Gray Dawn

18

“You got a crazy life, Easy Rawlins,” Fearless said. “You sure do.”

It was just him and me at the conference table.

“I don’t know about all that, Mr. Jones. This thing with Niska was just Detecting One-oh-One. It’s only now that the trouble begins. And this time you the one brought it to me.”

“Bet ya dollars to doughnuts you the one called Orem on yourself.”

“I don’t even know the man.”

“You armed?” he asked, dismissing my claim of innocence.

“No.”

“Then get so and let’s go.”

While I checked out my .32, Fearless made a short call on my desk phone. I didn’t hear what he said but, then again, I didn’t care.

I was behind the driver’s wheel again, Fearless riding shotgun. He was studying a street map, giving me directions.

“Turn up here on the left, Ease. Yeah, there.”

We’d made our way to a kind of no-man’s-land six or seven blocks north of downtown. There were businesses with apartments on the upper floors, convenience stores next to failed endeavors with boarded-up windows and doors. It was a cityscape almost totally devoid of people, like a specially designed film set waiting for the actors and film crew to arrive.

We turned on a little street named Charles Terrace. Going up the sharp incline, I was about to ask Fearless where we were when he said, “Pull up here, man.”

There was a long sky-blue Cadillac parked about twenty feet up the hill. When Fearless and I climbed out of my car, the Caddy disgorged four men.

The men were Black, wearing dark suits that were designed more for official functions than for any office job. After they took a few steps, I thought I recognized one of them.

“Joe?” I called.

“Mr. Rawlins,” hailed Charcoal Joe, one of the most powerful gangsters in LA.

“What are you doing here?”

“Your friend called me,” he said, motioning his head toward Fearless.

“He what?”

“Well, you know, Easy,” Fearless said, almost shy. “You said that you wasn’t gonna back down. So when you was in that house, I called Joe.”

“How you guys even know each other?”

“Who in this town don’t know Fearless Jones?” Joe asked.

“But why would you come? And there you got three men behind ya.”

“I like you, Easy,” Joe confessed. “You been good by me and so... here I am.”

“Okay, long as you here, why don’t you tell me what you think about this Orem Diggs.”

“Diggs is your fish outta water tryin’ to learn how to breathe.”

“Um,” I uttered. “Maybe you could try tellin’ me about him in words that I can understand.”

“He’s from Cincinnati, wanting to make a place for himself here in the sunshine. Been hookin’ up with people so rich they might be able to benefit from help like his.”

That was the best I was going to get, so I didn’t ask any more.

Joe introduced me to his gunsels, but I don’t remember any of their names. One of them took point and led the way up Charles Terrace until we got to a street with no street sign.

“This way,” he said, and the group went behind him.

It was a dead-end street plugged by a singular building. Not a business, house, or apartment building, not a utility or factory. Not a store. But, for all the things it was not, it was familiar, the kind of structure that would have had a place at any time in history. It would have been right at home in Pompeii, back in the days just before the eruption.

The entranceway had no door, just a more or less rectangular maw, the edges of which appeared to have been gnawed on by some great toothed beast. The interior of the first floor, swathed in gray shadow, was indefinite and vague. When a man in a crayon-blue sports jacket and black pants appeared there, I moved a hand toward my gun pocket.

“Can I help you?” the white gatekeeper asked the Black gunsel who had led us to his door.

“Rufus Tyler et al. for Mr. Orem Diggs.”

I was surprised at the formality of the sentence.

The guardian was lean and pock-faced, with skin that had darkened from too much drinking with maybe a dash of sin mixed in.

He said, “I don’t know no Rufus Tyler,” sneering indifferently.

“Maybe he knows him by another name,” the guide suggested. “Charcoal Joe.”

The sentry decided then to count our number.

He nodded, still sneering, and said, “Wait here.”

Moving away, he faded into shadow, and we waited. It felt as if there was a countdown in our collective mind, ticking off the seconds before something ugly was bound to happen.

But before the dreadful event could occur, the man returned and said, “Follow me.”

Once inside the dead-end edifice I realized that the familiarity of the architecture was that it was most like a burned-out and looted building in a war-torn city. Even the paint seemed to have been blasted away, and there was dust a quarter inch thick frosting the floors. I had prowled through many abandoned premises like it — from Berlin 1945 to Watts 1965. I could almost smell the smoke and moldering flesh.

At the end of a long hall there was a surprisingly wide stairway. Following the flights up four floors, we came to a set of double doors that were new, made from finished oak.

After you, the criminal Charon said with a hand gesture and a bow.

“No, motherfucker,” our articulate point man replied, “after you.”

The blue-coated guide counted our number again and then complied. He pushed the doors open and walked in, seemingly without a qualm.

This room, like the doors we came through, was neat and clean, with white walls and a carpeted floor, a high ceiling and sparkling-clean glass windows that let in a sun that had been extinguished for the rest of the disaster zone.

Maybe ten yards on was a big mahogany desk, behind which sat a white man somewhere in his forties. He had a wide face, flattened a little at the ears. His brown hair was neatly coifed, but it was also wiry, giving the impression that, at any minute, it might spring into disarray.

On either side of the substantial desk stood two men dressed in dark suits like Joe’s soldiers.

“You have to give me your guns,” the man in the blue sports jacket said.

“You would not like the way in which you receive them,” Joe’s well-spoken representative rejoined.

“Charcoal Joe,” the man behind the desk announced.

Joe moved to the front of our squad while the leader got to his feet and came around the desk. They approached each other, meeting and shaking hands at the dead center of the office floor.

Diggs’s men moved forward and so did we.

The board was set.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you,” Orem Diggs greeted. “I’ve been wanting to do this for quite a while.”

“Everything in its own time,” the south side gangster intoned. “Everything in its own time.”

Orem smiled and inquired, “What can I do for you, Joe?”

“Easy,” Joe said while looking our host in the eye.

“Yeah,” I said, moving up to stand next to him.

“Tell Mr. Diggs what it is we’re here for.”

I said, “A little bird told me that an Orem Diggs was lookin’ for me and that he wasn’t smiling.”

“Who are you?” Orem asked. “And who’s your little bird?”

“My name is Ezekiel Rawlins,” was all the answer I had as to the source of my interest. “I wanna know what your business is with me.”

The gangster’s eyes sharpened. He studied me in a way that was commonplace for men who made their living outside the scriptures of law. His expression exhibited scorn, contempt backed up by potential violence, mixed in with a desire to acquire knowledge that he had no obligation to reciprocate.

“There’s a woman name of Lutisha James that I would have words with,” he said at last.

“About what?”

He didn’t like being questioned, but his expression seemed to suggest that this was a singular situation.

“I’m looking for a thing that she might know the whereabouts of.”

“What thing?”

“A piece of paper.”

“Did you kill that family?” I just had to ask.

“What family is that?”

“The one in Bel-Air.”

“I haven’t killed nobody,” Diggs said. Then, turning to Joe: “Is that why you’re here? Those people belonged to you?”

“Anybody else you know after Lutisha or this paper?” I asked.

“Why?” the gangster replied. “What’s she got to do with murder?”

“That’s what I’m here to find out. I don’t get behind the slaughter of old people, innocent children, and most women.”

I didn’t mean to sound so angry in my reply. When men like Diggs heard anger pointed in their direction, they got their hackles up.

“Answer him, Diggs,” Charcoal Joe said in a velvet tone. The kind of black velvet that lines the interior of a coffin.

That was the moment of decision. Diggs was a dyed-in-the-wool bad man who made his way west like all the other prospectors, looking for gold. He was a bad man, but Joe had roots in the city that no one else could equal.

Orem glanced at Joe, then exhaled, realizing that he would be taking on an opponent above his weight class.

He said, “I don’t know.”

“You don’t know if anyone else is after her?” I asked.

“Right.”

“How about why they want her?”

He proved he was brave by hesitating before saying, “The paper is a deed that a man named Sasha, now deceased, gave to someone, and that someone gave it to Lutisha before the injured party could get to him.”

“Why give it to her?”

Orem chuckled and said, “Because Lutisha James is both a woman to fear and a woman to trust.”

“What’s the deed to?”

“I don’t know.”

“So, some guy named Sasha gave her this deed?”

Orem studied me again. This time it was less like a predator, more like someone considering a move in an important game of chance.

“Sasha gave the deed to some guy named Hannibal. I guess he was the one supposed to get it to her.”

“Who’s Hannibal?”

Shrugging his shoulders and holding up both hands, he said, “You tell me. Is that all?”

“Only one more question.”

“Shoot.”

“Who did Sasha steal the deed from?”

Smiling broadly, he said, “Waynesmith Von Crudock.”

Shit.