“I did.” Edwards had called him back, having gotten his message.

  “That helped narrow down who I was asking around about.” Edwards glanced over at him. “Better than asking around about some silver-haired ofay who procures or has procured for him the darker gals for their mysterious hoodoo ways.” He bugged his eyes at Ingram.

  “This chick packs a rod?”

  “Seems the company she keeps can be a bit obstreperous. Least that’s what I’ve been told. Open the glove box.”

  Ingram did. Except for a few papers in there and a nearly depleted roll of Life Savers candy, it was empty. “Okay, so?”

  Edwards reached under the dashboard on his left side and pressed a button. The back end of the glove box swung inward. “In there,” he said.

  Ingram reached in and took out a snub-nosed .38 with a taped grip.

  “Just in case.”

  His friend shook loose a cigarette from a Lucky Strike pack he plucked off the dashboard. The cigarette was bent but held together. Edwards pushed in the cigarette lighter. “Let me do the talking when we get there.” The cigarette bounced up a down in his mouth as he said this.

  “Sure.” Ingram put the gun in his jacket’s outer pocket, aware if the cops stopped them, he and Edwards might not live to see jail. This gave him a weird sort of calm, like when he was in the heat of battle, scared but eager.

  “We’re not going in there guns blazing, okay?” Edwards said. “The gat is, you know, insurance. No reason to be trigger happy but be on guard.”

  “Yeah, I got it. I’m not thrill crazy.”

  “Just saying, One-Shot Kid.”

  “Fine.”

  On they went. Eventually they reached a street in Watts that looked to be more country than city. What sidewalks there were existed in brief spans of concrete interspersed with sparse lawns that gently sloped all the way down to the uneven asphalt, grass tendrils stretching across as if trying to join with the lawns on the opposite side. Here and there were chunks of what had been curbs, cast aside as if the road crews had lost interest.

  By now it was dusk and what streetlamps there were had come on, pale yellow glows like fading stars. They parked and Ingram heard chickens clucking from not too far away. This under the hum of steel on steel as the Southern Pacific railcars went by on the tracks also not far from where they were.

  In the low horizon behind the houses at the end of the street was the silhouette of the top of the spires of the Watts Towers. Ingram had done a photo layout of the towers a few years ago for an assignment for a French jazz magazine whose name he couldn’t recall now. There were three main spiraling structures with plumbing pipe, and various other minor structures including arches compacted on a triangular piece of land. This had been erected by a cantankerous man named Sam Rodia. Mortar, tiles, the bottoms of glass bottles, wire mesh and rough concrete he’d used, material scavenged from all over to construct his wonder. Often Rodia, who began the construction in 1921, would change his mind and tear down a section after months of putting it together. It took until 1954 for him to say it was finished. Ingram had interviewed him, and recalled learning Rodia’s third wife had left him due to his obsession with its construction. Rodia had dismissed her splitting on him with a wave of his calloused hand.

  “Over here,” Edwards was saying. He pointed at a modest house with a large palm tree on a circle of dry lawn. A 1940s-era Hudson pickup truck was parked in the driveway. Judging from the lumpy bodywork, the vehicle had seen a lot of miles. There was a light on inside the house. A screen door hung haphazardly over the front door and as they got closer, Ingram noticed two rough-hewn symbols staked in front of the house. They were made of what seemed to be plaster embedded with rebar like lollipops. They looked like Rodia’s handiwork. One was a cross painted in silver; the other symbol, which he didn’t recognize, was painted gold.

  “That’s an ankh,” Edwards said.

  “How you know that?”

  “That teacher I used to date.”

  “Must be the one who taught you what ‘obstreperous’ meant.”

  “Forget you.” He nodded toward the gold symbol. “It’s Egyptian, fool, and it symbolizes life.”

  Edwards knocked lightly on the screen door. As the inner door creaked open, still no shape could be discerned. A pungent order came from within, clinging to the screen door’s mesh. Ingram half expected to hear the organ of Korla Pandit but there was only the sound of a television program.

  “Yeah?” came a rough voice.

  “I’m a friend of Rochelle’s. Strummer’s my name.”

  “Good for you.”

  “We came to see Hanisha.”

  “That right?”

  “I’ll make it worth her while. We’re here to talk is all.”

  “About what?”

  “That’s for her to share with you if she wants.”

  “Let ’em in, Clovis,” a female voice said from behind the man at the screen door.

  There was the shuffle of feet on carpet. Edwards and Ingram exchanged a look. The one called Clovis had walked away. Edwards pulled the screen door open and both men stepped inside.

  The interior of the home was spare in its furnishings but tidy. Sitting on the couch was a woman in white jeans, sandals and a man’s dress shirt, tail out. Her hair was stylish, and she was pretty in a natural way. She was chestnut colored and smoky-eyed. Ingram was positive she wasn’t the Black woman he’d seen in the picture. There were several heavy bracelets on one of her wrists. The television had been turned off.

  “How you doing?” Edwards offered his hand, and she shook it. “This is my buddy, Harry Ingram. He wanted to ask you a couple of questions about a white man named Winston Hoyt.”

  There wasn’t an overabundance of religious artifacts, at least not in the front room Ingram catalogued. On the carved mantel over the fireplace were several items including a statuette of a deity he’d seen in an article in Ebony. It had been about a religion called Santeria from Cuba that had found its way to the States, particularly back East. If he recalled correctly, it was a combination of religious practices from the Yoruba peoples in West Africa and Catholicism.

  The man she’d called Clovis straddled a chair he’d set backward in an archway. He must have been six-four when standing, Ingram estimated. His large muscles strained the white T-shirt he wore. To his back was a kitchen and there was another woman in there, humming as she prepared food. The savory aroma of simmering collard greens filled the house.

  “You’re a journeyer,” she said. There was a gray cat lounging at her feet, indifferent to the newcomers.

  “Huh?” Edwards said.

  She lifted a dark red nail at Ingram. “You go in and out of people’s lives.”

  “Yes, ma’am. I take pictures for the newspapers.”

  “Not just any pictures.” Before he could answer, she added, “Sit, why don’t you?”

  They both looked around and Edwards took hold of a chair and brought it over to sit close to Hanisha. There was no other chair, and it wasn’t like Clovis was going to offer his up. Ingram sat on the other end of the couch.

  The woman in the kitchen said, “Clovis, get in here, will you?”

  “What you want?”

  “I want you in here, what I just say? Get this jar open for me and take down this big bowl I need on top of the icebox. Use them muscles ’sides showing ’em off to silly girls down there at the record shop.”

  Clovis sighed and rose, moving into the kitchen fluidly for a man his size.

  “What can I do for you, Mr. Ingram?”

  “Harry, please. I’m interested in what you might know about this Hoyt.”

  She folded her arms. “Why you want to mess in white folks’ business, Harry?”

  “You mean I should be afraid?”

  “I mean I don’t want no shit coming back on me and my practice.” There wasn’t a coffee table in front of the couch but on an end table with a lamp on it, there were two books lying on their sides. One spine read The Kabbalah Explained and the other Practical Ancient Alchemy. Each had several torn strips of paper for bookmarks in them.

  “What is it that you do exactly?”

  She held out her hands. “I see and I provide.”

  Ingram chanced to ask, “Would that be colored gals for his parties?”

  She grinned. “What is it you’re really trying to find out? Knowledge is a key, but it can be a burden.”

  Clovis returned to his post.

  Ingram said, “Your name will never be heard from me or Strummer.”

  “Not even if you were offered money? Far more than thirty pieces of silver.”

  He was getting irritated about this ’round and ’round, but he had to be cool. “I just want whatever information you can give me. I can pay.”

  Clovis spoke from his chair. “How we know these spades can be trusted?”

  Edwards glared at him.

  “Yes, we should see if they are men of their word,” Hanisha said.

  “Some kind of proof,” Clovis said with relish.

  “Exactly.”

  “Now wait a minute,” Edwards began. “What Harry said is on the level, we ain’t no tattle tales. You can ask Rochelle. She knows me.”

  “Okay, go on your way,” she said, shrugging.

  “What kind of test you talking about?” Ingram said.

  Irritated, Edwards grimaced.

  Clovis said, “This here is real what we’re talkin’ about. You two strokes look like you ain’t up for it.”

  “Fuck,” Edwards said, “this is some bullshit.”

  “We getting to do this tonight?” Ingram asked, wondering if Hanisha had a pit of hot coals in the back and expected him to walk over them barefoot. Or like in the western he watched on TV the other week, cross a branch over a pit of spikes blindfolded.

  “We’ll let you know what and when,” Hanisha said. “It’ll be soon enough.”

  A cat slinked out of the kitchen at the sound of food frying in crackling oil. The cat walked between Clovis’s legs, stopped in the middle of the front room and sat on its haunches, pale green eyes on Ingram.

  Harry stood and so did Edwards. “Here you go.” He gave Hanisha one of his business cards. It had his name and phone number on it along with a reproduction of a generic camera with a flash lamp attached. The two started for the door.

  “I’ll tell you this for free, Mister Photographer,” she said as Edwards pushed the screen door open. Ingram turned his head back toward her. “Winston Hoyt is a member of the Association of Merchants and Industrialists. Them’s the peckerwoods who decide such things as having a freeway cut through colored folks’ neighborhoods like Sugar Hill, even though they be highfalutin. But they had to be reminded what they got is only nigger money to fool with. Now you could have found out what I just told you in the library. It’s what you can’t find out there is why you’ll be back.”

  Ingram said, “I suppose so.”

  She and Clovis exchanged a look. The cat rolled onto its back.

  “What in the holy hell was that about?” They were back in Edwards’s Chrysler, driving away.

  “You the one brought us out here, Columbus. Shit.” He chuckled nervously.

  “I wouldn’t put it past her or Clovis making you drive over to Maywood to fetch some damn thing or another.”

  Maywood, the sundown town not too far east of South Central, was home to a white gang called the Spook Hunters. They’d fought Black gangs such as the Slausons and the Del Vikings.

  “I need to find out what I can, Strummer.”

  “Why? He’s a rich white man who can squeeze you by the nuts, Harry. What else is there to know?”

  “The more you learn from recon, the better prepared you are for the battle.”

  “Yes, sir, General Patton.” He’d gotten out another cigarette and lit it. Again, it dangled from a corner of his mouth as he talked. “Man, are you so shell-shocked you think everything’s a mission?” He looked over at him.

  “I only want answers.”

  “Brother, listen to me when I tell you I’ve had more experiences with cats like your boy Clovis. Whatever that robust negro and the voodoo queen come up with, you can be sure it’s some shit where you might wind up with a bullet in your gut. And that might be a lucky outcome.”

  From out on the avenues, the various-colored neon glare of liquor store and motel signs reflected off the car’s glass as they rode past—businesses that were the staples of the ghetto.

  “You the one that said they could be obstreperous.”

  “More like mumbo-jumbo. Her practice.” He snorted. “You know she wouldn’t be the first chick to be a pimp. All that hooey jive she spouts, a glorified way to mesmerize some greenhorn country girl fresh off the turnip truck. Power of the pussy is what.”

  “You might have something there,” Ingram agreed. They rode along some more, then Ingram asked, “If it went bad back there, you expected me to blast our way out?”

  “What kind of friend you take me for?” he said indignantly. “You wasn’t gonna be the only one fillin’ his hand. I got a rod strapped to my ankle.” He tapped his lower leg.

  “Good to know.”

  “Yeah, well, if you want my advice and I know you don’t, ignore that call when you get it from that hoodoo dame.”

  “If I do, she might put a curse on me.”

  “You can outrun a curse, not a bullet.”

  “For a cat who does what you do, you’re kinda bent out of shape over this, ain’t you?”

  Edwards finally took the cigarette out of his mouth. “Dude come at me with a knife, fine. He’s mad ’cause I tried to make time with his girl or he wants to take my bankroll, okay, that’s normal. I can handle that action. But a motherlover wants to carve me up because he had a vision of Ooma-Gooma who ordered him to do so. Now that fella is always gonna come at you. He’s operating on another level, trying to get his seat at the table in the great by-and-by.”

  “But that’s only if you believed in that sort of jive.”

  Edwards tapped the dash with his index finger. “You’re missing the point, Harry. It might not be an act, them two could believe in their ghost in the sky like, you know, the followers of Malcolm X. Selling bean pies on the corner and preaching about Yakub. Ready to stand shoulder to shoulder against the cops if Malcolm said so.”

  Yakub was supposedly a Black scientist who lived on an island thousands of years ago and created the white race to bedevil the Black man. Ingram didn’t believe this yarn, but he got the point. Members of the Nation of Islam, many of them culled from the ranks of prisoners and addicts, had been cleaned up and reformed. They’d embraced the cause deeply and wouldn’t hesitate to defend the faithful.

  Ingram nodded. “A lot of that has to do with Malcolm’s charisma.”

  “Oh yes, that man can speechify. Stronger than King in some ways,” Edwards admitted.

  “With God on our side, how can we lose,” Ingram intoned. He then added, “Anyway, I don’t figure Clovis as no true believer.”

  “Yeah,” his friend drawled, “he’s her man or bodyguard or enforcer or whatever. Anything he’s on about, it’s on her orders.” They drove more in silence. At some point Edwards glanced over at him again, snapping his fingers. “You know what your problem is, you’re too damn curious is what. See what you really want is the story, isn’t it?”

  “That’s not what this is about.”

  “Uh-huh. A juicy story about the sex lives of the rich. Murder and blackmail brought to you by your ace negro reporter.” Edwards grinned.

  “Could be I can accomplish both things. Find out who killed Ben and write about it.” This was the first time the notion occurred to him—or at least the first time he was willing to admit that he might have a dual purpose in trying to find out what happened. A true-crime piece he could for sure sell to a white slick.

  “You don’t deny you want to be whatshisname, the one who blew his brains out, Hemingway for the colored crowd.”

  “You learned a lot from your teacher, didn’t you? All I want to do now is get home and put my feet up.”

  “Yeah, well, best be practicing on some bottles and cans with your pop gun, son. If’n you intend to deal with them again.” He grinned. “Probably stealing the gold teeth out of some old rich dame in Beverly Hills while she sleeps.”

  “They’ll be in a glass on her nightstand. Piece of cake.”

  “Sure you right.” Edwards dropped him off at his place. Ingram had put the gun back in its hidden compartment.

  “See you, Harry.”

  “Later.” Ingram tapped the side of the car as his friend drove off.

  Upstairs he had a pour of whiskey and turned on the radio in his bedroom. There was a news report about a suspect who was cleared as the Morning Bandit, a bank robber who’d struck yet again two days ago, robbing a bank in Venice, an area of surfers and beatniks called the slum by the sea. He dialed in KBCA, a jazz and blues station on the FM band. A John Lee Hooker number was playing, “Boom, Boom.” The Mississippi Delta native’s raw baritone was unmistakable as he sang about desire over the licks he laid down on his electric guitar. Ingram poured another drink. Having stripped off his shirt down to his athlete tee, he lay in bed, propped against the headboard, sipping, and worried about what Edwards had said about him. Was his eagerness to look into Kinslow’s death really about him being selfish, seeing it as a way to further his career? That could very well be the lens through which he was viewing the death, which could be an accident after all. He was trying to will it into being a murder because he needed a crime in order to make the story interesting.

  Ingram took his pants off and got under the covers but couldn’t fall asleep. It bothered him his motives weren’t pure, but more so that he hadn’t recognized this himself. He could look in the mirror and see a familiar face, yet those he knew saw his true self.