“Say what?” the man asked.
“No lie, man. Ray called me to go find his friend’s son. I’m a detective.”
“Shit.”
I handed him my ID.
“Raymond paid me to find out where the boy was last. Now, if you don’t let me in then I’ll have to tell him that the trail ends right up here—at your big toe.”
He studied the picture and pondered the ramifications. Then he handed the ID back.
“Mouse, huh?”
Ray was known in every illegal corner of Los Angeles, and most of the rest of Southern California.
“Wait here,” the man I dubbed Big Boy said at last.
He went through a red door beyond the yellow chair and closed it behind him. I heard a bolt being thrown and smiled, because that meant he was taking me seriously.
I couldn’t see Ruby anymore. I wondered if she decided to leave. Her unexpected absence got me thinking about Bonnie Shay. She was getting married. She was with her man. I wasn’t devastated or heartbroken because of my close encounter with death, but there was still sadness there, a melancholy that said no matter how hard I tried I’d never be able to hold on to the happiness I craved.
“Come on,” Big Boy said at the door.
I hadn’t even heard it open.
A black woman in a green-and-gold kimono sat behind an ivory-colored table in the small reception area. Looking down, I could see her well-formed breasts. Her eyes were dead but she smiled pleasantly enough.
This emotional juxtaposition made me feel right at home.
“Come on,” Big Boy said again.
He led me down a long hallway with open doors on either side.
In most of the rooms men and women were having commercialized sex. Nothing looked good or fun. There was a lot of grunting and pounding, urging and gyration. The whorehouse was in full swing while free love raged in the street below.
We came at last to a closed door. This Big Boy threw open. He stepped to the side, but the hall was so narrow that I had to squeeze by him. As I passed I could feel his hot breath. This made me think of Ruby talking to me on the Strip. I hoped that she’d be out there when I left.
There were three lamps on in the low room, but mere electric light had failed to illuminate the darkness. The office was furnished with a desk, two thin-legged doelike chairs, and a soiled tan sofa.
Big Boy took one of the chairs and placed it in a corner, where he sat down to keep an eye on me. A white woman, naked except for a turquoise feather boa around her neck, lounged on the vinyl couch. When I came in she lifted her left foot up on the cushion, displaying her pubic area like a beggar exposing his war wound.
Behind the desk sat a well-worn, fortyish white woman with dyed red hair and two blue eyes, one wandering and the other fastened on me.
“Lula Success,” she said, not rising, not holding out a hand.
“Easy Rawlins,” I said.
“That your real name?”
“Can I have a seat?”
She smiled a crooked smile. I took this as an invitation.
The room felt cramped but it was large enough. It was hot in there. The madam’s smile was like that of the alligator at home in the warm waters of my blood.
“Ezekiel,” I said.
“Come again?” Lula said.
“Easy. It comes from Ezekiel.”
For some reason this delighted Lula.
“Do they call you that because things always go your way?” she asked.
“Just the opposite.”
“You’re not here for pussy, are you, Mr. Easy?”
“Not right now. You see, a few nights ago a young man named Evander Noon came here on an acid trip with a girl named Ruby—”
“The makeup hippie girl,” Lula interjected.
“—and he, Evander, left with a man dressed all in green—I’m told.”
“Maurice,” Lula said to Big Boy. “I should have known.”
“Known what?” I asked.
“Are you here for Haman Rose?”
“Never heard of him. My friend Mouse sent me.”
“Oh, yeah, Arthur said something about him.”
I supposed Arthur was the name Big Boy went by at this job. It probably wasn’t his real name. You only gave people your real name if they paid you with a check.
“Who’s Haman Rose?” I asked.
“The kind of guy you don’t want looking for you.”
“Neither is Mouse,” I said, and Arthur Big Boy grunted.
Lula frowned at her employee.
“I don’t want any trouble, Easy,” she said. “I remember the young man. He was flying pretty high. Maurice was here that night. But I don’t remember if he had anything to do with your friend … do you, Sparkle?”
“Uh-uh,” the naked couch ornament murmured.
“They left together,” Arthur said.
“When?” I asked.
“Maybe around ten. Maurice said that he had a new girl for us, but when he met the kid he forgot all about that and they split.”
“Where?”
“I’ont know.”
“And this Haman Rose has been looking for him?”
“Keith Handel was,” Big Boy said. “But everybody knows that Keith works for Rose.”
I turned back to Lula.
“You know where I can find any of those men?”
“We aren’t that close. I do business with Maurice from time to time, but I’ve never kissed him on the lips.”
All the forward motion of that night came to a halt then. I wasn’t weak, but the strength Jo’s medicine had given me was gone. I sat there a few seconds too long without speaking.
“You disapprove of prostitution, Mr. Easy?” Lula asked, maybe just to fill in the silence.
“Not at all. I’m just a little surprised to find it here, with all the free love out there in the street.”
Lula’s sneer seemed to be accented by her wandering eye.
“Nothing’s free,” she said. “Free sex is like a pusher giving you a sample of his heroin. Once you get a taste you start paying.”
“For everything except air,” I agreed.
“Except that.”
19
Walking down the stairs I felt the strain in my thighs. I was getting weaker by the moment, and there was a long road left yet to travel. I took my time, because thinking and walking had started to vie for my attention. I’d take two steps and then stop, wondering where Evander was and what he had to do with a man in green that bad men were looking for. Then two more steps …
The parking lot was empty of life. The cars looked so settled and secure that I considered climbing into one and taking a brief eight- or nine-hour nap.
“Hi,” she said, giving the word two syllables.
Ruby had come from behind a slender pine at the edge of the lot.
“I was smoking this joint,” she said.
“That someone gave you for flowers,” I added.
She smiled. “Want some?”
“You hungry?”
“Like a beast,” she said.
Down near La Cienega was a disheveled little diner called Holly Heron’s All-Night Chili Palace. Ruby and I crowded in at the counter.
There was a jukebox playing from the corner.
That was the first time I ever heard the song “Somebody to Love” by the Jefferson Airplane. I liked the moodiness of the lead singer’s voice. I also liked it later on when I found out that they took their name from the bluesman Blind Lemon Jefferson.
Ruby wanted chili and I ordered a hamburger, even though I knew it would make my gut ache. I wasn’t bothered by pain that much in those days after coming to from the accident. Feeling anything, even if I didn’t enjoy the sensation, was like a little blessing.
“You got a girlfriend?” someone asked. I was unsure of who it was because the diner was packed and everybody was talking and the music was playing and my thoughts seemed to have sounds of their own.
Ruby pul
led on my jacket sleeve.
“Hey, Easy,” she said.
“What?”
“Do you have a girlfriend?”
“I was in love with a woman named Bonnie,” I said, though I hadn’t meant to. It was as if the words had a will of their own and decided to come and play. “We lived together, and when my little girl got sick she took her to Europe and got a cure. Feather is alive because of Bonnie.”
“Your daughter’s name is Feather?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s cool.”
“In order to help her Bonnie reconnected with an old boyfriend. They got close there for a while and when she came back I couldn’t stand it and threw her out of my house.”
“It’s the pigs, man!” someone shouted, and the noisy restaurant went silent.
The only sound was the Rolling Stones’ “Ruby Tuesday.”
In the mirror on the other side of the counter I could see through the glass behind me. Four uniformed cops were passing by, looking into the restaurant for misdemeanors or worse.
When they were gone the din wound up again.
“Wow,” Ruby said. “And you never asked her to come back?”
“I did but it was too late.”
“So what did you do?”
“Drove my car off a cliff up on Pacific Coast Highway.”
The food came then. A wild-eyed freckled white woman with a strawberry blond Afro put the plates down in front of us.
“Peace,” the waitress said.
Instead of taking up her spoon Ruby put her hand on mine. I was deeply grateful for the gesture and not sure why.
“I’m from Ohio,” she said. “My folks were born again. I never did anything they said and they hated me. Really they did. My mother told me that I was the devil and their burden. My father said that everybody’d be better off if I was dead.
“On my sixteenth birthday I balled my civics teacher and we ran away in his Pinto to L.A. We had this nice little apartment down on Venice Beach, but then one night he brings home this chick named Sandy. He said she needed a place to crash, but before a week they moved me out in the street. Then they went up to Berkeley and had a baby. They invited me to the wedding.”
“Did you go?”
“No.”
“Well,” I opined, “at least he got you away from parents who wanted you to die.”
Ruby thought about this a moment and then smiled brightly.
“I like you, Easy.”
These words seemed to bring on the exhaustion that was hovering over me. I tried to answer Ruby, but all I could do was sigh.
“You look beat,” she said.
“Still recuperating from the crash. I’m okay for a while, but then the legs are cut out right from under me.”
“Can you make it home?”
I shook my head, realizing that this motion took more energy than saying no.
“I could drive your car,” she suggested.
“It’s down on San Vicente. I couldn’t walk that far.”
Ruby had a young face, its emotions transparent like a child’s. She took a deep breath, held it while concentrating, and then said, “I know. Do you have a dime?”
I handed her the coin and she ran to a phone booth set against the far wall of the diner.
I considered putting my head down on the counter, next to the uneaten hamburger. But I worried that something bad might happen while I dozed. So instead I looked around the long room at the mostly white crowd. That place reminded me of the colored joints I’d frequented in my younger years.
When the Watts Riots had ended I saw the divisions form among the nonwhite races of L.A. I’d also seen a split in our own community, where brother turned against brother and corrupt city officials stepped in to take their revenge. But in that hippie diner there was the hint of something hopeful. There were white people realizing for the first time what it was like to be shunned and segregated, fired for no reason and arrested because of the way they looked.
“He’s on his way,” Ruby said. She took me by the elbow, and I followed her as if she was my mother or some trusted neighbor on the dirt road of my childhood.
“I have to pay,” I said.
Ruby steered me to the cash register, where I gave the freckled waitress seven dollars.
Outside I leaned against a wooden telephone pole, hoping that the police had better things to do than to roust me again.
Life in the form of lights swirled around me, and for a while time passed without my direct involvement. Ruby was standing next to me, but she also was distracted by the gaudy pinwheel of Sunset.
“You Ruby?” a man said.
Looking down I saw an electric blue mid-fifties Chrysler. There was a furry-faced guy leaning out from the driver’s-side window.
“Yeah,” she said. “My friend here and me need a ride just up on Ozeta Terrace a few blocks north.”
“Is he sick?” Furface asked. “You know it’s a bitch cleaning the vomit out from between the cushions and the carpet.”
“He’s just tired. He was in an accident,” Ruby assured him.
The next thing I knew I was being poured into the backseat of the car. Coming to rest was almost a spiritual delight.
“This a taxi?” I asked as the car pulled out into Sunset traffic.
“It’s the Blue Tortoise,” the driver said, “a hippie cab. You got money? Dope?”
“Six dollars?” I said.
“That’ll be fine.”
I don’t remember the ride or getting out of the cab. The next thing I knew I was standing, propped up by Ruby, before a large door in a dark courtyard. This door was the portal to a mansion that loomed above us.
“Where are we?” I asked my new friend.
“A place where I crash sometimes,” she said. “I keep my makeup box here.”
“Oh,” I replied, thinking that I could go to sleep right there, standing outside.
“Here you go, Easy,” Ruby said. “Lean against the wall while I get the key.”
Time passed, crickets sang, now and again a car would drive by beyond the tall hedge that separated the courtyard from the street.
The next thing I knew I was on my back and someone was pulling down my pants. My shirt and jacket were already off, socks and shoes too.
I kind of wanted to resist, but then the final wave of sleep rolled in and dragged me out to unconsciousness on a tranquil and moonlit sea.
20
Given enough time I can recall each and every sexual encounter I’ve ever had—in some detail; that is, except for that night.
At one point I came halfway to consciousness thinking that I was holding my erection, masturbating on the floor in a strange dark room. But when I willed my hand to stop I realized that someone else was stroking me slowly.
I tried to rise but a hand pushed me back down.
“Sh,” she said, and things went blank again for a while.
The orgasm brought me nearly all the way awake, but just for a moment. Drifting back into sleep I felt a kiss on my lips and a weight being taken off my chest.
“You’re beautiful,” she said, and I luxuriated in the compliment and the slow descent into blissful darkness.
Then there was light, sunlight coming through a tiny window high up on the wall of a room no larger than a long broom closet. I was naked and Ruby was too. There was a blanket draped around both our legs and coming up to her shoulder. She was on her side with her right arm thrown across my chest. I tried to remember what my hands had been doing with the girl, but I couldn’t conjure an image or even a sense memory. This failure made me feel incompetent.
There was something moving. That’s what had awakened me, not the light. On my left side my pants were sliding toward the door, slowly, maybe even stealthily. I watched the maroon leather belt in the straw-colored trousers move past my elbow down to hip level before I understood what was going on.
“Hey!” I shouted, and then jumped up.
I lunged at the partia
lly open door of the tiny room and grabbed a scruffy-looking guy by the arm.
“Let go!” he yelled back.
His right hand was gripping my suit pants.
“Then let go’a my clothes!” I told him.
“Yancy!” Ruby screamed. “Get the fuck outta here! What’s wrong with you?”
The little hippie guy was pulling on my pants. He was shorter than Ruby and rail thin, but I was still weak and found myself losing the tug-of-war with a ruddy little white guy with shoulder-length black hair and a beard.
“Yancy!” a youngish male voice declared.
The little guy let go of my pants and fell backward on his butt. There was a wacky element to his tumble, like in an Abbott and Costello skit.
Yancy had deep green eyes that opened wide to take in the newcomer.
This was a tall late adolescent with very long and stringy dirty blond hair, bad skin, and a nose that was bulbous and in poor contrast to his long face.
“Terry,” Yancy said. “Hey, man, listen …”
“This motherfucker was tryin’ to steal Easy’s pants,” Ruby said before Yancy could concoct some lie. “We were sleepin’ in the little room and he tried to pull his pants out from under us.”
“I just wanted to borrow a few dollars,” Yancy said. “You guys were sleepin’. I didn’t want to bother you. I just needed some breakfast.”
“There’s food in the kitchen,” Terry said. He looked nineteen, but I would have bet he was younger. Ugliness just piled the years on him.
“I … I … I didn’t know,” Yancy was saying.
“The fuck you didn’t, thief,” Ruby spat.
“You got to go, Yancy,” Terry said as he pushed a lock of moplike hair from his face. “I can’t have people stealing from each other in my house. That’s bad karma, man.”
Yancy got to his feet and focused his angry green eyes on me. His hair was neither straight nor curly; it was more crinkled, like pubic hair.
“Nigger,” he said.
“Oh, no,” Terry said. “Go, go on.”
The tall hippie boy waved his hand in a way that seemed truly regal. Yancy stooped under the weight of this gesture and then scuttled down the stairs.
The fact that there was a downstairs told me that I was above the first floor of the big house. I wondered how Ruby got me to climb in my weakened condition. Reflecting on this thought, I wondered if I was still suffering from concussion. My mind seemed flighty, easily led down any tangent. I should have been angry by the attempted theft; there was anger there, but I couldn’t hold on to it.
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