“And now you’re a vegetarian.”
“There you go.”
“But if you wit’ this Delilah, then why was you down in Texas?” I asked.
“My uncle died, and I had to help with the breakdown of his farm and shit. Anyway, the class we go to don’t meet this time’a year.”
We three, who some might call serious men, talked about things like the price of gas, TV shows, and even the stock market. When it got down to dessert, Joe turned serious.
“Why you lookin’ for Lutisha, Easy?”
I told him about Santangelo and the murders in Bel-Air.
“What’s in it for you?” the elder crook wondered.
“Tryin’ to do what’s right,” I said.
“What’s right? You save that shit for blood fam’ly, sometimes in-laws, and maybe a girlfriend. But you ain’t expected to owe sumpin’ to some stranger walk in off the street.”
“What can I tell ya, Joe? You just saved my life, so I damned sure ain’t gonna call you a lie.”
Joe moved his head around as if his collar was tight. Then he stood up to take off his arsenic-gray suit jacket. He removed the garnet-red cuff links from each wrist, rolled up the sleeves, and then dismantled the top two gold button shirt studs of his dress shirt.
“You haven’t asked,” Joe said. “But I’m’onna tell ya what I know about this woman you lookin’ for.”
“You know her too? Damn. Feels like everybody knows Lutisha James. Everybody but me.”
“She serious business,” Joe claimed. “Only time I ever heard her name outside’a some scheme or scam was that song Sonny Terry wrote on her. I knew her back when I started workin’. She was the girlfriend of Catfish Garland.”
“Who?” Fearless and I asked.
“Catfish. He ran gamblin’ an’ girls and did some larceny on the side. I kept his books, mostly in my head.
“Anyway, ’fifty-one ’fifty-two he met this woman was runnin’ all kinds’a property outta Chicago. I’ont know if she stoled the shit in Chi, but it come by crates outta there.”
“That was twenty years ago,” I commented.
“Yes, it was, and she was fine. She knew her words and her numbers, but what made Lutisha special, what she taught me, was how to question what you see and hold that up to what you believe.”
“How that work?” Fearless asked.
“Way back then,” the gangster replied, “I hated white people. If I saw a white man, or had to talk to one, I was ready to fight. One night, when me and Lutie was up late drinkin’ and breakin’ down a load she had hauled in from back east, she told me to talk to this white man name of Niles. I said I wouldn’t do business with no white man. When she asked me why not, I said ’cause you cain’t trust ’em.
“I remember that night as clear as if it was yesterday. She was pullin’ a case of stolen watches out this crate. She stood up tall and said, ‘You do business with Curt Bingham, don’t ya?’ I said I did. And she says to me that Bingham had been buyin’ from her to sell to Catfish for years.
“I knew that Catfish had introduced Bingham to Lutie and so it was bad form for him to do a go-around like that. Lutie told me that Niles hadn’t cheated anybody she ever knew.
“I got it. I learned a lot from that woman. And she could play them cards. There are casinos today that have a permanent ban on her because she could read the dealers better’n they could her.”
“The way people talk about her,” I said, “it’s like she’s evil incarnate.”
“If you wanna call a pack’a hungry dogs evil, okay,” Joe allowed. “But the way I look at it, she ain’t no more evil than a hawk’s claw or a tornado bearin’ down. Rather than judge her, you’d do better to stay out the way.”
I tried to imagine how sharp a woman or man would have to be for Charcoal Joe to treat that individual like a peer. I mean, he looked on Raymond Alexander as an unruly child.
Giving up on useless speculation, I turned to the more significant problem at hand:
“Waynesmith Von Crudock,” I stated.
Joe met my stare and smiled. “What about him?”
“That’s what I’m askin’ you.”
“He rich. Could be the richest, really. An’ the way I hear it, he play rough.”
“Crazy?”
“If you worked in a carwash an’ told me that you were gonna buy a ticket from TWA so you could fly to Paris to spend a weekend with your mistress, and you believed that shit, you would be crazy. But if Crudock told me that, I’d just wonder why he didn’t fly his own jet.”
That’s the way Joe talked. He wanted you to feel the nuance of what he meant.
“You know how I can get to the man?” I asked, hoping that that was all the information I’d need.
“Get to him how?”
“You know, walk up to the front door and knock.”
“He ain’t no dime a dozen like Diggs.”
“Neither am I.”
Joe shrugged and grinned. “I’ll ask around. If I get somethin’ I’ll pass it on through Fearless.”
A while after that the restaurant manager brought a black telephone on a long cord to our table. Joe thanked the man with a twenty-dollar bill and then made a call, telling whoever was on the other end that he was ready.
The well-spoken man who had led us to Orem Diggs’s place showed up soon after.
“Take care’a yourself, Easy,” Joe said, before walking off with his gunsel. “Luck don’t last forever.”
“Neither will we,” I said.
Joe laughed all the way down the long hall.
“You want me to come along wit’ ya while you look for this Lutisha?” Fearless asked after we cleaned off the last few crumbs on our plates.
“I don’t think so, Fearless.”
“Why not? Everybody need somebody to back him up.”
“I guess. I’ll call ya if need be.”
“Okay. Don’t forget.”
“I won’t. You wanna come wit’ me to the mountain, man? I mean, a proper bed should be better than some bookstore floor.”
“Nah. Thanks anyway. I’ma call Paris an’ get him to pick me up. He said he wanna talk to me about sumpin’.”
When I left the downtown restaurant, it was my intention to drive home. But on the way I started thinking about my mortality.
Most people wouldn’t understand when I say that Amethystine might signify my demise. I don’t mean that she’d shoot me like she did her ex-husband’s uncle. I don’t even mean that she would turn against me someday and side with my enemies. What I do mean is that she would, and did, impact my soul in such a way that I began to feel my manhood so intensely that I could start to take chances that most fools would avoid, even young fools.
That thought in mind, I decided to drive to the address that the file of the Brotherhood of Free Negroes Everywhere had for Santangelo Burris. He lived on Hubert Avenue just a block or so from Olmstead Ave. It was a small pink cottage behind a sprawling apartment complex. There I encountered another door ajar and no answer to knock or ringer.
I should have left and gone home. Maybe Amethystine would be there to greet me. But how could I love her right if I was afraid of a simple entranceway to a pink cottage?
The front door entered a fair-size living room. The oyster-blue curtains, tangerine rug, and lemon walls made the place look frilly, even girly. But the bloody visage of my client dispelled that illusion. He was lying on the floor, leaned up against the far wall, taking gasps of air like Charcoal Joe’s fish out of water, and nearly out of time. There was blood all down his gray T-shirt, snot and saliva from his nose and mouth. The spilt blood had hardened in places, telling me that he’d been in this condition for some time. He was holding on to his dick through rough jeans.
“The detective,” he said, maybe to some imaginary friend who came to keep him company at the end.