I was there early prowling the school, looking hard for unlocked doors or broken windows. I found an overturned trash bin on the upper campus. Instead of making a report for one of my custodians, I opened a hopper room and got myself a broom and dustpan. I had almost finished when the principal came upon me.
“Good morning, Mr. Rawlins,” she said.
“Principal Masters,” I said.
It took Hiram Newgate shooting himself in the head to make me call him principal.
“Is sweeping in your job description?” Ada Masters asked.
“When I used to go to school down in Louisiana,” I said, “the last thing we did every night was to sweep, dust, and pick up the classroom. Wasn’t any slot in the budget for a janitor. If you see a mess, you take care of it if you can. How else a child or an employee gonna learn unless somebody sets the example?”
Mrs. Masters’s smile beamed. That’s how my luck ran. Under the previous principal I couldn’t do a thing right. But since Masters had come she only saw me in my best light, even though I had lost my way and spent many days away from work on made-up illnesses.
“How are you, Mr. Rawlins?” she asked.
“As near to bliss as a poor man can hope for.”
Again she smiled.
I SPENT THE DAY checking between the cracks, making sure that my school was in tip-top shape.
Mrs. Plates called in and said that her husband had died that morning. It was no surprise, he’d been bedridden for years, but she was still broken up.
The students had put up an art show down the main hall of the arts building. Some of those black children had real talent. Portraits and landscapes, abstractions and stories about the good life of being young. Most of them would end up trading in their paintbrushes and watercolors for janitors’ brooms and mail sacks.
There was one painting of me. It was a full body portrait. I was wearing my herringbone jacket and pointing the way to a small boy, probably First Wentworth. I was pointing on ahead and looking in that direction. There was a smile on my face, my teeth were showing.
“You like it, Mr. Rawlins?” Nora Dewhurst, the art teacher, asked.
“That’s somethin’ else. Who did it?”
“Starla Jacobs. It’s her first attempt with oils. You know, she’s a natural painter. See how she made the paint thicker in your face and hands. I think she knew intuitively that that application would make the portrait come to life.”
It wasn’t the person I saw every morning in the mirror; not the hard-knocks black man from the Deep South. Not my jaw-line exactly. But it had my spirit and my style. She caught the pride in my eye from being able to help a young boy make it on his way. It was the Easy Rawlins they knew at Sojourner Truth.
“You think she’d take seventy-five dollars for it?” I asked.
Nora Dewhurst had blue-gray hair. Her eyes were nearly clear with just a touch of blue to them. She was close to retirement, had taught in Los Angeles public schools since 1926. But her eyes bulged with such surprise that you’d think no one had ever purchased one of her students’ paintings.
“Mr. Rawlins, I don’t know what to say. You would make a painter out of Starla if you were to do such a thing.”
“She’s already a painter.”
“You know what I mean.”
And there we were, a black man from the Deep South and a white woman from New York City, both aware of how little chance those kids had. We didn’t quite say it because neither of us wanted to know what would happen if we let the truth out of the bag.
“Tell her to put a matte board around it and I’ll pick it up on Friday after the last class.”
Nora kissed me on the cheek. Two little girls standing nearby gasped and ran away.
THAT EVENING I was in my car, down the street from Oliphant’s garage. I’d parked next to a vast concrete wall, far away from any streetlamp. And I sat low so that any passing cruiser wouldn’t see me watching.
Redheaded Ed came out at eight-fifteen. He wheeled a small motorbike to the corner. Five minutes later Amiee drove up. She opened the trunk and Ed put the bike in.
Everybody but Tilly and Eggersly had gone by nine. At ten they were still in there. They were playing cards, throwing down money and pulling from the deck.
Just past eleven a yellow Porsche drove up to the garage door and was admitted. Fifteen minutes later a red sports car pulled up. It must have been European because I didn’t recognize the make.
After that Tilly Monroe put up ten-foot opaque screens in front of the glass doors. That didn’t bother me though. I had already scoped out a building behind the garage that had a fire escape. I made my way back there and climbed up halfway between the second and third floors. From there I had a night bird’s eye view through the skylight.
There had been two men in each car. By the time I reached my perch they’d donned blue coveralls and covered the floor with a heavy tarp. Then they put up clear plastic tents around the cars. Tilly was already taping the chrome.
I decided at that moment I should take a class in photography.
The yellow car turned a dark green while I watched.
They were just turning their attention to the red car when a police cruiser pulled up to the door. I smiled. The job was being done for me. Any lawyer could punch holes in Oliphant’s story about Ross if he had been arrested for
