Farewell, Amethystine

8

Mary Donovan stood five five with hair a little lighter than my goddaughter’s. She was slender and deadly, brilliant and broken, a good ally to have at your side but no one you’d share your secrets with. Seeing her standing there almost sobered me.

“Hi,” I said.

“You got a good poker face,” she replied. “I’ll give you that.”

We hugged briefly and I stood back to look at her again. Mary D was like a great novel — just one read-through was not enough to understand what it means.

She wore a little black dress with its hem at her knee. She also had a satiny black shawl for the cold. No heels or jewelry, no makeup, not even a purse that I could see. This meant that she was flying under the radar — all business.

“You like what you see, Mr. Rawlins?” she challenged.

I noticed that Cosmo had retreated to his hut.

“I like to see lions in the zoo,” I said. “But when they roar, they scare me to death, in spite of the bars.”

She smiled, indicating with her hands that there were no bars between us.

I took a moment more and then, realizing that she was truly inscrutable, I said, “Wanna come up?”

She walked through the open gate and Cosmo came out. We entered the external elevator and the Sicilian gatekeeper closed us in. The mechanism engaged and we started to rise.

Late at night, ascending the mountain was always magical. Half the way up you could see as far as the Pacific, a vast darkness that dared you to perceive farther. Mary brought her face close to the glass in the door, appreciating the view that I loved.

The vertical railway arrived at the top of the mountain, a bowl-shaped depression that we called Brighthope Canyon. When the back door of the elevator opened, Mary and I exited onto an asymmetrical concrete platform studded with semiprecious stones and iron discs imprinted with the silhouettes of dozens of wild creatures both mythical and real.

“It’s so beautiful here,” Mary said on a calculated breath.

“Yeah.”

We walked down a blue-brick path that shimmered grayly in moonlight.

There were only six homes in Brighthope. All of them owned by Sadie Solomon, the richest woman west of the Mississippi River. Sadie gave ninety-nine-year leases to certain people who had done right by her, and others who had that potential. I was both.

We arrived at the home where my daughter and I lived. Roundhouse we called it. Four stories high and cylindrical in shape, it was white even by moonlight.

I ushered Mary into the first floor, a grand sprawl with no separate rooms. We stayed there because my family resided on the upper levels, and I didn’t want to disturb them with our noises.

We sat close to the outer balcony on rose-colored love seats that faced each other. Below, Los Angeles spread out under a carpet of electric light.

“You wanna drink?” I offered. It felt like the first move in a chess match.

“No, thank you, Easy. I need to keep my mind clear.”

“Okay. Why you here?”

“You called me.”

“Yeah,” I admitted. She was Pink Hippo #3. “I tried to call Melvin, didn’t get his machine, and then the cops gave me the runaround. I hooked up with Anatole and he said that he wanted to talk to you.”

“Did you give him my private number?”

“No.”

She studied my face a moment and then pulled her legs up on the divan.

“Mel’s in trouble,” she said.

“What kinda trouble?”

She bit her lower lip to indicate that whatever the problem was — it was bad.

“Somebody’s got something on me, a fingerprint, maybe. They told Melvin that they’d let it lie if he got somebody out from under a prosecution.”

“What they have on you?”

Giving a smile that might have been sexy she said, “There are some things that a girl just can’t talk about.”

Knowing a brick wall when slamming into it, I asked, “Where’s Mel?”

“He took off a day or two before Underchief Terrence Laks was gonna fall on him.”

I remembered Underchief Laks. A neatly dressed prig. He had four senior officers take me into custody on a Sunday afternoon when I still lived in LA proper. We were having a barbecue, my whole family, Jesus and Feather, Essie and Benita. The cops barged into the backyard, threw me on the ground, hog-tied me with chains, and were in the process of dragging me off. Jesus hefted a hot poker but I yelled at him to stand down.

“No, Juice! Make the call.”

They brought me downtown and sat me in a chair before Terrence Laks. He was wearing a midnight-blue three-piece Wilkes Bashford suit that was tailored to his slim build.

“Mr. Rawlins,” he said with a smile that would have worked well on a cartoon snake. “So nice to see you.”

“What am I doing here?” I asked one of the few cops who outranked my friend Melvin Suggs.

“It’s your turn, Easy. That’s what they call you isn’t it? Easy.”

“My turn for what?”

“A man named Forman, Guillory Forman, was shot dead in his pawnshop last night. He was killed before he could testify against a man known as Paul Dustman.”

“So?”

Laks turned to one of his minions, who, in turn, put a legal-length printed sheet in front of me.

“So, when you sign this confession you will be charged for his murder.”

“I didn’t kill him,” I said with steely conviction that I did not feel.

“I know where you live, Rawlins.”

“Why me, man?”

“We have a numbered list of Los Angeles’s top criminals. One by one we choose them and make sure that they pay... for something.”

Sounded like the plot of a bad James Bond movie. Seven out of ten of the city’s white residents would have said it couldn’t happen — not in America. Out of the remaining three, two would have said that I could have beaten the false charges in court.

Eleven out of nine Black Angelenos would have known that I was destined for a lifetime behind bars or a seat in the gas chamber.

“Hand our prisoner a pen,” the underchief commanded.

My hands were uncuffed and somebody slapped a transparent Bic pen down before me. I considered that blue ballpoint. It was a weapon. If my life was over I should have been able to take at least one of these criminals with me.

“Hurry up, Rawlins,” Laks said. “I have a dinner date with the mayor.”

I looked up from the writing/killing instrument into Laks’s eyes. A patina of concern passed over his smug stare. Maybe he was thinking of all the men and women I knew who could retaliate. Maybe he suddenly realized that it was a man he was trying to demolish.

Whatever it was, that thought was broken by a loud ringing.

He turned his attention to the phone, wondering, it seemed, who would be calling his office on a Sunday afternoon. After six rings he picked up the receiver.

“Yes?”

Surprise was followed by amazement; this wonderment turned his eyes to me.

“Um, well, yes. Of course, sir. No. No. Nothing like that. Yes.”

He put down the phone gently. Then for a long moment he stared at his desk. After that meditation Laks looked up at me through knitted eyes. Before that moment I had been a disposable utensil in the prig’s tool chest. Now I was the object of true hatred.

“Let him go,” he said to his underlings.

“What, sir?” one of them uttered.

“Let him go.”

“How’d Mel know that Laks was after him?”

“Somebody warned him,” Mary said with a shrug.

“Laks had me in his sights one time. I thought I was dead but my son called Mel and he did some magic.”

Mary had nothing to add to that.

“Where’d Mel go?” I asked.

“I don’t know.”

“You here ’cause you want me to find him?”

“No. I want you to find a man named Tommy Jester.”

“Who’s that?”

“He used to be an actor, but nowadays he does this and that.”

“This Jester have something to do with Mel?”

“Not directly.”

“You’re not giving me much.”

“I don’t have a lot.”

“Any idea where I could find the actor?”

“Not a one. We lost touch some years ago. Will you do it?”

“Will it help Mel?”

“I hope so.”

“Okay.”

“Let me give you a better number to call.”

Not long after Mary had gone, I fell asleep on a rose-colored love seat.

I hadn’t had many dreams in recent years. Life was good. I had family and friends, money and a safe place to live. I had a real profession that gave satisfaction.

In the dream I felt again the searing pain of the injury to my shoulder. I was laid up on a wadded cotton mattress while Anger Lee cleaned and dressed my wound; now and again she leaned down to kiss my lips.

I was hurt and bleeding, but at fifteen my dick was hard too.

“Did he hurt you?” I asked for the second or third time.

“Naw. He wanted to but you stopped that shit.”

“I tried to stop him but he put me down.”

“You just a boy, Easy, and still you the best man I ever known.”

After saying this she pressed down on my shoulder and I grunted.

“That hurt, baby?” she asked.

“Little.”

“You want me to make it feel bettah?”

“Uh,” I said.

She pulled down my pants and mounted me. I was oozing blood, hurting, frightened, and feeling more like a man than I ever had in all the years of my life — before or since.

“I love you, Easy Rawlins,” Anger Lee whispered in my ear.

At that moment everything was right in the world. I wasn’t a poor orphan without a pot to piss in. I was a man. It didn’t matter that I hurt or bled. It didn’t matter that one day someone would kill me. The only things that counted were that my blood was red and Anger Lee loved me.