The front door of Terry Aldrich’s mansion was ajar. This worried me, but I decided to leave the pistol nestled under the belt on the left side of my waist. The foyer was crowded with shoes and coats, duffel bags and two or three suitcases. It was an upscale hippie crash pad, and an open door might have been just as much policy as the sign of a crime.
I heard sounds to the left and followed a corridor of small doorways to an unfurnished room almost large enough to be called a hall.
Ten or twelve young people dressed in gaudy rags sat in the riches of that home. Terry was one of them. Ruby was sitting on his lap. Coco/Helen sat apart from the group on the marble ledge of a dead fireplace.
Two fat joints were being passed around. A woman was softly playing a large guitar in Spanish style with great speed and articulation. There were two black members of the temporary tribe: a man and a woman, both of whom wore brightly colored and beaded headbands, though they didn’t sit together.
“Easy!” Ruby shouted.
She jumped out of Terry’s lap, ran to me, and kissed my lips wetly.
“Come on in,” Terry hailed, waving me over.
I managed to lever myself down on the marble floor next to Terry. Ruby got back on his lap and took me by the hand. This gesture, more than anything else at the time, showed me the heart of hippie logic and philosophy. All the old rules about gender and race, class and relationship had been temporarily jettisoned for the hope that people could come together like any other social animal. We could sniff butts and rub noses, share our warmth and howl at the moon together without spoken agreements, contracts, or laws. There might have been a hierarchy, but this was a shifting thing, and the herd was more important than any temporary leader.
Somebody offered me a joint but I just passed it on.
“You a narc?” a redheaded, broad-shouldered young man asked. This accusation, strangely, carried no ire.
“No. I just need to stay straight to make sure I don’t get my head shot off.”
“Nobody’s gonna shoot you here, man,” said a young woman with hair so fair that it didn’t seem human.
“This is just a stop on my way,” I replied. “Terry?”
Terry took a hit off the joint I passed on, and so it was a moment before he could exhale and then catch enough breath to talk.
“Yes, Easy?”
“Can I get you and Ruby and Coco to go somewhere where we can talk privately?”
“Sure, brother. Come on, girls.”
“Women,” Coco corrected.
“Women,” the ugly young man said with a grin and an awkward, stoned nod.
There was a redwood picnic table in the overgrown backyard. Grasshoppers leaped and bumblebees hummed around us. There were green hummingbirds making the rounds of passion fruit vines. A cool breeze that passed one way and then another moved like an invisible snake weaving its way between and beyond us.
Ruby and Terry were high, very much so. Coco seemed as she had before.
“What can I do for you, Easy?” Terry said, placing both hands palms down on the table before him like a king at his judgment table.
“Three men broke into my office today,” I said. “I think they meant me harm. One of them was a guy named Keith Handel. He said that he found out about me from people in your house.”
“Bummer,” Terry replied.
“Is it true?”
Terry paused, staring at me with both distraction and intent. He nodded to himself and then said, “Yancy was moving his stuff out and Vixie came over with Keith. That was yesterday, I think. I don’t know what they talked about.”
“How do you know Handel?”
“He works for this dealer, Haman Rose. I buy a kilo from Haman almost every week, you know, to keep my friends high.”
“And Keith delivers?”
“No, no …” Terry drifted off then, looking at something in the sky.
“Terry.”
“What, man?”
“How does Haman deliver?”
“He doesn’t. Ruby or somebody else goes down to this Laundromat in Venice and picks it up for me. I let whoever it is that goes drive my Jaguar.”
“Yeah,” Ruby said with a dumb grin. “You just go in and act like you dropped off some laundry and they give you a cloth bag full’a dope.”
“What about the police?”
“They got a deal with Haman,” Coco said.
“You know him too?”
“Everybody up around here knows Haman. He supplies a lot of the grass and hash. Keith Handel makes sure people don’t get ripped off.”
“Oh.”
“Handel had been looking for this guy Maurice,” Coco said. “He was lookin’ for Maurice and Evander. Vixie musta told him Evander’s name.”
“Yeah,” Ruby said. “Vixie told me that Keith was looking for me, but then she told him what he wanted to know.”
“He was asking everybody where could he find Evander,” Coco added. “I told him I didn’t know anything.”
“Me too,” Ruby added, “but Yancy had already told him your name.”
“Have you been out to Mama Jo’s?” Coco asked me.
“Not since we were there.”
“I’d like to see her again.”
“I’ll tell her that,” I said to Coco, and then to Terry, “When do you make your pickups from Rose?”
“Anytime. I’m one of his special customers.”
“You mind if I go down with Ruby to pick up a key?”
“No problem. You wanna drive my Jag?”
“Yeah,” Ruby said greedily.
“I’ll drive,” I said.
I stood up and then stopped, because King Terry looked as if he was about to utter some royal decree.
“You wanna talk to Vixie?” he asked me.
“Where is she?”
“She was sitting in the big room with us. Why don’t you stay here and I’ll bring her back.”
Terry went to find the informer. Ruby went to change clothes, and Coco said that she was going upstairs to the roof. And so I was left there in the mansion’s backyard. It was lovely and sumptuous, a shaggy retreat for the wealthy and their children.
It occurred to me that before my encounter with mortality I believed that wealth could somehow save me. This illusion had been dispelled by experience. I knew that all I owned was my body and its mind, and that was a tenuous bargain that would be scratched off in time.
“Here you go, Easy,” Terry said, coming out of the back door.
Accompanying him was a sharp-featured, small-eyed redhead that I’d only glimpsed in the pot-smoking circle. She wore a black shift and had a reluctant frown on her face.
“Vixie?” I asked.
“What?” she said petulantly.
“The men you told about my man Easy here attacked him,” Terry said. “He needs to know why they’re after him.”
“He already knows,” she said, not looking in my direction. “He ripped off Keith Handel.”
“What makes you think that?” I asked.
My tone made her look at me.
“He said so,” she said.
“What did he say, exactly?”
“That you and Maurice stole his money.”
“What about Evander?”
The question seemed to confuse her.
“Him too,” she said, uncertainly.
“Him too what?”
“He said that Maurice and a black guy … you … I don’t remember exactly. But he was lookin’ for you because you were looking for Evander.”
“Did you take Evander up to Caller’s Creek?”
“Yeah. So what?”
“Did he tell you about blood on some money?”
“He was tripping,” she said defensively.
“Why did you leave him up there when you knew those men would have killed him?”
“I … I didn’t know.”
“You knew they tied him to a tree. You asked him where was the key to the bus locker and then left him with those animals. Why didn’t you tell the cops?”
“I’m only sixteen. They would have sent me home or to juvy.”
“You could have told me,” Terry said. “I would have called the police to save him.”
“What did Keith tell you about Evander?”
“That him and Maurice ripped him and Giles off?”
“Who’s Giles?”
“He works for Rose too,” Terry said. “And you don’t have to worry about Haskell and his friends.”
“Why?”
“They got busted tryin’ to move the dope out of their camp when there was a fire the other day.”
I wanted to say something else to Vixie. I wanted to make her understand, or at least to feel the kind of pain and danger she brought down on others. I wanted to hurt her.
So instead I shook Terry’s hand and walked away from the false security of his wealth.