Six Easy Pieces (21 page)

I DIDN’T NEED TO WORRY. Tilly Monroe was slumped down dead over a scattering of playing cards and cash. His hands were up at the sides of his head as if he were trying to surrender before he was slaughtered.

Five twenty-dollar bills had been dropped on the side of his face. They were old, 1934 issue, silver certificates from a time when the government backed up its currency.

My watch said four A.M.

I took the twenties and left for work.

IT WAS ALL IN THE AFTERNOON
Examiner.
Tilly Monroe shot dead, Eggersly Oliphant mysteriously missing, an argument over a poker game was the suspected cause of the falling out between cousins. But there was also evidence that there had been illegal activities surrounding the garage. Police detective Benjamin Suffolk told the press that Eggersly had been suspected of moving stolen cars for the past eleven months.

“Yeah,” I muttered. “And they’d’a gone on suspecting him for eleven years if not for those twenty dollar bills.”

“What’s that, Mr. Rawlins?” Willis Long, my newest janitor and pet project, asked.

“Nuthin’, Willie,” I said. “It’s just that some people in this world bigger fools than even young men like you.”

“The fool fool himself that he’s happy is better off than the smart man foolin’ that happy don’t mean a thing.”

“That gonna be your new song?”

“Maybe it is. Maybe.”

AT TEN-THIRTY I decided to ring the doorbell. The last visitor left the Sea Breeze Lane home at about nine-fifteen. I’d spent the time yawning and napping in the front seat of my car. I hadn’t gotten a good sleep for two nights. An old white woman opened the door.

“Yes?” she asked.

“Is Amiee in?”

“She’s not seeing anyone.”

“I’m not anyone, ma’am. I’m Easy Larry.”

“That’s all right, Myra,” Amiee said from about twenty feet away. She was wearing a long-sleeved blousy white dress that went all the way to the floor. Her hair was brushed out but not styled. Her nose was still wayward and sexy.

“But, Amiee,” Myra complained. “How would this look?”

“Go into some other room and close your eyes, dear,” Amiee said as she approached.

Myra huffed off through a doorway and I never saw her again.

“There you are again,” Amiee said.

There was fire in her eyes and my gut. But I wasn’t there for kisses.

“And there you are, the grieving wife abandoned by a faithless husband, cheated of her domestic bliss.”

“Why, Easy Larry, I do believe that you have read a book or two.”

“Where’s Ed?” I asked.

Amiee’s brash smile disappeared then. She looked down and shook her head.

“He’s upstairs cryin’ his heart out. The doctor came with a sedative for me but he ended up givin’ it to Eddie. He’s up there right now cryin’ in his sleep.”

I took the thirty-year-old twenty-dollar bills from my pocket and handed them to the siren.

“Where’d you get these?” she asked.

“Somebody had used this instead of pennies to cover Tilly’s eyes.”

“Oliphant,” she said uttering her own last name as if it was already alien to her.

“What does it mean?”

“That either Tilly or Eggersly robbed the safe. My husband got these from his first gas station back at the end of the war. It was the first money he made fixing a fancy car.”

“And he kept it in the safe?”

“Yes.”

“Do you think that Tilly was such a fool that he’d throw down this money in a poker game?”

“Maybe he would. I don’t know that Eggersly ever told Tilly about that hundred dollars.”

“Was Tilly up in here with you the night the safe was robbed?”

Amiee hesitated for a moment before saying, “Yeah. He knew I was open to him when I knew Gator was with his whore.”

“Then that rules him out,” I said. “Who else knew about the bills?”

The truth dawned in Amiee’s eyes. I could see it clearly.

“Where was Ed when you were playing with Tilly?”

“Tilly come over after Ed was asleep.”

“You think he might have ever got up and went to the toilet?”

ED WAS MOANING and shifting around in his bed. When we came in he cried and called out, “Mama?”

“Sh, baby, go back to sleep.”

It was definitely a boy’s room. It smelled of sour socks. There was a little box record player on a table and three baseball bats leaning into a corner. He had comic books and stacks of blue-lined paper jumbled on his desk. There was an accordion paper file folder in the closet that contained Oliphant’s receipts and maybe forty-two hundred dollars in cash.

“You stay here,” Amiee said. “I’ll go downstairs and get rid of Myra.”

When she was gone a few minutes I pulled an orange stool up to the side of the bed.

“Ed?”

“Uh.”

“Eddie.”

“Mmmm. What?” he whined.

“Are you awake?”

“No.”

“Why did you rob your father’s safe, son?”

“Tilly wanted to sell me the dirt bike. He said he wanted a hundred dollars.”

“What are you doing?” Amiee was standing at the door.

“Where’s Myra?” I asked.

“Already gone. What were you doing to Ed?”

“He was getting upset. I was just trying to calm him down.”

Amiee needed love in her life, not for herself but for the boy. She smiled and touched my sleeve, then motioned for me to follow downstairs.

We spent almost two hours at the kitchen table wiping down every surface of the accordion file. Not the money; I took that.

“I guess he was just doin’ what boys do,” Amiee said at one point.

“Don’t believe it,” I said. “He stole that money and then paid Tilly for a motorbike with those twenty-dollar bills the day of the poker game. He was workin’ some serious mojo there.”

“What do you mean?” Amiee asked. But she knew.

“Tilly’s been up in here with you.” I said. “Up in Ed’s father’s bed on Tuesday nights. He knew it.”

“I’ve seen you looking at my nose,” she said. “You know it used to be straight. I had what they call an aristocratic nose.”

I adjusted my dishwashing gloves. They were small on me and made my hands sweat.

“Oliphant broke it,” she sneered, “that was back when he still loved me. But I didn’t care about that. What made me mad was how he ignored Eddie. Wouldn’t stay around for a baseball game or ask about school. That’s why Eddie worked down at the garage. It was the only way he could see his father.”

“Sons love their fathers,” I said. “He set up Tilly. Did a good job of it too. Even if his cousin would have said that he got the money from Ed, Oliphant would have never believed it.”

“But he didn’t think his father would have killed him,” Amiee said.

“He wasn’t thinkin’ about what would happen at all,” I said. “Only how he could make his father as mad as he was.”

Soon after that we’d finished the wipe-down.

“Put this somewhere down in the basement and leave it there for a day,” I told her. “Then bring it back up here. Get a few prints on it. Call the cops and tell ’em you found it looking for your husband’s legal papers.”

“Okay.” She was looking into my eyes. “Stay with me tonight.”

“I can’t.”

“It’s because I been with so many men,” she said. “You think I’m some kind’a whore.”

“No.” I put my hand on her side. “I think you saved my heart from turnin’ back to stone.”

“What?”

“That’s why I’m helpin’ you. Because you gave me somethin’ and you didn’t even know it.”

I kissed her for a moment longer than I should have but then I leaned back.

“Thank you,” I said.

“HI, DADDY,” Feather said, as I came out of the bedroom the next morning.

She was all dressed for school in a green outfit and brown shoes. She looked taller.

“Baby.”

“You better?”

“Better than what?”

“You not nervous no more?”

I remembered our talk and sat next to her at the breakfast table.

“Yeah, baby,” I said. “I’m better. It was just that I was jealous that Bonnie goes all over the world and meets such wonderful people.”

“And you wisht that you could go?” Feather asked.

“No. I was wanting her to stay home and not have anybody but us as friends.”

“But she can’t do that because, because that’s her job.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I know.”

“Everybody got to do their job,” Feather added.

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, and Feather giggled and kissed me.

A
CAR DOOR SLAMMED on the street somewhere but it didn’t mean anything to me. I was at home drinking lemonade from the fruit of my own trees on a Saturday in L.A. Nobody was after me. My slate was clean. Bonnie had gone out with her friend Shirley, Jesus was taking sailing lessons near Redondo Beach, and Feather had gone down the street to her little boyfriend’s house, a shy red-headed child named Henry Hopkins.

Just four weeks before I would have spent my solitary time wondering if I should ask Bonnie to be my bride. But she had spent a weekend on the island of Madagascar with a man named Jogaye Cham. He was the son of an African prince born in Senegal while I was raised a poor black orphan.

Bonnie swore that the time they spent together was platonic but that didn’t mean much to me. A man who expected to be a king, who was working to liberate and empower a whole continent, wanted Bonnie by his side.

How could I compete with that?

How could she wake up next to me year after year, getting older while I made sure the toilets at Sojourner Truth Junior High School were disinfected? How could she be satisfied with a janitor when a man who wanted to change the world was calling her name?

Sharp footsteps on concrete followed the slamming door.

Bonnie had made my life work perfectly for a while. She never worried about my late-night meetings or when I went out for clues to the final fate of my old friend Mouse. I knew he was dead but I needed to hear it from the woman who saw him die. EttaMae admitted that she buried him in a nameless grave.

The footsteps ended at my door. They were the footsteps of a small man. I expected Jackson Blue to appear. Maybe he wanted my advice about his crazy love affair with Jewelle now that Mofass was dead. Or maybe he had some scheme he wanted to run past me. Either way it would be better than moping around, wishing that my woman wasn’t born to be a queen.

The knocking was soft and unhurried. Whoever it was, he, or she, was in no rush.

When I pulled the door open I was looking too high, above the man’s head. And then I saw him.

He pushed me aside and went past saying, “If it wasn’t for ugly, Easy, I woulda never even seen you again.”

“Raymond?” I could feel the tears wanting to come from my eyes. I was dizzy too. Torn between the two sensations I couldn’t go either way.

“You know I been drivin’ up an’ down Pico for the last hour and a half tryin’ to figure out if I should come here or not,” Mouse was saying.

He wore dark gray slacks and an ochre-colored jacket. His shirt was charcoal and there was gold edging on three of his teeth. On his baby finger he wore a thick gold ring sporting an onyx face studded with eight or nine diamond chips. His shoes were leather, honed to a high shine.

He wore no hat. Kennedy killed hats by going bareheaded to his inauguration, any haberdasher will tell you that. And if Mouse was a slave to anything it was fashion.

“Where the hell you been, Ray?”

He grinned. He laughed.

That was one of the few times I ever hugged a man. I actually lifted him off the floor.

“All right now, Easy. Okay. It’s okay, brother. I missed you too, baby. Yeah.”

Mouse was still laughing. It wasn’t a guffaw or even a roll. It was a calculated chuckle that only debutantes and killers had mastered.

“Where the hell you been?” I asked again.

“You got somethin’ to drink around here, Ease?” he replied. “I know you don’t drink but I thought maybe your woman did.”

Bonnie kept a bottle of brandy on the top shelf in the kitchen, behind the mixing bowls. I poured Mouse three fingers and refreshed my lemonade. Then he got comfortable on my recliner and I sat on the loveseat Bonnie brought from her home when she moved into mine.

“Well?” I asked after his first sip.

“Well what?”

“What happened?”

“You saw me get hit, didn’t you? You saw me sprawled out there at Death’s door. Shit. I was almost dead, Easy. Almost. Everything looked different. Slow and like black-and-white TV through red sunglasses. I heard Etta cryin’. I heard the nurse tellin’ her I was dyin’. I believed her. As far as I was concerned I was already dead.”

Mouse stared at the kitchen window through the door, his gray eyes amazed with the memory of his own demise.

“Where did Etta take you?”

“Mama Jo’s,” he said. “That’s why I’m here, partly.”

“You were too hurt to be taken all the way down to Texas,” I said. “Your heart wasn’t even beating.”

“Jo moved up around Santa Barbara six years ago,” Mouse said. “Etta knew about it but she never told no one. Domaque had got himself in trouble down Harrisville and she helped ’em move here.”

“She called me.”

“Etta?” Mouse asked.

“No. Jo. Couple’a months ago. She called and asked if I knew where you were. It was that same deep voice. Yeah. I couldn’t place it at the time. She healed you?”

“Yeah, baby. You know Jo’s a witch.” I remembered Mouse saying the same words when we were only nineteen. He’d taken me to her cabin in the woods outside of Pariah, Texas. Jo was twenty years older than we were. She was tall and jet black, crazy and full of need.

She seduced me and then saved my life when I came down with a fever.

“She used powders and ointments,” Mouse continued. “Stayed up all night by my side, every night for six weeks. She sat next to me almost the whole time. Etta and LaMarque was in the corner worryin’ and Domaque did all the work. You know, Easy, I believe that her standin’ sentry was why Death couldn’t pull me off. When my heart got weak she held foul-smellin’ shit up under my nose. And then one mornin’ I was awake. Everything looked normal. My chest hurt but that was fine. I was walkin’ in seven days’ time. I woulda been fuckin’ but Etta was mad at me for gettin’ myself shot.”