Gray Dawn

7

From the Farmers Market I took Wilshire eastward driving toward the heart of downtown. I kept on going until the addresses dwindled down to almost zero and the late-day traffic attained its densest, most sluggish flow. Those six or seven square blocks are LA’s sweet spot, where the banks and other financial institutions, and the corporate headquarters of many a mogul, thrive on the lifeblood of the people, having dug in like ticks, making themselves at home.

Just a few blocks from the end of the fancy boulevard, on the north side of the street, stood one of the city’s tallest glass-and-steel skyscrapers. This edifice represented the crux of business in America: the mining of the sweat and blood, hopes and dreams, of people who have never and will never see the upper reaches of possibility that their squandered labors have wrought.

I could see my destination from four blocks away. In other parts of the city, and the countryside that surrounded us, I felt most like just another man living his life by steady steps, slips, and slowdowns. But traveling on that tarmac thoroughfare I always realized that I was no more than a simpleton cell occupied with the business of a behemoth so large that it made less sense to one such as I than the stars do on a cloudless night in the middle of the ocean.

I had witnessed that star-strangled sky on my way to World War II.

The parking lot was on Sixth Street, a block north of my destination. The rate was an initial three dollars and then seventy-five cents an hour after the first two. Five years earlier I could have left my car all day for one dollar.

The building I was going to was completely occupied by P9, an international insurance company of French origin. The lobby was full of men and women in business attire, all of them moving with intention, like they were going somewhere important. There was the hubbub of conversation and bursts of laughter now and again. Almost every person in that great space was white, that’s just the way it was.

A small man, more gray than white, dressed in a muted olive-hued uniform, moved to stand in front of me.

“Can I help you?” he asked, and just that fast a half-forgotten rage welled up in my chest and made its way down to my fists.

After all I had accomplished. After all that I had learned, this little man with a halfway-Hitler mustache, graying at the edges, placed his body in my way and asked a question he knew for a fact I could not answer. He knew that he could pull out a pistol and shoot me in front of all the dozens of people surging in and out of that international hub of finance. He could shoot me down and say that I threatened him, that I reached for my jacket pocket, and he feared that I had a knife. All I’d seen and experienced, everything I had built, meant nothing up against the lying word of this high school dropout rent-a-cop. At that moment the most important thing in my mind was to grab that man by his throat using a thumb twist I’d learned while serving in the American army in the European theater. The torque would break his windpipe and nothing short of a tracheotomy could save him.

The security guard had a rectangular name tag over his left breast pocket. WARREN, it read. Warren couldn’t even imagine who I was or what, but still he posed confidently, believing that he was keeping the world in its proper order. I honestly hated him after less than three seconds of our encounter.

Nothing of this feeling showed on my face.

“You mind if I take out my wallet, Warren?” I asked in a pleasant tone.

I’m sure he did not like me calling him by his Christian name, but that was the only identity his tag offered.

Uncertainty worked its way into his forehead and brow.

“Okay,” he mouthed slowly, the question mark in his mien.

Taking a dusky green eel-skin wallet from my back pocket, I produced an identity card. This I held out to Warren.

At first, he just looked at the hand, wondering how this gesture fit into his worldview. A few seconds later, when this offer was not withdrawn, he plucked the item from between my forefinger and thumb. Glancing downward he saw the laminated card with my name, photograph, and security clearance as an employee of the vast insurance company that also employed him.

I was not a regular employee of P9, but French-born Jean-Paul Villard, the president and majority stock owner of the international corporation, was partial to the Black soldiers he’d encountered when we liberated France. So, he gave me a consultant’s ID because whenever he needed a hand that he could depend on, he called on me or one of my friends.

“H-h-how’m I s’posed to know this is you?” Warren asked from his stance there upon the thinnest ice.

“Does it look like me?”

“I can’t tell.” He might as well have added that all you people look alike to me.

“Then do what it says on the bottom’a the card.”

“What?”

“Call the security chief, you know him, your boss, Christmas Black.”

Christmas was the coal-colored eternal soldier who was the head of all security at that corporation. It was then Warren understood that he’d gone from master of his limited domain to the possibility of food stamps and unemployment checks until they both ran dry.

“Um, um, uh, yeah,” he said. “Excuse the mistake, Mr., um” — he looked down to read my name off the ID — “Mr. Rawlins. Go right on ahead, sir. Um, right on ahead.”

Walking toward the elevators I considered what had just passed between me and Warren. I had made sure that that little gray man would hate me even more. He would resent it that I could rise to a level so high that he could never even imagine reaching it. Never. I almost regretted what I had thought and done, but the truth was, I had to stand up to him in order for that hint of uncertainty to lodge itself in his mind. His hate-trained brain was a prototype of the white world. An infection of the sort I provided, here and there, meant that he and his ilk would have to think before they ignored or acted against me and mine.

On the thirty-first floor I was met by a very handsome, tall, and even strapping young Black man clad in a black suit made from a fine fabric I couldn’t identify.

“Mr. Rawlins?” he asked in an even tone that sounded like education.

“Yeah. What’s it made of?”

“What, the suit?”

“You got it.”

“Vicuna wool.”

“You take Jackson’s job?”

“No, sir. Why would — why would you say something like that?”

“Even Jackson would have to dig deep to afford enough vicuna cloth to make a suit.”

“I got a girlfriend from Peru.” The man’s boyish smile revealed his playful side. “Her uncle has a farm where he raises the things. She wove it into fabric, and I hired a tailor. Follow me, sir.”

Jackson Blue’s office was expansive, with floor-to-ceiling windows that looked far enough west that you could see the blue of the Pacific. The walls of the thirty-by-thirty-foot room were lined with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. There were hardback collections and one-off publications, paperbacks, dictionaries, novels, reports, biographies and histories, exposés, and a small corner dedicated to pornography in twelve different languages.

“Easy Rawlins,” scrawny Jackson announced, leaping to his feet. He wore a maroon-colored suit, loose cut to hide how skinny he was.

“Jackson.”

“C’mon, man, c’mon and sit ovah here.”

“Here” was a ten-by-ten-foot area defined by a dense red-velvet rug. There he had three sofa chairs that faced a vacant central point and, therefore, one another. The chairs were upholstered in sheepskin, the fur of which had been dyed lemon yellow.

After we were seated, he asked, “So what can I do you for, Easy?”

“Lutisha James.”

“Oh,” he uttered in a tone that expressed how impressed he was. “What’s your problem with her?”

“Nuthin’ that I know. A man callin’ himself her nephew wants to find her.”

“Who’s the nephew?”

“Santangelo Burris.”

“Oh.”

“You know him?” I asked.

“Nope. Never heard the name.”

“I don’t know him either, but he came to my office and said that his grandmother, Lutisha’s mama, needs to talk with her.”

“Her own mother don’t know where she’s at?”

“That’s what he said.”

“And why come to me?” Jackson asked.

“Come on, Jackson, I been comin’ to you for twenty-five years askin’ ’bout people in the streets.”

“If you hadn’t noticed, I don’t frequent the streets no mo’.”

I had known Jackson since I was a teenager in the Fifth Ward, Houston. Along with Raymond and John, he was one of my oldest acquaintances from that hardscrabble life. It just so happened that Blue was a genius. He met Jean-Paul somewhere and convinced the insurance tycoon to hire him to develop a computer system. From there he went on to strategies and foreign investments. He had risen to become the highest-ranked VP in the entire company.

“Do you know who Lutisha James is?” I asked.

“Yeah. She’s a gambler mainly.”

“What else she do?”

“I don’t know exactly, but whatever it is, it’s not on the Wilshire Boulevard side of the law.”

“You mean she’s honest?” I joked.

“I haven’t heard her name in a very long time,” Jackson offered after sharing a smile at my witticism.

“If you had to find her, how would you go about it?”

At that my old acquaintance-cum-friend squinted, indicating thought. He swiveled his head this way and that and finally turned to regard me again.

“Not enough data, man.”

“Stella Voorhes from down at the Orchid told me that she left the hotel in a fancy car headed for a place on the rich side of LA.”

“Damn, man. I haven’t thought about Stella in years. She was one fine woman.”

“Still is.”

“You got a name Lutisha went to stay wit’?”

“She said Andit or Ortit, somethin’ like that.”

“Huh,” he grunted. And then for a while he committed to silent thought.

After a bit he said, “You know, one time I seen Lutisha at a jazz club called Paradise. She was playin’ five-card stud... winnin’ too.”

I just nodded. I didn’t want to engage him in conversation because when Jackson set his massive intelligence to working out a problem he had to approach it stealthily.

He grunted again and then said, “You hear about them bank robbers up around Fresno, in Riverdale, went after this UCB branch?”

This question meant that Jackson wanted to conversate while trying to solve the problem of Lutisha James at the back of his mind.

“No,” I said. “What about ’em?”

“They had been plannin’ a straightforward robbery, but when they looked at the layout of the buildin’, they saw that one of the foot-thick walls to the vault was probably made from plaster. So, they went back to the drawin’ board, found the wall in a dentist’s office next door, and went through that on a weekend and then took down the plaster wall to the safe. They got away with seven hundred seventy-eight thousand two hunnert forty-six dollars. That’s how much the bank admitted to.”

“That’s a haul,” I said in reply to his talk-thinking.

“Woulda been except one’a them motherfuckers couldn’t help but brag. Add that to the fact that the bank put a ten percent reward on the robbers’ capture, and he signed the warrant for the whole crew...” He was about to say something else when a thought came to mind.

He snapped his fingers and cried out, “Mister! Mister!”

The young Black man in the vicuna suit hurried in.

“Yes, Mr. Blue?”

“Bring me the Southern California Social Register.”

“For how long back?”

“Last twenty years.”

Without another word the young man named Mister departed.

“I bet you the name they gave Stella was Corbet Orbit,” the top VP said to me.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“It’s a company that does radar designs for NASA. It was started by a dude name of Corbet, Lawn T. Corbet. He had a wife named Millicent. Yeah. The Corbet Orbit Corporation.”

Mister brought in the many tomes that comprised the upper crust of LA’s social register for the previous twenty years. Jackson rummaged around the pages until he found what he wanted.

“That’s it,” he said. “Lawn T. Corbet. He’s dead but his wife, Millicent, still around. She old, though. If Lutisha doin’ domestic work, I’m sure Millie could use it. She up in Bel-Air, the rich side’a town, just like Stella said. We could get the company Rolls to drive you over there. That way they’d kinda have to let you in.”

“Thanks, Blue, but I have a date to get ready for.”

“Hot date?”

“Simmering.”

“She got a friend?” Jackson asked, sporting a hopeful grin.

Here he was, one of the most powerful men in international finance and technology, married to one of the top real estate moguls of Southern California, and still, when someone mentioned a woman who might let him kiss her neck, he was willing to lose it all.

“Why would you wanna go after some tail in the street, man? I thought you said you didn’t get out in the hood no more.”

“Just ’cause I don’t, don’t mean I don’t wanna.”