The Sunridge was a smallish pink motel, made up of two rectangular buildings that came together in an L around an asphalt parking lot. The neighborhood was mostly Mexican and the woman who sat at the manager’s desk was a Mexican too. She was a full-blooded Mexican Indian; short and almond-eyed with deep olive skin that had lots of red in it. Her eyes were very dark and her hair was black, except for four strands of white that told me she had to be older than she looked.
She stared at me, the question in her eyes.
“Lookin’ for a friend,” I said.
She squinted a little harder, showing me the thick webbing of wrinkles at the corners of her eyes.
“Monet is her last name, French girl.”
“No men in the rooms.”
“I just have to talk with her. We can go out for coffee if we can’t talk here.”
She looked away from me as if to say our talk was over.
“I don’t mean to be disrespectful, ma’am, but this girl has my money and I’m willing to knock on every door until I find her.”
She turned toward the back door but before she could call out I said, “Ma’am, I’m willing to fight your brothers and sons to talk to this woman. I don’t mean her any harm, or you neither, but I have got to have words with her.”
She sized me up, putting her nose in the air like a leery dog checking out the new mailman, then she measured the distance to the back door.
“Eleven, far end,” she said at last.
I ran down to the far end of the building.
While I knocked on number eleven’s door I kept looking over my shoulder.
She had on a gray terrycloth robe and a towel was wrapped into a bouffant on her head. Her eyes were green right then and when she saw me she smiled. All the trouble she had and all the trouble I might have brought with me and she just smiled like I was a friend who was coming over for a date.
“I thought you were the maid,” she said.
“Uh-uh,” I mumbled. She was more beautiful than ever in the low-slung robe. “We should get outta here.”
She was looking past my shoulder. “We better talk to the manager first.”
The short woman and two big-bellied Mexican men were coming our way. One of the men was swinging a nightstick. They stopped a foot from me; Daphne closed the door a little to hide herself.
“Is he bothering you, Miss?” the manager asked.
“Oh no, Mrs. Guitierra. Mr. Rawlins is a friend of mine. He’s taking me to dinner.” Daphne was amused.
“I don’t want no men in the rooms,” the woman said.
“I’m sure he won’t mind waiting in the car, would you, Easy?”
“I guess not.”
“Just let us finish talking, Mrs. Guitierra, and he’ll be a good man and go wait in his car.”
One of the men was looking at me as if he wanted to break my head with his stick. The other one was looking at Daphne; he wanted something too.
When they moved back toward the office, still staring at us, I said to Daphne, “Listen. You wanted me to come here alone and here I am. Now I need the same feeling, so I want you to come with me to a place I know.”
“How do I know that you aren’t going to take me to the man Carter hired?” Her eyes were laughing.
“Uh-uh. I don’t want any piece of him… I talked to your boyfriend Carter.”
That took the smile from her face.
“You did! When?”
“Two, three days ago. He wants ya back and Albright wants that thirty thousand.”
“I’m not going back to him,” she said, and I knew that it was true.
“We can talk about that some other time. Right now you’ve got to get away from here.”
“Where?”
“I know a place. You’ve got to get away from the men looking for you and I do too. I’ll put you someplace safe and then we can talk about what we can do.”
“I can’t leave L.A. Not before I talk to Frank. He should be back by now. I keep calling, though, and he’s not home.”
“The police tied him into Coretta; he’s probably lyin’ low.”
“I have to talk to Frank.”
“Alright, but we’ve got to get away from here right now.”
“Wait a second,” she said. She went into the room for a moment. When she reappeared she handed me a piece of paper wrapped around a wad of cash. “Go pay my rent, Easy. That way they won’t bother us when they see us moving my bags.”
Landlords everywhere love their money. When I paid Daphne’s bill the two men left and the little woman even managed to smile at me.
Daphne had three bags but none of them was the beat-up old suitcase that she carried the first night we met.
We drove a long way. I wanted far from Watts and Compton so we went to East L. A.; what they call El Barrio today. Back then it was just another Jewish neighborhood, recently taken over by the Mexicans.
We drove past hundreds of poor houses, sad palm trees, and thousands of children playing and hollering in the streets.
We finally came to a dilapidated old house that used to be a mansion. It had a great cement porch with a high green roof and two big picture windows on each of the three floors. Two of the windows had been broken out; they were papered with cardboard and stuffed with rags. There were three dogs lounging around and eight old cars scattered around the red clay yard under the branches of a sickly and failing oak tree. Six or seven small children were playing among the wrecks. Hammered into the oak was a small wooden sign that read “rooms.”
A grizzled old man in overalls and a T-shirt was sitting in an aluminum chair at the foot of the stairs.
“Howdy, Primo.” I waved.
“Easy,” he said back to me. “You get lost out here?”
“Naw, man. I just wanted a little privacy so I figured to give you a try.”
Primo was a real Mexican, born and bred. That was back in 1948, before Mexicans and black people started hating each other. Back then, before ancestry had been discovered, a Mexican and a Negro considered themselves the same. That is to say, just another couple of unlucky stiffs left holding the short end of the stick.
I met Primo when I became a gardener for a while. We worked together, with a team of men, taking on the large jobs in Beverly Hills and Brentwood. We even took care of a couple of places downtown, off of Sixth.
Primo was a good guy and he liked to run with me and my friends. He told us that he’d bought that big house so that he could turn it into a hotel. He was always begging us to come out and rent a room from him or tell our friends about him.
He stood up when I came up the path. He only came up to my chest. “How’s that?” he asked.
“You got somethin’ with some privacy?”
“I got a little house out back that you and the señorita can have.” He bent down to look at Daphne in the car. She smiled nicely for him.
“How much?”
“Five dollars for a night.”
“What?”
“It’s a whole house, Easy. Made for love.” He winked at me.
I could have argued him down and I would have done it for fun, but I had other things on my mind.
“Alright.”
I gave him a ten-dollar bill and he showed us to the path that led around the big house to the house out back. He started to come with us but I stopped him.
“Primo, my man,” I said. “I’ll come on up tomorrow an’ we do some damage to a fifth of tequila. Alright?”
He smiled and thumped my arm before he turned to leave. I wished that my life was still so simple that all I was after was a wild night with a white girl.
The first thing we saw was a mass of flowering bushes with honeysuckle, snapdragons, and passion fruit weaving through. A jagged, man-sized hole was hacked from the branches. Past that doorway was a small building like a coach house or the gardener’s quarters on a big estate. Three sides of the house were glass doors from ceiling to floor. All the doors could open outward onto the cement patio that surrounded three sides of the house, but they were all shut. The front door was wood, painted green.