Gray Dawn

19

After sending his backup men off, Joe joined Fearless and me on a drive down to the Pacific Dining Car on Sixth Street. There was always a place ready for Joe there. He’d helped one of the managers with a problem at some point along the way, earning himself a permanently open table toward the back of the restaurant.

Joe and I ordered prime rib and Fearless asked for a Roquefort salad along with French fries and a side vegetable plate.

“What’s up, Fearless?” I asked.

“What you mean?”

“No meat? No chicken? Not even some shrimp?”

“Naw, man. I met this white girl up at UCLA told me all the bad things meat does and how they basically torture the animals before butcherin’.”

“UCLA?” Joe said. “What you doin’ there?”

“I was... I was... I was,” he said, thinking his way into an answer for the question. “I was livin’ wit’ this girl name of Helen Darcey. She cooked every night, know what I mean? In the kitchen and the bedroom. I was happy as a pig in shit. Then, one day—”

“She wanted you to move in and maybe get married,” I supplied.

Fearless threw up his hands. “You know how I am, Easy. I get calls at any time for things people need. I ain’t no detective or nuthin’, but I’m on the go. I really liked Helen, man, but she wanted a house and a car and a man come home every night when it gets dark. Every night.”

“And when it get dark is when you get goin’,” Joe said.

“Yeah, you boaf right. Anyway, I got this room down on Avalon. It wasn’t big but I don’t need a whole lotta space. There was this two-burner stove in there, and every time I look at it, I’d think about Helen and her fried chicken. Man... I could take that gas stove all apart and put it back together again, but I couldn’t boil water right. So I saw that there was a extension class at UCLA that teach anybody how to cook. So I signed up.”

“That don’t say why you only eatin’ vegetables now,” I said, slipping into the language of my upbringing.

“Naw, man, like I said, that was because’a Delilah.”

“The white girl?”

“Uh-huh. I mean, the first day I got to the class the teacher says that we got to buy this two-hunnert-page book and read it. You know, Easy, I can make it through a letter, read the bettin’ sheet at the races, but a whole book? Uh-uh.”

“But you stayed in the class, right?”

“Yeah. After class Delilah aksed was I gonna buy the book. I didn’t wanna ack like I couldn’t read or nuttin’ so I went with her to the campus book store. Book was fifteen dollars, fifteen. She didn’t have it. So, I said that I’d buy the damn thing, and we could read it together. I figured that she’d keep it when I stopped comin’ to class. But she wanted to meet at the lie-berry the next day and, well, you know — one thing led to another.”

“And now you’re a vegetarian.”

“There you go.”

“But if you wit’ this Delilah, then why was you down in Texas?” I asked.

“My uncle died, and I had to help with the breakdown of his farm and shit. Anyway, the class we go to don’t meet this time’a year.”

We three, who some might call serious men, talked about things like the price of gas, TV shows, and even the stock market. When it got down to dessert, Joe turned serious.

“Why you lookin’ for Lutisha, Easy?”

I told him about Santangelo and the murders in Bel-Air.

“What’s in it for you?” the elder crook wondered.

“Tryin’ to do what’s right,” I said.

“What’s right? You save that shit for blood fam’ly, sometimes in-laws, and maybe a girlfriend. But you ain’t expected to owe sumpin’ to some stranger walk in off the street.”

“What can I tell ya, Joe? You just saved my life, so I damned sure ain’t gonna call you a lie.”

Joe moved his head around as if his collar was tight. Then he stood up to take off his arsenic-gray suit jacket. He removed the garnet-red cuff links from each wrist, rolled up the sleeves, and then dismantled the top two gold button shirt studs of his dress shirt.

“You haven’t asked,” Joe said. “But I’m’onna tell ya what I know about this woman you lookin’ for.”

“You know her too? Damn. Feels like everybody knows Lutisha James. Everybody but me.”

“She serious business,” Joe claimed. “Only time I ever heard her name outside’a some scheme or scam was that song Sonny Terry wrote on her. I knew her back when I started workin’. She was the girlfriend of Catfish Garland.”

“Who?” Fearless and I asked.

“Catfish. He ran gamblin’ an’ girls and did some larceny on the side. I kept his books, mostly in my head.

“Anyway, ’fifty-one ’fifty-two he met this woman was runnin’ all kinds’a property outta Chicago. I’ont know if she stoled the shit in Chi, but it come by crates outta there.”

“That was twenty years ago,” I commented.

“Yes, it was, and she was fine. She knew her words and her numbers, but what made Lutisha special, what she taught me, was how to question what you see and hold that up to what you believe.”

“How that work?” Fearless asked.

“Way back then,” the gangster replied, “I hated white people. If I saw a white man, or had to talk to one, I was ready to fight. One night, when me and Lutie was up late drinkin’ and breakin’ down a load she had hauled in from back east, she told me to talk to this white man name of Niles. I said I wouldn’t do business with no white man. When she asked me why not, I said ’cause you cain’t trust ’em.

“I remember that night as clear as if it was yesterday. She was pullin’ a case of stolen watches out this crate. She stood up tall and said, ‘You do business with Curt Bingham, don’t ya?’ I said I did. And she says to me that Bingham had been buyin’ from her to sell to Catfish for years.

“I knew that Catfish had introduced Bingham to Lutie and so it was bad form for him to do a go-around like that. Lutie told me that Niles hadn’t cheated anybody she ever knew.

“I got it. I learned a lot from that woman. And she could play them cards. There are casinos today that have a permanent ban on her because she could read the dealers better’n they could her.”

“The way people talk about her,” I said, “it’s like she’s evil incarnate.”

“If you wanna call a pack’a hungry dogs evil, okay,” Joe allowed. “But the way I look at it, she ain’t no more evil than a hawk’s claw or a tornado bearin’ down. Rather than judge her, you’d do better to stay out the way.”

I tried to imagine how sharp a woman or man would have to be for Charcoal Joe to treat that individual like a peer. I mean, he looked on Raymond Alexander as an unruly child.

Giving up on useless speculation, I turned to the more significant problem at hand:

“Waynesmith Von Crudock,” I stated.

Joe met my stare and smiled. “What about him?”

“That’s what I’m askin’ you.”

“He rich. Could be the richest, really. An’ the way I hear it, he play rough.”

“Crazy?”

“If you worked in a carwash an’ told me that you were gonna buy a ticket from TWA so you could fly to Paris to spend a weekend with your mistress, and you believed that shit, you would be crazy. But if Crudock told me that, I’d just wonder why he didn’t fly his own jet.”

That’s the way Joe talked. He wanted you to feel the nuance of what he meant.

“You know how I can get to the man?” I asked, hoping that that was all the information I’d need.

“Get to him how?”

“You know, walk up to the front door and knock.”

“He ain’t no dime a dozen like Diggs.”

“Neither am I.”

Joe shrugged and grinned. “I’ll ask around. If I get somethin’ I’ll pass it on through Fearless.”

A while after that the restaurant manager brought a black telephone on a long cord to our table. Joe thanked the man with a twenty-dollar bill and then made a call, telling whoever was on the other end that he was ready.

The well-spoken man who had led us to Orem Diggs’s place showed up soon after.

“Take care’a yourself, Easy,” Joe said, before walking off with his gunsel. “Luck don’t last forever.”

“Neither will we,” I said.

Joe laughed all the way down the long hall.

“You want me to come along wit’ ya while you look for this Lutisha?” Fearless asked after we cleaned off the last few crumbs on our plates.

“I don’t think so, Fearless.”

“Why not? Everybody need somebody to back him up.”

“I guess. I’ll call ya if need be.”

“Okay. Don’t forget.”

“I won’t. You wanna come wit’ me to the mountain, man? I mean, a proper bed should be better than some bookstore floor.”

“Nah. Thanks anyway. I’ma call Paris an’ get him to pick me up. He said he wanna talk to me about sumpin’.”

When I left the downtown restaurant, it was my intention to drive home. But on the way I started thinking about my mortality.

Most people wouldn’t understand when I say that Amethystine might signify my demise. I don’t mean that she’d shoot me like she did her ex-husband’s uncle. I don’t even mean that she would turn against me someday and side with my enemies. What I do mean is that she would, and did, impact my soul in such a way that I began to feel my manhood so intensely that I could start to take chances that most fools would avoid, even young fools.

That thought in mind, I decided to drive to the address that the file of the Brotherhood of Free Negroes Everywhere had for Santangelo Burris. He lived on Hubert Avenue just a block or so from Olmstead Ave. It was a small pink cottage behind a sprawling apartment complex. There I encountered another door ajar and no answer to knock or ringer.

I should have left and gone home. Maybe Amethystine would be there to greet me. But how could I love her right if I was afraid of a simple entranceway to a pink cottage?

The front door entered a fair-size living room. The oyster-blue curtains, tangerine rug, and lemon walls made the place look frilly, even girly. But the bloody visage of my client dispelled that illusion. He was lying on the floor, leaned up against the far wall, taking gasps of air like Charcoal Joe’s fish out of water, and nearly out of time. There was blood all down his gray T-shirt, snot and saliva from his nose and mouth. The spilt blood had hardened in places, telling me that he’d been in this condition for some time. He was holding on to his dick through rough jeans.

“The detective,” he said, maybe to some imaginary friend who came to keep him company at the end.

I got down on a knee beside the dying man.

“Who shot you?” I asked.

“White man.”

“Which one?”

The perplexed look on Saint Angel’s face made me regret the attempt at humor.

“Do you have the deed?”

He shook his head sadly.

Feeling a little guilty, and not knowing why, I said, “Lie still, brother, I’ll call the ambulance.”

“White man. He wore... he wore a dark and light jacket, like a, like that game, you know.”

I asked the operator to get me an ambulance.

“Man fell through a glass windah and is bleedin’ a lot,” I claimed.

After making the emergency call, I went back to the dying man and took the wallet from his pocket. He roused, trying to stop me, but the big bad boar had become as weak as a little piglet.

I searched the house but found nothing.

I had put everything away by the time the paramedics arrived. The problem was — the police came with them. I identified myself to the cops, saying that Santangelo had retained me, that I was there to make a report and found him in that condition.

They didn’t believe any of that.

I wouldn’t have either.