That much is fact. Shadrach loaned me the money, but after that I would have had to work for him for almost nothing until it was paid off. Then Shad sold my debt to Purlo.”

“And what did Ron want from you?” I asked, feeling the anger rise in my chest.

“At first, he wanted me to entertain his high rollers. I told Curt about it and he went to talk to Purlo. He told me that they’d made a deal.”

“To investigate the books of the casino Purlo wanted to control,” I stated.

“I guess.”

“He didn’t tell you?”

“I thought that he’d taken on the debt and was paying it off. That’s what he said.”

“And what about Harrison? How did he fit into all this?”

“He got me the loan from Shadrach.”

“What was his angle?”

“I really don’t know. I mean, I thought he was just being nice.”

Faith trumps belief every time. I thought about the gangsters, the murder, and this woman who did all she could for the people she loved.

“I had Jewelle put a woman away in a property she manages. Do you know where that is?”

“Mrs. Blue owns places that nobody knows about but her. If you asked her to keep it secret, she wouldn’t tell a soul.”

“Do you have Jewelle’s number?”

“Sure I do.”

“Call it.”

She did as I said and I got on the line.

“Hey, J, how you doin’?”

“Fine, Easy. What you doin’ with my employee?”

“I want you to put her with Mary Donovan.”

“Why?”

“Puttin’ all my eggs in one basket.” “What kinda sense that make?” “A fool’s sense.”

After a long sigh, she said, “Whatever you say, Easy.”

Once I had worked out the details, I told Amethystine to go to her office and let Jewelle take her where she needed to stay.

“You think I’m in danger?” she asked.

“Could be.”

“I’ll need to get my brother and sister, then.”

“Work that out with Jewelle.”

She snorted daintily and then asked, “Why’d you call me?”

“Because I wanted to see you.”

“But you don’t trust me.”

“Not yet.”

Amethystine considered me and then said, “Take off your clothes.”

I must have looked a little confused because she added, “Don’t worry. It’s not about sex.”

She undressed me and then took off most of her clothes. We got down on the bed and she hooked her right arm under the back of my neck.

“This is not about sex?” Even at fifty, my erection was straining as it had that one night with Anger Lee.

“No.”

For some reason this answer got me even more excited.

“It’s about you,” she uttered. It almost felt as if I was nineteen again, in bed with Mama Jo, or maybe fifteen, bleeding from my shoulder and kissing Anger Lee.

“This does not feel like resting.”

That’s when she pulled her trick. She placed her left hand over my eyes and said, “Let it go.”

I was going to say that I wasn’t holding on to anything, but I was asleep before the words could make their way to my tongue.

Amethystine was sitting across from me at a small round-top glass table. She wore a lovely golden hat and white gloves.

“I don’t remember a thing,” I was saying, and then the phone rang, waking me from the dream.

“Hello?”

“Ease,” the caller intoned.

“Fearless.”

“We on the roof.”

Sitting up, I experienced a series of revelations. The first and deepest feeling was Amethystine’s absence. The second was that I was completely rested. Part of this rejuvenation was probably Jo’s elixir, but my client played a part in it too.

“You in there?” I called into the bathroom.

There was no answer, of course.

The certainty of my solitude brought to mind a simple fact: if only for that one morning, Amethystine Stoller brought to me succor without asking for a thing. This was a rare event in my half century of life. In those long decades, which seemed to span centuries, I had been brutalized, ripped off, lied to, pursued, and kissed in kind, but as rarely as an orchid blooming in winter was I given what I needed without asking.

The roof of the N&T Hotel was covered by maybe three-quarters of a foot of soil. Planted in this loam was a lawn of Californian blue-eyed grass. It was an extravagance that felt almost preternatural. At the western corner of this urban meadow was a whitewood table that would have seated eight comfortably. There sat Fearless and Melvin, drinking coffee and sharing words.

I walked up to the unlikely duo, said, “Gentlemen,” and sat a chair away from either one.

“Where’d you go last night, Easy?” Fearless asked.

“A long way from here.”

“You took care’a business?”

I nodded.

“No one came up to the cottage,” Mel said. “We cleaned up pretty good.”

“Good.”

Fearless poured me a cup of coffee and I left it black.

After four sips I asked Mel, “Who did you get out of jail?”

He winced and then stared, shook his head maybe a quarter inch, and said, “Peter Barth.”

Fearless leaned back and I merely waited.

“He’d been arrested,” the cop continued, “for the distribution of stolen property — boating equipment.”

I chuckled. “You mean captain’s wheels and like that?”

“Mostly mechanical stuff. From engines to fishing sonar. I got a guy in evidence to mislabel the inventory, like I told you. That way I knew I could bust him again just as soon as I figured out how to get at the guy threatening Mary.”

“Who’s that?”

“I don’t know.”

“How’s that work?”

“It was a note with a Polaroid picture of a weapon.”

“The gun she used?”

“From what she told me, it looks like it.”

“How did Laks tumble to it?”

“That’s the question. It feels like a setup. First he uses Barth as an excuse to bring me up on charges, and then he has one’a his people threaten to send Mary to prison.”

Fearless’s grunt sounded like a depth charge targeting some unseen submarine.

“Why would Laks wanna do you in?” I asked.

“There’s been some stories about him,” Mel ventured.

“What kinda stories?”

“I don’t like runnin’ a guy down without proof,” the lifelong cop said with some finality.

“He the one runnin’ you down, Commander. He put your name out there and then sent that man Mirth after us.”

“There’s no proof he did that.”

“Mary sent me to a man named Tommy Jester. When Jester got killed—”

“Killed?” Mel erupted. “Who killed him?”

“Jester called Mary. She asked a question and the next thing anybody knew he had a bullet in his head.”

“What question?”

“I wasn’t on the call, but I think it was if Bernard Kirby had possession of a film clip showin’ Laks in the company of prostitutes. The way I figure it, Jester called Laks and then met his maker. We came damn near that very same end.”

Mel’s stare was long and deep — a man looking for some barely knowable thing.

When he found what he was searching for he said, “Everything you say makes sense, Rawlins. Everything but why you’re sitting here sayin’ it. I mean, none of this is your business.”

“I came to you for help and found that you were missing.”

“So what?”

“Com’on, Mel. We ain’t no nine-to-five kinda guys. No punch clocks. No ranch-style house out in Pacoima. No boss we owe our souls to. You know how I do things. I need help and you do too. Put that together and you have why I’m here.”

“What kinda help you need?”

I told him about Curt Fields, his family, and the gangsters that employed and probably murdered him. I even mentioned Amethystine, without using her name.

“Okay, but what can I do?” Mel said with a shrug. “I’m damn near a fugitive myself.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “That boy Laks got you by the nuts. You on the run, but Anatole ain’t.”

“He works for Laks.”

“Bullshit. He the one warned you about Laks.”

Mel actually grinned at that evaluation.

“Damn, man,” I continued. “The way they sayin’ it, you jumped ship like an hour before they came lookin’ for you.”

“Yeah,” the cop agreed, “and they the ones let Anatole know... so they could get me on the run.”

“The only question is,” Fearless added, “why does Laks want you dead?”

That simple declaration sat Suggs back in his chair.

It’s important to say here that the LAPD, at that time, was a cult. Maybe all police departments everywhere in the world are bound up by toxic orthodoxy, I don’t know, but back then the LAPD didn’t believe in anything but the righteousness of their struggle to survive on streets at least partly of their own making. If a criminal needed killing sometime, he could be found dead, clutching a pistol that had no pedigree attached to him. Gangs were set one against the other and these deaths were seen simply as collateral damage.

I’m not saying that every cop felt like that. But the greatest sin among them was turning a brother in blue over to the justice system. In order for this system to work, the members had to believe in the righteousness of their clan.

Suggs believed. At least he did until Fearless honestly assessed his situation.

“That’s right, right?” Fearless pressed Mel.

Mel gave my friend an eighth of a nod in answer.

That was all he could manage before turning to me and saying, “And you, Rawlins, you got a dead man and a grieving family. Why not just let it go? Let it all go.”

“There’s gangsters around this that know the client. They’re standing at the doorstep of something big. I’d like it if no more bodies dropped, most especially mine and my client’s.”

“I can’t be seen anywhere near Anatole.”

“Right. And I’m known by the men killed my client’s ex-husband. You got a badge and there’s only an unofficial APB on your ass. We could help each other here.”

“You trust this client of yours?” Mel asked, staring me in the face.

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

Mel sat back in his whitewood chair, waited a beat, and then nodded.

“Then it’s settled,” I said. “Fearless?”

“Yeah, Ease?”

“Go get the car and Mel’ll be down in a few minutes. After that you can take him out to John’s. Once he’s there, I’d appreciate you goin’ up to stay at my place.”

“Sound like a plan.”