Farewell, Amethystine

9

As a rule, Brighthope Canyon was subject to a stiff morning breeze. That wind was rattling on the glass doors to the outer balcony at just a little past 5:00 a.m. It was still dark outside, and, despite my age, I felt the excitement of a new day.

I rarely experienced hangovers, so getting up was no problem.

After changing in the upstairs bedroom, I went to the kitchen and set about making breakfast. Homemade sausage, grits, hotcakes, and hot peach, strawberry, and rhubarb compote.

“Grandpa?”

She was standing on the bottom step of the curved stairway. At five Essie was beautiful and brown, Buddha-like and forthright.

“Yeah, baby?”

“You makin’ pancakes?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She giggled and scaled one of the high stools that sat at the dining ledge attached to three sides of the overlarge stove.

When she looked down on all that bounty she asked, “Can I have some?”

“We have to wait for everybody else.”

After a moment of great concentration, she climbed back down and ran half the way up the steel stairway that was molded to the curved wall.

“Mama! Daddy! Breakfast!” she cried.

Back atop her stool she stared greedily at our morning fare.

Within a few minutes Jesus, Benita, and even Feather made their ways down in various states of morning dress.

“Mornin’, Dad,” Jesus said. He wore silken black pajamas that Benita got him for their honeymoon. He looked good there next to Ms. Flagg in her fluffy pink robe. Feather wore jeans and a T-shirt, every day, every day.

As I served them breakfast a conversation slowly arose. Feather asked Benita if she ever went salmon fishing with Juice.

“Lord no, girl,” the onetime delinquent answered. “Wind so strong out there it like to blow you right off the deck.”

“So you could fly, Mama?” Essie asked.

“Fly right into a shark’s mouth.”

Essie’s eyes went as big as plates, her mouth a perfect O.

My mind at that time was mostly in turmoil. I couldn’t have explained it. It didn’t make sense that I’d be hankering after my younger days with empty pockets and trouble around every corner. It didn’t make sense because nothing made me happier than my little family. I would have died for any one of them without hesitation.

I mostly listened while the tribe gabbed and ate. Feather asked questions that revealed her deeper nature.

“How long you guys gonna stay?” she asked Benita.

Benita glanced at my son.

“We’re staying,” he said.

“You are?” That was me.

“Yeah. Bennie wants Essie to know her family and there’s some good fishing down here.”

“You could stay with us,” Feather offered.

Essie cheered.

“I wanna go to France this summer with the American Institute for Foreign Study, so there’d be even more room. I mean there’s room anyway but there’d be more space.”

Realizing that she might have gone too far, Feather turned to me and asked, “Right, Daddy?”

“They can stay as long as they want,” I agreed. “I’m goin’ upstairs to smoke my cigarette.”

As a rule, I smoked one cigarette a day. This on the flat and circular roof of Roundhouse, where I fussed over twenty-seven rosebushes planted in generous terra-cotta pots.

That morning I had another task to accomplish. In a locked box on the windswept rooftop, I kept a special phone that could not be bugged or traced.

After three rings a groggy voice complained, “What the fuck is it?”

“Raymond?”

“Easy? Hey, man. What’s up?”

“Not much. You know, workin’.”

“With that fine young thang broke up our conversation yesterday morning?”

“Maybe.”

“You still got some dog in ya, Easy.”

“What was that German shit you was talkin’ yesterday, Ray?” I asked to veer away from the topic of Amethystine.

“Frankfurt School, brother. Jackson was talkin’ to me ’bout ’em. Niggahs want everything to change. Everything.”

“Black professors?”

“You don’t have to have black skin to be a niggah, man. You know that.”

“Yeah, yeah, right. Just wanted to make sure you not talkin’ fiction.”

“What’s goin’ on, Ease? I was tryin’ to sleep.”

“I need to talk to Lynne Hua.”

“Got some kinda itch need scratchin’?”

“I ain’t runnin’ after your woman, Ray. Don’t worry.”

“I only got one woman, brother. That’s Vu Von Lihn.”

Almost as long as I had known Mouse, his one and only true love was EttaMae Harris. I wanted to ask him about what was going on with them but I knew it would just turn him sour — and when darkness gathered around Raymond Alexander there was always danger in the offing. Even though Ray had become a reader, that did nothing for his sanity.

“I just wanna ask Lynne if she knows somebody.”

“Okay.” Mouse didn’t ask questions if the answers didn’t help in some way — help or make him laugh. “Let’s meet at the regular place around two.”

“You still have that problem?” My question was a response to the circumspection he used.

“Like a stone in my shoe.”

“Okay, yah, see ya then.”

I checked out the rosebushes, making sure that there were no aphids, then leaned over the edge of the four-foot brick wall of the roof wondering about Mouse.

Federal marshals were surveilling him because they wanted to get to a man he did work for sometimes. Ray’s work was being a heist man on big jobs anywhere on the North American continent. If it was anybody else, I’d be worried that he’d soon be in prison — or dead. But Mouse was a wild card in any man’s game.

“Pop?”

Jesus was standing at the doorway to the stairs.

“Hey, boy.”

When he walked up to me, I studied his face.

“Cut’s healing pretty good,” I commented.

Touching the still reddish wound he said, “I had a fight with a guy up in the Northern Territory. He was messin’ with a native and I didn’t like it.”

“You kill him?”

“I don’t think so.”

Jesus wasn’t a talker. He watched, listened, and kept his own counsel. He told me as much as he knew, and so I left it at that.

I clapped his shoulder and said, “Good to have you home, boy.”

“You need anything?”

“Naw.”

We looked out over the wall for a few minutes and then he headed back downstairs. I took out the phone again and dialed a three-digit number.

“Information.”

“Yeah. I’d like the phone number and address of Giselle Fitzpatrick in Culver City.”

The phone number I already knew, and the operator told me that the address was 501½ Dragg Street.

Some years after that they stopped giving out people’s addresses, but 1970 was still a time of trust.

I left the house of laughter and youth feeling hopeful if not actually confident. It was a fair winter’s day in LA, the sun shone brightly, and all I needed was a thin green cotton sweater.

There were only two tools that any Angeleno needed to have: one was a car and the other a road map. I wound my way down to Robertson Boulevard and from there into Culver City. Dragg Street was only three blocks long, terminating in a dead end at a freeway overpass.

The last house on the left, as you approached the barricade, was a cobalt-colored bungalow. That address was 501 and so I figured Giselle’s house was behind.

I climbed out of my brown Dodge, a junker from the early sixties, and walked down the driveway toward the back of the property. Part of a coral-colored structure could be seen past the dark blue of the front house.

“Excuse me,” a man called out in a clear tenor voice.

Coming from the front of 501 was a well-built forty-something white man in drab gray cotton pants and a red-and-cream long-sleeved work shirt. I turned and he stopped maybe a yard and a half away. There was a black-handled ball-peen hammer in his left hand.

Idly, I wondered if he was left-handed.

“Can I help you?” he asked, his blue eyes looking me up and down.

“I’m going to see Miss Fitzpatrick at five oh one and a half,” I said without stutter or impediment.

“And who are you?” His chin was darkening from stubble that had probably grown since his early morning shave.

I noted that he had a tight grip on the blunt tool.

“Who are you?” was my insolent reply.

The man’s head pulled back as if he had been slapped. The hammer hand rose a few inches.

“This is my house,” he stated with emphasis on the personal pronoun.

“Which one?”

“This house right here next to you.”

“That don’t have nuthin’ to do with me, brother,” I said, noticing the slippage back to the tongue of my upbringing. “I’m headed for the place behind yours.”

“For what reason?”

This last question, added with the hammer, gave me pause. I realized that I was spoiling for a fight for no reason. Yes, this man was probably confronting me because a Black man walking down his driveway was, to say the least, a novel event. But having him swinging that hammer or, worse, calling the police, would not be in my client’s interest.

“I’m here to ask Miss Fitzpatrick a few questions that are private. My name is Ezekiel Rawlins, and I don’t mean anyone any harm.”

“Why should I believe you?”

“Why would I lie?”

This last question stumped Bluechin. Maybe it would have been his answer to the same question.

“I’ll go with you,” he said.

So, we went down the driveway, entering a fair and wide lawn that stretched between his cobalt and her coral.

He knocked on her door and then turned his head toward me, prepared to tell me that I had failed his test.

The door opened. A woman of pale-skinned, raven-haired, and zaftig beauty stood there behind the screen, wrapped up in a seersucker teal bathrobe.

“Mr. Beaumont,” she said in a reserved tone.

“Do you know this man, Giselle?”

She gazed at me a moment or two, then shook her head.

“Well?” Beaumont asked me.

Ignoring him I said to the lady, “Excuse me, ma’am, my name is Ezekiel Rawlins and I’ve been asked by Winsome and Alastair Fields to look for their son — Curt.”

“Oh,” she said in surprise. “They think he’s missing?”

“That’s what they tell me. I’m hoping that you might be able to point me in the right direction.”

“What do you have to do with Curt?” Hammerhand Beaumont asked.

“What do you have to do with anything?”

“What?” he asked in a voice that might have been tuned to a midsize dog’s bark.

“It’s okay, Mr. Beaumont,” peacemaker Giselle said. “I know what Curt’s parents are talking about. Just, um, just let us talk.”

It’s hard to make blue eyes look wild, but Beaumont managed it. Things were not turning out like he expected them to. I was supposed to be as unwanted by Giselle as by him. There was a certain propriety to the world that he imagined, and I was the contradiction to that particular credo.

“Please, Mr. Beaumont, give us some time to talk.”

“Yeah,” I added.

Giselle pushed the screen door open and said, “Come in, Mr. Rawlins.”

After I’d crossed her threshold, she closed the door on Beaumont.

The living room we entered was small, made smaller by outsized and garish furniture. The front window covered the entire wall, but the curtains were drawn. The dense, fluffy carpet was a natural hue of red, like that of a dusty apple.

“Have a seat,” she offered.

I plopped down on a couch the dimensions of a queen-size bed.

She sat on a cushioned throne that was as purple as a Concord grape.

“What’s this about Curt?” she asked.

As she spoke her left hand rose to her chin. There, on the ring finger, was an impressive emerald embedded in a thick, at least twenty-carat, gold band.

“You guys engaged?”

“We were.”

“What happened?”

“I don’t know,” she claimed, shrugging her left shoulder, her head listed in that direction. “Saturday before last he told me that it was over. When I asked him why, he said that he wasn’t happy. He gave me some money and told me to keep the ring. He’s probably getting back with that girl he was married to before.”

“Why you say that?”

“He had a picture of her in his wallet and he talked about her a lot.”

“What’d he say?”

“You should know.”

“Me?”

“She’s Black too.”

“My only job is to find Curt for his parents.” It wasn’t really a lie.

“He just talked about her, that’s all,” she said. “She was so smart and so hardworking. She had it hard and everything. I mean, a lotta people got it hard. You don’t have to be Black to be poor.”

“No,” I agreed. “That’s for sure. Um. Was Curt having trouble with anyone?”

“What do you mean?”

“No one has heard from him. His parents said that he called home almost every day.”

“You mean would anybody try and hurt him?”

“Maybe he’s keepin’ his head down. They say he worked court cases sometimes.”

She took longer with this suggestion, going over her memories like a low-flying airplane.

“No,” she said, slowly swinging her head from side to side. “He wasn’t even working any criminal cases... that I know of. Mostly just divorces and corporate bankruptcy cases.”

“He talked about his work a lot?”

“Not really. He said it was pretty boring.”

“So, he broke up with you on Saturday and went off anybody’s radar on Sunday. He hasn’t called you since then?”

“No.”

“And you don’t have any idea where he is?”

She searched my eyes then. This led me to think that she was the kind of person who naturally believed in themselves, their ability to understand what they were seeing.

I appreciated the respite. It gave me time to consider the man I was looking for.

Giselle was lovely. Elegant and poised, despite her broken heart, she was somebody I’d try to get to know — all other things being equal. It was a rare event for me to identify with the taste of white men. I wondered how our similarities might help me find Curt.

“He said that he’d been hired to do a job that would get him some good money.”

“Good money,” I repeated. “His words?”

“Yeah. I never heard him say anything like that before. He told me that he was going out of town for a couple of weeks, and he didn’t want to string me along.”

“What kind of work was he hired to do?”

“Accounting, I guess.”

“Anything to do with gambling?”

“No. Definitely not. Curt never gambled. I always wanted to go out to Vegas and he said he had no interest.”

“Did he ever mention a man named Purlo?”

“Yes. One of the people he was working with was named Mr. Purlo. Who is he?”

“I’m not sure. His uncle, Harrison, mentioned the name.”

“I don’t know what to tell you, Mr. Rawlins. I don’t really know much about his work. But you’re right, he did call his mother every day.”

“I guess when he broke up with the wife he moved in to live with his parents for a while.”

“He did,” she confirmed. “I’m not like that at all. My mom lives in Pasadena, and I haven’t seen or talked to her in a month.”

“I asked his mom if she knew his address, but she didn’t.”

“He’s here in Culver City, over on Longerville Road. Three sixty.”

At least that was something.

It was time for me to stand.

“Well, Miss Fitzpatrick, thank you. I’ll try to make some sense out of this.” I handed her my business card and added, “If you hear from Curt, my number is here. He can call me, or you can.”

“You want my number?” she asked. “I mean, I’m mad at Curt but I wouldn’t want anything to happen to him. Maybe you could call me when you find out where he is.”

“I already have the number. I got it from his dad. But I’ll do you one better and get him to call you.”

I walked up the driveway and out to my car. Driving off, I could see Bluechin Beaumont standing behind his own screen door — making sure the threat was gone and, probably, cursing the road I’d be traveling.