We dropped off Mouse and the seven revolvers at EttaMae’s in Watts proper.
“I’ll get Peter to help me pick up the Caddy tomorrow,” Mouse promised from the curb, “after we use the smelter at Primo’s to get rid’a these here.”
“Peter Rhone still live here?” Jackson asked.
“Yep, he sure does. He Etta’s French maid and my man Friday.”
We were getting off the Santa Monica Freeway at Fairfax when Jackson said, “I never thought I’d see this day.”
“What you talkin’ ’bout, Blue?” I had been staring off into the night lights of my adopted city, thinking about how far I’d come and how little progress I’d made.
“The day when Raymond Alexander had to tell Easy Rawlins to hold back.”
I chuckled. The humor brought back the things Charles said to stave off my wrath. This led to another train of thought.
“Does Jean-Paul have a contact with the police like Portia does?”
“Um …”
“Come on, Jackson. I just saved your ass, man.”
“Yeah,” he said reluctantly, “but we couldn’t use ’im. A fingerprint on a pistol woulda been too much for a cover-up.”
We got to Genesee at a little past three.
“I want you to call Jean-Paul,” I said to Jackson while handing him a bottle of beer.
“Now?”
I nodded. “Tell him that I wanna meet with his police contact down at the far end of the Santa Monica Pier at eight a.m.”
“It’s late, Easy,” Jackson whined.
“And I don’t need it gettin’ any later.”
After sharing the particulars of what I needed from his boss, I told Jackson that he could sleep in my bed or on the couch.
“What you gonna do?”
“Go out for a drive. I’ll be back to take you to work by ten.”
I drove up to our Bel-Air squat and waited until almost six. Sitting in the car, concealed by the deep driveway, I smoked a few menthols that I’d borrowed from Jackson and planned how to execute the rest of Jean-Paul’s revenge.
It felt good plotting, the way a spider must feel when spreading his web.
When the sky was light but the sun not yet risen, I pressed the button on the outer gate of the mansion.
It took a few minutes for someone to answer.
“Yes?” a soft but masculine voice said on the intercom speaker.
“It’s me, Juice.”
The gate swung slowly inward and I drove my gaudy red car toward the family I loved.
Jesus answered the door with the caramel-colored Essie sitting in the crook of his left arm.
The baby smiled, holding her hand out to me. I kissed her fingers and she giggled, pulling the hand quickly away.
“I think your little girl is telling me I need a shave.”
“How are you, Dad?”
“Keepin’ on, son. Keepin’ on.”
“Maybe a quick one. I got to be down in Santa Monica by eight.”
He boiled water and made me a cup of instant in the kitchen. We stood at the counter while the baby cooed and pawed his chin, a look of infinite wonder on her face.
“How’s everything?” I asked.
“Fine,” he replied. “Are you still drinking?”
“Not much for small talk, huh?”
“Are you?”
“Not a drop.”
When Jesus smiled it was like a little blessing or an unexpected moment of charity from a stranger. I sipped my coffee. Jesus held his daughter with intimacy and understanding that had no words and needed none. He and I had been together for many years. At the beginning he never spoke at all, and when he finally found his tongue, he was very conservative with its use.
We stood there for seven or eight minutes in deep silence.
“Where’s Feather’s bedroom?” I said at last.
“Across the hall from yours,” he said. “She wanted to be close in case you needed her.”
Feather’s room was the color of a half-rainy day, dominated by mild blues and soft grays. She had a short cherrywood bookshelf and a maple writing desk, both set upon a swept pine floor. There was a casement window, the doors of which opened out onto greenery so deep that it might have been a forest.
Her head was on a sea green pillow, and her bare leg stuck out from under the ash gray blanket. When I pulled the cover over her leg she woke up.
“Hi, Daddy.”
“Hey, babe,” I hailed, sitting down at her side.
“Happy to see your sleepy head.”
She grinned and sat up, holding the blue sheet up to her neck in the mature gesture of a much older woman.
“I miss you, Daddy.”
“I’m right here.”
“Are you finished with Uncle Ray’s case?”
“Not yet. I’m going down to Santa Monica in a little while to work out the last few kinks.”
“Then will you come home?”
“Yes.”
“And can we move back to Genesee?”
“Don’t you like it here?”
“It’s nice, but all my friends live down near school.”
Thinking about Jeffrey, I asked, “Would you mind if we moved somewhere around there?”
“How come?” But before I could answer, she said, “It doesn’t matter. If we’re close to Louis Pasteur that’s all I care about.”
“Then it’s done,” I said. “I have to get going. I just came over to kiss you good morning because I wasn’t here to kiss you good night.”
Feather proffered her light brown cheek and I kissed it.
“Ooh, Daddy! You need to shave.”
Changed, showered, shaved, and armed, I was sitting on a bench at the far end of the Santa Monica Pier at 7:47 in the morning. My only company was two old fishermen, one white and the other Mexican, or Mexican American, or maybe he was from some other colony of the conquistadores. Nine curious seagulls hovered around the old friends, hoping to get at the bait fish they were using.
“Mr. Rawlins?” a man said.
He was neither tall nor short: a white man with prematurely salt-and-pepper hair, slender, wearing dark blue trousers and a checkered red-and-black dress shirt. The shirttails were tucked in but he wore no belt. His eyes were slate gray. I’ve always been partial to gray eyes—they remind me of the cat my mother once owned.
My visitor was carrying a large brown paper bag by twined brown paper handles.
“Yes?” I said.
“Tim Richards,” he replied, lowering into the empty space next to me.
“Really?”
He smiled and gave a little chuckle out from behind closed lips.
“I don’t care what your name is, man,” I said. “Did you bring me what I want?”
He reached into the bag and came out with single sheet of white typing paper.
“There are quite a few guys with that first name, but I finally decided that it had to be Maurice Potter that you were referring to. He’s mostly a pimp, but he’s been busted for lots of stuff, including the kind of crimes that you told Villard about.” He handed me the sheet. “That’s the address we have for him. It’s up in Cheviot Hills. That’s the Jew Beverly Hills.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I know where it is.”
The man calling himself Richards cocked his head, looking at me quizzically.
“What is it with Villard and Negroes?” he asked. “I mean, he’s got that little black dude with him half the time, and now he’s helping you.”
“If you don’t like black people and you don’t like Jews, the real question is, what are you doing here with me at eight in the morning?”
“I don’t dislike anybody, Mr. Rawlins.” The cop’s voice was as cold as his eyes. “I just call a spade a spade.”
He was baiting me, and Mama Jo’s medicine wanted to rise to the hook. But I inhaled deeply, putting that urge down.
“You needed a whole shoppin’ bag for one sheet’a paper?” I asked.
“Oh, yeah. I got something else in here, something JP thought you might be interested in.”
He pulled out a manila folder. It contained well over a hundred sheets of various kinds and colors of paper. It was the thickness of a small town’s white pages.
When I got it in my hands I saw a familiar name on the filing tab—EZEKIEL PORTERHOUSE RAWLINS.
There were reports filed on me that went all the way back to the late forties. Other than Mouse it contained briefs on my friends Odell, John, EttaMae, Jackson, Primo, and a dozen or more others. There were all kinds of crimes I had been a suspect in—some of them I actually committed.
I must have spent five minutes engrossed in the life that the LAPD attributed to me.
“Damn,” I said at last. “You got one’a these on Ray Alexander?”
“I’d need a helper to bring down the file cabinet we got on him.”
“I guess you need this back, huh?” I asked.
“No. You can keep it.”
“Won’t it be missed?”
“If they go lookin’ for it they’ll just think it got lost.”
“They’re that careless about their files at the LAPD?”
“Look at the last page.”
I turned the tome over and opened it from the back. The final page of the damning document was mostly blank except for the sentence: SUBJECT DECEASED DUE TO A SINGLE-VEHICLE ACCIDENT ON PCH. INVESTIGATION CLOSED.
I was so engrossed in those twelve words that I didn’t notice the man who called himself Tim Richards rising from the bench.
“Keep your nose clean and they’ll never know you’re out here,” he advised.
He walked away, leaving me with my epitaph in my lap.