Blood Grove Read online

  The surprise pushed her head back two or three inches.

  “Um,” she said. “Yeah. How come?”

  “They have those two-week-long getaways where everybody does yoga, right?”

  “There’s some exercises but mostly they meditate. I went to two weekend retreats but the week-longs are very expensive. And I only get two weeks’ vacation anyway. I was thinking of going to one around Christmas maybe.”

  “How expensive is it?” I asked.

  “Hundred and thirty dollars—a week.”

  “What if I gave you two weeks off and enough money for the retreat—on top of your salary? You could call ’em and go right up there this morning.”

  “But what about the files and the phone?”

  “Files can wait and I learned how to answer a phone before you were born.”

  This was something new for the receptionist/office manager. Her eyebrows creased and her freckled nose scrunched up.

  “I don’t get it,” she said.

  “I want to be alone, honey. That’s all. Whisper and Saul are already out, probably for a while. I think it would be good for both of us.”

  “So you just want me to pack up and go?”

  “Right after I draw the money you need out of the safe.”

  She hemmed, hawed, and argued mainly because there was little precedent for a boss letting employees off from work on a whim back in 1969. And two hundred and sixty dollars plus two weeks’ salary for doing something you loved was unheard-of. But the offer was too good to pass up, and so by noon she was off and I could return to my office in solitude.

  I leaned back in my ample oak throne and sighed deeply.

  “Alone at last,” I said aloud.

  “Either for good or not for long,” a bodiless voice intoned.

  In life that voice belonged to an old man I knew only as Sorry. He was the wisest man of my childhood, whose advice would come to me every couple of years or so to remind me that I didn’t know everything and so to watch out for banana peels and blind corners, jealous husbands and comely wives.

  More than once I worried that that voice was an indication of severe mental disease. But then I’d remember that we lived in a world filled with insanity; where war, nuclear threat, and the slaughter of children crowded every day with distress.

  In the America I loved and hated you could make it rich or, more likely, go broke at the drop of a robber baron’s hat. That’s why I had a pile of cash hidden somewhere safe, no rent or mortgage payment, and no property tax either. And that was just the material of life. My true wealth was a small family, a few friends, and a phone number that was unlisted even to the police.

  These were just normal precautions. One thing I never forgot was that I was a black man in America, a country that had built greatness on the bulwarks of slavery and genocide. But even while I was well aware of the United States’ crimes and criminals, still I had to admit that our nation offered bright futures for any woman or man with brains, elbow grease, and more than a little luck . . .

  There was a sound out past the hallway toward the front of the offices. One of the settling cracks of the foundation, most probably. But then again maybe there was no sound at all but just my intuition.

  I looked up and saw the shadow of a man standing a few feet back from the doorway, the only exit from my office.

  Go left or go right but never move straight ahead unless there’s no other way, Mr. Chen often taught in his self-defense class. Look for the upper hand instead of trying to prove that you are the strongest. The other man is always stronger, but you will best him from either the right or the left.

  The problem was that I was sitting in a chair at a desk with my closest pistol in the bottom drawer. Whoever had walked in was good; he hardly made a sound. Even if I fell to the right and grabbed at the drawer he could have shot me right through the wood.

  He took a step forward. I could see that he was tall and lean with a pantherish gait, but still his features were hidden in shadow.

  “Are you Easy Rawlins?” he asked.

  With those words the unannounced visitor crossed the threshold. He was in his early twenties with very short sandy-blond hair and an ugly bruise on his left temple. He wore a peach-and-white checkered short-sleeved shirt over a white undershirt. His blue jeans were stiff, ending at silent white sneakers. I already knew he was a white boy by the spin of his words.

  “You always just walk in on people like that?” I replied.

  “The door was unlocked,” he said. “I said hello when I came in.”

  He took another step and I sat back again. His empty hands hung loose at the sides.

  “I’m Rawlins. Who’re you?”

  He took another step, saying, “Craig Kilian.”

  One more step. It felt as if he was going to walk right up on my desk.

  “Why don’t you take a seat, Mr. Kilian?”

  The offer seemed to confuse the young man. He looked to his left, identified the walnut straight-back chair. After a moment he went through the necessary movements to sit himself down.

  “You just out the military, Craig?”

  “Uh-huh. You say that ’cause’a my crew cut?”

  “Yeah. Sure.”

  There was a haunted look in Kilian’s eyes that would have probably still been there if he hadn’t been walloped upside the head. All through World War II I’d encountered soldiers from both sides of the battlefield who had that look, who had been shattered by the din of war.

  Craig took a pack of True cigarettes from his shirt pocket. Plucking out a cancer stick with his lips, he drew a book of matches from the cellophane skin of the pack. He lit up, took in a lungful of smoke, and exhaled.

  Then he gave me a quizzical look and asked, “Do you mind if I smoke?”

  I did mind. I’d been trying to quit for a couple of years. But there was something about Craig’s glower that made me want to give him some leeway.

  Watching him suck on that cigarette, I was reminded of an early morning in October 1945. It was outside of Arnstadt, Germany, and I was on guard duty after a long night of heavy rains. The war was just over and so we weren’t as sharp as we had been in battle. My brand was Lucky Strike. As I smoked I was wondering what it would be like to go back home to Texas after outflanking and outfighting the white man, and becoming friendly with his women too.

  I don’t know what made me look to the right—a sound, an intuition—but there I saw a German soldier in a filthy and tattered uniform bearing down on me with a bayonet raised high. I turned just in time to grab the knife-wielding hand by the wrist. In that instant we had seized each other, locked, almost motionless, in a struggle to the death. My cigarette fell onto his coat sleeve. I don’t know what I looked like to him, but his gaunt face was desperate and, oddly, almost pleading. He pressed harder and harder but I matched him sinew for sinew. Probably the deciding factor in that brawl was the fact that I was well-fed and he was not. He might have been trying to kill me in hopes of getting a few rations.

  The smoldering sleeve started to burn. Smoke got into my left eye. I winced and he pressed harder. We were both shaking under the exertions, literally on fire. I noticed a tear coming from his eye. At first I thought it was in reaction to the smoke, but then I saw, and felt, that he was crying. He shook harder and I was able to press him down onto the rain-soaked mud. There I got the upper hand, forcing the blade toward his throat. He was trying his best to protect himself while blubbering.

  I could have killed him as I had a dozen others in hand-to-hand combat. Death dealing was second nature after years on the battlefield. But instead I pushed his bayonet arm to the side, slamming it down on the wet earth, extinguishing the fire. He released the dagger, curled into a ball, and cried for all he was worth. I sat there next to him for long minutes. When he finally sat up I handed him my rations and indicated that he could leave. I should have taken him as a POW, but lately our troop had been executing anyone they deemed a Nazi.

 
Craig Kilian reminded me of the soldier I spared. Shell-shocked by war and stunned in civilian life, he was living in a world of his own, still trying to find a way back home. There were thousands of young men like Craig coming back from Vietnam. Innocents, killers, and children, all rolled up into the war-hardened bodies of veterans who had no idea what they’d done or why.

  I reached into the drawer that held my pistol and came out with an ashtray kept there for whenever my friend Mouse came by to visit. Placing the ceramic dish in front of Craig I said, “Knock yourself out.”

  He took another drag off the low-tar cigarette and then tapped a smattering of gray ash onto the white porcelain.

  There we sat; him hunched forward, smoking, and me leaning back, wondering whether I should have taken the pistol from the drawer.

  Maybe two minutes passed.

  “Why are you here, Mr. Kilian?”

  “I, I was told that, that you’re a good detective and, um, um, honest.”

  “By whom?” I asked, using my best English.

  “A man named Larker. Kirkland Larker.”

  “I don’t know anybody by that name.”

  Kilian stared at me, a deer frozen in the headlights.

  “Is he a vet?” I asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “What war?”

  “’Nam.”

  “I wasn’t ever there. He a black man?”

  “Can you help me?” Craig asked instead of answering the question.

  “I take it you need somebody honest because there’s something questionable that needs investigating.”

  “Why you say that?”

  “The bruise on your head. You dragging your feet instead of telling me why you’re here. The fact that you won’t look me in the eye.”

  “I need somebody I can trust,” he said, looking directly at me.

  “To do what?”

  The question could have been two live wires pressed against the hinges of his jaw. His face went through exaggerated contortions like a cartoon bad guy who, for all his brutish strength, could not crush Popeye to dust.

  All of this was simply prelude to the sudden, thunderous aftershock of the explosion that reverberated in the room.

  3

  The windowpanes behind me rattled in their frames. I could feel the air bulging against my eardrums.

  It was just another sonic boom, a military jet breaking the sound barrier. I’d heard it so many times that it meant nothing. But for the recent graduate from Vietnam University it was life-and-death.

  In an instant Craig was flying over the broad desk straight at me.

  I moved to the right, but not fast enough.

  Craig’s powerful left arm ensnared me and for a moment I believed that I was going to experience my last moments at the hands of a battle-hardened vet who had lost his sanity in the jungles of Vietnam. But instead of knifing, choking, or battering me, the young lion backed into the nearest corner, pulling me along as a kind of shield. He was shivering, and a low moan, almost a growl, emanated from his chest.

  Pushing free, I turned to face him, to provide cover from the imagined attack. He had his head buried in his arms. A preternatural stillness set upon him.

  “It’s okay, soldier,” I said calmly to the top of his head. “It’s okay. It was just a sonic boom. A sonic boom. You’re safe. Safe.”

  “How many, Sergeant?” he asked softly. “How many are there?”

  “They’re all dead, soldier. They’ve been dead a long time. You’re safe, safe and sound.”

  I placed a hand on his right shoulder, causing him to jerk away and gasp.

  “It’s all right,” I said. “They’re all dead. Dead and gone.”

  When I laid my hand on him this time he didn’t resist.

  “I can hear ’em,” he said. “I can hear ’em in the night when everybody else is sleepin’. I hear ’em.”

  I remembered the night terrors I had after liberating my second concentration camp; the animated skeletons of men and women dancing around the corpses of the Germans we’d killed.

  “It was just a sonic boom,” I said, and Craig raised his head.

  He looked around in confusion. It was as if he didn’t know how he got there crouched on the floor with some black man kneeling before him.

  “What happened?” he asked me.

  “Some fool broke the sound barrier and you had a flashback to the war.”

  He nodded and I held out a hand, pulling us both to our feet.

  “One of my partners keeps a fair bottle of bourbon in his desk drawer,” I said. “Why don’t we get us a shot?”

  Whisper always had a fifth of Cabin Still sour mash bourbon in his bottom drawer. He had glasses there too. I downed my first shot in one draft. Craig did the same. It made him cough pretty hard. I sipped the second shot but he downed that one too, this time merely gagging a bit.

  He held out the glass for a third go-round but I shook my head and said, “First let’s go back to my office and find out what you need an honest detective for.”

  We were seated again, silent again, with Craig looking everywhere but at me. After letting this go on for a while I said, “So what do you want, Craig?”

  He made a sour face and turned away, fidgeting so much that for a moment it looked as if he might crawl right out of his chair.

  Then he went still.

  “Have you ever heard of Blood Grove?” he asked.

  “Can’t say I have. That some battle in Vietnam?”

  “No. It’s a, it’s a orange grove out at the far end of the San Fernando Valley. They specialize in blood oranges.”

  “Okay. Is that your problem?” I wasn’t impatient but Craig had to be spurred on or he would stall.

  “I like, I like to go camping out there when the nightmares start coming even when I’m awake, you know?”

  I nodded.

  “Out there it’s mostly just farms. And if you climb up to this place called Knowles Rock there’s a cabin nobody uses and a campsite where you can build a fire and be so alone that it’s like you’re the only man in the world. I usually only go to the campsite because I like sleepin’ outside. The cabin is maybe a quarter mile from there.”

  “And whatever problem you got has to do with out there?”

  Craig blinked at me.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I was sound asleep in the early evening. It had been a hot day and it’s a seven-mile hike from the place where I park my mother’s car. I went to sleep early. But then I woke up all of a sudden at moonrise. There was this full moon staring me right in the face. And when I sat up I saw that there was a campfire goin’ at the cabin.”

  “A quarter mile away,” I said, just to prove that I was listening.

  “Yeah. I looked at that moon and then at the glow of the campfire and it was like I was drawn to it; like some kinda moth or somethin’. And then I heard a woman screaming, ‘Alonzo! Alonzo!’ It was faint because of the distance and the trees, but I heard it. She’d probably been yelling and that’s what woke me up.

  “Before I knew it I was on my feet in just my long johns and T-shirt running for the cabin. The closer I got, the louder her screams. She sounded scared outta her mind.”

  Craig stopped to hold his right hand over his mouth and nose. I thought I’d have to urge him on again, but then he said, “They were outside the cabin. The woman’s clothes was all ripped. A big black man with long straight hair had tied her to a tree. He had a knife. The next thing I knew I was runnin’ at him.”

  Craig stopped talking because he was remembering the events in the orange grove. He was mesmerized, panting too.

  “What happened then?” I asked.

  “I grabbed him. Tried to get the knife away. We fell to the ground and the woman, girl really, was shoutin’, ‘No, don’t! Don’t get in it!’ ”

  “Don’t get in what?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, almost pleading. “I don’t know.”

  That was a little break in the story. I was happy
to have sent Niska away.

  After a while I said, “Why don’t you finish tellin’ the story, Craig? Finish the story and we can get another drink.”

  “We were rollin’ around on the ground, fighting for the knife, and the girl was shouting . . . and then I flipped him.”

  “Like a judo throw?”

  “Nuh-uh. He was tryin’ to get on top’a me but before he could get set I heaved up and fell on him. That’s when I felt the knife sinkin’ into his chest. His eyes got real big like a man when he knows he’s got a bad wound.”

  Craig Kilian stood up and backed away, knocking the chair over. He got all the way to the wall, five feet behind. I believe he would have gone a mile if there was nothing there to stop him.

  “I stood up over him and he was holding on to the haft of that bayonet, I mean that knife. The girl shouted, ‘Alonzo!’ ”

  “Alonzo?” I asked.

  “I wanted to call a medic but then somethin’ hit me.” He raised his hand to the bruise on his temple. There were tears coming from his eyes but he gave no other sign of crying—no heaving or whine.

  I could almost see the dying man laid out before Kilian’s eyes. Behind him was the Vietnam War with all its dead, its carpet-bombing and heavy boots. In the distance, far behind that, I imagined Korea and Auschwitz, Nagasaki and ten thousand slave ships coming from the distant horizon over the African Sea.

  “Mr. Kilian.” No word had been spoken for some minutes. “Craig.”

  He looked up from the ground where the man named Alonzo lay dying. He saw me but I’m not sure that he knew why I was there.

  “What?”

  “What happened after you got hit?”

  Judging from his face, the question didn’t seem to make sense.

  “After you stabbed Alonzo,” I added.

  “Knocked out,” he said. “When I woke up it was morning. About six hundred hours. The sun was out.”

  “What about the girl and the man that got stabbed?”

  “Nobody,” he said, shaking his head. “Nobody but the dog.”