Gray Dawn

by Walter Mosley

Genres: Cozy Mystery; African American; Private Investigators; Noir; Thrillers

Synopsis

Detective Easy Rawlins has settled into the happy rhythm of his new life when a dark siren from his past returns and threatens to destroy the peace he's fought for, in the latest installment from "master of craft and narrative" Walter Mosley in a legendary series (National Book Foundation). 

The name Easy Rawlins stirs excitement in the hearts of readers and fear in the hearts of his foes. His success has bought him a thriving detective agency, with its first female detective; a remote home, shared with children and pets and lovers, high atop the hills overlooking gritty Los Angeles; and more trouble, more problems, and more threat to those whom he loves. In other words, he’s still beset on all sides.
 
A number of below-the-law powerbrokers plead with Easy to locate a mysterious, dangerous woman—Lutisha James, though she’s gone by another name that Easy will immediately recognize. 1970s Los Angeles is a transient city of delicate, violent balances, and Lutisha has disturbed that. She also has a secret that will upend Easy’s own life, painfully closer to home.

Release date: September 16, 2025

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 336

Sample

The phone was ringing. Ringing. Those evenly measured burps of jangled sound were a warning that my life was falling apart—that much I knew. I don’t know how many times it rang, but my conscious count was up to six when I finally rolled across the king-size bed to the other side, where the night table stood. Before I lifted the receiver from the cradle, I looked out the window into the wafting mists and fog that inundated the mountainside all the way down to where the ocean was usually visible. It felt like a poisonous sky had come down to choke both land and sea.

“Hello?” I whined, as if begging for some kind of miracle or release.

“What’s wrong, Daddy?”

“Feather? That you?”

“Uh-huh.”

“What’s wrong?” Fear for my daughter’s safety pulled me from sleeping dread into wakeful worry.

“Nothing. I just thought I’d use the phone card to say hi.”

I had just woken up, and I was already exhausted. It felt as if I had run full speed down a long city block, my heart thundering, breath coming in shallow gasps.

Feather was in Dijon, France, with a national high school group called the American Institute for Foreign Study. Gone for five weeks already, she was there to study French language and culture.

“What’s wrong, Daddy?”

“Nothing. Why?”

“You sounded scared or somethin’.”

“Maybe I was havin’ a nightmare, sumpin’ like that.”

“Nightmare about what?”

“I don’t know, honey, but I sure am happy to hear your voice. How’s your classes goin’?”

“Good. I got top marks in everything.”

“That’s great.” My fearful heart began to ease. “Have you heard from Bonnie?”

“She’s in Ghana right now, but she’s comin’ when school’s over. We’re gonna go to Paris.”

The joy in her voice was greater than the weight on my soul.

“That’s great, baby. I know how much she loves you.”

Bonnie and I had been lovers when Feather was an orphaned infant, lost in the world. We were the closest things to parents she’d ever have. And that was more of a blessing for us than it was for her.

“You sound sad,” Feather said.

“A little bit. Jesus and Benita spend most’a their time on the water, and you’re fifty-seven hundred miles away. All I got here is the dogs and June gloom.”

“I don’t have to go to Paris if you don’t want.”

“Yeah, you do. I’m okay. And I want one’a those little statues of the Eiffel Tower.”

“Okay,” she said softly. “But if you need me, I could come home.”

“You havin’ a good time?”

“Yeah,” she replied with a little more gravitas than she meant to express. Probably thinking about a sip of wine, her first cigarette, or maybe a kiss. That’s what I thought.

“I gotta go to a lecture, Papa,” she told me.

“Bien. Allez,” I said back.

The second after hanging up I was beset by a pack of dogs.

The two little ones felt like birds prancing wildly on my chest. But number three, Prince Valiant, weighed 180 pounds when the vet last hoisted him on a scale. PV was what Fearless Jones called mostly bull mastiff, stronger than your everyday wolf, friend to loved ones, and death to any threat.

I followed them down the stairs to the first floor and the exit to the backyard of our lighthouse-like dwelling. The smallest mongrel was Frenchie. He was the oldest and the titular leader of the pack. The next was a brown mutt who only wanted to play. These two each got a bowl full of dry food. The big dog, Prince Valiant, was fed three pounds of ground meat twice a day.

Back when I was a child in New Iberia, Louisiana, three pounds of prime ground beef would be enough to feed a family of three for two days. Back then I was, and everyone I knew was, so poor that the end of the Depression was no big deal because we didn’t even know it had happened. In those days a nickel would buy a sandwich that lasted from morning till night. It was a hard life, but I felt loved and cared for. So, at the age of eight, I was terrified when my parents died and I had to hop a boxcar to make it to the Fifth Ward of Houston, Texas. I went there to find my grandfather. After a week of wandering around, asking people if they knew him, I met a madwoman who pointed the way. My granddad gave me a place to sleep but said I had to provide my own victuals. By the time I was used to supporting myself, Uncle Sam said I had to go to war in Africa and Europe. After World War II, I went to California, where, they said, a poor soul could sleep on the ground and eat off the trees.

I did well, became one of the few colored private detectives in Southern California, invested in real estate, and experienced a few fortunate windfalls. Now I lived in a gated community atop a mountain for the fee of a penny a year. I had money in the bank and in the ground. I adopted and raised two children and had quite a few friends, a couple that I even trusted.

Considering where I came from, I’d done very well indeed.

But two years ago I was involved in a missing person case, and by the time I’d found the victim—a forensic accountant—he was dead. That by itself wasn’t so bad, but somehow I fell for the woman who hired me to find the man—her ex. She had committed a murder for which I would never have turned her in. She was justified but I had to let her go.

I went through the rest of the morning almost mechanically. After watering the rose garden on the roof, where I smoked my one cigarette of the day, I went down to the second-floor kitchen and made coffee and buttered toast. After that I donned a short-sleeved off-white dress shirt, brown trousers, blue-and-brown argyle socks, rubber-soled shoes made from black fabric, just in case I came across the unexpected necessity to run, and, finally, a dark, dark brown sports jacket.

Before taking the funicular down the mountain I went to the rough-cut Olympic-size, almost natural grotto of a swimming pool that was just perfect for my daughter to practice in for her swimming meets.

Looking down at the water, I could imagine Feather’s laugh and the smooth, steady strokes of her hours of practice. For some reason this made me climb over to the edge of our mountaintop and scale down the side until reaching the tall, and sometimes electrified, twelve-foot-high razor-wire fence that circled the six homes comprising my community.

Sitting there at the edge of the barrier, I felt like this was some kind of symbol of my life, a prisoner in a paradise of my own making.

I wanted another cigarette but had none. I wanted the fog to dissipate, but that wasn’t to be either.

“What are you doing out here, my friend?” a rough voice in a deep accent asked.

I didn’t have to turn to know that this was Erculi Longo, sire of the four adult brothers who protected the rich woman’s mountain. He was burly but not tall, old but looked less so, and deadly as a Tasmanian devil, at least that’s what his sons had told me. His pants, shoes, and workman’s jacket were neither gray nor brown, creating a kind of natural camouflage. His dark eyes and dark olive skin spoke of both sides of the Mediterranean, the Maghreb.

“Signor Erculi,” I greeted. “What are you doing down the hill?”

“I saw you,” he explained. “And I say to myself that you never have climbed down here before.”

“I don’t know,” I confessed. “Just seemed like somethin’ to do.”

That called up what I’d come to know as the Sicilian Stare. It was a silent inquisition unafraid of what you might have thought or wished to hide. There was a powerful mind behind that weathered face, the kind of focus that few human beings could manage. His family had been through a decades-long feud with a rival clan. When a shift in power came about, and the body count was piling up, Erculi decided to move his sons to America, where they’d have a chance to breathe and breed. He somehow met Orchestra Solomon, the owner of our mountain, and she realized how he could protect her and those she had chosen to live in her little community.

“You miss Feather?” he asked at last.

“Yeah.” I nodded toward the mist.

“But it is something else,” he concluded.

It was my turn for silent reflection. This was probably the longest talk I’d ever had with the stoic warrior. I understood that his gaze was an offering that I had a debt to answer.

“I don’t know, Signor. I feed my dogs, water the roses, go to work, and do whatever is asked of me. But it’s all habit. I could lie on my bed all day long and that would be just the same. I eat food but don’t really taste it. I drink liquor but it doesn’t feel like anything.”

Giving a shrug he said, “That is what we must do. Life is not pleasure for men like us. Life is only the future. It is our children… and their children. It is our young people. They see the world with new eyes when ours grow old and gray. We go blind and toothless… for them.”

I hadn’t been to church in many years. A minister’s palaver about sin and eternal life, the sacrifices of the testaments old and new, the hope of forgiveness, none of that seemed, in any way, true. I’d lived with good and evil since before I could speak, and I had never been able to separate them. In the life I’d lived through, good men turned their backs on suffering and bad ones loved their brothers without reservation.

I hadn’t been to church for a very long time, but it felt like I was in the pews on that mountainside with that patriarch who had also been a slayer.

“So, what should I do now?” I asked honestly.

“Go to work, my friend.”

Doing as the Sicilian elder suggested, I made it down the side of the mountain riding the vertical railway, descending into the mist as I went. Firing up the old brown Dodge, I made it to my office on Robertson Boulevard a few minutes before 6:30 a.m. I expected to have some hours alone to read and wait for the sun to burn away the fog. But after scaling the steep staircase to our third-floor offices, I found our receptionist and detective in training, Niska Redman, already at her desk and hard at work. Seated in her plush blue padded swivel chair, with one denim knee up to her chest, Niska was poring over one of six white-pages phone books open across her wide desk.

When I came in, she glanced up over a blue knee, smiled, and said, “Good morning, Mr. Rawlins.”

“Hey, Red,” I said, doing my best to keep the sadness out of my tone.

“I’m just wearing jeans until the office opens,” she apologized. “It feels more comfortable when I’m doin’ all this research.”

“What you workin’ on?”

“I put up a sign on the bulletin board at school offering to find missing persons or property.”

“You did?”

“Yeah, and this woman—a student—called me and said that she had this boyfriend that was missing.”

“Oh? Missing how?”

“At first it just sounded like he’d left her, but after we had tea at the student caf it turned out that he emptied her bank account without her knowin’.”

“How much?”

“Ninety-two hundred dollars.”

“Whoa.”

“Yeah. That was everything she had. It was money her grandparents had given her to pay for school. And this guy, he called himself Martin Durer, wasn’t anywhere that she could think of.”

“Why you say ‘called himself’?” I asked.

“I called Captain McCourt’s office and asked about him. You know, maybe he had a record or was wanted, or somethin’. It—it turned out that he’d done that kinda thing before, and if it was the same guy, he’d gone by Denton McDaniels, Mack Daniels, Dean Minton, Darryl Morley, Dax Mandel, and nine other names, all with the initials D.M. or M.D., except for one—Stanford Pride. His usual MO was to wheedle his way into a woman’s life and run off with her money a few months later.

“He took Doreen’s money like so many others’.”

“Doreen who?”

“Anton, Doreen Anton. She’s a grad student in economics. I went with her to the downtown police station and they, um, corroborated what Captain McCourt said.”

“You talked to him? Not his assistant?”

“Yeah. I told Doreen that I’d look for Durer for two weeks and charge one hundred dollars.”

“And that’s what these phone books are about?”

“Yeah. I go through six books every morning looking for one or more of his aliases. Today it’s Fontana, Ontario, Anaheim, Huntington Beach, Van Nuys, and Los Angeles County.”

“Seems like you would have looked at LA first.”

“I know,” she said shyly. “I guess I was saving the best for last. I mimeographed fifty sheets with all the names printed on them and I’m checkin’ off each one as either not there or making notes on the ones that are.”

“You do this every morning?”

“I do.”

“And what do you plan to do if you find this guy?”

“When I find him,” she corrected.

“When you find him,” I acceded, grateful for the grin her determination brought out in me.

“I’m going to go get a look to make sure it’s him, then I’ll get my client to come and see. After that I’ll have her press charges.”

Niska had been taking detective lessons from me for the past two years. She used the work she did for me and my partners to see what would work for her. She took her time, and I was proud to see how far she’d come.

“That sounds really good,” I said. And then, changing the subject: “Saul and Whisper coming in later?”

“Uh-uh. Mr. Lynx is down in San Diego looking to see if he wants to take on this smuggling case he’s been offered.”

“Smuggling what?”

“I think he said something about guns, but I’m not sure. And Tinsford is on vacation in Hawaii with Shirley Brown.”

“Just all of a sudden, he left for Hawaii? That’s not like him.”

“I think he’s planning to ask her to marry him.”

Niska had come to the office from working with Tinsford Natley, also called Whisper for his low voice.

“Well,” I said. “Keep me updated on this case of yours. I don’t want you doing anything reckless. And, um, don’t tell Whisper about it until it’s over.”

“Don’t worry, I won’t.”

Like most American men in the early seventies, Whisper felt that there was a deep divide between women’s work and the labors of men. I felt that way too but, at the same time, the world was definitely changing. Taking a step back from my own prejudices, I could see that if Niska could prove her ability as an investigator, then what she became was not up to me.

“Okay,” I said. “Keep up the good work. I’m gonna go back to my office.”

“Do you want me to tell you about calls or visitors?”

“Sure, why not?”

Sitting behind my overlarge desk I experienced the desire to have a simple and straightforward case like Niska did. Just thinking that there was somebody out there that I could find, a manhunt that needed doing, seemed to offer solace. It would be a joy to lose myself in a job.

I hadn’t taken on any cases in the last six months, and very few in the year and a half before that. Jobs came in, of course, but I passed them on to Saul and Whisper. But maybe it was time to shake off the stagnation and melancholy of a lost love that had been consecrated by the deaths of two men who might have been saved.

I had a copy of Katherine Anne Porter’s Ship of Fools in my bottom left drawer. I bought it secondhand, drawn to the title. A fool adrift, that was me.

I’d been reading for a few hours when I realized that, though I really enjoyed the prose, I didn’t retain very much of the story at all. I had just let the words wash over me like sometimes when I’d stand in the shower for a very long time.

There came a tapping on the doorframe. I looked up from the book that I was no longer reading to see Niska’s head peering in.

“There’s somebody here who wants to talk to you,” she said.

“To me specifically?”

She nodded. “He said that he wants to see Easy Rawlins.”

“Not Ezekiel?”

She shook her head.

“Okay then, show him in.”

Her head withdrew, leaving me to wonder if I had somehow conjured up this visitation.

A few seconds later Niska came through. She was wearing a coral-colored dress and yellow pumps. Her face was made up and her straightened hair was piled at the back of her head. The man who came in behind her was dressed in dirty overalls with tears here and there and a gray T-shirt that had once been white, and shod in shit-brown clodhopper boots.

“Mr. Santangelo Burris,” Niska said, “this is Mr. Ezekiel Rawlins.”

The detective in training then left me with my visitation.

If I didn’t exactly smell him, I imagined that I could. It was as if he’d just fallen off the back of a farm truck and tumbled upon my doorstep. He had the build and hunched posture of a wild boar—not tall but brutish. His face contained many emotions, none of these pleasant. By turns he seemed angry, suspicious, and as determined as a soldier before a battle.

The only thing about him that wasn’t piglike, threatening, or foul was a thick gold ring he wore on the pinkie of his left hand. This singular piece of jewelry was festooned with a large hunk of topaz, inlaid with a silver torch or some other kind of scepter.

“Saint Angel,” I said idly.

His expression of mere anger elevated into rage.

“What you say?” he cried, half raising his right fist.

“That’s what your name means,” I said by way of apology.

“That’s what—what they called me at school. Called me little angel and homo and stupid.” He was on the verge of shouting.

“Sorry about that, man. I was just thinking about the Italian.”

“What Italian?”

“The word, Santangelo, it’s Italian.”

The beast-man’s eyes bulged and looked around for something, anything to hate.

“I don’t know about all that,” he said. “I’m here about my auntie, Lutisha James.”

“Okay,” I said in my most placating tone. “Why don’t you have a seat, Mr. Burris?”

The man’s breath came in angry huffs. He looked at the three wide-bottomed walnut chairs arranged before my grand desk. I could imagine him asking which chair I wanted him to take. Instead, he pulled an outer chair away from the other two and hurled his backside into it.

Thinking that I’d have to get the chair cleaned, I paused for a second or two and then leaned back in my swivel seat.

It occurred to me that I had rarely been with someone whose breath was loud enough for me to hear it.

“Where did you get my name, Mr. Burris?”

“What?” he challenged.

“I was christened Ezekiel. Only those who know me call me Easy.”

“I’ont know about that,” he replied defensively. “All I know is that I aksed a man if he knew how I could find somebody missin’ and he said go to Easy Rawlins.”

“Who was this man?”

“What?”

Very slowly I said, “Who is the man that told you to call me?”

“I don’t know.” Almost every word he uttered was loud. “It was this dude down in Compton across the street from the hotel where she stayed at.”

“What hotel was that?”

“Ummmm, Orchid. The Orchid.”

Finally, something I knew.

“I went there,” Saint Angel continued, “to find Auntie Lutie, but she was gone. Nobody knew where she went so I aksed the man who owned the sto’ across the street if he’d maybe seen her go. He’s the one said about you.”

His hard breathing did not abate. Anger seemed to vibrate with every word, every gesture.

“So, you went to the Orchid to find Lutisha James. She wasn’t there and a man you didn’t know told you about me.”

He stared at me wondering, I believe, if I had more to add. When I didn’t, he said, “Yeah, yeah, that’s right.” Then he moved the gaze from me to the ceiling and continued from memory. “My grandmama called me up from down home and told me to get Auntie Lutie to call her. She said that they said at the hotel that she had moved out. So I went down there to find out where she gone.”

“Where’s down home?”

“What?”

“Where does your grandmother live?”

“She live in Pistol.”

“She lives in a gun?”

“No, fool, Pistol, Pistol, Texas.”

“Never heard of it.”

“I cain’t hep that.”

I wanted to say Touché, but instead I asked, “Is this some kind of emergency?”

“Sure is. I told you, my grandmama want me to find her.”

There wasn’t a doubt in my mind that this man was lying about something. But that didn’t matter, not right then. It was my job to reveal lies. That’s what detectives do.

“Do you have a picture of your auntie?”

“No. Don’t have no camera. My grandmama got a portrait’a her on her dresser back home.”

“But that’s in Pistol.”

“Yeah. That’s where she live at.”

“What kind of work does your auntie do?”

“She takes care’a old people an’ chirren. Old people an’ chirren. She pretty good at that.”

“Does she have any hobbies or other interests?”

He couldn’t even ask What? about that query. He just stared vacantly, with only a hint of rage.

“For instance, does she, uh, collect china plates or play any board games?” I suggested.

That got me my first smile from the feral man.

“She play hearts,” he said through a wide grin. “Hearts. She really good at that. Sometimes she play for money. Good money.”

“She play any other kind of card games? Bridge? Poker?”

His shoulders told me that he didn’t know.

“What about some other job, other than a domestic, I mean?”

“She not married.”

It took me a moment to realize that the word domestic dredged up marriage from the cauldron of Santangelo’s experience.

“Does she do any other kind of work?” I asked.

He thought so hard on that question that his eyes nearly closed.

“Um,” he began. “Uh. Back down in Texas she used to, um, take numbers over the phone in her house. That’s the only way she could afford to have a phone. . .