“I was looking around the shop building with Mr. Muldoon,” Newgate said, changing the subject. “I had him prepare the metal shop for a thorough cleaning.”
“I know,” I said. “I told him to put the furniture back into the classroom so Mr. Sutton can teach his class.”
“I ordered them to remove the furniture.” Newgate reminded me of a Captain Dougherty, who had sent four squads of soldiers into a firefight outside of Anzio, one per hour. Every member of every squad was slaughtered while we made no progress against the enemy. We knew that the good captain had been part of a wager between English and American officers about who would enter the city first. He started sending them at eight a.m. By ten to twelve he was hit with shrapnel from a Yankee grenade that went off by mistake.
“Lucky for you that I’m the officer in charge,” I said. “Because Sutton was in Korea and he wouldn’t like to see his classroom turned all inside out like that.”
“I’m in charge of the whole school,” Newgate said.
“Look it up in your handbook, Hiram,” I said. “Supervising custodian makes the final decisions about plant procedure. You can complain about it, but it will be at maintenance headquarters, not with the administration.”
Newgate had big veins in his neck, thick and cordlike. They stood out when he got really angry. That morning they even hinted red.
Watching him get so irritated gave me a moment of peace. I forgot about Brawly and Conrad, about bushwhackers and the secret arm of the L.A.P.D. Black men in America have always worked for white taskmasters. It had only been in the past few years that I could talk back without fear of losing my job, or maybe even a tooth or two.
Some men I’d known had died challenging their superiors. So Newgate’s aggravation was a kind of balm. It soothed my symptoms, but the disease was still there.
— 21 —
“Hello, Mrs. Plates,” I said later that morning.
Jorge Peña, Garland Burns, Troy Sanders, and Willard Clark had already come in, had coffee, and gone out again. “You’re a few minutes late, aren’t you?” I chided her but I didn’t really care.
Helen Plates was a natural blond Negro, also from the Midwest. She had a complaint for everything from politics to drinking water, from poor blacks to rich whites. She could never get in to work right on time but she was my hardest worker, next to Garland, and Helen never minded if I asked her to do a little overtime. I think she liked to stay late because her husband was an invalid and she worked harder for him than she ever did at Truth.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Rawlins,” she said. “You know I had to make sure Edgar took his pills before I left. His cousin, Opal, is fine to sit around and feed him soup, but she don’t know how to dole out them pills. You know, he has to take his blue pill every three hours, his pink pills two at a time every five, there’s the square white ones that he takes every hour, and the round white ones that he takes three times a day. The first time I left Edgar with Opal she just gave him all of ’em at once at ten-thirty. I called Dr. Harrell and he made us pump out his stomach at the emergency ward in the hospital.”
“But if you can’t trust Opal, then what are you going to do for the rest of the day?” I asked her.
“I have to call every time he needs to take a pill.”
My next question should have been, Well, if all you have to do is call, then why did you have to stay late this morning? But instead I asked, “Do you have Mercury’s address?”
Mrs. Plates’s friendly patter petered out then. She sat back in her chair and turned her face away from me, as if maybe I was naked and should be ashamed of myself.
“That’s a personal thing, Mr. Rawlins. I don’t know if Mercury wants me to be handin’ out his numbers like that.”
“He didn’t seem to mind you tellin’ me that he was in trouble over that burglary he committed when it helped him out,” I said.
“Shhh, baby. Mercury ain’t like that no more. He’s workin’ construction in Compton and you don’t know who might be at the door listenin’.”
“Write down his address, will you, Mrs. Plates?”
“Why?” I could see in her face that she didn’t want me to tell her the truth.
“I’m doin’ some work for John — you know, the man Mercury and Chapman work for. He needs me to locate one of his employees, and I was thinkin’ that Merc might know a thing or two.”
“Is John’s employee in trouble?”
“You don’t even know his name, Helen. Why worry about him? Mercury isn’t in trouble, either — that’s all you need to know.”
I spent the morning wandering around the grounds, checking out pink slips that various teachers and administrators had left reporting problems with the plant. There was paint peeling off the ceiling of the girls’ shower room and a faulty light in the teachers’ lounge. Nothing serious. Nothing I couldn’t handle with my eyes closed. I was having a good time.
At noon I went to the main building and took out the dirty and creased white card that Detective Knorr had given me. All it had was a telephone number with an Axminister exchange.
I dialed the number.
“D Squad,” a woman’s voice said.
“Detective Knorr, please,” I said in a stern, barely civil, white man’s tone.
“He’s not in right now,” the woman said. “May I take a message?”
“This is Grimes,” I said. “I have a special expenses check for the detective that’s come back three times. Can you give me the right address?”
“What address are you using?”
I gave her the address of the Seventy-seventh Street Precinct.
“Your records are obviously out of order,” she snapped. My tone had gotten under her skin. She gave me Vincent Knorr’s office address with vindictive pleasure.
I left work at one. That was seven hours and I’d worked hard. I wasn’t worried about Newgate getting mad at me. None of my custodians — or his teachers, for that matter — would tell him where I was. If he asked for me, the standard reply was “I saw him a few minutes ago. He was headed for the other campus.”
The address the angry secretary gave brought me to a building on Hope, just down the block from City Hall. Made from stone, the entrance brought me into a building-sized room that had a domed ceiling with a tiny colored-glass opening at the very top. A woman sat at a desk blocking entrée to the large circular room. Her nameplate read MISS PFENNIG.
Pfennig’s copper-colored hair came out of a wash basin and she had probably been ugly even when she was a child, which was more than forty years earlier. Her long nose had gone awry, like a sapling grown under heavy shade, wavering this way and that in search for the light. Her eyes were a translucent gray. Her skin was gray also, but lusterless and drab.
I came in from the bright sun, so it took a few moments for my vision to adjust to the tomblike interior. Even the skylight couldn’t brighten that dark globular room. With no windows and the roof at least thirty feet away, there was little possibility that it would ever muster any more than a dusklike gloom.
“What do you want?“ Pfennig asked.
I ignored her rudeness, looking at the doorways along the edges of the perfectly circular room. The floor might have been fifty feet in diameter. I found myself amazed at the profound waste of space. I thought of Jackson Blue’s lopsided room. At least he used the space he had for books and studying, for thinking, no matter how misguided. It struck me that Jackson might not have been so wrongheaded as I thought. After all, here I was in the medieval bastion of the special police squad assigned to hounding and destroying a black political group. How could someone justify being a law-abiding citizen after seeing something like that?