Six Easy Pieces (5 page)

HE WAS LIVING in an apartment building on San Pedro. It was a turquoise and plaster affair, designed to be ugly so that the tenants would know that they were poor.

I knocked on the door of apartment 3 G. No one answered. I jiggled the knob and it turned.

He had lied about the furniture. He didn’t use it for the new place. His big ebony desk wouldn’t have fit through the front door. Hiram Newgate sold everything to pay Vren Lassiter’s debt and now he was dead, slumped over on the thin cushions of a cheap couch, a .22-caliber bullet in his left temple, the pistol still in his hand.

I looked around the house. Photographs were spread across the card table in a nook that was supposed to be a dinette. The pictures were of two men, Hiram and a younger, sandy-headed man. They were arm-in-arm, holding hands. In one picture Hiram was laughing out loud.

I searched around for some kind of note, but there was none. I did find a letter though. It was from Lassiter. In it Vren beseeched his good friend to understand that he couldn’t help making bets. He tried to kick the habit but he couldn’t. And if Hiram didn’t help, they’d probably kill him.

I figured that Newgate went to Lund and took on the debt, that Lund threatened the school because he figured out that Truth was more important to Hiram than his own life. Newgate had earned his own private abbreviation: SchP, School Principal.

I put the letter back into the desk and went to the front door. I turned to look one last time, to make sure that there was nothing I left behind. His eyes glittered as if they had moved. I came up to him and stared into those orbs. He was still alive. Paralyzed, but still alive. He saw me, knew me.

“It’s gonna be all right, Principal Newgate,” I said. I touched his cheek and nodded.

I made the anonymous call to the police from his phone and left. I was out of the neighborhood before the sirens came.

I WAITED TWO WEEKS before going to the 77th Precinct.

“Where’d you get this?” Andre Brown asked me at Leah’s Doughnut and Coffee Shop three blocks down from the precinct. In his hand he held Emile Lund’s notebook.

“Found it.”

“If you found it, how would you know who it belongs to? His name’s not in it anywhere.”

“I guessed. I’m a good guesser, Officer.”

“These are his clients?” Brown asked. He was becoming wary of me.

“Yeah. I guess.”

Officer Brown studied me. He was a good study. Nine times out of eleven he would come up with the solution to his inquiry—but not that morning.

“I hear they brought your principal back home yesterday,” he said. “Some friend of his took him in?”

“Guy named Vren.”

“That’s an awful thing. Shoot yourself in the head and end up paralyzed for life.”

I took a deep breath.

“What does this book have to do with the fire?” Andre asked.

“He’s the one set the smoke bomb.”

“How do you know that?”

“Read the book.”

THAT NIGHT Feather sang us a song she’d learned in school. It was about a sailor lost at sea. He fought sea serpents and snake people and terrible storms. But at the end of the journey, he found a sunny land. And to his surprise, that sunny shore was the home he’d left long long ago.

“I learned it for Juice, Daddy,” she said. “’Cause’a when he’s in that boat he can sing it and then he could find his way back here.”

“Me too, baby,” I said. “Me too.”

E
THELINE,” SHE SAID, repeating the name I’d asked for.

“Yeah,” I said. “Etheline Teaman. I heard from my friend that she works here.”

“Who is your friend?” the short, nearly bald black woman asked. She was wearing a stained, pink satin robe that I barely glimpsed through the crack of the door.

“Jackson Blue,” I said.

“Jackson.” She smiled, surprising me with a mouthful of healthy teeth. “You his friend? What’s your name?”

“Easy.”

“Easy Rawlins?” she exclaimed, throwing the door open wide and spreading her arms to embrace me. “Hey, baby. It’s good to meet you.”

I put one hand on her shoulder and looked around to the street, making sure that no one saw me hugging a woman, no matter how short and bald, in the doorway of Piney’s brothel.

“Come on in, baby,” the woman said. “My name is Moms. I bet Jackson told you ’bout me.”

She backed away from the entrance, offering me entrée. I didn’t want to be seen entering that doorway either, but I had no choice. Etheline Teaman had a story to tell and I needed to hear it.

The front door opened on a large room that was furnished with seven couches and at least the same number of stuffed chairs. It reminded me of a place I’d been twenty-five years earlier, in the now defunct town of Pariah, Texas. That was the home of a pious white woman—no prostitutes or whiskey there.

“Have a seat, baby,” Moms said, waving her hand toward the empty sofas.

It was a plush waiting room where, at night, women waited for men instead of trains.

“Whiskey?” Moms asked.

“No,” I said, but I almost said yes.

“Beer?”

“So, Moms. Is Etheline here?”

“Don’t be in such a rush, baby,” she said. “Sit’own, sit’own.”

I staked out a perch on a faded blue sofa. Moms settled across from me on a bright yellow chair. She smiled and shook her head with real pleasure.

“Jackson talk about you so much I feel like we’re old friends,” she said. “You and that crazy friend’a yours—that Mouse.”

Just the mention of his name caused a pang of guilt in my intestines. I shifted in my chair, remembering his bloody corpse lying across the front lawn of EttaMae Harris’s home. It was this image that brought me to the Compton brothel.

I cleared my throat and said, “Yeah, I been knowin’ Jackson since he was a boy down in Fifth Ward in Houston.”

“Oh, honey,” Moms sang. “I remember Fifth Ward. The cops would leave down there on Saturday sunset and come back Sunday mornin’ to count the dead.”

“That’s the truth,” I replied, falling into the rhythm of her speech. “The only law down there back then was survival of the fittest.”

“An’ the way Jackson tells it,” Moms added, “the fittest was that man Mouse and you was the fittest’s friend.”

It was my turn to throw in a line but I didn’t.

Moms picked up on my reluctance and nodded. “Jackson said you was all broke up when your friend died last year. When you lose somebody from when you were comin’ up it’s always hard.”

I didn’t even know the madam’s Christian name but still she had me ready to cry.

“That’s why I’m here,” I said, after clearing my throat. “You know I never went to a funeral or anything like that for Raymond. His wife took him out of the hospital and neither one of them was ever seen again. I know he’s dead. I saw him. But Etheline met somebody who sounded a lot like him a few months ago, up in Richmond. I just wanted to ask her a couple’a questions. I mean, I know he’s dead, but at least if I asked her there wouldn’t be any question in my mind.”

Moms shook her head again and smiled sadly. She felt sorry for me, and that made me angry. I didn’t need her pity.

“So is Etheline here?”

“No, darlin’,” she said. “She moved on. Left one mornin’ ’fore anybody else was up. That’s almost four weeks ago now.”

“Where’d she go?”

Another woman entered the room. She wore a man’s white dress shirt and nothing else. All the buttons except the bottom one were undone. Her lush figure peeked out with each step. She was maybe eighteen and certain that any man who saw her would pay for her time.

When she sneered at me, I understood her pride.

“Inez,” Moms said. “You know where Etheline got to?”

A man came stumbling out from the doorway behind Inez. He was fat, in overalls and a white T-shirt. “Bye, Inez,” he said as he went around the sofas, toward the door.

“Bye,” she said. But she wasn’t looking at him. Her eyes were on me.

“Well?” Moms asked.

“What?” Inez’s sneer turned into a frown at Moms’s insistence.

“Do you know where Etheline has got to?”

“Uh-uh. She just left. You know that. Didn’t say nuthin’ to nobody.” Inez kept her gaze on me.

“Well,” Moms said. “That’s all, Easy. If Inez don’t know where she is, then nobody do.”

“You wanna come on back to my room?” Inez asked, sneering again.

She undid the one button and lifted the tails of the shirt so I could see what she was offering. For a moment I forgot about Etheline and Mouse and why I was there. Inez was the color of pure chocolate. But if chocolate looked like her I’d have weighed a ton. She was young, as I said, and untouched by gravity or other earthly concerns.

“How much?” I asked.

“Thirty dollars up front,” Moms said, no longer pitying or even friendly.

I handed the money over and followed the woman-child down a short hallway.

“You got thirty minutes, Easy,” Moms called at my back.

At the end of the hallway we came to a right turn that became another, longer passage. Inez stopped at the fourth door down.

Her room was done up in reds and oranges. It smelled of cigarette smoke, sex, lubricant, and vanilla incense. Inez let her shirt drop to the floor and sneered at me.

I closed the door.

“You shy?” she asked.

I scanned the room. There were no closets. The bed was just a big mattress on box springs. There was no frame that someone could hide under.

“How do you want me?” Inez asked.

“On a desert island for the rest of my life,” I said.

There was a bench at the foot of her bed. It was covered with an orange and cream Indian cloth that had elephants parading around the edges. I took a seat and gestured for Inez to sit on the bed. She mistook my meaning and got down on her knees before me.

“No-no, baby. On the bed, sit on the bed.” I lifted her by the elbows and gently guided her to sit.

“How you gonna fuck me like that?”

“I need to find Etheline.”

“I already told you. She left. She didn’t say where she was goin’.”

“What did she say before she left?”

“What do you mean?” Inez was getting a little nervous. She covered her breasts under crossed arms.

“Did she have any friends? Was there some neighborhood she lived in before she came here?”

“You family to her?”

“She might know something about a friend’a mine. I want to ask her about him.”

“You paid thirty dollars to hear about where she lived before here?”

“I’ll give you twenty more if I like what I hear.”

I hadn’t noticed how large her eyes were until then. When she put her arms down I saw that her nipples had become erect. They were long and pointed upwards. This also reminded me of my long-ago visit to Pariah.

“I don’t know,” Inez said. “She had a regular customer name of Cedric. And, and she went to…yeah, she went to The Winter Baptist Church. Yeah.” Inez smiled, sure that she had earned her twenty dollars.

“What was Cedric’s last name?”

The girl put one hand to her chin and the other to her ear. She pumped the heel of her left foot on the floor.

“Don’t tell me now,” she said. “I know it. We’d be sittin’ on the purple couch after dinnertime, waitin’ for the men. Shawna would be playin’ solitaire and then, and when Cedric came Etheline always smiled like she really meant it. She always saw him first and said, ‘Hi, Cedric,’ and Moms would say, ‘Good evenin’, Mr. Boughman.’ Moms always calls a man in a suit mister. That’s just the way she is.” Inez grinned at her own good memory. She had a space between her front teeth. I might have fallen in love right then if another woman didn’t hold my heart.

“What kinda suit?” I asked.

“All different kinds.”

“Black man?”

“We don’t cater to white here at Piney’s,” Inez said.

I stood up and took out my wallet, giving Inez four five-dollar bills. “You supposed to walk me out?” I asked.

“You don’t want me?”

“Don’t get me wrong, honey,” I said. “I don’t even remember the last time I’ve seen a girl lovely as you. You might be the prettiest girl ever. But I got a woman. She’s away right now but I feel like she’s right here with me. You know what I mean?”

“Yeah,” Inez whispered. “I know.”

IT WAS STILL EARLY when I left Piney’s, about noon. I drove up toward Watts thinking that I should have been at work instead of in the company of naked women. Whorehouses and prostitutes belonged in my past. I had a job and a family to worry about. And as much as I missed him, Mouse, Raymond Alexander, was dead.

But just his name mentioned on the phone ten days earlier had thrown me out of my domestic orbit. He was on my mind every morning. He was in my dreams. Jackson Blue had told me that Etheline talked about a man who might have resembled Mouse. I kept from seeking her out for seven days, but that morning I couldn’t hold back.

Maybe if Bonnie wasn’t off being a stewardess in Africa and Europe, things would have been different. If she were home, I’d be too, home with my Mexican son and my mixed-race daughter. Home with my Caribbean common-law wife. Either at home or at work, making sure the custodians at Sojourner Truth Junior High School were picking up the vast lower yard and clearing away the mess that children make.

But there was no one to stop me. Bonnie was gone, little Feather was at Carthay Circle Elementary, and Jesus had left early in the morning to study the designs of sailboats at Santa Monica pier.

I was living out the dream of emancipation—a free man in America, desperate for someone to rein me in.

WINTER BAPTIST CHURCH was just a holy-roller storefront when I came to Los Angeles in 1946. Medgar Winters was minister, deacon, treasurer, and pianist all rolled into one. He preached a fiery gospel that filled his small house of worship with black women from the Deep South. These women were drawn to the good reverend because he spoke in terms of country wisdom, not like a city slicker.

By 1956 Medgar had bought up the whole block around 98th and Hooper. He’d moved his congregation to the old market on the corner and turned the storefront into a Baptist elementary school.