A Little Yellow Dog Read online

  CRITICAL ACCLAIM FOR WALTER

  MOSLEY’S EASY RAWLINS NOVELS

  A LITTLE YELLOW DOG

  “[A] well-energized and crafty volume….”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “Mosley … writes with a pure, true voice. A Little Yellow Dog marks another winner for its remarkable author.”

  —Houston Chronicle

  “A Little Yellow Dog is just as smoky and sexy as Devil In a Blue Dress…. [Mosley] tells his story fast and hard, sometimes funny, sometimes lyrical.”

  —San Jose Mercury News

  “Easy Rawlins is back, which is great news…. Mosley’s thrillers, always thrilling, are salutary as well.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “How does Walter Mosley do it? … Each Easy Rawlins mystery is better than its predecessor—richer, more nuanced and, in this case, funnier.”

  —Newsday

  “Mosley just writes so well—so crisply, so smoothly…. His view of human nature is bone-solid realistic, no illusions.”

  —Philadelphia Inquirer

  “Early 1960s black Los Angeles is alive in the look and talk of the book…. Easy is a cool dude struggling to stay alive and make sense of his tough and tawdry world.”

  —Boston Sunday Globe

  BLACK BETTY

  “Detective fiction at its best—bold, breathtaking, and brutal.”

  —Chicago Sun-Times

  “As always, Mosley’s grip on character is compelling.”

  —People

  “Compelling, multilayered.”

  —The Washington Post

  “Black Betty is moody, absorbing, and disquieting as a recurrent dream.”

  —New York Daily News

  “Mysteries don’t get much better than this.”

  —Detroit Free Press

  WHITE BUTTERFLY

  “Rawlins … might be the best American character to appear in quite some time.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  “Compelling…. In all of American fiction, only Richard Wright treats America’s race problem more savagely.”

  —Village Voice Literary Supplement

  “With White Butterfly, Walter Mosley has established himself as one of America’s best mystery writers.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “Powerful…. Like its predecessors, White Butterfly provides excitement, social commentary, and clever, syncopated dialogue. If [Philip] Marlowe was tough, Easy has to be even tougher.”

  —Washington Post Book World

  A RED DEATH

  “Fascinating and vividly rendered … exotic and believable, filled with memorable individuals and morally complex situations.”

  —The Wall Street Journal

  “Exhilaratingly original.”

  —Philadelphia Inquirer

  DEVIL IN A BLUE DRESS

  “I read Devil in a Blue Dress in one sitting and didn’t want it to end. An astonishing first novel.”

  —Jonathan Kellerman

  “The social commentary is sly, the dialogue fabulous, the noir atmosphere so real you could touch it. A first novel? That’s what they say. Amazing. Smashing.”

  —Cosmopolitan

  “Richly atmospheric…. A fast-moving, entertaining story.”

  —Los Angeles Times Book Review

  GONE FISHIN’

  “It is, in some respects, the best of Mosley’s novels…. Mosley displays a pitch-perfect gift for capturing the cadences of black speech that rivals the dialogue in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.”

  —Time

  “A powerfully raw, lyrical coming-of-age story…. This late encounter with the early Easy offers an extra dimension to readers who have met, in previous stories, the man he grew to be.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  BOOKS BY WALTER MOSLEY

  PUBLISHED BY POCKET BOOKS

  Devil in a Blue Dress

  A Red Death

  White Butterfly

  Black Betty

  A Little Yellow Dog

  Gone Fishin’

  WALTER

  MOSLEY

  A LITTLE YELLOW DOG

  AN EASY RAWLINS MYSTERY

  WASHINGTON SQUARE PRESS

  NEW YORK LONDON TORONTO SYDNEY SINGAPORE

  The sale of this book without its cover is unauthorized. If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that it was reported to the publisher as “unsold and destroyed.” Neither the author nor the publisher has received payment for the sale of this “stripped book.”

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  A Washington Square Press Publication of

  Pocket Books, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  Copyright © 1996 by Walter Mosley

  “Gray-Eyed Death” copyright © 2002 by Walter Mosley

  Published by arrangement with W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce

  this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  For information address W. W. Norton & Company7, Inc.,

  500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110

  ISBN: 0-7434-5180-5

  eISBN: 978-1-4516-1249-3

  First Washington Square Press trade paperback printing November 2002

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  WASHINGTON SQUARE PRESS and colophon are

  registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  Cover art by Don Kilpatrick III

  Printed in the U.S.A.

  For information regarding special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact Simon & Schuster Special Sales at 1-800-456-6798 or [email protected]

  IT WAS THE DOG’S FAULT.

  FROM WALTER MOSLEY’S SIX EASY PIECES

  GRAY-EYED DEATH

  A CAR DOOR SLAMMED on the street somewhere but it didn’t mean anything to me. I was at home drinking lemonade from the fruit of my own trees on a Saturday in L.A. Nobody was after me. My slate was clean. Bonnie had gone out with her friend Shirley, Jesus was taking sailing lessons near Redondo Beach, and Feather had gone down the street to her little boyfriend’s house, a shy red-headed child named Henry Hopkins.

  Just four weeks before I would have spent my solitary time wondering if I should ask Bonnie to be my bride. But she had spent a weekend on the island of Madagascar with a man named Joguye Cham. He was the son of an African prince born in Senegal while I was born a poor black orphan.

  Bonnie swore that the time they spent together was platonic but that didn’t mean much to me. A man who expected to be a king, who was working to liberate and empower a whole continent, wanted Bonnie by his side.

  How could I compete with that?

  How could she wake up next to me year after year, getting older while I made sure the toilets at Sojourner Truth Junior High School were disinfected? How could she be satisfied with a janitor when a man who wanted to change the world was calling her name?

  Sharp footsteps on concrete followed the slamming door.

  Bonnie had made my life work perfectly for a while. She never worried about my late-night meetings or when I went out for clues to the final fate of my old friend Mouse. I knew he was dead but I needed to hear it from the woman who saw him die. EttaMae admitted that she buried him in a nameless grave.

  The footsteps ended at my door. They were the footsteps of a small man. I expected Jackson Blue to appear. Maybe he wante
d my advice about his crazy love affair with Jewelle now that Mofass was dead. Or maybe he had some scheme he wanted to run past me. Either way it would be better than moping around, wishing that my woman wasn’t born to be a queen.

  The knocking was soft and unhurried. Whoever it was, he, or she, was in no rush.

  When I pulled the door open I was looking too high, above the man’s head. And then I saw him.

  He pushed me aside and went past saying, “If it wasn’t for ugly, Easy, I woulda never even seen you again.”

  “Raymond?” I could feel the tears wanting to come from my eyes. I was dizzy too. Torn between the two sensations I couldn’t go either way.

  “You know I been drivin’ up an’ down Pico for the last hour and a half tryin’ to figure out if I should come here or not,” Mouse was saying.

  He wore dark gray slacks and an ochre-colored jacket. His shirt was charcoal and there was gold edging on three of his teeth. On his baby finger he wore a thick gold ring sporting an onyx face studded with eight or nine diamond chips. His shoes were leather, honed to a high shine.

  He wore no hat. Kennedy killed hats by going bareheaded to his inauguration, any haberdasher will tell you that. And if Mouse was a slave to anything it was fashion.

  “Where the hell you been, Ray?”

  He grinned. He laughed.

  That was one of the few times I ever hugged a man. I actually lifted him off the floor.

  “All right now, Easy. Okay. It’s okay, brother. I missed you too, baby. Yeah.”

  Mouse was still laughing. It wasn’t a guffaw or even a roll. It was a calculated chuckle that only debutantes and killers had mastered.

  “Where the hell you been?” I asked again.

  “You got somethin’ to drink around here, Ease?” he replied. “I know you don’t drink but I thought maybe your woman did.”

  Bonnie kept a bottle of brandy on the top shelf in the kitchen, behind the mixing bowls. I poured Mouse three fingers and refreshed my lemonade. Then he got comfortable on my recliner and I sat on the loveseat Bonnie brought from her home when she moved into mine.

  “Well?” I asked after his first sip.

  “Well what?”

  “What happened?”

  “You saw me get hit, didn’t you? You saw me sprawled out there at Death’s door. Shit. I was almost dead, Easy. Almost. Everything looked different. Slow and like black-and-white TV through red sunglasses. I heard Etta cryin’. I heard the nurse tellin’ her I was dyin’. I believed her. As far as I was concerned I was already dead.”

  Mouse stared at the kitchen window through the door, his gray eyes amazed with the memory of his own demise.

  “Where did Etta take you?”

  “Mama Jo’s,” he said. “That’s why I’m here, partly.”

  “You were too hurt to be taken all the way down to Texas,” I said. “Your heart wasn’t even beating.”

  “Jo moved up around Santa Barbara six years ago,” Mouse said. “Etta knew about it but she never told no one. Domaque had got himself in trouble down Harrisville and she helped ’em move here.”

  “She called me.”

  “Etta?” Mouse asked.

  “No. Jo. Couple’a months ago. She called and asked if I knew where you were. It was that same deep voice. Yeah. I couldn’t place it at the time. She healed you?”

  “Yeah, baby. You know Jo’s a witch.” I remembered Mouse saying the same words when we were only nineteen. He’d taken me to her cabin in the woods outside of Pariah, Texas. Jo was twenty years older than we were. She was tall and jet black, crazy and full of need.

  She seduced me and then saved my life when I came down with a fever.

  “She used powders and ointments,” Mouse continued. “Stayed up all night by my side, every night for six weeks. She sat next to me almost the whole time. Etta and LaMarque was in the corner worryin’ and Domaque did all the work. You know, Easy, I believe that her standin’ sentry was why Death couldn’t pull me off. When my heart got weak she held foul-smellin’ shit up under my nose. And then one mornin’ I was awake. Everything looked normal. My chest hurt but that was fine. I was walkin’ in seven days’ time. I woulda been fuckin’ but Etta was mad at me for gettin’ myself shot.”

  He sipped while he talked. After each swallow he hissed in satisfaction. As the moments ticked by I got used to seeing him. That was easy because Mouse had never really been dead for me. I took him with me everywhere I went. He was my barometer for evil, my advisor when no good man would have known what to say. Raymond was proof that a black man could live by his own rules in America when everybody else denied it. Why couldn’t he crawl up out of the grave and return to life whenever he felt like it?

  “Damn,” I said. “Damn.”

  Mouse grinned again. I refilled his glass.

  “Good to see you, Easy.”

  “I looked everywhere for you, Ray. I asked just about everybody here and down in Texas. I asked EttaMae but she said you were dead.”

  “She told me about that. You know I was mad at her for not gettin’ me to help that musician boy.” Mouse held up his glass in a toast to his wife. “But she’s a good woman. She didn’t want me hangin’ ’round you ’cause she said that she thought that you’d get me in trouble.”

  “Me?” I said. “Me get you in trouble?”

  Mouse chuckled again. “I know what you mean, Ease, but Etta got a point too. You know you always on the edge’a sump’n’. Always at the wrong door. I did get shot followin’ you down that alley.”

  Mouse winked at me then. We were both in our mid-forties but he didn’t look thirty. His smile was as innocent as Eve’s come-on in the Garden of Eden.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. A tear did escape my eye. “I really am.”

  Mouse ignored the emotion I showed. “Anyway,” he said. “She don’t know that a man cain’t be worried ’bout every Tom, Dick, and Harry wanna do him some harm. There’s always somebody out to get ya. Always. You cain’t hide from it. Shit. At least we friends, right?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “We sure are.”

  Mouse focused those cloud-colored eyes on me. “Domaque’s in trouble again.”

  “What about?”

  “Ugly,” the dapper killer said. “Ugly brought him into this world and ugly gonna take him out.”

  “What’s wrong with him?”

  “Wrong with him? Don’t you remember?”

  Domaque was Mama Jo’s son. He had the soul of an artist, the strength of a mule, and the looks of a fairy-tale ogre. His nasal passages didn’t work right and so his drooling mouth was always open. One eye was larger than the other and between his arms and legs no two of them were the same length. He had a curve in his spine that made him hunchbacked and, though he was very intelligent, he had the emotional makeup of a twelve-year-old.

  “I mean, what trouble is he in?”

  “They say he robbed a armored car on its way to the Bank of America in Santa Barbara.”

  “Did he?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “Did you?”

  That made Mouse laugh. But it wasn’t his debutante titter. It was a snort that was meant to be a warning. I had seen dogs run away from him when he’d made that sound.

  He’d only been alive for ten minutes and I was already under threat.

  “So what did happen?” I asked.

  “Some white girl been hangin’ ’round, that’s what Jo says. She met Dom down at this cove where he went fishin’ and started sweet-talkin’ him. One day she disappears and the next thing they know the cops come up to Jo and Dom’s house.”

  “They get him?”

  “Naw. Jo got a false floor with a hole for Dom to hide under. She told them cops that Dom was down in Texas, that he’d been there for two weeks. They didn’t believe her. But they couldn’t find Dom neither.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “Compton. With Etta.”

  “Etta’s here?”

  “Yeah. After you two killed tha
t white man she decided to come back. You gonna help me with Domaque, Easy? You know you owe me after all the shit I gone through.”

  There it was, the offer of redemption. I could pay Mouse back for the guilt I’d taken on. I just nodded. What else could I do?

  “YEAH, EASE,” Mouse opined as we drove south toward Compton. “You ain’t got no reason to feel guilty. The way I see it it helped me gettin’ shot and all.”

  “Helped you how?”

  “Well, you know I was so upset back then, wonderin’ if all the violence I lived through was wrong. But when Jo patched me up she said that I’m just a part of a big ole puzzle, a piece. I fit in where I go and I do what I do. She said that and it stuck with me. Now I’m just fine with who I am.”

  Etta’s new house wasn’t as nice as the servants’ quarters of the mansion she lived in, in the mountains above Santa Barbara. It was a small wooden cottage on a street of wooden cottages—all of them painted white. The only protection her little home had from harm was a wire fence that was twelve feet long and three-and-a-half feet high.