Gray Dawn

3

“Wow,” Niska commented a few seconds after Saint Angel left out the front door of the WRENS-L Detective Agency. “What was that?”

“That’s the kind of clients you get sometimes.”

“He scared me.”

“Me too,” I admitted.

“Really?”

“Look, Niska, if that man didn’t raise your hackles, you got no excuse to be in this business.”

She was seated behind her desk but still reached out as if she was going to touch my arm. It was a friendly gesture.

“I’m gonna go out for a while,” I said. “I want you to lock the doors downstairs and upstairs too.”

“Okay. Where you goin’?”

“To check out Mr. Burris’s case.”

“You’re gonna work for that awful man?”

“Oh yeah. Not everybody comes to you gonna be a sweet co-ed.”

Down around 103rd and Central there was a block-wide four-story building that had a barnlike fourth floor. This air-conditioned space was called, had always been called in all its addresses and reincarnations, John’s Bar. John didn’t have a liquor license nor any other kind of certification. It was just a place that Black people could go to feel down-home, no matter where that home was.

The hours for the establishment were 8:00 a.m. to closing, seven days a week. I got there at about 9:00, so there weren’t many patrons. There were only a couple of day laborers who needed a snort before a long day in the Southern California sun and a few others who came for the morning paper and coffee.

John was standing behind the long mahogany bar wiping it down with an ocher chamois cloth.

The lifelong bartender was an inch taller, two inches wider, and maybe twenty percent stronger than the mythical steel-driving John Henry. He could bust up any fight or crack any jaw without breaking a sweat. One time the strongest man I knew, Fearless Jones, told me, “I wouldn’t wanna have ta tangle with your friend John. He look like he got a serious bite.”

“Easy Rawlins,” John hailed.

“Hey, brother.” I extended a hand, and he gripped it. “I thought Millicent ran the early shift while you worked out back.”

“Oh yeah. She do. But today is special.”

“Special how?”

“She and me gonna get married and she makin’ her own weddin’ dress.”

“That’s great! Congratulations, man. You and her were made for each other.”

Millicent Roram had come to work for John as a bar girl. She served the tables, cleaned up after hours, and, after a few months, started keeping records on materials and money. A year later, when he came to the current address, she moved with him into the apartment that made up the back rooms.

“Yeah,” he agreed. The grin on the bartender’s face told of a deep joy.

“When’s the big day?”

“Monday after next,” he said, as satisfied as a shark that had just swallowed a baby seal.

“Next Monday? When did you propose?”

“Day before yesterday. When she said yes, I told her we could drive out to Reno after closin’ up, but she say she don’t wanna get hitched on the Lord’s day. That’s bad luck. So, that’s why we have to wait so long.”

“Can I come?”

“Oh yeah, Easy. You could even be my best man if the deputy mayor don’t want that job. Drink?”

“It’s a little early for me.”

“You on a job?”

“Maybe. I gotta check out a few things first.”

“Like what?” John stopped rubbing the bar. He could smell that I was there for information.

“What are the best numbers schemes around here?”

“Only one that really matters.”

“Who runs that?”

“Brother Forest.”

“Ah, shit. That man’s like a cancer in your balls.”

John laughed loud and hard.

“He still out behind that elementary school on Denker?” I asked.

“Naw. He moved the policy shop up to Hollywood. He Mr. Big Businessman nowadays.”

“Hollywood? A tar-ass Negro like that?”

“You bettah believe it,” John declared. “Cops down around Watts nowadays like wild beasts. They don’t mess with street brothahs ’cause they might fight back, and there ain’t no profit in that. But if you got a business, legitimate or not, then they lean hard.”

“They on you?”

“Uh-uh. I found the right pocket to line and they lea’ me alone.”

“It ain’t like the old days when the ofays stayed away from where we lived,” I said, feeling the wisdom of the words.

“Come on now, Easy,” John argued. “If we was twenty years old again, it would be the old days right now.”

I was all the way to the car before deciding on the next destination. The choice was between heading down to Compton or out to Hollywood. Without even flipping a coin I nosed my Dodge in a southerly direction, down Central till getting a little ways past the two hundred block.

LA has always been a transient city, as was, and is, the United States, on the whole. Urban folks are always moving in and out, or just away. Compton used to be a primarily white area. Back then there was a rivalry between Black Wattsonians and Caucasian Comptonites. One of the reasons gangs started to develop in Watts was because of raids from Compton. But by 1972 Blacks started to colonize their southern neighbor. Working-class folks bought homes, rented apartments, and looked for jobs close at hand.

I don’t know what the Orchid SRO was before, but now it was a four-story down-at-heel residence for women only.

I parked my pretty much nondescript car right out front and strode in like I belonged there.

But I didn’t belong there.

The first floor was a large living room — like space where there were couches, chairs, and tables for women to sit alone or with others to converse. It felt as if every eye in the place was on me as I made my way toward the reception desk at the back of the room.

“Ladies,” I greeted now and again as I went.

Some smiled and nodded, others frowned and turned away. Almost all the residents were women of color, from high yellow to midnight blue-black. It was a bastion of colored femininity and therefore felt different in a way that maybe you could learn from.

But the intelligence I’d come to gather had nothing to do with gender except for the fact that the person I was looking for might have at one time been a resident of the Orchid.

They didn’t have a proper reception desk, only a library podium with a young brown woman standing behind it. There was a nameplate that read GINA LIMA. The young woman, who might have borne the name on the plaque, gazed at me with what my distant cousin-by-law Riley used to call a belligerent eye.

“Is it Leema or Lyema?” I asked in my most pleasant voice.

“What the hell you say?” was her answer.

“The last name,” I said, gesturing at the nameplate that hung from two nails driven into the front side of that plinth.

“You don’t need to know my name or ask me questions. This is a place for women only and you are not a girl.”

“I know that, and I will be gone just as soon as I can ask a question.”

“You already asked a question,” she barked, just before slapping a vicious-looking hunting knife down on the podium.

I was a little shocked that walking into a building and making a simple request could turn into a life-and-death situation just that quickly.

“Aw, come on now, lady,” I pleaded. “I’m not lookin’ for any trouble.”

“You gonna get some, you don’t walk yo’ old Black ass outta here.”

I was very aware that my two years off the streets, up on my mountain, had slowed me down. Boxers call it ring rust. Whatever you call it, I needed a good oiling.

Her hand was laid across the hilt of that Bowie blade. Any smart man would have backed away ten steps and then run. But I had a question, and it made no sense that I couldn’t get an answer.

“Ezekiel Porterhouse Rawlins,” somebody said in a contralto tone that was juicy and deep.

Without turning away from Ms. Lima, I said, “Stella Voorhes.”

“Baby, what you doin’ flirtin’ with li’l girls like Gina?”

“He ain’t flirtin’ wit’ me,” Gina complained. “Bettah not if he don’t wanna lose whatever little he got.”

Gina lifted her blade as Stella sashayed into view. Peroxide-haired, black-skinned, of a mature age, and with a generous figure, Miss Voorhes was a pinup of the mind.

“Gina,” she said in as stern a timbre as her diva voice could muster.

“What?” the younger woman complained.

“What I tell you about that knife?”

“I told him to leave, and he didn’t,” the younger woman said by way of explanation.

“Do you like your job?”

“Yeah,” Gina replied in a much softer tone.

“Because if I see that mothahfuckin’ blade again I’ma fire your butt and take away your room. You know I don’t need the city comin’ in here threatenin’ my license because you hate every man you see.”

“But—”

“But what?”

“Nuthin’. I’m sorry.”

“Okay. Now, go on upstairs and bury that knife away in that trunk’a yours.”

Gina Lima walked past me carrying the knife in her left hand. I made sure not to make eye contact with her, just in case.

When the young woman started walking up the stairs, Stella turned to me and said, “Easy Rawlins. You know sometimes I wake up at night with your name on my lips. You evah think about me like that?”

“Every chance I get.”

“You got your chance right here, right now.”

“Honey, I’m on the job right now.”

After giving me a contemplative stare, she said, “I heard tell you live in a castle on a glass mountain like that princess in the fairy tale.”

“Not a castle, just a big house. And it’s a mountain all right, but one made outta soil and stone, not glass,” I confessed, “but... yeah.”

“Could I come up there and see you one day, maybe?”

“Just as soon as this job is over,” I lied.

“Yeah. I bet.”

“C’mon, Stella, gimme a break.”

“You got good shoulders, Easy Rawlins. Strong but not sharp like some’a these fools out here today. I could ride them bones all day long.”

Her smile was a thing out of mythology. I was resisting temptation, but if a conversation like the one we were having went on too long... there was only one place it could go. So I decided to cut it short.

“Lutisha James,” I said with a ring of finality to the words.

Amazingly, seemingly without a muscle moving on her face, Stella’s broad grin turned into a grimace.

“What about her?”

“I’ve been hired to find her.”

“She lost?”

“Her mama wants to hear from her.”

“I’m surprised a bitch on wheels like her even got a mama.”

“Why you say that?” I wondered mildly.

“Lutisha is old-school. She got a knife longer than Gina’s in her handbag and dynamite in both feet and hands. I once seen her knock a full-grown man to his knees. She is serious business.”

“She gave you a hard time?”

“Naw, uh-uh. She was quiet enough, and civil too. The only problem I evah had wit’ Lutie was that she liked to play poker in her room, and she wanted to have men in the game. I couldn’t allow that. You know, once you let men in, they hang around like dogs, beggin’ for whatever scraps you got.”

I liked talking with Stella. She brought the best of the old days to mind.

“The guy hired me said that he was her nephew,” I said.

“Fireplug of a man look like one’a those men clean out chimneys?”

“That’s him to a T.”

“An’ he the one payin’ your fee?”

“He is.”

“And he said he was her blood?”

“He did.”

“I hope you ain’t takin’ to believin’ just anything that some fool tells ya,” Stella challenged. “When that man came here all I tole ’im was that Lutie was gone, and I didn’t have no idea where she went to.”

“I can understand that, but in my business, I try and give everybody the benefit of the doubt.”

“That’s what they call castin’ pearls before swine.”

“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “I know. What I’m doin’ is lookin’ for her to ask if she wants to be found.”

“And you had to climb down from your glass mountain ’cause you couldn’t see her from up there?”

“Can you help me, girl?” I asked in faux exasperation.

She gave me a leery look and then reached out to take me by the hand.

“You know I really do like you,” she said.

“And I like you too, Stella.”

“My mama, God rest her soul, used to tell me that it was better to hook up with a man you liked instead’a one that you loved. She said that like lasts a lot longer’n love.”

There was nothing to say to that.

“If I help you,” she said, “will you return the favor someday, if I should happen to need it?”

“Absolutely.”

We both smiled on my oath. That was better than shaking hands.

“A white man come by one day in one’a them fancy limos. I think he was a professional driver ’cause he wore a suit and that kinda military hat with the brim only in the front. He took her and her suitcase outta here.”

“Where’d he take her?”

“Up to some rich people house, on a fancy street in LA somewhere.”

“Did she know ’em? Was she gonna work for ’em?”

“Work, yeah. To take care of some old lady. Andit, Ortit, sumpin’.”

It was good to go down to the Orchid. Being there reminded me of things that most of my people would rather forget. We’d rather forget, all the time knowing that the only way to survive is to remember.