“Listen, D,” he said. “It’s true. The only reason I ran away from you was that some guys had been lookin’ for me at the rooming house I was staying in. I had to run... to protect you.”
She took his hand.
The shock on Niska’s face was proof that she was learning an important lesson.
Delroy looked into each face around the table, ending with me.
“So, what are you gonna do?” he asked me.
I took my time, pondering a thief’s fate.
“You can’t turn him in,” Doreen said. “I’m paying for this... this investigation. Now it’s over. It’s done.”
Ignoring Doreen, I said, “You ask me what I’m gonna do, Delroy?”
“Yeah.”
“Nuthin’.”
“What’s that mean?”
“I don’t wanna get involved in your business or Manny’s.”
“You want me to pay your fee?”
“No. I want you to leave.” I turned to Doreen and asked, “Now, what about you?”
“What about me?”
“Either you dodge a bullet, or you take the next step down.”
She gazed at me, examining my words as if they were on a contract presented by the devil himself.
“Come on, sugar,” she said to the man temporarily named Delroy. “My car’s downstairs.”
Minutes later, Fearless, Niska, and I were still seated at the table.
“I don’t understand what happened,” Niska said. “Did... did she hire me because she wanted to get back with him?”
“Probably not,” I told her. “I’m sure she thought that she wanted her money back. Maybe she dreamed of turning him in to the police. But, you know, love’s a powerful drug. Once she saw him, that was it.”
Fearless leaned back in his chair and looked up to the ceiling.
“Why didn’t you take the money?” Niska asked.
“Because that would have involved you in an aspect of the case that you’re not ready for and that I don’t have the time to take on.”
Niska bit her lower lip and then smiled.
“That was fun,” she said.
“Go on home, honey,” I advised. “Take a few days off and think about all this. Clemmie’s mama’s out of a job, so she needs a few days’ salary.”
18
“You got a crazy life, Easy Rawlins,” Fearless said. “You sure do.”
It was just him and me at the conference table.
“I don’t know about all that, Mr. Jones. This thing with Niska was just Detecting One-oh-One. It’s only now that the trouble begins. And this time you the one brought it to me.”
“Bet ya dollars to doughnuts you the one called Orem on yourself.”
“I don’t even know the man.”
“You armed?” he asked, dismissing my claim of innocence.
“No.”
“Then get so and let’s go.”
While I checked out my .32, Fearless made a short call on my desk phone. I didn’t hear what he said but, then again, I didn’t care.
I was behind the driver’s wheel again, Fearless riding shotgun. He was studying a street map, giving me directions.
“Turn up here on the left, Ease. Yeah, there.”
We’d made our way to a kind of no-man’s-land six or seven blocks north of downtown. There were businesses with apartments on the upper floors, convenience stores next to failed endeavors with boarded-up windows and doors. It was a cityscape almost totally devoid of people, like a specially designed film set waiting for the actors and film crew to arrive.
We turned on a little street named Charles Terrace. Going up the sharp incline, I was about to ask Fearless where we were when he said, “Pull up here, man.”
There was a long sky-blue Cadillac parked about twenty feet up the hill. When Fearless and I climbed out of my car, the Caddy disgorged four men.
The men were Black, wearing dark suits that were designed more for official functions than for any office job. After they took a few steps, I thought I recognized one of them.
“Joe?” I called.
“Mr. Rawlins,” hailed Charcoal Joe, one of the most powerful gangsters in LA.
“What are you doing here?”
“Your friend called me,” he said, motioning his head toward Fearless.
“He what?”
“Well, you know, Easy,” Fearless said, almost shy. “You said that you wasn’t gonna back down. So when you was in that house, I called Joe.”
“How you guys even know each other?”
“Who in this town don’t know Fearless Jones?” Joe asked.
“But why would you come? And there you got three men behind ya.”
“I like you, Easy,” Joe confessed. “You been good by me and so... here I am.”
“Okay, long as you here, why don’t you tell me what you think about this Orem Diggs.”
“Diggs is your fish outta water tryin’ to learn how to breathe.”
“Um,” I uttered. “Maybe you could try tellin’ me about him in words that I can understand.”
“He’s from Cincinnati, wanting to make a place for himself here in the sunshine. Been hookin’ up with people so rich they might be able to benefit from help like his.”
That was the best I was going to get, so I didn’t ask any more.
Joe introduced me to his gunsels, but I don’t remember any of their names. One of them took point and led the way up Charles Terrace until we got to a street with no street sign.
“This way,” he said, and the group went behind him.
It was a dead-end street plugged by a singular building. Not a business, house, or apartment building, not a utility or factory. Not a store. But, for all the things it was not, it was familiar, the kind of structure that would have had a place at any time in history. It would have been right at home in Pompeii, back in the days just before the eruption.
The entranceway had no door, just a more or less rectangular maw, the edges of which appeared to have been gnawed on by some great toothed beast. The interior of the first floor, swathed in gray shadow, was indefinite and vague. When a man in a crayon-blue sports jacket and black pants appeared there, I moved a hand toward my gun pocket.
“Can I help you?” the white gatekeeper asked the Black gunsel who had led us to his door.
“Rufus Tyler et al. for Mr. Orem Diggs.”
I was surprised at the formality of the sentence.
The guardian was lean and pock-faced, with skin that had darkened from too much drinking with maybe a dash of sin mixed in.
He said, “I don’t know no Rufus Tyler,” sneering indifferently.
“Maybe he knows him by another name,” the guide suggested. “Charcoal Joe.”
The sentry decided then to count our number.
He nodded, still sneering, and said, “Wait here.”
Moving away, he faded into shadow, and we waited. It felt as if there was a countdown in our collective mind, ticking off the seconds before something ugly was bound to happen.
But before the dreadful event could occur, the man returned and said, “Follow me.”
Once inside the dead-end edifice I realized that the familiarity of the architecture was that it was most like a burned-out and looted building in a war-torn city. Even the paint seemed to have been blasted away, and there was dust a quarter inch thick frosting the floors. I had prowled through many abandoned premises like it — from Berlin 1945 to Watts 1965. I could almost smell the smoke and moldering flesh.
At the end of a long hall there was a surprisingly wide stairway. Following the flights up four floors, we came to a set of double doors that were new, made from finished oak.
After you, the criminal Charon said with a hand gesture and a bow.
“No, motherfucker,” our articulate point man replied, “after you.”
The blue-coated guide counted our number again and then complied. He pushed the doors open and walked in, seemingly without a qualm.