Herman said, “He was tellin’ her where he lived. She said so herself.”
I was trying to remember how far down the beach was. By then I knew I had to get out of there before there were two or three dead bodies, one of them being mine.
“Excuse me,” a man’s voice called out.
There was a slight commotion behind the football player and then a Panama hat appeared there next to him.
“Excuse me,” Mr. DeWitt Albright said again. He was smiling.
“What do you want?” the footballer said.
DeWitt just smiled and then he pulled the pistol, which looked somewhat like a rifle, from his coat. He leveled the barrel at the large boy’s right eye and said, “I want to see your brains scattered all over your friends’ clothes, son. I want you to die for me.”
The large boy, who was wearing red swimming trunks, made a sound like he had swallowed his tongue. He moved his shoulder ever so slightly and DeWitt cocked back the hammer. It sounded like a bone breaking.
“I wouldn’t move if I were you, son. I mean, if you were to breathe too heavily I’d just kill you. And if any of you other boys move I’ll kill him and then I’ll shoot off all your nuts.”
The ocean was rumbling and the air had turned cold. The only human sound was from Barbara, who was sobbing in her sister’s arms.
“I want you boys to meet my friend,” DeWitt said. “Mr. Jones.”
I didn’t know what to do so I nodded.
“He’s a friend’a mine,” Mr. Albright continued. “And I’d be proud and happy if he was to lower himself to fuck my sister and my mother.”
No one had anything to say to that.
“Now, Mr. Jones, I want to ask you something.”
“Yes, sir, Mr., ah, Smith.”
“Do you think that I should shoot out this nasty boy’s eye-ball?”
I let that question hang for a bit. Two of the younger boys had been weeping already but the wait caused the footballer to start crying.
“Well,” I said, after fifteen seconds or so, “if he’s not sorry for bullying me then I think you should kill him.”
“I’m sorry,” said the boy.
“You are?” Mr. Albright asked.
“Y-y-yes!”
“How sorry are you? I mean, are you sorry enough?”
“Yessir, I am.”
“You’re sorry enough?” When he asked that question he moved the muzzle of the gun close enough to touch the boy’s tiny, flickering eyelid. “Don’t twitch now, I want you to see the bullet coming. Now are you sorry enough?”
“Yessir!”
“Then prove it. I want you to show him. I want you to get down on your knees and suck his peter. I want you to suck it good now…”
The boy started crying outright when Albright said that. I was pretty confident that he was just joking, in a sick kind of way, but my heart quailed along with the footballer.
“Down on your knees or you’re dead, boy!”
The other boys had their eyes glued to the footballer as he went to his knees. They tore out running when Albright slammed the barrel of his pistol into the side of the boy’s head.
“Get out of here!” Albright yelled. “And if you tell some cops I’ll find every one of you.”
We were alone in less than half a minute. I could hear the slamming of car doors and the revving of jalopy engines from the parking lot and the street.
“They got something to think about now,” Albright said. He returned his long-barreled.44-caliber pistol to the holster inside his coat. The pier was abandoned; everything was dark and silent.
“I don’t think that they’d dare call the cops on something like this but we should move on just in case,” he said.
Albright’s white cadillac was parked in the lot down under the pier. He drove south down along the ocean. There were few electric lights from the coast, and just a sliver of moon, but the sea glittered with a million tiny glints. It looked like every shiny fish in the sea had come to the surface to mimic the stars that flickered in the sky. There was light everywhere and there was darkness everywhere too.
He switched on the radio and tuned in a big-band station that was playing “Two Lonely People,” by Fats Waller. I remember because as soon as the music came on I started shivering. I wasn’t afraid; I was angry, angry at the way he humiliated that boy. I didn’t care about the boy’s feelings, I cared that if Albright could do something like that to one of his own then I knew he could do the same, and much worse, to me. But if he wanted to shoot me he’d just have to do it because I wasn’t going down on my knees for him or for anybody else.
I never doubted for a minute that Albright would have killed that boy.
“What you got, Easy?” he asked after a while.
“I got a name and an address. I got the last day she was seen and who she was with. I know the man she was seen with and I know what he does for a living.” I was proud of knowledge when I was a young man. Joppy had told me just to take the money and to pretend I was looking for the girl, but once I had a piece of information I had to show it off.
“All that’s worth the money.”
“But I want to know something first.”
“What’s that?” Mr. Albright asked. He pulled the car onto a shoulder that overlooked the shimmering Pacific. The waves were really rolling that night, you could even hear them through the closed windows.
“I want to know that no harm is going to come to that girl, or anybody else.”
“Do I look that much like God to you? Can I tell you what will happen tomorrow? I don’t plan for the girl to be hurt. My friend thinks he’s in love with her. He wants to buy her a gold ring and live happily ever after. But, you know, she might forget to buckle her shoes next week and fall down and break her neck, and if she does you can’t hold me up for it. But whatever.”
I knew that was the most I would get out of him. DeWitt made no promises but I believed that he meant no harm to the girl in the photograph.
“She was with a man named Frank Green, Tuesday last. They were at a bar called the Playroom.”
“Where is she now?”
“Woman who told me said she thought that they were a team, Green and the girl, so she’s probably with him.”
“Where’s that?” he asked. His smile and good manners were gone; this was business now — plain and simple.
“He’s got an apartment at Skyler and Eighty-third. Place is called the Skyler Arms.”
He took out the white pen and wallet and scribbled something on the notepad. Then he stared at me with those dead eyes while he tapped the steering wheel with the pen.
“What else?”
“Frank’s a gangster,” I said. That got DeWitt to smile again. “He’s with hijackers. They take liquor and cigarettes; sell ’em all over southern California.”
“Bad man?” DeWitt couldn’t keep his smile down.
“Bad enough. He somethin’ with a knife.”
“You ever see him in action? I mean, you see him kill somebody?”
“I saw him cut a man in a bar once; loudmouth dude didn’t know who Frank was.”
DeWitt’s eyes came to life for a moment; he leaned across the seat so far that I could feel his dry breath on my neck. “I want you to remember something, Easy. I want you to think about when Frank took his knife and stabbed that man.”
I thought about it for a second and then I nodded to let him know that I was ready.
“Before he went at him, did he hesitate? Even for a second?”
I thought about the crowded bar down on Figueroa. The big man was talking to Frank’s woman and when Frank walked up to him he put his hand against Frank’s chest, getting ready to push him away, I suppose. Frank’s eyes widened and he threw his head around as if to say to the crowd, “Look at what this fool is doin’! He deserve t’be dead, stupid as he acts!” Then the knife appeared in Frank’s hand and the big man crumpled against the bar, trying to ward off the stroke with his big fleshy arms…