Farewell, Amethystine

by Walter Mosley

Genres: Mystery; Private Investigators

Synopsis

Easy Rawlins’ latest client sends him down a warren of memory and nostalgia, blinding him to reason and risk, from “master of the genre,” (Washington Post) Walter Mosley.

January 1970 finds Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins, LA’s premier Black detective, at 50 years of age despite all expectations.  He has a loving family, a beautiful home, and a thriving investigation agency.  All is right with the world… and then Amethystine Stoller, his own personal Helen of Troy, arrives. Her ex-husband is missing. A simple enough case. But even as Easy takes his first step in the investigation he trips.  He falls into the memory of things past. Little things, like loss, love, a world war, and a hunger that has eaten at him since he was a Black boy on his own on the streets of Fifth Ward, Houston, Texas.

The missing ex, a young white man named Curt Fields, is found dead. Easy’s only real friend in the LAPD, Melvin Suggs, has gone into hiding rather than allow his femme fatale wife to go to the gas chamber.  And that’s only the beginning.

Easy finds himself pressed into a reckoning. All of his success cannot succor his heart. The 1970’s have ushered in new expectations of men and women, Black and White, and Easy has to make a choice that will almost certainly hasten a permanent descent, one that might sunder his soul.
 

Release date: June 4, 2024

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 336

Sample

“Naw, naw, man. Shit no. They wanna kick her outta that school because she a Black woman want the Constitution to practice what it preach. All kindsa white revolutionaries and, and, and activist teachers up there at UCLA and they don’t make a peep about them.”

“But, Raymond,” Tinsford “Whisper” Natley rumbled, “they say she’s a Marxist, a communist.”

“So? It’s a free country, ain’t it?” my friend challenged.

Raymond Alexander, Saul Lynx, Whisper, and I were sitting around the conference table in my office at the back of WRENS-L Detective Agency.

Mostly on Monday mornings we got together to discuss events in the news. Monday was a good day because the rest of the week you couldn’t trust that we’d all be around. At the top of the week around 9:30, 10:00, my partners would migrate back with paper cups of bitter coffee in hand.

For the past couple of months, Ray, also known as Mouse, had shown up for this informal meeting every other week or so.

This was an unexpected wrinkle. Saul and Tinsford had once asked me to keep him away from our workplace, because Raymond was a career criminal who practiced everything from racketeering to first-degree murder. But that request changed on a Wednesday morning in the late fall of ’69.

I was out, going around a few SROs in Inglewood, looking for a missing husband, while Saul was at Canfield Elementary School because his son, Mo, had gotten into a fight. That morning, as every morning, Niska Redman occupied the reception desk and Whisper was in his office.

Somewhere around 11:00 my friend Mouse dropped by. Niska brought Raymond to LA’s best detective’s cubbyhole of an office. There she introduced the man who needed no introduction.

Weeks later Whisper told me that he said, “Easy’s not here, Mr. Alexander.”

“I’m not here for him, brother,” was the heist man’s reply. “It’s you need to hear what I got to say.”

Without even sitting down, Raymond told Whisper that a man named Desmond Devereaux was planning to kill Natley because he got DD’s brother arrested for a killing in Oxnard.

“And how would you know about that?” Whisper was a small man, even smaller than Ray, but he was someone you knew to take seriously.

“He sent a guy ovah to ask me about you.”

“Why would he ask you?”

“Because e’rybody knows I know Easy and that’s just one step away from you.”

Tinsford sent Niska home, left messages for me and Saul, and then went out with the deadliest man I knew, to take care of business.

They were gone for two and a half days, after which they never spoke about DD again. I hadn’t heard another word about the man anywhere.

Ever since then Raymond has been welcomed into our Monday morning talks.

As usual it was a rollicking conversation. Each of us had a favorite story in the day’s newspaper. We laughed at the rumor coming from the Turkish countryside: some people there thought that the newest flu epidemic was somehow caused by the moon expedition. The U.S. had similar issues with Russian spy satellites. White parents in Mississippi had a sit-in complaining about even just the word integration. But it was Angela Davis and UCLA’s attempt to oust her from her teaching position that got Raymond and Tinsford riled.

“But,” Tinsford complained, “the communists want revolution.”

“So did Thomas Jefferson.” Raymond wielded the name as if it was a weapon. For the past few months, he’d been spending his spare time reading heavy tomes of history about politics and race.

But Tinsford had been reading his entire life.

“Jefferson was influenced by the French Revolution, not Karl Marx.”

“Angela was influenced by the Frankfurt School,” Raymond said. I knew right then that he was going to be a whole new kind of threat in the coming decade.

“What school is that?” Saul asked.

“It’s these college professor guys from Germany,” Mouse said. “This guy Herb Marcus, somethin’ like that, works with them. They want things to change, and Angela does too. That’s why the trustees tryin’ to fire her.”

“Mr. Rawlins?” Niska Redman, our office manager, was standing at the door.

“Yeah?”

“That woman, Miss Stoller, the one Mrs. Blue wanted you to talk to. She’s here.”

Niska was tallish for a woman at that time, maybe five nine, and brown like the lighter version of See’s caramel candy. She usually tried to be serious because of her job, but you could tell that she was always ready to laugh.

“Well, guys,” I said to my friends, “I guess it’s time to get back to work.”

And that was it. Saul and Whisper went to their offices. Mouse left for a world of bad men, bank robbers, and bloodletters.

Niska backed up into the hall, allowing the men to file by, then she returned followed by a woman two shades darker than her.

“Amy Stoller,” Niska announced.

The potential client was wearing an ivory-colored dress that had a high collar and a knee-level hem that flared just a bit as if maybe responding to an errant breeze.

Already standing to see my friends out, I took a step in the potential client’s direction and held out a hand.

“Easy Rawlins,” I said.

“Nice to meet you.” She obliged the gesture with a firm grip.

“Have a seat,” I offered, motioning at the three chairs set before my gargantuan desk.

I’d started WRENS-L Detective Agency with a quasi-legal windfall I’d come upon years before. Saul and Whisper came in as partners, but they made me take the big office. I’d accepted the allocation with only mild trepidation. I wasn’t humble among friends or clients. But as an orphan in Houston’s Fifth Ward, I’d learned that, in the world at large, if people knew you had something, they were liable to take it.

I made it behind the desk. Ms. Stoller waited for me to sit down before she settled in. This struck me along with something else about her, a subtle scent she wore that was reminiscent of the bouquet of some ancient forest, welcoming but having hardly any trace of sweetness.

She was in her mid- to late twenties with satin brown skin and amber eyes on a face that was wide and unusually sensual. Her mouth was also wide, promising a beautiful smile. Stoller’s eyes being lighter than her skin meant something that I couldn’t put my finger on. But that wasn’t a bother, not at all.

“It’s a very nice office,” she said. “Kind of like the master bedroom in an apartment, or even a house.”

“The whole building used to be a rich man’s home till the furniture store downstairs bought it.”

She let her head tilt to the left and gave up half a grin.

I knew that this was a very important moment but had no idea if it would be for the good or not.

“How do you know Jewelle, Ms. Stoller?”

“I work for her and, you know, she treats all the women in the office kinda like they’re family.”

There was an aura of unconscious elegance surrounding her. This brought a question to mind.

“Is Amy your given name or is it short for something else? Amanda? Amelia?”

Smiling she said, “Amethystine.”

I was, unexpectedly, enchanted by the name. It seemed somehow… perfect. For a moment I didn’t know what to say and she had nothing to add. This quietude didn’t bother either one of us. We sat comfortably in the expanding silence.

“So, um,” I stammered. “How’d you come to work for Jewelle? You study business or real estate at school?”

Showing more of her left cheek than the right she said, a little shyly, “I was working for her husband at the insurance company P9, and she told him that she wanted to meet me.”

“What you do for Jackson?”

“You know Mr. Blue?”

“I knew Jackson back in the biblical days when he robbed Peter and then robbed Paul too.”

That got me the broad grin I’d been searching for.

“I went to P9 to apply for a job in statistics and they gave me a test. I guess I did pretty good on it because the human resources lady sent me to Mr. Blue’s office.”

My eyebrows rose a bit.

“What?” she asked.

“Jackson’s the highest-ranking vice president of P9. I can’t even think of a reason why he’d want to meet an entry-level applicant. Did he know you or somethin’?”

“We had met. He’s the one told me about the kind of jobs they had. But I didn’t tell him that I was applying.”

“Then why would they send you all the way up to the thirty-first floor?”

“I asked him that very same question,” she said. “You know what he told me?”

“What?”

“He said that those white people in personnel don’t never hire Black people and so he asked the president… ummmm.” She snapped her fingers a few times trying to remember the name.

“Jean-Paul Villard,” I said, filling in the blank.

“Yeah. Jackson asked Mr. Villard to tell human resources to send the colored applicants to Mr. Blue if they did well on the written test. And it was a good thing they did.”

“Because he hired you?”

“Not only that. You see, they ask you about your education before getting the transcripts, and I lied, sayin’ that I graduated from USC with a business degree.”

“That must’a tickled Jackson.”

“Yeah. He said that he didn’t make it past the fifth grade in school.”

“And he failed the fourth grade.”

We were having an excellent time.

“But then Jewelle got involved,” I prompted.

“Yeah.” She seemed a little bit shy again.

“You don’t have to explain that one. Jackson is a genius by nature and a dog by nurture. He’s been kicked more times than he’s been kissed. I know exactly what happened.”

“There was never anything inappropriate between us.” Amethystine’s words bordered on anger.

“I believe ya. What happened was one night Jackson probably said at the dinner table that he had a Black woman working in mathematical predictions, what he calls statistics. And in that moment Jewelle heard that little twang of excitement Jackson gets when a girl strikes his fancy.”

“Mmm,” was her reply. She nodded, signaling, maybe unconsciously, that we should get down to business.

“So,” I said. “What can I do for you, Ms. Stoller?

“Miss Stoller.”

With a smile I said, “What can I do for you, Miss Stoller?”

“I used to be Mrs. Fields, wife of Curt Fields. That’s why I’m here.”

I waited patiently.

Then, a bit hesitantly, but with no discernible shyness, she said, “Curt and I were married soon after we met. When he proposed to me, I thought that I’d never meet a man as good again. I said yes and we were doing really well, really happy, you know?”

“I’ve been there,” I said. Our eyes met and connected.

“I was very happy,” Amethystine Stoller averred, “and then, well, I got bored. So I left him.”

“You got divorced?” Maybe there was a hopeful little quiver in my chest.

“Yes. But… we’re still friends. I liked him and, I think, he was hoping we’d get back together again. I told him that I wouldn’t do that; I wouldn’t do that to him. I mean, he deserves somebody who would love him like a woman does a man, you know?”

“Yes, I do.”

“But even with all that, when I got into a kind of a jam, he helped me without askin’ for nuthin’. So I feel like I owe him.”

“What kind of jam?”

“That doesn’t have anything to do with why I’m here.”

“Okay. Why are you here?”

It was work getting at what she wanted, but less like pulling teeth and more like plucking apples from the upper tiers of a golden tree. There I sat, in the gilt-green dome of my imagination.

“You’re very patient,” the young woman observed.

“I don’t have all the time in the world, but you got an hour penciled in on the calendar.”

Amethystine studied these words a moment or two and then said, “I still feel very kindly toward Curt, and so when his parents called me yesterday I knew I had to do something.”

“What did your ex-in-laws want?”

“The Sunday before last he told them that he was going out with some friends.”

“He lives with his parents?”

“No. He makes a good living and has his own place. He’s just a good son. Tells his mother everything. You know… boring.”

“So,” I encouraged. “He called and said he was going out.”

“And nobody’s heard from him since.”

“Black kid.”

“White… man.”

There was nothing this woman said that I did not like. Her sentences were pithy, like a combat general’s orders in the heat of battle.

But she didn’t look military. The dark skin under her pale dress made her seem, somehow, vulnerable.

“Okay,” I said. “A missing person. Gone a week. Tell me about him.”

Amethystine Stoller smiled at me like a refugee seeking passage at a foreign border. The emigrant had shown her papers and now she was being ushered through.

“Curt’s a forensic accountant. He works mostly for courts and lawyers, prosecutors and, if they can afford it, the defense. He uses computer files, libraries, three part-time research assistants, and a newspaper clipping service that works out of Chicago. He goes after hidden wealth, the movement of money, and what Curt calls false fronts.”

I was finding it hard to concentrate on the words she was saying. This because she reminded me of a woman named Anger. Anger’s mother was a Black woman named Angel, her father a high-yellow killer called Shadow Lee. A dark-skinned, sharp-eyed young woman, Anger worked the back rooms of whatever job she was hired for. And she only did jobs that were in opposition to whatever law there was. For a long time, she worked for a small warehouse that bought and sold stolen goods off Black dockworkers employed at the Galveston port.

When I was fifteen, and nearly a full-grown man, Anger was seventeen and had been on her own at least half a dozen years.

“I feel guilty,” Amethystine said, shocking me back to the present.

“Guilty about what?”

“About leaving him. He was pretty useless when it came to dealing with anything but numbers. Numbers and long hours at work.”

Also boring, I thought.

In a bizarre turn of mind, I got the urge to ask her if she was going to get me killed. But instead I said, “I’m gonna need his parents’ information, and his.”

“You mean like their names and addresses?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t know Curt’s new address. I mean, I don’t see him very often because, because he needs to get over me.”

Nodding, I pushed a yellow legal pad and yellow No. 2 pencil across the desk.

While writing she said, “Mrs. Blue told me to come see you, but she didn’t tell me what it would cost.”

“Jewelle and I work on an old-school monetary system.”

Looking up, Amethystine asked, “What’s that?”

“We trade in favors.”

“Trade?”

“Back and forth like two tennis players in hell.”

“Is there some favor you need from me?”

“No, at this point all I need is information.”

She worked the pencil across the blue-lined yellow sheet with intensity. It was then that I noticed she was left-handed.

“Do you have any idea of where Curt might be?”

“No.”

It was the first lie she uttered. That’s when I decided, for sure, to kick the tires on her missing person case.

“Does he have any enemies?” I asked, as PI protocol demanded.

“I couldn’t say. I mean, he doesn’t run around with a bad crowd or anything, but he’s kind of innocent, know what I mean?”

“Maybe, but why don’t you explain?”

“He’s a soft touch, gives away money on the street to anybody who says they need it. He believes that people mostly tell the truth and keep their promises. He’s a white man but I don’t think that ever, even once, he thought there was anything unusual about us being together.”

“You don’t share his beliefs?” I teased, mildly.

“Do you?”

“Your number on that paper?” I asked in reply.

She took up the pencil once more.

For quite a while after Amethystine had departed, I stared out the window at our backyard neighbor’s picnic table.

Not long before, a quintet of hippies lived there, growing marijuana in a jury-rigged greenhouse. They escaped capture by the LAPD because I had warned them of the threat, and now a young couple lived there with their toddler son.

Anger Lee and I were walking down a dark Galveston alley late one Wednesday night. I was smitten with her even though she treated me like a little brother.

I’d just gotten off from my job as a dishwasher at an upscale bordello on Rent Street. Halfway down the alley a big Black man jumped out, slapped me, and then pulled out a jagged-looking black-bladed knife.

“Bitch! You comin’ wit’ me!” the attacker yelled at Anger.

Fifteen-year-old man that I was, I jumped up and tried my best to demolish our attacker. Instead, I was laid on my back with a knife wound in my left shoulder and a concussion that lasted nine days. Even though I was outmanned, my attack was a success because it gave Anger the chance to pull out her long-barreled .41-caliber pistol.

“Back it up, suckah!” she yelled.

Then there was a shot.

“Mr. Rawlins?”

Niska was standing at the door, her words a beacon set on leading me out of a nightmare.

“Yeah, baby?” I said, speaking words in the language of a long-ago life.

“Can we talk?”

“Come on in.”

She crossed the threshold.

One of the many things I liked about our office manager was that, whenever she was nervous, it showed in her gait.

Stiffly she moved to the central visitor’s chair. We then sat in unison.

“What can I do for you, Niska?”

The differences between our office manager and Amethystine were many.

Niska was open and aboveboard, a churchgoer, and careless about things that did not matter.

“I’ve been here over two years,” she began. “Before that I worked for Mr. Natley.”

I nodded.

“That’s a long time,” she added. “Since I was sixteen.”

“It is.”

“I like this job and, and I’m pretty good at it.”

“And now you want a raise,” I said with absolute certainty.

“No. You pay me more than most kids my age get. It’s just that I don’t want to be an office manager forever.”

“That’s why you’re going to college, right?”

“I want to be a PI like you.”

These words created a vacuum in my mind. I didn’t see Niska as a detective. As a matter of fact, I had never met a woman PI. In my experience, back then, women only did men’s jobs if they worked on a farm or if the men had gone off to war.

“What do you think about that?” Niska wanted to know.

Searching for the right words, I asked, “You talk to Whisper ’bout this?”

“Tinsford treats me like he my uncle or sumpin’. He always comes and picks me up if I ever work after nightfall and if he’s out of town he gets somebody else to do it.”

“But you drive your own car,” I argued against the man not there.

“They walk me to my car.”

Her look was plaintive, and I could understand why.

“I can see why a man like Tinsford would think he had to protect a young woman,” I said. “That’s just the world we come from.”

“But it’s not the world we live in, Mr. Rawlins,” she complained. “Just as much as a man, a woman has to follow her dreams. She has to be able to take care of herself too.”

“And your dream is to be a private detective?”

“Uh-huh.”

“But why? I thought you were studyin’ business or somethin’.”

“You remember when I told you about the guy I met at the TM retreat a few months ago?”

“Yeah.”

“He’s a patrol cop and wants to be an investigator one day. When he found out that I worked for two Black detectives he was so excited. It made me realize how good and important your job is.”

“You’re a big part of this job, N.”

“I know. I mean I know that I help. But you’re out there in the world making sense out of things that are hidden, secrets. Reggie wants to do that, and while he was saying it, I realized that I did too.”

“Reggie’s a Black man?” I asked, realizing how often that kind of question came to mind.

“Yeah. And he wants to be like you and Whisper.”

“And you do too?”

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

“Because this work makes more sense than book learning does. Human sense.”

I was impressed.

“What do you think?” Niska insisted.

“The first thing is you have to talk to Tinsford. You can tell him that I support you and that I’ll be part of your education. But he has to agree. I won’t go against a partner like that.”

Niska gave me a long, soulful look and then nodded.

“You’re right,” she said. “If I want something like this, I have to stand up for myself. Thank you, Mr. Rawlins.”

She stood up, held out a hand for me to shake, and then walked out with confidence and aplomb.

After Niska was back at her desk, my mind wandered for a while. There were many thoughts swimming around up there. Mouse talking revolution, Niska wanting to put her life on the line. And, most important, Amethystine Stoller, who somehow reminded me of a woman named Anger with a smoking gun in her hand.

I nodded to myself and picked up the phone.
. . .