Six Easy Pieces: Easy Rawlins Stories Read online

I took a step to the side, away from Etta.

  “You gonna let us go?” Willis asked, playing his part well though I’m sure he didn’t know it.

  Snow was amused. He was listening for something.

  Etta put her hands down at her side. She raised her face to look at the ceiling and prayed, “Lord, forgive us for what we do.”

  At a picnic table Snow’s grin would have been friendly.

  I took another step and bumped into the wall.

  “Nowhere to run,” Snow apologized. “Take it like a man and it won’t hurt.”

  “Please God,” Etta said beseechingly. She bent over slightly.

  A car horn honked. That was what Snow was waiting for. He raised his pistol. I closed my eyes, the left one a little harder than the right.

  Then I forced my eyes open. Abel Snow brought his left heel off the floor, preparing to pivot after killing me. EttaMae pulled a pistol out of the fold of her dress, aimed it at his head, and sucked in a breath. It was that breath that made Snow turn his head instead of pulling the trigger. Etta’s bullet caught him in the temple. He crumpled to the floor, a sack of stones that had recently been a man.

  “Oh no,” Willis cried. He pulled his legs up underneath himself. “Oh no.”

  Etta looked at me. Her face was hard, her jaws were clenched in victory.

  “I knew you had to be armed, baby,” I said. “If he was smart he would’a shot you first.”

  “This ain’t no joke, Easy. What we gonna do with him?”

  “What caliber you use?” I asked.

  “Twenty-five caliber,” she said. “You know what I carry.”

  “Didn’t even sound that loud. Nobody live close enough to have heard it.”

  “They gonna come in here sooner or later. And even before that he ain’t gonna report in to Mr. Merchant.”

  “Tell me somethin’, Etta.”

  “What?”

  “You plannin’ to go back to work for them?”

  “Hell no.”

  “Then call your boss. Tell him that Abel’s not comin’ home and that there’s a mess down here.”

  “Put myself on the line like that?”

  “It’s him on the line. I bet the gun in Abel’s hand was the one he used on Art. And if that girl of his finds out about any killing in this house she’d have somethin’ on her old man till all the money runs out.”

  “What about Willis?”

  “I’ll take care of him. But we better get outta here now.”

  I DROVE ETTA to a bus station in Santa Monica. She kissed me good-bye through the car window.

  “Don’t feel guilty about Raymond,” she said. “Much as was wrong with him he took responsibility for everything he did.”

  “What you gonna do with me?” Willis Longtree asked as we drove toward L.A.

  “Take you to a doctor. Make sure your hand bones set right.”

  “I’m still gonna stay here an’ try an’ make it in music,” he told me.

  “Oh? What they call you when you were a boy?” I asked.

  “Little Jimmy,” he said. “Little Jimmy because my father was James and everybody said I looked just like him.”

  “Little Jimmy Long,” I said, testing out the name. “Try that on for a while. I can get you a job as a custodian at my school. Do that for a while and try to meet your dreams. Who knows? Maybe you will be some kinda star one day.”

  “Little Jimmy Jones,” Willis said. “I like that even better.”

  I GOT HOME in the early afternoon. Bonnie wasn’t there but her clothes were still in the closet. I went to the garage and got my gardener’s tool box. I clipped off all the roses, put them in a big bowl on the bedroom chest of drawers. Then I took the saw and hacked down both rose bushes. I left them lying there on either side of the door.

  The little yellow dog must have known what I was doing. He yelped and barked at me until I finished the job.

  I went off to work then. I got there at the three o’clock bell and worked until eleven.

  When I got home the bushes had been removed. Bonnie, Jesus, and Feather were all sleeping in their beds. There were no packed suitcases in the closet, no angry notes on the kitchen table.

  I laid down on the couch and thought about Mouse, that he was really dead. Sleep came quickly after that and I knew that my time of mourning was near an end.

  Gator Green

  EASY?” Bonnie’s voice came from the kitchen window.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  I was sitting in a maple chair on the concrete apron that spread out around our back door. I’d just started Jesus’s advanced sailboat-building book. It was going to be his reading assignment for the next three weeks and I wanted to make sure I understood it before he and I started our lessons.

  “There’s a man at the front door.”

  “He want you or me?” I said in an unfriendly tone.

  “Easy.”

  She was outside now. All I had to do was turn around and I could see her. But I didn’t turn. I pretended to go on reading even though the words had turned into squirming worms across the page.

  “He wants to talk to you,” she said.

  I put Juice’s book down on the chair and stood. I stared straight ahead, childishly avoiding her gaze. She touched my arm as I passed her. She always touched me when I was close enough. Especially lately, when I was so upset that I couldn’t even sleep in my own bed.

  “WHY YOU SLEEP in the livin’ room, Daddy?” my adopted daughter, Feather, asked when she came upon me one morning and realized that she couldn’t watch cartoons on the living room TV set.

  “I been restless,” I said.

  “Why don’t you go to a doctor?”

  “There’s nuthin’ the doctor got for this.”

  I must have sounded sad because Feather put her little golden hand on my neck and sat over me until I fell back to sleep.

  “MORNIN’, MR. RAWLINS,” the small white man hailed. He was standing in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room.

  “Saul,” I replied. “What are you doing here?”

  “Got a little problem I thought you might help me with.”

  “Would you like some coffee, Mister…?” Bonnie asked.

  “Lynx,” the man told her, “Saul Lynx. And yeah, I’d love a little java in a cup with some milk.”

  Saul Lynx was a private detective. He and I worked a case that he started and I took over some years before. When I first met him I didn’t trust him. I didn’t trust many white people. But as it turned out he was okay. It wasn’t until some time later that I found out he had a black wife and three children as light as Feather.

  “What’s up?” I asked, herding him into the living room.

  “That your wife? She’s beautiful.”

  “Bonnie Shay. She lives here with us. Now what is it you want, Saul?” It was Saturday and I was tired from a hard couple of months of work—both on and off the job.

  My son, Jesus, had dropped out of school but I was still teaching him every evening; making him read to me and then having him explain what he read. My lover, Bonnie, had admitted that she’d gone away to Madagascar with an African prince who was trying to liberate the continent. She said that they slept in separate rooms but still I couldn’t bring myself to kiss her good night.

  I had been slipping back into the street in spite of my respectable job as supervising senior head custodian at Sojourner Truth Junior High School. In less than three months I had investigated arson, murder, and a missing person. I had also been party to a killing that the police might have called murder.

  But worst of all, I had found out that my best friend in life was definitely dead. Raymond Alexander, Mouse, had died trying to help me. There wasn’t a place in my mind that I could turn to for hope or a laugh.

  THE COFFEE WAS ALREADY BREWED. Bonnie brought Saul his cup and I led the way into the backyard carrying a maple chair for him. We sat side by side looking up at the enormous shade tree that dominated half the yard.
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  “Good coffee.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “She can burn.”

  Saul gave me a questioning glance and then he smiled. He was a small man who always wore brown. That day it was cotton brown trousers with a brown, blue, and green sweater that had an argyle pattern on the chest. He was also wearing tennis shoes, so I supposed he was on a job.

  Saul had a big shapeless nose and a face you would forget two minutes after you saw it. But he had emerald-colored eyes that Hollywood starlets would have paid a hundred thousand dollars to possess.

  “I have a cousin-in-law named Ross Henry,” he said.

  “Don’t we all.” I was responding to his tone more than his words.

  Saul laughed.

  “I’ve missed you, Easy.”

  “Ross Henry,” I said.

  “Yeah.” Saul put his cup and saucer down on the deck and leaned forward, clasping his hands. “Ross is a good kid, man really, he’s thirty-seven. But…he never learned how to make it in the white man’s world.”

  I grunted and Saul grinned again. He lived among black people and understood the humor in his words.

  “But it’s worse with Ross,” he said. “He had an argument at work with his boss which led to a scuffle. He broke the boss-man’s nose.”

  “Then it’s lucky he lives up here,” I said. “’Cause down in Mississippi they just might have strung him to a tree.”

  “Not so much Mississippi as it is Louisiana.” Saul shook his head.

  “Say what?”

  “Eggersly Oliphant,” Saul said. “Known to the world as ‘Gator.’ He owns and operates a six-lift garage down on Lincoln, near the beach.”

  “Six lifts.” I was impressed.

  “Not only that. He owns a small used-car lot across the street and a motel two blocks down. Oliphant is president of the Santa Monica Board of Commerce and a power broker in local politics. A northern Dixiecrat.”

  “Ross broke Gator’s nose?” I asked.

  “No. Gator’s tough. Very much so. It’s his cousin, a runty little man named Tilly. Tilly called Ross a name that white men shouldn’t use on black people and then he picked up a ten-pound monkey wrench. Ross figured that he had a reason and that the difference in size was made up for by the steel.”

  “I’d have to agree with the brother on that,” I said.

  “Maybe I would too,” Saul agreed. “But Ross went overboard. He kicked Tilly when he was down and made him lie there while he bad-talked him.”

  “So now Ross is in trouble with Tilly or with Gator?”

  “Gator. Well, really it’s with the SMPD.”

  “For assault?”

  Saul shook his head. “Robbery.”

  “He robbed him?”

  “No. They fired Ross on the spot. That night the garage safe, where they kept the proceeds from all of Oliphant’s businesses, was robbed.”

  “And Ross did it?” I asked.

  “Gator says so but Ross denies it.”

  “But Eggersly is an important man and so the police arrested your wife’s cousin for the job.” It wasn’t hard to figure out.

  Saul nodded. “It was definitely an inside job. That’s why Ross could even be arrested. Whoever it was knew exactly where the safe was and what tools they needed to crack it open.”

  “What did they use?”

  “An acetylene torch from the car lot.”

  “And Ross worked there?” I asked.

  “He worked all over,” Saul explained. “Ross is a natural mechanic. They used him wherever they had a need. He could fix the ventilation system at the motel and crack open an automatic transmission for the garage.”

  “So the cops have it that he broke into the car lot, stole the torch, toted it over to the garage, and then burned the lock off the safe?”

  “Actually,” Saul corrected, “it was an old safe. All the guy had to do was burn off the hinges.”

  “How much?”

  “Between cash receipts, checks, and past due bills, they reported forty-nine thousand and some change.”

  “And all the cops got on Ross is that he broke a man’s nose and then they fired him?” I said. “I doubt if they could convict a man on that kinda evidence.”

  “Well…” Saul looked down at his coffee cup, hesitating, “it’s not that simple.”

  “Oh no?”

  “No. You see, when Ross was younger he was arrested for assault and robbery. They even convicted him but all he did was six months.”

  “Why?”

  “It was a dispute he had with a bartender on Central. He had fixed up a TV on a platform so they could play the baseball games at the bar. Ross told the bartender, a man named Grey, that he’d do it for thirty-five dollars, which was his rent at that time. Grey said okay, but when it came time to pay up he said that he had agreed on twenty-five…”

  There was real feeling in Lynx’s words. I could see that he and Mr. Henry were close.

  “Ross fought with Grey, knocked him out and took his thirty-five from the till.”

  “And they arraigned him for felony assault and robbery but then argued it down because of extenuating circumstances,” I said, finishing the all-too-common tale.

  “There was a woman in the bar, the waitress. She heard the deal and the judge was feeling merciful that day,” Saul said, wrapping up the story.

  “So? What he needs is a lawyer. What do you want with me?”

  “We got him representation,” Saul said. “But she’s gonna need some help if we want to prove he’s innocent. The problem is if Ross didn’t do it, then somebody else had to.”

  “What else they have on him?”

  “He was the only one to use the torch. And he was the only one who had access to all the keys except for Gator and his cousin.”

  “Why didn’t they take his keys when they fired him?”

  “He’d left them at home that morning because it wasn’t his day to lock up.”

  “It sure is a mess,” I said. “But what could I do about it that you can’t?”

  “That’s just it, Easy. I made the mistake of going over there when Ross got in trouble. I went up against Oliphant and he called me a kike. I didn’t do anything, but let’s just say that there’s no love lost between us.”

  “And so you want me to what?”

  “He likes people from down around where he comes from,” Saul explained. “Southerners, especially from Louisiana. They got a machinist opening now that Ross is gone…”

  “I got a job, man,” I complained.

  “Yeah, I know. For a favor, Easy.”

  It never hurt to have a white man owe you a favor, that’s what I believed. And Saul was a good guy. Even the fact that he was there giving a bad-tempered black man the benefit of the doubt made me want to help him.

  And then there was Bonnie and Mouse. Him dead and her—a dead place in my heart.

  “Where is this Ross Henry now?”

  “We got him out on bail. His mother put up every cent she has for the bond. He’s down in Watts, at his mother’s place.”

  * * *

  SOMEBODY IN ROSS HENRY’S apartment building had a very bad cough. We heard it from the bottom of the stairs. It was one of those deep, wet, rolling coughs that, in my childhood days, almost always preceded a funeral.

  They lived on the third floor of the building, which had been constructed from wood some time before the First World War. The stairs sighed with each step. The colorless paint had separated with the grain of the drying wood planks. The screen door we stopped at was divided into two equal panes. The top screen was as old as the house, rusted and crumbling. The bottom one was brand new, gray, and supple.

  The cough was coming from inside the apartment.

  Saul knocked but I didn’t think anyone could hear it over that rheumy hacking, so I tried pulling the door open. It was latched from the inside.

  I was glancing over to the right, looking for a button or something harder than knuckles to knock with, when Saul said, “Um
, Easy.”

  Behind the ancient haze of the upper screen I saw a sour-faced black woman with staring yellow eyes.

  She coughed.

  “I thought you might not have heard us knocking,” I said lamely. “I mean—”

  “I’m sick, not deaf,” the woman said and then she suppressed a cough.

  “Hello, Clara,” Saul said. “This is Easy Rawlins. He’s a specialist that I’m using to help Ross. Is your son in?”

  Clara Henry was tall and dark. She had manly shoulders and hands that had seen so much work that they seemed too large for her body. She looked me up and down and curled her lip.

  “I guess,” she said, and unlatched the door for us to enter. Then she called, “Ross, it’s that white man and somebody for ya.”

  The entryway of the apartment was bisected by a wall that separated two parallel halls. Clara Henry went coughing down the hall to the right. I was about to follow her when a man’s voice called out from the other way.

  “Send ’em on down.”

  After about twelve feet the hallway veered off to the left depositing us into a room that had no one particular purpose. There was a green couch that doubled as a bed, and a card table used for dining. In one corner there was a sink set upon a small patch of tiles. The rest of the floor was wood so deeply rutted and splintered that a mop would have been torn to shreds in any attempt to wash it.

  The big man stood up and extended his hand when we entered.

  “Hey, Saul,” he said.

  “Ross.”

  Ross had orange-brown skin and a thick mustache that didn’t stop at the corners of his mouth but went straight back and up until it blended with the hair just above his ears. He had a receding hairline and shoulders inherited from his mother.

  Behind him there was a youngish white woman still seated on the couch. Her short hair was brown and styled into a flip. Her nose slanted toward the right which made her seem as if she was standing in profile even when she was looking straight at you.

  She had obviously just put on her sweater. I imagined that her bra was under the couch somewhere.

  She noticed me noticing her nipples under the thin pink cotton and turned away, smiling slightly.