“That’s what the Constitution and the Bill of Rights say,”
Tommy offered weakly.
“True,” I agreed. “But that’s a moral stance, not a scientific one. And the original document only referred to white, Christian, male landowners. Darwin throw a much bigger net than that one there.”
Somebody overhearing our words would have thought that I was going down the wrong road. But that someone wouldn’t have been listening between the lines. In his own estimation Tommy was a superior specimen. He only dealt with white 110
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people and was better educated than 99 percent of the Negro race. He would have felt that he could dismiss me unless I intimidated him physically or intellectually.
Tommy could have kicked my ass up and down the block, so I used the only muscle I had.
It worked too.
“Angel Allmont and I used to go out,” Tommy told me.
“We saw each other for a couple of months. But I had to let her go. She was pretty and everything, but I need a lighter-skinned girl in the business I do, and she had a wild side.
“And now that I think on it . . . her new boyfriend might have been called Useless. Something like that.”
“Have you talked to her in the last week or so?” I asked.
“No. She was goin’ out with your cousin and they got tangled up with a flimflam man named Hector. I think that’s what she said his name was.”
“Hector what?”
“I didn’t ask.”
“How you know he was bent?”
“Angel said that they were doing business where they were going to make ten thousand dollars in a month,” Tommy said in a muted voice. “That kinda money don’t evolve from honest labor.”
I smiled at his inside joke.
“You know where I can find her?” I asked.
“Man’s Barn.”
“She moved outta there.”
“Oh,” Tommy said, not really caring. “I don’t know, then.
All I can tell ya is that the one time I met your cousin he told me that he played billiards at Jerry Twist’s and that he could get me in there any time I wanted.”
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He looked at me.
I returned the stare.
“That all you after, Mr. Minton?”
“I guess so.”
“Any time you need me to tell you more about Darwin, you just drop on by.”
I wondered as I left if he believed that he had lectured me.
112
J e r r y Tw i s t ’ s wa s a p o o l p a r l o r on Slauson, occupying the second floor of a lime-18 colored two-story building in the center of the block. The bottom floor housed Ha Tsu’s Good News Chinese restaurant.
Good News was unique inasmuch as it was the only Chinese restaurant I’d ever been to that had a bouncer — Harold Crier.
Harold was big and dark. He wore a black eye patch and had hands like catchers’ mitts. Harold was fat, but I’d seen him chase a would-be patron who had slapped him after being refused entrance. The runner was young and sleek, but the forty-something and ponderous Harold ran that boy down after two blocks.
The story goes that Harold met Ha Tsu while trying to rob him late one Monday night. The armed robber made the mistake of getting too close to the restaurateur and before he knew it the smaller man had grabbed Harold’s gun wrist and jabbed him in the eye with a fork from the counter. When Harold woke up, he was in the back room on a cot with a Chinese doctor ministering to him.
Ha Tsu made Loretta’s hatred of white people seem like 113
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mild perturbation. Loretta’s anger came from a specific event over a relatively short period of time. But Ha hated whites for the domination of China. He hated white people the way Sitting Bull hated them. He hated them so much that he wouldn’t even turn Harold, an armed robber, over to the cops. He told Harold that he could either die there on that bamboo cot or take a job as the sentry at the front door of Good News.
“You want me to be a guard?” Harold had asked.
“You perfect,” Ha told him. “You know when somebody bad comes to rob me, and when they see your eye they know what they get.”
“Hey, Paris,” the bouncer said in greeting. It was late afternoon, I remember, and there was hot sun on my back. The big bodyguard was sitting on a high stool, leaning against the wall next to Good News’s double green doors.
“Harold. How’s it goin’?”
