Never in my life had I taken such a chance for somebody else. I’d risked my life before but that was always because of my pride — or stupidity. But here I was working for a dead woman to save a woman who I hardly even knew.
Those shots of whiskey in John’s car had gone right to my brain and stayed there.
The office building was really a walled-in courtyard. The path between the cottage-offices was wet brick. The offices were made of brick too. Old crumbling brick that was dark from the dust of years and not pigment. The cold those walls threw off was clammy and unhealthy.
If there was a valley of death I had stumbled upon it.
Dr. Green’s office wasn’t even in the court, it was through a redwood door at the back and across an alley. There stood a turquoise stucco building with potted succulents on either side of the oak entrance.
I knocked and awaited my fate.
The man who opened the door wore a green suit. Maybe, I thought, that was his joke. There was no Dr. Green. Jackson had discovered that Stetz rented the office as a partial cover to his gambling activities.
“Mr. Stetz?” I asked the dark-skinned white man. He had a bad complexion, rough caves instead of cheeks. His hair was thick and black. He wasn’t a big man but you could tell by his dark stare that if he got mad you’d have to kill him just to slow him down.
“Who’re you?” He jutted his head at me.
“My name is Rawlins. I’ve come to speak with Mr. Stetz.”
“How’d you know to come here?”
I saw no reason to lie so I said, “Jackson Blue.”
The ugly man froze for a second and then he moved backwards, making room for me to enter the sham office.
He led me through a dwarf foyer into a waiting room, or parlor. There, seated around a squat maple table, were five white men. All of them smoking and all of them hard. Each one was figuring how he’d have to go about killing me, if he got the chance.
“Wait here,” the man in the green suit told me.
He went through a door. The men peered at me from their seats.
I was remembering the wet heat of the Louisiana summers of my boyhood. Old folks used to say that it was so hot that even God was sweating.
“What’s the skinny, shine?” a roly-poly man in a dark suit asked. His slight accent was eastern European but he’d been down among my people once or twice; the twist on his words told me that.
His tone also told me that my mortal troubles might soon be over. But I was pacific. I had a .38 strapped to my thigh and a slit cut into my pants so that I could get to it fast. I could kill the moonfaced talker and maybe one or two of his friends before I went down.
It was that thought that saved me. I didn’t lose my cool. I gave that man a look that said, “Don’t mess, motherfucker, don’t mess.” If I had gotten mad or scared he would have been on me in a second. This way he had to consider first. He had to wonder what it was that I had.
The other men started to laugh. They liked a good standoff. The man I was looking at had probably killed a dozen men, and every one of them begged for life. But not this time.
“Hey, Aaron,” a slappy-looking guy dressed in clashing browns said. “Looks like you met your match there.”
All the men laughed.
Moonface tried to grin, but failed.
I took a deep breath and he measured it. He tried another smile and I lowered my shoulder to go for the gun. I was a fool but I didn’t mind.
“Hey you.” The man in the green suit was standing in the doorway to the doctor’s office.
I looked at him feeling unconcerned. I was in no hurry.
“Yeah?” I asked.
“Come on.”
Aaron smoothed back the little hair he had as I walked by. I felt a sort of comradeship with him. For a moment the violence that we both wanted seemed okay, like it was just an expression between men — rough humor, healthy competition, survival of the fittest.
As I passed into the big man’s office I shed the feelings of impending violence I had with Aaron. Now I had to be ready for a new game. I didn’t know what to expect, but that’s what street life is all about — you get thrown into the mix and see if you can get your bearings before your head’s caved in.
“This is him, Mr. Stetz,” the green suit said.
“Thanks, Arnie. You frisk him?” Stetz asked.
Arnie and I looked at each other.
Stetz shook his head.
“Get outta here, Arnie.”
Arnie wanted to say something but Stetz said, “Just go.”
Something about the way Stetz sent Arnie away made me like the man. In those two words he said, “You’re hopeless, Arnie, but I’ve got to keep you around because we’ve known each other so long and because I can still squeeze an ounce of worth out of you now and then.” It reminded me of my job at Sojourner Truth.
Stetz was a good-looking white man. Tall and comfortable with the elevation, he had a good tan and light brown hair. His eyes wavered between brown and yellow and his shoulders had seen their days of labor.
His suit was dark blue.
“Sit down,” he told me. I heard the door close on Arnie at my back.
“Jackson Blue sent you?” Stetz asked. His eyes looked bored. I had the feeling that he’d asked me in because he didn’t have anything else to do.
He waited for me to sit first.
“Not exactly,” I replied. I didn’t give much because I was still trying to figure the right approach with him. Stetz had kept the doctor’s office exactly as he had found it. There were medical books on the shelves; big oak filing cabinets along the opposite walls. The meandering vine that grew in the window behind him looked as if it had been growing there for over a decade. The central stalk had gone woody.
The desk in front of him was empty except for a Modern Library edition of Meditations by Marcus Aurelius.
“You read?” His question startled me.
“Yeah. Some.”
“You read this?” He held the volume up.
I shook my head no. “But that was his journal, right? He was waging a campaign against the Germans or somebody and wrote down his thoughts about bein’ a right man.”
“What do you want, Mr. Rawlins?”
“I got a problem, and so does Jackson. As I see it your waters might be gettin’ a little rough too. One thing I learned down home was that sometimes men can trade off their losses and come out with a profit.”
“You’re losing me, friend,” Stetz said.
Friend.
“Jackson’s partner’s in jail. There’s half a dozen big-time gamblin’ men in L.A. wanna see Jackson dead, an’ without Ortiz he knows he’s meat. I come to him with my own problem and he sent me to you for a deal.”
“What kinda deal could a nigger have for me?” Stetz said.
He drew the line between us with one word.
“The reason you can’t catch Jackson is ’cause of his system. He tapped onto the phone company with an invention. A machine that records the bets. He got eighteen hundred customers layin’ down bets an’ playin’ numbers with a tape recorder that you couldn’t never find. Jackson got the edge on all you boys, an’ the one that get in on it will be the top dog on bettin’.”
It flowed out easy. One word after the other. Stetz was a smart man, I’d’ve known that without his book, and so he listened.
“And so what would this top dog eat?”
“Jackson’s twelve bookie boxes, the recorders I mean, a paper tellin’ you how to use’em, the phone numbers he got for his customers t’call, and the phone numbers of those customers.”
“And what do I give?”
“You put out the word that Jackson’s outta business. That way nobody got a reason to wanna see him dead. That and one other thing.”