Ingram took this all in, then wound back to Arlene Domergue’s office. It was, as Horne said, along the way to the loading dock. The hallway leading to her door was situated between two tall racks containing sacks of cement, scores of rebar and a stack of drywall which was being used more and more these days as opposed to plaster and lath. Domergue’s door was dark stained pine and solid, no wording on it. He knocked lightly, announcing himself.

  “Miss Domergue, it’s Harry Ingram.”

  “Come in,” she said.

  He opened the door and stepped through as Arlene rose from her desk. She didn’t look as he’d imagined a spinster with cats might appear. His notion derived from late night movies like Arsenic and Old Lace and episodes of Maverick. She was his height in low heels and wore up-to-date attire, a gray conservative skirt and buttoned up white shirt, the sleeves at half-mast. Her coiffed black hair was streaked with white, like that of an aging fashion model. While the lines of her face suggested a woman of a certain age, she was handsome with observant eyes. She put out her hand in greeting, a sparkly bracelet on her wrist.

  The accessory triggered a memory in Ingram, but he didn’t hesitate and shook her hand.

  “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Ingram. Have a seat why don’t you?”

  “Thanks,” he said, sitting. What did live up to his expectations was the papers and manilla file folders on her desk in orderly stacks. There was a row of three metal file cabinets in a corner. Her credenza was wood, part of her desk set, and had an adding machine on it.

  Domergue left the door slightly ajar and she took her seat back behind her desk. “You talked to Chet?”

  “I did. There doesn’t happen to be a spare key to Tolbert’s house around here, is there?”

  “What are you suggesting, Mr. Ingram?” she said flatly.

  “Didn’t mean it the way it sounded, Miss Domergue. Wanted to see in case of an emergency that maybe there was one.”

  “There isn’t.”

  “Understood. Anything you can share about Tolbert’s habits? He go to the prize fights at the Olympic, chase the ponies at the track, that sort of thing?”

  “Why would I know about those manly pursuits? Did you ask Chet these questions?” Her tone wasn’t accusatory, but connoted mild curiosity. She sat forward, her forearms crossed atop the desk.

  Ingram said, “Tolbert and Chet are drinking buddies. It occurred to me he might not be inclined to level with a stranger about certain things concerning his pal.”

  “But a woman would? A white woman at that?”

  “Betty says you seek enlightenment.” He’d borrowed that term from a program on KPFK, when Anita Claire was listening to a reading of Aldous Huxley’s Doors of Perception.

  “That doesn’t make me somebody who tells tales out of school.”

  “I know from her he’d go off the rails now and then, and you’re the one that’s been here the longest, Arlene.”

  She interlaced her fingers. Ingram noticed several gaudy rings on each hand. “You want to know if he liked to gamble?”

  “Does he?”

  “You got that from Betty?”

  “I did.”

  She looked past Ingram, then back at him. “Mose appreciates a game of poker now and then. In fact, so do I. Nothing fancy, no outlandish stakes, I can assure you . . . Harry.”

  “Any strongarm types ever come around collecting on a bet?”

  “Not for years. Back in ’57 he got carried away and brought a danger to the business. But we cleared that up.”

  “You and him?”

  “Chet too,” she admitted.

  The goddamn Three Musketeers, Ingram noted. His face blank he said, “Who was the debt to?”

  “I don’t recall.”

  He didn’t believe her. He wondered if it was Rickler, or he was involved somehow and she knew that. Like with Horne, it would be counter-productive to call her on it now, he judged. She was direct only to a point. Ingram hedged he was going to have to circle back to her at some point and didn’t want her to freeze him out. “I appreciate you telling me this.” He rose.

  “Let me know if there’s anything else I can help you with,” she said, but notably, she remained in her seat instead of seeing him out.

  He thanked her and walked back outside. Ingram watched one of the Restoration panel trucks drive away from the business, then plucked a crooked hand-rolled cheroot out of his coat’s inner pocket. He lit the crooked cigar and blowing a thin plume of smoke, took a stroll around the neighborhood rather than return to his car. Partly this was due to Claire complaining about the stale odor that would be trapped inside the Falcon. But this was also a way for him to consider his next steps. He walked west along Slauson toward Figueroa. It was clear to Ingram he was going to have to take a run at Rickler. He’d told himself he would walk away if it got to be too much. But who was he jivin’? Was he so shell-shocked he liked this kind of challenge?

  His cheroot almost spent, Ingram stood in front of a deactivated Water and Power pump station. The grounds the structure sat upon was a rectangular half acre of city-owned land that started at Slauson and continued north to 58th Street. Ingram had once been inside on an assignment. He took a last puff.

  Just as the cheroot left his fingers, a police car rolled past. The two cops in it eyed him but kept going, heading south along Figueroa. Three weeks ago he supposed they would have stopped and harassed him for littering. He watched the patrol car recede. The cop car reminding him of the riots, he drove to Whitehead’s Market to check on his friend Arthur Yarbrough, who he last saw then. And while he wasn’t articulating this to himself, in the past he and Yarbrough had shared their ruminations on surviving combat. There was comfort in talking to his friend.

  “COLORED FOLKS had to get it out of their system,” Yarbrough opined.

  “Until the next time,” Ingram said.

  “Yep,” Yarbrough agreed. The two stood in the front of his store, Whitehead’s. He held a push broom. He knew the layout of his store well and, as if guided by biological radar, often swept up.

  During the riots, Yarbrough, who’d been blinded by an exploding land mine in the Korean War, had nonetheless stood guard with two of his employees inside. The business occupied the ground floor of an old-fashioned apartment building Ingram had once lived in before taking up house with Claire. Across the street and a few doors down, an upholstery store had been torched. Flying embers had ignited the wood trim around Whitehead’s display window, threatening to burn the entire establishment. Fortunately, there was a threaded spigot inside the store and a hose was attached to deal with the emergency. The front wall had been discolored and smelled of charred wood from within. Repairs would have to be done but that was as far as the flames had gotten. Ingram had been to the store the first full day of the unrest but hadn’t been back until now.

  “You should have seen Arthur being all fire chief,” Eric Coley said. The young man of twenty-two, who was also taking plumbing courses at Trade Technical College, had guarded the store by Yarbrough’s side. He’d also been the one to call Ingram to tell him the store had survived. “He was directing us how to put out the fire.”

  Ingram smiled. “Figures.”

  “The heat had me light-headed,” Yarbrough cracked.

  “I hear you, man. Mind if I make a call? Want to see if Strummer’s around.”

  “Be my guest.”

  Edwards would hopefully have a better sense of who Rickler was. Was the gambler volatile? Reasonable? In the back office, Ingram first dialed his blind pig joint, the Stockyard, but there was no answer. He then tried the office Edwards maintained on the second floor of a two-story cinder block building on Western Avenue near Adams. Pest Be Gone extermination services occupied the first floor. The name on Edwards’s door in Art Deco relief lettering read: RENARD ENTERPRISES. Edwards’s enterprises were varied. Some were above the line—he and Ingram were among the investors in Whitehead’s—but there were underworld dealings as well. He imagined one day, the life Edwards led would catch up to him, possibly sucking him and Yarbrough down, too. Ingram reached the man’s answering service.

  “I’m not sure where I’ll be,” he told the pleasant-voiced woman on the line. “Just let him know I called and will try him later.” He could hear someone typing in the background on her end.

  “Very well, Mr. Ingram.”

  “Thank you.” He hung up.

  After saying good-bye to Yarbrough and Coley, Ingram got back in his car and headed to the Ascot branch of the library. He was putting his search for Mose Tolbert on pause until he talked with Edwards. At any rate Ingram needed to get his notes together before his appearance on the Louis Lomax show on Thursday. True, he had a desk with a typewriter in the detached garage where he’d set up a darkroom. Claire also had a desk in there. But he was used to using the library and liked the idea that if he needed to look something up, such was instantly accessible. Walking into the quiet space, carrying his note pad and a yellow legal pad, he was pleased to find an unoccupied desk at a window, the blinds drawn against the bright sun. Ingram sat and got to work.

  About an hour later, he was finishing up and preparing to leave. He’d been checking particular dates and had taken a book off the shelf, From Slavery to Freedom by the historian John Hope Franklin. He picked up the book and went toward the section where it belonged to reshelve it. Heading down the aisle, he saw a familiar face.

  “Doing your homework, Sister?”

  Violet O’Shay smiled at him. She was holding a book and had been scanning for another one on the shelf. “Something like that,” she said. “I’ve been asked to do an article on the recent troubles.” She pointed at the book he was returning. “And in fact I was looking for that.”

  He handed the book across. “Is the article for that Catholic magazine, Tidings it’s called?”

  “A bit more this way,” she said, veering her hand to the left. “It’s a tabloid called the Catholic Worker.”

  Grinning, he said, “Of course it would be called that, like the commie’s newspaper.”

  “Wait till you read my article.”

  “You mean it’s not going to have the headline, ‘Get Whitey?’” That had been part of a headline on the front page of the L.A. Times the first day of the riots.

  They chuckled. She said, “Believe me, that’s not the approach I’m taking. Really, I might need to call on you, Harry, for a quote or two. Part of what I want to get at is about the police department and how they treat us in this part of town.”

  He cocked his head at that. Playfully, she tapped the back of her hand on his chest. “You know what I mean, smart ass.”

  “You haven’t gone native have you, Violet?”

  “I’ll let you know when I do.” She allowed her words to linger for a moment, her gaze steady on him.

  His cheeks warm, he said, “I’ll let you get back to it.”

  “Okay. I know where to find you when I need you, Harry.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She waved at him as she returned to her research.

  Walking to his car, he warned himself—what kind of foolishness was he trying to do? Flirting with a Sister and him practically a married man. He loved Anita and he damn sure better not mess that up. Maybe, he reasoned getting into his car, he’d been unduly influenced by one of those articles in Dapper about the playboy lifestyle, a different girl for each day of the week. And what did it say about Violet, who surely knew what she was saying to him. She had vows and whatever, right? Wouldn’t they both go straight to hell if they had an affair?

  Slipping into traffic, he considered that at least Anita wasn’t going to be on that one-way ride to demons and pitchforks. Her folks were atheists, but they’d brought her and her sister up to learn for themselves what it meant to be spiritual. Tomes such as the Bible, the Talmud and the Quran had been in their household and what these various religions meant was often discussed around their dinner table. It was religion as viewed through the lens of her parents’ politics. That was certainly different than how he’d been raised, typical of any number of Black households with roots in the south. He clearly remembered a framed print of a painting of a bearded, beatifical Jesus aglow in his purple robes, arms outspread as he ascended to heaven. The reproduction hung in his mother’s bedroom before his father had left them. He’d been a trolley conductor here in town and when he’d abandoned him and his mother, he went to Texas and took up with another woman.

  To his mother’s credit, religion didn’t become a crutch for her after he left. When it was the three of them, they went to church probably once a month. After he was gone, the two of them attended only on certain occasions like Easter and Christmas. If anything, his mother became more driven after his father departed, going from a secretary at the Black insurance company Golden State Mutual to one of the few women selling policies. It was initially limited to types of businesses associated with women, such as beauty shops and bakeries, but she diversified and could count enterprises like an auto parts store and a furniture shop as clients.

  In the house he shared with Claire were her books about Buddhism and memoirs written by people searching for enlightenment or just wandering like John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley and Zora Neale Hurston’s Tell My Horse. Books that wouldn’t have been in Ingram’s purview until he’d met her. They did discuss their ideas about the afterlife and both were unsure. Or as Claire had said, flexible on the subject of what, if anything, waited for them once the last breath left their body.

  He stopped at a red light. Never mind a fantasy about fooling around with Sister O’Shay on the side and all the implications of that . . . if doom was to be his, surely it would be for killing the hood, Wicks. It was only at this moment that Ingram noted the strange coincidence of his shooting Wicks in a junkyard of trolley cars and what his father’s job here in Los Angeles had been. He’d replayed that night among the junked trolleys several times since then but hadn’t made the connection until this moment. Having heard Claire and her mother talk about Freudianisms several times, had part of his willingness to squeeze the trigger been a desire to kill his father? But he didn’t think about his father that much and wasn’t of the mind to reach out to him—wherever he might be these days. Neither the dead Wicks nor the fate of his absent father gave him bouts of sleeplessness. The light changed and on he went.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  After his workout at the 28th Street Y, Ingram called Strummer Edwards again, hoping to get information on Rickler, but he was still unavailable. Feeling the need to justify the money Betty Payton was paying him, he made a call over to the Four Aces auto repair. Jed Monk, the owner, was out on a parts run but Howell Exum, one of the mechanics, answered.

  “You must be like that cat, Criswell,” Exum said after they’d greeted each other and Ingram said why he was calling.

  “That’s right, man, I see all and knows all. Like chicken ain’t nothin’ but a bird.”

  “Ain’t that the truth? Anyway, that car you wanted towed is here. We got it this morning.”

  “I’m on my way.”

  By the time he got to the Four Aces, Jed Monk had returned. He took Ingram to Mose’s car, a 1962 Chevy Bel Air. Not too fancy but not too plain either. The car had been placed behind the enclosed service bay area on an open rectangular concrete pad bordered by a chain-link fence.

  “Far as I can tell, this ride’s in pretty decent shape,” Monk said in his bass voice. “I checked the dipstick and the oil’s not too dirty, so he must have kept up the maintenance.”

  He wiped at an upper portion of the car with a clean shop rag. “It’s the Sport coupe, low milage, 409 V8, nice.” He nodded appreciatively. “They call this the Bubbletop ’cause of how the roof is shaped.”

  “I’m not angling to buy this short, you know.” Ingram stood looking at the car with his hands in his pockets.

  Monk smiled. “Okay, Boston Blackie, I’ll leave you to it.”

  “The car’s unlocked?”

  “Yeah, they’d jimmied the door open when it was first towed.”

  “Thanks, man.”

  “Sure.”

  Monk returned to his office. Ingram opened the driver’s door and leaned in, a knee on the bench seat. There wasn’t anything of interest in the glovebox. Ingram discounted a used roll of Life Saver candy as a clue. He felt under the seat and produced a few old receipts. One of them was from the bar at Hollywood Park racetrack. The date was from several months ago. He pocketed this. In the backseat he slipped his hand between the crevices and except for a few coins, came away with nothing else. He pulled the seat back away to gaze inside the trunk, spotting several items in there. Rather than wrestle removing the seat back out of the car, Ingram decided he’d instead pop the trunk.

  Borrowing a screwdriver and a hammer, Ingram tapped the blade end of the tool into the trunk’s lock. He twisted the screwdriver’s handle, turning the lock and opening the trunk. Inside there was a medium-sized carboard box, its top interlocked by the flaps. There were several loose 45 records in their colorful paper sleeves, a picnic basket and a roadside kit containing a flare, jumper cables and the like. There was nothing in the picnic basket and he noted the 45s were doo-wop numbers like “Earth Angel” and “Yakety Yak.”

  The man had a social life, Ingram mused. Tolbert likely brought his records to house parties or to barbeque out at the pool. Sifting through the contents inside the carboard box, he noted a jumble of parts—rollaway casters for a couch, a small block and tackle pulley with a hook, and a mechanical fuel pump for a car. He took the box and the other objects out of the trunk and lifted the flooring to peer into the cavity where the spare tire and jack were. He took the tire out and set it aside but there was nothing underneath where it resided in its circular hollow. He put it back. Ingram also put the flooring back in place and returned the other stuff he’d taken out. He was about to close the trunk when he paused.