“Wanna beer, boys? I gotta couple’a quarts in the box.”
We got drinks and lit up cigarettes that Junior offered. He seated us on folding chairs he had placed around a card table.
“What you need?” he asked after a while.
I took a handkerchief from my pocket. It was the same handkerchief that I used to pick up something from the floor at Richard McGee’s.
“Recognize this?” I asked Junior as I opened it on his table.
“What’s a cigarette butt gotta do with me?”
“It’s yours, Junior, Zapatas. You the only one I know cheap enough to smoke this shit. And you see how somebody just let it drop to the floor and burn so that the paper on the bottom is just charred but not ash?”
“So what? So what if it’s mine?”
“I found this here on the floor of a dead man’s house. Richard McGee was his name. Somebody had just given him Coretta James’s name; somebody who knew that Coretta was with that white girl.”
“So what?” Like magic, sweat appeared on Junior’s brow.
“Why’d you kill Richard McGee?”
“Huh?”
“Ain’t no time to play, Junior. I know you the one killed him.”
“Whas wrong wit’ Easy, Mouse? Somebody hit him in the head?”
“This ain’t no time to play, Junior. You killed him and I need to know why.”
“You crazy, Easy. You crazy!”
Junior jumped up out of his chair and made like he was about to leave.
“Sit down, Junior,” Mouse said.
Junior sat.
“Tell me what happened, Junior.”
“I don’t know what you talkin’ ’bout, man. I don’t even know who you mean.”
“All right,” I said, showing him my palms. “But if I go to the police they gonna find out that that fingerprint they got on the knife belong to you.”
“What knife?” Junior’s eyes looked like moons.
“Junior, you got to listen real close to this. I got troubles of my own right now and I ain’t got the time to worry ’bout you. The night I was at John’s that white man was there. Hattie had you carry him home and then he must’a paid you for Coretta’s name. That’s when you killed him.”
“I ain’t killed nobody.”
“That fingerprint gonna prove you wrong, man.”
“Shit!”
I knew I was right about Junior but that wasn’t going to help me if he didn’t want to talk. The problem was that Junior wasn’t afraid of me. He was never afraid of any man that he felt he could best in a fight. Even though I had the information that would prove him guilty, he didn’t worry because I was his inferior in combat.
“Kill’im, Raymond,” I said.
Mouse grinned and stood up. The pistol was just there, in his hand.
“Wait a minute, man. What kinda shit you tryin’ t’pull here?” Junior said.
“You killed Richard McGee, Junior. And the next night you called me ’cause it had somethin’ to do with that girl I was lookin’ for. You wanted to find out what I knew but when I didn’t tell you anything you hung up. But you killed him and you gonna tell me why or Mouse is gonna waste your ass.”
Junior licked his lips and threw himself around in his chair like a child throwing a fit.
“What you wanna come messin’ wit’ me fo’, man? What I do to you?”
“Tell it the way it happened, Junior. Tell me and maybe I forget what I know.”
Junior threw himself around some more. Finally he said, “He was down at the bar the night you come in.”
“Yeah?”
“Hattie didn’t want him inside so she told him to go. But he must’a already been drunk ’cause he kinda like passed out on the street. So Hattie got me to go out an’ check on ’im ’cause she didn’t want no trouble with him out there. So I go out to help him to his car, or whatever.”
Junior stopped to take a drink of beer but then he just stared out the window.
“Get on with it, Junior,” Mouse said at last. He wanted to move on.
“He say he give me twenty dollars for to know ’bout that girl you was askin’ on, Easy. He said that he give me a hundred if I was to drive him home and tell ’im how to find the white girl.”
“I know you took that.” Mouse was working a toothpick between his front teeth.
“Lotta money.” Junior smiled hopefully at the warmth Mouse showed. “Yeah, I drove him home. And I told’im that I seen the girl he was lookin’ for, with Coretta James. Just’a white girl anyway, why should I care?”
“Then why you kill’im?” I asked.
“He wanted me to give Frank Green a message. He says that he give me the money after I do that.”
“Yeah?”
“I tole him that he could fuck dat! I did what he wanted and if he needed sumpin’ else we could talk about that after I got paid.” Junior got a wild look in his eye. “He told me I could walk home with my twenty if that’s how I felt. Then he badmouth me some an’ turn off into the other room. Shit! Fo’ all I know’d he had a pistol in there. I got a knife from the sink an’ goes in after’im. He could’a had a gun in there, ain’t that right, Raymond?”
Mouse sipped his beer and stared at Junior.
“What he want you to say to Frank?” I asked.
“He want me t’tell ’im that him an’ his friends had sumpin’ on the girl.”
“Daphne?”
“Yeah,” Junior said. “He say that they got sumpin’ on’er and they should all talk.”
“What else?”
“Nuthin’.”
“You just killed him ’cause he might’a hadda gun?”
“You ain’t got no cause to tell the cops, man,” Junior said.
He was sunken in his chair, like an old man. He disgusted me. He was brave enough to take on a smaller man, he was brave enough to stab an unarmed drunk, but Junior couldn’t stand up to answer for his crimes.
“He ain’t worf living,” the voice whispered in my head.
“Let’s go,” I said to Mouse.
CHAPTER 24
DUPREE WAS AT his sister’s house, out past Watts, in Compton. Bula had a night job as a nurse’s assistant at Temple Hospital so it was Dupree who answered our knock.
“Easy,” he said in a quiet voice. “Mouse.”
“Pete!” Mouse was bright. “That pigtails I smell?”
“Yeah, Bula made some this mo’nin’. Black-eyes too.”
“You don’t need to show me, I just run after my nose.”
Mouse went around Dupree toward the smell. We stood in the tiny entrance looking at each other’s shoulders. I was still half outside. Two crickets sounded from the rose beds that Bula kept.
“I’m sorry ’bout Coretta, Pete. I’m sorry.”
“All I wanna know is why, Easy. Why somebody wanna kill her like that?” When Dupree looked up at me I saw that both of his eyes were swollen and dark. I never asked but I knew that those bruises were part of his police interrogation.
“I don’t know, man. I can’t see why someone wanna do that t’anybody.”
Tears were coming down Dupree’s face. “I do it to the man done it to her.” He looked me in the eye. “When I find out who it was, Easy, I’m a kill that man. I don’t care who he is.”
“You boys better com’on in,” Mouse said from the end of the hall. “Food’s on the table.”
BULA HAD RYE in the cabinet. Mouse and Dupree drank it. Dupree had been crying and upset the whole evening. I asked him some questions but he didn’t know anything. He told us about how the police had questioned him and held him for two days without telling him why. But when they finally told him about Coretta he broke down so they could see that it wasn’t him.
Dupree drank steady while he told his story. He got more and more drunk until he finally passed out on the sofa.
“That Dupree is a good man,” Mouse slurred. “But he jus’ cain’t hold his liquor.”
“You got your sails prett
y far up too, Raymond.”
“You callin’ me drunk?”
“All I’m sayin’ is that you been puttin’ it away along wit’im and you could be sure that you wouldn’t pass no breath test neither.”
“If I was drunk,” he said, “could I do this?”
Mouse, moving as fast as I’ve ever seen a man move, reached into his fancy jacket and came out with that long-barreled pistol. The muzzle was just inches from my forehead.
“Ain’t a man in Texas could outdraw me!”
“Put it down, Raymond,” I said as calmly as I could.
“Go on,” Mouse dared, as he put the pistol back into his shoulder holster. “Go fo’ your gun. Les see who gets kilt.”
My hands were on my knees. I knew that if I moved Mouse would kill me.
“I don’t have a gun, Raymond. You know that.”
“You fool enough to go without no piece then you must wanna be dead.” His eyes were glazed and I was sure that he didn’t see me. He saw somebody, though, some demon he carried around in his head.
He drew the pistol again. This time he cocked the hammer. “Say your prayers, nigger, ’cause I’m’a send you home.”
“Let him go, Raymond,” I said. “He done learned his lesson good enough. If you kill’im then he won’t have got it.” I was just talking.
“He fool enough t’call me out an’ he ain’t even got no gun! I kill the motherfucker!”
“Let him live, Ray, an’ he be scared’a you whenever you walk in the room.”
“Motherfucker better be scared. I kill the motherfucker. I kill’im!”
Mouse nodded and let the pistol fall down into his lap. His head fell to his chest and he was asleep; just like that!
I took the gun and put it on the table in the kitchen.
Mouse always kept two smaller pistols in his bag; I knew that from our younger days. I got one of them and left a note for Dupree and him. I told them that I had gone home and that I had Mouse’s gun. I knew he wouldn’t mind as long as I told him about it.
I DROVE DOWN my block twice before I was sure no one was waiting for me in the streets. Then I parked around the corner so that anyone coming up to my place would think I was gone.
When I had the key in my lock the phone started ringing. It was on the seventh ring before I got to it.
“Easy?” She sounded as sweet as ever.
“Yeah, it’s me. I thought you’d be halfway to New Orleans by now.”
“I’ve been calling you all night. Where have you been?”
“Havin’ fun. Makin’ all kinds’a new friends. The police want me to come down there and live wit’em.”
She took my joke about friends seriously. “Are you alone?”
“What do you want, Daphne?”
“I have to talk with you, Easy.”
“Well go on, talk.”
“No, no. I have to see you. I’m scared.”
“I don’t blame ya for that. I’m scared just talkin’ to ya on the phone,” I said. “But I need to talk to ya though. I need to know some things.”
“Come meet me and I’ll tell you everything you need to know.”
“Okay. Where are you?”
“Are you alone? I only want you to know where I am.”
“You mean you don’t want your boyfriend Joppy to know where you hidin’?”
If she was surprised that I knew about Joppy she didn’t show it.
“I don’t want anybody to know where I am, but you. Not Joppy and not that other friend that you said was visiting.”
“Mouse?”
“Nobody! Either you promise me or I hang up right now.”
“Okay, okay fine. I just got in and Mouse ain’t even here. Tell me where you are and I’ll come get ya.”
“You wouldn’t lie to me, would you, Easy?”
“Naw. I just wanna talk, like you.”
She gave me the address of a motel on the south side of L. A.
“Hurry up, Easy. I need you,” she said before hanging up. She got off the phone so quickly that she didn’t give me the number of her room.
I scribbled a note, making my plans as I wrote. I told Mouse that he could find me at a friend’s house, Primo’s. I wrote RAYMOND ALEXANDER in bold letters across the top of the note, because the only words Mouse could read were his own two names. I hoped that Dupree came with Mouse to read him the note and show him the way to Primo’s house.
Then I rushed out the door.
I found myself driving in the L.A. night again. The sky toward the valley was coral with skinny black clouds across it. I didn’t know why I was going alone to get the girl in the blue dress. But for the first time in quite a while I was happy and expectant.
CHAPTER 25
THE SUNRIDGE WAS a smallish pink motel, made up of two rectangular buildings that came together in an L around an asphalt parking lot. The neighborhood was mostly Mexican and the woman who sat at the manager’s desk was a Mexican too. She was a full-blooded Mexican Indian; short and almond-eyed with deep olive skin that had lots of red in it. Her eyes were very dark and her hair was black, except for four strands of white that told me she had to be older than she looked.
She stared at me, the question in her eyes.
“Lookin’ for a friend,” I said.
She squinted a little harder, showing me the thick webbing of wrinkles at the corners of her eyes.
“Monet is her last name, French girl.”
“No men in the rooms.”
“I just have to talk with her. We can go out for coffee if we can’t talk here.”
She looked away from me as if to say our talk was over.
“I don’t mean to be disrespectful, ma’am, but this girl has my money and I’m willing to knock on every door until I find her.”
She turned toward the back door but before she could call out I said, “Ma’am, I’m willing to fight your brothers and sons to talk to this woman. I don’t mean her any harm, or you neither, but I have got to have words with her.”
She sized me up, putting her nose in the air like a leery dog checking out the new mailman, then she measured the distance to the back door.
“Eleven, far end,” she said at last.
I RAN DOWN to the far end of the building.
While I knocked on number eleven’s door I kept looking over my shoulder.
She had on a gray terrycloth robe and a towel was wrapped into a bouffant on her head. Her eyes were green right then and when she saw me she smiled. All the trouble she had and all the trouble I might have brought with me and she just smiled like I was a friend who was coming over for a date.
“I thought you were the maid,” she said.
“Uh-uh,” I mumbled. She was more beautiful than ever in the low-slung robe. “We should get outta here.”
She was looking past my shoulder. “We better talk to the manager first.”
The short woman and two big-bellied Mexican men were coming our way. One of the men was swinging a nightstick. They stopped a foot from me; Daphne closed the door a little to hide herself.
“Is he bothering you, Miss?” the manager asked.
“Oh no, Mrs. Guitierra. Mr. Rawlins is a friend of mine. He’s taking me to dinner.” Daphne was amused.
“I don’t want no men in the rooms,” the woman said.
“I’m sure he won’t mind waiting in the car, would you, Easy?”
“I guess not.”
“Just let us finish talking, Mrs. Guitierra, and he’ll be a good man and go wait in his car.”
One of the men was looking at me as if he wanted to break my head with his stick. The other one was looking at Daphne; he wanted something too.
When they moved back toward the office, still staring at us, I said to Daphne, “Listen. You wanted me to come here alone and here I am. Now I need the same feeling, so I want you to come with me to a place I know.”
“How do I know that you aren’t going to take me to the man Carter hired?” Her eyes were laughing.
>
“Uh-uh. I don’t want any piece of him … I talked to your boyfriend Carter.”
That took the smile from her face.
“You did! When?”
“Two, three days ago. He wants ya back and Albright wants that thirty thousand.”
“I’m not going back to him,” she said, and I knew that it was true.
“We can talk about that some other time. Right now you’ve got to get away from here.”
“Where?”
“I know a place. You’ve got to get away from the men looking for you and I do too. I’ll put you someplace safe and then we can talk about what we can do.”
“I can’t leave L.A. Not before I talk to Frank. He should be back by now. I keep calling, though, and he’s not home.”
“The police tied him into Coretta; he’s probably lyin’ low.”
“I have to talk to Frank.”
“Alright, but we’ve got to get away from here right now.”
“Wait a second,” she said. She went into the room for a moment. When she reappeared she handed me a piece of paper wrapped around a wad of cash. “Go pay my rent, Easy. That way they won’t bother us when they see us moving my bags.”
Landlords everywhere love their money. When I paid Daphne’s bill the two men left and the little woman even managed to smile at me.
Daphne had three bags but none of them was the beat-up old suitcase that she carried the first night we met.
We drove a long way. I wanted far from Watts and Compton so we went to East L. A.; what they call El Barrio today. Back then it was just another Jewish neighborhood, recently taken over by the Mexicans.
We drove past hundreds of poor houses, sad palm trees, and thousands of children playing and hollering in the streets.
We finally came to a dilapidated old house that used to be a mansion. It had a great cement porch with a high green roof and two big picture windows on each of the three floors. Two of the windows had been broken out; they were papered with cardboard and stuffed with rags. There were three dogs lounging around and eight old cars scattered around the red clay yard under the branches of a sickly and failing oak tree. Six or seven small children were playing among the wrecks. Hammered into the oak was a small wooden sign that read “rooms.”
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