Blood Grove Page 9

  But this meeting was not about vocabulary.

  “You didn’t have any trouble at the door?” I asked.

  “Trouble? There better not be no trouble. Shit. I fuck trouble in the ass and send him home to his mama.”

  I laughed and said, “I thought that since you’re retired you might have lost touch with some’a the made men.”

  “Lost touch? Retired? No, baby, that’s not it. I mean, I don’t do as much as I used to, but ever since Dearborn I get to run jobs . . .”

  He went on to explain that he agreed to go with one of their heist bosses to Michigan to plan a hit on an armored car company.

  “Mothahfuckah said he needed twelve men, three specialized cars, a mothahfuckin’ bulldozer, and on top’a that he wanted at least four months to plan the job. They were going to kill a few guards too . . .”

  Somewhere in the middle of that our five-hundred-dollar bottle of Brut arrived. Mouse had a sixteen-ounce T-bone and I got a Caesar salad to offset the street chili.

  “. . . you know me,” Mouse was saying. “I just stood back and listened ’cause it wasn’t my job. But then one day when we was scoutin’ I noticed this hale-lookin’ black janitor . . .”

  Hale?

  “. . . I called the overboss and told him that I could do the whole job for a tenth the cost in two weeks’ time. All he had to do was bring in a good-lookin’ woman from East Europe know how to talk good English. Three-and-a-half-million-dollar take and the whole thing took sixteen days with four men and Natasha.”

  “Why a woman from Eastern Europe?” I asked.

  “You know, Easy, a white woman from America try to be talkin’ like she liked a brothah but he might could see that she lookin’ at a niggah in her mind. And I needed our inside man to feel trust. Those European girls, especially if they wantin’ to move west, be happy for that dark meat.”

  I laughed and Mouse appreciated the respect.

  “So that’s why I call it semiretired nowadays,” my killer friend concluded. “But why you wanna know, anyway?”

  “Etta seemed uptight, that’s all. And I know she wanted you to give the heavy shit up.”

  Mouse’s eyes tightened a bit, making it feel as if a shadow had fallen across our pinwheel table.

  A moment or two passed before he said, “Lihn. Vu Von Lihn. That girl make me feel sumpin’. I think I do her too.”

  “Like you’re in love?” I couldn’t keep the surprise out of my voice. In his nearly half a century of life Mouse had professed love only for his mother, now dead, and EttaMae Harris.

  “Is all you wanted was some salad?” he asked. “Or is there a job for us?”

  “We should go to the barroom if you’re finished eating,” I answered. When Mouse changed directions you either cut bait or lost the pole. “I need to find out if anybody here knows some people I’m lookin’ for.”

  “White people?”

  “One is, one isn’t.”

  “And what you need me for?”

  “First, just to get in the front door.”

  Mouse’s grin glittered at that.

  “Then,” I went on, “there’s the chance I might get what I wish for.”

  He smiled again and the threat of love moved into the background.

  “You got any names?” he asked.

  “Alonzo’s the only one I heard so far. That and where he was last seen at; a place called Blood Grove.”

  Mouse was back on track with me. He nodded and said, “I know seven niggahs named Alonzo.”

  “He might just be one of them.”

  Our early dinner, including tip, cost just under eight hundred dollars. This wasn’t the kind of job I expected to get paid for. Instead it was my dues for turning in time to see that German soldier before he could stab me in the back.

  The big white alligator, whose name was Rudolf, showed us to another door under his purview and ushered us through. We descended a spiral staircase for sixty steps or so. The well opened into a jazz bar with a black trio playing for more than a hundred patrons.

  The Dragon’s Eye bar area was twice the size of the dining room. The male patrons, except for the trio, me, and Mouse, were all white, as were most of the women. The bar was an enormous dragon carved from a hard, mottled-brown boulder. The stone was highly polished and the coiled myth’s head rose at least eighteen feet above the three bartenders. There was a live flame flickering in the beast’s left eye socket.

  “I see a couple’a people I know, Easy,” Mouse said. “I’m’a go over there and ask if they could help us with your man.”

  As Mouse walked away through the tide of white, I watched and wondered about him. For more than four decades I had been sure of the smiling killer. He never altered his path in life. But now he was becoming a different man—and change for the personified threat of death was not a welcome incarnation.

  “Hi,” a young woman’s voice chimed.

  15

  I turned to see a lovely straw-haired woman with rich brown eyes and a small scar at the tip of her chin. The scar was reminiscent of some kind of foreign punctuation mark.

  “Hi,” I replied.

  “What are you thinking about?”

  “Uh . . .” I uttered, reluctantly.

  “You wanna buy me a drink?” She was happy to change the subject.

  The second question took me away from Mouse and that German soldier.

  “Sure do,” I said.

  The young woman looked deeply into my eyes. I appreciated the attention.

  “What’s your name?” she asked.

  “Easy Rawlins.”

  “Easy? You could call a boy Easy, I guess, but a girl would suffer under a name like that.”

  I grinned and said, “It’s short for Ezekiel. What’s yours?”

  “Montana.”

  “For real?”

  “Can I help you?” a man’s anything-but-helpful voice asked.

  Swiveling my head to the left I saw the bartender, a beefy and pink-skinned specimen with a scowl for a mouth. His hands were working on drying a tall glass with fingers swollen from muscle. He was maybe thirty and only five eight, but if he ever clamped on with those mitts, that would have been the end of whoever got grabbed.

  “What’s your pleasure, Montana?” I said to my bar date.

  “I didn’t ask her,” the pink bartender said as he put down the glass.

  I considered grabbing the tumbler and smashing it around the vicinity of his eyes.

  “Rudolf says that Mr. Rawlins should be considered a platinum guest,” Montana informed the barman.

  I didn’t look at her because he could have used that glass on my eyes.

  Absorbing this intelligence, the bartender went through an amazing transformation. Across the wasteland of the pink man’s broad, flushed face, glower turned to grin.

  “Sorry, sir,” he said. “Monty always has the same. What would you like?”

  I made my order and he moved away.

  “My father was born in Cleveland but he always wanted to be a cowboy,” Montana said with a bit of nostalgia in her voice.

  “Say what?”

  “Instead he named me Montana and I turned into a saloon girl.”

  “I’d probably name you Platinum.”

  Montana grinned and bowed her head, only slightly. “Platinum means that if Cunningham made you mad he might could get fired.”

  “It’s more like I made him angry.”

  “Yeah,” she agreed. “Sometimes the band brings in a guest. They could sit at a table but the rules are they can’t stand at the bar. That’s for white customers.”

  “The story of my life and my father’s and his father’s and his.”

  Montana reached over to pick up a glass filled with red liquid. My drink was there too. Cunningham had stealth capabilities rivaling Craig Kilian’s and Christmas Black’s.

  “Did Rudolf ask you to follow me?”

  “To take care of you,” the daughter of a w
ould-be cowboy corrected.

  “Oh.”

  “What do you need, Easy?”

  She sipped the red drink and I considered my position. I wasn’t used to people offering to help me without the use of subterfuge on my part. Most often I had to cajole them with some circuitous chitchat for a good while before they let up on what I wanted to know.

  “I’m looking for a man, or the girlfriend of a man named Alonzo.”

  For the first time Montana had to consider her words before replying.

  “Um,” she said, the answer in mind but still wondering if it should come out of her mouth. “What’s the girlfriend’s name?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “Is this Alonzo a black man?”

  I nodded and sipped on my orange juice.

  “I don’t know if it’s the man you’re looking for but there’s a guy named Alonzo that’s kinda like a talent scout for the Eye. The waitresses have a pretty big turnover rate.”

  “And this Alonzo reps women?”

  “Yeah, you could put it like that. I didn’t get here through him but a lotta my girlfriends did.”

  “He have long straightened hair?”

  She had to think a minute. It didn’t look like she was stalling.

  Montana shook her head and uttered, “No. Just normal. A short Afro.”

  One of the most questionable things in my line of business is an easy answer with nothing at stake. I considered that truth a second too long.

  “What’s wrong?” asked the blond woman who studied men up close and often.

  “I walked into this place expecting to spend the rest of the night asking my question. And here, the first person I meet has the answer tied up with a bow.”

  When she wasn’t thinking about it, Montana’s pretty smile turned beautiful.

  “I like you, Easy. You pay attention. Most men I meet expect the world to bend over for them. They ask a question and think you have to tell them the truth. You ask the question and know there’s no one answer. I like that.”

  She was the kind of woman you wanted to like you. But I was on the job.

  She smiled again and touched my wrist. “Ask anybody who works here, Easy. They all, or almost all, know Alonzo.”

  “But this one doesn’t have straightened hair,” I added.

  “Not the last time I saw him.”

  “And when was that?”

  “A couple of weeks. He usually comes in in the daytime and talks to the floor manager.”

  “And who’s that?”

  “Another drink?” That was Cunningham, doing his job.

  “Put three rounds on my tab,” I said, glancing at him.

  “Be back after a while,” was his reply.

  “You’ve been to clubs like this before,” Montana observed.

  “Management here tonight?”

  “Upstairs. One floor past the dining room.”

  I was considering my next move. Montana studied my contemplation.

  “What now?” she asked.

  “I was thinking that if I wanted to give you the two twenties in my pocket, would it be bad manners just to put them in your hand?”

  “There’s these little red envelopes at this end of the bar,” she instructed, gesturing at the wall behind me. “Put whatever tip you want in one, write my name on it, and drop it in the slot on the other side.”

  “That doesn’t seem like a reliable system.”

  “Only Rudy has the key to the box, and he empties it every night.”

  “Okay,” I conceded. Then I gestured to Cunningham that I wanted my check.

  “You want to go look at the parking lot?” Montana offered.

  “Say what?”

  “Forty dollars won’t get you to the top floor. But it’s nice out back. They got padded benches in the recesses along the wall.”

  It proves how engaging Montana was that I was surprised at her suggestion. She saw what I was thinking and took it as a compliment.

  “No, no, baby,” I said. “You already gave me all I need.”

  She pouted prettily. “Everything?” she said.

  At that moment Cunningham put down a half tumbler with my paper bill stuffed inside. I picked out the check.

  “Is it because I’m white?” she asked, just fishing.

  “Certainly not.”

  “You don’t think I’m pretty?”

  “Come on now, girl, when was the last time you looked in the glass?”

  “Then what?” She was going to ride that horse into the ground.

  I counted out the outrageous cost of drinks and sighed.

  “I’m a detective.”

  “A cop?” She pulled her head back an inch or so, a tiger cub reacting to a king cobra’s threat.

  “Private. I got a client who wants to talk to a man named Alonzo. Maybe it’s your talent scout, maybe not.”

  “A black private eye?”

  “One day they’ll have black astronauts too.”

  Montana smiled for me again.

  “I’ll be right up there with you, my brother,” she said and then moved close as if to kiss.

  The fact that our lips didn’t touch was more powerful than if they had.

  She walked off into the growing crowd and I took in a lungful of air.

  I talked to seven other Eye employees. Five of them knew of the black talent scout named Alonzo. None of them remembered straight hair.

  After a couple of hours talking I pressed through the jazz and bodies toward a corner table where Mouse had been sitting most of the time. His company was two older guys who looked like they’d been drained of everything vital, including their souls. One of the mummies wore a blue suit, the other gray.

  When I approached the table, two young men with faces that somehow resembled scars stood to block my passage.

  “Hey, Kikkino,” Mouse said. “Tell your boys not to get their breaths on my friend.”

  Blue Suit said something that might have been in English and the thugs parted like as if Moses had spoken their names.

  I wondered if I should sit but Mouse stood up before I could decide.

  “Good to see you guys,” Raymond said to the dead souls. “We’ll talk about that job later.” Then to me: “Come on, Easy.”

  We achieved the dining floor and walked toward where Rudolf was standing. When I realized that we were headed for the door I put a hand on my friend’s shoulder and said, “I need to get an address before I leave. They tell me the club manager got it.”

  “You mean for Alonzo Griggs?”

  “You got his last name?”

  “Name, phone number, address, and the smell’a his pits. I know who you lookin’ for and I know where he say he live at. On top’a that I know where he stays when he needs to hide out.”

  16

  I followed Mouse’s Caddy from Hollywood to Inglewood. At that time of evening in 1969 there was not a great deal of traffic. It was about a quarter past ten when we turned into an alley off Coeller Street. The unpaved lane went by the back doors of a few warehouses and then abruptly stopped at a tall steel mesh fence with barbed wire nested across the top and a huge BEWARE OF DOG sign hung about midway. Above the warning was another, smaller sign that read CAFKIN’S JUNKYARD.

  “Cafkin,” I said. “Who’s that?”

  “He the man that owns the place where Alonzo go when he wanna stay hid,” Mouse explained.

  My friend had a long and slender crowbar in his right hand and a grease-stained brown paper bag in the other. He set the bag down, then threaded the crowbar through the hook of the big padlock holding the chains that kept the front gate from opening.

  “You take one side and I will the other and we’ll twist,” Raymond said. “Somethin’ gotta give.”

  “What about the dog?”

  “Dogs,” he corrected, his smile glittering. “You got your gun, right?”

  I sighed and we started turning the steel fulcrum. At about nine turns I heard the metal scrunch. At eleven one or more o
f the thick chain links cracked. By sixteen the chain fell away and the gate swung in a few inches.

  I was thinking about the plural of dog when Mouse walked across the threshold of danger.

  It was an old-fashioned junkyard. A few cars, some refrigerators and stoves. There were boxes, areas, and entire aisles that specialized. One little canvas-covered walkway had only pants. Old jeans, corduroy, khakis, discarded slacks done in wool, nylon, cotton, and even silk. There was a kitchenware corridor with cast-iron pots, chipped but otherwise fine china, plastic ware, cutlery, and cooking utensils from measuring cups to garlic presses. There was even a little lane that hoarded discarded electronics. There you could find electric lamps, toasters, flashlights, and a whole bin filled with tiny defunct transistor and crystal radios. These organized places and containers were Cafkin’s little store. Farther on, beyond the sorted materials, tarp-covered junk was piled high with no particular order imposed.

  Mouse led me down a curved pathway dimly lit by a string of low-watt bulbs hanging from whatever the electrician could find to tack on to. It was a dark night and the thought of canine fangs had me on edge.

  We turned a sharp corner defined by the sleek side of a once-orange tractor that teetered by itself near the back fence.

  That’s when the dogs started to bark and howl, bay and snarl.

  To my shame I jumped back and went for the .38 in my pocket.

  “Easy, what’s wrong with you, man? If they didn’t jump us at the gate you know they not doin’ they job. So they prob’ly locked up.”

  Probably was the word I chose to highlight, finger on the trigger.

  Then I saw the kennel with its high fence. Two of the three mongrels were bouncing off the wire barrier in between canine exhortations. The third dog just stood there growling, showing its most prominent teeth.

  Next to the dog enclosure was a tin shack that abutted the wall of a larger structure. It could have been an office, bedroom, or outhouse.