When I finished Wrightsmith said, “Thank you very much, Mr. Rawlins. Now if you’ll just excuse us.”
Mason and Miller, Jerome Duffy — Carter’s lawyer, and I all had to go.
Duffy shook my hand and smiled at me. “See you at the inquest, Mr. Rawlins.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Just a formality, sir. When a serious crime is committed they want to ask a few questions before closing the books.”
It didn’t sound any worse than a parking ticket if you listened to him.
He got into the elevator to leave and Mason and Miller went with him.
I took the stairs. I thought I might even walk all the way home. I had two years’ salary buried in the backyard and I was free. No one was after me; not a worry in my life. Some hard things had happened but life was hard back then and you just had to take the bad along with the worse if you wanted to survive.
Miller came up to me as I descended the granite stair of City Hall.
“Hi, Ezekiel.”
“Officer.”
“You got a mighty powerful friend up there.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” I said, but I did know.
“You think Carter gonna come save your ass when we arrest you every other day for jaywalking, spitting, and creating a general nuisance? Think he’s gonna answer your calls?”
“Why I have to worry about that?”
“You have to worry, Ezekiel” — Miller pushed his thin face right up to mine; he smelled of bourbon, wintermint, and sweat — “because I have to worry.”
“What do you have to worry about?”
“I got a prosecutor, Ezekiel. He’s got a fingerprint that don’t belong to anybody we know.”
“Maybe it’s Joppy’s. Maybe when you find him you’ll have it.”
“Maybe. But Joppy’s a boxer. Why’d he stop boxing to use a knife?”
I didn’t know what to say.
“Give it to me, son. Give it to me and I’ll let you off. I’ll forget about the coincidence of you being involved in all this and having drinks with Coretta the night before she died. Mess with me and I’ll see that you spend the rest of your life in jail.”
“You could try Junior Fornay against that print.”
“Who?”
“Bouncer at John’s. He might fit it.”
It might be that the last moment of my adult life, spent free, was in that walk down the City Hall stairwell. I still remember the stained-glass windows and the soft light.
Chapter 31
I guess things turned out okay, huh, Easy?”
“What?” I turned away from watering my dahlias. Odell was nursing a can of ale.
“Dupree’s okay and the police got the killers.”
“Yeah.”
“But you know, something bothers me.”
“What’s that, Odell?”
“Well, it’s been three months, Easy, an’ you ain’t had a job or looked for one far as I can see.”
The San Bernardino range is the most beautiful in the fall. The high winds get rid of all the smog and the skies take your breath away.
“I been workin’.”
“You got a night job?”
“Sometimes.”
“What you mean, sometimes?”
“I work for myself now, Odell. And I got two jobs.”
“Yeah?”
“I bought me a house, on auction for unpaid taxes, and I been rentin’ it and—”
“Where you get that kinda money?”
“Severance from Champion. And you know them taxes wasn’t all that much.”
“What’s your other job?”
“I do it when I need a few dollars. Private investigations.”
“Git away from here!”
“No lie.”
“Who you work for?”
“People I know and people they know.”
“Like who?”
“Mary White is one of ’em.”
“What you do for her?”
“Ronald run off on her two months back. I tailed him up to Seattle and gave her the address. Her family brought him back down.”
“What else?”
“I found Ricardo’s sister in Galveston and told her what Rosetta was doin’ with ’im. She gave me a few bucks when she come up and set him free.”
“Damn!” That was the only time I ever heard Odell curse. “That sounds like some dangerous business, man.”
“I guess. But you know a man could end up dead just crossin’ the street. Least this way I say I earned it.”
Later on that evening Odell and I were having a dinner I threw together. We were sitting out front because it was still hot in L.A.
“Odell?”
“Yeah, Easy.”
“If you know a man is wrong, I mean, if you know he did somethin’ bad but you don’t turn him in to the law because he’s your friend, do you think that’s right?”
“All you got is your friends, Easy.”
“But then what if you know somebody else who did something wrong but not so bad as the first man, but you turn this other guy in?”
“I guess you figure that that other guy got ahold of some bad luck.”
We laughed for a long time.