“What else I’m gonna do?” I asked him. “I got to pay the bills.”
“What about them apartments you got? Don’t they make you some money?”
“I put that away, for Jesus and Feather.”
“How is Juice?”
“Almost finished with that boat. It looks good too.”
“Why’ont you come to work for me, Ease? I get you rich in no time.”
“Doin’ what?”
“I got this dockworker gig goin’.”
“What’s that?”
“I gotta couple’a guys movin’ anything from Swiss watches to French champagne for me. I get ’em to drop it off different places and then I make some calls. The people I do business wit’ pick the shit up and then they pay me.” When Mouse smiled his gray eyes flashed. “Everybody gets paid and the police be scratchin’ they heads.”
“What you need me for?”
“I don’t know, Easy,” Mouse shrugged. “You my friend, right? You cleanin’ up toilets, right?”
“I’m the supervisor, Raymond. I tell people what to do.”
“Whatever. It’s the same chump change all these workin’ fools bring home. You should live better’n that.”
“I like my life just the way it is thank you very much.”
“No, baby. That ain’t true.”
“Why not?”
“If you did like it you wouldn’t be out here takin’ a pair’a shoes to go out and find a murderer. No, man. You need to come around.”
“A man raising children has to set an example, Ray,” I said. “Our children, especially our sons look at us to tell what it is they should be doing with their own lives. That’s human nature.”
“I don’t know what you call it but Etta done raised LaMarque well enough to know that if he tried to do like me that he’d get killed inside of a week.”
“But it’s not just what they think they might be doing,” I said. “What they do is buried deep in their minds.”
“I don’t know about all that shit,” Mouse said. “But even if it is true you cain’t expect a man to give up everything he is ’cause one day one’a his kids might slip up. This is life, Easy. In the end it’s every man for himself.”
With those words he climbed out of the car and I drove off. On the way I castigated my friend for his mistaken beliefs. But as I drove I wondered about my own actions; about the late-night visitors, men and women, white and black. I wondered about what my own children saw when they looked at me. At least Raymond’s son had seen him seemingly lifeless with a hole ripped in his chest. He looked like a criminal so his son had the ability to make a choice. But to my kids I might have seemed like some kind of hero.
Maybe I was angry with myself and not Raymond at all.
IT WAS JUST A STOREFRONT with a hand-painted canvas sign in the window that read TAXES. There was a camel-colored young woman sitting at a desk set off to the right. She had a sensual face with big orange-tinted lips that must have motivated half the men in the neighborhood to ask her opinion on their taxes.
“Yeah?” she said to me before I could ask my question.
“I need to see Matthew,” I said.
“Why?”
“I wanted to talk to him about a five-hundred-dollar murder.”
If there had been a movie camera on the receptionist it would have stopped at that frame. She neither blinked nor breathed for a good five seconds.
“What did you say?” she asked at last.
“Get him for me will ya, sister?”
“Matt,” she said, raising her voice.
“What?” came a man’s voice from the room at the back.
“I think you better come out here.”
A medium-sized white man came out. He had thinning hair combed across his head to hide the encroaching baldness. His eyes were blue and his skin yellowy. His lips were almost as large as his secretary’s. But his were wrinkled like a day-old balloon that’s lost half its air.
“Mr. Munson?”
“Yes?” he asked warily.
“You knew Jackie Jay?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m here representing a man named Musa Tanous. Do you know him?”
“No.”
“He owns a building a couple’a blocks down. He was arrested a few days ago for murder.”
Matthew gulped and touched his throat with all the fingers of his left hand.
“Rita,” he said to the secretary. “I’ll be spending a few minutes with this gentleman.”
“Yes sir,” she said in a thick voice.
I turned her way in time to see her wiping tears from her eyes.
“Follow me, Mister—?”
“Rawlins.”
* * *
LIKE THEODORE, MUNSON had a backroom much larger than his front office. But most of the space back there went unused. The only furniture was a pine desk shoved into one corner. This was crowded with papers and files which were in turn covered in a fine layer of rubber eraser dust.
The accountant led me to the desk but he didn’t sit—neither did I.
“Now what’s this about Jackie?” he asked me.
“I was hired by a man, another man who knew Jackie. He wants me to make sure that Musa Tanous gets the chair for the crime.”
“You said something about her and a murder?”
“Don’t you know?”
“Know what?”
“Jackie was murdered three days ago.”
Munson’s mouth fell open. His eyelashes fluttered. If he was acting he was the best I had ever met.
“Who, who is this man? The one you’re working for?”
“I can’t tell you that, Mr. Munson,” I said. “He’s married and, well, you know—important. He doesn’t want it to get out that he was involved.”
Munson watched my eyes with a steady gaze. I wasn’t worried though. A good liar learns to use his eyes in the tales he spins. And I was a good liar, a very good one.
“Who are you, Mr. Rawlins?” Munson asked.
“I’m unofficial,” I said. “I look into things when people want to be sure that there’s no notes or forms to be filed or remembered. Right now I’m the man looking for Jackie Jay’s killer.”
Munson winced.
“I thought you said that this Muta guy did it?”
“That’s what I thought,” I said. “But then I found this list.”
I handed him the list I took from Jackie’s apartment.
He read it over, then over again.
He held it away from me and asked, “Isn’t this police evidence?”
“I got the mother’s permission to search Jackie’s house. There was no police notice telling me not to look around.”
“Well,” he said with sudden authority in his voice, “I think I’ll hold onto this for the cops if they need it.”
I have fast hands. I snatched the list out of Munson’s grasp before he could move. He tried to muscle and I slapped him. I didn’t think I’d hit him hard but he tipped over and fell on his side. He was up quickly though. There were tears in his eyes.
“Who the hell do you think you are hitting me?” he said.
“You try an’ take this paper from me again and I’ll kick your ass up and down the block.”
He reached for the phone on his desk.
“I’m calling the police.”
He picked up the receiver.
I watched him.
He watched me.
“Are you going to give me that list?” The threat was thick and ridiculous on his tongue.
“Why’d you give her the money, Matt?”
The tears were still streaming from his eyes. I doubted if any man ever hated me more than he did at that moment.
“When we met she told me that one day she would ask me for five hundred dollars. She said that I didn’t have to give it to her, that I should only do it if I wanted to.”
“And did you?”
“What’s it to you?” Munson said. He was regaining his
feeling of superiority so I reminded him:
“It ain’t nuthin’ to me, man. But the cops’ll be more interested in you bein’ on this list than me havin’ it.”
The accountant’s lashes fluttered again. He was so upset that I wouldn’t have been surprised if he had started foaming at the mouth.
“Yes,” he said.
“You gave it to her?”
“Seven-hundred-and-forty-eight dollars,” Munson said, nodding. “And she gave me a letter stating that she owed me the money and that she’d pay off the loan at the rate of five dollars a month.”
“Long-term loan. Did she ever make a payment?”
“Yes. Two of them.”
I should have felt good. I got what I wanted and I was able to show a superior-feeling white man that he couldn’t bully me with his arm or his will. But seeing him so defeated only reminded me of all the defeats me and mine had experienced. I actually felt sorry for him.
“Is Rita’s last name Wilford?’ I asked.
“No. It’s Longtree,” he said. “Why?”
“I thought she was a Wilford from down Dallas. Guess I was wrong.”
LONG AND LEAN BOB HENRY was sitting at a desk behind a glass wall when I drove up to his Atlas gas station. I asked him about the $500 club and he was easy enough.
“Sure,” the copper-haired fifty year old said. “I’ve spent more on girls give me less in a week than she did in one night. That girl was sex-crazy. When’s the last time you had a twenty year old beggin’ you for sex?”
“Seventeen,” I said.
“What?”
“Seventeen years old.”
“I didn’t know that.” Bob Henry sat up in his swivel chair. “Any judge in the world look at her and he’d know that she looks twenty.”
“She looks dead.”
“What?” It was the same question but it took on a whole new tone.
“Murdered. Three days ago. In an alley off of Central.”
It’s a strange thing seeing a white man go white.
“Who is she to you?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“She’s a complex girl. I didn’t know about her until after she was dead but even still she’s full’a surprises. Did she start paying you five dollars a week?”
“Yeah. How did you know?”
“Jackie was a very organized young lady. It seems that she paid all of her gentleman friends five dollars a week for a long-term loan.”
“What did you say your name was?”
“Easy.”
“And what do you have to do with this?”
“I’m looking into it—for the family.”
“Isn’t this a police job?”
“You’d think so, but I haven’t seen one cop looking into it and I bet you haven’t either. Look, you didn’t even know the girl was dead.”
The red-headed man took in my claim with a certain amount of bewilderment.
“What are you saying?” he asked.
“Do you know who might have killed her?”
“No.”
“No enemies? No jilted lovers?”
“Jackie had a lot of boyfriends,” Bob said. “Sure she did. She never hid that. No. Nobody had any reason to kill her.”
TED DURGEN’S HARDWARE STORE was closed by the time I got there. I could wait a day to talk to him. I drove down to a Thrifty’s Drug Store on 54th Street and made a call from a phone booth near the ice cream counter.
“Hello,” Bonnie said in a musical voice.
“Hey, honey,” I said.
“Where are you, Easy? You said that you were just going to get a pair of shoes.”
There was a time, when we first got together, that neither one of us would have asked that question. But another man had crossed her path, and though she swore that her love for him was that of a friend, we still asked questions where once there would have been only trust.
“Theodore said if I did something for him that he’d let me have the shoes for free.”
“What did he want you to do?”
“Ain’t nuthin’, honey,” I said. “Nuthin’ at all. How’s the kids?”
“Jesus is sewing his sail and Feather is helping him. Really she’s just drinking chocolate milk and talking.”
“I got to go out to the Palisades to see this friend of Theodore’s,” I said. “I’ll be back before ten.”
“Raymond called. He said if you needed him to call at this number.”
I wrote down the number and we hung up.
THE PHONE BOOK TOLD ME that Rita Longtree lived on Defiance Avenue. It was an orange stucco building in the middle of the block. Her door was nestled in a third-floor nook that had a small palm growing in a terra cotta pot right outside.
She was surprised to see me standing there. The orange had been wiped from her lips. Her eyes seemed different.
“Yeah?” It was the same word she used when we first met, only this time the edge was gone.
She’d been crying but that’s not what was different. I realized that she was wearing false eyelashes before.
“Rita, I need to talk to you about Jackie.”
“I don’t know her.”
“Yes you do, and if you don’t want me to say that to the cops you’ll let me in and answer my questions.”
As a rule I don’t threaten black folk with the law. That’s because most of the time I’m trying to help someone black. The police are hardly ever in the position to make a Negro’s life easier. They’re there to keep us from making trouble. But I needed to know what Rita’s connection with the dead girl was and the law opened almost any door in the ghetto.
She let me in and showed me to a chair.
The chair was blue and the couch gray; there were lavender walls and a red-and-brown carpet. It was a poor working girl’s apartment, clean and ill-fitted.
She was wearing cranberry slacks and a white T-shirt.
She looked good. Even the sorrow made her attractive.
“What you wanna know?”
“You got a picture of Jackie?”
From a table behind the couch she took a small frame that had an oval aperture. The photograph was of a lovely, smiling young woman, a little heavy but worth every pound.
“She was beautiful,” Rita said.
“You knew her pretty well?” I asked.
“Uh-huh. We were friends.”
“Did you know her before she got to know Mr. Munson?”
“No. She met Matt at a hamburger stand down Hoover. At first he’d bring her over to the office after I went home but after a while they got sloppy and I’d catch ’em. After that she’d call sometimes when he was out with a client and we talked. She was a really good person.” Sorrow constricted the last few words.
“Did she love your boss?” I asked.
Rita smiled through the tears.
“Jackie just liked men,” she said. “I mean they had to be older and they couldn’t be black but after that she wasn’t too picky. She didn’t mind if they was fat or bald or plain.”
“How about rich?” I asked.
“No. I mean she had her investment plan but you didn’t have to be rich to belong to that.”
“That was to buy her house?”
“Uh-huh. She fount this house for only twelve thousand dollars in Compton. Then she would ask her boyfriends to put up the money, like an interest-free loan. She had started payin’ it back. She called it her rent.”
“And where’d she get that?”
“She was a good girl,” Rita said. “She was only seventeen you know. And her mama could hardly make enough to pay the rent. And Jackie really liked the men she was with. So what if a couple’a them gave her money?”
It was a discussion held between women that I had been overhearing since I was a child. Poor young women with no money, and no hope for a job, taking a handout now and then from a “friend.” Maybe he was called “uncle” or a family friend.
He was older and lonely and willing to let her go out dancing when she wanted to. The money was always in an envelope and never in the bedroom. Sometimes there wasn’t even sex at all, just a series of well-dressed dates and maybe a kiss or two at the end of the evening.
“Why not black men?” I asked.
“She hated her father,” Rita said. “He used to beat her mother and brother. She said that most’a the white men she was with were gentle.”
“What about Musa Tanous?”
“She loved him for real. She’d call me after they were together and tell me about his stories about castles in Jordan and Lebanon. His family used to own a castle that was a thousand years old.”
“When’s the last time she called you?”
“The morning she was killed.” Her throat tightened again.
“What time?”
“About eight. We planned to meet at Brenda’s Sunshine Diner on Eighty-second at eight-thirty but she never got there.”
“Where’d she call from?”
“The motel.”
“You sure?”
Rita nodded.
“Can I use your phone?”
“Is it long distance?”
“Station to station but I’ll give you two dollars for it.”
“You better. It’s ’cause of you I lost my job.”
“What do you mean?”
“Matt really didn’t know that Jackie was dead. When he asked me if I knew and I said yeah he fired me.”
“Oh.”
“YES?” Musa Tanous said into my ear.
“It’s Easy Rawlins,” I said.
“I’ve been waiting for you, Mr. Rawlins.”
“Where were you from eight to nine on the day Jackie was killed, Mr. Tanous?”
“Picking up floor wax from a distributor on Alameda. S&J Distributions.”
“You were in the place at eight?”
“Yes. Mr. Hind and I were having coffee. He’s an old friend.”
“What time did you leave Mr. Hind?”
“Quarter to ten. Why?”
“What time did they find Jackie?”
“Nine-fifteen,” he said, and then he choked. “She had been stabbed and beaten. She wasn’t dead until they got her to the hospital.”
Nothing I could say seemed important but still I went on, “If that’s true then I can prove that you didn’t do it.”
“Do you know who did?”
“I didn’t sign up for that. But once the cops clear you then they’ll probably find the man who did it. It’s somebody she knows. It always is.”
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