A shudder went through the squat man’s shoulders.

“The, um, the uh, those, those men worked here. I hardly ever saw ’em. You know, just muscle on the job.”

“You fired them?”

“No, no. They quit. I mean, really they just stopped coming in.”

“How long were they here?”

“I don’t know. Here, lemme get my secretary on the line and you could ask her.” He went as far as getting behind the desk and picking up the receiver.

“What do you think would happen if I called an LAPD commander to search every property you had for something bigger than a breadbox?”

“What are you talking about?” he asked.

Maybe he really didn’t know. But he was afraid of something. He was a cornered creature and I had to be careful that he didn’t go mad.

“So what was it?” I asked him. “You spent too much money on the girlfriend, lost it in Vegas, or maybe both. You had to sell out to Starr so your kneecaps didn’t get busted. Then Alonzo offered you a big-time payout and all you had to do was turn your back.”

I knew part of the story from Jewelle. The rest I surmised.

Pitman’s mien was rueful sorrow. In a bind for quick cash, he said yes when it should have been no.

I knew that moment all too well. Most black men of my generation do; men born as second-class citizens, living third-class lives. The grandsons, great-grandsons, and great-great-grandsons of slaves. Those men would be sitting around a card table late at night drinking hard liquor for temporary relief of the pain that hard lives and hard labor bring. They talk about sex first and then naturally come to discuss their children and those children’s mothers. On some nights, like the one Pitman was remembering, the men who didn’t have good mothering, who didn’t listen in the pews to what the minister was laying between the lines, who didn’t believe in law because they had never been the recipients of justice—those men crossed a line in their minds. One of them says, why not? Why not do that thing that they think we do anyway? Maybe it’s stealing a bag of coal that won’t be missed or allowing that beautiful white daughter to enter when she comes knocking. Maybe it’s running your car over some soused-up peckerwood stumbling down a country road in the dark of night, alone.

Why not is the question and most often drunken oblivion is the answer. But sometimes, sometimes you wake up in the morning with that question still in your mind. Why not? They took everything else. Why not take something precious that’s theirs?