“That’s okay, Easy, you know I been dealin’ with men like that since I cut my teeth, sleepin’ in the street.”
When I got off with Jackson I said to the bartender, “I’m gonna get a call on your pay phone in a bit, Madeline.”
“As long as it’s short,” she said.
“That’s a lovely dress,” I replied.
“Oh. Thank you.”
“Yeah,” I added. “Dyed lace over white silk is what I’d imagine Marie Antoinette would wear.”
That bought me a ticket to converse for the next three-quarters of an hour with the weathered debutante.
We talked and talked. The longer we did, the more her posture straightened. Her face took on a glow, bringing to my mind the thought that so many people lived their lives not being at all what they wanted. This certainty echoed with the mission of the Creative Mind.
Madeline was from Michigan, competed in a beauty contest out there. She came in second, but still, a talent scout from Hollywood gave her his number if she ever wanted to throw the dice. She took a Greyhound bus and used that number. The scout, who called himself Noone, did his best to get her work. She did a couple of commercials and general events where pretty girls were needed.
“I finally gave it up,” she said.
“Why?” I asked. “You got that kind of appeal that starlets have.”
“Maybe a little,” she admitted. “But they work you hard for every minute they pay you for. Real hard.”
Then the phone rang.
“Hello.”
“Mr. Rawlins?”
“Hey, George.”
“I got an address for you.”
The phone George checked on belonged to a Gretchen Miller, who lived in a small house on Ayres Ave. in West Los Angeles. I parked across the residential street and down the block, under a big carob tree that threw a dark shadow.
There was a toy red wagon lying on its side in the front yard. Now-dead blades of grass had grown up through and around the child’s conveyance in better times, when someone still remembered to water the lawn; or, maybe, the vegetation throve during the rainy season the previous winter. The windows were all shut and shaded. There were three dark sedans parked in a line in the driveway, running from the backyard to the front.
I sat there for hours.
Now and again big rough-and-tumble men would come or go. The men reminded me of soldiers, deployed in enemy territory that their army had occupied but not completely suppressed.
That’s the real work of a private detective. We sit and observe, take pictures through windows and from behind trees. If you were any good at the job, you’d spend this time creating scenarios that would clarify your way.
There was a long way to go. I wanted to protect my family, new and old. There was Anger and our son, Jesus and his brood, and even Carlos Ortega, an incarcerated survivor looking for his dad.
After four or five hours, when the sun was going down and I hadn’t taken one positive step toward the resolution of any case, except Niska’s, I drove away from the faulty domestic facade that hid a squadron of enemies who had their sights set on the son I had never met.
All that was okay. I was becoming familiar with my targets. And they had no idea about me.
25
Big and bearlike, Cosmo Longo lumbered out from the sentry’s hut at the bottom of the mountain I called home.
“Mr. Rawlins,” he greeted.
“Mr. Longo,” I hailed. “What’s goin’ on up the hill today?”
“She is gone,” he said.
It was a warm evening, but a chill ran over my scalp.
“Ama — Amethystine?” I managed to say.
The hirsute guard smiled and said, “She told me that she left you a note in the kitchen and that she would be back tomorrow.”
I was a little lightheaded and unsteady just standing there.
“She is beautiful,” Cosmo said, reading my mood.
“How you doin’, Big C?” I asked to change the subject. “Your father told me that you been goin’ down to the beach on your days off.”
“I like the ocean,” he confessed. “It is, how you say, vass?”
“Vast, with a t at the end.”
The towering Sicilian grinned.
“Sometimes I swim out a mile, more. There dolphins swim, and sharks sometimes too, I think. There is no more freedom than the ocean. It is a place where everything else is small.”
Amethystine’s note, written with a No. 2 pencil, was on the dining ledge on the second floor. Sitting on one of the high stools, I considered the block print, which was so neat and precise, as if she had been straining to pass on meaning far beyond the words she wrote.
Hi baby,
Sorry I’m not here to meet you. Pearl called from up at their school. She needs some feminine products and a big sister’s love. I’ll stay up there tonight and then be back to you by noon tomorrow.
Okay?
I love you.
Rereading her note at least eight times reminded me of my teen years spent in love with Anger Lee. Every breath, back then and right now with Amethystine, was imbued with the subtle vibrations of that love, that obsession.
Prince Valiant came into the room and hopped up, draping his forelegs across my lap. His big head lay there.
Love gets love, Theressa Edgington used to say. She was an old woman, a neighbor of mine who lived on the first floor of a tenement we both lived in, in the Fifth Ward. Love gets love, baby. Because it shines like a beacon and strikes like lightnin’. You can see it and hear it, feel it an’ smell it on the air.
The answering service had been kept busy taking messages for me. Jackson Blue had been able to get in to see Waynesmith Von Crudock. Mary said that she had information for me too. The last message was from Hannibal Lee. He’d merely left a number for me to call.
I decided to contact the lady first.
“Hello,” Melvin Suggs answered. “Who is this?”
“Damn, Melvin, you gonna interrogate me on your private line?”
“Can’t this wait till tomorrow, Rawlins?”
“It could, but them patent lawyers don’t like me too much I don’t think.”
“Patent? Oh, you callin’ for Mary?”
“I am indeed.”
He banged the receiver down on something hard. After that, I heard him calling his wife.
“Hello?” she said sweetly.
“He’s such a brute,” I joked.
“But he’s my brute,” she said, after a laugh.
“So, what you got for me?”
“The BNDD agent with the backward punctuation scar under his lip is Drake Simmons. His title is investigator, but I couldn’t find out any more than that about him and the agency.”
“No, no, that’s more than good enough. Where’d you get it?”
“I know a dude on the highway patrol, a dispatcher. He said that the BNDD did a joint operation with the CHP a while ago. Simmons was the federal contact. My guy there said that the chief was dissatisfied with the results of the investigation, but my contact didn’t know why.”
“Thanks, Mary, this gonna help.”
“I still owe you, Easy. Call whenever you want.”
“At the lawyers’?”
“No. They fired me.”
“Why? You not a good secretary?”
“They didn’t like the company I keep.”
“Easy,” he said in my ear.
“How you know it was me, Jackson? You got some gizmo on that phone tell you who’s callin’?”
“I got seven phones, Ease.”
“Seven phones? You only got two ears.”
“Between me and Jewelle and my son, that’s six ears.”