Six Easy Pieces (3 page)

There was a weathered sign above the front door of the building. If you looked closely you could make out the word HETTLEMANN and, a little farther down, RINGS. I had no idea what the building used to be. Now it was a series of sales and service offices rented out to various firms and individuals. On the fourth floor was a block of offices run by a man named Zane. They did bookkeeping and financial statements for small businesses.

The three flights of stairs was nothing for me. For the past few months I had cut down to ten cigarettes a day and I was used to the vast stairway at Truth.

When I opened the door on the fourth floor, I came into a small room where Anatole Zane sat. Zane, by his own estimation was a “…manager, receptionist, janitor, and delivery boy…” for his quirky accounting firm. He hired nonprofessionals who were good with numbers and parceled out tasks that he took in for cut-rate prices.

Jackson Blue was his most prized employee.

“Mr. Rawlins.” Zane smiled at me. He got his large body out of the chair and shook my hand. “It’s so good to see you again.”

Zane did my year-end taxes. I owned three apartment buildings around Watts and had the sense to know that a professional would do a better job with the government than I ever could. I had introduced the modest bookkeeper to the cowardly, brilliant, and untrustworthy Jackson Blue.

“Good to see you too, Anatole.”

“Jackson’s in his office doing a spreadsheet on the Morgans.”

“Thanks.”

I went through the door behind Zane’s small desk. There I entered a hall so narrow that I imagined the fat manager might get stuck trying to make it from one end to the other.

I knocked on the third door down.

“Yeah?”

“Police!”

I heard the screech of a chair on the floor and three quick steps across the room. Then there was a moment of silence.

After that, a quavering voice: “Easy?”

A door down the hall opened up. A bespectacled Asian man stuck his head out. When I turned in his direction, he jumped back and slammed the door.

“Come on, Jackson,” I said loudly. “Open up.”

The door I had knocked on opened.

If coyotes were black, Jackson Blue would have been their king. He was small and quick. His eyes saw more than most, and his mind was the finest I had ever encountered. But for all that, Jackson was as much a fool as Douglas “Cousin” Hardy. He was a sneak thief, an unredeemable liar, and dumb as a post when it came to discerning motivations of the human heart.

“What the fuck you mean scarin’ me like that, Easy?”

“You at work, Jackson,” I said, walking into his office. “This ain’t no bookie operation. You not gonna get busted.”

Jackson slammed his door.

“Shut up, man. Don’t be talkin’ like that where they might hear you.”

I sat in a red leather chair that was left over from the previous tenants. Jackson had nice furniture and a fairly large office. He had a window too, but the only view was a partially plastered brick wall.

“How you doin’, Jackson?”

“Fine. Till you showed up.”

He crossed the room, giving me a wide berth, and settled in the chair behind his secondhand mahogany desk. He avoided physical closeness because he didn’t know why I was there. Jackson had betrayed and cheated so many people that he was always on guard against attack.

“What you doin’?” I asked.

He held up what looked like a hand-typed manual. It had a cheap blue cover with IBM and BAL scrawled in red across the bottom.

Jackson smiled.

“What is it?”

“The key code to the binary language of machines.”

“Say what?”

“Computers, Easy. The wave of the future right here in my hand.”

“You gonna boost ’em or what?”

“You got a wallet in your pocket, right, man?”

“Yeah.”

“You got some money in there?”

“What you gettin’ at?”

“You might even have a Bank Americard, am I right?”

“Yes.”

“One day all your money gonna be in this language here.” He waved the manual again. “One day I’ma push a button and all the millionaires’ chips gonna fall inta my wagon.”

Jackson grinned from ear to ear. I wanted to slap him, but it wouldn’t have made a difference. Here he was the smartest man you could imagine, and all he could think about was theft.

“Roke Williams,” I said.

“Niggah was born in the alley and he gonna die in one too. Right down there offa Alameda.”

“Who runs him?”

“Was a dude named Pirelli, but he got circulatory problems.”

“Heart attack?”

“Kinda like. A bullet through the heart. Now it’s a man named Haas. He’s a slick bita business run his people outta the Exchequer on Melrose.”

“How about a man named Lund?”

Jackson squinted and brought his long thumbs together. “No. Don’t know no Lund. What’s this all about, Easy?”

I told Jackson about the smoke bomb and Cousin.

When I finished he said, “So? What do you care about all that, man? It ain’t your house.”

“It’s my job.”

“Your job is to make sure that the toilets don’t smell and that the trash cans is emptied. You not no bomb squad.”

I remember trying to dismiss Jackson’s argument as some kind of cowardly advice, but even then there was a grain of truth that made it through.

“Maybe not,” I said. “But I’m in it now.”

“You better bring some backup you wanna tango with Haas.”

That reminded me of Mouse. He had been my backup since I was a teenager in Fifth Ward, Houston, Texas. Mouse was crazy, but he was always on my side.

“I got a call this mornin’, Jackson. It was a woman with a deep bass voice—”

“She ask you about Mouse?”

“How you know that?”

“She called me too. Three days ago. Said she was lookin’ for Raymond.”

“What you say?”

Jackson became wary again. He scratched the back of his neck with his left hand and looked off to his left. When he saw that there was no escape route, he turned back to me. “I don’t want no trouble now, Easy.”

“Trouble’s over, man. Mouse is dead.”

“Like you once told me: you don’t know that.”

“I saw him. He wasn’t breathin’ and his eyes were wide. That bullet opened him up like a busted piñata.”

“But you didn’t go to no funeral.”

“Etta carried the body outta the hospital. You know how much she loved him. She probably put him in the ground herself.”

Jackson wrung his hands.

“What did you tell that woman?” I asked.

“Nuthin’. I didn’t tell her a thing.”

“Okay,” I said. “What didn’t you say?”

“You cain’t tell nobody I told, Easy.”

“Fine.”

“A girl named Etheline, Etheline Teaman.”

“What about her?”

“I met her a few weeks back and we started talkin’ shit. I told her ’bout some’a the crazy stuff Mouse done did. You know, just talkin’ jive. She told me that just before she left Richmond she met a gray-eyed, light-skinned brother named Ray. She said he got in a fight one night, and even though he was small, he put down this big dude with a chair, a bottle, and his knee. She didn’t even know Mouse, man. She only moved here from Richmond six months ago.”

“Where is this girl?”

“Piney’s.”

“A prostitute?”

“So what? You ain’t askin’ her to take care’a your kids. She said that she knew a man might be him. That’s what you asked me.”

“Why didn’t you call me about this, Jackson?”

“If Mouse is alive and don’t want nobody to know, then I don’t need to say a word.”

It was Jackson’s long silence that bothered me. He turned into a loudmouth braggart after just one beer. For him to have kept quiet about his suspicions meant that something in what he heard made him fear that Mouse was really alive.

And Mouse was a man to fear. He was deadly to begin with, and his heart was unrestrained by any feelings of guilt or morality.

“What you gonna do, Easy?”

“Go out and buy me a tie.”

I STOPPED AT THE May Company downtown and bought an orange silk tie. It had blue veins running through it and a yellow kite veering to the side as if it had broken its string.

I knotted my tie using the rearview mirror and then drove off to Melrose Avenue.

The Exchequer hotel and bar was a small building wedged between a lamp store and a hospital for the elderly. Lined out on the sidewalk were the aged inmates of that old folks’ prison. They sat in wheelchairs and on benches, looking out over Melrose as if it were the river Styx. I turned my head now and again as I passed them, thinking that one day, if I made it through this life, I would end up like them: discarded and broken at the side of the road.

There was one child-sized woman wearing a thin blue robe over blue pajamas. Her sagging, colorless eyes caught mine.

“Mister,” she mouthed. Then she waved.

“Yeah, honey?” I crouched down in front of her.

“When you were a boy you were so beautiful,” she whispered.

I smiled, wondering if my boyhood was showing in my face.

“Just like your mother,” she said.

“You knew my mother?” I asked. Maybe she thought some black maid in the old days was my relation.

“Oh yes,” she said, her voice getting stronger. “You’re my grandson—Lymon.”

Her eyes, when I first saw them, were beyond despair, verging on that stare that a dying man has when all hope of life is gone. I had seen many men during the war, shot up and dying, whose eyes had given up hope. But now the old lady’s eyes overflowed with delight—her white grandson, me, filling their field of vision.

She reached out a hand and I took it. She leaned forward and I accepted the kiss on my cheek. I kissed her gray head and stood up.

“I’ll come back a little later, Granny,” I said. Then I walked off to meet with a gangster.

THE HOTEL LOBBY WAS SMALL and simple. Not elegant or tawdry, but plain. The registration desk could have been a bell captain’s station. The rug would have to be changed in a year or less. The only outstanding features were the light fixtures set high up on the walls. They were in the form of nude women finished in shiny gold leaf. Above their heads they held big white globes of light.

“Help you?” the small man behind the desk asked. He was white and bald, about my age—which was mid-forties at the time. His eyes, nose, mouth, and ears were all too small for his small head. His miniature features showed disapproval and distrust of my presence. I couldn’t blame him. How often did white people see black men in fancy suits in 1964?

“Lookin’ for Mr. Haas,” I said.

“Who are you?”

“You don’t need to know my name, man.”

The desk clerk ran his tongue up under his lower lip and looked over at a doorless doorway. He nodded toward the dark maw and I went.

“WHAT’S UP, ROCHESTER?” a white man with big ears asked me. He was standing at the bar.

“Could be your ticket,” I said.

While he considered my words, I took a step closer to get within arm’s distance, so that if he decided to go for a weapon, I could stop him before he stopped me.

“Fuck you,” he said.

“Now that’s better,” I replied. “Are you Mr. Haas?”

“Who wants to know?”

“Ray,” I said. “Ray Alexander. I need to talk some business with the man.”

“Wait here.”

Big Ears wore an ugly, copper-colored iridescent suit. As he shimmered away from me into the gloom of the bar, I wondered if I had gone crazy somehow without warning. Jackson Blue was right; I was way out of my prescribed world there at the Exchequer.

I had fallen back into bad habits.

“Can I help you?”

It was yet another white man, this time a bartender. His words offered help, but his tone was asking me to leave.

“Mr. Haas,” I said, pointing toward the gloom.

A shimmering copper mass was emerging. Big Ears came up to me. “Come on.”

IT WAS POSSIBLY the darkest room I had ever been in that wasn’t intended for sleep. A man sat at a table under an intolerably weak red light. His suit was dark and his hair was perfect. Even though he was seated, I could tell that he was a small man. The only thing remarkable about his face were the eyebrows; they were thick and combed.

“Alexander?” he said.

I took a seat across from him without being bidden. “Mr. Alexander,” I said.

His lips protruded a quarter inch; maybe he smiled. “I’ve heard of you,” he ventured.

“I got a proposition. You wanna hear it?”

Ghostly hands rose from the table, giving his assent.

“There’s a group of wealthy colored businessmen, from pimps to real estate agents, who wanna start a regular poker game. It’s gonna float down around South L.A., some places I got lined up.”

“So? Am I invited to play?”

“Five thousand dollars against thirty percent of the house.”

Haas grinned. He had tiny teeth.

“You want I should just turn it over right now? Maybe you want me to lie down on the floor and let you walk on me too.”

Haas’s voice had become like steel. I would have been afraid, but because I was using Mouse’s name, there was no fear in me.

“I’d be happy to walk on you if you let me, but I figure you got the sense to check me out first.”

The grin fled. It was replaced by a twitch in the gangster’s left eye.

“I don’t do penny-ante shit, Mr. Alexander. You want to have a card game it’s nothin’ to me.” He adjusted his shoulders like James Cagney in
Public Enemy.

“Okay,” I said. I stood up.

“But I know a guy.”

I said nothing.

“Emile Lund,” Haas continued. “He eats breakfast in Tito’s Diner on Temple. He likes the cards. But he doesn’t throw money around.”

“Neither do I,” I said, or maybe it was Raymond who said it and I was just his mouthpiece in that dark dark room way outside the limit of the law.

The old folks were gone when I emerged from the hotel. I missed seeing the old lady. I remember thinking that that old woman would probably be dead before I thought of her again.

FEATHER WAS ASLEEP in front of a plate with a half-eaten hot dog and a pile of baked beans on it.
Astro Boy,
her favorite cartoon, was playing on the TV. Jesus was in the backyard, hammering sporadically. I picked up my adopted daughter and kissed her. She smiled with her eyes still closed and said, “Daddy.”