Gray Dawn

29

I didn’t sleep that night. Somewhere there was a shoe waiting to fall and I couldn’t let the drop find me napping.

When the sun started to light up the sky, I made a call and then went outside and followed the blue-brick road from my place to the round platform that stood before the entrance to the funicular car.

Five ten, lean, and standing erect, sixty-something Orchestra Solomon was wearing an ankle-length dark blue dress with a nose-to-tail red fox fur draped over her shoulders. Beside her was Reynard Khan, her life companion. They were looking out over Los Angeles like proud property owners. That might be a little of an overstatement, but Orchestra did own a great swath of the city. She might have been even wealthier than Von Crudock.

“Good morning,” I greeted my landlady and her friend. “Thanks for comin’ out so early.”

“Mr. Rawlins,” Reynard replied, giving me a civilized, if slightly snooty, nod.

“I spoke to Erculi,” Sadie said. “He told me that there might be trouble.”

“I hope not. And I’m really sorry.”

“Why not call the police?” Reynard wondered.

“I’m not sure if that’s a good idea. It’s about a disagreement with a man named Crudock.”

“Waynesmith Von Crudock?”

“Yes, ma’am. You know him?”

“Nine years ago, he assaulted a friend of mine. He beat her and did other things, then kicked her out of his house, naked in the street. Her name is Belinda Soren. She came to me after the attack. I tried to get that bastard arrested. I wanted him to go on trial and to be convicted. But he got to Belinda somehow and the charges were vacated.

“I wanted to have him killed—”

Reynard coughed and then interrupted, “Enough of that now.” The aged dandy was wearing a formally cut rose-colored suit that might have been in style during the Roaring Twenties. He wasn’t interested in women as a rule, but he loved Orchestra. She was his muse and his patron.

“Von Crudock is the one coming after you?” Sadie asked me.

“Me, a son I didn’t know I had, and the first woman I ever loved. A whole boatload of targets.”

“I’ll get Erculi to warn the other tenants and to help you.”

“I hope that I’m just being overcautious,” I said. “I mean, you’d have to be some kinda maniac to go up against a place like this.”

“Some kind of maniac,” Sadie repeated. “That’s exactly what you’re dealing with.”

I made a breakfast of flapjacks, maple-cured bacon, grits, and fresh-cut pineapple. The whole clan came down to eat it. The feeling was festive the way I imagined old-time barbarians were before they went out to kill and be killed.

When the feast was over, I asked Hannibal to come up to the roof with me.

Struggling valiantly, he followed me up all the curved stairways set into the round walls. When we finally got to the top, he limped right over to the gated edge, appreciating the vast vistas of LA.

“You make enough doing detective work to buy a house like this?” he asked, looking out at the sprawling panorama.

“I lease it.”

“You make enough for that?”

“It averages to a penny a year.”

“How the fuck a poor Black man from the Deep South get a deal like that?”

“Same way a rich white man gets cancer.”

It was a pleasure that my son, a man I had never met, was arrested by thoughts that most people would just pass over and forget.

“The people at the Penguin Club say that you’re a crook,” he said, adding a touch of condemnation to inquiry.

That made me smile.

“Any’a your fellow penguins know me?”

Hannibal gave me a half shrug and asked, “What you want me up here for?”

“I wanna know what it is with this deed your client took.”

“Why?”

“Because that’s my job. Your brother engaged me under a false pretense, but still, he hired me to find Lutisha James and I assume he wanted me to make sure she was safe. Right?”

“I guess.”

“The problem is this rich man, this robber baron, who wants what he thinks you have.”

My son nodded and then said, “It’s a deed to a single lot where there’s a one-family house. The owner was a woman named Shelly Dormer. You know all that already.”

“I do.”

“Well, the thing you probably don’t know is that there was a limited-time rule exception to the sale. That is, the man who sold her the house could buy it back anytime before a seven-year period had elapsed. The deal was, if he wanted the buyback, he had to pay three times the purchase price.”

“But he didn’t execute that clause?”

“The man who sold the house to Dormer was named Klaus Eckman. He worked with a real estate syndicate named Desert Fox and, with no one else knowing, he attached the mineral rights of all the homes that the syndicate built to that one lot. That included almost all the oil under Culver City.”

“Damn,” I said. “That don’t sound legal at all.”

“There was some kinda language in the fine print about a discount given to every lot they sold. It was a sweet deal for Eckman, but then he died from a heart attack three years after the transaction. Dormer died a while after that. She had a cousin who inherited the house. His name was James Martin.”

“Was?” I asked.

“He died almost a year ago,” Hannibal said. “That’s what started the ball rolling. You see, James had decided to keep up the payments and so the mineral rights were tied up, even if nobody knew it. The seven-year buyback clause had lapsed, and so the property goes to the Dormer line.”

“Huh. So, your client, Sasha, somehow came across this deed?”

My son, the son of my blood, nodded.

“And how’d he find out all the rest?”

“It was in the files that Eckman controlled.”

“And he told Sasha all this?”

“No. Sasha never knew any of them. He was hired by somebody, probably this Von Crudock you talkin’ about.”

“How does Waynesmith come into it?”

“Sasha told me that a wealthy man bought the company that Eckman worked for and then sent a crew of accountants in to find a copy of the deed on the address that Shelly Dormer owned.”

“So, Von Crudock knew about the mineral rights?”

“I didn’t know the name, but Eckman offered to sell the deed to somebody for millions.”

“What about this cousin, this James Martin’s heirs?”

“I don’t know. But I do know that the property is currently in probate and the rich man, the one you call Von Crudock, wants to make sure that the rightful owner is not told of what the property controls.”

“That could be worth millions.”

“Sasha said billions. Desert Fox built and sold hundreds of houses around Dormer’s.”

“And Sasha thought that was wrong,” I speculated. “Or maybe he wanted to cash in on it.”

“By the time he got to me, all Sasha wanted was to stay alive,” my son said wryly.

“He’s dead?”

At just that moment, I heard a firecracker, then a whole pinwheel of fireworks going off.

Only, I knew that it wasn’t fireworks.

Without another word to Hannibal, I ran slamfoot down the stairs to the first floor. When I got there Fearless was by the door with two pistols and my old M1 rifle in hand.

“Come on!” he shouted, and we were out the door.

When we reached the funicular, he handed me a pistol. I checked to see that it was loaded.

Fearless knew where I kept my guns because he’d come to my house to look out for the kids more than once.

“I don’t know if we should take the elevator or maybe try and climb down,” he said. “That glass box is a natural target.”

“Climb is too steep and, anyway, the shootin’ has stopped.”

“They could be reloadin’ or circlin’ around.”

There was a phone in the funicular car, put there in case there was any problem with the mechanism. It buzzed loudly.

Crouching low, I picked up the microphone and said, “Rawlins.”

A voice came through the speaker embedded in the car wall.

“They shot my boy!” Erculi cried. “They killed Cosmo!”

By the time Fearless and I got to the base, the entire Longo clan had gathered around the sentry hut. Cosmo was laid up against his father, blood seeping from three gunshot wounds to his chest. Agosto, Matteo, and Gaetano stood around father and son, high-powered rifles clutched in their angry fists. Gaetano was bleeding from his left shoulder, showing no sign of pain. In the distance there could be heard multiple sirens, heading for our once-peaceful home.

“Agosto,” I said. He was wearing dark clothes like all the other Longos. “Did you call for an ambulance?”

“Yes,” he said. “Yes.”

Fearless was already on his knees next to the grieving father.

“He’s still alive, Erculi,” my friend was saying. “The blood still comin’ means his heart still beatin’.”

Five men were in the dirt before the entrance to the gate that barred access to the funicular. They had come in two cars that had all their doors open. Each dead man had multiple gunshot wounds. None of them were still bleeding.