Gray Dawn

6

Most often, when it comes to the detecting profession, I prefer to work alone. I don’t want or expect assistance, but on the other hand, I try to give help where and whenever it might truly be needed. So, when I have to ask for aid, I do so with the feeling that I’ve earned it. This intricate excuse in mind, I went to a phone booth on Cherokee, after walking Ida back to the front door of her office building.

I called a number from memory.

“Hello?”

“Vu?”

“Easy?”

“I need to talk to him.”

“What’s your number?” the lapsed Vietcong asked.

I read it off the dial.

“Okay,” she said, and then she hung up.

I held down the receiver lever with a finger and two minutes later the pay phone rang.

After releasing the lever I said, “Ray?”

“Easy.” You could hear the smile on the killer’s lips. “How you doin’, brothah?”

“Okay here, not so much there.”

“I hear ya.”

“What’s goin’ on wit’ you?”

“Vu’s pregnant.”

The ground seemed to shift under my rubber soles. For a second, I wondered if this was another earthquake, like the half-billion-dollar one that happened in the San Fernando Valley the previous year. But then I realized this feeling was a response to Raymond’s news.

Raymond Alexander, called Mouse by many, was a man of violent moods. He could be your best friend or your executioner, a lover of epic proportions or a madman swinging from the rafters. And so any strong emotion coming from him was a sign of potential danger to anyone who knew him well.

“Congratulations,” I cheered.

“Yeah, man, this is a good thing. Very good.”

“How soon?”

“She won’t tell me.”

“Why not?”

“She say, because she don’t want me gettin’ all ovah-protective like Americans do, that her pregnant sistahs would do night work rebuildin’ the Ho Chi Minh Trail till the baby was about to drop.”

“That there’s a tough woman.”

“You bettah fuckin’ believe it, man.”

“So, what you gonna do?” I asked, knowing that there was something there.

“She and me lookin’ for a house.”

“Where?”

“Up in Laurel Canyon.”

“Really? Why there?”

“She says that that’s where the stars line up. It’s pretty safe and Vu like the sky ovah her head to be close up and clear. What about you? You still all heartbroken?”

“No,” I lied, knowing that he knew I was lying. “I’m okay now. I just met this woman might be right for a minute. How ’bout you, you readin’ anything good?”

This question had three purposes. One was to get him off the subject of my love life. Two was, since Mouse became a reader, he was always surprising me with the books he landed on. And three, you needed to give him time before getting down to business. If you didn’t, he’d feel used, even abused, and that was never good.

“Yeah, man,” he said. “I been readin’ this book about India and stuff. A guy name of Rag Heaven wrote it. Hol’ up, I got it right here.” I heard some shuffling around and then: “Here it is: 1971: A Global History of the Creation of Bangladesh. That’s it.”

“Why you readin’ that?”

“It’s all about war and revolution and shit and it’s international, you know? Vu’s always tellin’ me that Americans only worry about what we do and the world’s a helluva lot bigger’n that.”

Mouse was a madman and a killer, but he was also a lot more. If he’d been abused a little less, he might have been a professor at Harvard or, more likely, Howard.

“What about you, Easy?”

“What am I readin’?”

“No. Why the fuck you call me?”

“Yeah. It’s not too much,” I said. “I got hired by this guy lookin’ for a woman and I wondered if maybe you might know her.”

“What’s her name?”

“He says Lutisha James.”

The few seconds of silence over the line told me that I had crossed over into dangerous territory.

“In a hour, meet me at the place before last,” he said, and then he hung up.

Mouse lived a criminal’s life, at least in part. He was a heist man who did work with a continental syndicate that had the capability of striking anywhere in North America. Some branch of the federal government got on his scent a few years before, and so he had to limit the number of people who knew where he was at any particular moment. This meant that I had to keep a mental list of the last five places we’d met.

The place before last was the outside food court at the Farmers Market at Third and Fairfax. He was already there when I arrived, leaning back in a red rubber-coated metal wire chair and wearing a bright yellow suit with a royal blue shirt. His shoes were sharkskin dyed a uniform medium gray. His upper left incisor, which was on display from inside an affable grin, was embedded with a high-quality emerald that was at least half a carat.

“Ray,” I greeted.

“What you wanna eat?” he replied.

Mouse got a kind of gentrified Mexican food plate with hard-shell corn tortilla tacos, refried beans, so-called Spanish rice, and a few slices of avocado. I bought a hamburger and fries from one of the many food concessions.

When we were seated again, the emerald went away and Mouse asked, “How the hell you lose your way an’ end up at Lutie’s front door?”

“A man named Santangelo Burris, look like he come from the back end of a sharecropper’s outhouse, hired me to look for her.”

“He paid you?”

“He did.”

“How much?”

“Five hundred twenty-five dollars.”

“An’ he look like shit?”

I nodded.

“And that didn’t make you wonder?” he asked, nearly closing his left eye.

“I don’t know, Raymond. I guess it made me feel like the old days back down in Fifth Ward. You know, back when all we had was each other. I remember when the preacher, undertaker, blacksmith, and even any police we got were Black people. And you made a deal with anybody wanted your services, whether he had money or not.”

“But this dude didn’t ask for no deal. He pulled the bills out his pocket...” My friend looked up then, a question in mind. “Was they new, clean bills?”

“Dirty, and greasy too. I didn’t like handlin’ them.”

“Huh,” Raymond grunted.

“What?”

“If it was dirty money, then it coulda been his. So, you been out lookin’?”

“Some.”

“Where at?”

“I went down to the Orchid Hotel in Compton. She had stayed there but then she moved.”

Mouse glanced at his left wrist, where he wore an expensive-looking watch. Then he asked, “Where she move to?”

“I don’t know. Some old white woman hired her for live-in or somethin’.”

“Yeah,” he said nodding. “Where else?”

“Santangelo told me that she would be a phone runner for the numbers sometimes, down Texas. So, I went to John and he suggested I go see Brother Forest.”

Just the mention of the numbers man got Mouse to smile again.

“You went to see Pinky?”

“I did.”

“I hear he got this fine-ass woman workin’ there.”

“There was one. I don’t know if it’s the same girl, but she was fine.”

“What Pinky say?”

“He was scared that Lutisha was gonna try and take over his business. That’s when I knew I had to call you.”

“Had he seen her?”

“Not only that, she worked there for a while.”

“Oh, so this ain’t no jive. She out there, an’ people lookin’ for her.”

“Her nephew is, maybe.”

“More’n that, Easy. More’n that.”

“Why you say that?”

Looking at his watch again, he said, “Because I know from a long time ago that Lutie goes to be a live-in domestic when she needs to lay low.”

“So, you know how I can get to her?”

Mouse leaned way back in his chair and studied me, like I was a mark, an enemy, or a fool. And then without any warning he started to recite a poem of sorts.

I was a little stunned by the use of verse. Even though it had the earmarks of a song, it was also a poem. A poem that Raymond Alexander had committed to memory.

“Where’d you get that from?” I asked.

“They say Brownie McGhee penned that ditty but it coulda been Sonny Terry. I mean, it coulda been Lightnin’ Hopkins. All three’a them know her.”

“She a singer?”

“C’mon now, Easy. You heard the words. They wasn’t talkin’ ’bout no singer.”

“Okay. Then what do they mean?”

Holding up his pinkie he said, “Typhoid Mary,” the ring finger, “Lucretia Borgia,” the middle finger, “Boxcar Bertha.” I thought that that was it. But then he held up the forefinger and said, “And the Bitch of Buchenwald too.”

It was true that Mouse had changed since the days he started to read, but much of the knowledge he cherished carried the stench of the profane.

“So, what you sayin’?” I asked.

“Not me, the song. ‘If Lutie sets her eyes upon you...’” Raymond’s swaying head expressed the pity he felt for a lost fool like me. Then he looked at his watch again.

“What kinda timepiece is that?” I asked, taking a little break from our two-way interrogation.

“This here is the Rolex Oyster Perpetual Explorer II.” There was that emerald again.

I held up my right hand, showing a leather-banded wristwatch and saying, “This here is what they call a Q Timex. Cost me one hundred twenty-five.”

“Mines costed ten thousand.”

I leaned back and grinned.

“Okay,” I capitulated. “You win.”

Mouse accepted his victory with a brief head bow and then went right back into the subject at hand.

“She a shadow outta darkness. You will never see it comin’. And you should know that, Easy. The minute you seen Brother Forest hang back, you shoulda known what you was inta.”

I started laughing. It was a deep belly laugh that was so strong it scared me a little. I couldn’t stop. For a few moments I couldn’t breathe. And there wasn’t a shred of humor in it either.

“What you laughin’ at, fool?” Mouse asked. He was smiling.

“You know I know what I’m into. You been here, where I am right now, many, many times.”

“Yeah,” he opined. “Jackson Blue talked to me about it one day. He said that this dude like a psychologist said that it was the, um, come... com... compulsion to repeat.”

The laughter died in my chest.

“You mean you and Jackson were discussing Sigmund Freud?”

“That’s his name. Yeah. I aksed Jackson how come some niggahs be makin’ the same mistake ovah and ovah and he told me about that Sigmund man.”

Mouse had bought an encyclopedia and swore that he read in it every night. He’d been my friend for thirty-seven years and he still surprised me.

“So,” I said. “This Lutisha James, she’s like a crime boss or somethin’?”

“Somethin’.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Mouse looked up at me, his smile at the ready. He was about to say something when...

“Hi there, Raymond, Easy.”

We both looked over to see Vu Von Lihn in all her war-torn splendor. She was clad in olive-green long-sleeved coveralls that somehow accented her figure. Vu had been in a bomb blast in the service of the Vietcong against South Vietnam and the U.S. military. The lightning-bolt scar down the right side of her face traveled directly through that side’s eye, killing it, and leaving in its wake a slightly nacreous white scar in the form of an after-eye-like orb.

Raymond bounced up to his feet, fast as a hare who just heard a dog bark. He pulled out a chair and seated her like the finest trained waiter.

“I seen a booth make that salad you like,” he said at her ear. “Just gimme a minute.”

He hurried away.

“He’s so sweet,” the onetime communist insurgent said, looking at him moving away down the long outside aisle of shops and restaurants.

“Especially when his woman is with child,” I appended.

“He told you?” Vu asked.

“Proud as any man can be.”

When talking to Vu I tended to look into her dead eye. There was something beautiful about that wound. It made you feel that you were in the presence of a living secret.

“He’s a good man,” she answered.

“As long as you not on the other side.”

Vu laughed and tapped my knee.

“You are always on his side, Easy. He loves you.”

“I once knew a man raised a lion from a two-week-old cub in the property out behind the back of his house. He’d go back there to feed and play with her almost every night. She loved him like he was her natural mother. But when that three-hundred-fifty-pound cat run up on him and raise her front paws to rest on his shoulders, you better believe that that love was hard to bear.”

Vu leaned forward, looking me in the face. “You are like the old wise men in the village where I lived,” she said. “You teach with stories and make me want to smile.”

“Here it is,” Mouse announced. He was carrying a largish cardboard bowl, filled with Caesar salad. “I aksed him for extra anchovies.”

It was a pleasant visit after that.

Vu said that she was going to sell the garage, which had a chop shop on its lower level.

“You gonna do somethin’ else?” I asked.

“I’m thinking of going to school to study Asian history.”

“As a corrective for Western stupidity?”

“I love Black men,” she replied, blowing me a kiss.

We talked for maybe an hour or so. Mouse was happy and Vu was too. I told them the news from my rose garden and Raymond told us that he planned to spend more time at home.

After a while I decided to leave.

I’d made it all the way to the parking lot in front of Du-par’s restaurant when he came up behind me.

“Easy.”

“Yeah, Ray?”

“Look, man,” he said. “If you want my advice, you should give up lookin’ for Lutie.”

“Yeah, I got that.”

“But you gonna keep on?”

“For a little while.”