Maybe I should have turned him away. I already had two or three full-time jobs to accomplish in the next week or so. Jackson wasn’t deserving of special consideration because he was so undependable. But no one I ever knew had a mind like his. And I was going to need some special thinking if I was going to go out after Harold the woman killer.
“What’s up, Jackson?”
Bonnie whirled Feather around and whisked her back into the kitchen.
Jackson sat in the love seat and I pulled up a two-rung step stool that Bonnie had bought so that she could get up on the high shelves.
“It’s Jewelle,” he said. He adjusted his glasses as he spoke.
“Since when you been wearin’ glasses, Blue?”
“You like ’em? I just got ’em last week. Bought ’em up in Beverly Hills—on Rodeo Drive.”
“Near-sighted?” I asked.
Jackson grinned. “No, brother. My eyesight’s twenty-ten. You a small man like me, need an edge with all these violent peoples runnin’ up and down the street.”
He handed me the glasses and I tried them on. It was like looking through the windshield of my car—no change at all. I handed them back.
“I don’t get it. Glasses make you look like an egghead. What’s the angle?”
Jackson smiled again.
“You know I been studyin’ the binary language of machines,” he said.
Computers had been Jackson’s passion for some time. He had been holed up in a small apartment managed by his lover, Jewelle MacDonald, for well over a year reading about how those thinking machines worked.
I said all of this by nodding.
“Well,” he said, “a while ago I decided to see if I could get me a job at a bank or some insurance company workin’ on their computers. I know the IBM languages called BAL and COBOL and FORTRAN. I know all the loops and peripheries and the JCL too.”
I had no idea what he was talking about but it still gave me an inner glee to know that a ghetto-bred black man like Jackson could know all the rich white businessmen’s secrets.
“So what’s that got to do with your glasses?” I asked.
“I been goin’ out on job interviews for the last five weeks,” he said. “At first I was wearin’ my light blue suit but I could see that that wasn’t the way a businessman’s supposed to be dressed. I got me some Brooks Brothers then but still I couldn’t get a job. Finally I realized that I had to do somethin’ about bein’ black.”
We both chuckled. If anyone was a black man it was Jackson. His skin, his accent, the way he laughed at a joke.
“It came to me,” he went on, “that even though I’m little the white people were still scared’a me. So I had to make it so I didn’t seem scary.”
“Damn,” I said in deep appreciation for his uncharacteristically subtle solution. “So you put on those glasses with the ugly frames so the people at the bank would think that you’re a Poindexter.”
“Tried ’em out this afternoon,” he said. “And three people said I’m as good as hired.”
“Damn, Jackson. Damn. You’re good.”
It was rare that I complimented Blue. He grinned to show his appreciation.
“That’s the favor I need,” he said.
“I thought it was Jewelle needed help?”
“She does—in a way.”
“Uh-huh. What’s the scam, Jackson?”
“No scam, man. I swear.”
“No? Then let’s hear it.”
“You know about that big shoppin’ center they puttin’ up over near Slauson?” he asked.
“The one on Figueroa?”
“That’s the one.”
“What about it?”
“The name on the papers is the Bigelow Corporation,” he said. “But you know almost every dime comes from JJ. She bankrolled the project thinkin’ we was gonna be rich.”
It made sense that the young Jewelle and Jackson had gotten together. He was a technical and philosophical whiz, while she had a knack with real estate and finance that put me to shame. And Jewelle didn’t mind caring for a man older than her by decades. She had been with my real estate agent, Mofass. He was quite a few years past sixty when he died. And Jewelle wasn’t put off by a man who lived a rough life either. Mofass had died in a murder- suicide protecting Jewelle from her homicidal auntie.
“. . . so,” Jackson was saying, “I need to work until JJ get on her feet. You know she gonna have to sell almost everything she own to keep the wolf from the door. That house up in the canyon and every apartment buildin’ she got. She says she’s gonna come live with me down in Santa Monica.”
“You like that?”
