Gray Dawn

22

We sat across from each other at a corner table of a twenty-four-hour diner situated down the block from Temple Hospital. It was the first time I could study the grown-up version of the woman who had branded me with the truth about love and death. She’d doffed the wig, revealing salt-and-dark-chocolate hair. Her skin was dark, and her face still had the sharp-angled beauty of youth. She was older than I by three years, but there was a vitality there that could never be subdued, only killed. Her hands were balled into hard fists trying to choke out the hurt in her heart.

“Who did this to my baby, Easy?”

“I don’t know, Angie,” I admitted, calling up the memory of a nickname I hadn’t used for nearly forty years. “It’s like I said: Saint hired me to find you. I went down to that SRO you stayed at in Compton, the numbers parlor in Hollywood, and asked everybody I could think of. I finally got to the poker club because’a somethin’ that Gigi said.”

“The child?” She raised her head, up above the swamp of misery. “How you get to her?”

I didn’t want to, but I told the woman called Lutisha James about the Bel-Air murders and the little girl’s and the ancient woman’s survival.

“Killed them?” I’m pretty sure that she was asking her God, not me. “Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“That’s crazy. It’s insane to kill them folks.”

Gazing into each other’s eyes, I think we could have stayed like that for hours. But as much as Anger was a part of my orphaned life, I still had a job to do, even though the client was dead.

“Anger.”

“Yeah, baby?”

“Following your trail, it seems as if, I don’t know, you seem to be hiding, running from something, someone.”

She was gazing absently across the early-morning restaurant.

On the other side of the dining hall there was a very large white man in either hospital or restaurant whites sitting next to a gorgeous copper-colored Hispanic woman, decked out in fine clothes as if she had just come from some upscale nightclub. She looked bored but he was happy, chattering away.

“Anger,” I said again.

“For the past few years, I been movin’ from place to place, goin’ from one job to the other. Maybe I don’t need to no more, but it’s habit by now.”

“Do you think that whoever it is you runnin’ from might’a killed Gigi’s people?”

“What?” she asked in a pestered tone, jerking her head back as if my question was a mosquito bombing her ear.

“Do you think the people after you are the ones that killed Gigi’s people and — and Santangelo?”

“You sayin’ you think I got my son killed?” Her words, as the Bard once said, were sharper than a serpent’s tooth. But I couldn’t worry about that.

“I’m askin’ you who you’re running from so we can find out who did it.”

Anger wanted to use those strangling hands on my throat, I was sure of that. It took her a very long moment to overcome the rage. But she did get over it.

“I did something a while ago, Easy. Because’a that the police been on me.”

“Here in Los Angeles?”

“Naw. Back east. It was business as usual till somebody ended up dead.”

“And the cops are after you,” I stated.

“Cops, federal marshals, I don’t know, maybe even the FBI by now. They want somebody to pay. That’s why I’m in LA movin’ every couple’a months or so. I don’t know who all is after me, but I can tell ya they ain’t slaughterin’ no house full’a civilians.”

The fancy Spanish lady and the blubbery man were actually talking now. She was telling him something and he was listening intently.

“So Santangelo was really lookin’ for you,” I said. “I mean, he made it clear to me that he didn’t know where you were.”

“Saint’s a lovin’ son. He is. But he ain’t got no discipline. If I told him where I stayed at, everybody would know. I only stayed in touch with Hannibal. He the older one and his lip is always zipped.”

“So does Santangelo know where Hannibal is?” I asked, keeping up the use of the present tense for Anger’s sake.

“Usually. But the last time Hannibal talked to me, on the Orchid’s pay phone, he said that he had got hold’a sumpin’ important and he wanted to get it to me. But he was worried about bein’ followed so he gave it to Saint for safekeepin’ and told him that if anything happened that he should get the thing to me.”

“Was this thing a deed?”

“I don’t know. Hannibal said it was in a green envelope. Maybe a deed.”

“And did anything happen to Hannibal?”

“I don’t think so. No.”

“So you’re in touch with your older son.”

“We don’t talk too often. But every week or so we put ads in a neighborhood newspaper, the Pico Post. That way we could tell each other we okay and maybe a thing or two more. And... and... and he got a girlfriend named Violet, Violet Welles. If sumpin’ happened to him, she woulda told me through the Pico Post.”

“So,” I said, trying to untangle the mess. “Hannibal got somethin’ he wanted to get to you, but he was maybe in some trouble, so you think maybe he gave his brother this letter an’ asked him to try and pass it along?”

“Maybe. Like I said, Hannibal knew that I had stayed at the Orchid.”

“And you sayin’ it was just blind luck that sent your other son to me in order to find you?”

“No!” the blubbery man said aloud, responding to something the petite woman had said.

“No,” Anger echoed softly.

“So he knew that I knew you?”

“Hannibal did. I talked about you to him one night when we was drinkin’ wine, years ago now.”

“So Hannibal got the envelope,” I said, talking to myself as much as to her. “For some reason it was too hot to hold so he gave it to his brother to bring it to you. But by that time you had talked to Hannibal, and you knew that Santangelo was in the mix, and you might be in trouble, so you took a caretaker’s position at the cattle rancher’s Bel-Air home. But then you moved outta there because one night you was thinkin’ and you realized that somebody might work out where you had gone to.”

“That’s it,” Anger said. “Pretty much. People know me in LA as Lutisha James. I usually come out here every winter. You know these Texas bones don’t like no cold.”

Anger shivered from the thought of freezing temperatures.

“Then how did Saint know to get in touch with me?” I wondered aloud. “You think Hannibal told him?”

“Prob’ly did. He’s Saint’s older brother and he wanted to make sure the envelope got to me.”

“But it didn’t,” I said to be certain.

“I guess not.”

“He went out to the Orchid like Hannibal told him to and you weren’t there, and then he remembered to come ask the detective man to look.”

“Damn!” the blubbery man shouted.

There was a loud crashing sound. The man had gotten to his feet and overturned the table he and the petite woman were sitting at.

“I don’t give a goddamn what some greaser says!” the man shouted. “Fuck him!”

“Richard, stop,” the young woman said, loud enough for me to hear it but still not at the level of a scream.

I didn’t care what was happening over there. There were enough people around who could help, if help was needed.

As I made my silent pact of noninvolvement, Anger grabbed her purse and blazed across the dining room. By the time she’d gotten to the blubbery man, she was wielding that eight-inch knife I’d been warned about.

“Step the fuck back, niggah!” she shouted at the white man.

He moved a hand in the general direction of my childhood love, and she swung that blade. The way he pulled that hand back, I was pretty sure that she had nicked him.

“Get the hell outta here, fool!” Anger commanded.

Screaming like a frightened woman, the blubbery man ran for the door, grasping at a hand full of blood.

Witnessing this scene had a profound effect on me. It was as if I had never left the Fifth Ward, never went into the army, moved to California, aged forty years, or learned a goddamned thing. There are some things that we never learn and other things that we can forget in the twinkling of an eye.

Anger had her arm around the young woman’s shoulders. She was whispering to her. I came up to them then, the rubber sole of my shoe slipping a little on the dollop of red blood Richard had dropped on the green linoleum floor.

“We should go,” I suggested to Anger.

“You need a ride?” Anger asked the young woman.

“Please,” she replied, nodding.

We dropped the young woman, Conchita Alfaro was her name, at the Pathways bus station. When we asked her what the problem was with Richard, the blubbery man, she told us that she was going out with him for a few months but had decided to go back to her old boyfriend, Hector. She didn’t want to tell Hector about Richard because they both had bad tempers, and she just wanted to be happy.

“Don’t we all,” Anger Lee / Lutisha James lamented.

“Don’t we all,” I agreed.

Lost in our own private thoughts, Anger and I were sitting side by side in the front seat of the company Lincoln, parked at the curb out in front of the bus station.

“Is there someplace I could take you, Angie?”

The sound of her nickname brought a smile to her lips.

“I cain’t think’a anywhere,” she said.

“Can’t you go stay with Hannibal?”

“Hannibal in just as much trouble as me,” she said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if he left the state.”

But I would have been surprised. There were people who would have killed Anger, and those who would have saved her, but precious few who would just walk away.

“How did your good son get into this shit?”

“I cain’t really explain it, Easy, but I know it had sumpin’ to do with his job.”

“What job?”

“He work at a place called the Creative Mind.”

“What’s that?”

“Where people go to study their lives so they could see their opportunities in a different light.”

“How’s that work?”

“I ain’t got the slightest idea. I make my own opportunities an’ then use my knife, or my gun, to keep ’em. But Hannibal is part’a the younger generation. That’s what started all this shit.”

“How’s that?”

“Some guy come into his office and said that he was tired’a workin’ for businessmen no better’n thieves.”

“What did your son say to that?”

“He said that that young man, Sasha is his name, he said Sasha should use all his knowledge to start a honest business on his own. They worked it out that he could start a import-export business from relatives he got in Europe. It was goin’ pretty good, until one day Sasha come in with this paper that he said was proof that his bosses was stealin’. He wanted Hannibal to take it to the authorities to do sumpin’ right. But I raised that boy good enough that he knew he had to at least think it out before actin’ a fool.”

That was a lot, more than I could process in front’a that poor man’s Greyhound.

“So you got no place to go?” I concluded.

“Not really. But, you know, I got a few dollars. Must be some SRO got a room.”

“I know a place.”

At a pay phone in the bus station, I called Fearless Jones at Paris Minton’s bookstore to ask if he could make a reservation for Anger. I said to make her name Carlinda Newgate. He called back five minutes later to say it was done.

Then I drove Anger to the N&T Hotel on Grand Street. It didn’t look like a hotel, nor was it registered with the Chamber of Commerce. This was an ultra-private residence for kings and millionaires, ex-presidents, ousted dictators, and lapsed communists who had abdicated, taking the lion’s share of the state budget with them. Fearless was registered as a bodyguard for the N&T and, therefore, was given a deep discount if there were any rooms empty.

Parked out in front of the unremarkable entrance of the residence, I turned to say so long to one of my oldest friends.

“You can stay here as long as you want,” I told her.

“Okay,” she replied, her voice maybe light with gratitude.

“You know any way I could find your son?”

“Not really. We ain’t talked in a couple’a weeks, like I said. I know he got a apartment somewhere in West LA, but I told him that I don’t wanna know the address. You know, loose lips and all.”

“Is there anything I should know about him? I mean, anything at all.”

“Well, after all this time I don’t know if it’s important anymore.”

“What?”

“Hannibal is your son.”