Rinaldo’s eyes got crazier as he woke up. He seemed torn between attack and flight. He was fifteen years my junior, but I felt that I could take him. It was Mama who scared me. She was the kind of woman who kept a straight razor close at hand.
“Cousin didn’t start that fire,” Mama said.
“How would you know?”
“He was here with us.”
“Where is he now?”
Mama and Rinaldo exchanged glances. They were afraid of the police. They had good reason to be. All black people had good reason to be. But I didn’t care.
“Tell me or I’ll go right down to the precinct,” I said.
“He live on Hooper,” Rinaldo said. He blurted out an address.
“Okay,” I said, and I took a step backward. “I’ma go over there. If somebody calls him and warns him off I’m sendin’ the cops here to you.”
Rinaldo gave his mother a sharp look. Maybe he wondered if he should try to kill me. I took another step back. Before they could decide on an action, I was out of the door and on the way to my car. Rinaldo came out to watch me drive off.
“WHO IS IT?” a voice asked after I knocked.
“Are you Cousin?” I asked.
There was a pause, and then, “Yeah?”
“I’m John Lowry. Rinaldo sent me.”
When he opened the door, I punched him in the face. It was a good solid punch. It felt good but it was a stupid thing to do. I didn’t know who else was in the room. That crouching, slack-jawed man might have been a middleweight contender. He could have had an iron jaw and a pistol in his pocket. But I hit him because I knew that he had something to do with the fire at my school, because Mama and Rinaldo set my teeth on edge, because the police didn’t seem to care what I did, and because my best friend was dead.
Cousin fell flat on his back.
The room was painted a garish pink and there was no furniture except for a single mattress no thicker than a country quilt.
“Get up,” I said.
“What I do to you, mister?” he whined.
“Why you try’n burn down the school?”
“I didn’t burn nuthin’.” Cousin got to his feet.
He was an old twenty. Not smart or mature, just old. Like he had lived forty years in half the time but hadn’t learned a thing.
I knocked him down again.
“Hey, man!” he yelled.
“Who’s the white man you were with?”
“What white man?”
“You want me to kick you?” I moved my right foot backward in a threatening motion.
“What you want from me?”
“The man put that bomb under the metal shop at Truth.”
Cousin’s skin was a deep, lusterless brown. His jaw was swelling up. He passed his hand over his head from fear that I’d mussed his hair.
“You the law?”
“I work for the school.”
“Man named Lund.”
“Lund?”
“Uh-huh.”
“How you spell it?”
“I’on’t know, man.”
“What do you know?” I asked in disgust.
“Roke Williams. Roke run a crap game down Alameda. Lund work for the man sell him p’otection.”
I DROVE TO A SMALL BUILDING on Pico and Rimpau. All the way I was wondering why a man in organized crime would be setting a bomb at a Negro junior high school. I wondered but I wasn’t afraid—and that was a problem. If you go up against men in organized crime, you should at least have the sense to be afraid.
There was a weathered sign above the front door of the building. If you looked closely you could make out the word HETTLEMANN and, a little farther down, RINGS. I had no idea what the building used to be. Now it was a series of sales and service offices rented out to various firms and individuals. On the fourth floor was a block of offices run by a man named Zane. They did bookkeeping and financial statements for small businesses.
The three flights of stairs was nothing for me. For the past few months I had cut down to ten cigarettes a day and I was used to the vast stairway at Truth.
When I opened the door on the fourth floor, I came into a small room where Anatole Zane sat. Zane, by his own estimation was a “…manager, receptionist, janitor, and delivery boy…” for his quirky accounting firm. He hired nonprofessionals who were good with numbers and parceled out tasks that he took in for cut-rate prices.
Jackson Blue was his most prized employee.
“Mr. Rawlins.” Zane smiled at me. He got his large body out of the chair and shook my hand. “It’s so good to see you again.”
Zane did my year-end taxes. I owned three apartment buildings around Watts and had the sense to know that a professional would do a better job with the government than I ever could. I had introduced the modest bookkeeper to the cowardly, brilliant, and untrustworthy Jackson Blue.
“Good to see you too, Anatole.”
“Jackson’s in his office doing a spreadsheet on the Morgans.”
“Thanks.”
I went through the door behind Zane’s small desk. There I entered a hall so narrow that I imagined the fat manager might get stuck trying to make it from one end to the other.
I knocked on the third door down.
“Yeah?”
“Police!”
I heard the screech of a chair on the floor and three quick steps across the room. Then there was a moment of silence.
After that, a quavering voice: “Easy?”
A door down the hall opened up. A bespectacled Asian man stuck his head out. When I turned in his direction, he jumped back and slammed the door.
“Come on, Jackson,” I said loudly. “Open up.”
The door I had knocked on opened.
If coyotes were black, Jackson Blue would have been their king. He was small and quick. His eyes saw more than most, and his mind was the finest I had ever encountered. But for all that, Jackson was as much a fool as Douglas “Cousin” Hardy. He was a sneak thief, an unredeemable liar, and dumb as a post when it came to discerning motivations of the human heart.
“What the fuck you mean scarin’ me like that, Easy?”
“You at work, Jackson,” I said, walking into his office. “This ain’t no bookie operation. You not gonna get busted.”
Jackson slammed his door.
“Shut up, man. Don’t be talkin’ like that where they might hear you.”
I sat in a red leather chair that was left over from the previous tenants. Jackson had nice furniture and a fairly large office. He had a window too, but the only view was a partially plastered brick wall.
“How you doin’, Jackson?”
“Fine. Till you showed up.”
He crossed the room, giving me a wide berth, and settled in the chair behind his secondhand mahogany desk. He avoided physical closeness because he didn’t know why I was there. Jackson had betrayed and cheated so many people that he was always on guard against attack.
“What you doin’?” I asked.
He held up what looked like a hand-typed manual. It had a cheap blue cover with IBM and BAL scrawled in red across the bottom.
Jackson smiled.
“What is it?”
“The key code to the binary language of machines.”
“Say what?”
“Computers, Easy. The wave of the future right here in my hand.”
“You gonna boost ’em or what?”
“You got a wallet in your pocket, right, man?”
“Yeah.”
“You got some money in there?”
“What you gettin’ at?”
“You might even have a Bank Americard, am I right?”
“Yes.”
“One day all your money gonna be in this language here.” He waved the manual again. “One day I’ma push a button and all the millionaires’ chips gonna fall inta my wagon.”
Jackson grinned from ear to ear. I wanted to slap him, but it wouldn’t have made a difference. Here he was the smartest man you could imagine, and all he could think about was theft.
“Roke Williams,” I said.
“Niggah was born in the alley and he gonna die in one too. Right down there offa Alameda.”
“Who runs him?”