Farewell, Amethystine

41

Up on the roof I sucked down a deeply needed cigarette. After that, all I had to do was get dressed and show Amethystine where she might find a bathing suit in Feather’s chest of drawers.

“Do you think she’ll mind?” the ex-wife, almost ex-client, asked.

“Not a bit,” I said, before kissing Amethystine goodbye.

The address on Astral Lane was a boxy seven-story hollow structure with walls one apartment wide on every side. The hollow center of the building had outer stairways leading upward to the various floors and abodes.

The mailbox on the first floor told me that Paul German lived in 4C.

Noonday sun and shadows cascaded down through the maze of stairways as I made my way to his door.

I pressed his button, heard a buzzing in the distance, knocked, and buzzed again.

“He’s out of town,” a man said.

The voice came from behind me, across the atrium.

I turned and said, “Yeah. I heard that he might be out in Atlantic City but I’m only in town a couple’a days, so I decided to drop by and knock.”

“I don’t know about all that,” the man said, coming out of his door. “But I haven’t seen Paul in weeks.”

The neighbor’s Caucasian skin had seen a great deal of sun in his sixty-some years. He carried a fairly large and empty canvas bag, telling me that he was probably going off to some grocery store.

“Yeah,” I said meaninglessly. “A guy told me that Paul might have come back. That was an older gentleman called Harry.”

“You got me.” The shopper hunched his shoulders and began making his way down the stairs.

If he had gone back into his apartment, I would have been the one taking the stairs, worried that he might be watching through some peephole. If he did that, he would have seen me trying the doorknob of 4C and finding it unlocked. When I passed the threshold of German’s apartment, the midday shopper might have been compelled to call the police.

I didn’t have to go far. Ohioan, math enthusiast, and lucky in love if not cards — Harrison Fields was dead on the bare pine floor of the tiny living room. Dressed in a herringbone jacket and dark-green pants, his right eye was open wide while the left had been shot out. Lifeless lips bore an insincere grin.

I took out my traveling gloves, my breaking-and-entering gloves, and donned them like a doctor preparing to perform an examination or maybe a coroner looking for the cause of death. When I knelt down next to the dandy, I got a scent, a pleasant smell that was at odds with the situation. Then I went through the dead man’s pockets, looking for anything that might explain why he was there and, also, why he died there.

His wallet had seven dollars in it and also a driver’s license that had a picture of Harrison under the name Mark Melon. There was some change in a front pocket. Mixed in with the quarters and dimes was a five-dollar poker chip from the Exeter Casino. There was a single key in the other front pocket.

The only thing I kept was the poker chip.

The door opposite the front led to a bedroom. The bed was made. An old leather suitcase stood upright in a corner. Next to the travel bag was a blue satchel that turned out to be filled with cash.

Without opening the suitcase, I sat on the bed, reached for the phone on the nightstand, and once again called Anatole McCourt.

It was pretty much the same routine as at the 2120 Building, with fewer players. Four uniforms showed up first. This time they knew my name and merely asked me to stick around. Five or six minutes later a detective in a dark suit arrived. His name was Holder. The senior officer sent the uniforms out to canvas the seven floors of the hollow-hearted building.

While Detective Holder looked around, I took a seat in the kitchen. It was pretty neat in there. An orderly line of tiny ants was making its way to and from a crack in a cabinet door below the one-basin sink. They seemed so peaceful following a path that was millions of years old, that was so much more civilized than any punch-drunk civilian walking the streets of Los Angeles.

“What’s it look like?” I heard Anatole ask from the living room.

His voice got me moving.

“What you see is what you get, Captain,” Holder, a white man of early and hale middle age, replied. “Single shot to the left eye.”

When I emerged, Holder gestured toward me and said, “He was here like you said. Told me the door was unlocked. And, oh yeah, there’s a blue bag in there with a whole fuck of a lot of money in it.”

“Carry on,” McCourt told Holder. Then he turned his gaze on me.

That was one of the memorable moments of my career because he held out a hand for me to clasp.

“Thank you, Mr. Rawlins,” were the words he used, but it was his heartfelt tone that arrested.

“Nuthin’ to it, Captain. Just doin’ my civic duty.”

I don’t know what Holder made of our restrained lovefest. I’m pretty sure that the detective considered me a possible, maybe even probable, suspect. He’d never know that I solved a case that even Anatole couldn’t take on.

“You’re going to have to give a witness statement,” Anatole informed me.

Two uniforms were coming through Paul German’s front door.

“Sure,” I said to Anatole. “But I have an appointment downtown. Could I do it later on?”

“Certainly. I’ll walk you down to your car.”

When Anatole and I got out on the landing, someone shouted, “That’s him! The Black one!”

It was the shopper from across the way, his canvas bag now filled with vegetables, cans, and small boxes. He was talking to one of the uniforms at the door to his apartment.

“I suppose this has to do with the missing person case you were working on?” Anatole asked when we had reached my blue Pontiac.

“I heard that the guy lives here had studied poker under Curt’s uncle Harrison. I sure didn’t expect to find the old man dead.”

“What’s with the false ID?”

“I don’t know. Maybe he was afraid of being found out.”

“Found out about what?”

“I’m really not positive, but I think he had somehow double-crossed the gamblers.”

“What about Chita Moyer? Where’s she in all this?”

“I really don’t know.”

“And why were you looking for the old guy?”

“My client, Amethystine Stoller, Curt Fields’s ex-wife, wanted to know what had happened. I thought Harrison might have some idea.”

“You get this address from the guy we found in the closet?”

“Yeah, yeah.”

Anatole knew that I was holding back. I could tell that by the way he looked at me. But I had a get-out-of-jail-free card from helping Mel and exposing the plot against him. He wasn’t going to lean on me — this time.

“You got any idea who killed the old man?” he asked.

“No,” I lied.

When I got home, Feather was already back from school. She and Amethystine were laughing next to the grotto-like pool that Feather practiced in. They jumped in and started swimming back and forth in the Olympic-size pool. In between laps, Feather gave Amethystine pointers to make her movements more proficient.

Orchestra Solomon, the owner of the mountain upon which stood Brighthope Canyon, stood at the side of the water watching the younger woman and girl. Orchestra, also called Sadie, loved the energy and abilities of women. She often came out to watch Feather swim. Tall and elegant, down-to-earth and regal, Sadie was the richest woman west of the Rockies, it was said.

“Hi, Daddy,” Feather called when she saw my approach.

Jumping out of the rough-hewn pool, my daughter ran into me, her arms thrown around my neck. I knew this meant that she was happy with the presence of my latest client.

“You havin’ a good time?” I asked.

“Yeah. Amy’s great. She could be a really good swimmer if she worked at it.”

Amethystine joined us.

“I’d try out for the Olympics if I could only start ten years ago,” she said.

“Do they have a senior Olympics?” I asked.

“One day, probably,” my daughter allowed.

“You find your missing husband?” Amethystine asked me.

“Oh yeah. I always get my man.”

Our eyes locked for a moment, and then Orchestra came up to us.

“You know, Easy,” the sixty-something multimillionaire said. “Ever since you and Feather came to live here I’ve been much happier.”

“That makes three of us.”

“And Amy,” Orchestra added, “she’s so beautiful. Have you ever been to Madagascar?”

“Can’t say I have. I was in North Africa in the war, though.”

Looking at Amethystine with almost hungry eyes she said, “Amy is lovely like they are there. And those women are the most beautiful on earth.”

After making this pronouncement, Sadie Solomon walked off, headed for her home. I watched her go, thinking that the world she lived in was somehow different than the one I and mine inhabited.

“Mrs. Blue gave me the day off,” Amethystine said from behind me, shattering the trivial reverie.

Before I could turn, a human-size splash indicated that my fish of a daughter was back in the water.

“...but I’m going in to work tonight,” our guest concluded.

I reached out to touch her shoulder. It felt real.

“You want a ride to your car?” she asked.

A few months after my stint at Nuremberg, I was stationed in Paris as squad leader of a troop of Black soldiers that participated, almost daily, in marches down the ancient boulevards, celebrating Allied victory.

During that time, I made friends with an older French guy named Gaston. He lived in a doorway down an impossibly slender alley about a block away from our temporary barracks. I used to bring him bottles of wine along with cheese and baguettes.

Having been raised among the French-speaking people of Louisiana, I could communicate, in a limited way, through that specialized dialect. In the war my language skills improved so it was easy for the Frenchman and me to converse.

“I was a middle-class man before the war,” he told me one afternoon while we passed a bottle of red wine back and forth. “I lived in a fourth-tier flat of an elevator building.”

“That sounds very nice, Gaston,” I said.

We were sitting on wooden crates, getting high, remembering times before the slaughter of millions.

“Do you know what we used to say back then?” he asked.

“No, sir, I don’t.”

“If someone came home and took the lift to their floor and then pressed the button for the lobby, we would say, ‘That is someone who knows how to send the elevator back down.’”

“I’d love a ride,” I said to Amethystine.

She was someone who lived the life that Gaston had been talking about in the twilight of war. That didn’t mean she was good or virtuous, just that she was a comrade, no matter what.