Farewell, Amethystine

37

“That was unfair, Ezekiel,” Amethystine said on the drive to West Hollywood. We were alone in my car.

“What was?”

“Talking to my sister like that.”

“Like what?”

“I could tell by the way she was sitting that she was telling you all my little secrets.”

“Isn’t getting to know your family a good way to know you?”

“And why would you want to do that?”

“I like you.”

“Don’t.” She sounded as if she weren’t kidding.

“Why not?”

“This, what we’re doing, is just a job for you. You’ll do all your little detective things and figure out who killed Curt, then you’ll be off on some other case.”

“What if I don’t want to be off?”

“The Sash and Tail is on the next block, on the right. Let me off on the corner here so nobody sees you.”

I pulled to the curb and she got out, making it a point not to look at me. I might have wondered more about this strange behavior, but the night was filled with other activities.

Mel and Mary had taken a room at the Hills Motel, two blocks up from Sunset Boulevard. When I came to join them, Mary decided to go out and get a pint of Jim Beam.

“She’s something else,” I said to Mel when she was gone.

“Yeah,” he said contemplatively. “More than I ever imagined.”

“Must make you wonder about bein’ a cop.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Come on, Mel. You broke your oath for her. You walked away from the job for her. Hell, you left her, for her.”

The way Mel was looking at me, it seemed like he was ready to fight. Luckily the liquor store was next door and Mary’s key was already sounding in the lock.

She came in and looked at us, the question in her usually unreadable eyes.

“What?” she asked.

“You bring Dixie cups?” Mel wanted to know.

As long as I was talking with Mel, concentrating on him, I felt okay — even with the threat. But when it was the three of us, I started worrying about Amethystine. Sending a woman out to seduce some man, a potentially dangerous man, was contrary to my upbringing. But even dealing with these feelings I knew that Niska was right — the world had changed.

“Don’t worry,” Mary said, reading my fears. “Amy’s gonna be just fine.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“She got knockout drops and a derringer in her clutch. If one don’t get him the other one will.”

“How come you had all that stuff with you?” Mel asked her.

“I hope you don’t think that I would go out unprotected in this dangerous world, Mr. Suggs.”

We played penny-ante blackjack on one of the two beds for nearly two hours. By that time Mel had won $1.27. Mary and I had each paid about half of that.

That’s when the phone rang. I nearly jumped up.

“Hello,” Mary said into the receiver. After a few moments she said, “Uh-huh, okay, twelve thirty. Okay. Got it.” She hung up and said, “Twelve thirty Ringgold North.”

“That’s the address McCourt gave me,” Mel said. “So he took her home.”

“Was she okay?” I asked.

“She sounded good.”

Lit by two streetlamps, the house’s high arched roof was covered with dark wood shingles that came together in sinuous lines reminiscent of flowing waters. Mel drove up into the driveway and we all got out.

“You sure she sounded all right?” Mel asked Mary.

“She sounded fine.”

“And you’re sure it was her?”

“Come on,” she said. “It’s fine.”

The front door was recessed inside a flat porch-like area. When the door came open and light flooded out, Amethystine called, “Come on in.”

I walked right up to her and we kissed as if it was the most natural thing in the world. That was our first kiss, and I will never forget it.

She brought us down a short hall that led to a spacious sunken living room. Fyodor Brennan was laid out on a burgundy-carpeted floor.

The furniture was heavy and dark. On the wall above Brennan’s unconscious body was an oil painting of some medieval castle. It didn’t look like a knockoff.

Mel turned the attaché over for us to get a good look at him.

He was a small guy in a light-gray suit with dark-blue pinstriping. His mustache was razor-thin and his cologne was the strongest thing in the room.

“How did it go?” Mary asked Amethystine.

“Easy. I talked to him in the bar about the great gin fizz I made. I said it was the best anyone ever tasted. So, when we got here, he wasn’t suspicious at all. After he finished the drink, he played try to kiss the girl for a few minutes and then got woozy. When he realized what was happening I bear-hugged him from behind until he passed out.”

The women’s conversation was quite pedestrian. Like discussing a recipe or how to discipline an unruly child.

“How long will he be out?” I asked.

“We’ll have enough time to search the house, I think,” Mary surmised.

Mel organized the search. After being a lead detective for a decade, he was the most qualified. He had me go through the bedroom, where I found the gun. It was taped to the underside of the bottom drawer of a green metal filing cabinet. I had to yank the drawer off the track to find it. I’d looked everywhere before that. Under rugs, in pockets, and at the back of closet shelves. I threw the mattress off the bed and raised the frame to look under the stack of nudie magazines he hid there.

All that and it still felt too easy. I would have taken that gun and buried it somewhere in the desert. Or maybe I would have given it to a good friend like John the bartender, asking him not to tell me where to find it. But, I supposed, Brennan felt invulnerable.

“Mary,” I said as she and Amethystine were searching the kitchen.

“Yeah?”

“Wanna come with me over here?”

She accompanied me to Fyodor’s bedroom, where I showed her what I’d found.

“Is this the weapon?” I asked Mary, holding the .22 pistol in a white handkerchief I always carried with me.

Mary didn’t reach for the gun, just leaned forward, peering at the piece.

“Can you turn it over?” she asked.

Using the hand under the silk, I flipped the gun.

“I can’t believe it,” she said. “That bastard took it.”

“You’re sure?”

“It had the same red paint stain on the butt.”

I wrapped the gun in silk and shoved it into a pocket.

“But why would Graham keep it in the first place?” Melvin asked when we were reconvened in the sunken living room.

The still-unconscious Fyodor was tied up with electrical tape I’d taken from Shadrach’s house. Waste not, want not.

“I bet I know,” said Mary.

“What?” That was Amethystine. She hadn’t actually seen the pistol. I was trying to protect her but there she was, deeply involved.

“It was when he questioned me,” Mary answered. “That’s it. He had brought my file to the bungalow. They had been investigating me over a thing I was doing with this Yugoslavian diplomat guy.”

“Doing what?” Mel asked. He couldn’t help it.

“Guy’s name was Stefan, Stefan Davidovitch. He had a contact in South Africa who was moving diamonds. They wanted me to help with sales in America; thought that selling them here would cause less trouble. So when Graham asked me about Stefan, I figured if I just said I knew the guy it wouldn’t hurt. But I guess he saw something.”

“So he held on to the gun for leverage,” Amethystine surmised.

“Then why didn’t he ever use it?” I wanted to know.

“Stefan died from a heart attack a month or so after that,” Mary told us.

“Then,” I said, “years later, Laks goes to Brennan and offers him Mel’s job, and Brennan finds out that Graham had once been on Mary’s tail. Only question is, why Laks do all that?”

“Me bein’ a bulldog,” Suggs admitted. “It wasn’t just the time I saved your ass, Easy. I didn’t like Laks, and I pulled the rug out from under him every chance I got. I heard it that the chief was gettin’ tired of his vigilantism. Maybe he planned to use me to get him out of office.”

“Maybe?” I asked.

“There was a couple’a meetings. But I said I wasn’t interested in being underhanded. If they wanted him out, they should’a fired him.”

Remembering these events, I’m most aware of the fact that I wasn’t in my right mind. The worst thing that a man in my situation could do would be to work with career criminals, cops, or strangers. I was working with all three. The mistake that most people made was thinking about right then. That night we were friends with goals that benefited us, mutually. But I know, from experience, that friends often turn into enemies. Sometimes your best friend will wake up in the middle of the night realizing that you could turn on him — or her.

Criminals, cops, and strangers.

Even then, in that dark wood-shingled house, I knew that I was setting myself up.

At that moment I turned and started walking from the room.

“Where you goin’?” Mel asked.

“To see if your boy got some tequila.”