Gray Dawn

4

Dave Kleiger, the Russian grocer across the street from the Orchid, could not remember meeting a man matching the description of Santangelo Burris, and he had never heard of an Easy Rawlins. So I left the wide swath of Black LA for an address John had given me. That was on Cherokee Avenue in Hollywood. I didn’t want to go there, where Brother Forest was supposed to have set up shop, but seeing him would be like a crash course for ring-rusted instincts.

Brother Forest was from the streets of the Fifth Ward in Houston, Texas, streets I’d once known well. He could squeeze money out of bone and there was no act he would not undertake if it meant that he got what he wanted. Men like him could be found in maggot-infested back alleys and whorehouses where the women were nothing but drug-addicted slaves. Men like Forest came up on you out of nowhere, when you least expected it.

But no matter what it was that I expected, it was not a well-appointed eight-story building, constructed from rich, dark brick and broad, green-tinted windows. At first I was sure that it was a mistake, that John had somehow gotten the wrong numbers, or maybe there was a Cherokee Street somewhere nearby.

Then two men and a woman walked out the entrance of the posh building. The men wore business suits, gray and dark blue, and the woman a purple, red, and yellow minidress of paisley. But what they wore was less important than the fact that they were all white.

I was stuck. There was no other building on that block or the ones north and south of there that had more than six floors. The address John had given was suite 702. Finally, I decided that all I could do was walk in and get redirected to the right alley.

There was an actual uniformed guard behind a desk there at the back of the entrance hall. That clinched it. Brother F had to be someplace else. Had to be.

“Can I help you, sir?” the guard called out. Not young, he had blond hair and pale skin. Rising from his chair, he stood to a full six foot one, tall enough to look me in the eye.

I hesitated then. This was different. I’d been used to being in close quarters with white people for thirty years, all the way back to when I was slaughtering them from North Africa through Italy and France, and finally in the fatherland itself. I could face blood and bombs and insane hatred, but what could I do in this sedate office building talking to a very respectful man?

“Sir?” the guard urged.

“You got a... a man name of, um, Pinklon Frost here?” I managed to pull the name out from the depths of memory. That was Brother Forest’s real name. No one ever used it, and it was only the desperation of my history that culled it from so many years ago.

The guard paused to consider my question. He didn’t have a badge, just a navy-blue uniform and a name tag that read C. JORDAN.

Then he smiled and said, “Seventh floor, suite seven-oh-two, Sales and Support. Are you applying for the job?”

There was no spite or disrespect in his query. He was infinitely pleasant and patient, honestly wanting to know why I was there.

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, I am. Thank you.”

I boarded an elevator that was big enough for four. A white woman in a green/gray plaid skirt and a tan button-up blouse stepped in on the second floor.

“Good afternoon,” she said, smiling sweetly as she had been taught to do in good company.

“Hey,” I replied. “How are you today?”

“Fine,” she answered, looking up at the level register. “But I missed my floor. You know whenever I get into one of these things I think it’s gonna take me where I want to go without pressing the button.”

“I do it all the time.”

By then we’d reached the seventh floor and so I stepped out into the hallway.

“Have a good day,” the young woman blessed as the doors closed.

The first door I came across down the seventh-floor hallway had an oversize silver-and-black sign attached to it. The sign read SALES AND SUPPORT. The door was unlocked, so I walked in.

It was a long and somewhat slender room with ten little tables down each side. There were men and women of all ages and races sitting at nineteen of the twenty little desks. The empty seat, I thought, must have been the job C. Jordan told me about. Each station was big enough for two burly black phones, a pad of paper, and one well-dressed operator.

The phones were ringing mercilessly, accompanied by an offbeat and continuous chorus of many voices answering calls, saying the same three words, “Sales and support,” in many different keys and pitches.

The experience was disorienting, for a moment throwing me back in my bed with the clouds closing in.

At the far end of the hall of telephoners sat a Black woman with no table before her. The chair was set up about six inches from the floor, on a dais. She was studying a newspaper with rapt attention when she looked up and noticed me. Then, letting the newspaper fall to the floor, she rose effortlessly from her overseer’s chair, descended the stage, walked up to me, and said, without even a shred of sincerity, “Can I help you?”

There were two questions balled up into that one — the first was, Is there anything I could possibly do for you? And the second, What the hell are you doing here?

Up close she was a knockout, from figure to face, from dun-orange heels to conservative brown-and-green two-piece dress suit.

I probably smiled.

The expression on her face assured me that I could not be helped.

And then I said, “I’d like to speak to Brother Forest, please.”

Her countenance froze for a moment. The request I’d made was not meant to be spoken aloud in that space... ever. Her eyes worried over my fate, and maybe hers. When I didn’t turn away, running from a faux pas, she said, “Um, come with me.”

To the left of her administerial throne was a door. This she opened, gesturing for me to follow her through.

“Close it behind you,” she said, leading me to understand that no one was supposed to even suspect our destination.

Seven steps later we came upon another door.

She knocked.

I waited.

“What?” a gruff voice said.

“Somebody here askin’ for you,” the Knockout replied.

“Who is it?” the voice threatened.

Realizing she had not asked for my name, she turned.

“Ezekiel Rawlins,” I provided.

“Ezekiel Rawlins,” she repeated.

Then came the wait. I wasn’t worried, but the lady was. I got the feeling that this little interaction was pretty far above her pay scale.

Maybe a minute passed, and then the door slowly opened.

The lady stepped backward, bumping into me. I moved aside, leaving her room to flee. Then I walked through the doorway feeling as if I were entering a neolithic cave.

It was a largish space illuminated by blue lightbulbs set in the ceiling. There was a broad table that would have probably been white under normal lighting. Behind the table stood Brother Forest / Pinklon Frost.

He wore a suit that was what would have been dark blue in regular light and a maybe-yellow shirt with no tie. Almost anybody else would have been deemed presentable dressed as he was. But Brother Forest was a thug that no suit of clothes, address, or governor’s pardon could clean up or legitimate. The strain in his face would look like last-leg fatigue on a good man, but instead the deep creases, the old scars, and the darkness of Pinklon’s eyes told of hatred and determination, an entire history of whips and chains, illiteracy and cunning on a genius level. He was black like the black mold that gathers between old, cracked tiling. His teeth were deeply stained from the dozens of cigarettes he sucked down each day. His sour breath filled the room with its diseased scent. His hands were large, and his smile, when he smiled, was hungry for whatever you had.

“Sit’own,” he ordered.

There was a chair on my side of the table. I made use of it. He paused for a moment, eyeing me warily, and then sat down on his side of things.

“What you want?” he asked. This was high-level hospitality from a man like Forest.

“I’m lookin’ for a woman named Lutisha James.” I put emphasis on the last two words to test a hypothesis.

The big man leaned back in his chair. This brought a whine from the straining wood joints. What emotion, I wondered, was hiding behind Pinklon’s intense gaze? The blue light made me doubt. He might have just been angry that I was there wasting his time.

“I’ont know who you talkin’ ’bout,” he complained.

The tone of that denial exposed the full range of his fear.

“Come on, man,” I said on a sneer. “Stop lyin’.”

“What you mean — lyin’?”

I learned many things from this reaction. One was that whatever it was Santangelo Burris wanted, it was more than just a call to his grandmother. I also understood that even a man as heartless and reckless as Pinklon was afraid of the woman I was looking for, or, at least, he was afraid of what she represented. Brother Forest had changed. He was older and he had something he didn’t want to lose. Maybe it was a wife and family. Maybe, as time encroached, he’d become aware of death. Whatever it was, Brother Forest had moved to Hollywood out of fear.

All that was a big deal, and I had to concentrate not to laugh in his face.

“What you want wit’ ’er?” the bad man asked.

“What do you care?”

“What you say to me?”

“You heard me. I come here lookin’ for Lutisha James and you tell me you don’t know ’er. If you don’t know, then my business is still mine.”

“Fuck you, Easy Rawlins.”

“Okay.” I made to stand.

“Wait a minute.”

“Okay.” I slumped back down into the chair.

“I might’a heard about a woman of that name.”

“What you hear?”

“Why you lookin’ for her?”

“C’mon, man. Do you know her or don’t you?”

“Who you in dis wit’?”

“Look here,” I said with supreme authority in my voice. “I’m lookin’ for Lutisha James, me, I’m lookin’ for her. If you know where she’s at I might let you in on what I’m doin’. If you don’t, then you don’t.”

The dialect coming off my tongue meant that I had shed most of the ring rust. I was ready to throw down with that man, then and there.

But Pinklon was not so brash. He sneered and gave me some hard looks, but that didn’t mean a thing.

“I didn’t do nuthin’ to that woman,” he testified. “Not a damn thing. She worked a desk just like everybody else and I paid what I promised to.”

That was about as much of an answer as Pinklon was liable to give. Realizing this, I stayed silent.

“So, is she?” he asked.

“Is she what?”

“Don’t you fuck with me, Easy Rawlins. Don’t you fuck with me. I ain’t afraid’a you or your friends.”

“That’s where you and me’s different, Pinky.”

Calling him Pinky was the most dangerous thing I did that year.

“Different how?”

“I’m afraid of banana peels and little girls in pigtails. I’m afraid of a car behind me with no headlights.” I was just talking by that time. He was free to make what he would out of what I said.

“So... so... so she want in?”

“I have no idea what she wants, man. I’m lookin’ for her, not workin’ for her.”

Pinklon was a smart man. Smarter than I am. But he was so scared that his brain was no longer available for logical conclusions. He stared at me in that blue haze like a wildebeest that had his haunches clamped onto by a crocodile.

“Then we ain’t got no business,” he finally realized.

I nodded and stood.

“Why you even come here?” the thug cried out.

“Because I knew that she worked the numbers and I been told that you the only game in town.”

If he wasn’t so relieved by whatever it meant that Lutie James wasn’t after him, I do believe that he would have tried to hurt me. I wasn’t worried, though. No. I wasn’t worried, I was a fool, believing I could make brash challenges against bad men without paying for it.

Luckily Brother Forest could see that impudence in the set of my shoulders, misinterpreting it as true confidence.

“Get the fuck outta here, niggah,” he said.