Six Easy Pieces (28 page)

We entered into her bedroom. It was furnished with a big mattress held aloft by a cherry frame, and a vanity with lipsticks, powder cases, and bottles of perfume scattered about. The next room was the toilet. There was makeup crowding the sink and nylons hanging from a rack above the tub.

The last room was the kitchen. It was stacked with dirty dishes and fashion magazines. She had been cutting out pictures of women in sexy poses.

The only food she had was milk that had gone bad and cornflakes, both of them kept in the refrigerator.

Other than the magazines there was no reading material in the house. There were no photographs, no calendar, phone book, telephone directory, or television set. There was a radio on the kitchen counter. It was set on the station KGFJ which specialized in soul music. I knew that because Mouse turned it on.

There were condoms in her medicine cabinet—dozens of them.

There was nothing under the bed.

I was looking between the mattress and box springs when Mouse asked, “What you lookin’ for, Easy?”

“Something that might give us an idea about who killed Jackie,” I said, a little vexed that he wasn’t giving me a hand.

“You mean like this here?” He was holding out a thick sheaf of legal documents.

“Where’d you get that?”

“In the vanity drawer.”

Sooner or later I would have checked that drawer. But I had got it in my mind that Jackie was a devious child, that she would have kept her secrets in some pretty obvious hiding place.

It was the deed to a house at the southern outskirts of Compton. She’d paid twelve thousand dollars in cash for the place. It was large enough for a garden but I didn’t know if it was zoned for stabling a horse.

On a small piece of paper, folded in between the various documents, she had listed a dozen or so names under an underlined title—$500. Bob Henry was on the list. Ted Durgen was too. Musa Tanous was the second to last name, just before Matthew Munson.

WHEN WE WALKED OUT of the front door I noticed a man pushing a wire shopping cart, stolen from some supermarket, down the street. I say stolen because he wasn’t coming home from the grocery store. Neither had he been to the laundromat in the past year or so. His cart was filled with junk he’d picked up along the way. Broken umbrellas, a painting of a white woman holding an apple up to her eye, bottles, cans, newspapers, and various types of clothing. There was a green felt derby in there with a yellow hatband that sported three green feathers and a new-looking powder-blue scarf, festooned with large black polka dots, tied to the guide bar.

Close up the man stank. Mouse refused to get within three steps of him.

“Excuse me,” I said. “My name’s Easy.”

“Hello, Easy,” he replied holding out a hand. “I’m Harold.”

His hand was big and soft, bloated almost. I didn’t want to shake it but I needed to gain the man’s confidence.

“You got a cigarette, Easy?” Harold asked me.

I handed him a Chesterfield and lit it. His bloated hand was quivering; there was a line of sweat across his upper lip.

Harold’s brown chin sported white stubble and his eyes saw everything and nothing all at once.

“Do you hang out around here much, Harold?”

“Oh yeah. I sleep in that empty lot down the street two, three days a week. You know—when John Bull ain’t beatin’ the bushes. Sometimes they catch on to me and send me to county jail. It’s alright except if it’s in with the drunks. You know I hate the smell in there. I stay with my mama sometimes—”

“Did you know a young woman live in here, down on the first floor? Her name is Jackie Jay?”

“Jackie Jay,” he said, considering the name for a moment or two. “Jackie Jay. No. No. No I cain’t say that I do. My mama’s name is Jocelyn—”

“You sure?” I asked. “She’s a young black woman…” I was wishing that I knew what the woman-child looked like. “…a young woman hangs out with men more my age.”

“No, sir. Uhp. Whop. Maybe. Did one’a her boyfriends drive a red T-Bird? Convertible?”

“I don’t know,” I said, honestly. “It could be.”

“There’s a real pretty young thing wear them, what my mama calls scandalous short skirts. She come outta there every once in a while and this Mexican picks her up in a red sports car. Then they drive off.”

“Did you see them last Thursday?”

“Thursday I was in the can,” Harold said.

He was short and powerful, maybe fifty years old, but his hairline had just begun to recede. And even though his skin was medium brown you could see the streaks of filth on the back of his hands and across his face.

“Yeah, yeah,” he said. “I had a stomach bug, couldn’t hardly walk but they said I was drunk and took me off. When I was still sick the next day they took me to the nurse’s office and she sent me home. There I was sick like some kinda dog. First they arrest me and then they throw me out on the street. It’s a wonder that a colored child ever makes it to be a man.”

“Did you notice anything else about the pretty girl and the man in the red car?” I asked. “Did they ever fight?”

But Harold was still thinking about the disservice that the nurse and the police had done him.

“Easy,” Mouse said from his three-step distance. “Let’s get outta here, man.”

“YOU STILL WORKING over at that school, Ease?” Mouse asked me.

We were on the road again, heading back for Ginny’s so that Mouse could retrieve his car.

“What else I’m gonna do?” I asked him. “I got to pay the bills.”

“What about them apartments you got? Don’t they make you some money?”

“I put that away, for Jesus and Feather.”

“How is Juice?”

“Almost finished with that boat. It looks good too.”

“Why’ont you come to work for me, Ease? I get you rich in no time.”

“Doin’ what?”

“I got this dockworker gig goin’.”

“What’s that?”

“I gotta couple’a guys movin’ anything from Swiss watches to French champagne for me. I get ’em to drop it off different places and then I make some calls. The people I do business wit’ pick the shit up and then they pay me.” When Mouse smiled his gray eyes flashed. “Everybody gets paid and the police be scratchin’ they heads.”

“What you need me for?”

“I don’t know, Easy,” Mouse shrugged. “You my friend, right? You cleanin’ up toilets, right?”

“I’m the supervisor, Raymond. I tell people what to do.”

“Whatever. It’s the same chump change all these workin’ fools bring home. You should live better’n that.”

“I like my life just the way it is thank you very much.”

“No, baby. That ain’t true.”

“Why not?”

“If you did like it you wouldn’t be out here takin’ a pair’a shoes to go out and find a murderer. No, man. You need to come around.”

“A man raising children has to set an example, Ray,” I said. “Our children, especially our sons look at us to tell what it is they should be doing with their own lives. That’s human nature.”

“I don’t know what you call it but Etta done raised LaMarque well enough to know that if he tried to do like me that he’d get killed inside of a week.”

“But it’s not just what they think they might be doing,” I said. “What they do is buried deep in their minds.”

“I don’t know about all that shit,” Mouse said. “But even if it is true you cain’t expect a man to give up everything he is ’cause one day one’a his kids might slip up. This is life, Easy. In the end it’s every man for himself.”

With those words he climbed out of the car and I drove off. On the way I castigated my friend for his mistaken beliefs. But as I drove I wondered about my own actions; about the late-night visitors, men and women, white and black. I wondered about what my own children saw when they looked at me. At least Raymond’s son had seen him seemingly lifeless with a hole ripped in his chest. He looked like a criminal so his son had the ability to make a choice. But to my kids I might have seemed like some kind of hero.

Maybe I was angry with myself and not Raymond at all.

IT WAS JUST A STOREFRONT with a hand-painted canvas sign in the window that read TAXES. There was a camel-colored young woman sitting at a desk set off to the right. She had a sensual face with big orange-tinted lips that must have motivated half the men in the neighborhood to ask her opinion on their taxes.

“Yeah?” she said to me before I could ask my question.

“I need to see Matthew,” I said.

“Why?”

“I wanted to talk to him about a five-hundred-dollar murder.”

If there had been a movie camera on the receptionist it would have stopped at that frame. She neither blinked nor breathed for a good five seconds.

“What did you say?” she asked at last.

“Get him for me will ya, sister?”

“Matt,” she said, raising her voice.

“What?” came a man’s voice from the room at the back.

“I think you better come out here.”

A medium-sized white man came out. He had thinning hair combed across his head to hide the encroaching baldness. His eyes were blue and his skin yellowy. His lips were almost as large as his secretary’s. But his were wrinkled like a day-old balloon that’s lost half its air.

“Mr. Munson?”

“Yes?” he asked warily.

“You knew Jackie Jay?”

“Yeah?”

“I’m here representing a man named Musa Tanous. Do you know him?”

“No.”

“He owns a building a couple’a blocks down. He was arrested a few days ago for murder.”

Matthew gulped and touched his throat with all the fingers of his left hand.

“Rita,” he said to the secretary. “I’ll be spending a few minutes with this gentleman.”

“Yes sir,” she said in a thick voice.

I turned her way in time to see her wiping tears from her eyes.

“Follow me, Mister—?”

“Rawlins.”

LIKE THEODORE, MUNSON had a backroom much larger than his front office. But most of the space back there went unused. The only furniture was a pine desk shoved into one corner. This was crowded with papers and files which were in turn covered in a fine layer of rubber eraser dust.

The accountant led me to the desk but he didn’t sit—neither did I.

“Now what’s this about Jackie?” he asked me.

“I was hired by a man, another man who knew Jackie. He wants me to make sure that Musa Tanous gets the chair for the crime.”

“You said something about her and a murder?”

“Don’t you know?”

“Know what?”

“Jackie was murdered three days ago.”

Munson’s mouth fell open. His eyelashes fluttered. If he was acting he was the best I had ever met.

“Who, who is this man? The one you’re working for?”

“I can’t tell you that, Mr. Munson,” I said. “He’s married and, well, you know—important. He doesn’t want it to get out that he was involved.”

Munson watched my eyes with a steady gaze. I wasn’t worried though. A good liar learns to use his eyes in the tales he spins. And I was a good liar, a very good one.

“Who are you, Mr. Rawlins?” Munson asked.

“I’m unofficial,” I said. “I look into things when people want to be sure that there’s no notes or forms to be filed or remembered. Right now I’m the man looking for Jackie Jay’s killer.”

Munson winced.

“I thought you said that this Muta guy did it?”

“That’s what I thought,” I said. “But then I found this list.”

I handed him the list I took from Jackie’s apartment.

He read it over, then over again.

He held it away from me and asked, “Isn’t this police evidence?”

“I got the mother’s permission to search Jackie’s house. There was no police notice telling me not to look around.”

“Well,” he said with sudden authority in his voice, “I think I’ll hold onto this for the cops if they need it.”

I have fast hands. I snatched the list out of Munson’s grasp before he could move. He tried to muscle and I slapped him. I didn’t think I’d hit him hard but he tipped over and fell on his side. He was up quickly though. There were tears in his eyes.

“Who the hell do you think you are hitting me?” he said.

“You try an’ take this paper from me again and I’ll kick your ass up and down the block.”

He reached for the phone on his desk.

“I’m calling the police.”

He picked up the receiver.

I watched him.

He watched me.

“Are you going to give me that list?” The threat was thick and ridiculous on his tongue.

“Why’d you give her the money, Matt?”

The tears were still streaming from his eyes. I doubted if any man ever hated me more than he did at that moment.

“When we met she told me that one day she would ask me for five hundred dollars. She said that I didn’t have to give it to her, that I should only do it if I wanted to.”

“And did you?”

“What’s it to you?” Munson said. He was regaining his feeling of superiority so I reminded him:

“It ain’t nuthin’ to me, man. But the cops’ll be more interested in you bein’ on this list than me havin’ it.”

The accountant’s lashes fluttered again. He was so upset that I wouldn’t have been surprised if he had started foaming at the mouth.

“Yes,” he said.

“You gave it to her?”

“Seven-hundred-and-forty-eight dollars,” Munson said, nodding. “And she gave me a letter stating that she owed me the money and that she’d pay off the loan at the rate of five dollars a month.”

“Long-term loan. Did she ever make a payment?”

“Yes. Two of them.”

I should have felt good. I got what I wanted and I was able to show a superior-feeling white man that he couldn’t bully me with his arm or his will. But seeing him so defeated only reminded me of all the defeats me and mine had experienced. I actually felt sorry for him.

“Is Rita’s last name Wilford?’ I asked.

“No. It’s Longtree,” he said. “Why?”

“I thought she was a Wilford from down Dallas. Guess I was wrong.”

LONG AND LEAN BOB HENRY was sitting at a desk behind a glass wall when I drove up to his Atlas gas station. I asked him about the $500 club and he was easy enough.