Little Scarlet Read online

  He shifted gears again and we rumbled east on Olympic.

  The streets were pretty quiet and so was I.

  We were just turning onto Western when Hauser asked, “So what about the stuff they take over to your place?”

  “What about it?” Mouse said in a less than friendly tone.

  “We said that we were going to split the profits —”

  “On what we move outta your place, brother. Out of there. Whatever I keep for me is mine.”

  I could see that Hauser wasn’t happy about loot he was missing out on. But I knew, and he did too, that despite his size Mouse was unafraid of any man. If Hauser wanted to argue he’d better be serious because Mouse was always ready to arrange a meeting with Death.

  Hauser drove us all the way down Western past El Segundo, to a lonely spot between the Western Avenue public golf course and the Gardenia Airport. We backed up to a dark warehouse down there. While we were climbing out of the cab the door to the loading dock came open.

  I realized that Hauser was even bigger than I thought. He was at least six four and right around three hundred pounds. His red hair was thick and wavy and his shoulders were so big that they seemed like some other creature rising up behind him. He wore jeans and a light blue work shirt over a dark blue T-shirt.

  Looking at him I wondered about the origin of Nola Payne’s red hair color. Maybe Hauser’s ancestors owned Nola’s. Maybe they ran together, hiding from the English.

  Mouse was clad in white coveralls with a white T-shirt that looked to be silk. There was a sapphire hat pin stuck to his lapel and he carried a canvas money bag like the ones tellers use in banks.

  Mouse led us up a ramp and to a table at the center of the room. There were groups of black men on either side, about thirty men in all. Each group of two or three men stood amid their looted goods. One group had television sets, while another had pushed in five or six washing machines. Some had cans of food. One solitary man had a small green duffel bag slung over his shoulder.

  Mouse sat at the table and met with the men one group at a time. He’d make an offer and then they would argue. A couple of the groups left with their goods. When a deal was struck, Mouse took the payment from his money bag. The men worked loading the merchandise onto the truck under Hauser’s watchful eye.

  There were boxes of transistor radios, trays of watches, seven racks of suits, and about a dozen fur coats. The truck had a forty-foot trailer but it was full to capacity by the time the deals were through.

  The last man to see Raymond was the one with the duffel bag. He was tall and dark-skinned with small eyes and what I can only call a sensual mouth. Raymond took this man to the side to keep their talk secret. Both of them came away smiling and Mouse was toting the bag.

  “You see, Easy,” he said to me. “This here is work.”

  “I guess so,” I said.

  When the truck was loaded nearly to capacity we climbed back in the cab and Hauser drove off. He went south to Rosecrans Avenue and then turned right toward the sea.

  “I thought you said that this would be a big haul?” Hauser complained.

  “You got TVs, dishwashers, air-conditioners, and enough clothes to dress the whole National Guard,” Mouse said, “and you think you ain’t got a big haul? Shit.”

  “What you got in that duffel bag?” Hauser wanted to know.

  “None’a your business what I got. What I got is mine. We already made that deal.”

  “You know I ain’t a punk, Ray.”

  “Then don’t ack like one. I got my pick’a what the people come to us is sellin’. If it wasn’t for me you wouldn’t have nuthin’ at all.”

  “How does this work, Raymond?” I asked.

  I didn’t really care to know but I thought I could cut down the ire between the partners if I could shift the subject a bit.

  “Well, you know, Ease,” he said, “people I know be takin’ stuff hand over fist down in the riots and when they got a whole houseful they need to lay it off fast. You know sellin’ washin’ machines one at a time got jailbird written all over it. So I got this warehouse from Jewelle and told whoever it was doin’ business to come here at night . . .”

  “Jewelle know what you’re doing in her place?” I asked. I still felt protective of the young woman even though she was my superior in every form of business.

  “I didn’t tell her and she didn’t ask,” Mouse said. “But you know I buy at twenty-fi’e percent’a what Hauser here can get and then we split the profit fifty-fifty.”

  “But he keeps all the cream for himself,” the driver interjected.

  “And why the fuck shouldn’t I?” Mouse said. “You wouldn’t even have a dime if it wasn’t for me.”

  “You’re just a go-between,” Hauser said in an elevated tone. “You should only be getting ten percent.”

  “I got your ten percent right here in my pocket.”

  I was worried that the partners would start fighting right there in the cab. I wasn’t concerned about the outcome. I knew that Mouse would kill Hauser no matter how big he was. But we might die when the rig ran off the road. And even if we didn’t I’d be implicated in moving stolen goods and a murder.

  I was trying to think of some words that would ease the mood when a red light began flashing in the outside mirror. The siren started just after that.

  “Shit!” Hauser and Raymond said together.

  Raymond pulled out his large .41 caliber pistol.

  “Put it away, Ray,” I said.

  “I ain’t lettin’ them take me to jail, Easy.”

  “Put it away, man,” I said again.

  “I’m not goin’ to jail, man.”

  But he put the pistol behind the seat and we all climbed out on the passenger’s side. I strode up to the cops before the others and put my hands in the air. The cops coming at us numbered four. They were all white men. They all had their pistols drawn.

  In my left hand I held the letter given to me by Gerald Jordan.

  “Before you make a mistake, officers,” I said. “Please read this letter.”

  I hadn’t been pistol-whipped for quite some time.

  The advance policeman struck me for no reason I could see. He didn’t know me. I hadn’t committed a crime as far as he knew. My hands were aloft and the only thing I held was a flimsy note. But he hit me so hard that he grunted.

  I didn’t go down, though. And instead of striking back I held out the note.

  “You better read this,” I said.

  “Hold it, Billings,” another cop said.

  Billings swung at me anyway but I bent my knees and lowered my arm so that the gun swung over my head. I tasted blood on the side of my mouth but all I was worried about was Raymond murdering those four cops.

  The one who had told Billings to stop stood in front of me.

  “What’s that you got there?” the cop asked.

  “A letter about me and my friends,” I said, “from your boss.”

  I didn’t expect it to work. But the officer read my letter while the rest of the cops braced Hauser and Raymond.

  “Where’s the key to the back?” Billings was asking Hauser.

  “Lost it,” the big redhead said.

  By then my cop had read the letter.

  “This doesn’t have anything to do with you in a truck in the middle of the night,” he told me.

  “Call up and find out,” I said.

  He was brown-eyed and I would have said brawny if it wasn’t for Hauser. Sonny Liston would have looked scrawny in the presence of Raymond’s disgruntled partner.

  I was trussed up in handcuffs and pressed against the side of the forty-foot trailer—next to my friends.

  “Where’s the key?” a cop was yelling into Raymond’s ear.

  “It ain’t mines to keep,” Raymond said. “And stop spittin’ on me.”

  “Uncuff them,” the officer who took my official hall pass said.

  “What?” Billings asked belligerently.

 
“Which word didn’t you understand?”

  I could see the two cops got along about as well as Mouse and Hauser. But that meant nothing to me. My chains were released and three of the cops stood back. The leader, the one who read my note, came up to me then.

  “Can I be of any assistance, Mr. Rawlins?” he asked.

  It was worth the whole night just to see the look of wide-eyed shock enter Mouse’s face. In all the years I’d known him, since we were in our teens, I had never surprised my friend. He was a force of nature, the spawn of some nether god. There was nothing a mortal like me could do that would take him off guard.

  But I did that night.

  “As a matter of fact, yes, Officer,” I said. “Could you let your friends know that Mr. Alexander here and his friend Mr. Hauser will be doing work with me for the next few nights? I really wouldn’t want them to be bothered anymore.”

  “You got it,” he said. He didn’t even sound angry. Gerald Jordan was not only the enemy of my people but, in some ways, more powerful than all of us put together.

  17

  How you do that, Easy?” Mouse asked when we were back on the road.

  “Do what?” I asked innocently.

  “You know what. Get them cops to treat you like you was the mayor or somethin’.”

  “You don’t expect me to let up on all my secrets, do you, Ray?”

  “Come on, man, what did that letter say?”

  “It said, ‘Listen up, Mr. Policeman, that’s Easy Rawlins you talkin’ to.’ ”

  “I never saw anything like that in my life,” Randolph Hauser said. “That cop called you mister and he didn’t even try to look in our truck.”

  I didn’t respond to the compliment. I was just happy that Hauser’s estimation of Mouse and his value had risen.

  THIRTY MINUTES LATER we reached another warehouse on Hart, not half a block from the ocean. Six or seven white men rushed out on the dock and started unloading. I had found out along the way that Hauser really didn’t have the key. He carried a set of open padlocks to secure the van, so if the police did stop him they couldn’t get into the truck without metal-cutting tools.

  We went to the glass-walled warehouse to smoke and drink coffee while Hauser’s men worked.

  “That was a good trick, Rawlins,” Hauser was saying. “How’d you do it?”

  “Charm school,” I replied.

  The giant looked hard at me for a moment and then he cracked a smile.

  “You’re all right, son,” he said. “I guess Ray is better than I gave him credit for.”

  “If you borrowed on me,” Mouse added, “you’d be a rich man.”

  We all laughed and smoked for a while and then I wandered out toward the front of the warehouse so that Mouse and the big man could conclude their business.

  As a rule I avoided Raymond’s illegal business. I knew he was a crook, but what could I do? He was like blood to me. And that night the rules as I had always known them had been suspended. Police opening fire on a house of worship, covering up information about a murder, and employing a black man to get them out of a jam. Our bigoted mayor was set to meet with Martin Luther King. I hadn’t even broken the law, telling those policemen that Raymond was working with me. So it didn’t disturb me standing in the thieves’ den. That was simply another step toward the other side of our liberation.

  MOUSE JOINED ME outside the warehouse a few minutes past midnight. He still had that small duffel bag. He was smiling so I knew the money had worked out fine. Mouse only ever had two things on his mind: money and women. Revenge ran a distant third but still you wouldn’t want to be on his bad side.

  “Ready to go, Easy?”

  “Go where?”

  “To shake Nate Shelby outta his tree.”

  His white teeth and gray eyes flashed in the night and a laugh came unbidden from deep in my chest.

  THE MENLO JUNKYARD was dark, and so was every other house and business on the street. All except one. That was a house that had a double garage at the end of its driveway.

  “You gotta dime, Ease?”

  “For what?”

  “I got to make a call.”

  I gave my friend the ten-cent piece and he walked down to the corner where a working phone booth stood. I remember thinking that that had to be the only phone booth in Watts that had not been smashed by rampaging rioters.

  Ray talked for a good five minutes. Every now and then I could hear his voice rise in a threatening tone.

  “Here’s your dime,” he said, handing me the coin.

  “I thought you needed it for the call.”

  “I did. But the coin box is broke out so you get your money right back. I been callin’ people all over the country from the phones down here.”

  He took a cigarette from his white coveralls pocket, lit up, and then leaned against the junkyard fence.

  “What are we waitin’ for?” I asked when he lit a second smoke.

  “Magic.”

  “Come on, Ray. Who did you call?”

  “What you had in that note you showed the cops?”

  Mouse’s revenge ran a slow third but it always crossed the finish line.

  I laughed and said, “Okay, Ray. I’ll wait for your magic trick.”

  And so we stood there at 1:15, smoking cigarettes and watching the single lit window on the block. No one was out; not the army or the police force or people in the neighborhood. When we had stood around for about five minutes or so one of the doors to the garage came open and a car drove out. A red Galaxie 500. It came across the street and parked in front of us. The door opened and a big black man with a weathered, angry face got out.

  He walked up to Raymond and said, “This what you wanted?”

  Mouse turned to me and asked, “This the car you lookin’ for, Easy?”

  “Is it the one stolen from a white man bein’ beat on the second day of the riots?”

  Mouse looked at the ugly man.

  “Yeah,” the man said.

  “Then that’s the car.”

  “You got the papers, Nate?” Raymond asked Loverboy.

  “Glove compartment.”

  “Did you see what happened that night?” I asked then.

  “Who you, mothahfuckah?” Nate replied.

  “All you need to do is answer him,” Raymond said. “You see him standin’ here with me, don’t you?”

  “Crazy motherfuckin’ white man drivin’ around lookin’ out the window with people burnin’ and breakin’ and throwin’ rocks,” Nate said. “They grabbed and beat him good. Tore his clothes all up. He ran away screamin’ like a baby. Shit.”

  “You see where he went to?” I asked.

  “Naw, man. I just wanted the car. You lucky I still got it. We so backed up right now that we couldn’t chop it till Monday.”

  Mouse flashed his eyes at me and I shrugged.

  “Thanks, Nate,” Mouse said in dismissal.

  “What about my money?” the car thief asked.

  “You do want trouble, don’t you, son?” Mouse said.

  While Loverboy was screwing up the courage to die I opened the car door and took whatever papers there were in the glove compartment. I made a quick search under the front and back seats but found nothing.

  I took the keys from the ignition and opened the trunk. That was empty too.

  “You can keep the car, man,” I said. “All I need is this here.”

  I returned the keys to Loverboy. He took them from me and then turned to Mouse.

  “Is that all?”

  “Okay,” my friend, the self-appointed sovereign of Watts, said.

  We all stood there for a moment, wondering what the exact etiquette was in a situation like that. Was somebody supposed to say thank you or even good-bye?

  Nate made a quick move for the car.

  When he drove off, Mouse asked me, “Even, Easy?”

  “Maybe right now but I believe I’ll be in your debt before it’s all through.”

  RAYMOND DROVE
ME home. We had a good time on the way, chatting about people we knew. It wasn’t until he stopped at the curb in front of my house that I remembered my message.

  “I ran into Benita Flag at Cox Bar,” I said.

  “You did?”

  “Yeah. Didn’t Ginny tell you?”

  “Ginny don’t talk to me about women too much.”

  “Benita was worried about you.”

  “I bet she was.”

  It was almost three and I wasn’t Benita’s lawyer, so I opened my door.

  “What you do about your girlfriends, Ease?”

  “Say what?”

  “Your girlfriends,” he repeated. “When they get all cow-eyed and hungry for you.”

  Juanda popped into my mind but I pushed her away.

  “I don’t have any girlfriends, Ray. It’s just me and Bonnie, that’s all.”

  “You don’t get you no pussy on the side?”

  “Not lately.”

  “I cain’t live without it. I gots to have me a little taste every now and then. But you know some’a these girls don’t hear it when you tell ’em you married and shit. I mean they say okay but then they wanna know how you could love ’em like that and then not move in.”

  I didn’t even smile. This was a true moral conflict for my friend. His understanding of anyone outside of himself was severely limited. He didn’t know why Benita didn’t understand him, so he cut her off. And the mere fact that she would mention him to me set him on a dark path.

  “I’ll talk to her, Ray,” I said.

  “You will?”

  “Oh yeah. I’ll explain your predicament. She’ll understand.”

  “You know, you all right, Easy,” he said. “You all right.”

  He left me standing in the warm night air appreciating the silence. There I was, a middle-aged city employee. The only thing I should have had on my mind was my bed and my children, my mortgage, and the woman I loved. All of that was waiting for me in the house.

  But instead of heeding that domestic call I went to my car, turned over the engine, and drove off.

  18

  There was a chain drawn to block the driveway to the Miller Neurological Sanatorium. I had to park my car on the street and walk to the door. I was looking for the night bell when a flashlight shone on the side of my head.