Six Easy Pieces (17 page)

“I was just mad at Art,” she said. “He didn’t have to beat up Willis and hurt his hands. I thought my father would come and maybe do something.” Her eyes grew glassy.

“What happened?”

“I told Art that I was going down to the liquor store and then I called Daddy. I told him that I was with a guy but I was scared to leave and he said to wait somewhere near at hand. Then I waited in the coffee shop across the street. When I saw Abel I got scared and went to get Willy. When we came back to get my clothes he was…” She trailed off in the memory of the slaughter.

I turned to Willis and said, “You’d be better off holding a gun to your head.”

“I didn’t mean for him to get killed,” Sinestra said angrily.

“What now?” I asked Etta.

“I’m tryin’ to talk some sense to ’em. I’m tryin’ to tell Sin to go home and Willis to get away before he ends up like that Art fella.”

“I’m not going back,” Sinestra proclaimed.

“And I’m not leavin’ her or L.A.”

“She just had a big man break your fingers and then she went and fucked him.”

“She didn’t know. She was just flirtin’ and it got outta hand. She’s just innocent, that’s all.”

My mouth fell open and I put my hand to cover it.

Etta started laughing. Laughing hard and loud.

“What are you laughing at?” Sinestra asked.

I started laughing too.

“Shut up, shut up,” Sinestra said.

“Yes. Please be quiet,” Abel Snow said from a door in the back.

He had a pistol in his hand.

“There’s a man in a car parked out front, Sinestra,” Snow said. “Go out to him. He’ll take you home.”

Without a word the young white woman went for the door.

Etta looked into my eyes. Her stare was hard and certain.

“Sin,” Willis said.

She hesitated and then went out the door without looking back.

“Well, well, well,” Abel Snow said. “Here we are. Just us four.”

Willis was sitting on the couch. Etta and I were standing on either side of the boy. He turned on the blue sofa to see Snow.

“You gonna kill us?” I asked, my voice soaked with manufactured fear.

“You’re gonna go away,” he said, and smiled.

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.

E
ASY?” 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.

“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?”