He came smiling down the hall a minute later.
“Easy!” Mouse exclaimed. “It’s a real pleasure to see you on your feet, brother.”
“Ray,” I said on an exhalation.
He was wearing dark blue work pants and an equally dark gray sweater. The blouse was cashmere, but most people couldn’t tell that from a glance. The color scheme, or the darkness of it, told those in the know that Raymond was ready to do business: the kind of illegal business that he’d been practicing since childhood.
“Why don’t you go upstairs and pull out Easy’s tan suit, the linen one, a blue shirt, and his felt brown shoes,” Mouse said to Antigone.
“Why?” the registered nurse asked, bureaucratic danger in her voice.
“Because me and Easy got to go out in the world and do some business.”
“No,” Antigone Fowler said.
Mouse looked at her and grinned.
“I mean it, Mr. Alexander,” she continued. “Mr. Rawlins is not nearly strong enough to be out and active. He’s suffered a terrible blow to his system. He needs rest.”
“Listen, Annie,” Mouse said in an almost sympathetic tone. “Either go upstairs and get Easy’s things or go on home. I will send you the money I owe you by Friday next.”
The anger and hardness in “Annie” Fowler’s face spoke of her deep commitment to her profession. Raymond was her employer and he could dismiss her at any time. But I was her responsibility, her charge. She could leave—she wanted to—but that would be abandoning her duty, and that was something this woman would never do.
She nodded her reluctant assent.
“While you’re at it,” I said, “could you collect my wallet and keys and any loose change that I might have?”
“Anything else?” she asked.
“Yeah. What’s the phone number here?”
“I can tell ya that, Ease,” Mouse said.
Upon hearing this, Antigone Fowler walked away to reluctantly do our bidding.
“You got the new number memorized?” I asked my oldest friend.
“It was easy too,” he said, “because it’s the old number with a new exchange.”
“How’d that happen?”
“Jewelle got an in with the phone company.”
Twenty-five minutes later Mouse and I were driving off in his brand-new 1967 El Dorado. It was pink, as many of Mouse’s cars were.
Nurse Fowler had removed the IV needle from my arm and put a bandage over the puncture.
Raymond drove down the curvy cobblestone path through the arboretum of a front yard until finally coming to a great iron gate in the middle of a fourteen-foot-high stone wall. Mouse got out and did something at the side of the gate and it slowly swung open. He drove us outside into the outer driveway, got out, and performed some other juju to close the entrance.
As we drove southward out of Bel-Air I sat back and began to fade from consciousness.
“You okay, Easy?” Mouse asked, causing my mind to blunder back toward awareness.
“You know, maybe Antigone was right,” I said. “I mean, you even had to tie my shoes back there.”
“Open up the glove compartment,” he said as if in reply.
I did as he asked.
“Under the maps,” Mouse urged.
There, beneath a folded map of Arkansas, was a small crystal vial filled to its cork stopper with about an ounce and a half of lemon yellow liquid.
“Arkansas?” I said, picking up the vial.
“Did a little job out there a few weeks ago,” he muttered. “Drink it down, man.”
“What is it?”
“I can’t tell ya what’s in it. I just know what it does. Mama Jo give me twenty’a them li’l bottles for when I get hangovers. She said that when I need to be able to keep sharp this will do the trick. Go on, drink it.”
I pulled out the stopper and downed the contents in one draft. It had the strong taste of fruit: not berry or citrus, apple or grape, but all of those flavors, highly concentrated—enough to make me pull my head back as if I had just slugged down an especially strong alcohol drink.
“Somethin’, huh?” Mouse said.
“Wow.” Within seconds I could feel the effects of the homemade medicine. It was like the sun rising in my chest and a clear sky blooming in my head. “What is that?”
“You know Jo,” Raymond said. “She studied with every Chinese, Mexican, Indian, and savage tryin’ to learn what she can. She does things make most doctors say, ‘No, she did not.’ ”
I was coming awake for the first time since opening my eyes in the upstairs bedroom. I still felt like a dead man, but a dead man with a jig in his heart.
Mouse drove and I sat there next to him listening to radio station KGFJ. The song playing, I remember, was “Higher and Higher.” Your love keeps lifting me higher.… Maybe it was the subject of the song that made Raymond decide to broach Bonnie Shay.
“You call her?” he asked. He didn’t need to say who.
“I’ll tell you what, Raymond.”
“What’s that?”
“You want me to go out looking for this boy, right?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Then let’s not talk about who I am and am not callin’.”
“You got it, Easy.”
Mouse was the most dangerous man I ever knew. He was deadly and criminal, vengeful and capable of taking matters into his own hands. But for all of that he appreciated the simple things in life: a well-told joke, a blunt statement of fact.
He wanted to talk about Bonnie and I didn’t, so we sat there listening to Otis Redding, the Association, and the Fifth Dimension on L.A.’s premier soul station.
I was surprised at how clearheaded Jo’s elixir had made me. My memory was still spotty, but my body felt like it belonged to me and would at least try to obey if I gave it a command.
When the news came on I turned the radio off.
“Did you really carry me all the way up half the side of that cliff?” I asked.
“Sure did,” he said, shaking his head to emphasize the energy exerted.
“That’s amazing.”
“Not really.”
“If you was a boxer you could hardly make lightweight, Ray. I’m a light-heavy at least.”
“That’s true. But you know I got this thing in my head.”
“What thing?”
“When the need comes it just opens up and I’m like two people. I think twice as fast and I get stronger than a motherfucker. When I seen you lyin’ there like that I just grabbed you and threw you ’cross my back. I didn’t think that I couldn’t do it. No, sir, not me. I do what has to be done. That’s all there is to it.”
We made it to Fairfax and drove down to Pico, turned left and cruised about five blocks, where we turned right on Stanley. Not four buildings south of Pico was a turquoise duplex. We pulled to the curb in front of this building.
“Timbale live here?” I asked.
“There’s another duplex, exactly the same, right behind this one,” he said. “She lives in the top unit.”
“Is she home?”
“I think so.”
“Didn’t you call?”
Mouse shook his head.
“Why not?”
“Little Green was up on Sunset,” he said instead of answering my question. “He met a white girl up there. I don’t remember the name. Anyway, she had told him that they should go to this discotheque and he was all excited about it.
“Timbale is from the Deep South, and so she told him to come home. But he was stubborn and she said to be careful around those white people and spent the whole night waitin’ up for him. But he didn’t come home and he didn’t call. And when the days went by she got desperate.”
“That’s when she called you?”
“She ain’t call me, man. She got this friend named Lissa, who I know to talk to. Lissa called me and told me what I just told you.”
“You called Evander Little Green,” I said. “How come?�
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“That’s my nickname for him.”
“So you are a friend of the family?”
“Not really.”
“But even so we gonna go up there and talk to Timbale.”
“You gonna to have to go on up there by yourself, Easy.”
“Why?”
“Me and Timbale don’t really get along. I mean, that woman hates the water I drink and the sun that shine on my back.”
“But you’re worried about her and her son?”
“There’s many a time when Etta hate my guts. That don’t mean I can’t love her.”
“Timbale was a girlfriend?”
“Never,” he said with a curl to his lip.
“Can you give me any more than that?”
“Easy, I give ya what you need to know. A boy is missin’. His mother is on the top apartment behind this one. She’s the last one that talked to him. It don’t mattah what me and Timbale have between us.”
It was perplexing, my friend’s motivation, but it didn’t seem to be all that important. He was right—the problem was before me, not in that car.
9
The first nine steps were a real pleasure. I was up on my feet and walking just as if I was a living man in the real world who knew about gravity but didn’t worry about it bringing him down.
That got me to the concrete path at the side of the front apartment building. The concrete used to lay the path had been tinted a blue color that was meant to match with the turquoise plaster of the buildings—instead it clashed. When I noticed the discord of coloration my step began, ever so slightly, to falter.
All that means is that I’m still a little weak, I said to myself.
I was walking just as well as any other man: one step after another, evenly, in a forward motion.
But when I got to the little raised patio that served as a buffer between the two buildings I stopped before taking the step up. I was like a sentient gas engine that suspected that the fuel gauge was past empty. I was going just fine but at any moment the flow might begin to sputter.
I took the step up to the brick courtyard and strode in six paces to the bottom of the stairs. I estimated twenty-one white stonelike steps to the upper landing. Twenty-one.
Those stairs might have been one of the twelve trials of Hercules. Between the pain in my ankle, the dizziness, and the unfamiliar strain on the muscles pulling my body weight upward, I felt like a juggler forced to ply his trade just a few seconds after being shaken out of a deep sleep.
I also had the almost hallucinatory impression of leaving an image of myself on each passing stair. Every progressive Easy was a few years older and weaker than the last. When I made it to the small stone landing it felt like I had reached the century mark.
My lungs were working harder than a blacksmith’s bellows against white fire. I was sweating like a long-distance runner on the last leg of a losing race.
The turquoise door was open but the gray screen was closed. I put my hand against the doorjamb and counted out four deep breaths before pressing the ivory-colored plastic button next to my hand.
The ensuing bell was the two-tone economy brand, the kind of bell that a builder bought in bulk expecting to be asked to erect another building like the last and the one before that.
When there was no immediate answer my mind began making up things again. I imagined that I was almost a dead man and the bell was my request for eternal sleep. The reason for no answer was that my application had to be reviewed. I was being forced to hold on to the pain and exhaustion of life until the powers that be could make a judgment on the long list of things I’d done wrong.
The notion was ridiculous enough to get me to smile.
“Can I help you?” a woman asked.
She was dark-skinned and short, with hair cut closer than a marine recruit’s. Her build, in the simple, short-sleeved olive-colored dress, was slender and yet brawny, like many a sharecropper I’d known in my days in the South. I noted that the dress had one big pocket on the left thigh. I knew she was in her mid-thirties but she could have passed for fifty easily. Her brutal face was softened by the roundness of her features and also by the slightly fearful tone under the anger in her voice.
She wasn’t in any way pretty, but this woman was what the black sons of cotton pickers dreamed about when they had women in mind.
“Miss Noon?”
“Who’s askin’?”
“My name is Easy Rawlins.” Just saying these words dispelled the greater part of my exhaustion and banished pain to the outer regions of awareness. “I’m here because Ray Alexander asked me to come. He told me that your son, Evander, has gone missing and you might need someone to root him out.”
The permanent scowl on Timbale’s face hid any reaction she might have had to these words. But I didn’t care. I was still tickled at the magic quality of speaking my name.
“You a preacher, Mr. Rawlins?”
“No, ma’am, a private detective.”
“I never met a Negro detective before.”
“We’re a rare breed,” I acknowledged. “But you know a black man has to be twice as good if he claims to be equal with a white.”
The hardscrabble woman nodded against her will. When the truth is spoken among women and men like us there had to be an amen, had to be.
“You don’t look like you could root out a radish from sandy soil,” she said, thick Mississippi in her words.
“If you’re saying that I look tired, you’re right,” I said. “I wouldn’t refuse a chair and some lemonade.”
Asking a Southern woman for plain hospitality was like winking at a leprechaun: She had to give up her pot of gold no matter what.
“Come on in then,” she said.
She unlatched the screen door, pulled it open, and, after a stutter of hesitation, moved to the side.
I entered the small and bare foyer. The floor was waxed pine and the wallpaper was light lime paper decorated with tiny cherry branches that were set in slanting lines. Timbale walked through to a slip of a room that ended, after only fifteen feet or so, at a glass door that opened up to a plant-filled terrace. It was a small veranda with room for just two iron chairs, painted white, and a low glass-topped cast-iron table.
We didn’t go outside, however. Timbale had me sit on a backless couch in the den; then she went off to see to my refreshment.
“Excuse me a minute, Mr. Rawlins,” she said as she went.
There were so many plants out on the platform that all I could see above them was the sky. Succulents, ferns, and a couple of potted pines made up most of the greenery. Plants that were simple to pot and grow.
A rattling from a distant place in the apartment caused me, for no identifiable reason, to wonder exactly what I was doing there. This inner question brought me to a memory of when I had been wounded six days after the Battle of the Bulge. A sniper had been aiming somewhere else, missed the mark, and the ricochet grazed my shoulder.…
“Here we go,” Timbale said.
She came back into the room carrying a plastic tumbler in each fist. The liquid contained in the semiopaque containers was reddish in color.
“Don’t have no fresh-squeezed lemonade,” she said. “Kool-Aid will have to do.”
She put the glass down on the TV stand next to me. I let my whole body list forward to pick up the plastic tumbler.
“What you got to do with Ray Alexander?” There was no give in her voice.
“He has retained me to help you find Evander, if that’s what you want to do.”
A spasm of anger went through her thin body. A little red sugar water sloshed out and down her knuckles.
“You really are a detective?” she asked.
I took out my wallet and showed her the license I’d procured after helping the police with a crime that they would have never solved on their own.
She read it, nodding her head angrily, and then passed the little card back.
“I was at work,” she said. It was the
beginning of a story that she had gone over again and again, hoping for a different ending. “At Proxy Nine, where I’m a nighttime security guard—”
“Proxy Nine?” I asked. “The French insurance company?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“Nothing. I mean, I got friend named Jackson Blue that works there.”
“I never heard’a him. He work days?”
“Mostly.”
“Anyway,” Timbale said, “I was at work at a little after nine o’clock and Evander called me. He always calls around then. I could tell that he was outside, because I heard traffic, and so I asked him where he was. He didn’t wanna say, but finally he told me that he had gone up to the Sunset Strip to see what all the hippies looked like and met up with these people that invited him to go to this club.”
“Which club?”
“He didn’t say.”
“Mr. Alexander said that it was a girl that asked him.”
“How he know that?”
I raised my palms and shrugged.
“It was a girl,” Timbale agreed. “He didn’t wanna tell me at first, but after I kept askin’ he said. Her name was Ruby, but she was a white girl. I told him I didn’t want him to go, but he wouldn’t listen. He’s almost twenty years old and got a job workin’ for the Tolucca Mart grocery store on Robertson. At least, he did have that job. They told me that they had to fire him when I called to see if he had been there.”
“Had he been there?”
“No. Nobody done seen him since he called that night.”
Timbale Noon had cried all her tears in an earlier life. At this late stage the best she could do was frown and shake her head over one more blow to her attempt at happiness.
“Can you find him, Mr. Rawlins?” she asked, looking up.
“I can sure look.”
The smile that crossed her lips and faded was like one of those rare flowers that blossom once a year for twenty-four hours and then wither.
Before I could ask another question the screen door flew open, followed by the clatter of feet. Two girls, a teenager and a younger one, burst into the den.
“Hi, Mom!” the younger girl exclaimed. “Did Evy call?”
“No, baby,” Timbale said.
Little Green Page 4