Hanging and Burning

Book 4: King Oliver

by Walter Mosley

Genres: African American Mystery & Detective; Mystery

Synopsis

A dying gangster's plea sends Joe King Oliver on a quest for a missing woman across America's coasts, unraveling a dark and violent family history along the way.

Joe King Oliver is the big man you call to solve the most delicate and dangerous of problems. Fresh off unraveling the mystery of his own parents’ fates, King finds himself accepting (again at his grandmother’s request) a case from Arman Babylon, a powerful Los Angeles gangster now dying from cancer.
 
Babylon’s granddaughter, Twyla Mann, has been missing for years, and he’s desperate to find her before he passes. The search pulls King into the Babylons’ stained past and the cold case of Dalia Shorts, a torch singer who vanished without a trace and whom Arman was once suspected of killing.
 
As King follows her trail from L.A. to New York and back, he’ll realize nothing is what it seems as he uncovers a pattern of violence that has targeted the women around Babylon for decades. How much will King be willing to risk to finally set things right?

Release date: October 20, 2026

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 336

Sample

“ARMAN BABYLON, HMM, let’s see. Yes, yes, in room 3122, North Tower,” the stern Black woman in nurses’ white told me.

She was studying the computer screen set up before her on the broad, extraordinarily neat reception desk.

“How do I get there?” I asked.

Only then did she look up through the lenses of her pink-tinted clamshell-framed trifocals. Snorting, she seemed to be peeved at me for wanting… anything.

“Take the hall to your right past the first elevators, and then, at the elevator bank, take a car to the eighth floor. Follow your nose to the nurses’ station there. They’ll tell you where to go.”

To hell, I felt she wanted to add.

She was around my age, mid-forties, handsome and sour. She was also my color—dark chocolate brown.

“Thank you very much, Nurse Abbington,” I said, reading her nameplate, trying to provide the best smile I could. “As many times as I’ve been here, I still get lost.”

My attempt at civility caused Geraldine Abbington to look closer. The bitterness subsided and, I believed, she even considered smiling.

“Oh, you’re welcome, Mr., um, Mr. Oliver.”

When our eyes met, I asked, “Do I have to provide identification at that station too?”

“No,” she assured me. “You’re in the system now.”

The wide hall I passed through was bright and sunny, filled with people, most of whom, I was sure, were not happy to be there at Pilgrim’s, the most advanced hospital in Southern California, one of the best cancer treatment centers in America.

But the better the hospital, the sicker, and the richer, the patient.

I jostled my way to the second bank of elevators and shoved into a spacious lift with old and young, wheelchair-using, limping, medical-record-carrying, and grief-stricken human beings. They represented all the races too, in no hurry for anything but possibly a quick escape from that well-maintained and brightly lit hospice for diseases, infections, stern-faced health providers, failing organs and limbs, and insurance forms, health histories, constant pain, drugs, and a humming in the walls that seemed, at least to me, like ululations calling to the soon to be dead.

When the doors to the fifth floor slid open, a woman called out from the back of the car, “Excuse me. Excuse me. I have to get out here. I have to get out.”

As the voice came from behind, I moved to the side.

“Watch it,” a man complained.

“She’s tryin’ to get out,” I said over my shoulder.

“You stepped on my foot.”

I turned to face the guy. He was exactly what people meant when they said, “It was a white guy,” paleness and pinkish grays defining what was meant by evoking the skin color’s unfounded name. He was medium height, a few inches shorter than I, in his sixties. And there was something wrong with his eyes. They were yellowy, crusted, and maybe a little fearful that I was one of those crazy people who reacted to complaints with their fists. He took a step back, causing someone else to grumble, “Hey.”

The woman who had to get out was small, well past her sixties, dragging a glistening chrome oxygen tank that supplied needed air to the tubes in her nose. To me she was the modern-day reanimation of Sisyphus, lugging that shiny tank back and forth, day after day, for all time.

When I reached the nurses’ station on the eighth floor of the North Tower, I encountered a younger tawny-skinned woman whom I could only think of as hip. Her hair was mostly stark blue with streaks of orange and green here and there. Her light brown eyes were engaging, and there were small shiny gold flecks at their outer corners.

“King of what?” she asked me with a smile.

At just that moment the cell phone in my breast pocket throbbed twice.

“What?” I asked.

“Your middle name. It’s in the file they forwarded from downstairs.”

“Um,” I uttered, “uh, my father loved Louis Armstrong.”

“I thought it was Elvis Presley they called the king.” Her smile was insistent.

“Armstrong’s mentor was Joe Oliver, who they called King Oliver. What’s your name?”

“Molayo.”

“That’s Yoruba, isn’t it?”

Her brown eyes showed surprise, and she said, “It means strength. My daddy named me.”

“He from Togo or sumpin’?”

“Nah. The Philippines. My mom’s people are Scottish.”

“Where’s Africa come into that?”

“Dad used to say that we all came from Africa originally and that my name was in praise of that truth.”

“Your father knows somethin’.”

A woman had come up behind me, but Molayo was in no hurry.

“I can see why Abbington sent me your information and said I should take care of you. You charmed that old bitch.”

Feeling pressure from the woman behind, in other circumstances I would have hurried the young hipster along, but I had been lonely for over a year and this young woman’s patter offered welcome, if brief, relief.

“It’s my job,” I replied.

“To charm women?”

“Excuse me,” the woman behind me said.

“I’ll be right with you, Miss,” Molayo responded in a friendly enough tone. And then, “Well, Your Highness, do you see the hallway behind me?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“If you walk to the end, you’ll see room 3122 on the right.”

“I appreciate it.”

“You can thank me by stopping by on your way out and telling me where I could get a job charming people.”

“I can’t believe this,” the woman behind me declared.

The door to room 3122 was open, so I walked in.

It surprised me that there were four stations in the spacious sickroom, a bed in each corner. Three of these locations were being either visited or ministered to. The only patient who was alone sat beneath a large window that looked upon the hills marking the border between Los Angeles proper and what they called the Valley. This patient fit the description I’d been given.

I was surprised because this monstrosity of healthcare mostly served wealthier patients, most of whom had private rooms. I knew this because my ninety-six-year-old grandmother was doing time here. She had a whole suite of rooms that her boyfriend, Roger Ferris, arguably the richest man in the world, had paid for. I was out in Cali visiting Grandma B because if there was any true royalty in our bloodline, it was her.

My grandmother Brenda Naples was also the reason for this visit to the eighth floor.

I looked around for a moment or two and then headed for the solitary patient.

He was old, very much so, and distracted, I thought maybe by pain.

“Mr. Babylon?” I asked. “Sir?”

When he looked up from his seated position at the raised head of the hospital bed, I wondered if he remembered his own name. He stared for a long moment and then, surprising me, he said, “Mr. Oliver?”

“Yes.”

Through an unexpectedly strong smile he said, “Brenda told me you’d be comin’ today. Have a seat. Sit, sit.”

There was a comfortable-looking sheepskin-lined solid oak chair at the side of the high bed. Sitting down, I found that I had to look up to meet the eyes of my ailing host. With an oblong-shaped face bearing strong features, he had a wide mouth and a broad nose, and ears that were big, with hair sprouting from them. His eyes were faded blue and his skin was the color and coarse texture of a pig that my grandmother once illegally kept in the backyard of her home in New Jersey, back when my grandfather was still alive.

Mr. Babylon brought his hands out from under the gray blanket and rubbed them together. Those large hands once must have been very strong. Maybe they still were.

The old man took a deep breath, calling attention to his barrel-shaped chest.

“What kinda work did you do, sir?” I asked.

“I sold insurance. Why?”

“You look like you were either a boxer or a longshoreman.”

He grinned, showing that he had big strong teeth to go along with those hands.

“Had to keep in shape, since I was little,” he recalled. “Back then men was men, no matter their job. Back then motherfuckers didn’t care what you had or who you knew. All they cared about was if you could back it up.”

I smiled, maybe even chortled.

“What you laughin’ at, son?”

“I can see why my grandmother likes you.”

He smiled again, and said, “That Brenda’s a pip.”

“She said that you might wanna tell me somethin’.”

“She told me you used to be a cop.”

After a short, contemplative pause I said, “Used to be.”

“Back in New York?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Manhattan?”

“Brooklyn, mainly. Investigations.”

“Why’d you quit?”

The question, the hospital, maybe even the universal suffering contained within those walls had put me in a unique mood.

“Betrayal,” I said, though I had no idea that I was going to. “The whole system turned against me, almost got me killed.”

Arman’s face took on a somber countenance. He nodded sagely and remained silent for at least half a minute.

After this lull I said, “Grandma B tells me you might need my help.”

Our eyes met and he said, “Yeah, yeah.”

“With what?”

“I got a… I got a granddaughter name of Twyla—Twyla Macintosh—but she mostly calls herself Twyla Mann nowadays. She turned thirty-eight last August. Thirty-eight.”

The utterance of his granddaughter’s name, because of the content of our conversation so far, somehow linked up with my feelings about leaving the NYPD. It also brought out what I can only call a severe bout of self-empathy in the big-handed man. He spent some time thinking about what he was asking for.

“What about Twyla?” I asked at last.

Arman looked at me, a plea in his eyes.

“She’s… she’s…” He needed time to find and then voice the words, whatever they were.

I wasn’t bothered. As far as the dying man was concerned, I had all the time in the world.

Set on a mechanical table, on the other side of the bed, there was a plastic bottle of water. Mr. Babylon reached for this and then drained it. As soon as he put the empty container down, a woman in white, a nurse, walked up to the table and replaced the water.

“Mr. Babylon needs his rest,” the woman told me. Her name tag read ILSA LUND.

“No, no, Ilsa,” Arman said. “This man here is my, um, confessor.”

I smiled at the forty-something tight-skinned olive-hued woman.

She sneered and said, “Whatever you say,” and then turned away.

When the lady was out of earshot I asked, “What about Miss Mann?”

“She’s—she’s living a lie.”

“That’s probably true for half the people in the world,” I said, exhibiting more street smarts than wisdom.

Babylon sniggered and kept it up until it turned into a full-blown laugh, an actual guffaw. He pressed a hand to his forehead, and his broad chest shuddered on that high bed until he started to cough. The hacking bark got worse and worse until Nurse Ilsa Lund came back and administered another bottle of water.

“He really does need his rest,” she reinformed me.

“No, no, no, Ilsa,” Arman wheezed, the vestige of laughter in his breathing. “Don’t—don’t send him away. That was the first good laugh I’ve had all year.”

“That kind of outburst could kill you, Armie.”

Looking the serious healthcare professional in the eye, he said, “Can you think of a better way for a sinful old man to die?”

Ms. Lund definitely wanted to refute this question, but her expression said that she knew the protest would fall on deaf ears. She walked away again.

This time Arman Babylon watched her lovely stride.

“She kissed me one night,” Arman confided, the laughter dried up and gone. “If it wasn’t for my roommates, I think she might’a stayed till mornin’.”

“Miss Mann,” I reminded him.

“She’s my granddaughter. My real blood.”

“What’s that mean?”

The way the old man stared made me think that he was beginning to take me seriously.

“Her mother…” he managed to say.

“What about her?”

“Her name’s Mara Macintosh and she’s a shill.”

“In what way?”

“She ain’t Twyla’s real mom.”

“No? But Twyla’s your blood?”

“I loved my wife.” He stared out at the bordering hills.

“Was she the girl’s grandmother?”

“What the fuck kinda question is that?” a completely different persona dared.

“Look, man,” I said, getting serious myself. “I just came because Grandma B asked me to. If you don’t want me here, I can go.”

I was sure that if he could have gotten up, he would have tried to put me down. His bulging eyes were both unhealthy and intent, and his big hands made even bigger fists.

I almost called Nurse Lund to come give him some kind of sedative. I would have done so if he hadn’t said, “The one that raised her—that Mara Macintosh—she did an okay enough job, but she was never very—very loving. When Twyla used to come stay with me and Connie, she’d always wanna stay longer.”

“Her real mom’s dead?”

“No. No.”

I never liked double negatives.

“I don’t know where she’s at,” Arman Babylon said to his blanket. “But she’s not dead.”

“And this Mara raised Twyla pretending to be her mom?”

“Yeah. She told the child that she was her mother and that her father was a man name of Fredricks—Lonnie Fredricks. But he never existed, and Mara needed a new life. So I paid for her to raise my—my granddaughter.”

“Twyla.”

He nodded. “Twyla.”

“And who are her parents?”

The old bruiser looked at me, I believed, as if I were his mirror. He studied himself in me, did so for quite a while.

“I can’t,” he said at last. “No.”

“You can’t tell me what you want?”

“I want you to find—to find Twyla and talk to her.”

“Talk to her about what?”

“Tell her that she’s my blood but not Mara Macintosh’s.”

“What good is that gonna do?”

“She’s my blood.”

“Doesn’t she already know that?”

“I want you to tell her about Mara.”

“Why would I tell her anything, when you could just call her on the phone?”

“I don’t know where she’s at. She’s disappeared.”

“Missing?”

“No. Not missing. She sends postcards sometimes. From different parts of New York mainly. Either she’s there or somebody there knows where she’s at.”

There was nothing wrong with what he was asking for. Even if he was lying, I couldn’t see how finding the young woman would cause her trouble. He was an old guy, and my grandmother usually had an accurate grasp of human nature. She said he was okay.

“Do you have one of those postcards?” I asked.

“No. Not here. I didn’t bring them with me.”

“Okay.”

“Well?” Arman asked, a little peevishly.

“You want me to find this Twyla, tell her that somebody named Mara is not her mother but that you’re her blood,” I repeated.

“Yes.”

“Is that all?”

“Um, I guess—I guess I’d like to see her if it’s possible.”

“You want me to ask her to come see you?”

“That’s what I said.”

“What if she doesn’t want that?”

“I don’t know. I guess she won’t come, then.”

“Do you want me to tell you where she is?”

“Well, of course.”

“No.”

“What do you mean, no?”

“Look, Mr. Babylon, this woman deserves privacy. If she wants to call you, I’ll pass along the number. She’s the one who’ll decide whether or not to share her whereabouts with you.”

This was not the script that Arman Babylon was expecting to play by. I got the feeling that in his life, when he asked for something, he got that thing. But now he was old and sick, playing the last hand of a lifelong night of poker.

“Okay,” he said. “Tell her what I said and say that I’d really like to see her.”

“I wanna ask you some questions first.”

“Okay,” he said again.

“Is Babylon your real name?”

The question tickled the old man. I say old; all things being equal, he would have been maybe a hale eighty, but the condition he suffered from added anywhere from ten years to a century on top of that.

“In a way. My parents were Mr. and Mrs. Babel, from Old Palestine via Warsaw.”

“And,” I conjectured, “you don’t want any harm to come to your granddaughter.”

“I love her. The reason I want to hire you is that I want to—want to make sure that she’s safe.”

“Safe from what?”

There came a tic in the flesh around his left eye and that side’s shoulder seemed to rise involuntarily.

“She’s alone in the world. She’s smart and tough too. A beautiful girl. That’s a—that’s a dangerous combination.”

I smiled before asking, “You have a recent picture of Twyla?”

He rustled around under the blanket until coming out with a sleek and silvery key hanging from a dirty piece of string.

“Use this on the top drawer of the side table,” he said.

Next to my chair was a white cabinet, made from metal. The top drawer needed the key.

There were only three items therein: a young woman’s photograph in a golden frame, a nearly full pack of Lucky Strike cigarettes, and a snub-nosed .38 pistol, which, I assumed, was loaded.

I took out the picture frame and locked the drawer back up.

The subject was a young woman. She wore a blue T-shirt that had the song title THRILLER printed across the chest in darker blue. Her long hair was composed of medium-size dreadlocks. Her eyes sought out the lens and her mouth tried resisting a smile but failed. She was pretty and also handsome, but the two things that struck me about her were, first, she had the kind of face that made you expect a strong character; and second, she was what passed for a Black woman in America, the color of light brown sugar.

“That was taken ten or twelve years ago,” he commented. “But she—she still pretty much looks the same.”

I handed him the key and said, “I’ll need to hold on to the picture for a while.”

“It’s the only one I got.”

“You’ll get it back.”

He wanted to say no, knowing that he’d have to agree.

“How much?” he asked.

“Ten thousand if I find her. Nothing if I don’t.”

“That’s a lotta money.”

“Not anymore it ain’t.”

Making Arman grin helped deal with the sadness permeating the place where rich people, and their middle-class servants, went to die.

“You need anything else?” he asked.

“What kind of insurance did you sell?”

ARMAN BABYLON LEANED back on the mechanically raised mattress. His lips were smiling but his eyes were not.

“I wondered if you’d take the bait on that,” he said.

I waited.

In response he raised both big hands as if warding off criticism.

“It was protection,” he admitted. “Me and my friend Paulie Antonucci watched out for small businesses in run-down neighborhoods around Brooklyn. We were fair and honest—tough, too. We didn’t punish the people didn’t pay us. They usually became the best examples of why you could use the coverage.”

“You were connected?”

“No. We worked around the edges. If anybody tried to take away our policies, well, we dissuaded them.”

I was impressed. For a lifelong Cro-Magnon crime fighter like myself, it was like meeting Neanderthal Capone while passing through some wild valley in the middle of nowhere. It felt like, when he was young, he could have thrown me in the air like a baseball and then used his mastodon-bone club to knock me out of the park.

“Well?” Babylon asked.

“Where’s your partner now?”

“Paulie died back some years after I stopped sellin’ policy. We did okay against the Mafia guys. By that time, in the seventies and up into the nineties, they were into drugs and gamblin’, mainly. We did okay with them, but when the serious drugs took over, trouble got too much for us… for me, at least.”

“Drug gangs?” I asked.

“If that’s what you call the cops.”

“So the cops killed Paulie?”

“Somebody did,” he said on a philosophical note. “We knew the danger. I loved Paulie. His son, Paulie Jr., is the one who brought me the cigarettes and the gun.”

“He in New York?”

“Naw. He’s out here tryin’ to squeeze a few pennies outta Hollywood.”

“Protection?”

“Yeah, but not the old kind. He and a few of his people hire out as bodyguards. Gotta company called Star Shield.”

It was a lot to take in. But my grandmother was right. Arman Babylon was my kinda people.

“So,” I questioned, “did your old partner have anything to do with Twyla?”

“He—he knew her, but like I said, he’s long dead.”

“What about his son?”

“When he was back in New York, maybe he did a little. But he hasn’t seen her in ten, twelve years.”

“So, all I have to go on is the not-mother, Mara Macintosh, and your granddaughter, Twyla Macintosh, nowadays going by Twyla Mann?”

“Can you do it?”

“Why now?” I asked, even though I thought I knew what he’d say.

“Why what now?”

“You lookin’ for Twyla. I mean, she’s all grown.”

“And here I am,” he said, “dying.”

I nodded. “Yeah. There’s a good chance I could find her and say those things.”

“Okay, then.”

“Okay.”

In the hall outside room 3122 I took out my cell phone to check out the silent texts I’d received earlier.

The first message read I’m ready to come home.

The second said To you.

I managed to walk back down to the nurses’ station without stumbling or losing my way.

Molayo was still at her desk.

“How was the visit?” she asked.

“Interesting.”

The punked-out nurse pulled her head back, like some small mammal that had just come across a snake. “That’s a weird answer.”

“Why you say that?”

“Usually, people say that their family and friends are doing well or they’re in good spirits.”

“Oh,” I said. “Yeah, yeah. I never met Mr. Babylon before. It was a business thing.”

“What kinda business? Medical insurance?”

“I’m a private detective. As a rule, it’s my job to find what’s missing.”

“Oh,” she said, putting emphasis on the word. “You really do charm people for a living.”

“Not you.”

The Filipino woman with the West African name came to a decision, reached into a sky-blue leather purse that sat at the edge of her desk, and came out with a business card. This she handed to me.

Printed thereon was her name, Molayo Adlawan, along with her Facebook page, telephone number, and in the lower righthand corner, her astrological sign—Capricorn.

“You work at something else besides this job?” I asked.

“No.”

“Then why you need a business card?”

“In case I happen to meet you.”

I gave her my card. What else could I do?

Back to the first floor, then across the base of the hospital to the opposite side, I came to the restricted entrance to the South Tower. This was where the richest of the rich people were ensconced. A man in a business suit sat at the reception desk. He was flanked by two armed guards and watched from behind by a third.

“Mr. Oliver, isn’t it?” the brown-haired, tan-skinned receptionist asked.

“You know I am. I was here yesterday, and the day before that.”

“Identification, please.”

“You’ve already seen it, photographed it, and put it in the system.”

“Identification, please.”

I took out my wallet and handed over my passport card. I used this because I was from out of state . . .