Gray Dawn

32

When I was a soldier — no, it was longer ago than that. When I was a child of nine and then ten, I slept on the back porch of my maternal grandfather’s house in the Fifth Ward. He let me sleep there but I had to scrounge food for myself. I worked when I could and otherwise begged, borrowed, and stole to make the sustenance that a growing boy needs to survive. I didn’t waste a goddamned thing. If I lifted a bunch of carrots off a food cart, you had better believe that I didn’t peel them. I didn’t cut off the green tops. I ate all of what I got, and I would have fought to the death to keep what I had.

That tightfisted habit followed me into World War II. There I’d get myself a half-pound bar of Hershey’s chocolate and carry it around in my backpack. Other soldiers would eat everything they ever had right away, but I’d only stop now and then to break a section off from my Hershey bar and eat it peacefully while bombs went off in the night. And even when I bit into a chunk and realized I’d carried it so long that it had turned to chalk, I didn’t mind. Because, in some crazy way, that loss proved that I could survive.

That ability to put off satisfaction is part of my nature.

And so, when I awoke the morning after the multi-taskforce bust, I decided that it was time to tear open the letter Anger had received.

There were two sheets folded together into a long, ill-formed rectangle.

The first page was a sheet of white paper, on which had been scrawled a note, written in pencil.

The second sheet of paper was Shelly Dormer’s deed to the house in Culver City. I tried to read it, but the print was so small I couldn’t make out the words. When I employed my detective’s magnifying glass, I could read the words but could not make out what they meant.

That was okay. Somebody somewhere spoke deedish.

Two hours later I was once again seated in the thirty-first floor office of my old friend Jackson Blue.

We talked for a while about the life he thought he missed.

“She was fine?” he asked about the Knockout, Ida Lorris.

“Yeah,” I admitted. “Even Raymond had heard about her, somewhere.”

“Oh man. All I got is a lawn Jewelle want me to mow. Can you imagine that? Here I make more money than ninety-nine point nine-nine percent’a people an’ she want me to mow a lawn. Horticulture and the PTA, that’s where I get my kicks at. I know, Easy, you prob’ly think I’m some kinda fool, I know. I know what you think.”

“No, you don’t, Blue. I know you not no fool.”

“No?” His face was all snarled up, like he knew that whatever I really thought, it was worse.

“No. Tryin’ t’straighten you out would be like wantin’ Mouse to promise he’d never kill again. Even if he managed not to do it, that shit would eat at him like cancer.

“Shit. The only thing I feel, the only thing I hope, is that you’n Jewelle give up enough for each other that you don’t break each other’s hearts.”

After that candid conversation, I told him what had happened with the drug bust and the various government cops.

“The CIA too?” he exclaimed. “Are you crazy?”

“I’m just tryin’ to do what’s right.”

“Damn, man. Haven’t nobody ever told you that a niggah doin’ the right thing is worse than suicide?”

“What you got for me, Jackson?”

My friend gave up trying to set me straight, sitting back in his chair and cracking a smile. He put both his small feet up on the desk.

“Me and Mister,” he said after his patented pregnant pause, “spent five hours lookin’ through every file, computer record, county record, city record, and then had to ask other people to look in their physical file cabinets, just to get one name.”

I couldn’t rush the man. He’d once told me that his salary, if you worked it out, was more than a hundred dollars an hour. And here, I owed him five hours.

He brought his feet down, sat forward, putting elbows on the desk, and said, “Shelly Dormer’s heir, after James Martin, is Constance Brill, née Dormer. You know, I got a call from Von Crudock just yesterday. He made it clear that me givin’ him a name like that would be worth a hunnert thousand dollars. Can you imagine that? A hunnert thousand dollars to a niggah like me.” His grin would have put the Cheshire cat to shame. “Can you believe that shit? A street niggah like me makin’ a hunnert thousand for just a name and some numbers? You know, in the old days when we was boaf hangin’ by a string, I woulda sold my own mother down the river for a five-dollar bill.”

“Constance Brill,” I said.

“Constance Brill,” he certified. “She got a address on a canal out in Venice. If you had a telescope, you could probably see her out my windah.”

“What you want, Jackson?” I asked. “I mean, if it’s not killin’ somebody, I’ll do whatever.”

“You don’t owe me nuthin’, Easy. Shit. Back in the day you saved my ass more times than I can remember. Yes, you did.”

“I appreciate it, Jackson. I do.”

“Oh yeah,” he said, glossing over my heartfelt gratitude. “I got that other address you wanted too.”

Constance Brill née Dormer.

I drove as far as the entrance to the canal. A hundred feet or so down I came to a barge-like boat tethered to a metal pole on the side of the walkway. It was an old wooden craft with most of the paint worn off. If someone were to cut the hemp tether, that useless tub would have floated a few feet before it sank down into the channel.

I climbed up on the deck and located a door, knocked upon it.

“Excuse me,” someone said.

I turned toward the land. There was a man, a white man, of course, wearing a tight tan T-shirt on his brawny chest. He also wore sailor pants, but I doubted if he was a seaman.

“Yes?” I allowed.

“Can I help you?”

“Do you live on this scow?”

“What did you say to me?” he asked as his mother probably once asked him when he made some wisecrack.

At that moment the door I had knocked on opened inward. There, three steps down, stood a blowsy woman in a red muumuu dress. Her hair was both the texture and color of hay. Her eyes were pale, but I couldn’t discern the exact color.

“Yes?” she said to me.

“Mrs. Brill?”

“Do you need help, Connie?” the man on the shore-street called out.

She glanced at him and then said to me, “Yes, I am.”

“My name is Rawlins. I wanted to talk to you about a cousin of yours, Shelly Dormer.”

“Oh. Oh yes. Shelly. She passed.”

“Connie,” the faux seaman said.

“Go away, Frank,” she exclaimed exasperatedly. “Mr. Johns told us that you are not a security guard here no more.”

The lady looked to be in her fifties, but my calculations, based on Jackson’s information, put her at least a decade younger.

Frank didn’t like the dismissal, but he accepted it and walked on.

“You ever meet someone that just wants to be mad, Mr. Rawlins?”

“Every day, it seems.”

Smiling with me, she asked, “What is it you wanted to know about Shelly?”

“I’m representing a man who’s interested in your cousin’s will.”

“That was a few years ago.”

“Yes, but this guy thinks that he can make you some money.”

Her eyes widening, she smiled and said, “My place is a mess. Could we go down the street to a little café and talk?”

We sat at an outside table of the Crow’s Nest Café. I ordered coffee and said that Connie could have whatever she wanted. She ordered a salami and cheese sandwich on white bread and a glass of red wine.

“Did you know my aunt?” Connie asked while we waited to be served.

“No. I only became aware of her recently.”

“She was a very sweet woman. Married four times. She used to always say that she was too kindhearted, and most men took advantage.”

“I know people like that.”

“Like my aunt or her husbands?”

“Both.”

Constance had a nice laugh.

The food and wine came and was placed before the oldest surviving Dormer. There was something formal about this, as if we’d made a nonverbal compact stipulating that she would entertain my questions if I fed her.

“So, Mr. Rawlins, what do you want to know about Shelly?”

“Like I said, I’ve been talking to people about her will. And as far as I can tell, you’re her closest relative.”

“Yeah. What she said was that I would receive whatever she had left after other people got what she, um, what she instructed in the first part of the will. But the only thing left was a cultured pearl necklace and a set of rusty old golf clubs that she’d gotten from one of her no-good husbands. I’m sorry. But there’s nothing else.”

“She owned a house,” I suggested.

“Oh yeah. She did. In Culver City. I remember now. Jimmy Martin was left the house.”

“But he died, and now, because of the wording of the will, that property goes to you.”

“Oh my God. You mean, I own a house?”

“Yes,” I said as prelude. “But a very wealthy man wants it. Actually, all he really wants is the deed. He’s willing to do anything to get that deed.”

“But I don’t have it.”

“I know that. The trouble is that your claim on the property presents a problem for the rich man.”

“Do you work for him?”

“No, I don’t. I don’t really like the guy.”

“So, what should I do?”

She was so trusting.

“You could probably sell it to this guy for maybe twenty-five thousand dollars. But without the deed, I don’t know what he’d do.”

“What do you mean?”

“Forget that for a minute. What would you say if I could get you a hundred times what that house was worth?”

“That’s more than a million,” she said doubtfully.

“I can prove it.”

“Mr. Rawlins, I’m a cashier at JC Penney’s. What the hell do I know about millions?”

“You got a family?”

“A son that took my car one day and then called me a week later to say that he had moved to Reno. A daughter that married my second husband, and a brother who doesn’t know what he likes more — little boys or little girls.”

“So, what you’re saying is that any stranger is better than blood.”

Constance Brill laughed, but there were real tears in her eyes.

“I want to retire, sir,” she said. “I want to move down around San Diego and buy a house up on a hill that has a view of the ocean. I figgered it would cost me a quarter million dollars to buy a place like that and then to live there till I was seventy, that’s how long they say life expectancy is.”

“I think that you can do better than that.”

Connie couldn’t help but cry. She was elated and angry and fearful of the potential heartbreak of hope.

“I don’t see how,” she said through the tears.

I took ten twenty-dollar bills from my wallet and passed the fold to her, under the table.

“That’s two hundred dollars,” I said. “Hold on to it for three days and I swear I will make that dream of yours into reality.”