Walter Mosley - A Little Yellow Dog

His suit was dark blue.

“Sit down,” he told me. I heard the door close on Arnie at my back.

“Jackson Blue sent you?” Stetz asked. His eyes looked bored. I had the feeling that he’d asked me in because he didn’t have anything else to do.

He waited for me to sit first.

“Not exactly,” I replied. I didn’t give much because I was still trying to figure the right approach with him. Stetz had kept the doctor’s office exactly as he had found it. There were medical books on the shelves; big oak filing cabinets along the opposite walls. The meandering vine that grew in the window behind him looked as if it had been growing there for over a decade. The central stalk had gone woody.

The desk in front of him was empty except for a Modern Library edition of Meditations by Marcus Aurelius.

“You read?” His question startled me.

“Yeah. Some.”

“You read this?” He held the volume up.

I shook my head no. “But that was his journal, right? He was waging a campaign against the Germans or somebody and wrote down his thoughts about bein’ a right man.”

“What do you want, Mr. Rawlins?”

“I got a problem, and so does Jackson. As I see it your waters might be gettin’ a little rough too. One thing I learned down home was that sometimes men can trade off their losses and come out with a profit.”

“You’re losing me, friend,” Stetz said.

Friend.

“Jackson’s partner’s in jail. There’s half a dozen big-time gamblin’ men in L.A. wanna see Jackson dead, an’ without Ortiz he knows he’s meat. I come to him with my own problem and he sent me to you for a deal.”

“What kinda deal could a nigger have for me?” Stetz said.

He drew the line between us with one word.

“The reason you can’t catch Jackson is ’cause of his system. He tapped onto the phone company with an invention. A machine that records the bets. He got eighteen hundred customers layin’ down bets an’ playin’ numbers with a tape recorder that you couldn’t never find. Jackson got the edge on all you boys, an’ the one that get in on it will be the top dog on bettin’.”

It flowed out easy. One word after the other. Stetz was a smart man, I’d’ve known that without his book, and so he listened.

“And so what would this top dog eat?”

“Jackson’s twelve bookie boxes, the recorders I mean, a paper tellin’ you how to use’em, the phone numbers he got for his customers t’call, and the phone numbers of those customers.”

“And what do I give?”

“You put out the word that Jackson’s outta business. That way nobody got a reason to wanna see him dead. That and one other thing.”

“Money.”

I shook my head. Everything up until that moment had been window dressing. It was all bells and whistles to get the gangster’s attention. Sure, I was trying to save Jackson Blue. But he would either survive the transaction or he wouldn’t; my real business was to save my job, my life, and Bonnie Shay. “I got a friend. She’s in trouble with one’a your friends. She’s willin’ to make up but we got to know that your friend is too.”

“What friend?” Stetz asked. His voice had gotten softer.

“Beam. Joseph Beam.”

Stetz winced. “And your friend?”

“Her name don’t matter. All that matters is that Beam think that she stole from him, but she didn’t. She got somethin’ but it was by mistake. She wanna give him back his property, that’s all.”

Stetz ran the four tips of the fingers of his left hand around his cheek; an insincere smile was on his lips. Maybe he was scared of Beam. Maybe he wanted to stay out of his friend’s business. I had tossed out the bait; it tasted good, but now Stetz had to wonder if it was worth it to swim away from the school.

“What is it?” he asked.

“You know who Roman Gasteau is?”

“Yeah.”

“Him an’ Beam was movin’ aitch. Somehow the last shipment they was movin’ got lost. Beam thinks my friend stole it.”

“Why come to me?” Stetz asked. But his eyes were saying tell me more. “Why don’t you go to Joey?”

“I went to him. At least I tried. But he put his boys on me. Guys named Rupert an’ Li’l Joe. They sapped me up at the Black Chantilly an’ was about to kill me ’fore I run.”

It was all I wanted to say. I knew that Stetz would be interested in any business that his people were doing. If he knew about it, then it was a sweet deal to get his drug back. If he didn’t know, it meant that he’d have to do some house-cleaning. Either way I had a chance to get what I wanted.

“You say this was up at the club?” he asked me.

“In a toolshed around the side of the main house. I had to run right through the front driveway. Somebody musta told you about it.”

“How much heroin?”

“Three pounds about. I don’t know but it looks pretty pure.”

“And you say they were selling it at the club?” “I don’t know about that. All I know is that Beam and Roman was in business wit’ Rupert an’ Li’l Joe.”

Stetz played his cheek with his fingers some more and then asked, “What’s in it for you?”

“They already killed Roman. They probably killed Roman’s brother. My friend is still alive and I’d like to keep her that way. And if I can save Jackson, well, I’d like that too.”

Stetz was a cat in the window, frozen before his leap. I was a bird on the ledge, praying for glass.

“When can you get me these telephone boxes?”

“Today. I could give you the aitch too.”

“I don’t like drugs, Mr. Rawlins. Not too much. You keep it for Joey, that is, if Joey still wants it.”

I read a volume in his words but all I said was, “When and where?”

“We use a warehouse on Alameda sometimes.”

“This afternoon?”

Stetz nodded. He was thinking about something.

“So it’s a deal?” I asked.

“What?”

“You gonna lay off Jackson and let me give what I got over to Beam?”

“I’m going to talk to Joey. And I’ll send somebody over to the warehouse at four to pick up your recorders.”

He gave me the address and I moved to go from the room.

“Rawlins,” he said to my back.

“Yeah?”

“How’d you know about the guy who wrote this book?”

“Rome is closer to Africa than it is to here, Mr. Stetz,” I said.

I called Raymond from a phone booth five blocks down from Philly Stetz’s hideaway.

“Could you come meet me up at Mofass’s place?” I asked the onetime gangster.

“What you askin’, Easy?”

“I just need some company, Ray. It’s tough men I’m dealin’ with, but it’s them makin’ money. I just need a friend to stand by me.”

“I ain’t totin’ no gun, Ease. I won’t do that. Not yet.”

“That’s good,” I said. “No need for trouble.”

We met at Mofass’s house and picked up Jackson. Mouse was driving a neighbor’s car that he’d borrowed.

“Good-bye,” Jackson said to Jewelle at the front door.

“Bye,” she said. “You gonna call?”

“Come on, Jackson,” I said.

“She sure is sweet,” Jackson was saying in the car.

“You got better things to think about, Jackson,” I said.

“What’s that?”

I reached over and opened the glove compartment in front of him. Inside was a wax-paper bag. We all knew what it held.

“We gonna sell it?” he asked.

“We ain’t gonna do a thing. All I need for you to do is to tell me where you got them bookie boxes hid.”

“What?”

“We cain’t cut you no slack without somethin’ to trade, Jackson. Those bookie boxes are worth your life.”

“They worth a lot more’n that.”