Farewell, Amethystine

4

Clifton’s downtown cafeteria was replete with twelve-foot-high grotesque tiki sculptures carved from redwood tree trunks, bamboo-themed furniture, and women servers in tight-fitting, calf-length, white silk dresses that had bright-green blades of grass emblazoned on them.

It was a buffet-style place with long cafeteria lines where you filled up your tray with whatever food you wanted. Cashiers awaited payment at the ends of the long aluminum tracks.

There were fifty or more patrons sitting at tables or walking down the line, pushing dark trays and studying the offerings — which were anything but Hawaiian.

“Can I help you, sir?” a woman asked.

She stood at the host’s podium. Her name tag read DAISY but she was Asian, probably Chinese, slender, with a forlorn look in her eyes and a smile on her lips. She was in her mid-thirties, an age that was kind of a DMZ dividing youth from adulthood. Her face was long; maybe that’s why I felt she was sad.

“I’m meeting someone for lunch,” I said.

“Do you see them?”

She wasn’t being short or rude. Clifton’s was a busy place with three floors of dining space and no waitstaff except for drinks.

“No,” I said. “Maybe he left a note or something for me at your desk.”

“I don’t think—”

“His name is Anatole McCourt and he’s quite tall.”

Daisy’s head moved back maybe two inches, the kind of reaction any mammal might have when they catch the odor of something unexpected.

“Oh,” she said. “Yes. Follow me.”

She led me through the first-floor dining room to a stairway that wound upward past the second level to the third. We walked down a slender hallway that had hanging framed oil paintings of flowers every four feet or so. Finally, we came to a curtained doorway. This she gestured for me to go through.

On the other side of the beaded green blind was a solitary balcony that looked down onto the second-floor dining room. The table there could have seated four easily, but Anatole McCourt was there alone.

When I realized that he had arrived before me I considered walking away and taking my own unplanned vacation.

Anatole McCourt was tall and beautiful by masculine standards. He followed the law to the letter and was chivalrous to women. All that and he’d never so much as shaken my hand. Now I was invited into his private booth. And he was early, which meant that he was hungry for something other than teriyaki chicken thighs.

“Private balcony, huh?” I said, taking the seat across from him.

“You want a drink?”

“Do I need one?”

“Up to you.” He was almost chipper.

“Maybe later.”

“You hungry?” the cop offered.

“Sure. Wanna go down to the line?”

“No.”

He pressed a black button set on the balcony’s upper banister shelf. Immediately, a short mustachioed man came in through the beaded curtain.

“Yes, Captain?” the swarthy Caucasian inquired.

“Bring us out some appetizers and two of the regular.”

After the waiter was gone, I wondered aloud, “I didn’t know they had table service at Clifton’s?”

“They do for me.”

It’s funny how we, men in America and probably around the world, can compete over anything at all.

“So,” I said, “why we got to meet here instead of your office?”

“The man you’re looking for has been identified as a possible part of a numbers scheme being run by a man named Shadrach.”

“What part of the scheme is Fields?”

“We don’t know. He is almost certainly helping them hide the proceeds, but he may also have something to do with planning.”

“Racketeering?”

“They aren’t sure. But they’d like any information you have.”

“I don’t know anything. Woman, sayin’ she was his wife, came to my office and said he was missing, that his parents went to the police, but they didn’t find anything.”

“And what have you found out?”

“Mel was the first person I called.”

The curtain parted and the mustachioed man came in with a tall Black waiter carrying a pupu platter that was overflowing with skewers of teriyaki beef, stewed chicken, and butterflied shrimp, along with sweet pork ribs, chicken wings, fried rice balls, and cracked cold crab claws.

After the platter was installed at the center of the table, they brought in two meat-loaf plates with side dishes of mashed potatoes and short-cut wax beans.

“Anything else?” the head waiter asked Anatole.

“Yeah, bring me a Laphroaig.”

“Right away, Captain.”

He departed, leaving us to feast.

I could feel my heart working. Anatole McCourt was not the kind to share police information, not to mention their resources, with a man like me. A Black man, a fake cop, a friend of the notorious Raymond “Mouse” Alexander — I was everything a man like McCourt despised.

The waiter must have had the drink waiting because he returned with it just that fast. He put the peaty liquor down in front of McCourt and bowed his way out again.

“Okay,” I said. “I give.”

“What do you mean?” Anatole savored the first sip.

“Look, man, you don’t like me. You never did. You wouldn’t even talk to me if it wasn’t for Mel. So, you got me here to talk about somethin’ specific.”

“Yes. Of course. I was asked by the men investigating Fields to get you to share what you know and what you find.”

“No.”

“No, you won’t share?”

“No, that’s not why we’re here. You never work with people like me. It’s against your nature. You’d rather let killers and rapists get away than be in debt to me. You think that you’ll catch the bad guys later, on some other beef. No. What is it we really doin’ here, Anatole?”

The beautiful Irishman downed the rest of his double shot. He’d savored the sip but needed that gulp to keep him from throwing me off the balcony. He could probably count on one hand the number of times he’d had to come clean with someone like me.

“We’re looking for Mary Donovan,” he admitted. The tops of his perfectly sculpted earlobes were tinting red.

“What for?”

“That’s police business.”

“Mel’s a friend’a mine. I thought he was your rabbi.”

“We’re not asking you about Commander Suggs.”

“I once asked Mel how he explains his relationship with Ms. Donovan. You know what he told me?”

Anatole didn’t say anything, but I could feel his attention magnify.

“He said that she was his one external organ.”

“So, you refuse to help?”

“What’s goin’ on with Mel, man?”

The juggernaut cop’s face twisted. He wanted to hurt me. After maybe half a minute he stood up from his chair and said, “Finish your food, Rawlins, it might be your last meal as a free man.”

That was an exit line, but McCourt paused, thinking that maybe I’d be afraid enough to fold.

I looked up at him, considering the threat. Anatole was a brawler, a bad man with his fists. There was no question that he could have beaten me to death right there and then.

But I had just turned fifty. The average life span of Negro men in that year was sixty. He had more to lose than I did, and besides, Melvin Suggs was my friend.

When he saw that I wasn’t going to cave, the cop stormed out of our meeting place.

I devoured two wings and one rice ball, then made my way down the stairs to the basement toilets. Between the men’s and women’s doors was an old-fashioned phone booth with an upholstered seat.

My adopted son, Jesus, pronounced Hey Zeus by those who knew him, answered, “Hello?” on the first ring.

“Hey, Juice,” I hailed.

“Hi, Dad.”

He’d been sexually molested before his third birthday and had no idea of where he was from or who his people were. He had the features of Native Americans mixed in with a touch of Spanish blood. Raised till the age of five with a Mexican family, Jesus then came to finish off the sentence of childhood with me.

Deep-sea fisherman, long-distance runner, husband, and the father of my granddaughter, Essie, Jesus was a better man than I at less than half my age.

For a few years he and his wife, Benita Flagg, had lived in northern Alaska. Jesus, whom we mostly called Juice, owned his own fishing boat and made good money. But a couple of days before Melvin Suggs went missing, he and his family came to stay with me and Feather in Brighthope Canyon. Essie had grown into a toddler and Juice had a fairly fresh wound on the right side of his jaw.

“How you doin’, son?” I asked from the basement of Clifton’s.

“Good. It’s twenty below in Alaska and I’m in a T-shirt.”

“Thought you liked the cold.”

“I liked the people, the salmon when they ran. But the cold up there would kill you if you let it.”

“What you guys up to?”

“Feather and Benita makin’ dinner. A couple of Feather’s girlfriends comin’. You gonna be here?”

“I don’t think so. I got this job.”

“Okay. We’ll be around. Wanna talk to Feather?”

Over the few moments of silence that it took Feather to pick up the receiver, I ruminated on how lucky I was to have a family at all.

“Hi, Daddy,” Feather said with great exuberance.

“Hi, honey, how are you?”

“Mr. Fenton, the English teacher, said that everyone should say exactly what they felt and Lonnie Laughton said that Mr. Fenton was a bastard for not lettin’ people study communists and stuff like that. And, and, and then Mr. Fenton kicked Lonnie out for usin’ foul language but that wasn’t fair because he said that we could say whatever we felt...”

She went on for two minutes or so, slowly shifting from one subject to another. She was going to be in a swimming competition and she kind of liked bad-boy Laughton. She wanted to take the PSAT early and graduate a semester or two before schedule.

“How are you, Daddy?” she asked, surprising me some.

“I’m gonna be kinda late tonight, baby girl.”

“What you doin’?”

“Looking for people who aren’t there.”