Gray Dawn

31

New World Money Orders, Mail, and Stationery was a bodega-style bungalow, wedged in between Lucky Star Liquor Store and Vanessa’s Veterinarian Care, two blocks north of Venice Boulevard, on Western Ave. I went in, found box 21B, and retrieved its solitary piece of mail, a green envelope scrawled upon with Anger Lee’s pseudonym and New World’s address.

“Excuse me, sir,” a woman said to my back.

“Yes?” I turned, putting on a smile for her.

“Is that box yours?”

“It belongs to a friend. Miss Lutisha James.”

“Yes,” the small, somewhat wide, white woman said. She had cheeks that crowded her eyes and wore a short, curly wig that sported gray strands of hair, here and there, among the predominantly black strands. “That’s her name. Her rent on the box is seven months overdue.”

“How much she owe?”

“Forty-seven dollars, twenty-one cent.”

I took out my wallet, handing her two twenties and a ten.

“Oh,” she uttered. “Well, this is very nice. Let me get your change.”

Saying this, she went behind a modest lime-green Formica-topped counter, reached underneath to retrieve a tin cash box, and then carefully counted out my two dollars and seventy-nine cents.

Handing me the change, she asked, “Would you like to pay for the next month also?”

Proffering the brass key to the box, I said, “No, ma’am. Miss James has moved back down to Texas. She won’t be needing this box anymore.”

“Would you like to leave a forwarding address for her?”

“I don’t know it offhand, but the next time I’m around here, I’ll drop it off.”

“Okay,” the shopkeeper replied, saying, with her expression, that she didn’t believe a word I said.

Benita met me at the bamboo scrim that hid the entrance to Mama Jo’s domain.

“Hey,” I said from the open window of my car.

“Hi, Easy,” she said. When we were with Jesus, she almost always called me Mr. Rawlins. I never really understood why she used my nickname only when we were alone.

“Hey, Benita. So, you the welcome wagon, huh?”

“Essie and Juice is sleep, so I came out in case I had the answers you needed.”

“Come on and sit next to me, then,” I said.

She went to the passenger’s side and got in.

“You and Jesus are about to be free from the BNDD men.”

“How? I mean, I’d like to know, but, um, can we drive around a little bit first? You know I been cooped up in that tin house for days.”

Driving north on Central with Benita sitting next to me, I was reminded how beautiful my son’s wife was. Older than Jesus in years but younger in maturity, she’d once been Mouse’s side-girl, until she started demanding that he leave his wife, EttaMae.

“It feels good to have a breeze,” she said, her face leaning into the open window.

I told her about the BNDD agents’ movements.

“Yeah,” she said, staring up above my head as if there was a TV screen up there showing her memories. “They was drivin’ a brown wood-paneled truck, and they stopped at a diner for a long time after they got to Bellflower.”

“Then what?”

“Finally, they got back in the truck and went to that warehouse. It looked like it was shut down, but they honked once and the gate to the driveway opened up and they went in.”

“What time was all that?”

“It was late. The warehouse was all closed up, like I said.”

“What happened after they went into the warehouse?”

“I don’t know. I was sittin’ across the street in our car and the police drove by. That didn’t bother me, but then they passed by two more times. You know, my mama told me that the police was after us and I didn’t wanna have to talk to them, so I got outta there and drove back out to Compton.”

That was all I needed. But Benita was having such a nice time that I dropped by Basil’s Coffee Shop on Central Ave. There she ordered an ice cream sundae, and hamburgers for Essie and Juice. While she ate the ice cream I called Mel.

“What you got, Easy?”

“Sounds like your boys gonna make a deal with the dope at Warehouse Eighty-Six tonight. Sounds like a pass-off but I don’t know to who. But from what I hear they do the deal late at night.”

“Thanks. I’ll get on it.”

“There’s one other thing.”

“What’s that?”

“You should probably leave the local cops out the loop.”

“Oh. Okay. You wanna be there for the bust?”

“Oh yeah. Motherfuckers wanna mess wit’ my boy, I’d love to see them brought down.”

He gave me directions.

“Everything okay, Easy?” Benita asked while loving her ice cream and freedom.

“Good. How you doin’, girl?”

“Okay.”

“Mama Jo’s cabin drivin’ you crazy?”

“It’s all right, I guess. I know we gotta do this because’a what I did.”

“What’d you do?”

“I kept tellin’ Juice how easy it would be to move all that dope. I didn’t even think we could get in trouble. He shoulda taken Essie and left my butt right then.”

“That’s not my boy,” I said.

“No, it ain’t.”

“But don’t worry. After tonight you two can buy a new boat and go anywhere you want.”

Across the street from Warehouse 86 sat an office building that was four stories high. The FBI, an organization that had been directed by Richard Milhous Nixon to disgrace and, ultimately, dismiss the BNDD, was running the operation. They had requisitioned the top floor and from there they, along with Melvin and a bald man in a bright yellow suit, were directing more than twenty plainclothes agents and officers, secreted on the street below.

At the entrance of the building, where Melvin had directed me to go, I was met by two white men wearing similar black suits. The only difference between the two, that I could discern, was that one of them wore sunglasses.

“Not tonight, brother,” one of the twins said.

“No? I thought the FBI was advertisin’ for new agents out here tonight.”

The men glanced at each other and then, in unison, grabbed me by an arm apiece, dragged me down a hall, and then clapped my wrists together in federal irons.

Then one of the FBI men said into his walkie-talkie, “Sanders here. We have a colored man down here talking about the FBI.”

“Hold on,” someone said on the air.

A minute passed and then the same man asked, “What’s his name?”

I spoke up then. “Easy Rawlins.”

“He’s okay. Bring him up.”

After the coordinated operation was over, Melvin told me that the FBI guy running the show was named Clegg, Summerton Clegg. His suit was also black and his eyes a startling cornflower blue. When I was brought before him by Sunglasses, he looked at me and asked, “This him?”

Melvin stepped up then and said, “He’s the one.”

“Go back to your post,” Clegg said to Sunglasses. Then he turned away to watch the street below through a pair of high-powered binoculars.

“Easy,” Melvin greeted.

“Hey, Mel. Damn, man, this here is almost like real police work.”

He gave me a wry grin and we shook hands.

“Banks and Simmons got here around an hour ago. They’re in there with a few of the warehouse men. No idea what they’re doin’.”

“So, what do you figure?” I asked. “They gonna use the warehouse to send the dope to other places?”

“No. They bring it and sell it, that’s what we think.”

“What if you’re wrong? What if they come outta there with nuthin’?”

“The dope’ll still be somewhere in there.”

“So, you got ’em either way.”

“Yep,” Mel agreed. “Warehouse been closed for an hour now. But the three guys you told us about, the ones that work there, their cars are still parked out back.”

It was a long wait. During that time Clegg did not say one word to me, not one. He only spoke to subordinates, and, I supposed, I was lower than that in his estimation, like that male hyena on an African plain. I didn’t mind. Most of the time I was out there on some private investigation, my ass on the line. Hanging around there on the fourth floor, drinking coffee and talking now and then to Mel, felt good — like I’d been promoted to the position of private detective operations supervisor and no longer had to get my hands dirty.

At a few minutes past eleven, a black Cadillac sedan drove up to the closed entrance, barked out a short honk, and was allowed in. Over the next quarter hour three more cars, all of them dark of color, drove up and were admitted in similar ways.

“When’s your people gonna move?” I asked Mel.

“We figure we let them complete the transactions and then stop ’em a few blocks away.”

At 12:49 a.m., the gate of the warehouse folded upward and one of the dark sedans drove out.

“The first one turned left,” Clegg said loudly into his walkie-talkie. “Give him three blocks and then stop him.”

Three more minutes and three more automobiles.

Clegg raised his voice higher for each one.

Then a few more minutes passed.

Finally, the brown wood-paneled truck drove out and turned right.

“Get him! Get him!” Clegg screamed. “Get that motherfucker!”

The truck was forced to stop short when police and FBI vehicles came out of nowhere to block its way. At least twenty officers from the various agencies jumped out from the cars and doorways, guns in hand.

The brown truck hit the gas and jumped up on the sidewalk, trying to use that way as its escape route. It might have worked if fifteen officers of the law hadn’t opened fire. The wounded truck careered into a furniture store. After maybe half a minute, flames began to lick from under the hood.

The three warehousemen were herded together, their hands over their heads. The furniture store started to burn and so the fire department showed up to add their sirens and bright colors to the already festive tragedy. The bodies of Agents William Banks and Drake Simmons were extracted from the brown truck when the fire was brought under control. Clegg, the FBI bossman, had already descended into the street, situating himself in the middle of the ruckus. That left me, Mel, and the guy in the yellow suit standing at the windows of the fourth-floor vantage point.

“Rawlins?” asked the man I didn’t know.

“Yes?”

He held out a hand and I did too. He had a good grip.

“My name is Steinman, Omar Steinman.”

“You already know my name. You state police or sumpin’?”

“I’m with an international arm of the government,” he said. “Just here to observe.”

“Isn’t this a national thing?”

“It would be. But the fact is, these guys are bringing contraband in from outside the U.S. My interests are more on the structural side of things. You know, how the money moves and who benefits.”

“Wow,” I said. “I understand every word and still I don’t know what you mean.”

The man in the yellow suit moved his shoulder as if he was about to walk away. But then he turned back.

“What do you make out of all this, Rawlins?”

“Pay a man oatmeal wages to cook you a T-bone steak an’ you could bet that a little meat will get shaved off the bone before it makes it to your table.”

“That’s what you think the BNDD men were up to?”

Steinman’s eyes were a strong shade of gray. Looking into those eyes, I was suddenly reminded of Carlos Ortega. He had sat me down to see if I was worth saving from the usual beatings men like me got in the county jail.

I was being tested.

“Not only the BNDD men,” I said.

“You mean the warehouse workers?”

“The person who told me about this warehouse said that while he was sitting out front, the police cruised by at least three times.”

“So?”

“This isn’t a high-crime area,” I said. “No drugs, prostitutes, or gangs. Police got no cause to be here... unless they do.”

Omar Steiman smiled and said, “Unless they do,” and then he walked away.

When he was gone, Mel came up.

“I’m impressed, Easy.”

“With what?”

“A few things. I been wondering how you were gonna get Jesus outta trouble. This sting you put together does it beautifully. But it’s not only that. That guy callin’ himself Omar is CIA. You’re the only one he had words with.”

“I don’t know if that’s good or bad.”

“Me neither.”

After all that was through, I drove to the WRENS-L office on Robertson and stole a nap on my master bedroom office couch.