The man’s breath came in angry huffs. He looked at the three wide-bottomed walnut chairs arranged before my grand desk. I could imagine him asking which chair I wanted him to take. Instead, he pulled an outer chair away from the other two and hurled his backside into it.
Thinking that I’d have to get the chair cleaned, I paused for a second or two and then leaned back in my swivel seat.
It occurred to me that I had rarely been with someone whose breath was loud enough for me to hear it.
“Where did you get my name, Mr. Burris?”
“What?” he challenged.
“I was christened Ezekiel. Only those who know me call me Easy.”
“I’ont know about that,” he replied defensively. “All I know is that I aksed a man if he knew how I could find somebody missin’ and he said go to Easy Rawlins.”
“Who was this man?”
“What?”
Very slowly I said, “Who is the man that told you to call me?”
“I don’t know.” Almost every word he uttered was loud. “It was this dude down in Compton across the street from the hotel where she stayed at.”
“What hotel was that?”
“Ummmm, Orchid. The Orchid.”
Finally, something I knew.
“I went there,” Saint Angel continued, “to find Auntie Lutie, but she was gone. Nobody knew where she went so I aksed the man who owned the sto’ across the street if he’d maybe seen her go. He’s the one said about you.”
His hard breathing did not abate. Anger seemed to vibrate with every word, every gesture.
“So, you went to the Orchid to find Lutisha James. She wasn’t there and a man you didn’t know told you about me.”
He stared at me wondering, I believe, if I had more to add. When I didn’t, he said, “Yeah, yeah, that’s right.” Then he moved the gaze from me to the ceiling and continued from memory. “My grandmama called me up from down home and told me to get Auntie Lutie to call her. She said that they said at the hotel that she had moved out. So I went down there to find out where she gone.”
“Where’s down home?”
“What?”
“Where does your grandmother live?”
“She live in Pistol.”
“She lives in a gun?”
“No, fool, Pistol, Pistol, Texas.”
“Never heard of it.”
“I cain’t hep that.”
I wanted to say Touché, but instead I asked, “Is this some kind of emergency?”
“Sure is. I told you, my grandmama want me to find her.”
There wasn’t a doubt in my mind that this man was lying about something. But that didn’t matter, not right then. It was my job to reveal lies. That’s what detectives do.
“Do you have a picture of your auntie?”
“No. Don’t have no camera. My grandmama got a portrait’a her on her dresser back home.”
“But that’s in Pistol.”
“Yeah. That’s where she live at.”
“What kind of work does your auntie do?”
“She takes care’a old people an’ chirren. Old people an’ chirren. She pretty good at that.”
“Does she have any hobbies or other interests?”
He couldn’t even ask What? about that query. He just stared vacantly, with only a hint of rage.
“For instance, does she, uh, collect china plates or play any board games?” I suggested.
That got me my first smile from the feral man.
“She play hearts,” he said through a wide grin. “Hearts. She really good at that. Sometimes she play for money. Good money.”
“She play any other kind of card games? Bridge? Poker?”
His shoulders told me that he didn’t know.
“What about some other job, other than a domestic, I mean?”
“She not married.”
It took me a moment to realize that the word domestic dredged up marriage from the cauldron of Santangelo’s experience.
“Does she do any other kind of work?” I asked.
He thought so hard on that question that his eyes nearly closed.
“Um,” he began. “Uh. Back down in Texas she used to, um, take numbers over the phone in her house. That’s the only way she could afford to have a phone.”
I could think of more questions, but I doubted that the answers, if they came at all, would be of any use. While I stared at him, his nostrils opened wide, unconsciously testing for danger.
“Why does your grandmother need to talk to your auntie?”
“That’s her private business.”
“Okay,” I said. “All right. But you have to understand that I can’t be lookin’ for people if the one who pays me is out to settle a grudge.”
“It’s my grandmama wanna talk to her daughter. What kinda grudge could there be in that?”
“You’d be surprised at the number of times people want to use me to get at somebody.”
“Why my gram wanna hurt her own blood?”
It was at that point I wondered why I was even entertaining the conversation. This shitkicker out of deep Texas obviously did not have the $125 a day to pay for my services. He couldn’t afford to hire me, so why tease him?
It was this last thought that upset my neatly stacked applecart. I went into this business because poor Black people rarely got a break or official assistance. It once was that I did the work and they paid what they could. Often, we’d trade in favors, not having to deal with money at all. I wanted to get back to that way. Back then I was a happier man.
“Look here, Santangelo, you need to see this from my side’a the table. I don’t know you or your grandmother. I don’t know the man works across the street from the Orchid SRO. How am I to be sure that you don’t have some score to settle with this Lutisha James?”
“She my auntie, man. She my blood. I just need to get her the message that her mama want her to call.”
He had calmed down, was looking at me with the closest he would probably ever get to sincerity. It was something, but not enough.
“I’ll tell you what,” I said. “I’ll look for your auntie. And if I find her I will tell her what you said. If she wants to see you, I’ll make that happen. Or I can just pass on the message about making the call.”
Santangelo Burris’s murky eyes concentrated on me for at least two minutes. This gaze was so intense I thought that if he had had a gun I might have died right then and there.
Then he nodded and said, “Okay. How much it cost?”
I knew he wouldn’t be able to afford my going rate, and I didn’t want to say I’d do it for free. I also didn’t want to offer to trade favors with someone who was that angry.
“How much to find your auntie?”
“Yeah.”
“I charge by the day. Seventy-five dollars.”
“How, um, how many days would it take?”
“If I can’t locate her in a week, I’ll probably never find her.”
“And so that’s seventy-fi’e dollars a day for seven days?”
“That’s right,” I agreed, thinking that this man wasn’t as stupid as I’d assumed.
He gave me another two-minute stare, nodding almost imperceptibly, and then pulled out a thick roll of ten-dollar bills. He peeled off fifty-two notes, counting them out one by one as he laid them on the desk before me. It was dirty money, greasy and worn. After returning what was left of his wad of cash to a jacket pocket, he reached into another pocket, came out with a crumpled wad of green and slowly unfolded it into a five-dollar bill. This he laid upon the stack of tens.
It surprised me that a man looking like he did knew how to do numbers in his head.
“That enough?” he asked.
“Um. Yeah.”
“Okay then,” he said and then rose without using his hands for extra leverage.
“Do you have any idea of where your auntie could be?”
“Naw. If I did I would go there myself.”