Gray Dawn

11

I took surface streets on the drive downtown. I find it less distracting than the sixty-mile-an-hour route. After we made it to Sixth Street it was a more or less straight shot to our destination.

“How’s it been goin’, Anatole?”

Ignoring me, he turned toward his passenger’s window, looking at something there in the streets. If he was a witch, his familiar would have been some kind of feline that spent night after night hunting down prey.

After a few minutes he surprised me by answering, “I never liked you, Rawlins. You know that, don’t you?”

This aggressor’s question reminded me of a time over twenty-five years earlier. It was nighttime and I was out on my own, not far from our barracks in the city of Hamburg in Germany. That devastated town had been pacified and was deemed safe. I saw the shadow of a man skulking down an alleyway. I shouted, “Halt!” and he began to run. I ran after, service pistol in hand. That was an automatic reflex after three years of combat. I ran the guy down. He was a little older than I, some kind of officer with no weapons and no hope. He was undernourished, you could see the bones in his face. His skin was very pale, and he sported a dark, untrimmed mustache.

“I surrender,” he said, before falling to his knees. “I surrender. A prisoner of war. You must arrest me and give me my rights under the Geneva convention.”

I thought that he’d probably learned those words just so he could plead for his life in a situation like that. He knew, as I did, that German officers were being beaten and sometimes killed by our soldiers. Especially Black soldiers who weren’t allowed the same privileges as captive German officers were. That’s why my prisoner was begging for his life.

Luckily for him I’d lost my taste for blood.

I let him go.

“Why?” I asked the LAPD captain.

“Why don’t I like you?”

I nodded.

“Because... you’re a... a... a, you know.”

“A Negro?”

“I’m not prejudiced, Rawlins.”

“No? Then you just about the only one who ain’t.”

“I’ve never called you a derogatory name. The only times I ever came after you was when I was trying to solve criminal activity. You might be useful sometimes, but you cross that line way too often.”

“That derogatory name, you ever say it out loud? You know, in a parley with your cop friends?”

Silence.

“I just asked you how’s it been goin’,” I said to break the muzzle clamped down on the conversation. “That’s all.”

“There’s been a lot goin’ on,” he said, ceding to my request. “People are down on cops nowadays. They don’t trust us. That makes doing our job harder. What about you?”

“What’s been goin’ on with me? Is that what you’re askin’?”

“Yeah.”

“Never been better,” I said. “But that don’t quite make things good.”

Anatole actually smiled.

“You could have been Irish,” he said, giving me the best compliment he could think of.

“Yeah, the Englishman’s nigger.”

He looked like a man who had just been slapped.

“I just, um, wanted to thank you, Captain,” I said. “I know you don’t like me, but you still do the right thing, mostly.”

“That’s my job.”

“Yeah. I know Niska’s been callin’ your office and askin’ questions that your people don’t have to answer. I just wanted to thank you for helpin’ her.”

“I like Miss Redman. She’s not all angry like so many’a your people are.”

We were at a red light, and so I swiveled my head to look into his eyes. In the back of my mind, I had a whole document of the unwritten history of the people he was referring to; the death by violence, self-immolation, and spiritual suicide that we saw among our own on a weekly basis; the money we squandered looking for some kind of recompense; the children we tried, and failed, to protect from these truths.

But I knew that there was no way for him to understand.

My truth was not his.

The light turned green, and I drove on.

The captain and I went our separate ways when reaching LAPD headquarters. I went to the admissions desk, where I told them I was expected by Melvin Suggs, the third or, depending on how you gauged it, the fourth most powerful cop in the LAPD. They made me sit on a wooden bench, called Mel’s office, and then went about shuffling papers. After ten minutes or so a stocky, olive-skinned woman came out from some back room and called, “Ezekiel Rawlins?”

I was the only person on the bench.

“Here.”

“You can go on up. Do you know the way?”

Melvin’s office was on an upper floor, lost in a maze of hallways and doors. But I made it there and knocked, as protocol required.

“Come in,” a woman said, her voice raised for the task.

By the time I’d made it past the door, the professional police receptionist was on her feet. Maybe five five, 160 pounds, past sixty, gray-haired and with somehow intense brown eyes, Myra Lawless was the pit-bull grandmother who protected Melvin against all comers.

“Mr. Rawlins,” she said behind a synthetic smile. “Did Captain Suggs summon you?”

“He did.”

I knew that Myra didn’t dislike me. It was just her instinct to put any visitor at a disadvantage.

“Fearless says hi,” I said, eliciting a genuine smile.

“Oh. How is Mr. Jones?”

“He’s all right.”

I hadn’t talked to Fearless in months, but if I had seen him and told him that I was going to see Mel, he would have definitely passed along good wishes to Myra.

“Easy,” Melvin Suggs said from his office door.

He looked good, five eight, in good shape for fifty, with healthy skin and fawn-brown eyes.

“Hey, man,” I said.

“Come on in.”

I bowed my head to Myra and headed for the seat of power.

Mel maintained a man’s office. Papers everywhere, bookshelves that had files, statuettes, one or two tiny dying plants that probably had not enough water or sunlight. The smell was somehow of leather. And I could feel the grit of the floor under my rubber soles.

“Sit, sit,” my host offered.

The maple-wood visitor’s chair had a broad bottom and a curved back. It was a comfortable place to sit, something that humans have sought after since the days before we were actually human.

“Look, Easy, the old man was Lawrence LaCraig, also known as Rolf, a very rich cattleman.”

“Like a cowboy?”

“A real one, from down around South America. They say he owns a dozen ranches down there. The other man, Joseph Toledo, was Larry’s nephew, and the woman was Barbara, called Babs, Sentril — mother of the child and wife of Mr. Toledo.”

“Why didn’t Babs take Toledo’s name?”

“Don’t know,” Mel said. “The old man was an important part of a certain community, so there’s gonna be some pressure brought to bear.”

“I didn’t know anything about the man till right now.”

“Then how did you get there?”

“I’m lookin’ for a woman name of Lutisha James.”

“What for?”

I told the story of Santangelo Burris and the job he’d hired me for.

“Do you think she might have killed the people in that house?”

“The girl that survived said that it was a whole gang of people. They tortured the family before killin’ ’em. As far as I can tell, James was a live-in domestic.”

“Were the killers hippies?” Mel asked.

“I don’t know for a fact, but I don’t think so.”

“Why not?”

“Gigi, the child, said they were wearing sports clothes, and the victims were tortured like you do when tryin’ to get information. That makes me think that the attack was pretty well planned out. That’s not a hippie thing. But... but why would you care about that anyway?”

“Because we can’t have another Charles Manson kinda thing.”

“Oh. Yeah. There wasn’t anything in blood on the walls. Did they steal anything?”

“A wall safe the size of a small vault. Good one too. Made by Underwriters Laboratories.”

“What difference that make?”

“Means whoever took it is gonna have a bitch of a time gettin’ it open.”

He asked a few dozen more questions and was, I think, satisfied with my answers.

“Is that all?” I said at the end.

“Pretty much,” he said. “Except for this thing about Jesus.”

“What about my son?” Anybody hearing my tone might have heard a threat therein.

“A guy name of Oglethorpe with the BNDD says that two of his agents have targeted him.”

BNDD was the abbreviation for the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, predecessor of the DEA. According to the LA Times, Richard Nixon and the CIA were working both with and against them at that time.

“Targeted him for what?” I wanted to know.

“Dope.”

“Heroin?”

“Marijuana.”

“You mean like he gets high now and then?”

“For smuggling tons of marijuana.”

“Smugglin’. Jesus?”

“They say he’s bringin’ in regular shipments of grass in that fishin’ boat’a his.”

“That’s impossible,” my lips said, but my mind was racing far out ahead. For the past two years Jesus and his wife, Benita, had been doing deep-sea fishing. They had been going farther out because of overfishing and pollution along the coast. Jesus had told me that he was drifting farther and farther into Mexican waters. It made some sense that he would at least be suspected of smuggling.

“Who are these agents?”

“I asked to meet ’em, but Oglethorpe said that informing the LAPD was more manners than meat.”

“So, they’re after him?”

“They came to one of my captains who works narcotics. Told him that a kid named Jesus Rawlins was under suspicion. He knows that the BNDD is being investigated by the CIA for corruption, so he came right to me. He said that they almost caught up to your boy, but he scuttled the boat and got away.”

“In Mexican waters?”

“That’s what they said.”

I was unmoored. My head felt like a buoy floating on a sea rocked by a far-off storm. Suggs was doing his best to help me. He didn’t have to say a thing about the trouble gathering over my son’s head. As a matter of fact, it would have been better for him to keep me in the dark, or even to try to wheedle information out of me.

“Thanks, Mel,” I said at last. “Thanks, man.”

“You need anything else?”

A new name and a different country to call my home, I thought. But, instead, I asked, “Could you ask somebody to give you any records you got about a Lutisha James and Santangelo Burris?”

“Okay. I will. But that Burris guy, he’s your client, right?”

“He is.”

“I don’t understand. If you don’t trust the client, why would you even take the case?”

“That’s a very good question,” I said. “And I have an equally good answer, but in a language that you have never learned.”