It wasn’t until I was undressed and in the bed, under the covers and almost asleep, that the initials made sense to me.
That was three A.M.
THE DRIVE FROM MY HOUSE near Fairfax and Pico down to Truth was only twenty-five minutes at three in the morning. Before four I was in the registrar’s office looking up the faculty records.
HE WAS LIVING in an apartment building on San Pedro. It was a turquoise and plaster affair, designed to be ugly so that the tenants would know that they were poor.
I knocked on the door of apartment 3 G. No one answered. I jiggled the knob and it turned.
He had lied about the furniture. He didn’t use it for the new place. His big ebony desk wouldn’t have fit through the front door. Hiram Newgate sold everything to pay Vren Lassiter’s debt and now he was dead, slumped over on the thin cushions of a cheap couch, a .22-caliber bullet in his left temple, the pistol still in his hand.
I looked around the house. Photographs were spread across the card table in a nook that was supposed to be a dinette. The pictures were of two men, Hiram and a younger, sandy-headed man. They were arm-in-arm, holding hands. In one picture Hiram was laughing out loud.
I searched around for some kind of note, but there was none. I did find a letter though. It was from Lassiter. In it Vren beseeched his good friend to understand that he couldn’t help making bets. He tried to kick the habit but he couldn’t. And if Hiram didn’t help, they’d probably kill him.
I figured that Newgate went to Lund and took on the debt, that Lund threatened the school because he figured out that Truth was more important to Hiram than his own life. Newgate had earned his own private abbreviation: SchP, School Principal.
I put the letter back into the desk and went to the front door. I turned to look one last time, to make sure that there was nothing I left behind. His eyes glittered as if they had moved. I came up to him and stared into those orbs. He was still alive. Paralyzed, but still alive. He saw me, knew me.
“It’s gonna be all right, Principal Newgate,” I said. I touched his cheek and nodded.
I made the anonymous call to the police from his phone and left. I was out of the neighborhood before the sirens came.
I WAITED TWO WEEKS before going to the 77th Precinct.
“Where’d you get this?” Andre Brown asked me at Leah’s Doughnut and Coffee Shop three blocks down from the precinct. In his hand he held Emile Lund’s notebook.
“Found it.”
“If you found it, how would you know who it belongs to? His name’s not in it anywhere.”
“I guessed. I’m a good guesser, Officer.”
“These are his clients?” Brown asked. He was becoming wary of me.
“Yeah. I guess.”
Officer Brown studied me. He was a good study. Nine times out of eleven he would come up with the solution to his inquiry—but not that morning.
“I hear they brought your principal back home yesterday,” he said. “Some friend of his took him in?”
“Guy named Vren.”
“That’s an awful thing. Shoot yourself in the head and end up paralyzed for life.”
I took a deep breath.
“What does this book have to do with the fire?” Andre asked.
“He’s the one set the smoke bomb.”
“How do you know that?”
“Read the book.”
THAT NIGHT Feather sang us a song she’d learned in school. It was about a sailor lost at sea. He fought sea serpents and snake people and terrible storms. But at the end of the journey, he found a sunny land. And to his surprise, that sunny shore was the home he’d left long long ago.
“I learned it for Juice, Daddy,” she said. “’Cause’a when he’s in that boat he can sing it and then he could find his way back here.”
“Me too, baby,” I said. “Me too.”
Crimson Stain
ETHELINE,” SHE SAID, repeating the name I’d asked for.
“Yeah,” I said. “Etheline Teaman. I heard from my friend that she works here.”
“Who is your friend?” the short, nearly bald black woman asked. She was wearing a stained, pink satin robe that I barely glimpsed through the crack of the door.
“Jackson Blue,” I said.
“Jackson.” She smiled, surprising me with a mouthful of healthy teeth. “You his friend? What’s your name?”
“Easy.”
“Easy Rawlins?” she exclaimed, throwing the door open wide and spreading her arms to embrace me. “Hey, baby. It’s good to meet you.”
I put one hand on her shoulder and looked around to the street, making sure that no one saw me hugging a woman, no matter how short and bald, in the doorway of Piney’s brothel.
“Come on in, baby,” the woman said. “My name is Moms. I bet Jackson told you ’bout me.”
She backed away from the entrance, offering me entrée. I didn’t want to be seen entering that doorway either, but I had no choice. Etheline Teaman had a story to tell and I needed to hear it.
The front door opened on a large room that was furnished with seven couches and at least the same number of stuffed chairs. It reminded me of a place I’d been twenty-five years earlier, in the now defunct town of Pariah, Texas. That was the home of a pious white woman—no prostitutes or whiskey there.
“Have a seat, baby,” Moms said, waving her hand toward the empty sofas.
It was a plush waiting room where, at night, women waited for men instead of trains.
“Whiskey?” Moms asked.
“No,” I said, but I almost said yes.
“Beer?”
“So, Moms. Is Etheline here?”
“Don’t be in such a rush, baby,” she said. “Sit’own, sit’own.”
I staked out a perch on a faded blue sofa. Moms settled across from me on a bright yellow chair. She smiled and shook her head with real pleasure.
“Jackson talk about you so much I feel like we’re old friends,” she said. “You and that crazy friend’a yours—that Mouse.”
Just the mention of his name caused a pang of guilt in my intestines. I shifted in my chair, remembering his bloody corpse lying across the front lawn of EttaMae Harris’s home. It was this image that brought me to the Compton brothel.
I cleared my throat and said, “Yeah, I been knowin’ Jackson since he was a boy down in Fifth Ward in Houston.”
“Oh, honey,” Moms sang. “I remember Fifth Ward. The cops would leave down there on Saturday sunset and come back Sunday mornin’ to count the dead.”
“That’s the truth,” I replied, falling into the rhythm of her speech. “The only law down there back then was survival of the fittest.”
“An’ the way Jackson tells it,” Moms added, “the fittest was that man Mouse and you was the fittest’s friend.”
It was my turn to throw in a line but I didn’t.
Moms picked up on my reluctance and nodded. “Jackson said you was all broke up when your friend died last year. When you lose somebody from when you were comin’ up it’s always hard.”
I didn’t even know the madam’s Christian name but still she had me ready to cry.
“That’s why I’m here,” I said, after clearing my throat. “You know I never went to a funeral or anything like that for Raymond. His wife took him out of the hospital and neither one of them was ever seen again. I know he’s dead. I saw him. But Etheline met somebody who sounded a lot like him a few months ago, up in Richmond. I just wanted to ask her a couple’a questions. I mean, I know he’s dead, but at least if I asked her there wouldn’t be any question in my mind.”
Moms shook her head again and smiled sadly. She felt sorry for me, and that made me angry. I didn’t need her pity.
“So is Etheline here?”
“No, darlin’,” she said. “She moved on. Left one mornin’ ’fore anybody else was up. That’s almost four weeks ago now.”
“Where’d she go?”