Arnie wanted to say something but Stetz said, “Just go.”
Something about the way Stetz sent Arnie away made me like the man. In those two words he said, “You’re hopeless, Arnie, but I’ve got to keep you around because we’ve known each other so long and because I can still squeeze an ounce of worth out of you now and then.” It reminded me of my job at Sojourner Truth.
Stetz was a good-looking white man. Tall and comfortable with the elevation, he had a good tan and light brown hair. His eyes wavered between brown and yellow and his shoulders had seen their days of labor.
His suit was dark blue.
“Sit down,” he told me. I heard the door close on Arnie at my back.
“Jackson Blue sent you?” Stetz asked. His eyes looked bored. I had the feeling that he’d asked me in because he didn’t have anything else to do.
He waited for me to sit first.
“Not exactly,” I replied. I didn’t give much because I was still trying to figure the right approach with him. Stetz had kept the doctor’s office exactly as he had found it. There were medical books on the shelves; big oak filing cabinets along the opposite walls. The meandering vine that grew in the window behind him looked as if it had been growing there for over a decade. The central stalk had gone woody.
The desk in front of him was empty except for a Modern Library edition of Meditations by Marcus Aurelius.
“You read?” His question startled me.
“Yeah. Some.”
“You read this?” He held the volume up.
I shook my head no. “But that was his journal, right? He was waging a campaign against the Germans or somebody and wrote down his thoughts about bein’ a right man.”
“What do you want, Mr. Rawlins?”
“I got a problem, and so does Jackson. As I see it your waters might be gettin’ a little rough too. One thing I learned down home was that sometimes men can trade off their losses and come out with a profit.”
“You’re losing me, friend,” Stetz said.
Friend.
“Jackson’s partner’s in jail. There’s half a dozen big-time gamblin’ men in L.A. wanna see Jackson dead, an’ without Ortiz he knows he’s meat. I come to him with my own problem and he sent me to you for a deal.”
“What kinda deal could a nigger have for me?” Stetz said.
He drew the line between us with one word.
“The reason you can’t catch Jackson is ’cause of his system. He tapped onto the phone company with an invention. A machine that records the bets. He got eighteen hundred customers layin’ down bets an’ playin’ numbers with a tape recorder that you couldn’t never find. Jackson got the edge on all you boys, an’ the one that get in on it will be the top dog on bettin’.”
It flowed out easy. One word after the other. Stetz was a smart man, I’d’ve known that without his book, and so he listened.
“And so what would this top dog eat?”
“Jackson’s twelve bookie boxes, the recorders I mean, a paper tellin’ you how to use’em, the phone numbers he got for his customers t’call, and the phone numbers of those customers.”
“And what do I give?”
“You put out the word that Jackson’s outta business. That way nobody got a reason to wanna see him dead. That and one other thing.”
“Money.”
I shook my head. Everything up until that moment had been window dressing. It was all bells and whistles to get the gangster’s attention. Sure, I was trying to save Jackson Blue. But he would either survive the transaction or he wouldn’t; my real business was to save my job, my life, and Bonnie Shay. “I got a friend. She’s in trouble with one’a your friends. She’s willin’ to make up but we got to know that your friend is too.”
“What friend?” Stetz asked. His voice had gotten softer.
“Beam. Joseph Beam.”
Stetz winced. “And your friend?”
“Her name don’t matter. All that matters is that Beam think that she stole from him, but she didn’t. She got somethin’ but it was by mistake. She wanna give him back his property, that’s all.”
Stetz ran the four tips of the fingers of his left hand around his cheek; an insincere smile was on his lips. Maybe he was scared of Beam. Maybe he wanted to stay out of his friend’s business. I had tossed out the bait; it tasted good, but now Stetz had to wonder if it was worth it to swim away from the school.
“What is it?” he asked.
“You know who Roman Gasteau is?”
“Yeah.”
“Him an’ Beam was movin’ aitch. Somehow the last shipment they was movin’ got lost. Beam thinks my friend stole it.”
“Why come to me?” Stetz asked. But his eyes were saying tell me more. “Why don’t you go to Joey?”
“I went to him. At least I tried. But he put his boys on me. Guys named Rupert an’ Li’l Joe. They sapped me up at the Black Chantilly an’ was about to kill me ’fore I run.”
It was all I wanted to say. I knew that Stetz would be interested in any business that his people were doing. If he knew about it, then it was a sweet deal to get his drug back. If he didn’t know, it meant that he’d have to do some house-cleaning. Either way I had a chance to get what I wanted.
“You say this was up at the club?” he asked me.
“In a toolshed around the side of the main house. I had to run right through the front driveway. Somebody musta told you about it.”
“How much heroin?”
“Three pounds about. I don’t know but it looks pretty pure.”
“And you say they were selling it at the club?” “I don’t know about that. All I know is that Beam and Roman was in business wit’ Rupert an’ Li’l Joe.”
Stetz played his cheek with his fingers some more and then asked, “What’s in it for you?”
“They already killed Roman. They probably killed Roman’s brother. My friend is still alive and I’d like to keep her that way. And if I can save Jackson, well, I’d like that too.”
Stetz was a cat in the window, frozen before his leap. I was a bird on the ledge, praying for glass.
“When can you get me these telephone boxes?”
“Today. I could give you the aitch too.”
“I don’t like drugs, Mr. Rawlins. Not too much. You keep it for Joey, that is, if Joey still wants it.”
I read a volume in his words but all I said was, “When and where?”
“We use a warehouse on Alameda sometimes.”
“This afternoon?”
Stetz nodded. He was thinking about something.
“So it’s a deal?” I asked.
“What?”
“You gonna lay off Jackson and let me give what I got over to Beam?”
“I’m going to talk to Joey. And I’ll send somebody over to the warehouse at four to pick up your recorders.”
He gave me the address and I moved to go from the room.
“Rawlins,” he said to my back.
“Yeah?”
“How’d you know about the guy who wrote this book?”
“Rome is closer to Africa than it is to here, Mr. Stetz,” I said.
CHAPTER 39
I CALLED RAYMOND from a phone booth five blocks down from Philly Stetz’s hideaway.
“Could you come meet me up at Mofass’s place?” I asked the onetime gangster.
“What you askin’, Easy?”
“I just need some company, Ray. It’s tough men I’m dealin’ with, but it’s them makin’ money. I just need a friend to stand by me.”
“I ain’t totin’ no gun, Ease. I won’t do that. Not yet.”
“That’s good,” I said. “No need for trouble.”
WE MET AT MOFASS’S HOUSE and picked up Jackson. Mouse was driving a neighbor’s car that he’d borrowed.
“Good-bye,” Jackson said to Jewelle at the front door.
“Bye,” she said. “You gonna call?”
“Come on, Jackson,” I said.
“She sure is sweet,” Jackson was
saying in the car.
“You got better things to think about, Jackson,” I said.
“What’s that?”
I reached over and opened the glove compartment in front of him. Inside was a wax-paper bag. We all knew what it held.
“We gonna sell it?” he asked.
“We ain’t gonna do a thing. All I need for you to do is to tell me where you got them bookie boxes hid.”
“What?”
“We cain’t cut you no slack without somethin’ to trade, Jackson. Those bookie boxes are worth your life.”
“They worth a lot more’n that.”
I don’t think he realized what he was saying.
Mouse, who was sitting in the backseat, put his hand on Jackson’s shoulder. “Let up on it, Blue. It’s time to move on.”
Mouse had a persuasive hand.
Jackson directed us to a Bekins storage warehouse on Pico where he had hidden his boxes. There were fourteen of them. Small black wooden cases, each one about double the size of a table humidor for cigars. Along with them he had a notebook full of the numbers of his clients.
“How do these things work, man?” Mouse asked Jackson. He had one of the boxes opened up across his lap, revealing a small transistor tape recorder and a large dry-cell battery.
“It’s just a circuit switch,” Jackson answered, a little distracted. “After it rings, the switch go off an’ the recorder go on. Then the one who call give their number and the bet.”
When Mouse smiled the blue jewel on his front tooth sparkled.
WE ALL WENT BACK to my house to wait. Jackson didn’t want to go with us to meet Stetz, and we had an hour to kill.
“What the hell is this?” There was a dog turd in the middle of my neatly made bed.
I ran that dog all over the house. He scuttled under the couch and I yanked the thing away from the wall.
“He headed out t’the kitchen!” Mouse yelled out.
I ran right into the kitchen table and banged my thigh pretty bad. Jackson and Mouse tried to help me corner him but Pharaoh was too quick and they were mostly laughing anyway.
He finally took a bad turn into Feather’s room and I got him in a corner. He started yowling like Death had gotten hold of him—he wasn’t too far from wrong. The running had tired me and cut my anger a hair; if I had caught him a second sooner he would have had something to scream about. As it was I brought him out to the car and threw him into the trunk.
“Easy, you shouldn’t let that dog get under yo’ skin like that, man. He just a dumb dog,” Mouse said. “He don’t know what he doin’.”
I would have hit anyone but Mouse. I might have been angry but I hadn’t yet gone mad.
I CLEANED UP MY BED and sulked on the couch. Jackson sat across from me, writing out his instructions on how to use the bookie boxes.
Mouse was squatting down next to the door—reading a book!
“You read?” I asked him.
“Li’l bit, brother. Li’l bit. EttaMae make me an’ LaMarque sit’own sometimes an’ go through his readin’ lessons. I picked up a little.”
“What’s that you readin’?”
Mouse showed me his gold-encrusted teeth and said, “Treasure Island.”
I could feel the world turning under my feet. At any minute I could have gone spinning off into space. My children were changing every day. The headlines spoke of every kind of tragedy. You couldn’t just live life anymore—that’s how it seemed to me; you had to take notes and study charts just to know how to take the same road to the same place you’d always gone. And even when you got there, it was no longer the same.
The morning edition of the paper was still on the front porch. It said that the Bird Man of Alcatraz was dead. The man who had become a scientist in his cell. He was a hero down among my people because he was one white man who understood the odds that we faced. The prison officials interviewed said that he was just a criminal and that the public, and the movies, were mistaken in thinking that he was a good man.
They had no idea of goodness or honesty. They had power and that’s what they thought was good.
I would have mourned the passing of Robert Stroud, but there was no time to grieve.
“All right, boys,” I said. “Let’s hit it.”
Mouse slammed the book shut and put it on the floor. He stood up and smiled at me like he had done so many times since we were children in the Houston slums.
Mouse stood up but Jackson stayed in his chair.
“Come on, Jackson,” I said. “You could wait for us in the car.”
“I cain’t, man. I cain’t go.”
I didn’t press him. I didn’t care. Jackson wasn’t going to be of any help. And I was happy that he played the coward; at least that way the world made a little sense.
“Mouse,” I called out.
“Yeah, Easy. I’m out here in the kitchen.”
I heard a drawer close shut and then Mouse appeared. He met my eye with a somber face. I shuddered but I wasn’t quite sure why.
CHAPTER 40
EASY,” MOUSE SAID when we got out to his car, “what you plan to do with that dog?”
“Take him out to Primo. Primo could find some old lady like a dog like that.”
“Gimme the keys.”
“Naw, man,” I said. “Leave him in the trunk.”
“Gimme the keys.”
“What for?”
“Dog could suffocate in there, Easy. Don’t worry, I’ll watch him. You drive an’ I’ll hold the dog.”
PHARAOH WAS CALM in Mouse’s lap. We went downtown to Phyllo Place off Alameda. We made good time because the traffic was unusually light.
The address Stetz had given me was on the side of an alley that fed out onto the street. There was an arrow that pointed back into the alley for the number we wanted.
I parked the car and looked.
“Don’t look good,” I said to Raymond.
“But it’s a business deal, right?” Mouse said, the soul of logic.
“Yeah, but it’s a little close back there.”
“They ain’t after you, Easy. They just want them tape recorders. You ain’t chargin’, so why they wanna hurt you?”
The world had surely changed if I was going to listen to Mouse about what was safe and what wasn’t. But he made sense. All I was doing was handing over a fortune to Stetz. And I was going to help Beam too. At least until I could tell Lieutenant Lewis about who had the aitch he was moving.
I took the turn into the alley and drove down the red brick path until I came to another turn that led to a large garage door.
Mouse and I got out of the car, leaving Pharaoh whining inside.
We were in a deep hole of gray cement walls. It was a bright day, but there wasn’t much sun that found its way to that gangster’s door. The walls went up about nine floors but there was only one slender slit of a window.
I was happy that I’d remembered to bring my pistol—just in case Mouse was wrong.
“Watch it, Easy!” my friend yelled.
I turned and saw two men and then Mouse rammed me with his shoulder. Two shots sounded and echoed in the chamber of walls. The side window of the car exploded. Mouse pulled a meat cleaver from his belt and sent it twirling at the man who had taken the shots. It was Joey Beam. He was taking aim at me when the spinning blade hacked into the side of his neck.
The next two shots caught Mouse. He grunted each time he was hit and sank to his knees.
Sallie Monroe was swinging to shoot me when I leapt up on top of the roof of Mouse’s car and landed on top of the fat gangster. He dropped his gun. I threw a left hook a little wide of his head.
Sallie jumped on me when I missed and bore me down to the ground with his weight. He was good with his girth. He’d let his stomach fall against my ribs and then, when I was stunned, he’d ball his fist and hit me in the head.
Sallie grabbed me around the throat and started to squeeze. Out of one side of my sight I saw Mouse trying to rise, but h
e failed. On the other side Joey Beam was doing his last dance lying flat on his back, yellow jacket sopping up his own blood.
Suddenly the little yellow dog came into view. He was snarling and snapping. I waited for his attack on Sallie to throw the big man off. I had remembered my pistol by then and only needed a little room to lay my hands on it. All I needed was Pharaoh’s distraction.
That’s when the yellow dog launched his attack on me.
I could hear the skin of my own ear ripping as Pharaoh lent his jaws to Sallie’s cause.
Hatred surged in my blood. I boxed Sallie’s right ear and then his left; I did it again and kneed him. Then I grabbed his neck like it was a fat eggplant and dug my fingers in and twisted with a frenzy that no sexual act has ever equaled in my life.
I watched Sallie’s eyes go from life to death. And then I was up trying to stomp the life out of Pharaoh. But the dog was too quick and made it under the car.
“Easy.” It was Mouse. He’d made it halfway to his feet and was leaning up against the wall. He had both hands over his chest. “Get the gun, man,” he rasped. “Get the knife.”
I got Sallie’s gun, which was lying at his side, and the meat cleaver that had come from my own kitchen drawer. I took them to the car and helped Mouse into the seat.
Once behind the wheel I was flying backwards.
“Take me home, Easy.”
“We better get you to a hospital, Ray.”
“Naw, man. I’m okay. We don’t wanna get tied up in no killin’s.” He was smiling. Smiling.
“How bad you hit?”
“Shoulder,” he whispered. “Just in the arm.”
“Man, I thought you said you were unarmed!” I shouted. I didn’t know why. I wanted to say that I was sorry, I guess.
“I just said that I didn’t have no gun, Easy. I got the knife at your house. You know a knife don’t hardly even count.” He laughed weakly and coughed hard.
I DROVE SURFACE STREETS down to Compton, mainly to keep away from red lights. I wanted to keep moving. With the window busted out I didn’t want people looking to see what we were up to.
When we were about half the way there I said, “Ray. Ray?” But he didn’t answer. I looked over and saw him slumped almost exactly the way Idabell had been.
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