Gray Dawn

24

On the south side of Pico Boulevard, a few blocks east of Hauser, there was a bar called the Blue Reindeer. I went in there, the only customer, at just past noon. I had a drink, though it was too early for alcohol, and the cigarette that I usually allowed myself only in the morning. The bartender didn’t know why the bar bore that odd name; she’d only worked there for the past year.

“What’s your name?” the forty-something server asked. She was white, with fair posture, and on the tall side, wearing just the pattern of a white slip over which there was another, semitransparent, stiff lace dress, dyed in delicate yellow and green.

“Easy,” I answered.

“I’m Madeline.”

“Pleased to meet ya.”

“You live around here?” She had about her what seemed to be a faded glamour. A beauty queen from a long-ago life.

“I used to,” I said. “Why?”

“You look familiar,” she answered with a shrug, looking me in the eye as if expecting me to answer.

“Excuse me, Madeline, but I have to make a call.”

On the pay phone I called the number that Emily Haas had left for my son.

“What?” a gruff male voice growled.

“Julie there?”

“What? No. There’s no Julie here.” He hung up.

I considered asking Madeline for another drink but nixed the thought. Instead, I redialed.

“What?” answered Billy Goat Gruff.

“I’m — I’m sorry to bother you, sir,” I said, trying to sound timid. “But Julie’s my daughter and this is the number she left us to call. Do you know where my girl is?”

“No Julie here.” He hung up again.

On the third call I asked, would he please tell me whose number I was calling.

“Listen, motherfucker,” the man said. “If you call here again, I’m gonna find you and I’m gonna tear you a new asshole. Hear me?”

That time I was the one who hung up.

Back at the bar I ordered bourbon, neat.

Sipping the sour mash and sucking down a Lucky Strike borrowed from Madeline, I pondered my next move.

Finally, I decided on George Baron Dunkirk.

George worked at Bell Systems, affectionately referred to as Ma Bell. He was a supervisor of some sort, pretty high up. A white guy, maybe fifteen years my junior, he’d had a run of bad luck a few years before. His wife left him for a new man, in her eyes a better man. Her name was Dorinda, and she’d met J. J. Lothar at a supermarket. J.J. asked her how he could tell when a cantaloupe was ripe. An hour later, at a little coffee place on La Brea, Lothar told Dorinda that he was a salesman at the May Company department store. Handsome and strong, with a friendly laugh, he neglected to confide that he was a career criminal who wanted to own or control everything he could see or imagine. J.J. took Dorinda and the three kids and then he, through the former Mrs. Dunkirk, demanded that George set him up to sell special phone systems to corporations. He didn’t want just a job, but a way to embezzle Ma Bell, one of the largest monopolies that ever existed.

It was Jackson Blue who brought George’s problem to my attention.

“He’s a good guy, Easy,” Jackson said. “And he done a lotta work for me and Jean-Paul. If you could help him out, we’d both really appreciate it.”

J.J. had threatened George with all kinds of torture, but the only thing that the good Mr. Dunkirk worried about was the safety of his ex-wife and their children.

As a rule, I stayed away from jobs of that kind. George was a natural-born sad sack; nothing could save him from that. But his job intrigued me. Any in at the phone company could come in handy in my line of business.

I asked Raymond to go talk with Lothar. I usually didn’t bring out a big gun like Mouse to deal with riffraff of J.J.’s ilk, but the things he threatened to do to George and the way he turned Dorinda against him made me mad. I honestly think that if Mouse had killed him, I wouldn’t have minded.

But Ray was the more levelheaded one that time. He asked one of the white gangsters he worked with about Lothar. Once the details were obtained, Ray said to the mobster that a friend of his would like it if J.J. was asked to leave Los Angeles. Two days later Lothar was gone for good. I’d like to think that he left Los Angeles under his own steam, but, then again, like I said, I didn’t really care.

“Bell Systems,” a woman’s bright voice declared.

“George Dunkirk, please.”

“One moment.”

“Mr. Dunkirk’s line,” an equally cheerful male voice said.

“I’d like to speak with him, please. My name is Rawlins.”

“Hold on, Mr. Rawlings.”

I had long since given up correcting strangers about the pronunciation of my name.

“Hello,” a man said in what I can only call a pillowy voice.

“George. Easy Rawlins.”

“Oh,” he said nervously. “Hello, Mr. Rawlins. How are you?”

“Fine,” I said, and then got down to business. “I have a number for you. Two, as a matter of fact.”

“Go on,” he murmured in a hushed tone.

I gave him both the bar’s pay phone number and the one I pretended that he’d asked for. The first number was the number to call me back, while the second one I wanted him to look up. We had devised that system just in case someone was listening in. You could never tell with Ma Bell.

“I’ll call you back later,” George told me.

No one had heard from Lothar in three years. Dorinda was so heartbroken that the children had to come to live with George. He’d met a new woman, one who didn’t mind his mundane life. And I had a license to correlate any phone number with a physical address.

It was going to take a while before George called back. First, he’d have to send out a computer inquiry and wait for a paper reply. Then he’d go across the street to a phone booth, where he could call me without worrying about being eavesdropped upon.

So I decided to make some headway on other jobs in the interim.

“Mr. Blue’s line,” Mister announced.

“Easy for him.”

“Yes, sir, Mr. Rawlins, I’ll pass you right through.”

“Hey, Easy, what’s happenin’?” Jackson asked in a voice that was comparable to a tenor clarinet.

“You still want some street action, Jackson?”

“Sure. What you got?”

“You ever hear of a Waynesmith Von Crudock?”

“I know who he is. Why?”

“You think you might be able to arrange a meeting with him?”

“I’m sure. Everybody wants a word with P9. What you need?”

“Talk to the man about real estate. Tell him that P9 would like to start buyin’ and you heard that he’s got some holdings.”

“Real estate. Pretty sophisticated, huh? Maybe I should bring Jewelle along with me. You know she got a property mind.”

“Yeah, maybe. But you got to be careful, I hear Crudock’s kinda tough.”

“That’s okay, Easy, you know I been dealin’ with men like that since I cut my teeth, sleepin’ in the street.”

When I got off with Jackson I said to the bartender, “I’m gonna get a call on your pay phone in a bit, Madeline.”

“As long as it’s short,” she said.

“That’s a lovely dress,” I replied.

“Oh. Thank you.”

“Yeah,” I added. “Dyed lace over white silk is what I’d imagine Marie Antoinette would wear.”

That bought me a ticket to converse for the next three-quarters of an hour with the weathered debutante.

We talked and talked. The longer we did, the more her posture straightened. Her face took on a glow, bringing to my mind the thought that so many people lived their lives not being at all what they wanted. This certainty echoed with the mission of the Creative Mind.

Madeline was from Michigan, competed in a beauty contest out there. She came in second, but still, a talent scout from Hollywood gave her his number if she ever wanted to throw the dice. She took a Greyhound bus and used that number. The scout, who called himself Noone, did his best to get her work. She did a couple of commercials and general events where pretty girls were needed.

“I finally gave it up,” she said.

“Why?” I asked. “You got that kind of appeal that starlets have.”

“Maybe a little,” she admitted. “But they work you hard for every minute they pay you for. Real hard.”

Then the phone rang.

“Hello.”

“Mr. Rawlins?”

“Hey, George.”

“I got an address for you.”

The phone George checked on belonged to a Gretchen Miller, who lived in a small house on Ayres Ave. in West Los Angeles. I parked across the residential street and down the block, under a big carob tree that threw a dark shadow.

There was a toy red wagon lying on its side in the front yard. Now-dead blades of grass had grown up through and around the child’s conveyance in better times, when someone still remembered to water the lawn; or, maybe, the vegetation throve during the rainy season the previous winter. The windows were all shut and shaded. There were three dark sedans parked in a line in the driveway, running from the backyard to the front.

I sat there for hours.

Now and again big rough-and-tumble men would come or go. The men reminded me of soldiers, deployed in enemy territory that their army had occupied but not completely suppressed.

That’s the real work of a private detective. We sit and observe, take pictures through windows and from behind trees. If you were any good at the job, you’d spend this time creating scenarios that would clarify your way.

There was a long way to go. I wanted to protect my family, new and old. There was Anger and our son, Jesus and his brood, and even Carlos Ortega, an incarcerated survivor looking for his dad.

After four or five hours, when the sun was going down and I hadn’t taken one positive step toward the resolution of any case, except Niska’s, I drove away from the faulty domestic facade that hid a squadron of enemies who had their sights set on the son I had never met.

All that was okay. I was becoming familiar with my targets. And they had no idea about me.