“It was his brother, man. His brother. His brother. His brother …” He kept saying that with his big eyes on the knife in my hand. He was a butcher, after all; he knew what that knife could do to his meat.
“Holland?” I asked.
“Yeah. It was Holland. Roman come an’ got me to go out to the garden. He wanted to cut his drug for Joey Beam. Beam was gonna kill’im if he didn’t get his aitch. Roman was gonna cut it down at the garden class.”
“You dealin’ wit’im?”
“Uh-uh. No. I only ever helped stealin’ stuff. But Roman was in trouble wit’ Sallie an’ Beam. He wanted to turn the drug over an’ call it square.”
“But?”
“It was Holland. He come right outta the dark wit’ a shovel in his hand. He was shoutin’ an’ I run. I went right up to the fence an’ over.”
“An’ so how you know Holland killed his brother?” I asked.
“He killed him, man. Who else coulda killed’im?”
“Roman had keys to my school?”
“Yeah.”
“They didn’t find no keys on him. That’s why they was lookin’ at me.”
“I got the keys. They in that top drawer, in the dresser. I was carryin’ the keys for Roman and I still had ’em when I ran.” He looked at my knife. “Look in the drawer if you don’t believe me.”
I looked. There was a giant key ring with over thirty master keys on it. I pocketed the keys and went back to the butcher.
“And then you called the principal about me?”
“That was Sallie. I went to him to tell’im what happened. I didn’t tell’im nuthin’ ’bout no drug though. I just told’im that he was outta the school-robbin’ business.”
A feeling of calm came over me. The story sounded right. Yes. Holland killed Roman. Now at least I knew the truth.
I was half the way through the living room when Billy cried out, “Hey! You ain’t gonna leave me tied up!”
I dropped the knife and walked out the front door. Outside there was a man standing on the dirt lawn. He wore green work pants and a blue shirt, I remember. His face was shaped like a crescent and his eyes were small. His eyes darted from me to the front door.
Maybe he freed Billy after I’d gone. Maybe he robbed him.
CHAPTER 38
PHILLY STETZ’S SECRET OFFICE was in a small medical building on Olympic near Vine.
Walking down the midmorning street on my way to face one of the most dangerous men on the West Coast didn’t scare me. My gait was nonchalant and there wasn’t a thought in my head. It wasn’t that I was particularly brave. The fact was that I found it hard to imagine that I had come so far over the line in just a few days. Never in my many years of street life had I gone up against somebody like Stetz.
Never in my life had I taken such a chance for somebody else. I’d risked my life before but that was always because of my pride—or stupidity. But here I was working for a dead woman to save a woman who I hardly even knew.
Those shots of whiskey in John’s car had gone right to my brain and stayed there.
The office building was really a walled-in courtyard. The path between the cottage-offices was wet brick. The offices were made of brick too. Old crumbling brick that was dark from the dust of years and not pigment. The cold those walls threw off was clammy and unhealthy.
If there was a valley of death I had stumbled upon it.
Dr. Green’s office wasn’t even in the court, it was through a redwood door at the back and across an alley. There stood a turquoise stucco building with potted succulents on either side of the oak entrance.
I knocked and awaited my fate.
The man who opened the door wore a green suit. Maybe, I thought, that was his joke. There was no Dr. Green. Jackson had discovered that Stetz rented the office as a partial cover to his gambling activities.
“Mr. Stetz?” I asked the dark-skinned white man. He had a bad complexion, rough caves instead of cheeks. His hair was thick and black. He wasn’t a big man but you could tell by his dark stare that if he got mad you’d have to kill him just to slow him down.
“Who’re you?” He jutted his head at me.
“My name is Rawlins. I’ve come to speak with Mr. Stetz.”
“How’d you know to come here?”
I saw no reason to lie so I said, “Jackson Blue.”
The ugly man froze for a second and then he moved backwards, making room for me to enter the sham office.
He led me through a dwarf foyer into a waiting room, or parlor. There, seated around a squat maple table, were five white men. All of them smoking and all of them hard. Each one was figuring how he’d have to go about killing me, if he got the chance.
