“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.”
8
“Hello?” she answered after the fourth ring. I was calling from a phone booth next to the outside garage where my car was parked.
“Miss Lorris?” I asked.
She tittered and said, “You could call me Ida, Mr. Rawlins.”
“And you can call me Easy.”
“That’s an odd name for a man.”
“Not if it’s an antonym.”
“Oh. Smart, are we? Where’d you go to college?”
“Up at the university.”
“Which one?”
“The University of Life.”
Her laugh was just what I needed at the end of a concentrated day of detecting.
“Are we still on for tonight, Mr. Hard Knocks?”
“I can pick you up anytime.”
“I’m on the eleven hundred block of South Genesee.” She gave me the address and added, “You can’t miss it. It’s the only blue house on the block. You could get me at seven.”
“I’ll be there.”
There wasn’t enough time to go all the way home, so I made my way to the WRENS-L offices because I kept a few changes of clothes there.
Niska was still at her receptionist’s post, deep in thought. The telephone books were gone and instead she had on her desk a single sheet of paper with a yellow No. 2 pencil in hand. This configuration — a solitary wooden pencil and a clean sheet of paper on a bare desk — reminded me of her first boss, now my partner at WRENS-L, Tinsford Natley. Tinsford was one of the best detectives on the West Coast and it was no wonder Niska picked up habits from him. She had changed out of her coral dress into a dark blue ensemble that I knew from previous appearances came down to her calf.
“Hi, Mr. Rawlins,” she said.
I knew, when she didn’t look up, that she’d identified my footsteps on the outer stairs.
“How’s the detective work going?”
That was when she raised her head to regard me. The big smile on her face told the whole story, a silent tale she backed up with the words “I think I found the guy.”
“What’s his name?”
“The one he’s using is Delroy, Delroy Magi. That’s one of the aliases Captain McCourt’s assistant told me about. It’s such a strange name, it’s like he got it out of a book. I called the number and it’s at a rooming house. The guy that answered was very friendly and he liked how my voice sounded, I could tell. So, when he told me that Delroy wasn’t in, I pretended like I needed to talk with him soon. I said that I found something of his and I wanted to return it.”
“Did he want to know what it was you found?” I asked, proud of my only student’s first maybe-success.
“I said that it was a letter addressed to him. I looked up the name on the envelope and got his number. The guy said that Delroy was on a date with some girl, that he probably wouldn’t be back until tomorrow. I asked if I could bring it to him somewhere else, like where he worked, and he said that he had the afternoon-evening shift at Chieftain’s Cigar Mart on Cahuenga Boulevard. I looked it up. It’s a fancy place out in the Valley.”