Little Green (31 page)

“Him and Keith were going to rob Haman?”

“And blame it on somebody else,” she said. “They had it all planned. They were gonna use this guy named Jammy, a black man like you. They told Jammy that he was gonna get ten thousand dollars. But really they planned to kill him and Mitch and blame the robbery on a gang of niggers. That way Haman wouldn’t know, and me and Giles could move to Vegas in a few months or a year and set ourselves up out there. Giles said that we could buy a house for seventy-five hundred dollars and he could get a job as a dealer and we could have some kids.”

It sounded like the kind of plan an underling might hatch, halfway smart. It would take you just far enough to get yourself killed.

“Only Jammy got busted for beating on his wife,” Shawnie went on, “and they put him in jail. I thought they was gonna give it up, but when Bobby told me that Giles was gone I knew what happened. I knew it.”

She shook her head and then laid it on my shoulder. I might as well have been an angel on a round of house-call confessionals.

A few spots of blood had soaked through the white napkin. Shawnie took a heavy breath that ended in a snore. We sat there for quite a few minutes, her sleeping and me wondering what to do.

I couldn’t help Shawnie. She’d lost her brass ring and there was no getting it back. Giles’s death was probably the best thing that could have happened to her.

After a long while I moved out from under the sleeper and laid her as comfortably as I could on the squat divan.

As I passed out the front she called out, “Gilesy?”

I shut the door and went away.

On the drive back to my Genesee house I considered the problems that had arisen. The biggest one was, of course, my own resurrection from the mountainside crypt that a fool had earned himself and dumb luck had nixed. I was alive and no longer even in need of Mama Jo’s elixir. I was a man again, on the job again, back in the world where nothing ever turned out right but it kept right on turning anyway.

Shawnie wouldn’t remember that I’d been there, and even if she did she didn’t know anything that could harm me. I was sure that when she sobered up she’d know better than to tell Rose, or anyone else, that she was privy to a plot to rob him of nearly a quarter million dollars.

Evander was almost home free; that is, except for the fact that he wanted to kill the deadliest man I’d ever known and was in love with the daughter of a woman that might give Mouse a run for his money in the dangerous department.

The stolen money was safe.

It struck me as funny and somewhat ridiculous that men died to obtain and protect money. It was like wild rams batting horns over water rights, or Shawnie believing in Giles even though she knew he was wrong.

I drove past Genesee on Pico and took the right on Stanley, parked a few houses down and crossed the street to the back duplex where the Noon family lived.

I climbed the white stairs, remembering the few days before, when every step felt like my last.

The screen door was open again. The off-the-shelf doorbell made its two-tone plea, and footsteps sounded from a place deep in the darker parts of the sunny unit.

When Beatrix Noon appeared, the first thing I noticed was that she had grown nearly two inches since last I’d seen her. Also, the hardness that I’d noted in her face the first time we met was greatly diminished. I thought that maybe she mimicked her mother only when in Timbale’s presence.

“Hello, Mr. Rawlins,” Beatrix said through the screen. She even smiled.

Looking down I saw that she was wearing high heels around the house. I would have bet that she only did this when her mother wasn’t around.

“Hi, Beatrix. Is your mother in?”

“She’s at the store.” The girl was at ease with herself in the house, probably alone.

“Oh,” I said. “When do you expect her?”

“Anytime. You wanna come in?”

“Maybe I should wait outside.”

“No,” the girl said. “Mama’d be mad if I made her visitors stay outside. Come on in and sit down.”

She pulled open the screen door and I followed, pulled along by the gravity of her invitation.

I sat in the same backless sofa as before and she settled opposite me.

“Do they call you Bea?” I asked my host.

She shook her head no, and said, “Evy called and told us that you found him at the beach and brought him back.”

“Yeah.”

“But he can’t come home?”

“With a little luck he’ll be here by this time tomorrow.”

“Is he in trouble?” Beatrix asked.

I had to remind myself that I was talking to a child. Her seated
posture and attitude placed her well beyond her years. This reminded me of Feather, and, in another way, of the young hippies wandering up and down the Sunset Strip. The world was changing fast, and young people had to hurry to keep up with those changes.

“No,” I said, answering Beatrix’s question. “He just stepped on a couple of toes. You know that brother of yours has got some big feet.”

That elicited a smile.

There came the sound of clattering from the back of the apartment.

“Beatrix?” Timbale called. There was the incipient tone of worry in her voice. I imagined that Timbale was always worried about her children—night and day.

“In here, Mom.” Beatrix kicked off the heels and pushed them under her chair.

When Timbale entered the little den through the foyer she put on her angry face. Her eyes were searching for impropriety, and I understood why, seeing how as a teenage girl she’d been kidnapped and raped by the monster Frank Green.

“Mr. Rawlins just got here,” the dutiful daughter said, rising from her seat. “He said that he’d wait outside, but I told him that you wouldn’t like it if I made him do that.”

Timbale didn’t like my propinquity with her child, but she trusted Beatrix, and so I went unstabbed—for the moment.

“Go down to Brenda’s house and get LaTonya,” Timbale told her daughter.

“Okay,” the girl said. She ran into some other part of the house and, less than half a minute later, she was bounding down the white stone stairs in boys’ black-and-white tennis shoes.

“What’s this nonsense I hear from Evander?” Timbale asked. She had no intention of sitting down.

“Your boy got himself into some deep shit, Ms. Noon,” I said. “That girl he met gave him some LSD. While he was high a man who needed a patsy fooled him somehow into getting involved in a robbery—”

“Not my boy!” Timbale threatened.

“Sit down, Ms. Noon.”

Her eyes were wide and her fists trembling. Timbale wore a shapeless purple dress that had probably been stitched in Mexico, smuggled into Southern California, and sold downtown replete with fake tags.

Timbale sat down where her daughter had rested. Her look told me that I had better watch my words.

“The man who fooled Evander,” I continued, heedless of her silent warning, “was in business with two other guys. They were all pulling a fast one on the boss of the other two. Maurice, the guy who tricked Evander, planned to double-cross his friends and leave Evander holding the bag. One man got killed and two others got shot—”

“Oh, no.”

“Somehow Evander and the man who tricked him got separated and your son ended up with the money. Maurice was killed by his surviving partner, who is now looking for your son.”

Timbale’s eyes had narrowed to slits. I would have bet that she could have repeated my explanation word for word.

“Why?”

“It’s a lot of money,” I explained.

“So? My son is not a thief.”

“That’s right,” I said, pointing a finger at her. “Your son.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“The man looking for Evander is not the problem. He doesn’t know a last name or where to start looking. He never even met Evander, so there’s not much for your son to worry about on that account. What the trouble is, is you telling your son that Ray killed Frank Green.”

“That’s the truth,” Timbale sermonized. “The God’s honest truth.”

“Yeah … and right after you told Evander that truth he told me that he intends to kill his father’s murderer.”

I could see the whole history of Timbale’s bad luck in her shocked expression. The last thing she expected was her baby boy going out
with a gun in his hand looking for revenge on the baddest man in town.

“No,” she said softly, shaking her head in feeble denial.

“Yes,” I said. “Yes and yes again. Evander’s a man and you just told him that another man slaughtered his father. Now, what’s gonna happen when he goes down to the places where Mouse hangs his hat? What’s gonna happen when he goes out with a gun among those hard men?”

“I won’t let him,” Timbale said with devout certainty.

“Like you stopped him from goin’ up to the Sunset Strip? Like how he came home when you told him to?”

“Why doesn’t he come home now?” the mother wailed.

“He’s with a woman and he’s runnin’ for his life,” I said. “And if you don’t talk to him and tell him that you have no proof that Raymond killed his father you might as well start shoppin’ for pine boxes now, because he won’t live out the year.”

“What woman?”

“Timbale,” I proclaimed, “don’t be a fool. Men get with women; you know that. Evander’s a man. He’s a man and you’re sending him on a mission of vengeance. All that anger and rage and years you sat up here nursin’ a grudge don’t even make no sense. You never saw Raymond kill Frank.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because I knew Mouse back then. If he saw a witness, that witness was dead. Tell your boy the truth, that you don’t know who killed Frank, and I’ll handle Mouse.”

Timbale’s fragile eyes might have shattered if she blinked hard. Her chest was heaving, and I’m sure her fingernails had cut into the skin of her palms.

“I have the money Evander got away with,” I said, suddenly persuasive and kind. “I can have it sent to you at a rate of fifteen hundred dollars a month for the next twelve years. That with your salary and whatever Raymond gives will make it so your kids can have a good life and none of them will need to die.”

“After all these years you just want me to let it go?”

“What’s worthwhile hangin’ on to, Timbale? Frank raping you? Kidnapping you? Getting you pregnant and then livin’ the kind of life that kills twenty-three outta twenty-five? You want Evander to seek your revenge? You want Beatrix and LaTonya to cry the rest of their lives? Make sense. It’s ovah, honey. You ain’t nevah gonna get back what you lost. Only thing you can do is take it out on those kids.”

I had never uttered truer words, and Timbale heard me too. She hung her head down, and tears from some other lifetime dripped from her face. She shivered and shook and I knew enough not to try and comfort her. Giving up all that bile and hatred was a private duty, not one that could be shared.

She was still crying when LaTonya and Beatrix returned. The girls were both licking soft-serve ice-cream cones. That must have been part of their ritual, I thought: LaTonya would always be happy to see her older sister coming to take her home because that meant ice cream on the way.

“What’s wrong, Mama?” the younger child cried, running to put her arms around Timbale Noon’s head.

Beatrix went to stand in the space between me and her mother. I was proud of both of those children.

“It ain’t nuthin’, baby,” Timbale answered in a cracked voice. “Mr. Rawlins just told me that Evander was coming home and I started to cry.”

“But you don’t never cry,” LaTonya challenged.

“I do when I’m happy, baby.” Timbale sat up straight, staring at me. “Evander’s coming home and everything is gonna be just fine.”

I was thinking that if the four of us in that room were alive twenty years hence, we would all have different memories of that day.

With that thought I got to my feet and walked out of that place of joyful grief.

Driving back to the Genesee house I was feeling almost in synch with myself. I had performed my trials and earned back the life I’d thrown away. I was a new man at the threshold of a different existence.

That man parked in my driveway.

He was almost home.

I slammed the door shut on the borrowed Barracuda thinking that I might like to keep that car as a reminder of those few days of purgatory.

“Mr. Rawlins,” she called, and I knew instantly that there was still some distance for me to travel.

She was getting out from the passenger’s side of a gold-colored Lincoln Continental parked across the street. The driver was Ashton Burnet. He came around the car to accompany Angeline Corey on the short span across Genesee toward me.

“Angeline,” I greeted her. “Ashton.”

“I’m not foolin’ with you, Easy Rawlins,” she said.

Ashton stood half a step behind her, a dark behemoth risen up out of the hell that so recently tried to pull me down. He was an inch shorter and three inches wider than I, with a reputation for violence that caused most rooms to go silent when he made an entrance. He was wearing a brown suit that paled on his dark skin, and a medium gray, short-brimmed Stetson that struggled to contain his hard head.

“I have always taken you seriously, Ms. Corey,” I replied.

“Where’s my daughter?”

“I’d be happy to look up the number if you wanted to call.”

“I know the number, motherfucker,” she said. “She told me that she was with that dopehead and that she wasn’t comin’ home.”

“Evander never took dope on purpose,” I told her. “Somebody fooled him into taking it. He’s a good kid. He loves your daughter.”

“He just wants her ass, that’s what,” Angeline said.

“I don’t think so.”

“Are you contradictin’ Angeline?” Ashton asked.

“Yes, I am, Ashton. If somebody’s wrong they’re wrong.”

“He took the dope,” Angeline said. “Now he’s addicted.”

“It’s not like heroin, Angeline,” I reasoned. “It’s not the kind of drug like that.”

“All drugs are like that.”

“No,” I said, “they’re not.”

“Watch it, Easy,” Ashton warned.

“Listen, man,” I said to the demon in mortal skin. “I almost died recently, just got out of my sickbed a few days ago. But that’s no excuse. I couldn’t take you if I was a hundred percent and fifteen years younger, but you know you don’t wanna start this war.”