“I told him that I knew he didn’t rob Gator but all I could do was to give him the secret knowledge that he had the boss-man’s woman before he ran.”
“No wonder he was so mad when we interrupted you.”
Amiee smiled and gestured at me with her jaw.
Only that morning I thought that I’d never kiss another woman.
We wrestled around for a minute or two. Her hands were quick and clever. I felt every hormone and instinct in my body surging but still, I took Amiee by the shoulders and pressed her back against the door—at arm’s length. Not daunted by the distance she pressed a bare foot against my erection and smiled.
“No,” I said.
“Not yet,” she replied. “But it’s comin’.”
“No,” I said again. “It’s not.”
Amiee composed herself then accepted my refusal without anger.
I felt a powerful urge to jump out of the car and run back to Bonnie. I wanted to tell her something, but I had no idea what.
“I’ll never forget you, Easy Larry,” Amiee said.
“Why’s that?” I asked in a voice much deeper than usual.
“I never had a man frustrate me twice in the same day.”
We both laughed.
“You still need a ride home?” Amiee asked. She leaned over to give me a half-friendly kiss.
“Naw,” I said. “My ride is a couple’a blocks away from the garage.”
“You gonna tell me why you workin’ there?”
“To see if there’s some other explanation for the robbery.”
“You find anything?”
“Nope.”
“But you’re there to help Ross?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
“For a favor to Saul. That’s the guy I was with.”
“What if I told you something?” she said. “I mean, could I trust you to keep secret where you heard it from?”
“Yeah,” I said. “But I don’t know how to prove it.”
“Oh I’ll take your word, honey. I can feel how much you wanted me and still you held back. Some woman has made an honest man outta you.”
Her words seemed to be full of meaning.
“Any man that true,” she continued, “will keep his word if he can.”
“All right,” I said. “You got my word. So what can you tell me?”
“Gator and Tilly are movin’ stolen sports cars.”
“From the used car lot?”
“Uh-uh. They work on ’em late at night and then sell ’em from off the street.”
“How so?”
“They get the car in and paint it, then they leave it on some corner and send the buyer the key.”
“How long they been doin’ that?”
“Couple’a years.”
“And was Ross in on it?”
“I don’t think so.”
“And how do you know about it?”
“Eggersly don’t give two shits about me. He got at least two girlfriends at any one time an’ he ain’t hardly ever home. When he is he treats me like a piece’a property. He brags about what he’s doin’ like I wasn’t in the room. Talk about women he had, men he beat, and the cars too. Gator always says that he was born poor white trash but he was smart and tough and made somethin’ outta himself. But my mama always said that you could put trash in a silver ashcan but it’s still just trash.”
I’d known men like Oliphant. Men so proud of their strength and their accomplishments that they forget even the greatest fighter can be stabbed in the back.
“So you think Gator or Tilly knows who stole the money?” I asked.
“Not himself. He wasn’t in there that night, ’cause it was Tuesday. On Tuesdays he drops Eddie off at Little League practice and then goes off. Nobody sees him again till Wednesday.”
“So what does that mean for Ross?”
“Ross don’t know none of it. He don’t know that most nights Tilly and Gator up in there with stolen cars. How’s he gonna be so smart to pick the one night you can be sure nobody’s there?”
It was a good question.
“YOU DIDN’T GET IT? What the fuck is wrong wit’ you, Easy?” Mouse asked.
It wasn’t really Mouse but just a specter in my mind. Lately, whenever I was disturbed or distressed, I’d start telling the story to the air and from somewhere in my mind I’d imagine my dead friend’s opinions.
“No,” I said in the empty car. “No. I haven’t set things straight with Bonnie yet.”
“Lemme get this straight, Ease. She had her hand down in your pants, had a hold’a yo’ dick, and you still pushed her off?”
“Yeah,” I said on a heavy sigh.
And there was no reply. It was new ground for Mouse and me. What could he say? There was no experience he’d ever had with a friend who would have said such a thing.
I PULLED UP INTO THE DRIVEWAY at about eleven. The lights were on. Bonnie was sitting in the reclining chair reading and waiting for me. Her recreational reading was mostly in French. I’d always felt that it was a barrier between us, like her French-speaking African prince.
She put the book down when I came in.
For a while after I found out about her holiday she tried to act normal. She’d smile at me when I came through the door and kiss me the way she always had. But after a few weeks of me being cold and turning away she stopped pretending.
“Easy.”
That’s all she said, just one word, and I wanted to put my fist through the wall.
“Hey, baby,” I said instead. “What you readin’?”
That threw her off guard. She was about to say something else but those words never came out.
“A book,” she said. “Nothing. It’s about a young girl in love with a man who doesn’t even know that she’s alive.”
I pulled a wooden chair up next to the recliner and sat down.
“Just because somebody loves someone else that don’t mean she got to love him back,” I said. I was hoping for better words to come out; words like she’d been reading in that novel.
Bonnie wanted to say something but all she could do was reach out and touch my cheek.
“I was mad at you,” I said. “I wanted to take my love away from you ’cause I thought that’s what you did to me. And maybe it is. Maybe you love somebody who don’t know it. But all I know is that you’re here with me, inside me. And so I wanna say that you can go off now or tomorrow or next month. You can go have that life you read about and I will let you go. And…” I was talking from a place inside me that I didn’t even know was there; saying words that had been worked out in a part of my mind that I was unaware of. “…and you can leave knowin’ that I love you. It doesn’t matter that you love him or don’t love me. It doesn’t matter what you did or wanted to do. I’m not mad at you anymore. And the good feeling from my lovin’ you is stronger than the pain of seein’ you do what you got to do.”
As soon as those words were out I felt like a fool. My ears got hot and I expected Bonnie to laugh in my face. But she didn’t laugh. Her hand fell down against my chest and pressed. Whether it was a caress or pushing me away, I didn’t know.
“You wanna come to bed, baby?” she whispered.
“Not tonight,” I said. “I got things to think about.”
“What Mr. Lynx wanted you to help him with?”
“Yeah. Tryin’ to help his cousin stay outta jail.”
“Okay. But will you come back to bed when this is over?”
“If you still want me.”
Bonnie’s eyebrows furrowed and her hand moved away. She kissed me on the cheek and left without saying another word.
I laid back on the sofa and for the first time since before Mouse had been shot I fell instantly to sleep. It was a place beyond images, way past normal, everyday rest. It was the kind of sleep that you fall into after surviving a high fever or grave illness. It was the healing sleep of infants and wild animals. My dreams, if there were any, were sh
apeless and feral notions far beyond any small problems of humankind.
When I awoke early the next morning it took a few minutes for me to remember who I was and where. It was a new world and a new life opening up for me. And I was ready to challenge the world.
BUT FIRST I had to go to work.
I was there early prowling the school, looking hard for unlocked doors or broken windows. I found an overturned trash bin on the upper campus. Instead of making a report for one of my custodians, I opened a hopper room and got myself a broom and dustpan. I had almost finished when the principal came upon me.
“Good morning, Mr. Rawlins,” she said.
“Principal Masters,” I said.
It took Hiram Newgate shooting himself in the head to make me call him principal.
“Is sweeping in your job description?” Ada Masters asked.
“When I used to go to school down in Louisiana,” I said, “the last thing we did every night was to sweep, dust, and pick up the classroom. Wasn’t any slot in the budget for a janitor. If you see a mess, you take care of it if you can. How else a child or an employee gonna learn unless somebody sets the example?”
Mrs. Masters’s smile beamed. That’s how my luck ran. Under the previous principal I couldn’t do a thing right. But since Masters had come she only saw me in my best light, even though I had lost my way and spent many days away from work on made-up illnesses.
“How are you, Mr. Rawlins?” she asked.
“As near to bliss as a poor man can hope for.”
Again she smiled.
I SPENT THE DAY checking between the cracks, making sure that my school was in tip-top shape.
Mrs. Plates called in and said that her husband had died that morning. It was no surprise, he’d been bedridden for years, but she was still broken up.
The students had put up an art show down the main hall of the arts building. Some of those black children had real talent. Portraits and landscapes, abstractions and stories about the good life of being young. Most of them would end up trading in their paintbrushes and watercolors for janitors’ brooms and mail sacks.
There was one painting of me. It was a full body portrait. I was wearing my herringbone jacket and pointing the way to a small boy, probably First Wentworth. I was pointing on ahead and looking in that direction. There was a smile on my face, my teeth were showing.
“You like it, Mr. Rawlins?” Nora Dewhurst, the art teacher, asked.
“That’s somethin’ else. Who did it?”
“Starla Jacobs. It’s her first attempt with oils. You know, she’s a natural painter. See how she made the paint thicker in your face and hands. I think she knew intuitively that that application would make the portrait come to life.”
It wasn’t the person I saw every morning in the mirror; not the hard-knocks black man from the Deep South. Not my jaw-line exactly. But it had my spirit and my style. She caught the pride in my eye from being able to help a young boy make it on his way. It was the Easy Rawlins they knew at Sojourner Truth.
“You think she’d take seventy-five dollars for it?” I asked.
Nora Dewhurst had blue-gray hair. Her eyes were nearly clear with just a touch of blue to them. She was close to retirement, had taught in Los Angeles public schools since 1926. But her eyes bulged with such surprise that you’d think no one had ever purchased one of her students’ paintings.
“Mr. Rawlins, I don’t know what to say. You would make a painter out of Starla if you were to do such a thing.”
“She’s already a painter.”
“You know what I mean.”
And there we were, a black man from the Deep South and a white woman from New York City, both aware of how little chance those kids had. We didn’t quite say it because neither of us wanted to know what would happen if we let the truth out of the bag.
“Tell her to put a matte board around it and I’ll pick it up on Friday after the last class.”
Nora kissed me on the cheek. Two little girls standing nearby gasped and ran away.
THAT EVENING I was in my car, down the street from Oliphant’s garage. I’d parked next to a vast concrete wall, far away from any streetlamp. And I sat low so that any passing cruiser wouldn’t see me watching.
Redheaded Ed came out at eight-fifteen. He wheeled a small motorbike to the corner. Five minutes later Amiee drove up. She opened the trunk and Ed put the bike in.
Everybody but Tilly and Eggersly had gone by nine. At ten they were still in there. They were playing cards, throwing down money and pulling from the deck.
Just past eleven a yellow Porsche drove up to the garage door and was admitted. Fifteen minutes later a red sports car pulled up. It must have been European because I didn’t recognize the make.
After that Tilly Monroe put up ten-foot opaque screens in front of the glass doors. That didn’t bother me though. I had already scoped out a building behind the garage that had a fire escape. I made my way back there and climbed up halfway between the second and third floors. From there I had a night bird’s eye view through the skylight.
There had been two men in each car. By the time I reached my perch they’d donned blue coveralls and covered the floor with a heavy tarp. Then they put up clear plastic tents around the cars. Tilly was already taping the chrome.
I decided at that moment I should take a class in photography.
The yellow car turned a dark green while I watched.
They were just turning their attention to the red car when a police cruiser pulled up to the door. I smiled. The job was being done for me. Any lawyer could punch holes in Oliphant’s story about Ross if he had been arrested for painting stolen cars.
But it was just a friendly visit. The police came in and conversed with Oliphant while the red car turned white. They received an envelope and a handshake and went on along their way.
Two of the thieves were rolling up the tarp and washing off the spray-paint nozzles by the time the cops left. The other two were shining powerful lamps on the newly painted cars. I watched them clean and dry while Tilly and Gator went into the glassed-in office and smoked.
The thieves were through with their work by three. Three of them drove off in the stolen automobiles but one walked away.
He went over to Pico and turned east. I followed him for two blocks, taking one-and-a-half steps for every one of his. When I was right behind him he turned his head to the side.
“Don’t turn around,” I said. “Unless you want I should shoot you.”
I pressed the muzzle of my .38 in between his shoulder blades and took out his wallet.
“You robbin’ me?”
The short, white car thief sounded surprised. I guess he figured that a man committing a crime was immune from being held up. Like a first-class passenger thinking that his plane can’t crash.
“Oliphant sent me,” I said.
“What for?”
We had stopped walking by then. We were standing there at the corner, two men on a short line to nowhere.
“He wants his money or your blood,” I said, reading the name on his license, “Mr. Tremont.”
“Then what you take my wallet for?”
“To see if you had one of his thousand dollar bills.”
“He had thousand dollar bills in there?”
“Don’t try and play me, man,” I said. “Just gimme the money and I bust your leg. That’ll make us all even.”
“I swear I didn’t do it,” the thief cried.
“Step over here, out of the light,” I said.
Alan Tremont did as he was told. We walked into the entryway of a bank building. He tried to turn around but I cuffed him on the ear, saying, “Eyes front.”
He started trembling then.
“Please, man. I didn’t do it. I swear I didn’t do it.”
“Then why Oliphant put me on you?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know.”
“Gimme somethin’ then,” I said. “Gimme somethin’ or I blow out the back�
�a your head.”
“I wasn’t even there, man,” Alan Tremont said. “I wasn’t even in town. We had a line on a car down in San Diego. Me and Pete did.”
“I’m goin’ to see Pete right after I kill you.” I wanted to put my intentions in plain language. Simple terms are often the most frightening.
“I can’t prove it, man. If you think it was me and Pete what, I mean…Listen, I got thirty-six hundred dollars I been savin’ up…I could give it to you.”
I paused for a moment, letting him think I was considering the offer.
“I could get it for you tonight,” Alan said.
“Who do I hang it on then?” I asked.
“You could just say that I got away from you.”
“Better to have the man who did it. You say it wasn’t you, right?”
“No. But I don’t know who did it. All I know is that it wasn’t me and it wasn’t Pete neither. We weren’t in town.”
“Then who?”
“It could’a been anybody. No one was workin’ that night and we all knew it. That was Tuesday and Tuesdays Oliphant spends with Thana Jamieson. Nobody works if Oliphant ain’t there.”
“Who do you think though, Alan? ’Cause you see, boy, I got to kill somebody. I’d like your money but I got to kill somebody or else I got to take Eggersly out. ’Cause if I don’t get you he bound to come after me.”
“Maybe it was the one they said. Maybe it was the, the colored guy.” He almost said “nigger” but held back due to the cast of my own words.
“He’s out.”
“Then Tilly’s your man,” Alan said. “Tilly hates Oliphant. He’s always talkin’ behind his back. He’s been fuckin’ Ollie’s wife for over a year. He does it on Tuesdays, when Ollie’s with Thana. Tilly stoled it if anybody did.”
“Okay. Okay. You know the Farmer’s Market up on Fairfax and Third Street?”
“Yeah.”
“You know the Du-Parr’s restaurant up there?”
“Sure.”
“Meet me there at six tomorrow with the money in a paper bag.”
“You bet.”
He tried to turn around but I cuffed him again.
“You’ll see my face tomorrow,” I said. “When the job’s over.”
“But how will I know it’s you?”
“I’ll be reading a book,” I said. “War and Peace by Tolstoy. You can read, can’t you?”
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