Six Easy Pieces er-8 Read online

  “What white man?”

  “The one who put that thing under Mr. Sutton’s classroom.”

  “What thing?”

  “A big red can,” the boy said. “I don’t know why.”

  “Why didn’t you say anything before this?” I asked.

  “I forgot that I saw’im. But then later Mr. Weston said that the school might burn down.”

  I could have asked him why he came to me, but I knew the answer. I was the only black person on the campus who had any authority. Most of the children came to me with their problems because bill collectors, policemen, and angry store owners were the only white people in their daily lives.

  “And it was a white man?” I asked First.

  He nodded, looking at my feet.

  “Was he wearin’ a suit?”

  “Uh-uh. Just some pants and a green windbreaker.”

  “Have you seen him around here before?” I asked. “Does he work here sometimes?”

  First shook his head. “No. I mean I seen’im but he don’t work here.”

  “Where’d you see him?”

  “Wit’ Cousin.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “It’s a boy, a man. You know.”

  “A young man?”

  “Uh-huh, he used to go here. But he graduated an’ dropped out.” First looked up at me. “Am I in trouble?”

  “No, Number One. You did all right. You might have to tell somebody else about it. But don’t worry right now. Don’t you have a class to go to?”

  “Yeah. History-geography.”

  “You better go then.”

  I watched the child, who was so willing to rely on my strength, run up all those eighty-odd stairs without a falter.

  I CALLED THE POLICE STATION and asked for Sergeant Andre Brown. When he wasn’t there, I talked to another policeman; I forget his name. I forget because he was of no help. He told me to come in the next afternoon and file a report. When I said that I thought it might be more important than that, he hung up.

  Then I called the fire department. Gregson was out on a call. When I told the operator why I was calling, he told me to call the police.

  “ALL I KNOW IS that his nickname was Cousin,” I said to Laini Trellmore, Sojourner Truth’s registrar.

  “Cousin. Hm,” the elderly woman said to herself. She looked closer to seventy-five than the age she gave, which was sixty-one. I wasn’t the only one to suspect that under her duties as record keeper, Miss Trellmore had altered her date of birth to keep her job past the age of forced retirement.

  She frowned.

  “Oh yes. I remember now. Douglas Hardy. Oh yes. Trouble from the first day to the last. He was sixteen years old and still in the ninth grade. Oooo. The kind of boy who’s always grinning and nodding and you know he just did something bad.”

  “You got an address for his family in the files?”

  THE HARDY FAMILY lived on Whithers Court off of Avalon. It was a dead-end street that had once been nice. Neat little single-family homes built for working people in a cul-de-sac. But the houses had all been bought up by a real estate syndicate called Investors Group West. They raised the rent as much as the market would bear. The turnover in tenants had a harmful influence on the upkeep of the dwellings and the street. Barren lawns and walls with the paint peeling off were the norm.

  The Hardys’ home was secured by a screen door frame that had no screen. There was loud cowboy music blaring from inside. I looked for a doorbell but there was none. I knocked on the door, but my knuckles were no match for the yodeling cowboy.

  I pulled the door open and took a tentative step inside. It was that step, uninvited into the house of people who were strangers to me, that was the first step outside the bounds of the straight and narrow life that I pretended to. The room had a gritty look to it. Dust on the blanket-covered sofa and dust on the painted wood floor. The only decoration was a paper calendar hung by a nail on the far wall. It had a large picture of Jesus, his bleeding Valentine’s heart protruding from his chest, over a small booklet of months. There was no sign of life.

  I considered calling out, but I would have had to shout to be heard over the warbling cowboy, and anything that loud might alarm any occupants of that tinderbox home.

  I turned off the radio.

  “What the hell is goin’ on?” someone said from beyond a doorway that led to the kitchen.

  A short brown woman hustled in. She was wearing a shapeless blue shift that had white butterflies all over it. The neck of the dress had been stretched out, one side sagging open over her left shoulder.

  “Who the hell are you?” she asked, squinting and scowling so that I could see the red gums of her almost toothless maw.

  “Ezekiel,” I said, remembering the morning caller.

  “What the hell do you want?”

  “I’m lookin’ for Cousin.”

  Her nose twitched as if she were tied to a post and a mosquito were trying to bite her nose.

  “Rinaldo!”

  I heard a man grunt somewhere in the house. The heavy pounding of footsteps followed and soon a man, not as short as the woman but not as tall as I, came through the doorway. He was wearing only boxer shorts and a yellow T-shirt. His nose, chin, and forehead jutted out from the face as if his head were meant to be used as an axe. His eyes seemed insane, but I put that down to him getting rousted by the woman’s scream.

  “What, Momma?”

  “This man lookin’ for Cousin.”

  “The hell are you?” Rinaldo asked me.

  “Cousin’s in trouble,” I said.

  “The fuck he is,” Rinaldo said.

  “Watch your language, boy,” Toothless Mama said.

  “The hell are you?” Rinaldo asked again. He balled his fists and levered his shoulders to show off a ripple of strength.

  “He knows a man who tried to burn down the junior high school,” I said. “Somebody saw them together—”

  “Who?” the woman asked.

  Ignoring her, I kept on talking to Hatchet Face. “…if I don’t see me some Cousin I’m just gonna give the police this address and let you shake your shoulders at them.”

  Rinaldo’s eyes got crazier as he woke up. He seemed torn between attack and flight. He was fifteen years my junior, but I felt that I could take him. It was Mama who scared me. She was the kind of woman who kept a straight razor close at hand.

  “Cousin didn’t start that fire,” Mama said.

  “How would you know?”

  “He was here with us.”

  “Where is he now?”

  Mama and Rinaldo exchanged glances. They were afraid of the police. They had good reason to be. All black people had good reason to be. But I didn’t care.

  “Tell me or I’ll go right down to the precinct,” I said.

  “He live on Hooper,” Rinaldo said. He blurted out an address.

  “Okay,” I said, and I took a step backward. “I’ma go over there. If somebody calls him and warns him off I’m sendin’ the cops here to you.”

  Rinaldo gave his mother a sharp look. Maybe he wondered if he should try to kill me. I took another step back. Before they could decide on an action, I was out of the door and on the way to my car. Rinaldo came out to watch me drive off.

  “WHO IS IT?” a voice asked after I knocked.

  “Are you Cousin?” I asked.

  There was a pause, and then, “Yeah?”

  “I’m John Lowry. Rinaldo sent me.”

  When he opened the door, I punched him in the face. It was a good solid punch. It felt good but it was a stupid thing to do. I didn’t know who else was in the room. That crouching, slack-jawed man might have been a middleweight contender. He could have had an iron jaw and a pistol in his pocket. But I hit him because I knew that he had something to do with the fire at my school, because Mama and Rinaldo set my teeth on edge, because the police didn’t seem to care what I did, and because my best friend was dead.

  Cousin fell flat on his back.
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  The room was painted a garish pink and there was no furniture except for a single mattress no thicker than a country quilt.

  “Get up,” I said.

  “What I do to you, mister?” he whined.

  “Why you try’n burn down the school?”

  “I didn’t burn nuthin’.” Cousin got to his feet.

  He was an old twenty. Not smart or mature, just old. Like he had lived forty years in half the time but hadn’t learned a thing.

  I knocked him down again.

  “Hey, man!” he yelled.

  “Who’s the white man you were with?”

  “What white man?”

  “You want me to kick you?” I moved my right foot backward in a threatening motion.

  “What you want from me?”

  “The man put that bomb under the metal shop at Truth.”

  Cousin’s skin was a deep, lusterless brown. His jaw was swelling up. He passed his hand over his head from fear that I’d mussed his hair.

  “You the law?”

  “I work for the school.”

  “Man named Lund.”

  “Lund?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “How you spell it?”

  “I’on’t know, man.”

  “What do you know?” I asked in disgust.

  “Roke Williams. Roke run a crap game down Alameda. Lund work for the man sell him p’otection.”

  I DROVE TO A SMALL BUILDING on Pico and Rimpau. All the way I was wondering why a man in organized crime would be setting a bomb at a Negro junior high school. I wondered but I wasn’t afraid—and that was a problem. If you go up against men in organized crime, you should at least have the sense to be afraid.

  There was a weathered sign above the front door of the building. If you looked closely you could make out the word HETTLEMANN and, a little farther down, RINGS. I had no idea what the building used to be. Now it was a series of sales and service offices rented out to various firms and individuals. On the fourth floor was a block of offices run by a man named Zane. They did bookkeeping and financial statements for small businesses.

  The three flights of stairs was nothing for me. For the past few months I had cut down to ten cigarettes a day and I was used to the vast stairway at Truth.

  When I opened the door on the fourth floor, I came into a small room where Anatole Zane sat. Zane, by his own estimation was a “…manager, receptionist, janitor, and delivery boy…” for his quirky accounting firm. He hired nonprofessionals who were good with numbers and parceled out tasks that he took in for cut-rate prices.

  Jackson Blue was his most prized employee.

  “Mr. Rawlins.” Zane smiled at me. He got his large body out of the chair and shook my hand. “It’s so good to see you again.”

  Zane did my year-end taxes. I owned three apartment buildings around Watts and had the sense to know that a professional would do a better job with the government than I ever could. I had introduced the modest bookkeeper to the cowardly, brilliant, and untrustworthy Jackson Blue.

  “Good to see you too, Anatole.”

  “Jackson’s in his office doing a spreadsheet on the Morgans.”

  “Thanks.”

  I went through the door behind Zane’s small desk. There I entered a hall so narrow that I imagined the fat manager might get stuck trying to make it from one end to the other.

  I knocked on the third door down.

  “Yeah?”

  “Police!”

  I heard the screech of a chair on the floor and three quick steps across the room. Then there was a moment of silence.

  After that, a quavering voice: “Easy?”

  A door down the hall opened up. A bespectacled Asian man stuck his head out. When I turned in his direction, he jumped back and slammed the door.

  “Come on, Jackson,” I said loudly. “Open up.”

  The door I had knocked on opened.

  If coyotes were black, Jackson Blue would have been their king. He was small and quick. His eyes saw more than most, and his mind was the finest I had ever encountered. But for all that, Jackson was as much a fool as Douglas “Cousin” Hardy. He was a sneak thief, an unredeemable liar, and dumb as a post when it came to discerning motivations of the human heart.

  “What the fuck you mean scarin’ me like that, Easy?”

  “You at work, Jackson,” I said, walking into his office. “This ain’t no bookie operation. You not gonna get busted.”

  Jackson slammed his door.

  “Shut up, man. Don’t be talkin’ like that where they might hear you.”

  I sat in a red leather chair that was left over from the previous tenants. Jackson had nice furniture and a fairly large office. He had a window too, but the only view was a partially plastered brick wall.

  “How you doin’, Jackson?”

  “Fine. Till you showed up.”

  He crossed the room, giving me a wide berth, and settled in the chair behind his secondhand mahogany desk. He avoided physical closeness because he didn’t know why I was there. Jackson had betrayed and cheated so many people that he was always on guard against attack.

  “What you doin’?” I asked.

  He held up what looked like a hand-typed manual. It had a cheap blue cover with IBM and BAL scrawled in red across the bottom.

  Jackson smiled.

  “What is it?”

  “The key code to the binary language of machines.”

  “Say what?”

  “Computers, Easy. The wave of the future right here in my hand.”

  “You gonna boost ’em or what?”

  “You got a wallet in your pocket, right, man?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You got some money in there?”

  “What you gettin’ at?”

  “You might even have a Bank Americard, am I right?”

  “Yes.”

  “One day all your money gonna be in this language here.” He waved the manual again. “One day I’ma push a button and all the millionaires’ chips gonna fall inta my wagon.”

  Jackson grinned from ear to ear. I wanted to slap him, but it wouldn’t have made a difference. Here he was the smartest man you could imagine, and all he could think about was theft.

  “Roke Williams,” I said.

  “Niggah was born in the alley and he gonna die in one too. Right down there offa Alameda.”

  “Who runs him?”

  “Was a dude named Pirelli, but he got circulatory problems.”

  “Heart attack?”

  “Kinda like. A bullet through the heart. Now it’s a man named Haas. He’s a slick bita business run his people outta the Exchequer on Melrose.”

  “How about a man named Lund?”

  Jackson squinted and brought his long thumbs together. “No. Don’t know no Lund. What’s this all about, Easy?”

  I told Jackson about the smoke bomb and Cousin.

  When I finished he said, “So? What do you care about all that, man? It ain’t your house.”

  “It’s my job.”

  “Your job is to make sure that the toilets don’t smell and that the trash cans is emptied. You not no bomb squad.”

  I remember trying to dismiss Jackson’s argument as some kind of cowardly advice, but even then there was a grain of truth that made it through.

  “Maybe not,” I said. “But I’m in it now.”

  “You better bring some backup you wanna tango with Haas.”

  That reminded me of Mouse. He had been my backup since I was a teenager in Fifth Ward, Houston, Texas. Mouse was crazy, but he was always on my side.

  “I got a call this mornin’, Jackson. It was a woman with a deep bass voice—”

  “She ask you about Mouse?”

  “How you know that?”

  “She called me too. Three days ago. Said she was lookin’ for Raymond.”

  “What you say?”

  Jackson became wary again. He scratched the back of his neck with his left hand and looked off to his left. When he saw
that there was no escape route, he turned back to me. “I don’t want no trouble now, Easy.”

  “Trouble’s over, man. Mouse is dead.”

  “Like you once told me: you don’t know that.”

  “I saw him. He wasn’t breathin’ and his eyes were wide. That bullet opened him up like a busted piñata.”

  “But you didn’t go to no funeral.”

  “Etta carried the body outta the hospital. You know how much she loved him. She probably put him in the ground herself.”

  Jackson wrung his hands.

  “What did you tell that woman?” I asked.

  “Nuthin’. I didn’t tell her a thing.”

  “Okay,” I said. “What didn’t you say?”

  “You cain’t tell nobody I told, Easy.”

  “Fine.”

  “A girl named Etheline, Etheline Teaman.”

  “What about her?”

  “I met her a few weeks back and we started talkin’ shit. I told her ’bout some’a the crazy stuff Mouse done did. You know, just talkin’ jive. She told me that just before she left Richmond she met a gray-eyed, light-skinned brother named Ray. She said he got in a fight one night, and even though he was small, he put down this big dude with a chair, a bottle, and his knee. She didn’t even know Mouse, man. She only moved here from Richmond six months ago.”

  “Where is this girl?”

  “Piney’s.”

  “A prostitute?”

  “So what? You ain’t askin’ her to take care’a your kids. She said that she knew a man might be him. That’s what you asked me.”

  “Why didn’t you call me about this, Jackson?”

  “If Mouse is alive and don’t want nobody to know, then I don’t need to say a word.”

  It was Jackson’s long silence that bothered me. He turned into a loudmouth braggart after just one beer. For him to have kept quiet about his suspicions meant that something in what he heard made him fear that Mouse was really alive.

  And Mouse was a man to fear. He was deadly to begin with, and his heart was unrestrained by any feelings of guilt or morality.

  “What you gonna do, Easy?”

  “Go out and buy me a tie.”

  I STOPPED AT THE May Company downtown and bought an orange silk tie. It had blue veins running through it and a yellow kite veering to the side as if it had broken its string.

  I knotted my tie using the rearview mirror and then drove off to Melrose Avenue.