Blood Grove Read online

  “I was in nearly every big blowup they had in World War II and Korea. And I was in ’Nam too, in the early days; major under Lieutenant General Jared ‘Quick’ Johnston, a white boy of the Alabama persuasion. I don’t think he liked colored people, as a matter of fact I know he didn’t. But I was the best and he knew he had to have the best with him. We threw our men on conflagration like dry twigs on white-hot flame. That’s what these motherfuckers did to your boy. Killed him but left him breathing and walking, a dead man in so much pain that it’ll live on past him.”

  I wasn’t exactly sure what the soldier meant, but I knew that as the restraints of military order eased in Black’s mind his anger grew. I didn’t see him that often, so this was the first time I had noticed the degree to which he was fraying around the edges.

  Something about the distaste in the ex-soldier brought to mind a debauched club named the Dragon’s Eye.

  “How’s Easter doin’?” I asked.

  The question had the desired effect. His breathing evened out and an almost smile brushed his lips.

  “She’s a good kid, Easy,” he said. “Fast and strong and smarter than any other kid in her grade—boy or girl. She only takes orders if they make sense to her. Better than me by about a mile.”

  That card had struck a memory. It revealed something about Craig’s situation that I wasn’t about to share with my partner. Christmas had to work through his rage before he could go out on the playground with the other kids.

  On the way back to the cars I took a plastic bag from my back pocket and collected maybe a dozen oranges.

  13

  John’s 1958 dark green Pontiac Bonneville was roomy and rolled along like a young man walking down the boulevard—steady but with a little swagger.

  I reached the office a few minutes shy of 10:00.

  The outer door to our private stairwell was sturdy but rarely locked. There came the scent of burnt tobacco as I crossed the threshold. The threat was clear, but those were my stairs and so I mounted them, three at a time. When I turned at the first half flight I detected an added hint of patchouli oil blending with cigarette smoke. Three more turns and I saw him, perched at the top of the stairs, listening to my approach. He stood only when I came into view.

  “Mr. Rawlins?” he asked hopefully.

  The young man’s foot-and-a-half-long hair was deep brown against pale white skin. Upon standing he proved to be quite tall. I’d seen his features in two people I’d known, and also, if I wasn’t mistaken, I had met him once a dozen or more years before. His scant facial hair made him look younger, but I put him at about twenty-five.

  “Milo, right?” I said.

  Surprise registered on the young man’s face. He made a sound that was also a question.

  “I met you at your parents’ house in 1956. You answered the door and then called for your mother.”

  His eyes tightened as he tried to remember. There was a glimmer of recognition, but the details were lost.

  “I came to you to find my sister’s daughter,” he said. “Robin’s little girl.”

  By then we were standing toe-to-toe on the platform before the front door of my office. He was half an inch taller but I had the weight advantage. I wanted to fight him but he made no threatening gesture. His tone was respectful.

  In the corner he’d leaned a large nylon backpack that had once been bright yellow but by the time it got to my door it was well used, torn, mended, and generously soiled.

  “Your mother send you out here?” I asked him.

  “No.”

  “Then how did you find me?”

  “Can we go inside?”

  I looked from him to the sad pack and back again before saying, “Sure, but leave the bag out here.”

  I took out the key and unlocked the door, pushed it open and gestured for him to walk through.

  “Keep going down that middle hall to the end,” I said. “That’s my office.”

  Remembering another young white man, I locked the front door and followed in the footsteps of Milo Garnett.

  He was standing in the middle of the office awaiting further instructions. The hippie wore blue jeans and a threadbare multicolored, tie-dyed T-shirt. His frame was thin but carried the strength of youth.

  “Take any chair,” I said and then went around the desk.

  I sat down and Milo was still considering the three chairs as if his future depended on the right choice.

  “What’s her name?” he asked, still contemplating.

  “Sit.”

  He went to the chair at my left.

  “What’s my niece’s name?” he asked again.

  “Answer my question first.”

  “Um, I forget.”

  “How did you find me?”

  His first response was to sit up straight, probably something he learned in grade school. When an adult asks a question part of the answer is represented by posture.

  “I went to college in Rhode Island but couldn’t hack it so I got a job on a farm but that was hard and I got sick.”

  “Sick with what?”

  “. . . and my mother and her husband came out and brought me to his house,” he said, passing right over the question. “I was there when you called and Mom got so upset. She always told me never to mention my sister, but then her and Lambert were fighting about it. You know . . . arguing without raising their voices.”

  “Lambert is your mother’s husband?”

  He nodded and gulped down some air. “He’s the one that said your name. My mother told him that you were a Negro detective in LA. After I got better I hitched out here because, um, um, that little girl is my blood no matter what color she is.”

  “You just climbed up on the freeway in Boston and put out a thumb?” I asked. “You didn’t even know where to find me but you bummed across country for thousands of miles?”

  “What’s wrong with that?” Milo said, showing his first glimmer of backbone.

  “Her name is Feather and she’s been with me—”

  “Did you name her that?” he asked, cutting me off.

  “No. Your sister did . . . before she died.” The last three words caused Milo to blink.

  “She’s my blood, not yours,” he said, against tears.

  “But I’m her legal guardian. I got the papers in a file cabinet at our home.”

  This testament slowed the young man’s passion. His eyes softened and he said, “I want to see my niece.”

  My breath became deadly shallow and I could feel my body tensing, seemingly of its own accord. The violence I was feeling must have shown on my face.

  “Look, man,” the hippie said. “I just want to meet her. I want to know my family. I don’t care if she’s black. It’s my mother that’s racist, not me.”

  I had my own opinions about that.

  “I understand,” I said. “But you can see that this is a big thing, right? Feather is still just a child and I’m the only family she’s ever had—me and her brother, Jesus. I have to tell her that you’re here and then ask her what she wants to do.”

  “But I’m her blood,” Milo countered.

  “And your blood, your mother, refused even to talk to her,” I said. “Your blood, your father, murdered Robin and Feather’s father rather than have it known that his daughter had made a black child. Don’t talk to me about blood, son. It’s not blood that sat up with her through nights of whooping cough and fever. It’s not blood that put food on the table and clothes on her back.”

  Milo listened. He really did. He knew about his father and sister. His mother knew about it and lied to the white world they lived in.

  “Okay,” he said after one nod and then another. “You’re probably right. I can’t just walk in and say I’m her uncle. I can wait.”

  “Where are you staying?”

  “Nowhere. Just got in last night. I found your office in the yellow pages and came over about nine.”

  “You slept on the steps?”


  He nodded and I pondered.

  “I know a good guy,” I said. “Longhair like you, lives up above the Sunset Strip. He has a big house and lets people stay with him most of the time. Why don’t I bring you over there? Then I’ll know how to get in touch after I talk to Feather.”

  “All right. Yeah.”

  The decision made, we sat in the aftermath staring at each other.

  “Look,” I said. “I got to make a call. Why don’t you gather up your things and go downstairs? I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

  Milo stood up and went about the tasks assigned. I picked up the phone to take care of a task of my own.

  “Hello,” she answered on the first ring.

  “You soundin’ sour, Etta.”

  “Hey, baby,” she said. “That friend’a yours like to get on my last nerve. He didn’t get home till after three in the morning. Three! Come in the bed drunk and kissin’ my neck. It’s only deep religion kept me from killin’ him in his sleep.”

  “He still asleep?”

  “I’ll roll him out for you.”

  I’d been holding the line for a few minutes when Mouse said, “Hello,” his voice thick with sleep.

  “Raymond,” I said. “What you doin’ this afternoon?”

  “Sleepin’.”

  “I might need a hand and both’a my partners are outta town.”

  “What kinda hand?”

  “I gotta go ask some questions over at the Dragon’s Eye. You know what it’s like in there.”

  “The Dragon’s Eye? Damn. You right, that could get kinda strenuous. An’ you know I need me some exercise. I gained three pounds in the last two years.”

  “You remember what time they open?”

  “Four . . . Uh-huh, yeah, they open at four.”

  “I will see you there at five.”

  “You got it,” he said and then he hung up.

  “. . . I mean,” Milo was saying as I drove up San Vicente toward Sunset, “straights like my mother and her old man are what’s holdin’ everybody down. They’re the ones cause this war and racism and private property bullshit. That’s what’s holdin’ everybody back from their potentials. It’s meditation and mind-altering chemicals can bring us to another level completely . . .”

  Sitting in a moving car turned him into a different person. At the office he was brooding and dour, but in the passenger seat he climbed up into the pulpit of his mind and preached. He’d been talking ever since we left the curb. The only time he’d stop was either to light a cigarette or suck on one.

  “. . . take you and me, for example,” he said. “We’re the same. Blood and bone, history and heart. We got the same problems and we all need the same answers, ask the same questions. It’s just—”

  “Hold up, youngster,” I said, intent on stopping the flow of palaver.

  “What?”

  “You think we’re the same, you and me?”

  “Yeah,” he asserted. “Marx and Lenin, Jesus too. They all—”

  “It’s my turn, Milo. Let me talk a minute, okay?”

  “Yeah,” he said, “sure.”

  I got the feeling that people didn’t usually get to speak once he started on a tear.

  “I hear what you’re sayin’, but I see it a little different,” I said.

  “You mean you believe in this capitalist bullshit?” There was actual disdain in his words.

  “The way I see it is that you’n me were both in a shipwreck and we got washed up on opposite shores. Not far apart, maybe only a quarter mile or so, but the waters between us are shark infested. It looks like we’re in the same place; lotsa sand and maybe a palm tree or two. Sun is hot like hell and the saltwater so blue. We’re both stranded but there’s one big difference.”

  “What’s that?” Milo Garnett asked.

  “I’m on a desert island, and even though it looks like you are too, really where you washed up is a peninsula.” I glanced over at Milo and saw that he was listening again. “If I set out on my way looking for food and water, company, or just a different view, all I’ll do is walk in a circle and end up back where I started—looking at you. But you take the same walk on your side, you will end up back in the bosom of America; hot dog stands, beautiful women, and enough drugs that you’ll forget that shipwreck and the time it seemed like we were in the same jam.”

  “You really believe that?”

  “Test it out.”

  “What do you mean, get marooned?” He had a vocabulary.

  “Naw, man, you don’t have to go that far. Just shave your face, get a crew cut, put on a gray suit and red tie. Then go out there and see how much they compare you to me.”

  Milo eyed me suspiciously. He sneered a bit but then faltered in his resolve.

  “But that’s wrong,” he said.

  “You right about that,” I replied.

  I pulled to the curb outside of the hidden domicile of the young millionaire Terry Aldrich, a block or two north of the Sunset Strip. The holly hedge surrounding the property was so high that you could see only the upper floor of the mansion, which, I knew from past experience, was a four-story hodgepodge of conflicting architectures and styles.

  “Go through the path cut in the hedge and knock on the front door,” I said to Milo. “Whoever answers, tell ’em your name, my name, and then say you’re there for Terry to give you a place to stay. Even if he’s not in town they’ll open up and give you a corner to curl up in.”

  Milo was concentrating on me. Maybe he was still thinking about the desert island versus the peninsula.

  “Remember,” I said, “your name, my name, and that you’re there for Terry. I’ll talk to Feather and then get back to you in a few days at most.”

  The young uncle nodded and climbed out. He pulled his dirty yellow pack from the back seat and went to and through the hedge wall leading to the hippie manor.

  I drove off wishing that he was now on that island, with me on my way to safety.

  14

  It was just shy of noon and I had some hours to kill, so I drove out to Hollywood, had a chili cheeseburger with fries, then went out to see a movie for the first time that year. A few days before, they released one called Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid with Paul Newman and a new guy. It was good because there was action and you could laugh too. I’d forgotten how much I love a big dark movie house with the sound so loud and the world somewhere far off.

  The Dragon’s Eye was a club a bit deeper into Hollywood. It was on a street named Gantner with a big parking lot out back that was surrounded by a fourteen-foot-high brick wall that had a dozen or so little inlets along the sides. The entrance had a double-door system and a camera that monitored everyone coming through the first portal. Passing the first door, you went through a gaudy red-and-black hallway and encountered the second gate. This was pulled open by an exceptionally tall man wearing a red tux and tails. If you were to ask me his race, I’d’ve said albino gator because his false smile resembled the many-toothed predator’s grin.

  “Easy Rawlins?” Razor-mouth asked.

  I’d never met this particular bouncer but I wasn’t surprised that he knew my name, because of my oldest friend, Raymond “Mouse” Alexander. Mouse was a remorseless killer, a criminal from sunup to sunup, and one of the five most dangerous men I knew of in Southern California. But he was more than that. Raymond was connected to organized crime because of his predilection for committing high-yield heists. Due to this affiliation even those establishments that usually turned away black skins were more likely to leave the door ajar.

  “Yes, I am,” I said.

  “Come right on in, sir.”

  Sir.

  The dining room of the Dragon’s Eye was a perfect circle with maybe eighteen round tables taking up the main floor. There were semi-secluded booths along the wall. The waitresses wore variously colored thin silk slips with nothing underneath. The Eye was not a strip club but rather a high-end gathering place for sensualists of all gende
rs and persuasions. I’d never been above the first floor, but it was rumored that there were bedrooms and other chambers nestled there where clients and their guests could enjoy all kinds of pleasure, pain, and euphoria.

  The champagne was very good, starting at a hundred dollars a bottle, and the steaks well aged. The ladies serving were nice but you couldn’t press them—the management needed their servers smiling and friendly. You could, I’d been told, negotiate with the serving staff—I was relying on that.

  The only thing wrong with the Eye was the smell. Not a powerful odor, but just a whiff of something too sweet, with, at the same time, somewhere at the back of the nasal wall, a hint of rot.

  Raymond was sitting at a round table at the very center of the room. He wore a dark green suit with the same color vest over a lime shirt, all topped off by a deep brown, short-brimmed Borsalino cocked on the side of his head. Two women, one brown-skinned in pink and the other white in black, were talking with him, laughing loud enough that I could hear them across the nearly empty room.

  I walked up to them. The tabletop was a swirl of different pastel colors, making it and its cousins resemble pirouetting dancers endlessly, gracefully in motion.

  “. . . I told Benny that he had to pull up his pants before he could tie his shoe,” Mouse was saying.

  The women seemed genuinely entertained.

  “Mouse,” I said.

  “Easy!” Raymond’s grin was gated in gold and there was a glittering yellow diamond embedded in his left upper front tooth. “Ladies, this here is my lifelong friend, Mr. Ezekiel Rawlins.”

  “Hi,” the lady in pink said. “Desdemona.”

  She held out a hand and I shook it, gently.

  “I’m Priss,” said the girl in black. She smiled and nodded. No touching for her.

  I pulled out a chair and Desdemona asked, “Should we bring over the champagne now, Mr. Alexander?”

  “All the way, baby.”

  The women departed and I settled in, wondering about the word lifelong. This was not a Mouse word. I’d never heard him use it or any other word in that category. He was an intelligent conversationalist and most certainly a raconteur, but his language was stripped down and bare like our hardscrabble lives had been in the Fifth Ward.