Little Green (11 page)

“Dropped?”

“Took acid.”

“LSD?”

“Yeah. He said that he never did it before, and somebody gave me a two-way hit for some roses.”

“That stuff is dangerous, isn’t it?”

“So’s deep water, but people still go swimming in it.”

That’s when I began to like Ruby.

“So what happened after the club?” I asked.

“We never went, because I had to go up behind the Shangri-La to give some of the girls up there their makeup.”

“Another club?”

“Yeah,” Ruby said with a one-shoulder shrug and a little frown, “but no. I mean, Lula’s place is up behind the club. It’s there for, you know … sex. I go up sometimes and Lula lets a couple of the girls pay me to make them look like hippies. Some’a the guys want to ball a hippie chick and I give ’em the look.”

“There’s a whorehouse on the Strip?”

“It’s work,” the girl said, gesturing with her free hand at the sky. “I mean, it’s really no different than sellin’ your body to a production line or a coal mine.”

Or the cotton fields, I thought.

“Did Evander go there with you?”

“Yeah. I thought we’d leave together, but he met this guy and they cooked up something. I don’t know what, but when I finished workin’ he was gone.”

“What was this guy’s name?”

“I don’t know. I’ve seen him before. A white guy who likes to wear all green—shirt, tie, everything.”

“Like a straight guy?” I asked, experimenting with the language.

“He wasn’t a hippie, but he wasn’t straight either,” she said. “I didn’t know his name, but he was a pimp.”

The Shangri-La discotheque was vibrating from an overactive electric bass. We took an alley down the side of the blocky three-story building and ended up in a dark parking lot behind.

Across the lot was another three-story building. There were wooden stairs with no railing that went from the lower right corner of the building to the upper left, making a stop along the way for the door to the second floor. The only light was at a small deck at the summit of the stairs. On this upper platform was a yellow chair with an occupant who seemed large even from that distance.

“That’s Lula’s up there,” Ruby said.

“Let’s go.”

“I don’t wanna,” she said. “I mean, I go when they pay me, but it smells bad and the men look at you like you were meat … the women too.”

“I thought it was just another job?” I said.

“I’ll stick to my flowers. You want me to wait?”

“If you’d like.”

“Would you like?”

I nodded and touched a tress of her hair. She put three fingers on my left elbow. After that communication I headed for the long stairway.

Walking up that precarious flight of steps sticks out in my memory of that night. Jo’s Gator’s Blood was still roiling in my system, but it had waned appreciably since my fracas with the bikers. The stairs were wide enough for two lanes of foot traffic, but the feeling that there was no bannister to grab onto seemed to focus the insecurity of an entire generation on that climb.

I listed toward the wall, reaching out now and then for its solidity, and climbed with great concentration.

About halfway up I saw that the man sitting in the chair was broad, black, and bald.

When I was only three steps down he bellowed, “What you want?”

“I’m here lookin’ for the son of a friend’a mine,” I said in our common patois.

“You ain’t got no friends up here, mister.”

I took two more steps and the big black man stood up from his comfortably padded seat.

“You best to turn your ass around,” he advised.

I took the last step.

“I seen dudes in parachute school make a two-story jump,” he said. “Hit and roll, they said. You think you could do that?”

I turned my head to look down on the parking lot. I could see Ruby standing at the outer edge, looking up at me.

“Three nights ago,” the Gator’s Blood said with my lips, “a young man named Evander Noon came here. That was the last time anyone saw him. I’ve come to find out where he went next.”

“Niggah, didn’t you hear me?” Big Boy said.

“Evander is a young brother,” my voice continued. “Maybe twenty. I have a picture.”

“One more word and I’ma throw you down on the asphalt.”

“Okay,” I said, suddenly relenting. I even took half a step down. “He’s not my friend anyway. I came here for somebody else—Raymond Alexander. Maybe you heard’a him. People like to call him Mouse.”

That was cheating. I didn’t usually use Raymond’s name to get into, or out of, trouble. But the fact was that I’d have to call Ray if the bouncer didn’t let me in. And then Big Boy would have been the one who plummeted down to the ground.

“Say what?” the man asked.

“No lie, man. Ray called me to go find his friend’s son. I’m a detective.”

“Shit.”

I handed him my ID.

“Raymond paid me to find out where the boy was last. Now, if you don’t let me in then I’ll have to tell him that the trail ends right up here—at your big toe.”

He studied the picture and pondered the ramifications. Then he handed the ID back.

“Mouse, huh?”

Ray was known in every illegal corner of Los Angeles, and most of the rest of Southern California.

“Wait here,” the man I dubbed Big Boy said at last.

He went through a red door beyond the yellow chair and closed it behind him. I heard a bolt being thrown and smiled, because that meant he was taking me seriously.

I couldn’t see Ruby anymore. I wondered if she decided to leave. Her unexpected absence got me thinking about Bonnie Shay. She was getting married. She was with her man. I wasn’t devastated or heartbroken because of my close encounter with death, but there was still sadness there, a melancholy that said no matter how hard I tried I’d never be able to hold on to the happiness I craved.

“Come on,” Big Boy said at the door.

I hadn’t even heard it open.

A black woman in a green-and-gold kimono sat behind an ivory-colored table in the small reception area. Looking down, I could see her well-formed breasts. Her eyes were dead but she smiled pleasantly enough.

This emotional juxtaposition made me feel right at home.

“Come on,” Big Boy said again.

He led me down a long hallway with open doors on either side.

In most of the rooms men and women were having commercialized sex. Nothing looked good or fun. There was a lot of grunting and pounding, urging and gyration. The whorehouse was in full swing while free love raged in the street below.

We came at last to a closed door. This Big Boy threw open. He stepped to the side, but the hall was so narrow that I had to squeeze by him. As I passed I could feel his hot breath. This made me think of Ruby talking to me on the Strip. I hoped that she’d be out there when I left.

There were three lamps on in the low room, but mere electric light had failed to illuminate the darkness. The office was furnished with a desk, two thin-legged doelike chairs, and a soiled tan sofa.

Big Boy took one of the chairs and placed it in a corner, where he
sat down to keep an eye on me. A white woman, naked except for a turquoise feather boa around her neck, lounged on the vinyl couch. When I came in she lifted her left foot up on the cushion, displaying her pubic area like a beggar exposing his war wound.

Behind the desk sat a well-worn, fortyish white woman with dyed red hair and two blue eyes, one wandering and the other fastened on me.

“Lula Success,” she said, not rising, not holding out a hand.

“Easy Rawlins,” I said.

“That your real name?”

“Can I have a seat?”

She smiled a crooked smile. I took this as an invitation.

The room felt cramped but it was large enough. It was hot in there. The madam’s smile was like that of the alligator at home in the warm waters of my blood.

“Ezekiel,” I said.

“Come again?” Lula said.

“Easy. It comes from Ezekiel.”

For some reason this delighted Lula.

“Do they call you that because things always go your way?” she asked.

“Just the opposite.”

“You’re not here for pussy, are you, Mr. Easy?”

“Not right now. You see, a few nights ago a young man named Evander Noon came here on an acid trip with a girl named Ruby—”

“The makeup hippie girl,” Lula interjected.

“—and he, Evander, left with a man dressed all in green—I’m told.”

“Maurice,” Lula said to Big Boy. “I should have known.”

“Known what?” I asked.

“Are you here for Haman Rose?”

“Never heard of him. My friend Mouse sent me.”

“Oh, yeah, Arthur said something about him.”

I supposed Arthur was the name Big Boy went by at this job. It probably wasn’t his real name. You only gave people your real name if they paid you with a check.

“Who’s Haman Rose?” I asked.

“The kind of guy you don’t want looking for you.”

“Neither is Mouse,” I said, and Arthur Big Boy grunted.

Lula frowned at her employee.

“I don’t want any trouble, Easy,” she said. “I remember the young man. He was flying pretty high. Maurice was here that night. But I don’t remember if he had anything to do with your friend … do you, Sparkle?”

“Uh-uh,” the naked couch ornament murmured.

“They left together,” Arthur said.

“When?” I asked.

“Maybe around ten. Maurice said that he had a new girl for us, but when he met the kid he forgot all about that and they split.”

“Where?”

“I’ont know.”

“And this Haman Rose has been looking for him?”

“Keith Handel was,” Big Boy said. “But everybody knows that Keith works for Rose.”

I turned back to Lula.

“You know where I can find any of those men?”

“We aren’t that close. I do business with Maurice from time to time, but I’ve never kissed him on the lips.”

All the forward motion of that night came to a halt then. I wasn’t weak, but the strength Jo’s medicine had given me was gone. I sat there a few seconds too long without speaking.

“You disapprove of prostitution, Mr. Easy?” Lula asked, maybe just to fill in the silence.

“Not at all. I’m just a little surprised to find it here, with all the free love out there in the street.”

Lula’s sneer seemed to be accented by her wandering eye.

“Nothing’s free,” she said. “Free sex is like a pusher giving you a sample of his heroin. Once you get a taste you start paying.”

“For everything except air,” I agreed.

“Except that.”

Walking down the stairs I felt the strain in my thighs. I was getting weaker by the moment, and there was a long road left yet to travel. I took my time, because thinking and walking had started to vie for my attention. I’d take two steps and then stop, wondering where Evander was and what he had to do with a man in green that bad men were looking for. Then two more steps …

The parking lot was empty of life. The cars looked so settled and secure that I considered climbing into one and taking a brief eight- or nine-hour nap.

“Hi,” she said, giving the word two syllables.

Ruby had come from behind a slender pine at the edge of the lot.

“I was smoking this joint,” she said.

“That someone gave you for flowers,” I added.

She smiled. “Want some?”

“You hungry?”

“Like a beast,” she said.

Down near La Cienega was a disheveled little diner called Holly Heron’s All-Night Chili Palace. Ruby and I crowded in at the counter.

There was a jukebox playing from the corner.

That was the first time I ever heard the song “Somebody to Love” by the Jefferson Airplane. I liked the moodiness of the lead singer’s voice. I also liked it later on when I found out that they took their name from the bluesman Blind Lemon Jefferson.

Ruby wanted chili and I ordered a hamburger, even though I knew it would make my gut ache. I wasn’t bothered by pain that much in those days after coming to from the accident. Feeling anything, even if I didn’t enjoy the sensation, was like a little blessing.

“You got a girlfriend?” someone asked. I was unsure of who it was because the diner was packed and everybody was talking and the music was playing and my thoughts seemed to have sounds of their own.

Ruby pulled on my jacket sleeve.

“Hey, Easy,” she said.

“What?”

“Do you have a girlfriend?”

“I was in love with a woman named Bonnie,” I said, though I hadn’t meant to. It was as if the words had a will of their own and decided to come and play. “We lived together, and when my little girl got sick she took her to Europe and got a cure. Feather is alive because of Bonnie.”

“Your daughter’s name is Feather?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s cool.”

“In order to help her Bonnie reconnected with an old boyfriend. They got close there for a while and when she came back I couldn’t stand it and threw her out of my house.”

“It’s the pigs, man!” someone shouted, and the noisy restaurant went silent.

The only sound was the Rolling Stones’ “Ruby Tuesday.”

In the mirror on the other side of the counter I could see through the glass behind me. Four uniformed cops were passing by, looking into the restaurant for misdemeanors or worse.