“I need Frank Green alive. You kill him and one of my sources dries up.”
“What? What that got to do with this mess?” Mouse took off his jacket and draped it over his arm. “That the bathroom?” he asked, pointing to the door.
“Yeah,” I said.
He hung the pistol in his belt and carried the stained jacket to the toilet. I heard the water running.
When Mouse returned I was staring out the front window, through the slatted blinds.
“He ain’t gonna be back t’night, Easy. Tough man like Frank seen too much death to want it on him.”
“What you doin’ here, Mouse?”
“Din’t you call Etta?”
“Yeah?”
Mouse was looking at me, shaking his head and smiling.
“Easy, you changed.”
“How’s that?”
“You use’ t’be kinda scared of everything. Take them little nigger jobs like gardenin’ and cleanin’ up. Now you got this nice house and you fuckin’ some white man’s girl.”
“I ain’t touched her, man.”
“Not yet.”
“Not ever!”
“Com’on Easy, this is the Mouse you talkin’ to. A woman look twice at you an’ you cain’t say no. I should know.”
I had messed around with Etta behind Mouse’s back when they were just engaged. He found out about it but he didn’t care. Mouse never worried about what his women did. But if I’d touched his money he’d have killed me straightaway.
“So what you doin’ here?” I asked to change the subject.
“First thing I want to figure is how I can get that money you told Frank about.”
“No, Mouse. That has nuthin’ t’do with you.”
“You gotta man comin’ here wanna kill you, Easy. Yo’ eye look like hamburger. Man, I could see why you called me, you could use some help.”
“No, Raymond, I did call ya, but that was when I was low. I mean I’m glad you saved me, man, but your kinda help ain’t nuthin’ I could use.”
“Com’on Easy, you let me in on it an’ we both come outta this wit’ sumpin’.”
He had said almost exactly the same words to me eight years before. When everything was over I had two dead men on my soul.
“No, Raymond.”
Mouse stared at me for a minute. He had light gray eyes; eyes that seemed to see through everything.
“I said no, Mouse.”
“Tell me ’bout it, Easy.” He leaned back into his chair. “Ain’t no other way, brother.”
“What you mean?”
“Nigger cain’t pull his way out the swamp wit’out no help, Easy. You wanna hole on t’this house and git some money and have you some white girls callin’ on the phone? Alright. That’s alright. But, Easy, you gotta have somebody at yo’ back, man. That’s just a lie them white men give ’bout makin’ it on they own. They always got they backs covered.”
“All I want is my chance,” I said.
“Yeah, Easy. Yeah, that’s all.”
“But let me tell ya,” I said. “I’m scared t’get mixed up wit’ you, man.”
Mouse flashed his golden smile at me. “What?”
“You remember when we went to Pariah? To get yo wed-din’ money?”
“Yeah?”
“Daddy Reese an’ Clifton died, Ray. They died ’cause’a you.”
When Mouse stopped smiling the light in the room seemed to go dim. All of a sudden he was pure business; he’d just been playing with Frank Green.
“What you mean?”
“You kilt’em, man! You, an’ me too! Clifton came to me two nights fo’ he died. He wanted me t’tell’im what t’do. He tole me how you planned t’use him.” I felt the tears pressing my eyes but held them back. “But I didn’t say nuthin’. I just let that boy go. Now ev’rybody think he killed Reese but I know it was you. And that hurts me, man.”
Mouse rubbed his mouth, never even blinking.
“That been botherin’ you all this time?” He sounded surprised.
“Yeah.”
“That was a lotta years ago, Easy, an’ you wasn’t even there, really.”
“Guilt don’t tell time,” I said.
“Guilt?” He said the words as if it had no meaning. “You mean like what I did makes you feel bad?”
“That’s right.”
“I tell you what then,” he said, putting his hands up at his shoulders. “You let me work on this with you and I let you run the show.”
“Whas that mean?”
“I ain’t gonna do nuthin’ you don’t tell me t’do.”
“Everything I say?”
“Whatever you say, Easy. Maybe you gonna show me how a poor man can live wit’out blood.”
WE DIDN’T TOUCH the whiskey.
I told Mouse what I knew; it wasn’t much. I told him that DeWitt Albright was up to no good. I told him that I could get a thousand dollars for information about Daphne Monet because there was a price on her head.
When he asked me what she had done I looked him in the eye and said, “I don’t know.”
Mouse puffed on a cigarette while he listened to me.
“Frank come back here an’ you might not get out again,” he said when I stopped talking.
“We ain’t gonna be here neither, man. We both leave in the morning an’ follow this thing down.” I told him where he could find DeWitt Albright. I also told him how he could get in touch with Odell Jones and Joppy if he needed help. The plan was to put Mouse on Frank’s trail and I’d look into the places I had seen Daphne. We’d come up with the girl and improvise from there.
It felt good to be fighting back. Mouse was a good soldier, though I worried about him following orders. And if I had the whole thing scammed out right we’d both come out on top; I’d still be alive and have my house too.
Mouse fell asleep on my living room sofa. He was always a good sleeper. He once told me that they’d have to wake him for his execution because “the Mouse ain’t gonna miss his rest.”
CHAPTER 22
I DIDN’T TELL Mouse everything.
I didn’t tell him about the money Daphne stole or the rich white man’s name: or that I knew his name. Mouse probably meant to keep his word to me; he could keep from killing if he tried. But if he got a whiff of that thirty thousand dollars I knew that nothing would hold him back. He would have killed me for that much money.
“All you have to do is worry about Frank,” I told him. “Just find out where he goes. If he leads you to the girl then we got it made. Understand me, Raymond, I just wanna find the girl, there ain’t no reason to hurt Frank.”
Mouse smiled at me. “Don’t worry, Ease. I was just mad when I seen’im over you like that. You know, it made me kinda wanna teach him a lesson.”
“You gotta watch him,” I said. “He know how to use that knife.”
“Shit!” Mouse spat. “I’as born wit’ a knife in my teefs.”
☼ ☼ ☼
THE POLICE MET US as we were leaving the house at eight in the morning.
“Shit.”
“Mr. Rawlins,” Miller said. “We came to ask you a few more questions.”
Mason was grinning.
“Guess I better be goin’, Easy,” Mouse said.
Mason put a fat hand against Mouse’s chest. “Who are you?” he asked.
“Name is Navrochet,” Mouse said. “I just come by t’get some money he owe me.”
“Money for what?”
“Money I lent him over a year ago.” Mouse produced a wad of bills, the topmost of which was a twenty.
The broad grin on Mason’s fat face didn’t make him any prettier. “And he’s just got it now?”
“Better have,” Mouse said. “Or you officers would be comin’ fo’ me.”
The cops exchanged meaningful glances.
“Where do you live, Mr. Navrochet?” Miller asked. He took out a pad and a pen.
“Twenty-seven thirty-two and a half, down on Florence. It’s u
pstairs in the back,” Mouse lied.
“We might have some questions for you later,” Miller informed him as he wrote down the address. “So you should stick around town.”
“Anything you boys want. I work at that big World Carwash on Crenshaw. You know I be there if I ain’t at my house. See ya, Easy.” Mouse went swinging his arms and whistling. I never did figure out how he knew the streets so well to lie like that.
“Shall we go in?” Miller gestured back toward the house.
☼ ☼ ☼
THEY PUT ME IN a chair and then they stood over me, like they meant business.
“What do you know about this Richard McGee?” Miller asked me.
When I looked up I saw them searching my face for the truth.
“Who?” I said.
“You heard me,” Miller said.
“I don’t know who you said.” I was stalling for time to figure out what they knew. Mason laid a heavy hand on my shoulder.
“LAPD found a dead man in his house in Laurel Canyon last night,” Miller told me. “Richard McGee. He had a handwritten note on his table.”
Miller held out the scrap of paper to me. On it was scrawled “C. James.”
“Sound familiar?” Miller asked.
I tried to look stupid; it wasn’t very difficult.
“How about Howard Green? You know him?” Miller put his foot on my table and leaned forward so far that his gaunt face was no more than a few inches from mine.
“No.”
“You don’t? He goes to that nigger bar you were at with Coretta James. That place just isn’t big enough to hide in.”
“Well, maybe I’d know his face if you showed me,” I said.
“That would be kinda hard,” Mason growled. “He’s dead and his face looks like hamburger.”
“What about Matthew Teran, Ezekiel?” Miller asked.
“ ’Course I know him. He was runnin’ for mayor up till a few weeks ago. What the hell is this, anyway?” I stood up, faking disgust.
Miller said, “Teran called us the night we arrested you. He wanted to know if we’d found out who killed his driver, Howard Green.”
I gave him a blank stare.
“We told him no,” Miller continued. “But there had been another murder, Coretta James’s murder, that had the same kind of violence related to it. He was real interested, Easy.
He wanted to know all about you. He even came down to the station and had us point you out to him and his new driver.”
I remembered the peephole in the door.
“I ain’t never even met the man,” I said.
“No?” Miller said. “Teran’s body was found in his downtown office this morning. He had a nice little bullet hole through his heart.”
The spike through my head drove me back into the chair.
“We don’t think you had anything to do with it, Ezekiel. At least, we can’t prove anything. But you have to know something … and we have all day to ask you questions.”
Mason grinned wide enough to show me his flaring red gums.
“I don’t know what you guys are talking about. Maybe I know this dude Howard Green. I mean if he goes to John’s I prob’ly know what he looks like, but I don’t know nuthin’ else.”
“I think you do, Ezekiel. And if you do but you don’t tell us then things are going to get bad. Real bad for you.”
“Man, I don’t know a thing. People gettin’ killed ain’t gotta thing to do with me. You took me in. You know I ain’t got no record. I had me a drink with Dupree and Coretta and that’s all. You cain’t hang me for that.”
“I can if I prove that you were in McGee’s house.”
I noticed that Miller had a small crescent scar under his right eye. It seemed to me that I always knew he had that scar. Like I knew it and I didn’t know it at the same time.
“I ain’t been there,” I said.
“Where?” Miller asked eagerly.
“I ain’t been to no dead man’s house.”
“There’s a big fat fingerprint on the knife, Ezekiel. If it’s yours, then you’re fried.”
Mason took my jacket from a chair and held it out to me, like a butler might. He thought he had me so he could afford being polite.
THEY TOOK ME back down to the station for fingerprinting, then they sent the prints downtown to be compared against the one found on the knife.
Miller and Mason took me to the little room again for another round of questions.
They kept asking the same things. Did I know Howard Green? Did I know Richard McGee? Miller kept threatening to go down to John’s and find somebody who could tie me to Green, but we both knew that he was throwing a bluff. Back in those days there wasn’t one Negro in a hundred who’d talk to the police. And those that did were just as likely to lie as anything else. And John’s crowd was an especially close one so I was safe, at least from the testimony of friends.
But I was worried about that fingerprint.
I knew that I hadn’t touched the knife but I didn’t know what the police were up to. If they really wanted to catch who did the killing then they’d be fair and check my prints against the knife’s and let me go. But maybe they needed a culprit. Maybe they just wanted to close the books because their record hadn’t been so good over the year. You never could tell when it came to the cops and a colored neighborhood. The police didn’t care about crime among Negroes. I mean, some softhearted cops got upset if a man killed his wife or did any such harm to a child. But the kind of violence that Frank Green dished out, the business kind of violence, didn’t get anybody worried. The papers hardly ever even reported a colored murder. And when they did it was way in the back pages.
So if they wanted to get me for Howard Green’s death, or Coretta’s, then they might just frame me to cut down the paperwork. At least that’s what I thought at the time.
The difference was that two white men had died also. To kill a white man was a real crime. My only hope was that these cops were interested in finding the real criminal.
I WAS STILL BEING questioned that afternoon when a young man in a loose brown suit entered the small room. He had a large brown envelope that he handed to Miller. He whispered something into Miller’s ear and Miller nodded seriously as if he had heard something that was very important. The young man left and Miller turned to me; it was the only time I ever saw him smile.
“I got the answer on the fingerprints right here in this package, Ezekiel,” he grinned.
“Then I guess I can go now.”
“Uh-uh.”
“What’s it say?” Mason was frisking from side to side like a dog whose master had just come home.
“Looks like we got our killer.”
My heart was beating so fast that I could hear the pulse in my ear. “Naw, man. I wasn’t there.”
I looked into Miller’s face, not giving away an ounce of fear. I looked at him and I was thinking of every German I had ever killed. He couldn’t scare me and he couldn’t bring me down either.
Miller pulled out a white sheet from the envelope and looked at it. Then he looked at me. Then to the paper again.
“You can go, Mr. Rawlins,” he said after a full minute. “But we’re going to get you again. We’re going to bring you down for something, Ezekiel, you can bank on that.”
“EASY! EASY, OVER HERE!” Mouse hissed to me from my car across the street.
“Where’d you get my keys?” I asked him as I climbed in the passenger’s side.
“Keys? Shit, man, all you gotta do is rub a couple’a sticks together an’ you could start this thing.”
The ignition had a bunch of taped wires hanging from it. Some other time I might have been mad but all I could do then was laugh.
“I was startin’ t’think that I’d have t’come in after you, Ease,” Mouse said. He patted the pistol that sat between us on the front seat.
“They don’t have enough to hold me, yet. But if something don’t happen fo’ them real soon they might just take it
in their heads to fo’get ev’rybody else an’ drag me down.”
“Well,” Mouse said, “I found out where Dupree is holed up. We could go stay with him and figger what’s next.”
I wanted to talk to Dupree but there was something that was more important.
“We go over there a little later, but first I want you to drive somewhere.”
“Where’s that?”
“Go up here to the corner and take a left,” I said.
CHAPTER 23
PORTLAND COURT was a horseshoe of tiny apartments not far from Joppy’s place, near 107th and Central. There were sixteen little porches and doorways staggered in a semicircle around a small yard that had seven stunted magnolia trees growing in brick pots. It was early evening and the tenants, mostly old people, were sitting inside the screened doorways, eating their dinners off of portable aluminum stands. Radios played from every house. Mouse and I waved to folks and said hello as we made it back to number eight.
That door was closed.
I knocked on it and then I knocked again. After a few minutes we heard something crash and then heavy footsteps toward the door.
“Who’s that?” an angry voice that might have had some fear in it called out.
“It’s Easy!” I shouted.
The door opened and Junior Fornay stood there, in the gray haze of the screen door, wearing blue boxer shorts and a white T-shirt.
“What you want?”
“I wanna talk about your call the other night, Junior. I gotta couple’a things I wanna ask.”
I reached to pull the door open but Junior threw the latch from the inside.
“If you wanted t’talk you should’a done it then. Right now I gotta get some sleep.”
“Why’ont you open the do’, Junior, fo’ I have t’shoot it down,” Mouse said. He had been standing to the side of the door, where Junior couldn’t see, but then he stood out in plain sight.
“Mouse,” Junior said.
I wondered if he was still anxious to see my friend again.
“Open up, Junior, Easy an’ me ain’t got all night.”
We went in and Junior smiled as if he wanted to make us feel at home.
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