This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2013 by Thing Itself, Inc.
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.doubleday.com
DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Jacket design by Michael J. Windsor
Jacket photographs: car © Car Culture / Getty Images; motel © FarukUlay / Vetta / Getty Images; city © Sai Yeung Chan / Shutterstock
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Mosley, Walter.
Little green : an Easy Rawlins mystery / Walter Mosley. —1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Rawlins, Easy (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Private investigators—California—Los Angeles—Fiction. 3. African American men—Fiction. 4. Los Angeles (Calif.)—Fiction. 5. Mystery fiction. I. Title.
PS3563.O88456L44 2013
813′.54—dc23
2012036464
eISBN: 978-0-385-53599-1
v3.1
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
About the Author
Other Books by This Author
1
I came half-awake, dead and dreaming. My eyes were open but I couldn’t focus on anything because I was still falling, as if the nightmare had followed me from sleep into the waking world. I didn’t know where I was or where I’d come from. But the bed under me was turning and falling and I, I was sure, had perished. This sensation was so real, so palpable that I closed my eyes and moaned. The movement of the bed then took on a temporal quality; instead of falling I had become unmoored in time: traveling backward and then forward through a life that was mine and yet, at the same time, foreign to me.
I watched my mother dying in the bedroom of our shanty house in New Iberia, Louisiana. She was laid up in a feather bed, a big woman who was trying to catch her breath but couldn’t inhale right. It sounded like she was drowning. She was so pretty, I thought. I had once loved her but could no longer raise this feeling in my heart. I might have even smiled as she shuddered under the labor of simple breathing.
Then I tumbled into a boxcar peopled by brooding and silent black men. They stared at the boy and he saw from their point of view a scared eight-year-old orphan child looking for companionship in those angry, bloodshot eyes. I was no longer that kid but had become those men who couldn’t care about another defenseless child orphaned and destined, probably, to die. I saw myself and wondered, almost idly, if that young son would live to the end of the line.
I was surprised to see that he had made it to Fifth Ward, Houston, Texas. Stealing oranges, skulking in back-alley corners, asking everyone he met if they knew a name—Martin. “My grandfather,” he said. He’d learned to speak up and stand straight. He already carried scars that would follow him through life but he found his grandfather: a hard man who allowed him to sleep on the outside front porch at night.
Time picked up speed after that. In an instant the boy, Ezekiel, was a young man, a fool who signed up for the army, for the war. He passed through North Africa, then Italy and France. He fought men and killed them out of reflex and fear. He liberated a concentration camp, a killer opening the gates for the dead and the dying and those left with the image of death permanently imprinted on their souls.
I was dying, no, had died.
Returning to Houston, the man, no longer weak or afraid, found that most of his friends in that part of town were deceased. Renfro had been slaughtered by a jealous woman named Theresa who in turn died from alcohol poisoning. Martin killed a white man and then shot himself in the burning shack where the boy had slept on the porch. Minna Rogers, Delphine Montesque, Michael Michaels, Big Boy Sanders, and dozens of others, all died while the boy-turned-man had survived the greatest war in history.
“Easy?”
There was a flood rising in the room that was swathed in darkness. My right ankle was shackled to the floor next to the bed, and the water was already up to my ears. I pulled against the chain but all that did was cause me pain. My ankle hurt like a motherfucker and the chain would not give. I tried to rise, hoping that I could float to the extent of the bond, that maybe I could keep my nose above water, but I knew somehow that my luck had run out, that Death had come in on me while I was distracted by the mountains of evil I had lived through. Just the fact that I could survive such terror made me guilty, and now he was coming up through the floorboards like he did for my mother.
Death. I had followed him through all the years of my life as he dropped bodies in my path as little reminders to me and others that the end of the road was no bed of roses, no kingdom come. It felt as if my whole life was an obstacle course, a slogging journey trying to catch up with Death, trying to get a good look at his face.…
“Easy.”
And then, up ahead, on my journey through a past life that no longer belonged to me, I saw his back; the Reaper was right there in front of me, carelessly firing a pistol into the night. I could reach out and touch his shoulder. When I did this he grunted and turned and I realized that I knew this being, this deadly force that had dogged me from the earliest moments of my life.
He was well dressed for any occasion or epoch. Smiling with a gold tooth that had a diamond embedded in it, he was a colored man, not black but light-skinned and light-eyed. A brother who had littered the road I traveled with so many dead that even he had lost count.
“Easy.”
His lips didn’t move but I recognized my name, my true name, not the one my dead father gave me. Raymond Alexander, known as Mouse to his victims and friends alike, smiled at me and I shivered in pleasure and fear.
“Ray,” I said, and his smile slowly diminished.
He stared at me and shook his head. I almost cried but then I remembered who I was and what I’d been through.
“No, man,” I said. “You can’t dismiss me like some schoolkid. You can’t turn your back on me after all these years.”
He smiled again, and even though I was dead I felt elation. This emotion was followed by the sense of falling again. There was a broad ocean rippling gently under a partial moon and the execution of a perfect accelerating arc of plummeting downward. A shackle was affixed painfully to my right ankle but, impossibly, Mouse was still standing there in front of me, his expression daring me to do something about the fix I was in.
“You expect me to fly, motherfucker?” I yelled.
Mouse laughed without sound and nodded at me.
“Easy, wake up.”
The command was feminine, a nuisance that somehow carried weight. The panorama of my hallucinatory journey called to me. I wanted to go off with Mouse, to follow the long line of dead black folks, soldiers, and Jews. I wanted to join the people I killed and the ones I couldn’t save. I wanted to shed my scarred and pain-riddled body. One more breath seemed like too much to bear.
“Easy, it’s time for you to wake up.”
I tried to open my eyes but I was a child again, a slave to sleep, needing just two more minutes of rest. But a hand shook my shoulder and little aches came awake through my upper torso and down my spine.
It was this pain that opened my eyes.
I could see after a fashion but my vision wasn’t proper yet. I couldn’t get a bead on the room I was in, but the beautiful Asian woman sitting beside me on the bed was clear and present as a Catholic priest preparing to give last rites.
Instead of incense there was a mild floral scent of perfume.
“Lynne?” I said. My voice was hoarse and congested, cracking hard enough that I thought my throat might bleed.
“I didn’t think you were ever going to wake up, Easy,” the Chinese bit-part TV actress claimed.
“I died,” I said.
She almost responded but then moved to a chair next to the head of my bed.
2
“I died, right?” I said, looking at the lovely Lynne Hua sitting in the off-white padded chair there next to me.
She was wearing a slight and short maroon dress made from fine silk. She crossed her olive legs as if to say, If you don’t respond to this you may very well be dead.
“How are you feeling, Easy?” she asked.
My vision was still playing tricks on me. I could see the young woman but the room around her was blurred, without specific detail or spatial form.
“I …” I said.
Lynne smiled and moved toward the edge of the boxy chair.
“Do you remember what happened?” she asked.
The question almost brought me to tears. I concentrated so hard that I began to tremble.
Lynne took hold of my cold hand and squeezed.
“It’s okay, baby, you had an accident,” Lynne said. She smiled. Her teeth were perfect. “It was very bad, but you’re pretty much all right. You’ve been coming in and out of consciousness for the last two months. Don’t you remember?”
“No.”
“You will.”
“Is this a hospital?”
“No.”
The nondescript room behind Lynne got lighter but I still couldn’t make it out.
“Where?”
“It’s the house that Jewelle MacDonald got you when you were trying to protect your family.”
“How did I get here, Lynne? What happened?”
“I don’t know the whole story, Easy.”
“Tell me what you do know.”
“The doctor said that when you came to and could talk we should make sure you stay calm.”
“I’m calm. I need to know what happened.”
“You were drunk, trying to pass a truck on Highway One.”
“So you’re saying that if I’m not dead I should be.”
“Everybody thought you were,” Lynne said. “Ray got the call from your son at four in the morning. They found your license on the beach and the registration in the glove compartment of your car. It had crashed into the surf.”
“And I was in the water too?”
“Your body was lost. The driver’s-side door was torn off. The police told us that you had probably floated out on the tide.”
“So what happened?”
“I went up to the house with Raymond. Later in the morning after Christmas Black came to watch the kids, Ray and I drove over to Mama Jo’s.”
The image of the tall black witch-woman came up into my mind’s eye. Just the thought of her power and magnetism anchored my floating thoughts.
“What did Jo have to do with it?” I was imagining some mystical rite where the witch had made a bargain with the Devil to raise the dead.
“Ray told her that you had died and that he wanted her to perform the funeral ceremony, especially since the body had been washed away.”
“And did she agree?”
“She looked Raymond in the eye and grabbed him by both shoulders,” Lynne said, still astonished by the act. “She even lifted him up on his toes. And all Ray did was stare back. After a minute or so she let him go and stood up so tall that her head almost touched the roof of the cottage and she said, ‘Your friend is not dead, Raymond. While you’re here feelin’ sorry for yourself he’s out there in pain, near death. Go back to where that accident happened and look for him. Look close.’
“I drove him up to the place you went off the cliff and he climbed down. He was gone for two hours searching through the hillside and bushes, between the big boulders and down along the beach. I just sat there and waited, thinking about how much Ray loved you and how sure Mama Jo was that you had survived. And then, after I knew there was no hope, Raymond came up the side of that mountain with you slung across his back. You know he’s a small man, Ezekiel; you’re almost twice his size, but he carried you halfway up that steep climb, brought you all the way to the car and laid you in the backseat like you were a child.”
“Where was I?” I asked.
“Raymond said that when your car hit the first boulder the door flew off and you were probably thrown free. You fell into these thick bushes. They broke your fall but they also hid you from view. I guess the police just figured you were dead once they saw the car. You’d been there for almost a day and so were suffering from exposure as well as a bad concussion.”
There came a ripple in the atmosphere between me and Lynne.
It felt as if an invisible wall had suddenly come down between us. She was still talking but I could no longer make out the words. I wanted to know everything about my death, but I couldn’t speak or even gesture, and Lynne was slowly moving backward as if her chair was being drawn away by cables into the depths of the featureless room. As she moved off into the distance the light lowered and soon I was, once again, dead and dreaming.
3
The next thing I heard was the chirping of crickets. They cried out in the night like an orchestra of mad violinists playing what they really felt—not what anybody but their potential lovers wanted to hear. For long minutes there was just me under the covers surrounded by the love-hungry insects. I imagined that my bed had been dragged out of the room and I was now in a garden—the twittering chirps were that strong.
And there was something else. There was a breeze wafting over me: a chilly nighttime desert breeze that made me shiver and almost want to giggle. I was awake but my eyes were closed.
There was a scratchy striking sound and then a brief susurration. I smelled the sharp sulfuric odor of a struck match and then, five seconds later, there came the delicious scent of burning tobacco. I took in a deep breath and then exhaled with a grunt of pure satisfaction.
One day cigarettes would kill me, but ten thousand days before that final hour they would be a balm, a medicine, and a doorway to a whole lifetime of memories, like Proust’s fateful madeleine.
This last thought reminded me that I was, basically, an uneducated reader, a man who loved books beyond any other thing outside of family and close friends. André Malraux and Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston and T. S. Eliot lived in me just as surely as back-coun
try lynchings and the scent of a lover’s sex.
I opened my eyes and was not surprised to see Raymond Alexander sitting in the chair that Lynne Hua last inhabited. He was hatless in a glimmering, silver-colored suit and a muted red dress shirt with no tie, open at the collar. Smoke was wafting around his sharp features, and his smile seemed to move with the sinuous wisps.
“You shouldn’t never take another drink as long as you live, man” were his first words to me.
We were good friends, old friends. Our camaraderie had worn down to a comfortable patter that we’d share standing next to each other in front of a firing squad or with one of us visiting the other on his deathbed.
“Lynne said that I almost died,” I said by way of a thank-you for his mythic effort on my behalf.
“Almost?” Mouse replied, holding his hands a foot apart to show the enormity of my understatement. “You was dead, brother. I seen me a whole lotta dead men and you made half’a them look like they might get up and tap their toes. Shit. If Jo didn’t tell me I was lookin’ for a live man I might’a buried you right there under them bushes rather than strain my back.”
He took a pack of Lucky Strikes from his breast pocket, teased out a cigarette, and lit it with the one he was smoking. He leaned over and placed the new cigarette between my lips. This intimate gesture reminded me of family. I inhaled deeply, grateful for that brief moment of feeling.
“Yeah, Easy,” Mouse said. “You know I been dead before too. It wasn’t only that time I was shot and Etta dragged my body off to Jo. Uh-uh. You know when you was off in the war me and this girl, Lorelle Pinchot Richards, started talkin’ ’bout this rich white lady she worked for. Lorelle told me that Mrs. Lottie Montou had all kindsa gold and cash and jewels up in her house. I had told Lorelle that I was in with this bent white dude named Bill that was happy to take whatevah I stole and sell it in New Orleans or Atlanta. He was my fence and my front too. Anyway, Lorelle had this, what she called a first cousin named Vince, and she hinted that me and Vince could empty out the house after she drugged her mistress with a sleepin’ powder.
“We did all that and then, when we was at Vince’s cabin Lorelle held out her arms and said, ‘Come here, baby; gimme some sugah.’ I was young and stupid, and after I took one step Vince, who I later found out was not her cousin, shot me dead in the back. I pitched forward, missed Lorelle, and hit the wall.
Little Green Page 1