Six Easy Pieces: Easy Rawlins Stories Read online

  “Did she give you the money?”

  “I bought her a new dress and shoes with it. Then we drove to San Diego and went to the zoo.” Tears welled in his eyes. “She taught me how to dance.”

  He certainly loved her enough to kill her.

  “How long this go on?”

  “Months,” he said. “Three…no, four months.”

  “Love at first sight.”

  He smiled at me and shook his head.

  “My wife left me. She took the children but I didn’t care. Even now that Jackie’s dead I don’t regret. Have you ever loved like that, Mr. Rawlins?”

  It sounded more like a contest than a profession of love.

  “No,” I said. “Cain’t say that I have.”

  We were both silent there for a while. It was a pleasant day. I thought about my good friend Raymond Alexander. When I believed he was dead I was as distraught as the man before me.

  “What happened to her?” I asked.

  “Somebody had beat her…. They found her in the alley, behind my building.”

  “What was she doing there?”

  “I don’t know. She had the key. Maybe she was coming to surprise me.”

  Tremors shook Tanous’s forearms and knees.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll do it. I’ll try and find out who killed her. But I warn you, man: I will find out who did it so it better not be you.”

  “You haven’t told me your price.”

  “Who rents that office we found you in?”

  “No one. It’s been vacant for over a month. I was trying to do my work from there without anyone knowing. But Trevor found me somehow.”

  “If I find out who did it and get you off, you give me that office for twenty dollars a month for as long as that building is in your family,” I said. “The rent stays the same, forever.”

  My demand amused him. He smiled for a moment and then nodded.

  For my part I was surprised. I had no need for an office but somehow that room seemed as if it had been waiting for me. I wanted to go back there, sit in a chair, and look out of the window at the street.

  “Where does Trevor live?” I asked.

  He gave me the address. It wasn’t far.

  “And I’ll need a picture of Jackie. Do you have one in your wallet?”

  “No,” he said. He seemed rather embarrassed. “I have some at home.”

  “Then let me have your address and telephone number. I’ll call before I come by, probably tonight.”

  COX BAR WAS A DIVE in a back alley off of Hooper, not far from Steinman’s Shoe Repair. I don’t think the alley had a name. It had been paved at one time but most of the asphalt had worn away, leaving a rutted dirt path that ruined the alignment of any car that drove on it.

  It was a boxlike structure tiled with tar paper flaps that had green-and-red pebbles pressed into them. The sign was a hand-painted flat board leaned up against the front wall.

  I parked on the street and walked the hundred yards or so to the screen door. The room smelled of cigarettes, smoked sausage, and stale beer. At noon its only inhabitants were Ginny Wright and Raymond Alexander.

  She was the girlfriend of the now-dead Tiny Cox and he was my best friend.

  They sat across from each other in the gloom, under a dim light, playing blackjack. Ginny had sixty years, three hundred pounds, and one of the best memories I had ever encountered on her side. Mouse had what he called the “luck of the black man” on his.

  “Easy,” he had once told me, “you know a black man has to be luckier than any white guy you ever met.”

  “How you get that?” I asked.

  “Well you know white men had it easy. They had jobs and guns and the western plains for them. All we had was chains and nooses and shit like that. For a white man’s father’s father to survive was nuthin’. But if one of our people lived it was only because of the best luck. Jackson Blue said it to me. He said that this scientist, Derwin I think, said that you got things from your ancestors through the blood. I got luck from mines.”

  That didn’t explain why Mouse thought he was luckier than other black men, but I didn’t question his beliefs because he was the luckiest man I had ever known.

  “Twenty-one,” Mouse shouted, slapping down a red queen. “Pay up Ginny. You owe me thirty-seven cents.”

  Ginny Cox was slow and deliberate, more than twice the size of Mouse. She looked at his cards and then looked at hers. Then she brought out a change purse and counted out her losses.

  “Another game?” she asked then.

  Women liked Mouse. It passed through my mind that she might have lost games often enough to keep Mouse around. Who knows? One drunken night she might just drag him off to bed.

  “Not right now if you don’t mind, Raymond,” I said.

  “Easy.” Mouse turned to me and smiled, his gold-edged teeth glittering.

  “I need your company, Ray.”

  “You gonna get me shot again?”

  “I hope not,” I said. “But you never know.”

  “Well if I could beat Ginny here then I must be on a streak. I might even be lucky enough to survive Easy Rawlins.”

  With those words he stood and walked out into the alley with me.

  WE DROVE THE FEW BLOCKS over to Parmelee, Trevor McKenzie’s street. On the way I told Mouse about the girl Jackie Jay and the friend of Theodore Steinman.

  “Teddy’s cool,” Mouse said. “You know him and me go out barhoppin’ sometimes.”

  “You do?”

  “Oh yeah. Teddy like them bars with the girls got the naked titties hangin’ out. He won’t touch ’em though, not him. He wouldn’t do that to Sylvie—”

  “You know his wife too?” I was shocked. For some reason I didn’t imagine Raymond with everyday people.

  “Yeah, man,” Raymond said. “One time I brought him a pair of rattlesnake boots that Poor Howard made.”

  Poor Howard was a Cajun who lived in the woods of southern Louisiana. I hadn’t thought of him in years. He was a cobbler. All of his shoes were made from the things you could gather in the swamplands. From alligator hide to water moccasin skin, from opossum fur to cougar fleece—Poor Howard made it all.

  “Where’d you get that?” I asked.

  “Howard up around here nowadays, man. He killed a white boy slapped his woman and then made beeline for L.A.”

  “He’s in town?”

  “You know Howard,” Mouse said. “He’s somewhere. In the woods or down by the sea. Settin’ traps and whatnot. Anyway when Theodore got a look at those snakeskin boots, he was my best friend from then on. I like the guy. Them Frenchmen are all right.”

  “He’s not French,” I said. “He’s a German.”

  “Same thing,” Mouse said with a shrug.

  I would have argued further but we were at the McKenzie house.

  I knocked while Mouse stood off to the side. After a moment or so a woman answered. She was small and blunt-looking, dark-skinned with eyes that never looked straight at anything.

  “Yes sir?”

  “Mrs. McKenzie?”

  “Miss McKenzie.”

  “Is your son here, ma’am?”

  “Who wants to see him?”

  “Tell him that it’s the man who hit him in the head earlier today. I came by to apologize and ask him a question.”

  Miss McKenzie’s mouth came open showing no teeth and resembling a cornered Gila monster.

  “Trevor?” she said, and the big young man appeared.

  He had been standing off to the side just as Mouse was.

  “What you want?” Trevor barked.

  “I’m working on a job,” I said. “Tryin’ to prove that Jackie was killed by Musa Tanous.”

  “You lyin’, man. You the one saved him from me.”

  “I’m the one saved you from the electric chair,” I corrected, “just where my client wants to put Tanous.”

  Trevor squinted and moved his head around as if trying to hear some far-off sound
.

  “Nuh-uh, man,” he said at last. “You hit me upside the head and took my knife.”

  Trevor pushed the door open, confident that round two would go in his favor. I took a pace backward and Ray took a sidle pace into view. Trevor noticed the periphery movement and swiveled his head.

  “Hey, brother,” Mouse hailed.

  “Trevor,” Miss McKenzie cried. “Stop it before you get in trouble.”

  She would have said those words anyway but I don’t think Trevor would have stopped his onslaught if he wasn’t worried about my friend.

  Mouse had the aura of danger around him. The way he walked, talked, and smiled were all harbingers of violence.

  When Miss McKenzie looked at him, her frown deepened. She turned to me and asked. “What you want here, mister?”

  “My name is Easy Rawlins, ma’am, and I want prove that Musa Tanous killed your daughter.” I said this with absolute certainty. And it was true. If I tried my best to prove Tanous’s guilt then maybe I’d achieve the opposite.

  “Get inside, Trevor,” she said.

  He obeyed her and she made room for me and Mouse.

  * * *

  THE FRONT ROOM was just that—a room. It had no carpeting or decoration. There was a wooden bench and a couple of wood chairs. There was a stool. Mouse took that. We all sat, even Trevor.

  “Who you workin’ for?” Trevor asked.

  “I can’t tell you his name,” I said. “He’s a married man and he’s afraid that his wife might find out. But he paid me to make sure that Jackie’s killer gets convicted.”

  “Is it Durgen?” Trevor asked, “that white man own Trellson’s?”

  “No,” I said quickly, as if avoiding the question. “Tell me what happened the day your sister was killed. Did you talk to her? Did Tanous call her?”

  “She didn’t stay around here much any more,” Miss McKenzie said. “She has her own apartment and most of the time she was out cattin’ around. You know men loved her and she loved them too. I tried to get her to stay here with me but she went her own way.”

  “Did she have lots of boyfriends?”

  “What’s that got to do with anything?” Trevor said belligerently.

  Mouse grinned.

  “What you grinnin’ at, fool?” Trevor asked him.

  “Don’t listen to him, Mr. Alexander,” Miss McKenzie said. “He too young to know respect.”

  Mouse shrugged generously.

  “I need to know what she was doin’ and who she knew,” I said. “Because that way maybe I can put Jackie and Musa in the same place at the time she was killed.”

  “You ain’t the police,” Trevor said.

  “And she’s no white girl,” I replied. “I hope you don’t think the cops gonna work up a sweat over her killer. If Tanous got the money for a good lawyer then he’s gonna walk.”

  “And I’ll kill his ass.”

  “And spend the rest of your life behind bars, or maybe the court will be lenient and execute you.”

  This prospect seemed to confuse Trevor.

  “Yes, Mr. Rawlins,” Miss McKenzie said. “She knew a lotta men. She wasn’t no prostitute now. Sometimes men helped her with her rent and she was out to dinner every night. But money never changed hands for gettin’ in the bed.”

  “Did you know many of them?”

  “Not a lot. Mr. Tanous was really the only one she stuck with. He was nice to all of us.”

  “He killed Jackie, mama. He killed her. How can you call that nice?”

  “The Lord will take care of all that, boy. Yes he will.”

  Trevor jumped up from his wood chair and stormed out the front door.

  After he was gone conversation became easier.

  “Other than this Durgen, are there any other men that she might have known, Miss McKenzie?”

  “She had started to see a man named Bob Henry. He’s got a gas station on Alameda. And then there’s Matthew Munson. He does taxes down here on Central.”

  “How old was Jackie?” I asked.

  “She told everybody she was nineteen. She looked twenty-one but she was just seventeen, Mr. Rawlins. Just a girl.” Miss McKenzie’s eyes filled with tears. “When she moved out she took all of her dolls. And you know she was a good girl. She always said that she was going to buy me my own house in the country where I could have a garden and Trevor could have him a horse.”

  “WHY YOU WANT me wit’you on this, Ease?” Mouse asked as we rode down Hooper.

  He had one foot up on my dashboard and the other knee laid flat on the seat. He wore a yellow short-sleeved shirt that was loose fitting with soft gray slacks and maroon-colored shoes with no socks. Those were his “slumming” clothes.

  “Somethin’ to wear but not to go nowhere in,” as he’d told me more than once.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I guess I missed runnin’ around with you when I thought you were dead. And if the guy who hired me is right and he didn’t kill that girl, then I thought I might need you to back me up.”

  “So you was lyin’ when you said that you were tryin’ to prove Mustard did it.”

  “Musa,” I said. “And, yeah, I was lyin’ but either way I’ll do what she would want. If Musa did it I’ll find out and if he didn’t I’ll find out who it was instead.”

  “An’ what’s he payin’?”

  “It’s just a country trade, Raymond. No money.”

  “Then what do I get wastin’ my time when I could be winnin’ money off’a Ginny?”

  “Theodore asked me to look into this,” I said.

  “So?”

  “That means he will owe me a pair of handmade shoes.”

  Raymond lit up there next to me. He might have been a child he was so pleased.

  “Drive on, my man,” he said. “Drive on.”

  * * *

  OUR FIRST STOP was a small apartment building on Manchester. Doreen McKenzie had given us the key to her daughter’s apartment mostly because she seemed to have a deep regard for Mouse.

  “How do you know that woman?” I had asked my friend.

  “Don’t know her far as I can remember, Ease.”

  “Then why she show you so much respect?”

  “I got a rep, man. People know who I am. You know that.”

  “Yeah.”

  Her apartment was built on the model of shotgun architecture of the Deep South. Three rooms in a line from front to back. And because she was on the first floor there was a back door too.

  We entered into her bedroom. It was furnished with a big mattress held aloft by a cherry frame, and a vanity with lipsticks, powder cases, and bottles of perfume scattered about. The next room was the toilet. There was makeup crowding the sink and nylons hanging from a rack above the tub.

  The last room was the kitchen. It was stacked with dirty dishes and fashion magazines. She had been cutting out pictures of women in sexy poses.

  The only food she had was milk that had gone bad and cornflakes, both of them kept in the refrigerator.

  Other than the magazines there was no reading material in the house. There were no photographs, no calendar, phone book, telephone directory, or television set. There was a radio on the kitchen counter. It was set on the station KGFJ which specialized in soul music. I knew that because Mouse turned it on.

  There were condoms in her medicine cabinet—dozens of them.

  There was nothing under the bed.

  I was looking between the mattress and box springs when Mouse asked, “What you lookin’ for, Easy?”

  “Something that might give us an idea about who killed Jackie,” I said, a little vexed that he wasn’t giving me a hand.

  “You mean like this here?” He was holding out a thick sheaf of legal documents.

  “Where’d you get that?”

  “In the vanity drawer.”

  Sooner or later I would have checked that drawer. But I had got it in my mind that Jackie was a devious child, that she would have kept her secrets in some pretty obvious
hiding place.

  It was the deed to a house at the southern outskirts of Compton. She’d paid twelve thousand dollars in cash for the place. It was large enough for a garden but I didn’t know if it was zoned for stabling a horse.

  On a small piece of paper, folded in between the various documents, she had listed a dozen or so names under an underlined title—$500. Bob Henry was on the list. Ted Durgen was too. Musa Tanous was the second to last name, just before Matthew Munson.

  WHEN WE WALKED OUT of the front door I noticed a man pushing a wire shopping cart, stolen from some supermarket, down the street. I say stolen because he wasn’t coming home from the grocery store. Neither had he been to the laundromat in the past year or so. His cart was filled with junk he’d picked up along the way. Broken umbrellas, a painting of a white woman holding an apple up to her eye, bottles, cans, newspapers, and various types of clothing. There was a green felt derby in there with a yellow hatband that sported three green feathers and a new-looking powder-blue scarf, festooned with large black polka dots, tied to the guide bar.

  Close up the man stank. Mouse refused to get within three steps of him.

  “Excuse me,” I said. “My name’s Easy.”

  “Hello, Easy,” he replied holding out a hand. “I’m Harold.”

  His hand was big and soft, bloated almost. I didn’t want to shake it but I needed to gain the man’s confidence.

  “You got a cigarette, Easy?” Harold asked me.

  I handed him a Chesterfield and lit it. His bloated hand was quivering; there was a line of sweat across his upper lip.

  Harold’s brown chin sported white stubble and his eyes saw everything and nothing all at once.

  “Do you hang out around here much, Harold?”

  “Oh yeah. I sleep in that empty lot down the street two, three days a week. You know—when John Bull ain’t beatin’ the bushes. Sometimes they catch on to me and send me to county jail. It’s alright except if it’s in with the drunks. You know I hate the smell in there. I stay with my mama sometimes—”

  “Did you know a young woman live in here, down on the first floor? Her name is Jackie Jay?”

  “Jackie Jay,” he said, considering the name for a moment or two. “Jackie Jay. No. No. No I cain’t say that I do. My mama’s name is Jocelyn—”