“But she stayed at the Orchid?”
“Yeah. I aksed them where she went but they didn’t know.”
“You think she might work numbers here in LA?”
“I don’t know nuttin’ ’bout that. I just need you to go out and find ’er.”
Giving up on getting any more out of the boar-man, I asked, “How do I get in touch with you?”
“What for?”
“To tell you what I’ve found.”
“Oh. How long you think it’a take?”
“Maybe one day,” I said. “Maybe never.”
“But you gonna get into it right away, right? My grandmama need to talk to her.”
“It’s the only job I got right now. I’ll be on it this very morning.”
“Okay.”
“So, what’s your number?”
“Don’t worry about that. I’ma... I’ma... I’ll call you.”
“It’d be better if I could call you.”
“I’ont have a number right now. I’ll call you at the end’a the week.”
I shrugged and nodded.
“Okay,” he said. “I’ll call Friday. You be here, now.”
He turned and walked down the short hall from my office to the front door.
I followed him to make sure that he didn’t take a bite out of or stamp on Niska.
3
“Wow,” Niska commented a few seconds after Saint Angel left out the front door of the WRENS-L Detective Agency. “What was that?”
“That’s the kind of clients you get sometimes.”
“He scared me.”
“Me too,” I admitted.
“Really?”
“Look, Niska, if that man didn’t raise your hackles, you got no excuse to be in this business.”
She was seated behind her desk but still reached out as if she was going to touch my arm. It was a friendly gesture.
“I’m gonna go out for a while,” I said. “I want you to lock the doors downstairs and upstairs too.”
“Okay. Where you goin’?”
“To check out Mr. Burris’s case.”
“You’re gonna work for that awful man?”
“Oh yeah. Not everybody comes to you gonna be a sweet co-ed.”
Down around 103rd and Central there was a block-wide four-story building that had a barnlike fourth floor. This air-conditioned space was called, had always been called in all its addresses and reincarnations, John’s Bar. John didn’t have a liquor license nor any other kind of certification. It was just a place that Black people could go to feel down-home, no matter where that home was.
The hours for the establishment were 8:00 a.m. to closing, seven days a week. I got there at about 9:00, so there weren’t many patrons. There were only a couple of day laborers who needed a snort before a long day in the Southern California sun and a few others who came for the morning paper and coffee.
John was standing behind the long mahogany bar wiping it down with an ocher chamois cloth.
The lifelong bartender was an inch taller, two inches wider, and maybe twenty percent stronger than the mythical steel-driving John Henry. He could bust up any fight or crack any jaw without breaking a sweat. One time the strongest man I knew, Fearless Jones, told me, “I wouldn’t wanna have ta tangle with your friend John. He look like he got a serious bite.”
“Easy Rawlins,” John hailed.
“Hey, brother.” I extended a hand, and he gripped it. “I thought Millicent ran the early shift while you worked out back.”
“Oh yeah. She do. But today is special.”
“Special how?”
“She and me gonna get married and she makin’ her own weddin’ dress.”
“That’s great! Congratulations, man. You and her were made for each other.”
Millicent Roram had come to work for John as a bar girl. She served the tables, cleaned up after hours, and, after a few months, started keeping records on materials and money. A year later, when he came to the current address, she moved with him into the apartment that made up the back rooms.
“Yeah,” he agreed. The grin on the bartender’s face told of a deep joy.
“When’s the big day?”
“Monday after next,” he said, as satisfied as a shark that had just swallowed a baby seal.
“Next Monday? When did you propose?”
“Day before yesterday. When she said yes, I told her we could drive out to Reno after closin’ up, but she say she don’t wanna get hitched on the Lord’s day. That’s bad luck. So, that’s why we have to wait so long.”
“Can I come?”
“Oh yeah, Easy. You could even be my best man if the deputy mayor don’t want that job. Drink?”
“It’s a little early for me.”
“You on a job?”
“Maybe. I gotta check out a few things first.”
“Like what?” John stopped rubbing the bar. He could smell that I was there for information.
“What are the best numbers schemes around here?”
“Only one that really matters.”
“Who runs that?”
“Brother Forest.”
“Ah, shit. That man’s like a cancer in your balls.”
John laughed loud and hard.
“He still out behind that elementary school on Denker?” I asked.
“Naw. He moved the policy shop up to Hollywood. He Mr. Big Businessman nowadays.”
“Hollywood? A tar-ass Negro like that?”
“You bettah believe it,” John declared. “Cops down around Watts nowadays like wild beasts. They don’t mess with street brothahs ’cause they might fight back, and there ain’t no profit in that. But if you got a business, legitimate or not, then they lean hard.”
“They on you?”
“Uh-uh. I found the right pocket to line and they lea’ me alone.”
“It ain’t like the old days when the ofays stayed away from where we lived,” I said, feeling the wisdom of the words.
“Come on now, Easy,” John argued. “If we was twenty years old again, it would be the old days right now.”
I was all the way to the car before deciding on the next destination. The choice was between heading down to Compton or out to Hollywood. Without even flipping a coin I nosed my Dodge in a southerly direction, down Central till getting a little ways past the two hundred block.
LA has always been a transient city, as was, and is, the United States, on the whole. Urban folks are always moving in and out, or just away. Compton used to be a primarily white area. Back then there was a rivalry between Black Wattsonians and Caucasian Comptonites. One of the reasons gangs started to develop in Watts was because of raids from Compton. But by 1972 Blacks started to colonize their southern neighbor. Working-class folks bought homes, rented apartments, and looked for jobs close at hand.
I don’t know what the Orchid SRO was before, but now it was a four-story down-at-heel residence for women only.
I parked my pretty much nondescript car right out front and strode in like I belonged there.
But I didn’t belong there.
The first floor was a large living room — like space where there were couches, chairs, and tables for women to sit alone or with others to converse. It felt as if every eye in the place was on me as I made my way toward the reception desk at the back of the room.
“Ladies,” I greeted now and again as I went.
Some smiled and nodded, others frowned and turned away. Almost all the residents were women of color, from high yellow to midnight blue-black. It was a bastion of colored femininity and therefore felt different in a way that maybe you could learn from.
But the intelligence I’d come to gather had nothing to do with gender except for the fact that the person I was looking for might have at one time been a resident of the Orchid.
They didn’t have a proper reception desk, only a library podium with a young brown woman standing behind it. There was a nameplate that read GINA LIMA. The young woman, who might have borne the name on the plaque, gazed at me with what my distant cousin-by-law Riley used to call a belligerent eye.