Gray Dawn

23

“Easy,” Amethystine said, holding my head against her breast.

We were reclining on the love seat next to the terrace, looking out over West LA all the way to the expanding darkness of the nighttime ocean. I was exhausted and so worn-out emotionally that I was having trouble just talking.

“Huh?” I grunted.

“What’s wrong, baby?” she cooed.

“Can we talk about that later?”

“Okay. But can you at least tell me where you’ve been the past couple’a days?”

“Sure. I... I helped a detective in training find a man that had seduced and then robbed his girlfriend. In the process we discovered that the man, who went by a dozen names, had robbed a bank robber. The girlfriend forgave him and took him back again. Then I went to see some gangster name of Orem Diggs who’d been hired to grab me and make me talk about a document that I never even heard of. Then I had dinner. After that I went to a guy’s house to talk but he’d been shot. I called emergency, they called the cops. I was arrested and taken to the county jail, where a guy, another inmate, hired me to look for his father. I got outta jail, took a nap, then went to three poker parlors, lost five hundred dollars, and found the woman I been searchin’ for, for days. She wanted to shoot me, but I got her to put away her gun, then I told her that the man I saw get shot was her son. We went to the hospital but soon after he died. That’s everything that’s important.

“Oh. Oh, yeah. Except that it turns out that the woman I was looking for was a one-night stand from forty years ago, and on that night we made a son that I never knew about.”

“Oh my God,” Amethystine said on a hollowed breath. “Your son is dead?”

“No. That was her other son, the bad one.”

“That poor woman.”

Sleep overcame me and stayed on course with no incursion from the worry or fear that I should have felt.

After that night I was convinced that something I’d often been told, but never believed, was true; that love is the most powerful and therefore the most dangerous human emotion. I came to this conclusion because, lying there with Amethystine, with us touching each other carelessly, and breathing the mountain air, I was unconcerned with the turmoil, danger, and utter helplessness of my life. I didn’t care because I had something that wound its way around the core of my being going all the way down to the soul. I was as deeply satisfied as a timber wolf is, baying at the moon and being at one with everything in his domain.

I awoke completely refreshed at 4:53 a.m.

Two hours later I was seated at the table ledge of the second-floor kitchen, drinking my fourth cup of French roast, thinking about all the things I had to do.

“Hi-i,” Amethystine said, making the word into two syllables.

“Hey.”

We shared a long kiss and then another.

“You gonna take the day off?” she asked.

“No time for that.”

“So, what now?”

“Now I track down Anger’s son, and mine. I think he holds the key to a problem.”

“What problem?”

“I don’t exactly know. It’s got somethin’ to do with a deed, a rich man that wants that deed, and people dyin’.”

“You want me to come with?”

“No. I’d like it if you stayed here. The guys guarding this place feed my dogs when I’m not around, but you could keep them company.”

“Now I’m a dog walker?” she asked, full of humor.

“If I could be the mutt.”

The Creative Mind: Different Alternatives for New World Living had its office on Sunset Boulevard, a few blocks east of Doheny. The building that housed the new age company was twelve stories high. The Creative Mind occupied the top three floors. It had a special elevator that went only to floor ten, the outer wall of which was made from glass. Taking the express lift, I read a little write-up etched upon a chromium plaque: The Creative Mind is a nonprofit corporation dedicated to helping people achieve their dreams. We are here to obliterate the humdrum, the nine-to-five, the drudgery of working to make other people rich, other people happy. In this travesty’s place we aim to offer the potential joy of living, a life that gives back.

The doors slid open, and I entered a world where oil and vinegar just had to be the best of friends. That much was apparent in the people who occupied the lobby. The outer walls of the upper floors were glass, tinted a faint green. The reception area ran the length of the front of the offices and had a ceiling that was three floors high, giving a feeling of what I can only call largesse.

Populating this futuristic, and definitely capitalist-leaning, nonprofit enterprise were long-haired, mustachioed, braless, patchouli-scented, multicolored, smiling, actually grinning employees who looked as if they were on a permanent break... from life. Some men wore colorful pants rendered in psychedelic patterns, and there were women in pants, miniskirts, maxiskirts, and some with single sheets of bright fabric wrapped around them and pinned.

There was a front desk of sorts, positioned in the farthest corner against the window. A woman sat there. She was wearing drastic dark purple makeup and a black dress. Her nameplate — yes, she had a nameplate — read SUNSHINE EOS.

She was a Black woman, the color of maple syrup, with eyes that seemed a little large.

I walked up to her desk and said, “Excuse me... Miss Eos?”

She gestured to a chair next to her marbled violet-and-cream desk, which seemed to be carved from fanciful stone.

“Yes?” she asked, not smiling.

“I’m looking for a directory.”

“For what?”

“I’m looking for a man named Hannibal,” I said, realizing that I wasn’t sure about his last name.

“Mr. Lee?”

“Yes. That’s right.”

“Do you have an appointment?” There was the faintest hint of an English accent in her articulation.

“Do I need one?” I wondered aloud, looking around at the chaos of the entrance hall.

“Of course you do. Why would you even ask that?”

“It looks like a... like a nightclub in here.”

That got me my first smile.

“Oh,” she said. “No, no. That’s just the design.”

“Um,” I said, looking confused.

“The president of the Creative Mind, Mr. Hamsho, made the entrance a room where people could take their breaks. That way when visitors came, they would be put at ease, feeling like this was going to be a good time.”

“How would they know that it wasn’t just a big party?”

“Usually, when visitors make an appointment, they are told to ask at the desk against the window.”

“That’s a different way’a doin’ things,” I admitted. “You from England?”

This was the first time the stern Miss Eos showed surprise.

“Why do you ask?”

“The way you talk.”

“You hear that?”

“Yeah.”

“My father was a lifer in the army. We were stationed in London for six years when I was a kid.”

It really felt like I was at a party, meeting someone and chatting.

“To the left of the elevator,” she said then. “All the way to the corner. There you’ll come to a door to the stairway. You go up to the top floor, turn right, and Mr. Lee’s office is three doors down.”

“What’s he like, your Mr. Lee?”

“You’ve never met him?”

“No. His mother suggested this meeting.”

“Oh. He’s never spoken about his mother.”

I had nothing to say about that.

“He’s a very nice man,” Miss Eos told me. “He deals with everybody the same way and he doesn’t ever lose his cool.”

The door to Hannibal Lee’s office was closed. I knocked and then knocked again. I tried the doorknob and then walked in.

The back window looked out over the Sunset Hills. There was no desk, just a few chairs, a locked file cabinet, and a foldaway table no larger than a TV tray. Upon this tray was a pink slip of paper that read Emily Haas from Von Crudock Enterprises.

I had just put the pink slip in my pocket when someone asked, “Can I help you?”

She was plain-faced, tall, in her twenties, of Asian origin, at least racially so; I suspected that she was from Chinese stock, but I’ve been wrong about assumptions like that as many times as I’ve been right.

“I was looking for Hannibal, Miss...?”

“Rosetta.”

“Well, Miss Rosetta—”

“No, just Rosetta.”

“And my name is Easy. Ezekiel, really. I was looking for Hannibal.”

“For what reason?”

“He’s my son.”

That claim stood my inquisitor up a little straighter.

“You’re Hannie’s father?”

“I am.”

“He’s never mentioned you before,” she said, studying my features closely.

“His mother and I broke up a long time ago. I just came back into the picture recently.”

“Oh,” she said, biding her time while considering the landscape of my face. “Um. He’s not in today, Mr. Lee.”

“My last name is Rawlins. His mother and I never got married.”

“Oh. He’s still not in.”

“Hm. Do you know how I can get in touch with him?”

“Not really,” she fibbed.

“Oh. That makes this tough. You see, well, Hannibal’s brother had an accident and he’s, well, he’s dead.”

It was like being back in the casino, playing against the house. I kept raising the ante hoping that the bluff would take me over the top.

“Oh no,” Rosetta lamented. “What happened?”

“I’m not sure. Hannibal’s mother told me that Santangelo had some kind of accident and was taken to Temple Hospital, where he died.”

“Oh my God.”

“I know. I really would like to talk to Hannibal.”

Rosetta hesitated and then came to a decision.

“You look a lot like your son,” she said. “I think it’d be all right if I gave you his information.”

Rosetta provided Hannibal’s address and phone number, but I decided not to call. I wanted to make sure that I was looking into his eyes when we first met.

The address was an apartment building on the fifteen hundred block of South Stanley Drive near Saturn Street. It never felt strange calling Hannibal my son. His mother might have been a cardsharp, a killer, and a thief, but she was not a liar. He was my blood, I never had a doubt about that.

The apartment building looked somewhat like a Spanish castle in miniature. The brick-red plaster walls were all curved. I went through a circular patio into the front door and up the sinuous stairway to the third floor, apartment C. I knocked, of course, waited, knocked again, and then I cracked the lock with a screwdriver that I brought along especially for this circumstance.

Hannibal’s apartment was impressive. The floors were sealed pine and there were plants of many kinds set in the bay windows looking down upon Stanley. Everything was neat and swept, dusted and in order. The bookshelf had two encyclopedias and one fat dictionary, books by W. E. B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, Malcolm X, James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, and other writers, both Black and not.

This time I heard the door.

I turned in time to see a willowy and yet striking young Black woman walk in. I was hoping she hadn’t noticed the damage to the lock. She exhibited no fear, even though I was nearly two times her weight and half a foot taller.

“What are you doing here?” she demanded.

“This your place?”

“I asked you a question.”

She was very dark-skinned, wearing a bright yellow cotton dress that buttoned all the way from the knees to the collarbone. Her face was heart-shaped, her lips generous, yet twisted into an unfriendly welcome. And she had no-nonsense eyes.

“My name is Ezekiel Rawlins,” I said, as if that should mean something.

“And what are you doing in this apartment, Mr. Rawlins?”

“And your name?”

“Violet,” she uttered reluctantly.

“Violet Welles?”

Her name in my mouth threw the bantam inquisitor off a little.

“Yes,” she said. “Now you answer me.”

“I am Hannibal Lee’s father.”

“That’s a lie,” she said, pointing at my face. “Hannibal’s father is dead.”

“His mother tell him that?”

“He the one told me.”

“Well,” I conjectured, “that was probably just wishful thinkin’.”

That created the second crack in her resolve.

“I am very much alive,” I continued, “and I need to see my son.”

“Hannibal is not here,” she said, looking around the room to prove the point.

“He’s not at the Creative Mind either.”

“I don’t know what to tell you, Mr. Rawlins.”

“You his girlfriend, Violet?”

“We’re friends.”

“If you’re close, then you probably know that Hannibal’s in trouble. There’s people after him and he needs my help.”

More cracks.

“Sorry, but I don’t have anything for you,” she said, a worried crease appearing in the middle of her forehead.

“Okay. You don’t know me and there’s no reason for you to trust what I say. So if you hear from Hannibal, tell him that his father’s alive and his brother, Santangelo, is dead.”

“What?” she gasped.

“Shot dead in his house over there in Leimert Park.”

“No.”

“Tell him that that deed he got from Sasha could get him killed too. I’m gonna write down my number, and if he wants, he can call me.”