“You don’t owe me nuthin’, Easy. Shit. Back in the day you saved my ass more times than I can remember. Yes, you did.”
“I appreciate it, Jackson. I do.”
“Oh yeah,” he said, glossing over my heartfelt gratitude. “I got that other address you wanted too.”
Constance Brill née Dormer.
I drove as far as the entrance to the canal. A hundred feet or so down I came to a barge-like boat tethered to a metal pole on the side of the walkway. It was an old wooden craft with most of the paint worn off. If someone were to cut the hemp tether, that useless tub would have floated a few feet before it sank down into the channel.
I climbed up on the deck and located a door, knocked upon it.
“Excuse me,” someone said.
I turned toward the land. There was a man, a white man, of course, wearing a tight tan T-shirt on his brawny chest. He also wore sailor pants, but I doubted if he was a seaman.
“Yes?” I allowed.
“Can I help you?”
“Do you live on this scow?”
“What did you say to me?” he asked as his mother probably once asked him when he made some wisecrack.
At that moment the door I had knocked on opened inward. There, three steps down, stood a blowsy woman in a red muumuu dress. Her hair was both the texture and color of hay. Her eyes were pale, but I couldn’t discern the exact color.
“Yes?” she said to me.
“Mrs. Brill?”
“Do you need help, Connie?” the man on the shore-street called out.
She glanced at him and then said to me, “Yes, I am.”
“My name is Rawlins. I wanted to talk to you about a cousin of yours, Shelly Dormer.”
“Oh. Oh yes. Shelly. She passed.”
“Connie,” the faux seaman said.
“Go away, Frank,” she exclaimed exasperatedly. “Mr. Johns told us that you are not a security guard here no more.”
The lady looked to be in her fifties, but my calculations, based on Jackson’s information, put her at least a decade younger.
Frank didn’t like the dismissal, but he accepted it and walked on.
“You ever meet someone that just wants to be mad, Mr. Rawlins?”
“Every day, it seems.”
Smiling with me, she asked, “What is it you wanted to know about Shelly?”
“I’m representing a man who’s interested in your cousin’s will.”
“That was a few years ago.”
“Yes, but this guy thinks that he can make you some money.”
Her eyes widening, she smiled and said, “My place is a mess. Could we go down the street to a little café and talk?”
We sat at an outside table of the Crow’s Nest Café. I ordered coffee and said that Connie could have whatever she wanted. She ordered a salami and cheese sandwich on white bread and a glass of red wine.
“Did you know my aunt?” Connie asked while we waited to be served.
“No. I only became aware of her recently.”
“She was a very sweet woman. Married four times. She used to always say that she was too kindhearted, and most men took advantage.”
“I know people like that.”
“Like my aunt or her husbands?”
“Both.”
Constance had a nice laugh.
The food and wine came and was placed before the oldest surviving Dormer. There was something formal about this, as if we’d made a nonverbal compact stipulating that she would entertain my questions if I fed her.
“So, Mr. Rawlins, what do you want to know about Shelly?”
“Like I said, I’ve been talking to people about her will. And as far as I can tell, you’re her closest relative.”
“Yeah. What she said was that I would receive whatever she had left after other people got what she, um, what she instructed in the first part of the will. But the only thing left was a cultured pearl necklace and a set of rusty old golf clubs that she’d gotten from one of her no-good husbands. I’m sorry. But there’s nothing else.”
“She owned a house,” I suggested.
“Oh yeah. She did. In Culver City. I remember now. Jimmy Martin was left the house.”
“But he died, and now, because of the wording of the will, that property goes to you.”
“Oh my God. You mean, I own a house?”
“Yes,” I said as prelude. “But a very wealthy man wants it. Actually, all he really wants is the deed. He’s willing to do anything to get that deed.”
“But I don’t have it.”
“I know that. The trouble is that your claim on the property presents a problem for the rich man.”
“Do you work for him?”
“No, I don’t. I don’t really like the guy.”
“So, what should I do?”
She was so trusting.
“You could probably sell it to this guy for maybe twenty-five thousand dollars. But without the deed, I don’t know what he’d do.”
“What do you mean?”
“Forget that for a minute. What would you say if I could get you a hundred times what that house was worth?”
“That’s more than a million,” she said doubtfully.
“I can prove it.”
“Mr. Rawlins, I’m a cashier at JC Penney’s. What the hell do I know about millions?”
“You got a family?”
“A son that took my car one day and then called me a week later to say that he had moved to Reno. A daughter that married my second husband, and a brother who doesn’t know what he likes more — little boys or little girls.”
“So, what you’re saying is that any stranger is better than blood.”
Constance Brill laughed, but there were real tears in her eyes.
“I want to retire, sir,” she said. “I want to move down around San Diego and buy a house up on a hill that has a view of the ocean. I figgered it would cost me a quarter million dollars to buy a place like that and then to live there till I was seventy, that’s how long they say life expectancy is.”
“I think that you can do better than that.”
Connie couldn’t help but cry. She was elated and angry and fearful of the potential heartbreak of hope.
“I don’t see how,” she said through the tears.
I took ten twenty-dollar bills from my wallet and passed the fold to her, under the table.
“That’s two hundred dollars,” I said. “Hold on to it for three days and I swear I will make that dream of yours into reality.”
33
From the canals of Venice Beach to North Santa Monica was a short distance to drive, but despite the brevity, I found myself in front of a very different, seemingly commonplace abode. Just a block or two north of San Vicente Boulevard was a small street that had a few restaurants, a pharmacy, and a six-story gray-stone structure that might have been an office building downtown, a small factory in East LA, or a collection of medical offices in Beverly Hills.
On that street the changeable building was the solely owned property of a multimillionaire who had tried twice to kill me, though he probably didn’t know my name.
When Melvin Suggs and Charcoal Joe had failed to attain it, Jackson Blue had provided this address.
There were no windows on the ground level and an overabundance of them from floors two to six. The upper casements were the only thing about the rich man’s private offices that gave any hint that there was something going on in there. The windows were all different. Some were square, others oval or round. There were star shapes and triangles, crescents, and some formed out of sea urchin — like spines. A few were very long, and here and there were checks and dashes, or a series of horizontal or vertical lines; there was even a window comprised of crosshatched tines of glass. And the differences didn’t stop there. Almost every uniquely shaped aperture was filled by a different hue of glass. From clear to foggy white, from red to dusky orange, from shades of green to blue to violet. The upper floors of the otherwise almost nondescript edifice were like a child’s toy waiting for a candle to be lit in its hollow core.