Gray Dawn

5

Back in the long aisle of operators, the Knockout was waiting for me. She seemed impressed that I made it out unscathed. Her skin was almost as dark as her boss’s hide, but this blackness was more satin at midnight than diseased misery.

“You get what you wanted?” she asked.

“Some.”

She seemed to like my tone — certainty edged with ambiguity.

“I’ll walk you to the door,” she offered.

Nineteen pair of eyes followed us to the door, which she opened.

The surprise came when she accompanied me into the hall.

“You need anything else?” she asked, closing the door behind.

“Yeah. Do you remember an operator workin’ here name of Lutisha James?”

“Yes, I do.”

“What was she like?”

The policy shop manager took a moment to consider the question and then said, “Lutisha was different.”

“Different how?”

“To begin with, she was extremely intelligent, could speak Spanish and French. She never made a mistake with her paperwork, and you only had to explain an operation to her once. After that she knew whatever it was well enough to teach it to anybody else.”

“Spanish and French you say?”

“She would talk to some of our Latin employees in Spanish and once she said something to me in French.”

“Why she do that?”

“I don’t know,” she said, rather wistfully. “I guess... I guess it felt like she was testing me.”

“Testin’ you for what?”

“Same reason that any house cat swivels its head. They’re always on the hunt, it’s in the blood.”

“You said ‘to begin with,’” I prompted.

“Huh?”

“‘To begin with, she was extremely intelligent,’” I said, repeating her words to me.

“Oh, right. Mr. Frost gives me all the names of the people he wants me to hire, but Miss James came in looking for a job. She was the only one who was ever invited back to his cave. She would go there, have lunch, and come out smelling like scotch.”

“A drinker, huh?”

“She always did her job impeccably.”

“Yeah, but I guess you wouldn’t want the other nineteen operators to start havin’ liquid lunches.”

“There’s no personnel department here, Mr. Rawlins. Here, if the boss wants his friend to have a drink with him, that doesn’t mean I have to let anybody else do so.”

I did like the way she talked.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Ida Lorris.” She held out a hand and I shook it, smiling into her dark auburn eyes.

“So,” she said, still holding my hand. “Who is Ezekiel Rawlins?”

“You mean what do I do for a living?”

“I mean who are you to barge in on Brother Forest and then walk out again without a bruise on your face?”

“I’m a man with many friends.”

“Mr. Frost doesn’t have any friends.”

“I’m not talkin’ about his people.”

“Who then?”

That was when I relaxed from the ordeal of interrogating Brother Forest. I’d been ready for a fight to the death with the numbers man, but now Ida’s talk had switched the dial.

I held my hands palms up to indicate helplessness and said, “I don’t know what to tell ya... People.”

“Anybody could get you in our back room is not just people.”

“Yeah, well, I guess some folks might think that a few of my friends are pretty scary.”

“Like whom?” She pursed her generous lips into a gesture that dared you to kiss them.

I was very impressed to hear her using the object form of who in a two-word sentence.

“Um,” I said. “There’s a man named Redbird, whose extinct tribe was native to this continent, a war hero named Fearless Jones, and, um, uh, then there’s Charcoal Joe the Black gangster and Raymond Alexander.”

“Oh,” she sang in a higher register than before, indicating that she was impressed, though not revealing by whom.

“Now you can tell me somethin’.”

“What is it you want to know?”

“How does this place work? I mean, I know you’re takin’ bets, I just didn’t hear anybody callin’ out numbers.”

She liked something about the question, looking at me attentively and asking, “You want to go downstairs and grab a cup of coffee?”

Crenshaw’s Coffee Klatch was up on Hollywood Boulevard. We walked the four blocks, talking as we went.

“To begin with,” she said, “we really do phone sales at S and S.”

“You do? Sellin’ what?”

“Mr. Frost has a woman named Tina Aren working for him. She puts ads in business sales papers and makes cold calls to people who might want our services.”

“And who are those people?”

“Anybody with a legitimate need.”

“And what do you sell to these unknown bodies?”

She smiled at the wordplay and then, when we stopped at a red light, said, “Whatever anybody wants to buy. Goods and services, penny stocks, cleaning products, frozen meat and fish, even vacation packages for airlines. We cold-call clients from lists that Tina supplies and we take calls from people who have read our ads. We also reach out to businesses for other businesses. And we charge twenty percent below the nearest competitor, so if anybody investigates us, they can see that we provide a thriving service.”

“So, you’re completely legal?”

“Oh no. Not in the least. We are a straightforward policy shop. The daily number is chosen from the last dollar digit for the win, place, and show of the fourth race of whatever track is active right then. It’s clean.”

The light changed and we made it all the way to a table at the Coffee Klatch before continuing the discussion.

“But what if you’re making calls to sell magazine subscriptions and all the phones are busy when a client is calling in to make a bet?”

“Only ten phones at a time can be making legitimate business calls and the other ten are open for bettors. Each station has a number, and we switch back and forth between even and odd every half hour or so.”

“But what would you do if the cops came in to bust your operation?”

“When a call comes in for the number of Acme Plumbing Equipment, APE, the person taking the call fills out the standard form for any sale, using the same format we would for any other solicitation. The only difference is that the details identify the person calling, the amount of the bet, and the number they want.”

“And if the cops come in, everybody starts makin’ calls so the phones don’t ring,” I imagined aloud.

“You’d be good at this.”

“So, it all looks copacetic?”

Ida had a beautiful smile.

“And how do your phone operators get paid?” I asked, before taking a bite out of my glazed buttermilk doughnut. “I mean, twenty-one employees make for a big number on the right side of the ledger.”

“You know accounting?”

“I own a little property, and I like to keep track of my own debits and credits.”

“Huh.” It was as if I had just come into focus for her.

“The sales force gets a percentage of whatever profit there is from what they sell. Mr. Frost gives them one seventy-five an hour over that.”

“Damn. That’s a really slick system you got there.”

“It is pretty neat.”

“The only thing I don’t understand,” I said, “is you.”

“My pronunciation is off?” she asked on a smile.

“No. Your pronunciation is perfect. More’n that. You sound educated and you don’t seem to be truly bent. So why would you be workin’ for a dog like Pinky?”

Miss Lorris’s soul was alive in her eyes. She’d been playful enough on the walk and when we were talking about the procedures of their particular policy scheme. But when it got personal, those fun-loving orbs transformed into those of a full-grown and wronged woman.

“Educated,” she said, regarding the word as an offense and me as something somewhat less than human. “You think my schooling means anything?”

“Doesn’t it?”

This question caught her off guard. I was hoping that this meant she sensed my sincerity.

“No,” she said, not quite angrily. “I am Black, and I am also a woman here in America hardly fifty years after women received the right to vote. Most people, men and women, think I should be having babies, cooking my no-good man’s dinner in case he decides to come home that night, and cleaning up any shit I find or fall into.

“We get paid less than men for the jobs they let us have. Our husbands leave us and then forget to pay for their kids. Is that the education you were referring to?”

I didn’t respond immediately. I’d heard this kind of complaint too often to deny it, not only its truth, but also its complexity. Western women were coming out of a centuries-old coma-like state in the 1970s. They didn’t want what they’d been given, and, to some degree, they didn’t want to lose what they were told they had. I knew these things, but also, I understood that I could not speak to them.

It was like Niska wanting to be a PI. Of course she should be enabled to practice that trade. I shouldn’t have any say in that. But, on the other hand, she needed me, or someone like me, to open that door and even to hold it open for a little while.

“What?” was Ida’s challenge to my silence.

“No,” I said softly.

“No what?”

“No to all of it. I mean, you’re right. I got no reason to be questioning you. You doin’ the best you can with the cards you been dealt.”

“And the deck is stacked.”

“Yeah. It is.”

There wasn’t anything to add. So I sipped my coffee and ate some doughnut while she looked like she was staring at me, but I suspected that that gaze was inward. The silence expanded into a basketful of minutes.

Finally, she said, “At least at S and S all the women on the line get paid the same amount as the men. And as long as I’m running the room, I make sure that they have what they need for their kids and their own well-being. At least that.”

“I see what you mean,” I said.

She then fell into another tub of contemplative minutes.

I had a job to do, but I didn’t mind waiting. The pastry was fresh, and Hollywood Boulevard always had something new to reveal.

I saw a man walk by in a full clown suit, makeup and everything. Then there was a woman wearing what might have been a bear coat walking an animal that looked an awful lot like a brown bear cub. A young woman wearing very little stopped an older white-haired man, probably in his sixties. She asked him something with a smile on her lips and he answered her question with a pleasant look, echoing her own. She nodded happily, he crooked his elbow, making space for her left arm to snake through. Then they both walked on, happy with their choices.

“What are you doing for dinner?” Ida asked.

“What?” I replied, shocked back to our little table.

“My pronunciation again?”

“No. I just thought I’d made you mad or somethin’.”

“You didn’t. Men like you can’t help that they feel superior because they might be stronger than I am. At least you know it.”

“Can I have your number?”

Our talk seemed to be about different things, but it wasn’t.

She wrote down her number on a napkin and I folded it away.

“What kinda food you like?” I asked her.

“Good food.”

“That shouldn’t be a problem.”