Blood Grove Page 11

  “Get down from there, Sammy,” Craig said in a completely human tone.

  “This the dog you found up at Blood Grove?”

  The question soured the young man a bit.

  “Did you talk to my mom?” he asked.

  “Didn’t she tell you?”

  Craig winced, not giving an answer.

  “That Lola’s something else,” I said.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” The anger rose in his voice like a river on a cloudless day overflowing its banks due to a faraway cloudburst.

  In an imperfect world I do believe a man could get himself killed saying good morning in the wrong key.

  “That she’s fierce,” I said. “That she’d protect you no matter what the danger was.”

  Craig listened to my words closely and then nodded.

  “She knows me,” he agreed. “When I can’t explain myself she’s got the right words.”

  “I went out to the campsite with a Green Beret.” I changed the subject so as not to say something wrong again. “He agreed with part of your story. But he thought that there were four people there including you and the girl.”

  “Four?”

  “You, the two you saw, and the one that hit you,” I said. “It was his opinion that all four walked away under their own power.”

  Craig’s eyes sifted through the images my words presented. His breath picked up its pace, slightly.

  “Did you?” he asked and then stopped. “Did you find out their names or anything like that?”

  “Nothing. They didn’t leave anything on the ground outside and the cabin was laid bare too.”

  “But nobody died?”

  “Not then. Not there.”

  “Nothing about a guy named Alonzo?” Craig asked.

  “No. Nothing.” I was a fountain of negatives.

  The bad boy turned sad soldier studied his bare feet a moment.

  Sammy kept leaping up on me, ecstatic that he had found such a sturdy playmate.

  There were sounds of radios and TVs playing in other apartments. Somewhere a man and a woman were yelling. The air was very still.

  “There was one other thing,” I said finally.

  Craig looked up, wishing, no doubt, that his mother was there to carry the conversation.

  I took out the photograph I’d found in the real Alonzo’s wallet and showed it to the boy-soldier.

  “Do you know who she is?” I asked.

  One of the symptoms of shell shock is that the victim of the trauma sometimes loses themselves in thought. Craig stared at that picture a good long minute. He turned it over, saw the phone number, and then turned it back again. He waited a bit longer before saying, “No. No. I don’t.”

  He didn’t ask where I got the photograph or why I was asking him about it. In short, he was lying. The question was—did he know he was lying?

  “There was no body, no blood, no evidence of a life-and-death struggle at the campsite you sent me to,” I said in my professional voice while tugging the little photograph from his fingers. “If I went to the cops with this they’d say, ‘No evidence, no case.’ So my advice is to consider yourself lucky, love your dog, and forget all about Blood Grove. Don’t go up there again.”

  Craig gave a smile that was also a grimace. He nodded, shook his head, and then nodded again.

  Sammy the dog was leaping up and down between us, whining happily.

  “I guess you’re right, Mr. Rawlins,” he said. “I guess you’re right.”

  “Hey, mister?” the girl in the short shorts hailed when I came back out on the verandah. She was the only one left out there.

  She walked up to me both shy and bold.

  “Yeah?”

  “Hinder was all mad that you didn’t stop and explain yourself. He wants to think he’s the super but he’s just another tenant.”

  “His name is Hinder?”

  “Uh-huh. Why?”

  “Nothing. People like to think they have control over what they see as their own territory. They try and protect it like a bear or a dog.”

  “A dog with no teeth,” the girl said with a sneer. “My name’s Shirley.”

  “Easy,” I replied, pressing three fingers against my chest.

  “Easy, do you think I should try and be in the movies?”

  I’d come up the stairs into this young woman’s life and showed her that the rules she felt oppressed by didn’t necessarily apply. Now she just had to ask the question that burned in her mind both day and night.

  I conjured a contemplative look and nodded.

  “You know you’re a pretty girl because there’s a mirror in your bathroom,” I said. “And you’re old enough to know what a pretty girl can expect from men between the ages of sixteen and sixty-nine.”

  She smiled, telling me that I knew how she felt.

  “That’s both a blessing and a curse,” I went on. “As long as you remember that you can try anything you want because the only real thing a young woman like yourself has is her dreams.”

  After saying this I hustled down the stairs so as not to incur feeling in myself, herself, or Hinder, if he happened to be watching.

  19

  On the far side of Brighthope Canyon there’s an odd-shaped but generally Olympic-size swimming pool. Erculi Longo kept it clean and an underground engine warmed the water to just about seventy-two degrees.

  Orchestra Solomon, wearing a yellow dress under a pearl-gray wrap, watched the grotto-like pool as my daughter swam back and forth with intention and steady speed. My sixty-something landlady smiled down on the amphibious child, pleased as many older women are at the unconscious strength of youthful femininity.

  I sidled up next to one of the wealthiest women in California and said, “She could be the best in the world if she applied herself.”

  Without turning toward me Sadie replied, “A long time ago my mother told me that the best is never the best.”

  “That’s a truth,” I said, and a kind of melancholy settled on me. “I met Joe Louis in Vegas once. They called him the best and he paid for it in more ways than a poor black man could imagine.”

  “You’re a good father, Ezekiel. That’s better than being a good man. But you’re a good man too.”

  “I just keep the flies off.”

  “She comes straight out of your heart.”

  “Daddy!” Feather called. She swam for the closest edge to me and Orchestra, emerging from the water in a fluid motion like a seal or an otter.

  “Hey, baby,” I said, hugging her wet body and bathing suit.

  “Hi, Miss Sadie,” she said to our landlady, shivering just a bit.

  I pulled a towel from a cherrywood dowel installed on the side of a cedar tree. When I tried to drape the cloth around her shoulders she pushed it off.

  “You’re cold,” I complained.

  “I like to feel cold after a swim,” she said, looking off into the distance.

  “You want to come inside?” I suggested. “I could warm up some gumbo.”

  “Let’s sit out here for a while.”

  We sat on a bench of stacked gray slate stone.

  I turned to invite Orchestra to join us, but she was already walking back toward her home.

  “What you do today, Daddy?”

  “I went out and picked some oranges for Erculi.” I sat as close as I could to the swimmer, hoping to impart some of my warmth.

  “You see anybody?”

  “Christmas Black.”

  “How was Easter Dawn?” Even though Christmas’s daughter was much younger, Feather liked the little girl’s company because of her ability to pay attention.

  “She wasn’t there,” I said. “I saw him at work. I saw Raymond too, along the way.”

  The hint of a shadow crossed my daughter’s brow. Not a darkness so much as an undigested memory.

  “A long time ago when I was eleven,” she said, leaning a little against me, “I was staying with Aunt Etta and Cousin Peter. But then Mama Jo called
up and told Aunt Etta that she needed help because this man had pneumonia and Mama Jo wasn’t strong enough to move him around like she had to . . .”

  I tried to imagine how large a man would have to be to need both Jo and EttaMae, the two strongest women I knew, to drain him of fluids by witchcraft and gravity.

  “. . . so Aunt Etta told me to stay with Cousin Peter . . .”

  Peter Rhone was a young white man I once proved didn’t commit a murder. He’d been blamed for slaughtering the young black woman he loved. After the case was over he left his wife, deciding to live with Mouse and Etta as a kind of atonement. He slept on their screened-in porch, cleaned, cooked, shopped, and, I suppose, took care of my daughter when EttaMae had errands to run.

  “. . . but then Uncle Mouse came and told Peter that he was gonna take me to the park . . .”

  Peter would have been sorry to let Feather go, and he would have called Mama Jo to tell Etta, but Jo’s only means of communication was a phone booth about half a mile from her Compton home.

  “Did Mouse take you to the park?”

  “Uh-huh, yeah. He met this man named Maxie and they talked about somethin’ I didn’t understand. But there was these other girls there and we played jump rope and talked about boys and school and stuff. And then this big man came up and said something I didn’t really hear, and Wanda, one of the girls, said he should just leave. And the next thing I knew Uncle Mouse was there. He told the big man to go over with him to the other side of the park and Maxie bet us that we couldn’t do a hundred skips with double skip ropes. He said that he’d give us two dollars each if we could.”

  Feather sat there remembering the contest for a moment.

  I was about to ask her what happened in the park when she said, “We won and everybody got a two-dollar bill from Maxie and then Uncle Mouse came back and we went to his car.”

  “What about the big man?”

  “I didn’t see him again, but when we got to the car Uncle Mouse took a rag out of the glove compartment because he had a cut on his finger and he wanted to wipe it off. And that reminded me that Wanda said Mouse was probably gonna kill that man because he wasn’t nice to me.”

  We sat there for a few moments.

  When I put my arm over her quavering shoulder she asked, “Do you think Uncle Mouse would have killed that man?”

  “Never,” I said.

  “How come never?”

  “He just wouldn’t do something like that.” What I meant to say was that Mouse wouldn’t murder somebody in a crowded place in the daylight, but those details weren’t important to make clear to my child.

  I was considering the talk I’d have to have with Mouse when Feather said, “I was thinking that maybe I’d change my name.”

  “Change your name to what?” Some years earlier I’d legally adopted Feather, giving her my last name. I feared she was about to reject this christening.

  “Genevieve.” She pronounced the name in the French way, using all four syllables.

  “Why Genevieve?”

  “I like the way it feels in my mouth and it’s French and I speak French and my good friends could call me Ginny.”

  “Why don’t we go inside and get warm?”

  I made long-grain white rice and heated up a pot of frozen blue crab gumbo thickened by both gumbo filet and fried okra. Feather loved that stew and I did too. We ate for a while and she explained how geometry defines the old universe while Mr. Einstein’s theory of relativity described the new one.

  “So could there be two different universes?” I asked the chomping child.

  “Of course. Maybe even a billion of them. Maybe we could live in a completely different place by just thinking about it.”

  She was coming to the end of the bowl.

  I was just about to tell her to go up and take a shower when instead I said, “Your uncle, your real uncle, Milo Garnett, came by the office yesterday.”

  “Who?”

  “Your mother’s brother from back east.”

  Feather put her spoon down and leaned back.

  She already knew the broad strokes of her mother’s life and death. More than a year before, she’d asked if we could find her grandmother and any other family, but this was the first real chance she had at meeting her blood. I told her that Milo had heard about her and come all the way to California to meet her. And, oh yeah, he’s a hippie.

  “How tall is he?” was her second question.

  I told her.

  “What do you want me to do?” she asked.

  “He seems like a nice young man,” I said after a bit. “And he traveled almost three thousand miles to meet you.”

  “Why didn’t him and his mom try to talk to me before?”

  “I think he was a kid and his mother was heartbroken over the deaths of her daughter and husband,” I said delicately.

  “But why’s he here now?”

  “I guess he grew up enough to make up his own mind.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Staying with friends.”

  “Do I have to see him?”

  “Not right now. Not until you’re ready. If you don’t want to see him, you don’t have to.”

  “What do you think I should do, Daddy?”

  “Sit with it. Think about it. And know that I will always be there with you and you will be safe.”

  “Could he make me go with him?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  20

  That afternoon bowl of creole stew felt like an end point of sorts. I called Milo and told him that his niece needed a little time; that I’d call back in a few days. I guess he’d settled in pretty well at the hippie house and so voiced no complaint.

  Niska was working her mantra in Redlands. Their own cases kept Saul and Whisper out of town. And I stood at my back office window a couple of early mornings watching bare-chested Stache carrying his watering can out to the greenhouse.

  On Friday Feather was off with some girlfriends at a swimming event and I was at the office reading a slender text on the theory of relativity so I could keep up with her junior high school classes.

  “Anybody home?” a gravelly voice called from the front office.

  I had decided that I wouldn’t allow Craig Kilian to make me so fearful that I’d start locking doors.

  “Back here!” I called.

  I could hear his footsteps, heavy and hard soled, as he marched toward and then into my office. He wore a gray suit that had the mildest of pink patinas running under the surface, a shirt white enough to shine, and a bloodred tie that had been woven at the neck into a perfect square knot.

  He was short for a man, five seven or so, and had once been fat. When I met him he was a homicide detective in South Central LA. After solving a couple of high-profile cases, with my help, he was now the number two or three cop in the city, depending on how you judged influence versus rank.

  This last detail was what surprised me about the unexpected visit: a man in Melvin Suggs’s position did not make house calls.

  “Easy,” he said. “You’re looking prosperous.”

  “And I can see that Mary Donovan is keeping your shit together. Have a seat.”

  Melvin didn’t hesitate. He grabbed a chair and pulled it close enough to my grand desktop that he could rest his beefy fingers on the ledge.

  “Why you say that?” he asked.

  “No wrinkles on the suit or shirt, a tie that the king’s butler could have knotted, and fat gut still gone the way of the steam engine.”

  Mel didn’t want to smile but did anyway.

  His live-in girlfriend, called Mary Donovan for at least the past three years, was a con woman, thief, bank robber, and, if you scratched deep enough, I’m sure you’d’ve discovered that she’d been involved in crimes that would get a person hanged. But in spite of all that, she and Melvin were deeply in love. Their love story was like a fairy tale finished in San Quentin just before the author was due for execution.

>   “She’s been taking me to these fancy parties lately,” the cop confessed. “Congressmen and senators, billionaires and movie stars. Says that I could move on up and become an important man in California.”

  Their relationship was a disaster waiting to happen but you couldn’t tell either one of them what was in store.

  “Looks good on you,” I said, telling the truth.

  Pleasantries over, Melvin caught my eye and said, “Anatole found a murdered man at the back of a junkyard in Inglewood. Tells me that you’re the one told him about it.”

  “I told him that I overheard some people talking at the Dragon’s Eye and that they said a man named Griggs was dead. Nobody said anything about him being murdered. And all I stumbled on were the words.”

  “What people spoke these words?”

  “I told Anatole. I was in a clench with a young woman around a corner from them. I didn’t see anybody and nobody mentioned any names but Griggs and Cafkin’s.”

  I was lying of course. From the look in his beautiful taupe-colored eyes I could see that Melvin knew it.

  “There was a lot of pornographic material on the scene,” he said. “He was found in a tin shack—did you know that?”

  “Why are you here, Mel?”

  “Griggs frequented the bar where you heard about him. He was what they call a talent scout.”

  “So?”

  “The night you told Anatole about what you heard, you were seen with Raymond Alexander at the Eye.”

  “I already told you I was there.”

  “But you neglected to mention Alexander.”

  “I neglected to mention I took a piss too. What’s your point?”

  “Griggs was shot.” It was a statement intended to indicate my, or my friend’s, culpability.

  “Was he shot with a forty-one-caliber shell?” This was Mouse’s weapon of choice.

  “Some people said that both you and Alexander had been asking about Griggs.”

  He had me. There was no reason to continue that particular lie and so I took another tack.

  “All right, all right. I was tryin’ to be professional but you got me. The day I went to the Eye a woman came to my office. She said her name was Charlotte Nell and that her daughter, Portia, had been seduced and turned out by Griggs. She wanted to find him to buy her daughter back. I asked around, found that he showed up at the Eye now and then. I asked some questions and a little guy in a green suit told me that he’d heard Griggs had been killed. I found out where the cat stayed at and called Anatole. Just a citizen doing his duty.”