In the back office behind a section in the wood paneled wall was a safe. Ingram undid a hidden latch and removed the panel. He bent down and dialed the combination on the safe. He then opened the heavy door and put the envelope inside and locked it up again. He replaced the panel and went back out front. Strummer Edwards was a part owner of the building. Through him, Ingram, Nakano and Yarbrough each owned a piece.

  “Yes, Miss Rose, I should have fresh rhubarb in on Thursday,” Yarbrough was saying to one of the shoppers.

  Ingram was heading toward the door, then double-backed to the canned goods. He took a can of peas and carrots off the shelf and put a dollar on the counter.

  “See you, daddy-o.”

  “You overpaid,” Yarbrough said.

  “You sure you can’t see?”

  “I know the sound of money.”

  “Wish I did.”

  Back upstairs Ingram tidied up and got some ground round out of the fridge. This he put in a skillet and browned, cutting the meat to scramble as it cooked. He drained the meat and added the vegetables and a couple of other items from the cupboard, including a small can of tomato paste, to concoct his hobo stew. He was feeling good having found the photos. While they presented more pieces of the puzzle, he was elated to be making progress in finding out what had happened to his friend.

  At his kitchen table he ate while Ella Fitzgerald sang on the record player. He had a second helping and when he was done, he sat in his favorite chair and lit a cigar. He turned on his black-and-white television, bought secondhand. Fooling with the rabbit-eared antenna, he cleared the fuzzy picture. Petticoat Junction was on and he watched the comedy show to the end, laughing a few times at the goings on. After that a doctor drama started and Ingram got up, clicking away from this to the next channel. He came upon a game show in progress. He left it there, mildly interested in the contestants vying for space-age cookware.

  Ingram sat and puffed away, his smoke trailing out the window he’d opened overlooking the avenue. Out there a dog barked, and two men could be heard discussing who was the better boxer, that loud-mouthed Cassius Clay, who’d recently beat Doug Jones in New York, or the bear, the heavyweight champ, Sonny Liston. Each man effusively argued for their respective fighter, their voices fading into the night as they sauntered along. Getting more comfortable in the chair, Ingram started to doze, having stubbed out what was left of his smoked cigar in an ashtray. Just before going under, he looked at the TV screen. The point of view was through a windshield as a vehicle bounced along a dirt road in a village. His breath caught in his throat as he hauntingly recognized the humble dwellings of Chorwa. He gaped, staring as Korean peasants went about their daily chores. A plane buzzed over the village. The aircraft dropped a bomb. People screamed and ran as it exploded and gunfire erupted.

  Ingram was leaning forward but couldn’t get his legs to work to get him out of his chair as the devastation unfolded. He blinked and swallowed, trying to surface from the miasma. Now the TV showed a bucolic middle-class street as jaunty theme music signaled the beginning of another comedy program. He could make his legs work now and he got up, clicking through the channels with a dry mouth. There was no village destruction to be seen. Ingram rubbed a hand over his face, worried he was becoming unmoored. He had a blast of whiskey before going to bed, afraid he’d have a nightmare. But he slept soundly, untroubled.

  CHAPTER SIX

  “How’s your sandwich?” Ingram asked Anita Claire.

  “Fine, thank you. Sorry I couldn’t get away.”

  “Ain’t nothing wrong with honest work, as my mama would say.” She’d called him earlier today to tell him she had to work late. He’d suggested he’d bring her dinner and she’d agreed. Not exactly four-star, getting sandwiches, potato salad and two slices of apple pie from the Detour diner. They ate at her desk, which was tucked in a corner of the storefront campaign office on Pico Boulevard. There were three others working, calling people from voter lists to reaffirm they were voting for Bradley and seeing if they needed a ride to the polls.

  “Does your mom live in town, Harry?”

  “No, she went back to Atoka in Oklahoma. My dad was gone several years by then. This was when I was drafted.”

  “You were born here?”

  “Well, no, they’re both from Oklahoma and I grew up there until right before junior high. We came out here because my father had a job waiting for him through a cousin. He was a trolley man.”

  “Did your mom stay home?”

  He shook his head, grinning. “She was and is an independent sort from a long line of those kind of women. She worked part-time as a secretary at Golden State Mutual, then eventually sold policies.”

  “Wow, impressive. Any brothers or sisters?”

  “Kind of,” he said. “Pops left us for another woman, and he had two children with this woman back down in Texas. Boy and girl.”

  “Have you met your steps?”

  “Yeah, but there’s an age difference so we’re not exactly what you’d call close.” He made a feeble gesture. “Same goes for my dad. Although he did write me a couple of times when I got out of the Army.”

  “Sorry to hear that, about your dad I mean.”

  He ate more of his sandwich, setting it down on a square of unfolded wax paper.

  “What about your folks?” he asked.

  She cocked her head. “Go ahead and ask.”

  “What?”

  “You know what, smart guy.” She said it sharply but was smiling.

  “Okay, fine, your mom is the one who’s white?”

  “Good guess.”

  “Don’t go all shy now.”

  She forked down a bite of potato salad before speaking again. “They’re both lefties, Harry. That’s how they met, on the picket line.”

  “I see,” he said.

  She slapped the back of his hand playfully. “What do you see?”

  “You can’t help yourself, indoctrinated to help the downtrodden and be the Wonder Woman for equal rights.”

  “You damn right.”

  They had more of their food. Then, taking a gander at her coworkers, Claire eased open a drawer in her desk. A finger to her lips, she extracted a flask and unscrewed its attached top while also holding it in the same hand. She poured a shot for Ingram in his coffee cup.

  “My mama warned me about you big-city women.” He tipped his cup toward her and took a sip. “Are your folks here in L.A.?”

  “They are,” she said. “They’re divorced yet have remained friends. They went through some hard times, which put a big strain on the marriage. Had me and my sister coming and going when we were teenagers.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “They were involved in a lot of agitation around housing covenants and don’t shop where you can’t work campaigns. They know Charlotta Bass.” The Eagle and the Sentinel regularly took bold stands against discrimination. “That always meant they got grief on the job, both of them being public school teachers. Loyalty oaths, getting followed, that bullshit took a toll.”

  “I can imagine.”

  She studied him a moment, sitting back in her chair. “It just occurred to me. How is it you were fighting them commie Asian devils over there yet don’t miss a beat working for somebody like Bass when you first got back?”

  “She hasn’t taken a shot at me. And by the time I came on, she’d already sold the paper.” Lawyer and one-time reporter for the paper Loren Miller owned the Eagle these days.

  Her lip curled. “You know what I’m talking about.”

  “I didn’t volunteer, Anita. But yeah, like I said at Ben’s send-off, once I was over there, I decided I should do my duty. I guess I hoped like a lot of negroes, we’d show Uncle Sam we were good at soldiering, fighting for democracy and all that.”

  “I suppose Black troops in the Civil War figured the same,” she said. “Look at those fellas who came back from the First War and got lynched in their uniforms in their own hometowns, they must have counted on a goodwill for their sacrifices that never materialized.”

  Ingram had more of his spiked coffee. “We can only do what we can do. Not ignore the past, but don’t let it shackle us either.”

  She folded her arms. “You’re just full of surprises, aren’t you, Mr. Ingram?”

  “No more than you it seems.”

  Claire poured from her flask into a paper cup she’d had water in. Raising it to her mouth she said, “Maybe we’ll keep surprising each other.”

  “Pie,” he said, pushing a slice toward her on a paper plate.

  She patted her hip. “One bite is all you can tempt me with. Any more than that, and I’ll have to be shopping for a new dress size.”

  He made sure his eyes didn’t linger on her hip, and avoided the temptation to make a Redd Foxx–like remark. He wasn’t looking to get slapped for being fresh. They finished their meal and she walked him out. Claire’s coworkers were still making phone calls.

  “Don’t you think I’m not shouldering my load,” she said as they stood next to his car.

  “What are you talking about?”

  She notched her head toward the campaign’s storefront. “The phone banking. My shift is tomorrow morning.”

  “Nobody’s thinking you’re a goldbricker.”

  She pointed at him. “That’s right.”

  He unlocked his door. “See you again?”

  She put her arms around his neck and kissed him. “See you soon.”

  Wistfully he watched her walk back into the office. Driving home, he rolled down his window halfway to let the cool air of evening blow across his warm face.

  The following morning he got up and as was his custom, put on the scanner as his coffee brewed. But as a report of a domestic squabble came over the airwaves, he turned off the device. Ingram decided he had other matters to attend to this morning. Not in a rush, he made breakfast and had two cups of coffee, leafing through a copy of the Herald Examiner from a day ago. He washed the dishes and headed out for the library.

  “Where would I find books on the body, particularly the heart?” he asked the librarian.

  “Like how the heart works?”

  “Yes.”

  “That would be in the three-hundreds, down that row.” She indicated.

  “Thanks.”

  Ingram stood in the aisle and pulled various books about anatomy and internal organs off the shelf, glancing through each one. He carried several to a table and sat there to regard them more thoroughly. He’d brought along the page with the hurried scribbles and the fractions and unfolded it, smoothing it out on the table. He was sure now one of the words was “heart.” He read sections about how the heart functions, but no lightbulb went off in his head. Was one of these scrawled words a name for a chemical? Was it referring to something the body produced? He looked through the indexes and tried comparing what he found there with what he guessed the word was, but no match. He also looked through a high school chemistry text but found no match there either.

  He slumped, imagining walking into his neighborhood drugstore to show the word to the druggist, some guy in a white smock who looked like Boris Karloff. The cat would take a look and say, “Wait right here, will you?” Then would go away to call the cops on him. At least Ingram would know he was onto something. Like maybe this was some kind of stuff used to make an explosive.

  He could show the fractions to Anita but what could she make of them? Best to keep this to himself for now.

  He left the library and spent time back at his apartment cleaning his gear and straightening up in the darkroom. Ingram took a handful of photos from a bottom shelf of a rickety table he’d rescued from the trash. In his bedroom he opened one of his file boxes and tossed them in. He paused before closing the closet door. What had Pettigrew mentioned about preserving his legacy? He hardly considered what he had as gallery quality but here he was running around playing snooper and there could be consequences. If he died, who would take care of his thousands of photos?

  He sat heavily on the end of the bed and lay down on his back. He’d been going at this since he’d come back from the war. Damn near ten years now. Rushing out in the middle of the night to take snaps of a drunk man on his knees crying over the body of the wife he’d just stabbed to death, or some poor mother devastated after her little girl was killed in a hit-and-run. That lady in Kinslow’s rooming house was probably right about him. He’d spent a lot of time and energy capturing those petrified looks of horror, stark in the white glare of his exploding flash bulbs. The unmistakable defeated slump of the shoulders, the head hung low. Humanity at its worst and most vulnerable. Ingram had seen and photographed a city full of misery and gruesomeness. There were plenty of pictures of picket lines too, cops wailing on brothers and white guys just because, rallies for equal rights and on and on. There was a breadth of subject matter he’d shot over the years, albeit not for the tea and crumpets crowd.

  “Fuck it,” he muttered as he sat up. He wasn’t about to burn his pictures in a backyard incinerator like they were garbage. He’d made an honest living taking these pictures. He’d never staged anything like he knew more than one photographer in town had. For good and for ill they represented his work, and he shouldn’t be so cavalier about caring for them. But first, time for a sandwich and a beer.

  Ingram went into the kitchen to fix his lunch and try to figure out where he could archive his photos. Some of the boxes were organized by gunshot, woman-on-man crime, man-on-woman crime and so on. Ingram got calls from time to time for such a photo where an editor determined they wanted to illustrate a point in an article, and it didn’t have to be of current vintage.

  Fortified by two hot dogs weighted down with onions and relish and half a bottle of Eastside Old Tap, Ingram got the boxes out of his closet and from under his bed. He wasn’t about to go through them to put order to everything. That would require setting aside days to get done. Rather a brief shifting through the contents in each box reminded him generally which contained the tamer shots, like those taken backstage at the Crystal Tea Room, and which had the more lurid material. Good thing he always made a notation on the backs of each as to where it was taken and date.

  One of the boxes wasn’t full of photographs. This one was metal, designed like a miniature steamer trunk, and stashed behind another box on the top shelf at the rear. He took it down to look through it, placing it on the bed. He undid its flaps and opened the lid. Aside from his service weapon, in here were souvenirs Ingram had brought back from Korea. He took out his service medal, an embroidered silk scarf he’d gotten on leave in Ashiya, Japan, and a bayonet from a Garand rifle he’d coated with Cosmoline to prevent rusting. He’d wrapped the blade in an inexpensive cotton handkerchief. Ingram hadn’t looked in this box since he’d first packed it away after getting back.

  He also took out a particular type of can opener the soldiers would dangle from their uniform’s flapped breast pocket. The device was used to peel back the lids of their C ration tins. You wolfed that grub down because you were perpetually hungry, and it seemed half the time you got diarrhea from the chow. That is, until he’d learned from other dogfaces if you put a dent in the tin, then set it on an open fire until the dent popped back out, you were good to go. Having an upset stomach also reminded him of General MacArthur, who was in charge of the United Nations Command over there. The troops included Canadians and Australians but were mostly US personnel. Even though President Truman had officially integrated the armed services a couple of years before, MacArthur was of the studied opinion that Black soldiers were inferior in every way to their white counterparts. When the president fired him in ’51 for insubordination, General Matthew Ridgeway, who took over, put the integration orders into effect. Not that there was a bunch of psalm-singing and roasting marshmallows after that among the white and Black enlisteds. Far from it.

  Also, in the metal box was a deungsil, a typical Korean lantern hung outside a home, or from the rafters in a barn. It was designed to hold a candle. The lantern was made of thin metal and glass and was in fragile condition. He turned it over and over in his hands, his eyes tearing up. Countless lanterns like this could be found in villages and towns all throughout the country, north and south. Like in Chorwa, when his patrol had marched through on their way to reconning the Hambone Ridge. Where the KPA, the Korean People’s Army, aided by a contingent of Chinese soldiers, opened fire on them from huts and hidden foxholes. In the onslaught of bullets and screams and bodies blasted apart, Harry Ingram accidently shot that nine-year-old. He’d tried later to find out the boy’s name, but he hadn’t been able to. Nor find his folks.

  Ingram closed his eyes, and it took him several minutes to compose himself. He put everything back in the metal box, closed it up and put it away.

  Ingram got back on task. He separated out his negatives, many of which were inserted between piles of photos. By the time he’d finished, he’d had a second Old Tap and it was late in the afternoon. The phone rang and he picked up the handset.

  “Hello?”

  “Harry, it’s me.”

  “What’s up, Strummer?”

  “I’m coming by to pick you up,” he said in a rushed manner.

  “Where we going?”

  “You’ll see. Be downstairs.”

  Edwards soon arrived in his Chrysler.

  “Why all the hush-hush?” Ingram asked his friend as he got in on the passenger side of the bench seat.

  “Kind of a delicate situation, you might say.”

  “The hell you talking about, Strummer?”

  “I forgot to mention it—did you bring a bat?”

  “Negro, where the hell are we going?”

  “Watts, son.”

  “Yeah?”

  “You told me there was a couple’a colored gals in those ofay party pictures.”