By the time I got back to the illegal hotel I was flagging—not exhausted or shattered, as I had been before my last bouts of sleep, just very, very tired.
Unit J was empty, and so I told myself that I had to go out and find Evander. Nan Mann would have seen him leave. Luce might even have noted the direction. It was early afternoon. I laid my head down on the unmade bed, in the little cell that passed for a room, taking a few minutes to close my eyes before going out looking for my troubled ward.
When I woke up, maybe four hours later, Evander was perched on a chair at the side of the bed. Our positions brought back my first memories after the accident. I was once again an invalid, and Evander flipped back and forth between being Mouse and Lynne Hua sitting vigil over me.
Inhalation promoted me from invalid to merely exhausted.
The young man that Mouse called Little Green was deep in thought. His fists were under his chin, he was leaning forward like Rodin’s Thinker, and his eyes were cast down but looking inward.
“Evander.”
“You awake?” he asked, not looking up.
The mechanics of raising my torso from a prone to a seated posture seemed infinitely complex. But I managed it, making the grunting sounds that old people do when they have to bend down—or crank themselves back up again.
“Where’d you go?” I asked.
“Tulip Café,” he said.
“What’s that?”
“It’s a soul food place. Miss Mann told me that I could get somethin’ to eat there.”
“Good?”
“I called my mama.” Full stop.
“Yeah?”
“I told her what Mr. Alexander told me to.” Stop.
“And?”
“I told her that Mr. Alexander told me that he knew who my father was, and that if she didn’t tell me, then he would.” Stop.
Evander’s halting story didn’t bother me, because I knew his lineage had nothing to do with me and my problems.
“She said,” Evander continued unexpectedly, “that Mr. Alexander should know who my father was. He should know because my father was a man named Frank Green and Mr. Alexander murdered him.”
It was nineteen years before that a white gangster named DeWitt Albright hired me to find a white woman who preferred the company of black men—Daphne Monet. But Daphne only looked white, and used her looks to pass as something she was not in the American notion of race. She was a Negro woman but her skin was white. Her half brother, Frank Green, however, was the color of a starless night. Frank was a gangster too, and he was bound and determined to kill me for even thinking about his sister.
Frank was hunting me but Mouse found him first. And even though Raymond did the deed, I was the reason he killed Little Green’s father.
“Did you know my father?” Evander asked from a far-removed place in time.
“Back in those days L.A. was a much smaller place,” I said. “There were two million fewer people in Southern California. I knew almost every black face back then. And if I didn’t know ’em I knew somebody who did.”
“Did you know Frank Green?”
“Not personally, but I knew who he was.”
“Did Mr. Alexander kill him?” Evander sat up straight to ask this question.
“Your father,” I said, “if Frank Green really was your father, was a killer, a terror with knife or gun. I know of six people he slaughtered. Not murdered, not killed, but butchered like beef cows. Ray’s a bad man too. If they crossed each other one or both were destined to die. On that side of the tracks killing was just another part of life.”
“If it’s true then I have to kill him,” Evander said to his hands.
“Maybe,” I agreed. “Maybe he did and maybe you do. But let’s follow it down first. Did your mother actually see Ray kill Frank?”
“I don’t know,” the young man said.
“First you got to make sure you know what you’re saying is true, because you only have two and a half possibilities if it is. The most likely outcome is that you try and kill Ray, but he gets you first. After that there’s the slim chance that you kill him and then one of his friends’ll hunt you down and kill you, that is unless you get arrested and the judge sends you to the gas chamber.”
Evander, Little Green, was concentrating on my words. I thought my logic was getting through to him when he asked, “Did you go to college, Mr. Rawlins?”
“No. But I been to school.”
“I was gonna go to college.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“Because Mama needed help and I was just … I don’t know … I just wasn’t ready to take myself seriously like that.”
I lifted up on my left side and pulled the car keys out of my pocket.
“I got a bottle of Mama Jo’s medicine in my trunk,” I said. “Car’s parked right out on the street. Go get it for me, will you, son?”
Evander went and I wondered if I was the reason that the lost boy wasn’t ready to live his life. Could I have saved his father? Should I have died so that the next generation would live? I thought about how Mouse had taken care of the boy and his family for nearly two decades after killing Frank Green. Mouse and I had been friends since our teen years, and I was still finding new sides to him.
When Evander returned I gulped down the sweet and foul brew, and then lay back to consider what to do about so many different and conflicting troubles.
“I found Maurice,” I said some while later. I had a multitiered plan in place. I might not have been able to articulate every step, but you don’t have to be able to forge a pistol in order to shoot a man dead.
“Did he know what happened?” Little Green asked.
“I’m sure he did, but he didn’t tell me, because he was dead.”
“Dead? How?”
“Somebody shot him in the shoulder, but he survived that. Then somebody tortured, beat, and then shot him in the head trying to get to you.”
“Me? What for?”
“That money, of course.”
“Where is the money?”
“In a safe place.”
“I been thinkin’ ’bout it, Mr. Rawlins. That’s my money and I want it.”
“We don’t know whose money it is,” I said. “One thing for sure: There’s blood on it. If you take one you got to take the other. But in the meanwhile we can’t put it under the bed or in the trunk of my car. The money is safe and it will stay that way until we figure out who killed Maurice and dissuade them from doing the same thing to you and yours.”
Evander frowned again. He was worried about his mother and sisters. That was good. I wanted to keep him focused on right now so I could work some magic around later on.