“You and Manny can go now.” Albright smiled. “Easy and I have some business to talk over.”
Mr. Albright went behind a big blond desk and put his bone shoes up next to a half-full bottle of Wild Turkey. There was a paper calendar hanging on the wall behind him with a picture of a basket of blackberries as a design. There was nothing else on the wall. The floor was bare too: plain yellow linoleum with flecks of color scattered through it.
“Have a seat, Mr. Rawlins,” Mr. Albright said, gesturing to the chair in front of his desk. He was bare-headed and his coat was nowhere in sight. There was a white leather shoulder holster under his left arm. The muzzle of the pistol almost reached his belt.
“Nice friends you got,” I said as I studied his piece.
“They’re like you, Easy. Whenever I need a little manpower I give them a call. There’s a whole army of men who’ll do specialized work for the right price.”
“The little guy Chinese?”
Albright shrugged. “No one knows. He was raised in an orphanage, in Jersey City. Drink?”
“Sure.”
“One of the benefits of working for yourself. Always have a bottle on the table. Everybody else, even the presidents of these big companies, got the booze in the bottom drawer, but I keep it right out in plain sight. You want to drink it? That’s fine with me. You don’t like it? Door’s right there behind you.” While he talked he poured two shots into glasses that he had taken from a desk drawer.
The gun interested me. The butt and the barrel were black; the only part of DeWitt’s attire that wasn’t white.
As I leaned over to take the glass from his hand he asked, “So, you want the job, Easy?”
“Well, that depends on what kind of job you had in mind?”
“I’m looking for somebody, for a friend,” he said. He pulled a photograph from his shirt pocket and put it down on the desk. It was a picture of the head and shoulders of a pretty young white woman. The picture had been black-and-white originally but it was touched up for color like the photos of jazz singers that they put out in front of nightclubs. She had light hair coming down over her bare shoulders and high cheekbones and eyes that might have been blue if the artist got it right. After staring at her for a full minute I decided that she’d be worth looking for if you could get her to smile at you that way.
“Daphne Monet,” Mr. Albright said. “Not bad to look at but she’s hell to find.”
“I still don’t see what it’s got to do with me,” I said. “I ain’t never laid eyes on her.”
“That’s a shame, Easy.” He was smiling at me. “But I think you might be able to help me anyway.”
“I can’t see how. Woman like this don’t hardly know my number. What you should do is call the police.”
“I never call a soul who isn’t a friend, or at least a friend of a friend. I don’t know any cops, and neither do my friends.”
“Well then get a—”
“You see, Easy,” he cut me off, “Daphne has a predilection for the company of Negroes. She likes jazz and pigs’ feet and dark meat, if you know what I mean.”
I knew but I didn’t like to hear it. “So you think she might be down around Watts?”
“Not a doubt in my mind. But, you see, I can’t go in those places looking for her because I’m not the right persuasion. Joppy knows me well enough to tell me what he knows but I’ve already asked him and all he could do was to give me your name.”
“So what do you want with her?”
“I have a friend who wants to apologize, Easy. He has a short temper and that’s why she left.”
“And he wants her back?”
Mr. Albright smiled.
“I don’t know if I can help you, Mr. Albright. Like Joppy said, I lost a job a couple of days ago and I have to get another one before the note comes due.”
“Hundred dollars for a week’s work, Mr. Rawlins, and I pay in advance. You find her tomorrow and you keep what’s in your pocket.”
“I don’t know, Mr. Albright. I mean, how do I know what I’m getting mixed up in? What are you—”
He raised a powerful finger to his lips, then he said, “Easy, walk out your door in the morning and you’re mixed up in something. The only thing you can really worry about is if you get mixed up to the top or not.”
“I don’t want to get mixed up with the law is what I mean.”
“That’s why I want you to work for me. I don’t like the police myself. Shit! The police enforce the law and you know what the law is, don’t you?”
I had my own ideas on the subject but I kept them to myself.
“The law,” he continued, “is made by the rich people so that the poor people can’t get ahead. You don’t want to get mixed up with the law and neither do I.”
He lifted the shot glass and inspected it as if he were checking for fleas, then he put the glass on the desk and placed his hands, palms down, around it.
“I’m just asking you to find a girl,” he said. “And to tell me where she is. That’s all. You just find out where she is and whisper it in my ear. That’s all. You find her and I’ll give you a bonus mortgage payment and my friend will find you a job; maybe he can even get you back into Champion.”
“Who is it wants to find the girl?”
“No names, Easy, it’s better that way.”
“It’s just that I’d hate to find her and then have some cop come up to me with some shit like I was the last one seen around her — before she disappeared.”
The white man laughed and shook his head as if I had told a good joke.
“Things happen every day, Easy,” he said. “Things happen every day. You’re an educated man, aren’t you?”
“Why, yes.”
“So you read the paper. You read it today?”
“Yes.”
“Three murders! Three! Last night alone. Things happen every day. People with everything to live for, maybe they even got a little money in the bank. They probably had it all planned out what they’d be doing this weekend, but that didn’t stop them from dying. Those plans didn’t save them when the time came. People got everything to live for and they get a little careless. They forget that the only thing you have to be sure of is that nothing bad comes to you.”
The way he smiled when he sat back in his chair reminded me of Mouse again. I thought of how Mouse was always smiling, especially when misfortune happened to someone else.
“You just find the girl and tell me, that’s all. I’m not going to hurt her and neither is my friend. You don’t have a thing to worry about.”
He took a white secretary-type wallet from a desk drawer and produced a stack of bills. He counted out ten of them, licking his square thumb for every other one, and placed them in a neat stack next to the whiskey.
“One hundred dollars,” he said.
I couldn’t see why it shouldn’t be my one hundred dollars.
When i was a poor man, and landless, all I worried about was a place for the night and food to eat; you really didn’t need much for that. A friend would always stand me a meal, and there were plenty of women who would have let me sleep with them. But when I got that mortgage I found that I needed more than just friendship. Mr. Albright wasn’t a friend but he had what I needed.
He was a fine host too. His liquor was good and he was pleasant enough. He told me a few stories, the kind of tales that we called “lies” back home in Texas.
One story he told was about when he was a lawyer in Georgia.
“I was defending a shit-kicker who was charged with burning down a banker’s house,” DeWitt told me as he stared out toward the wall behind my head. “Banker had foreclosed on the boy the minute the note was due. You know he didn’t even give him any chance to make extra arrangements. And that boy was just as guilty as that banker was.”