Farewell, Amethystine

by Walter Mosley

“I’m meeting someone for lunch,” I said. “Do you see them?” She wasn’t being short or rude. Clifton’s was a busy place with three floors of dining space and no waitstaff except for drinks. “No,” I said. “Maybe he left a note or something for me at your desk.” “I don’t think—” “His name is Anatole McCourt and he’s quite tall.”

Daisy’s head moved back maybe two inches, the kind of reaction any mammal might have when they catch the

odor of something unexpected. “Oh,” she said. “...

Anatole McCourt was tall and beautiful by masculine standards. He followed the law to the letter and was chivalrous to women. All that and he’d never so much as shaken my hand. Now I was invited into his private booth. And he was early, which meant that he was hungry for something other than teriyaki chicken thighs.

Anatole McCourt was not the kind to share police information, not to mention their resources, with a man like me. A Black man, a fake cop, a friend of the notorious Raymond “Mouse” Alexander—I was everything a man like McCourt despised.

“Okay,” I said. “I give.” “What do you mean?” Anatole savored the first sip. “Look, man, you don’t like me. You never did. You wouldn’t even talk to me if it wasn’t for Mel. So, you got me here to talk about somethin’ specific.”

“No, that’s not why we’re here. You never work with people like me. It’s against your nature. You’d rather let

killers and rapists get away than be in debt to me. You think that you’ll catch the bad guys later, on some other beef. No. What is it we really doin’ here, Anatole?”

There was no question that he could have beaten me to death right there and then. But I had just turned fifty. The average life span of Negro men in that year was sixty. He had more to lose than I did, and besides, Melvin Suggs was my friend. When he saw that I wasn’t going to cave, the cop stormed out of our meeting place.

left hand. She stared at the note until reaching me. Then she held it out away from her body as if she wanted to be free of it. “Here,” she said. “What’s this?” I asked, taking the offering. “Giselle’s number, of course.”

“Some woman Curt knows. He told us if he didn’t answer his home phone we were to call this one.”

“And did you call her?” “No.” I wanted to ask why not, but there are some myst...

standing there in the late twilight, and feeling the chilly sea breeze—I realized that I was no longer just gathering information. I was now committed to the case of the missing ex.

Karin Vosges. Young and handsome, between races, and almost perpetually bemused by a world that made no sense to her.

We stood there, appreciating that private moment like two very old friends at the end of their days, rather than a fifty-year-old man and a young woman half the way through her twenties. “Is she in?” I asked. “Yes.” Something about her delivery threw me back into her prehistory.

With World War II just over, Black soldiers, once again, had to worry about our primary enemies—white Americans. They’d seen us slaughtering white

Germans. They knew we were bedding German, French, English, and Italian women. They understood that there might well be a reckoning on the horizon.

“Penelope Vosges.” “What you do to her?” “The worst thing.” “Killed her?” “Might as well have.” “Raped her?” “She’s pregnant with my child.” The bald soldier wept.

She was one of the camp girls who sold themselves for rations and cigarettes, mostly to the Negro soldiers.

the look on her face when she heard about what the pious corporal wanted was a whole novel of the convergent passions imprinted on the hearts and souls of the survivors of that terrible war. Albert was one of the few innocents I was aware of in that conflagration.

Penelope did what she needed to do in order to survive.

The fat woman turned her broad, doughy face toward the sound of her daughter’s voice. “Guten Abend, Mr. Easy,” the blind woman said. “Guten Abend, Frau Vosges,” I replied, trying my best to affect the right accent.

“Why you got all these candles, Pen?” “I’m not completely blind,” she whispered into the drinking glass. “Only mostly. I see shadows and those shadows dance by firelight.” That room reminded me of the war. The woman did too.

“Why are you here, Easy?” his wife asked me twenty-five years later. “Maybe I should have that drink,” was my reply. I went out to the kitchen to escape Penelope’s blind scrutiny. I poured myself a stiff one, took a drink, poured a little more, and then made my way back to the room of dancing shadows.

I closed my eyes and thought about Mississippi-born Albert Grimes, a Black man, the grandson of slaves, who went to Europe, killed white men, and married a white woman who had had it even harder than he had.

Mary Donovan stood five five with hair a little lighter than my goddaughter’s. She was slender and deadly, brilliant and broken, a good ally to have at your side but no one you’d share your secrets with.

Mary D was like a great novel—just one read-through was not enough to understand what it means.

There were only six homes in Brighthope. All of them owned by Sadie Solomon, the richest woman west of the Mississippi River. Sadie gave ninety-nine-year leases to certain people who had done right by her, and others who had that potential. I was both.

at the home where my daughter and I lived. Roundhouse we called it. Four stories high and cylindrical in shape, it was white even by moonlight.

Why you here?” “You called me.” “Yeah,” I admitted. She was Pink Hippo #3. “I tried to call Melvin, didn’t get his machine, and then the cops gave me the runaround. I hooked up with Anatole and he said that he wanted to talk to you.”

“Where’s Mel?” “He took off a day or two before Underchief Terrence Laks was gonna fall on him.”

I remembered Underchief Laks. A neatly dressed prig. He had four senior officers take me into custody on a Sunday afternoon when I still lived in LA proper.

“What am I doing here?” I asked one of the few cops who outranked my friend Melvin Suggs. “It’s your turn, Easy.

“My turn for what?” “A man named Forman,

was killed before he could testify against a man known as P...

“So, when you sign this confession you will be charged for his murder.” “I didn’t kill him,” I said with steely conviction that I did not feel.

“We have a numbered list of Los Angeles’s top criminals. One by one we choose them and make sure that they

pay… for something.”

Seven out of ten of the city’s white residents would have said it couldn’t happen—not in America. Out of the remaining three, two would have said that I could have beaten the false charges in court. Eleven out of nine Black Angelenos would have known that I ...

Surprise was followed by amazement; this wonderment turned his eyes to me.

He put down the phone

Laks looked up at me through knitted eyes. Before that moment I had been a disposable utensil in the prig’s tool chest. Now I was the object of true hatred.

“How’d Mel know that Laks was after him?” “Somebody warned him,” Mary said with a shrug. “Laks had me in his sights one time. I thought I was dead but my son called Mel and he did some magic.”

“No. I want you to find a man named Tommy Jester.”

making breakfast. Homemade sausage, grits, hotcakes, and hot peach, strawberry, and rhubarb compote.

“What was that German shit you was talkin’ yesterday, Ray?”

“Frankfurt School, brother. Jackson was talkin’ to me ’bout ’em. Niggahs want everything to change. Everything.” “Black professors?” “You don’t have to have black skin to be a niggah, man. You know that.”

“Let’s meet at the regular place around two.” “You still have that problem?” My question was a response to the circumspection he used. “Like a stone in my shoe.”

Federal marshals were surveilling him because they wanted to get to a man he did work for sometimes. Ray’s work was being a heist man on big jobs anywhere on the North American continent.

Giselle Fitzpatrick in Culver City.” The phone number I already knew, and the operator told me that the address was 501½ Dragg Street. Some years after that they stopped giving out people’s addresses, but 1970 was still a time of trust.