“No time for relaxation, Dom,” Mouse said. “Easy got to get you outta trouble before Jo loses her mind.”
A pitiful emotion spread over Dom’s already damaged face.
The front door led into a makeshift dining room. There was a dark wood table just inside the door, surrounded by six chairs.
I grabbed a seat and turned it backward.
“Who was this girl you’d been seeing, Domaque?” I asked. I wanted to get down to business quickly.
“You ever learn how to read books, Easy?” he asked.
“Yeah. Yeah.”
When I’d met Dom and his mother I knew how to make out what words I needed to pick through instructions or read a love letter from a girl. But when I saw him read hard books out loud I got jealous because I realized that he could go further than I could in the world of his mind. It struck me that it was because of Dom that I learned to read.
“Her name is Merry,” Dom said. “E-R-R-Y Merry not A-R-Y the way it is usually. She was just on the beach one day while I was fishin’. You know you cain’t shoot the water in the sea for fish, Raymond. It’s too big.”
“Dynamite prob’ly work though,” Mouse replied.
“Tell me about Merry,” I said.
“She was real pretty, Easy. Real pretty and nice. She didn’t care I was ugly and humpbacked. She liked to laugh. For a few days she’d come around and talk to me. She even kissed me on the cheek and let me hold her hand.” A sigh shuddered through Domaque’s diaphragm. He was more upset about the girl than the police intent on sending him to prison. “But then she had me go to a supermarket-like place on the coast highway one day. She said that the guy who ran the place always tried to make her kiss him and she hated him. But she owed him some money and said for me to take it there.”
“Did the armored car come while you were there?” I asked.
“Uh-huh. It did. You know how much I like trucks and other big cars. I looked at it and they told me to get away.”
“Did Merry tell you that you could see the money car if you went down to pay her debt?”
“Sure did. But they didn’t have no record of her owin’ money and they told me to get away from there.”
“And the next thing you know the car is robbed?”
“Not till the next week,” Dom said, shaking his head. “It was a week later that we found that bag in the bushes.”
I glanced at Raymond. He just hunched his shoulders and looked away.
“What bag?”
“Jo fount a bag in the bushes outside our house,” Dom said.
“Was that after the cops came?”
“Uh-uh. She got the sight, you know. She felt somethin’ and started nosin’ around. That’s when she made me hide in the space. She knew the cops would be there.”
Before I could ask what was in the bag Raymond pulled it out from a closet next to the table.
It was a Wells-Fargo bag that had three stacks of a hundred twenty-dollar bills and a short .38 with a rough black handle the shape of a lightbulb. I didn’t touch the money or the gun.
It was a beautiful frame: the girl with the fake name that nobody ever saw; the witnesses at the country market and evidence poorly hidden in the bushes.
“But what about the guards?” I asked out loud. “I mean there’s no mask in the world that could hide Dom.”
“Dead,” Mouse said. “Both of ’em shot in the head. And I bet you ten to two that it was this here .38 done it.”
“Damn.”
“She prob’ly had partners,” Mouse said. “I mean Dom says she wasn’t big or tough or nuthin’.”
“Yeah,” Dom put in. “She was prob’ly tricked by some guy wanted to fool me too. I don’t wanna get her in trouble for that.”
“You see why I called on you, Easy,” Mouse said. “If I knew who they were it would be a piece’a cake. But I got to find ’em before I could convince ’em to let up on my cousin here.”
I had to laugh then. It was really funny. Maybe I wasn’t an African prince but I had my own domain. I wasn’t a sovereign maybe and I didn’t wear a crown or signet ring. But I too spent my time working for my people.
“What the hell you laughin’ about, Easy?” Mouse complained.
“It’s good to see you, Ray. It really is.”
THE FRONT DOOR OPENED and a tall and lanky youth came in tripping over his own big feet.
“LaMarque!” Dom shouted.
The boy, who was at least six foot three, winced.
“Is that you, LaMarque?” I asked.
“Hi, Mr. Rawlins.”
“Boy, you’ve grown a foot.”
“Yes sir.”
His skin had grown darker in just the few months since I’d last seen him, and he had brooding eyes. His shoulders slumped and his head hung down. He was Jesus’s age, seventeen, and prey to all of the sour emotions of an adolescent.
“Say a proper hello to Easy and your uncle,” Mouse ordered his son.
“He’s not my uncle,” LaMarque replied.
“What you say?” Mouse asked.
I stood up and stuck my hand out. “It’s great seeing you, son.”
After a moment’s hesitation LaMarque took my hand.
“Ray,” I said. “Let’s go somewhere where we can talk. This is some serious business and it should just be us three involved.”
“You gonna say hello to your uncle?” Mouse asked his son.
“Hello, Uncle Dom.”
Dom grinned and waved with his long arm.
The level of drama around Mouse was always higher than it was anywhere else in the world. A week in Raymond’s company would age a normal man a year or more.
He smiled at LaMarque and said, “Okay, Easy. I got a place we could go.”
“What you want me to tell mama?” LaMarque asked his father.
“That I went out. That you don’t know where I went or who I was wit’.”
The brooding boy nodded and turned away toward the kitchen.
WE CAME TO A SMALL HOUSE with a brick façade off of Denker. Mouse had the key and so we went in the front door. The door opened onto a good-sized living room. There was a picture of a shapely black woman and a bespectacled black man on the coffee table. The table was flanked by two sofas. Dom and I sat on one couch and Raymond took the other.
“Whose house is this?” I asked.
“Pamela Hendricks and her husband Bobby.”
“They friends of yours?”
“She is. I don’t think he likes me too well.”
“Where are they?” I was wondering what Mouse thought I meant when I asked for privacy.
“He took her up to Frisco for a vacation. They gonna be gone another ten days.”
“And they gave you keys to their house?”
“She did. He prob’ly don’t know about it. But even if he did—what’s he gonna do?”
“So nobody’s gonna come around?”
“No sir.” Mouse grinned.
I shook my head. Mouse still lived in the fever of our youth. At that degree he should have died long before he was shot down in that alley.
“Did Merry have a last name, Dom?”
“Not that I know.”
“Did she tell you anything about herself, anything? About her parents, her school, where she’s from—”
“She said she was from Pasadena,” Domaque blurted out. “She said that when she moved out from her parents she moved to, to …” the damaged man pressed his powerful fingers against his dark brow. “… Culver City. Uh-huh, Culver City.”
“Think hard, Dom,” I said. “Did she ever say anything about her last name or her parents’ last name?”
“I think,” he said. “I think that it had the sound ‘Bick’ in it somewhere.”
“Bickman? Becker? Buck somethin’?”
“Uh-uh. No. Not like that. I don’t know, Easy.”
“She have any scars or marks? What color was her hair?”
“Light, light blond. Almost white. But br
own eyes though. Most’a your blond-haired peoples got blue eyes but not Merry. And she had a little nose and her canine teef was sharp. She bit me one time and laughed.”
Mouse sighed and stood up. “I’ma go in the other room,” he said. “Stretch out a minute.”
He walked out. I knew he was bored by all of my questions. The only questions Mouse had patience for could be answered by “yes” or “no,” either that or with a number.
“How tall?” I asked Domaque when Raymond was gone.
“Five-five,” he said, and then he ducked his head and grinned. “She showed me her butt,” he whispered.
“What?”
“She showed me her butt. One day we was playin’ around down by the sand at Horth’s Cove. She’d pushed me and then run before I could push her back. I got kinda hard an’ she point at my pants and laughed. Then she pulled down her jeans and said was that what I wanted. I told her yeah and she said to go down to the market and wait for her in two days. And I did but then the people who owned the place made me go away.”
“That was the day of the robbery?”
“Yeah,” Dom said. There was a glimmer of suspicion in his eye but it faded quickly.
Raymond had left the Wells-Fargo bag on the sofa. I opened it and took out the gun. It was a peculiar design. The barrel was silver or at least silver-plated. It had ornate designs etched all over—wandering vines with small dog heads instead of flowers. The butt was made from ebony wood capped with hammered gold. The cylinder was extra-large with eight chambers. Four bullets had been discharged.
I used my shirttail to wipe my fingerprints off and then put the gun back and checked out the bag. It was double-ply canvas, tough and coarse. On the very bottom it was lined with a leather strip. Along the seam of the strip was a dark stain: blood of the corpses whose dead fingers pointed at one of the only people that Raymond loved.
Dom and Ray were raised together in the now defunct town of Pariah, Texas. They ran together because they were both outcast from the other poor children. Dom because of his birth defects and Raymond because he had always been crazy.
“Did Merry ever say that she had a boyfriend?” I asked Domaque.
He pouted and turned to the side, away from me.
“Did she?” I asked.
“That was all over. She said it was.”
“I’m sure it was,” I said, and he turned a quarter of the way back. “But maybe if I could locate him he might know something about her that could help me find out what happened.”
“Like what?”
“Like her last name.”
This didn’t seem so bad to Dom. A name wasn’t like looking at the comely girl’s butt.
“His name was Dean,” he said. “That’s what she told me. But he wasn’t nice to her and I was and that’s why she liked to come see me at Horth’s Cove.”
“Was there anything else about him?” I asked. “A last name or maybe what he looked like.”
“He was strong but not as strong as I was. And he had stringy black hair that got in her eyes when he made her have sex with him.”
I asked a hundred questions but didn’t learn much else.
Finally I asked, “How did Merry come across you in the first place?”
“I go down to the cove all the time to fish. You know I love fishin’, Easy.”
“Anybody else know that you went down there?”
“Jo.”
“Other than Jo.”
“There’s Axel.”
“Who’s that?”
“Axel Myermann. He’s a guy live up in the hill over Santa Maria. Axel come down and fish wit’ me now and then.”
“Jo ever meet Axel?”
“Yeah. Onceit.”
“Did she like him?”
“Not too much. She said that he had twisted eyes.”
RAYMOND WAS ASLEEP. I reached for his shoulder but before I could touch him he grabbed my wrist. For a small man Raymond was very strong.
“You finished, Easy?”
“If your friends won’t be back for a few days I think you should leave Dom here,” I said. “You wouldn’t want the police showin’ up at Etta’s place and findin’ a suspected murderer.”
“Where we goin’ next?” Mouse asked with a smile.
“I’m gonna strike out solo for a while. You know, quiet like.”
“Okay, Ease. Do what you got to. But remember—I will do anything and kill anyone to keep Jo from comin’ to grief.”
Those words rattled around my mind for weeks after it was all over.
I SPENT THAT NIGHT with Bonnie and my brood. Feather had been reading her first book with no pictures while Jesus put the finishing touches on the hull of his single-sail schooner. Bonnie was reading a French-African journal published in Mali. I made pigtails and black-eyed peas with white rice. There was pumpkin pie in the refrigerator for dessert.
We ate and talked loudly, laughing and making fun. At least the ladies and I did. Jesus was almost always silent. But he had a good time. He loved the family I had cobbled together around him. He’d have done anything for Feather and the way he looked at Bonnie sometimes made me feel like putting my arm around her waist.
They spoke together in Spanish sometimes. Bonnie knew five languages.
She would reach out and touch my arm now and again, somehow sensing that I was giving her up in my heart, that I felt unequal to her black prince. We made love passionately every night. I think she was trying to hold on to me. For my part every moment was precious because I knew that one day soon she would leave me for her throne.
“Ray came by today.”
“What?” all three of them said.
“He’s alive. Etta lied. Our old friend Mama Jo nursed him back to health.”
“No,” Bonnie said. “You’re joking.”
“No ma’am. He walked right up to the front door and knocked.”
“What did he want?” Jesus asked.
There was feeling behind my adopted son’s question. He knew Ray almost as well as I did.
“Nuthin’ much,” I said, but I doubted if either Jesus or Bonnie believed me.
“ARE YOU IN TROUBLE, EASY?” Bonnie asked after we had made love.
“No. Why?”
“It was the way you mentioned Raymond. It was as if you were hiding something by being so simple.”
I turned toward her under the covers. The clock over her shoulder said 11:30.
“He’s got a friend in trouble and I’m the best one to figure it out.”
“Is it dangerous?”
“Not anymore. I’m just a snoop like. Just askin’ a few questions here and there.”
“Just don’t stick your neck out,” she said. “I wouldn’t know what to do without you.”
“Without me you’d be a queen.”
She kissed my lips and said, “Why would I want to settle for second best?”
I DROVE UP TO SANTA MARIA and looked Axel Myermann up in a phone booth at an Esso gas station. He lived at number five Elmonte Crook.
“What’s a crook?” I asked the station attendant.
“Say what?” He was over sixty but his thick hair was still mostly blond.
“I mean like a street,” I said. “It says here Elmonte Crook.”
“Oh,” the man said. He had the name DELL stitched on his breast pocket. “You mean Elmontey. Some rich old family bought up the land around there and started usin’ different names for streets. Lane and Circle and Way weren’t good enough for ’em so they started with that stuff like Crook and ‘Y’ and ‘U.’ If you got money you could do what you want. Now me, I can’t even get the town to come over and fill in a pothole. I been callin’ every Monday for three years almost. Every Monday and that hole gets bigger every time it rains.”
“Down where I used to live,” I said, “the city once left a dead dog in the street for over two weeks. It was one of those big dogs. Some guys and me tried to put it out for the trash collectors but they just left it moldering in the
can.”
“Damn Democrats,” Dell said. “Damn Republicans.”
I didn’t have anything to add so we stood there a moment. I pulled out my wallet to pay for the three dollars’ worth of gas that he’d pumped. I handed him a five.
When he was giving me my change I asked, “How do I get up to this crook?”
“Follah Stockton all the way up the mountain till you get to Reynard. Turn there and stay on it till you get to a dirt road with no sign. Take that for a little less than a mile and you’ll see Elmontey. All the mailboxes are there together at the foot of the road.”
THE LOOSE DIRECTIONS worked perfectly. Twenty-three minutes after leaving the Esso station I was at the foot of Elmonte Crook. Number five did indeed belong to Axel Myermann. It was country out around there, dusty shrub country. There were no farms or even big trees. Just dirty green leaves, rocky terrain and blue sky.
Elmonte Crook was a hilly path that was well named. I passed two unlikely driveways before coming to a dark lane that had a small sign that read MYERMANN’S . The path was too steep for my car so I pulled off the road as far as I could and hiked my way down. I got as far as a small brook when I saw the house. Really it was just a cabin. Painted dull red and roofed in green, it had only one window that I could see and one step, even though the doorway was a good two feet above the ground.
The door was unlocked and Axel was not quite dead.
“Help me,” the elder man said.
He was sitting in a chair and holding his chest where blood was still escaping. He was small with a wiry build. Through his sparse beard you could see that he had a weak jaw. He wore a jeans jacket and denim pants too. His T-shirt had been white before the bleeding started. His shoes were brown with eyes but no laces.
“They shot me,” the man said.
“Dean and Merry?” I asked.
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