Black Betty (22 page)

“What you lookin’ at?” I asked him after a while. He answered by jumping off the hood and pecking at a twig on the ground.

When I lowered myself back behind the steering wheel I smelled what those crows must have smelled: it was the smell of a sick animal, so weak that he couldn’t even clean himself.

WHEN I STARTED THE ENGINE the crow finally took off. I saw him and his friend gliding over the willow as I drove back toward my life.

I went down to the YMCA on Main for an early-morning soak in the pool. After that I took a shower and a shave with a razor I borrowed from Amos Mackey—the towel man down there. I tried Remo’s again but it was too early for them to be open.

I had time to kill but I couldn’t think of rest. My mind was too agitated to read the newspaper and there wasn’t anyplace to get cool. There were so many things on my mind; each one worse than the other.

I could have gone and talked to John about a solution I had about Mouse. But I didn’t feel strong enough for that, so I decided to drive over to 52 Wilshire Boulevard where Save-Co had their southern California offices. At least Save-Co just wanted my property; as far as I knew they weren’t a threat to my life.

IT WAS ONE OF THOSE new buildings. White steel girders showing around green cement and blue windows. It looked something like a waffle that had sprouted various kinds of fungus.

When I looked at the directory I noticed that Mason LaMone had an office there. He wanted my money too, but he was just a solitary man. Maybe I could scare him into leaving my property alone.

“YES, SIR?” a handsome young white man with sandy blond hair said to me. He was sitting behind a desk in an office that had MASON LAMONE REALTY stenciled on the door.

“You LaMone?” I asked him.

“No, sir,” he answered pleasantly. “My name is Carson. I’m Mr. LaMone’s assistant.”

“Get him for me, will ya?” I wasn’t feeling very cordial.

“Whom shall I say is here?”

“Freedom’s Plaza.”

“What?”

“You heard me. You tell him that he’s got Freedom’s Plaza outside the door.”

Carson got on the phone and delivered my message, more or less.

“Have a seat, sir. Mr. LaMone will be with you when he can.”

I walked by Carson then, toward the door behind him.

He said, “Hey!” and jumped up—all six feet of him.

When he came toward me I held up one finger and said, ever so softly, “Sit down or I will break your head, white boy. An’ I ain’t foolin’ wit’ you.”

Carson balked and I went on through the door to Mason LaMone’s office.

It was more like a utility room than an office. Even though there was air conditioning in the rest of the building this room was hot. The window was propped open and that desert sun was pouring in. The floor was covered with gray linoleum tiles through which writhed thin red veins.

Mr. LaMone’s desk was just a plain metal table, painted dark brown. There was no other furniture to be seen, not even a bookcase. There was a paint-stained black phone on the desk. From the phone ran a long knotted wire that snaked its way off to the cracked jack in the wall.

On the phone, seated behind the desk, on the only chair in the room, in a shaft of relentless L.A. sunshine—there sat Humpty Dumpty. He had a big upside-down bowl of a bald head with small ears and tiny-lensed glasses that were barely large enough to cover his big eyes. His mustache was gray down and his light green suit seemed to be sewn from baby frog skin, both bright and slimy.

“Excuse me, I have to go,” he said into the receiver in a husky whisper that sounded as if it could have carried for miles.

Mr. LaMone stood up from his desk on bright green frog-skin legs that were more like tree trunks than human limbs.

“Yes?”

“You LaMone?”

He nodded.

I wasn’t prepared for such an odd-looking and intimidating man. Everything about him seemed calculated to throw me off.

“My name is Rawlins,” I said.

He smiled and nodded. “I’ve heard of you. Yes I have.”

“You might not have heard all there is. Not yet.”

The door to the office opened behind me. Three more white men plus Carson came flooding in.

“Mr. LaMone!” Carson shouted.

“What is this?” LaMone said directly to Carson. His eyes were twinkling behind the sun-laced lenses.

“Uh, um, well, I brought the security guards when he, because he…”

“It’s your job to guard the door, Carson,” the great green egg rumbled. “Now go. Find Milo and bring him here to me.” LaMone pointed at his feet with a wide forefinger.

“What about… what about…”

“I’ll talk to Mr. Rawlins alone.”

Only one of the security men would have given me any trouble. One was short and skinny, while another was fat in the gut and had small arms. The big, bearded guy might have had more muscle than me but he couldn’t have wrestled with Saul Lynx’s .38.

“Go on. Get out.” Mason LaMone made a sweeping motion with his big hands.

The guards gave me hard stares as Carson herded them back through the office door. They were mad at the way Mason was dismissing them but their anger was directed at me.

After all, I didn’t pay their salaries.

When they were gone I faced LaMone. He was seated behind his desk again.

“I know what you an’ Clovis been up to, man,” I said. He wasn’t even breathing as far as I could tell. “And I ain’t gonna let you take away what’s mines.”

“I don’t have anything to do with the county, Mr. Rawlins. They need a sewage treatment plant. What’s that got to do with me?”

“You can’t pull that shit on me. I got Clo’s number now and I will bring the house down on both of you.”

My threat didn’t mean much to Mason LaMone. He took off his glasses and stared out with his big vacant eyes. “If that’s how you want to spend your time, Mr. Rawlins, it’s okay by me. I’m in business, that’s all. When I heard that some investors were planning to build a shopping mall I went straight out to meet them.”

Suddenly the egg was full of life. He got up and gestured meaninglessly in the air. “I found Miss MacDonald and opened a line of communication. That’s what I do.

“Now I was upset to find that the county had to condemn that property.” He pointed up to the ceiling for no good reason that I could tell. “I want to make money. A sewage plant won’t make me a dime.”

“But if they reverse the decision after they throw us out, that would open up the property at rock-bottom prices.”

LaMone went back to his chair. He sat down and returned to his peaceful state. He cupped his big hands on the desk and contemplated them.

“I’m not a fortune-teller, sir. If the right chain of events occur I will exploit them. That’s business.” LaMone couldn’t help but give me a little smile after that. Couldn’t help but laugh at how he had it over some poor nigger who wanted to come up with the big boys and get his chance.

“Uh-huh, yeah,” I said. “But I could read the tea leaves. I can tell you what will happen. I can tell you that Clovis MacDonald is gonna lose all the money that you gave her. I can tell you that if I lose my property and then by some celestial coincidence there magically appears a shoppin’ center or some big store where that treatment center shoulda been, then there will come some terrible events. I can promise you that whatever comes up outta that ground, if it ain’t mines then it won’t be nobody’s. Because if you insist on makin’ me out a nigger I ain’t got no choice but to be one. No choice at all.”

Mason LaMone’s smile dimmed. And where his eyes didn’t care before I saw some little bit of concern, some worry. Where there had been a lifetime of clear skies set out before him, Mr. LaMone, the great green-and-white reptile egg, now saw a bank of clouds.

YEAH,” the bartender at Remo’s said. “He said that you was ta meet’im atta… atta…” He hesitated trying to read the note. “At nine out behind the hot dog stand that you told him about.”

That was at twelve-fifteen. It was one hundred and seven degrees. The wind coming out of the east was a scythe of pain.

It was too hot to stay in my car and there was no place to drive until nine anyway. So I went over to a mixed bar on Normandie called the Viking. It was a cool dark room that played old tunes and served food. I had deep-fried fish sticks with French fries and cole slaw. I almost asked for a beer but settled for ice water.

There was an
L.A. Times
on the bar.

Kennedy was considering resuming underground nuclear tests and Khrushchev threatened above-ground testing. Fallout in Alaska had increased three thousand percent and there wasn’t a Negro in the world worthy of an article.

I hung around until two-thirty. Then I went to the phone booth and called John.

“I been tryin’ t’call you, Easy,” John told me.

“Ain’t been home. What did you want?”

“I think you better drive by here tonight, ’bout nine.”

“Cain’t, man. I got some serious business and I don’t know how late it’ll go.”

The quiet on the other end of the line was John’s rage. People didn’t tell him no very often.

“I could make it in the mornin’ if I ain’t in jail by then,” I said to fill up the silence.

“Make it nine in the mornin’ then,” he said and then he hung up.

I SPENT THE REST of the day down in Santa Monica. I got barefoot and sat on a YMCA towel in the sand. But the sea didn’t relax me and the bathing girls didn’t make me smile.

I went to an army/navy store on Pico in the early evening. I got black pants, a dark blue shirt, and a pair of black canvas shoes.

I’D PARKED A FEW BLOCKS west of Robertson, on Livonia, and was walking up the alley at eight fifty-nine. I was proud at being so exact and on time. That pride being a leftover from my army days.

“Easy.”

In his drab-colored pants and black jacket Alamo was a wraith behind the trash bin. Slung across his back was a black-dyed long English rucksack. We were three buildings down from Hodge’s office.

“You ready?” Alamo asked. He looked down at my hands and then at my feet. “Good shoes. Good shoes.”

He gestured two fingers for me to wait and then he went ahead. I waited two minutes and then came on behind. The Robertson Professional Building faced Robertson Boulevard right at the corner of Pico. Alamo and I stood at the back of that building in a small lot for parking off of the alley. The parking was for the Cupcake Bakery, Ron Gordon Glazier’s shop, and a stationery store that faced out onto Pico. The office building and the glazier’s shop met at the angle of the backwards el.

“Shh.” Alamo took two pair of yellow dish-washing gloves from his sack and handed me one. “Put ’em on.”

There was a ladder propped up next to a window about midway between the first and second floors of Hodge’s building.

Two more fingers and Alamo was up the ladder. The breaking glass was louder than some cannon fire I’ve heard. He was in and I was up and in right after him.

We were on the halfway landing of the stairs leading up.

We pulled the ladder in and took it up to the second floor, where we laid it flat against the wall. Alamo took a flashlight from his sack. It gave off a very dim light as if maybe the batteries were going bad.

We stopped at a door that had CALVIN P. HODGE, ESQ. stenciled on it.

“This your boy?” Alamo asked.

“Yeah.”

Instead of pulling his tools out and working on the door, Alamo went further down the hall to another office. This one said “Myna Goldstein, Fine Fabrics.” Alamo took a pair of pliers that had a long flat nose. He closed the pliers and inserted the nose in between the lock and the doorjamb. Then he put his strength into it, trying to pull the pliers open.

“Gimme a hand.”

I grabbed one side of the handle with my good right hand and pulled as hard as I could. After about thirty seconds the wood around the lock started to give. The bolt was pulled out of place and the door swung inward.

It was another poor office. Just a desk and a filing cabinet. There was a two-toned spider plant in a pot on the windowsill. While I improvised, propping a chair under the doorknob to keep unwanted noses out, Alamo went right to the wall that Hodge’s office shared. He took two mountain climber hammers from his bag and handed me one.

“Let’s get to it,” he said. He started hammering away at the plaster wall.

We spent the next half an hour clearing away the plaster from the crossbeams that made the wall. Then we crawled through the triangular space and were in Hodge’s office. No alarms to prevent going off. No fancy locks to pick.

Hodge’s office was the same layout and size as Myna Goldstein’s. But he had a large oakwood desk and plush carpeting. There were many plaques on the walls extolling his achievements and a glass-enclosed cabinet that had at least fifteen trophies that he’d won for hunting and shooting. There was too much furniture in that small room. I imagined that he once had a big office on Wilshire but he had to move when times got hard.

Mr. Hodge was a man on his way down.

Using hammers, a punch with a titanium bit, and a pair of metal shears, we opened up Hodge’s file-safe in under thirty minutes. I found Albert Cain’s file in there. It wasn’t very thick. On a whim I looked up Saul Lynx and Commander Styles.

I expected to find Saul but there was only a slender folder on the commander.

While I searched, Alamo went through the rest of the office, taking whatever he could get into his sack and any petty cash lying around.

I was more than ready to go when there was a loud crash.

Alamo hissed, “Shh!”

We could see a light flashing into Myna Goldstein’s office through the hole in the wall.

“Help me!” Alamo was grabbing the husk of the file cabinet. I knew right away what he was doing. Together we pushed the gutted file to cover the hole in the wall as well as possible. Then I took Hodge’s typewriter and threw it through the bolted window.

Three different alarm bells went off all at once. Somebody shouted, “Police!”