“You wanna pull into some parking lot and ball me in the backseat?” Ruby asked a few blocks from the Laundromat.
“What?”
“I’m all excited,” she said. “I wanna get it.”
She was sitting on her knees in the seat looking at me.
“I’m old enough to be your father, girl.”
“You were the same age the other night at Terry’s.”
“And I thought you and Terry were a thing now.” I don’t know why I argued; maybe it was my way of biding time on the bigger issues in my life.
“So? People don’t own each other. He doesn’t care what I do.”
“I’ll get you up to his place and you can get together with him.”
“You don’t want me?”
“I want you in all kinds of ways, Ruby,” I said with both feeling and honesty. “I do. But I got a job to do, and maybe there’s a woman I love who I want to be with.”
“That Bonnie?”
I nodded, thinking that she had paid closer attention to my words than I thought.
“What does she have to do with me?” Ruby asked.
I laughed at the brazen honesty of the hippie girl.
“Will you please let me off this hook, child?” I asked. “I’m an old man who almost died a couple of months ago, and right now I’m just trying to do a simple job.”
She smiled and turned around in her seat.
“Sometimes I just don’t understand men,” she said to the world at large.
“What fun would there be in that?” I reached out and squeezed her hand. This seemed to satisfy her need temporarily. That was the least I could do. After all, Ruby had been instrumental in getting me over the hump of my slapdash investigation.
Ruby gave me another wet kiss before jumping out of the car at Terry’s mansion. I watched her running on those young haunches, thinking that I was alive again but not exactly the same man. I would miss the old Easy Rawlins. He was running into the yard behind Ruby, looking for that sweet oblivion that all young men, white and black, thought could save them from the greater darkness that dogged their heels.
I arrived at the 77th Street precinct at a little past eight. The good thing about the police is that they’re open twenty-four hours a day. It often seemed to me that the constabulary was a modern-day church—always there … waiting for your confession.
“Yeah?” the desk sergeant asked when I approached his desk.
I had a valid carry license but left my gun in the car. The police in L.A. were a skittish lot. Even the sight of a pistol on a black man’s person might call down a hail of gunfire.
“I’d like a powwow with Melvin Suggs if you don’t mind, Sergeant.” I might have even smiled.
“Rawlins, right?”
“Yes, sir.” I was feeling very Southern and civilized, the way that the ex-slave-owning, Jim Crow–enforcing white Southerners liked to pretend to be. I was a new man with a new life and three-quarters of a pack of Camels in his breast pocket. But the world I lived in had not yet registered the changes in itself or in me.
The wait was nearly forty-five minutes.
I was expecting Suggs to come from the swinging doors behind the desk sergeant’s post, but instead he came through the front door wearing a burnt orange–colored suit and shiny black shoes. His pressed shirt wasn’t even white; it was lemon with little cherry dots here and there.
“This way,” he grunted as he rushed past me through the swinging doors.
We climbed three stairs and turned right through a door marked EXIT. This brought us to a stairwell that went up and down and to a door that probably went outside. I followed as Suggs rushed up the stairs all the way to the fourth floor.
There we crossed a large room filled with booking desks, alleged felons, and their captors.
It’s a strange thing to see a powerful man’s hands chained behind him, almost poetic in a brutal sort of way. Maybe those fists had beaten some hapless pedestrian to the ground, or the fingers had choked the life out of a woman that he loved so much he couldn’t let go; but now those fists and fingers were like bunches of dark plantains hanging down around the crack of his butt, helpless in every way possible.
Melvin led me to a desolate corner of the booking floor where there was a brown door painted on in black letters that read, “offlimits”; no caps, no punctuation. Through this door and up half a flight we came to a solitary and dusty office, dimly lit through a window by an outside security light. Suggs ushered me in, shut the door, turned on the desk lamp, and then collapsed into his squeaky-wheeled chair.
I took my seat across the desk from him and lit up a Camel.
“I thought you’d be here at work,” I said. “I didn’t mean for them to get you out of bed.”
“Do I look like I was in bed?” he asked. “I told the desk to call me if you came in. I’m interested in this Rose thing.”
“You still got them here?” I asked.
“Transferred downtown. They’ll be out by eleven in the morning unless you decide to come in, with your friend, and make a complaint.”
“My friend’s shy.”
“Yeah.”
That might have been the end of our talk, but we both wanted something, maybe some things.
“You sure that Handel works for Rose?” I asked.
“For the past eight years,” Suggs replied. “Why?”
“I don’t know. I just heard that he might be working on his own, that’s all.”
“Hm,” Suggs said, sitting back. “Yeah … that fits.”
“Fits what?”
“Handel didn’t call the Rose lawyer, and the guys he had with him were from Vegas. Neither one had ever been busted in L.A.”
“Yeah,” I said to myself. “That’s what I thought.” Because Rose didn’t ask about Easy Rawlins. It seemed that he would have wanted to know about another black man that he’d sent Handel to brace.
“What you got on Rose?” Suggs asked. Then he yawned.
“First I need to know some things.”
“Like what?”
“I know that Haman has two guys around him named Bobby and Mitchell, and you say this other guy is Keith Handel. Is there anybody else he’s got?”
Suggs pulled a thick and dusty folder out of the desk and opened it up in front of him. He paged back and forth for at least three minutes.
“He’s had quite a few cohorts over the years. He works for a downtown mobster named Lofty, Aaron ‘Lofty’ Purdy from Cincinnati. It says here that there’s a Giles Lehman that he’s tight with. Giles and Keith are his underbosses; at least, that’s what the organized crime unit calls ’em. I say that they’re just midsize thugs in a broke-nose jungle.”
“You got an address on Lehman?”
“Why?”
“I’d like to strike a deal with him,” I said.
“What kind of deal?”
“That’s my business.”
“I need more than that, Rawlins.”
“Do you have in that folder that Haman Rose runs a Laundromat down near Venice and Lincoln and sells grass in laundry bags?”
“No.”
“How about that he pays the cops down there to leave him and his business alone?”
Suggs had become subverbal, shaking his head and looking like he just licked a lemon.
“This is fact?” he asked.
“I don’t know. It’s just what I heard along the way.”
“Okay,” Suggs half agreed. “So if I sting this place I get Lehman too.”
“I need to talk to Lehman first.”
“Why?”
“From what I hear Giles Lehman and I have a lot in common.”
“I’m still the law, Easy. I can’t let you just go out and do whatever you want.”
“I know that, Melvin, I do. That’s why I’m giving you this. But if you’re gonna want any more help I need that address.”
It only took six or seven minutes for him to pass me the numbers.
G. Lehman lived on Renvert Street in Culver City.