Gray Dawn

33

From the canals of Venice Beach to North Santa Monica was a short distance to drive, but despite the brevity, I found myself in front of a very different, seemingly commonplace abode. Just a block or two north of San Vicente Boulevard was a small street that had a few restaurants, a pharmacy, and a six-story gray-stone structure that might have been an office building downtown, a small factory in East LA, or a collection of medical offices in Beverly Hills.

On that street the changeable building was the solely owned property of a multimillionaire who had tried twice to kill me, though he probably didn’t know my name.

When Melvin Suggs and Charcoal Joe had failed to attain it, Jackson Blue had provided this address.

There were no windows on the ground level and an overabundance of them from floors two to six. The upper casements were the only thing about the rich man’s private offices that gave any hint that there was something going on in there. The windows were all different. Some were square, others oval or round. There were star shapes and triangles, crescents, and some formed out of sea urchin — like spines. A few were very long, and here and there were checks and dashes, or a series of horizontal or vertical lines; there was even a window comprised of crosshatched tines of glass. And the differences didn’t stop there. Almost every uniquely shaped aperture was filled by a different hue of glass. From clear to foggy white, from red to dusky orange, from shades of green to blue to violet. The upper floors of the otherwise almost nondescript edifice were like a child’s toy waiting for a candle to be lit in its hollow core.

It had no signage, not even numbers to indicate the address. There was a door. It was like the portico of a humble house in a neighborhood that was part of a larger county but had no city affiliation. A wood door with a round iron doorknob. There was no buzzer or doorbell, no knocker.

Standing at that pedestrian brown plank, I thought about Amethystine. It was like she went everywhere with me, hanging on my arm, elated by my adventures and decisions. Without her I would have given up on the Santangelo Burris case. She filled me with an excess of life, something I hadn’t experienced since I was a boy, surviving vicissitudes that would have defeated most grown men.

So I knocked on that very ordinary door, expecting no answer, hoping that no one came to see what was happening outside. But if wishes were fishes...

I waited for one minute, counting the seconds off in my mind. When time was up, I lifted a clenched hand to knock once more. But before my knuckles could reached their destination, the portal door was jerked inward. It was a violent action. And there I was without even a pistol to defend myself from the big bunker before me.

“Yeah?” he drawled.

I don’t know what I expected the person who answered my knock to look like, but this man was the only one it could have been.

At least six six, he was stooped just a little, as if maybe there was too much trunk for him to stand upright. His forward-tilting chest was massive, and his hairless chin gave the impression that it needed a shave. His forehead was too wide and his cheekbones too close to each other. He probably thought of himself as a white man, though I doubted if many others would. His skin was dark the way some southern Caucasians can be. The whites of his eyes were pinkish with flecks of butter-like fat here and there. The pupils were as dark as gray could get. He wore a sports jacket comprised of square yellow and black patches, the costume of a demon out of Santangelo’s and little Gigi’s nightmares.

“Waynesmith Von Crudock,” was my reply to his one-word question.

“What about him?”

“I’d like to talk with him.”

“Who’s askin’?”

“Opportunity.”

His expression, a big-toothed grimace, probably worked for laughter, pain, and the pleasure of seeing his victims bleed or cry out or die.

“You a smart nigger, huh?” he said.

There was no reason to answer.

“That all you got to say?” he threatened.

“Are you Waynesmith?” I asked.

“I am not,” he averred proudly.

“Then I’m not here for you, brother.”

“What kinda opportunity?”

“The kind that can be rigged in a land deed.”

The giant’s unhealthy eyes squinted down to slits; his long-fingered, big-knuckled hands curled into fists.

“Come on in,” he commanded.

Before taking a forward step, I had to suppress the desire to run.

The checkerboard ogre led me down one hall, turned left, and walked until getting to an elevator that was made for three normal humans or for me and my guiding troll.

The sixth floor had no halls, no rooms. It was a huge, cavernous space littered with boxes, furniture, and tables that supported everything from caches of jewelry to empty pizza boxes, half-read books to piles of disassembled electronics.

Leaned up into one corner there teetered a large safe that had been yanked out of some wall, broken open, and left to be discarded, like an old beer can on a tenement roof.

In the far corner of the space where all things lost ended up, there was an enormous chair supporting the weight of a man who, at that moment, one could have easily believed was intent on devouring the entire world.

He was tall and fat, with long hair, a grizzled beard, and a face, though mostly hidden behind hair, that blazed with hunger. This prime example of uncrowned royalty wore a black T-shirt and dirty white jeans. His feet were bulbous and bare. The toenails needed clipping. Standing there before him, I could smell that he needed two or three baths.

The first sound from him was a loud, moist fart.

“Who’s this?” he growled.

“Says he knows something about a deed,” the wolfish doorman replied.

A light beyond the run-of-the-mill, endless appetite dawned in the master’s eyes.

Before the sovereign throne, which was made of some kind of metal and cushioned with pillows and carpeting, there sat a small TV tray with a very large hunting knife upon it, reminding me of the man-hating desk clerk from the Orchid SRO, Gina Lima. I wondered what he used that knife for. If I were to answer that question without thinking, I would have said, For cutting raw meat.

“You here for Hannibal Lee?” he asked me.

“Why wouldn’t I be here for Santangelo Burris, or Lutisha James for that matter?”

“What do you want?” He had no interest in my banter.

“To know the value of a deed,” I said like some warrior poet on a lost page of the Bard.

Von Crudock grinned, his teeth the color of aged copper pennies turning green at the bottom of a wishing well.

“Ten thousand dollars,” he said.

“Hey,” I said, smiling like Jackson Blue used to when he spied a dollar he could steal.

“Do you have it?” the farting monarch asked.

“I know where I can get it.”

“Where?” he commanded.

“I can bring it to you.”

“Why didn’t you bring it now?”

“’Cause Lurch here might’a made me drop it on one’a these tables. Shit. Mothahfuckah look like he could hold me upside down and shake it outta my pocket.”

My humor was lost on Crudock.

“This one was at Solomon’s Mountain,” the ugly servant said then.

“You killed five of my men,” Crudock said to me.

“Do you care?”

That was a Kodak Moment. Crudock gazed at me quizzically, not able even to understand the question. Did he care? He struggled with the concept for a moment or two and then said, “Bring me the deed and I won’t have you killed.”

“You won’t have me killed but you will pay me that ten thousand.”

“Yes. Of course.”

“I’ll have it for you by ten a.m. day after tomorrow.”

“Why not today?”

“Because I say so,” I said, speaking words that I knew Crudock could understand.

He gazed at me from underneath the tangled hair, behind the wiry gate of his beard. His lips pressed against each other as if he were about to spit.

“Day after tomorrow at nine,” he said with a nod.

I considered haggling about the time but decided that no benefit could come from it.

Lurch stayed with me on the elevator and then kept me company toward the pedestrian entrance. He pulled the door open. Before stepping out into a world where no one wanted me dead, I stopped.

“Let me ask you a question,” I said.

“What’s that?” he replied, looking down into my eyes.

“Why’d you kill those people up at the LaCraig house?”

Lurch had a hard face. You imagined that his entire life had been trying to survive a continuous rockslide that broke his body, over and over. He had a hard face, but my question brought a beatific smile to his lips. His eyes went up behind the lids and he moved his head from side to side as if listening to lovely music.

“Sometimes,” he said dreamily. “Sometimes you got to squash some bugs.”

It was the most beautiful, terrifying confession that I’d ever witnessed. But still I said, “That don’t make one bit’a sense.”

That sublime smile turned into a boyish grin.

“I was after the Negress,” he said. “That’s the one that Sasha said was supposed to have the deed. The old rancher knew who I was, he said so.”

“The other ones didn’t know you.”

He hunched his shoulders, ever so slightly.

“Tell me sumpin’ else,” I asked then.

“What?” the happy killer requested.

“What’s your name?”

“Why?”

“I like knowin’ the names of people I might have to kill one day.”

The fairy-tale ogre laughed out loud. He was tickled all the way down to his fungal core.

“Leon,” he said loudly. “Leon.”

It took me less than an hour to make it downtown and to Melvin Suggs’s disheveled office.

“How’d you even find out where Crudock was at?” he asked me.

“I looked it up in an old phone book.”

“Yeah, right,” he doubted.

“He as much as admitted he was behind the attack on Solomon’s,” I said. “They got a big safe on the sixth floor that was pulled out of a wall. I bet it’s the one LaCraig had in his house.”

“So?”

“What you mean, so? He confessed to me. There’s proof of the home invasion. All you got to do is bring him in.”

“Look, Easy, that man Crudock got more money than God. He has residences in four states and in each of them he has at least one senator that owes their seat to him.”

“But he attacked Orchestra Solomon,” I reasoned.

“And if she attacks him back, I won’t be able to do a thing about that either.”

“I told him I could get the deed that all this shit is about.”

“So either give him what he wants or move to Mongolia.”

“You can’t do anything?”

“Not within the law.”

When I got home, Amethystine was there waiting for me, wearing a classic fifties housedress, black with yellow polka dots on an A-line ensemble that went down to just above her ankles. Her flat black shoes were inhabited by brown feet in white silk socks.

“Are you wearing anything under that?” I asked.

“You’ll find out soon enough.”

When she pressed her red, red lips up against mine, I tasted strawberries and whiffed the mild scent of fresh-milled soap.

“I hear you been hangin’ out with Mary Donovan.”

“Yeah,” Amethystine admitted. “She’s nice.”

“If this was three hundred years ago, they would have burned her at the stake.”

“You like Mary,” she said dismissively. “Me and her being friends is not the problem, now, is it?”

I could feel the breath resonating in my chest.

I said, “One of the richest men in America seems to want me dead.”

“Is that all?”

“That’s not enough?”

“Is this a flesh-and-blood man?”

“Quite a bit of flesh.”

“And does he have anywhere near the acumen of the ways of the world that you do?”

“He has an army.”

“Beehive got a queen. But step on her and her army don’t mean a thing.”

“I love you, Amethystine Stoller.”

Jesus, Essie, and Benita made it home that afternoon. By nightfall Hannibal, Violet, and Lutisha James had arrived.

I scoured the standalone freezer kept in a closet on the second floor. From there I brought out gumbo and jambalaya, eggnog mixed with bourbon, and collard greens. While those country delicacies warmed on the stovetop, I made white rice and monkey bread with creole sauce. Benita made a fresh citrus salad to cut the grease and Jesus and Essie threw together a mess of pralines — to end it all on a sweet note.

We had all just sat down to dinner at the long table on the first floor when the front door, which had been locked, was opened.

Feeling for my pistol, I rose from the table.

Then, “Daddy?” she called.

“Baby?”

Feather came in dragging a huge canvas duffel bag.

“Hi-i,” she cried.

Most of the room rose to hug her. The dogs leaped in the welcome.

“I didn’t know you were comin’,” I told her after the third or fourth hug.

“You sounded so sad, Daddy. Bonnie said I should go.”

That night was like a furlough in the middle of a world war. I had family, people I loved, and they loved me. There was no tomorrow. There was no war. Everyone had a full stomach and a safe place to sleep.

I was the last one awake, washing dishes and putting away food. It felt so good, so safe and secure doing family chores, that I was surprised to hear the doorbell.

Erculi and Orchestra stood at the threshold, swathed in solemnity. The wise old man bore up under a great weight and the lady stayed close to him, lending him her strength of will.

I ushered my late-night guests out onto the small terrace, where they took seats on two iron stools while I leaned against the latticed-steel balustrade.

“Cosmo is dead,” Erculi said.

“I’m so, so sorry, man,” I said, feeling his pain in my chest.

“It is not your fault,” the proud Sicilian judged. I could tell by his tone that he’d wondered if I was the cause. He thought it over and, I believed, finally decided that he and his sons had failed in their preparedness.

“It’s not your fault either,” I said.

“Maybe not my fault, but it is my responsibility.”

“What do you need from me?”

Erculi wanted to know where he could find the man who was the cause of the death of his son. Orchestra sat next to him, lending her authority to back up the request.