Little Scarlet

26

Suggs accompanied me out of the precinct. Half the policemen in the station came out to watch our passage. If I’d gone alone I would have been drawn into a fight I could have never won. Suggs knew that and walked me all the way to my car. There he extended his hand to me again. I shook it. It had been a long time since I felt that a white policeman saw eye to eye with me. The least I could do was take his hand in friendship.

I had the urge to get out in the streets and search for Harold but I knew better. Los Angeles is a big place. Anyone can hide there. There are docks and train yards and so many back alleys that it would take you two months to search them all once.

No, I wouldn’t get far by driving around, so I went home to see my beautiful patchwork family.

The little yellow dog, Frenchie, met me at the door. He snarled and barked his disapproval at my presence.

“I’m home,” I called, thinking that Bonnie and Feather would be in the kitchen sharing girl talk and making dinner.

“Hey, Easy,” a somewhat masculine voice said.

Jackson Blue rose up out of the love seat.

Jackson was very dark, slender, and short. I’d known him since my early years in Houston. We were what you would call friends but he certainly was not someone I could trust.

Jackson’s own mother couldn’t trust him. He was a liar by nature and a thief from the first day he could close his hands around some other baby’s rattle. But on the plus side he smiled easily, knew all of the important gossip within a twenty-mile radius, and had an IQ probably on a par with some of the greatest geniuses of history.

One of Jackson’s most endearing qualities was his cowardice combined with a willingness to get involved with some of the worst criminals you could imagine. He was always looking over his shoulder or cowering in some dark corner. He laughed easily and I was sure that he stayed so slim so that he’d have the edge when he might have to outrun some irate partner in crime.

“Jackson,” I said.

Now that he was standing I could see that he was wearing a tailored two-piece gray flannel suit with a white shirt, a dark maroon tie, and glasses with thick black rims. I tried to think of why he would be wearing such a getup. But no matter what came to mind there was no justification for it.

“You like?” he asked with a grin, holding up his cuffs and giving a wink.

“Halloween?” I asked, gesturing at the suit.

“You a regular Redd Foxx. No. This is a business suit. I’m a businessman.”

“Hi, honey,” Bonnie said, coming out of the kitchen.

“Daddy!” Feather yelled, careening between Bonnie and Jackson and slamming into my legs.

Feather hugged my right thigh, Bonnie kissed my cheek, and Jackson got into it by giving me a handshake. It was one of the few moments at that time that stands out for me as peaceful and whole. There I was, a man surrounded by friendship and love.

“Uncle Jackson says that there’s people in the South Pacific got two heads,” Feather said.

“Maybe if they buy a head of lettuce at the store,” I told her.

Feather giggled and then laughed until she fell to the floor.

Bonnie picked her up and I kissed her.

“What you doin’ here, Jackson?” I asked.

“Anybody ever need help, they come to Easy Rawlins,” he said.

Maybe I should have turned him away. I already had two or three full-time jobs to accomplish in the next week or so. Jackson wasn’t deserving of special consideration because he was so undependable. But no one I ever knew had a mind like his. And I was going to need some special thinking if I was going to go out after Harold the woman killer.

“What’s up, Jackson?”

Bonnie whirled Feather around and whisked her back into the kitchen.

Jackson sat in the love seat and I pulled up a two-rung step stool that Bonnie had bought so that she could get up on the high shelves.

“It’s Jewelle,” he said. He adjusted his glasses as he spoke.

“Since when you been wearin’ glasses, Blue?”

“You like ’em? I just got ’em last week. Bought ’em up in Beverly Hills—on Rodeo Drive.”

“Near-sighted?” I asked.

Jackson grinned. “No, brother. My eyesight’s twenty-ten. You a small man like me, need an edge with all these violent peoples runnin’ up and down the street.”

He handed me the glasses and I tried them on. It was like looking through the windshield of my car—no change at all. I handed them back.

“I don’t get it. Glasses make you look like an egghead. What’s the angle?”

Jackson smiled again.

“You know I been studyin’ the binary language of machines,” he said.

Computers had been Jackson’s passion for some time. He had been holed up in a small apartment managed by his lover, Jewelle MacDonald, for well over a year reading about how those thinking machines worked.

I said all of this by nodding.

“Well,” he said, “a while ago I decided to see if I could get me a job at a bank or some insurance company workin’ on their computers. I know the IBM languages called BAL and COBOL and FORTRAN. I know all the loops and peripheries and the JCL too.”

I had no idea what he was talking about but it still gave me an inner glee to know that a ghetto-bred black man like Jackson could know all the rich white businessmen’s secrets.

“So what’s that got to do with your glasses?” I asked.

“I been goin’ out on job interviews for the last five weeks,” he said. “At first I was wearin’ my light blue suit but I could see that that wasn’t the way a businessman’s supposed to be dressed. I got me some Brooks Brothers then but still I couldn’t get a job. Finally I realized that I had to do somethin’ about bein’ black.”

We both chuckled. If anyone was a black man it was Jackson. His skin, his accent, the way he laughed at a joke.

“It came to me,” he went on, “that even though I’m little the white people were still scared’a me. So I had to make it so I didn’t seem scary.”

“Damn,” I said in deep appreciation for his uncharacteristically subtle solution. “So you put on those glasses with the ugly frames so the people at the bank would think that you’re a Poindexter.”

“Tried ’em out this afternoon,” he said. “And three people said I’m as good as hired.”

“Damn, Jackson. Damn. You’re good.”

It was rare that I complimented Blue. He grinned to show his appreciation.

“That’s the favor I need,” he said.

“I thought it was Jewelle needed help?”

“She does—in a way.”

“Uh-huh. What’s the scam, Jackson?”

“No scam, man. I swear.”

“No? Then let’s hear it.”

“You know about that big shoppin’ center they puttin’ up over near Slauson?” he asked.

“The one on Figueroa?”

“That’s the one.”

“What about it?”

“The name on the papers is the Bigelow Corporation,” he said. “But you know almost every dime comes from JJ. She bankrolled the project thinkin’ we was gonna be rich.”

It made sense that the young Jewelle and Jackson had gotten together. He was a technical and philosophical whiz, while she had a knack with real estate and finance that put me to shame. And Jewelle didn’t mind caring for a man older than her by decades. She had been with my real estate agent, Mofass. He was quite a few years past sixty when he died. And Jewelle wasn’t put off by a man who lived a rough life either. Mofass had died in a murder-suicide protecting Jewelle from her homicidal auntie.

“. . . so,” Jackson was saying, “I need to work until JJ get on her feet. You know she gonna have to sell almost everything she own to keep the wolf from the door. That house up in the canyon and every apartment buildin’ she got. She says she’s gonna come live with me down in Santa Monica.”

“You like that?”

“She been payin’ my bills for a long time, Easy. Don’t matter what I like.”

It takes a woman to make a man. That’s what my cousin Rames used to say. I never knew what he really meant until that moment.

“So what is it you need from me, Jackson?”

“You remember that answerin’ machine I hooked up for that numbers thing?”

“You mean when those white gangsters were tryin’ to kill you?” I asked. “You mean the reason you livin’ in Santa Monica today? So they don’t find you and shoot you in the back’a your head?”

“Yeah,” he said, giving me the evil eye. “I wanna put that machine on your office phone.”

“Why?”

“I gave your number for a reference. I said that your number was for the office of Tyler Office Machines. I said that I fixed your cash registers and time clocks.”

And there it was again. Jackson couldn’t fly straight down if you threw him off a cliff. He could have gotten a job as a filing clerk or a secretary and worked his way up to the computer room. But that wasn’t how he operated. Get in quick, burn down everything, and then run like hell—that was Jackson’s way.

“Sure,” I said. “I’d be happy to.”

I even smiled.

Jackson didn’t like it. He was ready to give me some long sob story about how we both owed so much to Jewelle and how he was finally trying to settle down and use his mind. He wasn’t used to me saying yes without an argument.

“What’s up, Easy?” he asked cautiously.

“Let’s wait till after dinner,” I said. “Then we can go down and put in your machine and maybe you could do a little something for me.”