“You’re Jesus’s father?” she asked, pronouncing his name the way the Spanish did.
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t he come?”
“Benita, his wife, and their daughter, Essie, are down with the flu, so I told him that I would come.”
“Why didn’t he call?” Her voice was getting stronger.
“He couldn’t remember the number and didn’t have it written down.”
“He could have called Information,” she suggested.
“I dialed four-one-one, but there was no Terry or Terrance Lomax listed.”
I didn’t like the way she was looking at me.
“I don’t know,” she said, dubious.
“I understand, ma’am. Your boy’s been in some trouble and you’re thinkin’ that I might have brought some of that here to your door. But I’m not here to mess things up. Just the opposite. Jesus helped me figure out something I could do that might help your Terry avoid spending time in a federal penitentiary.”
“You’re Jesus’s father?” a young man’s voice asked from behind the woman.
“Yes,” I said, looking up into shadow.
A frowning young man stepped forward. He was white and tall, thin and black-haired. Despite his lean frame I got the feeling that he was pretty strong.
“What do they call you?” he asked.
“Easy. Easy Rawlins.”
My answer elicited a smile.
“It’s okay, Grandma,” he said. “He can come in.”
The elder stepped back from the door, her right hand formed into a fist around the barrel of a Winchester rifle.
“Don’t worry, Mr. Rawlins. She won’t shoot you unless I ask her to.”
“Terry?”
“Yes, sir. Come on in.”
Terry led me down a narrow hallway into a dark kitchen. There was an overhead light shining, but it did little to illuminate the room. The gas stove was old and black. The air was scented with mercaptan, the rotten-egg scent added to natural gas. A heavy wooden table dominated the space. The waxy finish was peeling away from the tabletop, which was also scarred and dented.
“Have a seat,” my young host offered. “Can I get you somethin’ to drink?”
“No, thanks. I just wanna talk a little.”
Terry had the kind of thin face that made you think of the outcome of generations of inbreeding, but his eyes, like his grandmother’s, burned with untamed intelligence.
“How’s T.J. doin’?” he asked.
“Who?”
“Jesus, your son.”
“Oh. Never knew people called him that. At home we call him Juice for short. He’s not too good. The BNDD is lookin’ for him.”
“Oh. Oh yeah. He said that he was in trouble with them. That why you’re here?”
“Yeah.”
“You told my grandmother that maybe you could help me with my legal problems.”
“Yes,” I said, sitting up a little straighter.
“Why you wanna help me?”
“I don’t, but it just so happens that the way I plan to get Juice outta trouble will benefit you.”
“How?”
“The BNDD agents that have charges pending against you are also putting pressure on my son. I know that one of them is named Drake Simmons. If I can identify the other guy, I think I might be able to implicate them both in a thing. Once that happens, Jesus will be cut loose from his problems and anybody else being prosecuted and persecuted by those guys will, hopefully, have their charges dropped.”
“Implicate in what?” Terry asked.
“You don’t have to worry about that, son.”
After gnawing a bit on his lower lip, the strong-shouldered, lanky kid smiled and said, “Okay. T.J. says that you’re cool, so why not? The man who arrested me is a dude name of Agent William Banks. He’s with the BNDD, like you said.”
“What they get you on?”
“I was drivin’ three keys out to Laguna Beach. They stopped me, took the stash, and then charged me for one key. That what they did to T.J.?”
“Somethin’ like that.”
I drove all the way back to my office before making the requisite calls.
“Hello, who is this?”
“Me, Mel.”
“You callin’ my wife again, Rawlins?” he asked, only half joking.
“No, sir. This time I’m lookin’ for you.”
“You know I got an office.”
“And that’s the last place you’d want me sayin’ what I got to say.”
There passed a brief moment in which he could chew on my cryptic words. Then he muttered, “What you got?”
I told him about Warehouse 86 and the rumors regarding BNDD agent Billy Banks.
After I’d finished, Suggs went quiet for at least three minutes. I accepted this silence as a compliment. Mel was a brilliant tactician, and he was rarely moved to act solely on someone else’s initiative.
“You sure this Banks is bent?” Mel said at last. “Dealing drugs.”
“I am. And it’s not just Banks. He’s got a partner named Drake Simmons.”
“He’s an agent too?
“He is.”
“And they use this warehouse out in Bellflower?”
“I’m pretty sure.”
“This isn’t some trick, now, is it, Rawlins? I mean some shit you makin’ up to protect your own.”
“No. I wouldn’t do anything that had a chance of backfiring on my boy. It’s all true. The only thing I can’t tell you is when they’re gonna be movin’ the next shipment.”
“I’ll get back to you.”
My answering service had a message from Niska. I wanted to get home, but that would have made for a late-night call to her.
“Hello?” a man said.
“Reggie?”
“Yeah. Who’s this?”
“Easy Rawlins. Niska’s boss.”
“Oh. Hello, sir. You callin’ for her?”
“I am.”
“Okay. Niska,” he said aloud, and then, whispering: “It’s your boss.”
“Hello,” she said then. “Mr. Rawlins?”
“It is. You called?”
“Yeah. I went down to that street in East LA you said about, looking for the father of that man you met in jail.”
“How’d it go?”
“I went with Reggie. I don’t know if I ever told you, but his mother is from Mexico City. So, he came along, you know, to keep me company. We went to two stores near to where he lives. They knew him and his father. One even saw him the day he disappeared, but they didn’t know where he’d gone to. Then we just started talking to people out in front’a their houses. Two different ladies said about how much Rafael liked playing bingo. It’s like the Mexican Lotería but you could win money. We found out where there was one bingo parlor in that neighborhood and went there.
“It was too early for it to be open, so we went to a movie and then had lunch. After that we went back to the bingo parlor and the lady there told us that Mr. Ortega met a woman named Rosa and that they had come back two more times. They said he liked her because she made food like he used to eat in Sinaloa.”
“Wow,” I said, truly impressed. “Did you find Rafael?”
“When the game started up, there was a lady that knew Rosa and she agreed to call. We gave Rafael a ride to his home so they could send a message to his son.”
“I hope you told them that I sent you.”
“We did.”
28
On the drive back to the mountain I thought about Niska and Amethystine. They had very little in common except for the thing Amethystine had said about me: Toes in the soil beneath my feet. That’s what a detective had to have. She had to know her city, its peoples, dialects, and languages, its neighborhoods and histories, everything you could see and touch. A detective’s mind had to be right there in front of her. Your city was your whole world. That’s what Amethystine loved about me, and that same sensibility was what I was trying to impart to Niska.