“A-A-Anger,” I stuttered, trying, once more, to will my heart back down into my chest.
“Yeah, baby, it’s me.”
She sat up straighter with an emotionless smile stitched across her face. I could see in that disguise how she’d hidden her identity from the world.
“You remember when we got kicked outta my room at Toolie’s speakeasy and you and me snuck up into the horse barn them white people owned?” she asked, reminding me of that night and a thousand other stories we’d shared in the months we knew each other.
“The Parkers,” I said.
“Yeah, that was their name. That old guy, the one called Nate, he heard somethin’ out there and ran out with his scattergun. Shit, we run outta there, screamin’ so loud that he didn’t even remember to shoot.” She laughed, reminding me again of the children we’d been.
“I...” I said.
“What, baby?”
“Whatever happened with you?”
“I rode a Mississippi riverboat for a while and then moved to East St. Louie. Sold stolen merchandise and then I started gamblin’. I went to prison once for killin’ some fool tried to love me with his fists. After I got out, we moved down to La Marque, my two kids and me.”
“You got kids?”
“Oh, yeah. Hannibal and Santangelo.”
“Santangelo is your son?”
“Yeah. You know him?”
“He the one hired me to find you, told me that he was your nephew.”
“Saint did?” She actually seemed surprised. “I–I thought you just happened in on me. You know, I been in LA long enough that I always expected to run into you one day.”
“No. He hired me to find you.”
“Oh. He did? Huh.”
“What’s this all about, Anger?”
“I don’t know, Easy. I mean, I knew you was around. Now and then, when I passed through LA, I used to see your friend — Mouse. He talked about you but he didn’t know about us. I heard that you was a detective and shit.”
“Why didn’t you call me?”
“No reason, really. As far as I was concerned you was a part’a the past.”
“All right,” I said, accepting her judgment. “Then why did your son come to me claiming you were his aunt and that he needed me to find you?”
“I have no idea. Saint didn’t even know that I knew you. I guess it coulda been Hannibal. Maybe he told Saint about you.”
“Hannibal?” I asked, hoping for more detail.
“Yeah. He’s my other son, the good one.”
“Anger.”
“Yeah, Easy?”
“Could you please put that gun away?”
She looked down at her gun hand. This seemed to cause some kind of inner turmoil. Her lips moved but she didn’t say anything. Her free hand clenched and then she shoved the pistol back into her purse.
“Somebody shot Santangelo,” I said, once the pistol was safely away.
“You?” There was a deep feeling imparted to that one word.
“A white guy,” I said softly, while shaking my head to the accusatory tone.
“Is he all right?” the mother in Anger asked.
“I don’t think so.”
“Take me to him. Take me now.”
I called Melvin at home. He told me what hospital Santangelo was in. He said that he’d call ahead to make sure we got in to see him.
Santangelo Burris was laid out on one of those mechanical beds with a tube up his left nostril and one down his throat. There were three IVs dripping their holy waters into his veins.
“Oh my God no!” the hardest woman I’d ever known hollered in despair.
She ran to the side of his bed while I pushed up a chair for her to sit in, next to him. She settled in, holding his hand and muttering invocations to God, his angels, and probably even Lucifer if he’d listen.
It was a holy moment. Mother and child at the end of their journey. After a while Anger ceased her mumbled pleas. She just sat there, holding Santangelo’s hand and gazing at him. Spread across her face was the naked pain of all the mothers who ever felt for children they could not save.
I backed up against the slender window that looked in on the two. It felt as if my job was to be the witness to the saddest event that could befall a woman.
We stayed like that for hours. The room was almost absolutely silent, except for the hissing of the respirator that struggled to keep his breathing even. When the sun finally began to make its presence known in the sky outside, a large-bodied, pale-skinned, redheaded nurse made her way to the other side of the bed. She felt around for Saint’s pulse, and, after maybe two minutes, she stopped.
“He’s gone, ma’am,” she said to Anger.
“What?” Anger replied in the most fragile voice I’d ever heard.
22
We sat across from each other at a corner table of a twenty-four-hour diner situated down the block from Temple Hospital. It was the first time I could study the grown-up version of the woman who had branded me with the truth about love and death. She’d doffed the wig, revealing salt-and-dark-chocolate hair. Her skin was dark, and her face still had the sharp-angled beauty of youth. She was older than I by three years, but there was a vitality there that could never be subdued, only killed. Her hands were balled into hard fists trying to choke out the hurt in her heart.
“Who did this to my baby, Easy?”
“I don’t know, Angie,” I admitted, calling up the memory of a nickname I hadn’t used for nearly forty years. “It’s like I said: Saint hired me to find you. I went down to that SRO you stayed at in Compton, the numbers parlor in Hollywood, and asked everybody I could think of. I finally got to the poker club because’a somethin’ that Gigi said.”
“The child?” She raised her head, up above the swamp of misery. “How you get to her?”
I didn’t want to, but I told the woman called Lutisha James about the Bel-Air murders and the little girl’s and the ancient woman’s survival.
“Killed them?” I’m pretty sure that she was asking her God, not me. “Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“That’s crazy. It’s insane to kill them folks.”
Gazing into each other’s eyes, I think we could have stayed like that for hours. But as much as Anger was a part of my orphaned life, I still had a job to do, even though the client was dead.
“Anger.”
“Yeah, baby?”
“Following your trail, it seems as if, I don’t know, you seem to be hiding, running from something, someone.”
She was gazing absently across the early-morning restaurant.
On the other side of the dining hall there was a very large white man in either hospital or restaurant whites sitting next to a gorgeous copper-colored Hispanic woman, decked out in fine clothes as if she had just come from some upscale nightclub. She looked bored but he was happy, chattering away.
“Anger,” I said again.
“For the past few years, I been movin’ from place to place, goin’ from one job to the other. Maybe I don’t need to no more, but it’s habit by now.”