She held the bottle toward Gigi, but I put up a hand. I looked Anatole in the eye, the question unspoken. He nodded at me, and I allowed Fabricant to commit her misdemeanor.
A few minutes later the little victim child laid her head against my chest again and yawned.
“Hand her to me, Mr. Rawlins,” Fabricant requested.
“She’s not asleep yet, lady.”
“I have a time schedule to keep.”
“Keep whatever you want, but Gigi’s not asleep yet.”
“I—” she started to say.
“You will wait,” Anatole interrupted, using that cop’s commanding voice that would stop anyone short of Mouse.
“Your superiors will hear about this,” she warned Anatole.
“Oh yeah? You got your MD on you, sis?”
“What?”
“I don’t think you have the license to prescribe lemonade. Do you?”
Fabricant’s brows furrowed while she worked out the quality of the cop’s threat.
Finally, she said, “I’ll be outside.”
A few minutes later Gigi was in a light sleep. I carried her out to the social worker’s car and strapped her into the child’s seat in back.
Gigi woke up then and looked at me sleepily.
“Easy,” she said.
“Yes, baby?”
“Are you gonna come see me?”
I kissed her cheek and whispered, “Wherever you are, just say you want to see me, and I’ll come to you.”
Watching the Child Services car roll down the path toward the street, I felt a little pang for the girl. I was about her age when I lost my one surviving parent, my father. Gigi was like me in that she was going to have to make it in a world that didn’t know to care. I hoped that she had someone, somewhere.
There was an ambulance-like van parked in front of the house.
“That the coroner’s truck?” I asked Anatole.
“No. It’s for the old lady.”
“What old lady?”
As if my words were a magical incantation, the front doors of the mansion flew open and out came a man in white. He was pushing a wheelchair that held an ancient woman, swathed in a blanket and strapped to the chair. She was moving her head from side to side, trying to get a look at the man, while yelling hoarse curses at him. She weighed no more than seventy pounds.
“Millicent Corbet?” I asked.
“She was in a room upstairs,” Anatole said on a nod. “Sitting in her own waste. I guess the killers didn’t think she was worth the effort.”
Another male nurse climbed out of the dark van and helped his friend wrestle the old woman and wheelchair into the back of that specialized ambulance.
I watched as they drove off.
“So, Easy,” Anatole said to my back.
“Yeah.”
“You have anything else to add?”
I turned to face him. “You got your car here?”
“I got driven out by Officer Rath. Why?”
“Will you ride with me back downtown?”
“That Lincoln yours?”
“It belongs to the company.”
“I don’t know if I want to ride to headquarters in a pimpmobile.”
“You take your whores in secret?” I retorted, thinking, What the fuck he mean calling my car that?
“You don’t have to be so sensitive, Rawlins. I’ll take a ride.”
11
I took surface streets on the drive downtown. I find it less distracting than the sixty-mile-an-hour route. After we made it to Sixth Street it was a more or less straight shot to our destination.
“How’s it been goin’, Anatole?”
Ignoring me, he turned toward his passenger’s window, looking at something there in the streets. If he was a witch, his familiar would have been some kind of feline that spent night after night hunting down prey.
After a few minutes he surprised me by answering, “I never liked you, Rawlins. You know that, don’t you?”
This aggressor’s question reminded me of a time over twenty-five years earlier. It was nighttime and I was out on my own, not far from our barracks in the city of Hamburg in Germany. That devastated town had been pacified and was deemed safe. I saw the shadow of a man skulking down an alleyway. I shouted, “Halt!” and he began to run. I ran after, service pistol in hand. That was an automatic reflex after three years of combat. I ran the guy down. He was a little older than I, some kind of officer with no weapons and no hope. He was undernourished, you could see the bones in his face. His skin was very pale, and he sported a dark, untrimmed mustache.
“I surrender,” he said, before falling to his knees. “I surrender. A prisoner of war. You must arrest me and give me my rights under the Geneva convention.”
I thought that he’d probably learned those words just so he could plead for his life in a situation like that. He knew, as I did, that German officers were being beaten and sometimes killed by our soldiers. Especially Black soldiers who weren’t allowed the same privileges as captive German officers were. That’s why my prisoner was begging for his life.
Luckily for him I’d lost my taste for blood.
I let him go.
“Why?” I asked the LAPD captain.
“Why don’t I like you?”
I nodded.
“Because... you’re a... a... a, you know.”
“A Negro?”
“I’m not prejudiced, Rawlins.”
“No? Then you just about the only one who ain’t.”
“I’ve never called you a derogatory name. The only times I ever came after you was when I was trying to solve criminal activity. You might be useful sometimes, but you cross that line way too often.”
“That derogatory name, you ever say it out loud? You know, in a parley with your cop friends?”
Silence.
“I just asked you how’s it been goin’,” I said to break the muzzle clamped down on the conversation. “That’s all.”
“There’s been a lot goin’ on,” he said, ceding to my request. “People are down on cops nowadays. They don’t trust us. That makes doing our job harder. What about you?”
“What’s been goin’ on with me? Is that what you’re askin’?”
“Yeah.”
“Never been better,” I said. “But that don’t quite make things good.”
Anatole actually smiled.
“You could have been Irish,” he said, giving me the best compliment he could think of.
“Yeah, the Englishman’s nigger.”
He looked like a man who had just been slapped.
“I just, um, wanted to thank you, Captain,” I said. “I know you don’t like me, but you still do the right thing, mostly.”
“That’s my job.”
“Yeah. I know Niska’s been callin’ your office and askin’ questions that your people don’t have to answer. I just wanted to thank you for helpin’ her.”
“I like Miss Redman. She’s not all angry like so many’a your people are.”
We were at a red light, and so I swiveled my head to look into his eyes. In the back of my mind, I had a whole document of the unwritten history of the people he was referring to; the death by violence, self-immolation, and spiritual suicide that we saw among our own on a weekly basis; the money we squandered looking for some kind of recompense; the children we tried, and failed, to protect from these truths.
But I knew that there was no way for him to understand.
My truth was not his.
The light turned green, and I drove on.
The captain and I went our separate ways when reaching LAPD headquarters. I went to the admissions desk, where I told them I was expected by Melvin Suggs, the third or, depending on how you gauged it, the fourth most powerful cop in the LAPD. They made me sit on a wooden bench, called Mel’s office, and then went about shuffling papers. After ten minutes or so a stocky, olive-skinned woman came out from some back room and called, “Ezekiel Rawlins?”