Instead, I came upon a corpse that was half in and half out of the doorway.
He was a big man, especially around the middle. Black, he wore blue work pants and a blue work shirt that had been pulled almost off of his back. His head was crushed from behind and there were deep bloody marks in his back also made by the bludgeon.
He resembled the carcass of a beached sea lion left by the tide.
There were dozens of columns of tiny black ants making their way to and from the body. Given enough time, they might have consumed it.
The day’s mail was sticking out from under his gut.
The company of the dead doesn’t bother me much, not after the front lines of World War II. I’d seen death in all colors and sexes, in all sizes and states of decomposition. That’s why I could step over that spilled life into Isolda’s powder-blue oceanic home.
The fight and flight were evident in upturned furniture and bloody hand- and footprints on the walls and floor. It was a spare house with pine floors and not much furniture. The walls were white and the furniture mostly an ugly violet hue. The stuffed chair and couch were on their sides. In the sunny kitchen a cabinet had been ripped from the wall, and all the china and glass had shattered on the floor. There was a dollop of blood frozen in a spilling motion from the drain board into the sink.
I traced the fight from its beginning in the kitchen, through to the living room, and from there back to the front door, where the fat man had lost his race with Death.
In the corner of the little front patio I saw the weapon. It was a meat-tenderizing mallet. A stainless-steel hammer with a head made of a four-inch cube that had jagged teeth to mash up tough flesh. The mallet was slick with dark gore.
I went back in the house, into a woman’s bedroom. Here the color scheme was white and pink. The neatly made bed was covered with a satin coverlet and piled with small quilted pillows at the head. The room seemed so innocent that, compared with the bedlam in the other parts of the house, it took on a sinister air.
There were four pictures taped to Isolda’s bureau mirror. One was of a burly man — maybe the corpse, I couldn’t be sure without turning him over. The next two were of Brawly somewhere in his teens and also as a grown-up. The last photo was of a good-looking woman in her late thirties wearing a bathing suit and laughing at Brawly, who was rubbing water out of his eyes. That picture had been taken near the Santa Monica Pier.
In one drawer I found a red and black envelope of photographs. Most of the pictures were of the woman modeling in a two-piece bathing suit. She looked rather inviting. The odd thing was that the pictures were taken inside, in a room that I hadn’t seen in her house. In one photo she was lying on a bed with her legs splayed and her back arched. She was beaming a smile that could have made a new sire out of an eighty-year-old man.
While I was staring at those photographs a car door somewhere slammed. At first it was just a faraway sound, meaningless to me. Then, for some reason, I thought of the black-and-white photographs I had once seen in a book about ancient Rome. I wondered what could have made me think about the Colosseum. Then the cops came back into my mind. I ran to the front and peeked out from behind the violet drapes.
The sight of the four policemen deflated me for a second. The fact that two squad cars had been dispatched meant that someone had seen the body and called it in. I had that helpless give-it-up emotion that comes on me sometimes.
But it passed quickly.
Running was a fool’s enterprise, but I took it up with vigor. I pocketed the pictures and ran to the door at the back of the kitchen. I used my shirttail as a glove to turn the knob. As I left out of there I heard a man’s voice call, “Watch it, Drake. Man down.”
I ducked low in the bare backyard and headed for the fence. Over that hurdle I made it to the next street through the back neighbor’s driveway. Most people, men and women, in that neighborhood spent the day at work, so I wasn’t too worried about being seen. I dropped the photographs into a trash can, set out for the weekly pickup, just in case I was stopped by the cops.
The only trouble I had left was walking to my car without being noticed. In any other city that would have been easy. But not in L.A.
I went the long way around and turned up two blocks on Henry. By the time I got to Isolda’s block there were four police cars parked out front. An approaching patrol car drove past me. They slowed down to watch. I turned and glanced at them and kept on walking.
I guess the lure of real action pulled them away. A dead man in a doorway was still news back then.
I got the key in the ignition slot on the fourth try and drove well within the speed limit past the powder blue dream. The police in their dark uniforms reminded me of the ants that were swarming over the corpse at their feet.
— 6 —
From the moment I heard John’s voice I had expected trouble. I was looking for it. But the dead man had sobered me somewhat. I didn’t want to get that far into somebody else’s grief. I didn’t want to be used, either. But I doubted that John and Alva would have lied to me — not about murder, anyway.
I decided not to call them until I had at least seen Brawly. If I were to tell Alva that I had come upon a dead man instead of her son, there’s no telling where her imagination might have taken her. I would go to the headquarters of the Urban Revolutionary Party, hoping to catch a glimpse of the young man.
But first came food. I hadn’t eaten since Juice’s pancakes, and fear always stoked my appetite.
Hambones was a soul food diner on Hooper, not far from the First Men’s storefront address. I hadn’t been there for a while because it catered to a rough clientele and I had spent the past few years (with one major slip) trying to deny that I ever traveled in those crowds.
Sam Houston, proud black son of Texas, owned the place. It was one long room with tables running down the length of the walls and a kitchen in the back. If you wanted to eat at the Hambone, you had to sit next to your honey and look at the man across the way.
Sam was standing at his waist-high counter at the back of the place. Behind him was the kitchen full of his family members, their spouses, and friends.
“Sam,” I hailed as I walked toward him.
“I knew they was gonna take it, Easy,” he bellowed. Sam’s speaking voice would have been a shout for a normal man.
“Take what?”
“The Star of India,” he said in a smug and satisfied tone. “Right outta the Museum of Natch’l History up there in New York City. I knew it.”
I had come to his countertop by then. His loud pronouncement irritated me.
“You knew what?”
“I knew that they had to steal sumpin’ like that. You cain’t have no million-dollar jewel lyin’ around for just any old motherfucker t’be lookin’ at. I read it right here in the Examiner.” Sam gestured at a rumpled pile of papers lying next to him on the counter.
“What the hell you talkin’ ’bout, Sam?” I hadn’t seen the man in at least two years, but the first words out of his mouth had already made me mad. “All the shit in the news and you gonna be worried ’bout some goddamned piece’a glass?”
“It’s the money, man. Got to go wit’ the money. I feel for them civil rights workers, but they dead. And them white men kilt ’em? They gonna see a white judge for tea and they mamas for dinner that night.”
“How the hell you figure that?”
“I know what I know, Easy. I know what I know.”
“Man, you don’t know shit.”