"Getting your client off meant that much to you?"
"Shit. Leon was trash. But Randy had been riding pretty high for a couple'a years and I had it in mind that it was time for him to lose a case." Albright straightened his shoulders. "You have to have a sense of balance when it comes to the law, Easy. Everything has to come out just right."
After a few drinks I started talking about the war. Plain old man-talk, about half of it true and the rest just for laughs. More than an hour went by before he asked me, "You ever kill a man with your hands, Easy?"
"What?"
"You ever kill a man, hand-to-hand?"
"Why?"
"No reason really. It's just that I know you've seen some action."
"Some."
"You ever kill somebody up close? I mean so close that you could see it when his eyes went out of focus and he let go? When you kill a man it's the shit and piss that's worst. You boys did that in the war and I bet it was bad. I bet you couldn't dream about your mother anymore, or anything nice. But you lived with it because you knew that it was the war that forced you to do it."
His pale blue eyes reminded me of the wide-eyed corpses of German soldiers that I once saw stacked up on a road to Berlin.
"But the only thing that you have to remember, Easy," he said as he picked up the money to hand me across the table, "is that some of us can kill with no more trouble than drinking a glass of bourbon." He downed the shot and smiled.
Then he said, "Joppy tells me that you used to frequent an illegal club down on Eighty-ninth and Central. Somebody saw Daphne at that very same bar not long ago. I don't know what they call it but they have the big names in there on weekends and the man who runs it is called John. You could start tonight."
The way his dead eyes shined on me I knew our party was over. I couldn't think of anything to say so I nodded, put his money in my pocket, and moved to leave.
I turned back at the door to salute him goodbye but DeWitt Albright had filled his glass and shifted his gaze to the far wall. He was staring into someplace far from that dirty basement.
4
John's place was a speakeasy before they repealed Prohibition. But by 1948 we had legitimate bars all over L.A. John liked the speakeasy business though, and he had been in so much trouble with the law that City Hall wouldn't have given him a license to drive, much less to sell liquor. So John kept paying off the police and running an illegal nightclub through the back door of a little market at the corner of Central Avenue and Eighty-ninth Place. You could walk into that store any evening up until three in the morning to find Hattie Parsons sitting behind the candy counter. They didn't have many groceries, and no fresh produce or dairy goods, but she'd sell you what was there and if you knew the right words, or were a regular, then she'd let you in the club through the back door. But if you thought that you should be able to get in on account of your name, or your clothes or maybe your bankbook, well, Hattie kept a straight razor in her apron pocket and her nephew, Junior Fornay, sat right behind the door.
When I pushed open the door to the market I ran into my third white man that day. This one was about my height with wheat-brown hair and an expensive dark blue suit. His clothes were disheveled, and he smelled of gin.
"Hey, colored brother," he said as he waved at me. He walked straight toward me so that I had to back out of the store if I didn't want him to run me down.
"How'd ya like t'make twenty dollars fast?" he asked when the door swung shut behind him.
They were just throwing money at me that day.
"How's that?" I asked the drunk.
"I need to get in here … lookin' fer someone. Girl in there won't let me in." He was teetering and I was afraid he'd fall down. "Why'ont you tell'em I'm fine."
"I'm sorry, but I can't do that," I said.
"Why's that?"
"Once they tell you no at John's they stick to it." I moved around him to get into the door again. He tried to turn and grab my arm but all he managed was to spin around twice and wind up sitting against the wall. He put up his hand as if he wanted me to bend down so he could whisper something but I didn't think that anything he had to offer could improve my life.
"Hey, Hattie," I said. "Looks like you got a boarder out on your doorstep."
"Drunk ole white boy?"
"Yep."
"I'll have Junior look out there later on. He can sweep'im up if he still there."
With that I put the drunk out of my mind. "Who you got playin' tonight?" I asked.
"Some'a your homefolks, Easy. Lips and his trio. But we had Holiday, Tuesday last."
"You did?"
"She just come breezin' through." Hattie's smile revealed teeth that were like flat gray pebbles. "Must'a been 'bout, I don't know, midnight, but the birds was singin' wit'er 'fore we closed for the night."
"Oh man! Sorry I missed that," I said.
"That'a be six bits, baby."
"What for?"
"John put on a cover. Cost goin' up an' he tryin' t'keep out the riff-raff."
"And who's that?"
She leaned forward showing me her watery brown eyes. Hattie was the color of light sand and I doubt if she ever topped a hundred pounds in her sixty-some years.
"You heard about Howard?" she asked.
"What Howard?"
"Howard Green, the chauffeur."
"No, uh-uh. I haven't seen Howard Green since last Christmas."
"Well you ain't gonna see him no more—in this world."
"What happened?"
"He walked outta here about three in the mo'nin' the night Lady Day was here and wham!" She slammed her bony fist into an open palm.
"Yeah?"
"They din't hardly even leave a face on'im. You know I tole'im that he was a fool t'be walkin' out on Holiday but he didn't care. Said he had business t'see to. Hmm! I tole him he hadn't oughtta left."
"Killed him?"
"Right out there next to his car. Beat him so bad that his wife, Esther, said the only way she could identify the body was cuz of his ring. They must'a used a lead pipe. You know he had his nose in somebody's nevermind."
"Howard liked to play hard," I agreed. I handed her three quarters.
"Go right on in, honey," she smiled.
When I opened the door I was slapped in the face by the force of Lips' alto horn. I had been hearing Lips and Willie and Flattop since I was a boy in Houston. All of them and John and half the people in that crowded room had migrated from Houston after the war, and some before that. California was like heaven for the southern Negro. People told stories of how you could eat fruit right off the trees and get enough work to retire one day. The stories were true for the most part but the truth wasn't like the dream. Life was still hard in L.A. and if you worked every day you still found yourself on the bottom.
But being on the bottom didn't feel so bad if you could come to John's now and then and remember how it felt back home in Texas, dreaming about California. Sitting there and drinking John's scotch you could remember the dreams you once had and, for a while, it felt like you had them for real.
"Hey, Ease," a thick voice crackled at me from behind the door.
It was Junior Fornay. He was a man that I knew from back home too. A big, burly field hand who could chop cotton all day long and then party until it was time to climb back out into the fields. We had had an argument once, when we were both much younger, and I couldn't help thinking that I'd've probably died if it wasn't for Mouse stepping in to save my bacon.
"Junior," I hailed. "What's goin' on?"
"Not too much, yet, but stick around." He was leaning back on a stool, propping himself against the wall. He was five years older than I, maybe thirty-three, and his gut hung over his jeans, but Junior still looked to be every bit as powerful as when he put me on the floor all those years before.