But of my many flaws, neither innocence nor ignorance played a part. We were on our way to the scene of a movable crime; a crime committed by black men. I was already guilty simply because of the color of my skin. It was even worse because my brethren had committed the crime. My head would be considered for the chopping block no matter how guilty the liberals on the Westside, or in Washington, felt.

I was as frightened as Rinaldo, but he didn’t have the great luck of being on the battlefields of World War II. The fear of being huddled in a foxhole with two-hundred-pound shells exploding all around gave the beating heart perspective that no peacetime experience could equal.

The Compton installation was even larger than its Valley counterpart. We pulled in through double gates and drove the equivalent of a block and a half to a triple-gated area where a dozen or more storage areas were used for cargo, construction paraphernalia, and, of course, earth-moving vehicles. The storage units were constructed from iron slabs that formed the walls and roofs for containment. Starr wasn’t fooling around protecting the tools of his trade.

“It’s twenty-six-A,” Rinaldo said when we exited the car. “But like I told you, there’s nothing there.”

We walked down one path, turned left on another, then went quite a ways to get to 26A.

There was a huge, complex lock at the center of the garage-like door of the unit. The metal door was slatted, fifteen feet in width and twice that in height.

Bob Bester went up to the lock. He was maybe five ten, with a thatch of white hair, the gait of a male ballet dancer, and a grin that was irrepressible. He was a strongly built man, like an old-school middleweight with some pop.

He took a crazy-looking keychain from a pocket and used six or seven odd-looking devices on the door. After these machinations a small slat slid open. Bob stuck his arm in up to the elbow, did some kind of blind manipulation, then yanked his hand out. A few seconds after that the slatted wall began to rise, each iron plank folding neatly and loudly into the one above.

This revealed a big empty garage with a dirt floor.

“You see? You see, I told you. There’s nothing here,” Rinaldo said. “I never saw nothing either. I don’t know what they did.”

Pitman was right as far as any vehicle or object was concerned, but there was something there: a weak scent. An odor with which I was quite familiar.

“There any units out here that don’t get opened very often?” I asked Bob Bester.

That man might have been some kind of genius. He looked at me with gray eyes that were almost white. Slowly understanding filled those glossy orbs. Then he nodded, giving me a little smirk.