Six Easy Pieces (22 page)

He sipped while he talked. After each swallow he hissed in satisfaction. As the moments ticked by I got used to seeing him. That was easy because Mouse had never really been dead for me. I took him with me everywhere I went. He was my barometer for evil, my advisor when no good man would have known what to say. Raymond was proof that a black man could live by his own rules in America when everybody else denied it. Why couldn’t he crawl up out of the grave and return to life whenever he felt like it?

“Damn,” I said. “Damn.”

Mouse grinned again. I refilled his glass.

“Good to see you, Easy.”

“I looked everywhere for you, Ray. I asked just about everybody here and down in Texas. I asked EttaMae but she said you were dead.”

“She told me about that. You know I was mad at her for not gettin’ me to help that musician boy.” Mouse held up his glass in a toast to his wife. “But she’s a good woman. She didn’t want me hangin’ ’round you ’cause she said that she thought that you’d get me in trouble.”

“Me?” I said. “Me get
you
in trouble?”

Mouse chuckled again. “I know what you mean, Ease, but Etta got a point too. You know you always on the edge’a sump’n’. Always at the wrong door. I did get shot followin’ you down that alley.”

Mouse winked at me then. We were both in our mid-forties but he didn’t look thirty. His smile was as innocent as Eve’s come-on in the Garden of Eden.

“I’m sorry,” I said. A tear did escape my eye. “I really am.”

Mouse ignored the emotion I showed. “Anyway,” he said. “She don’t know that a man cain’t be worried ’bout every Tom, Dick, and Harry wanna do him some harm. There’s always somebody out to get ya. Always. You cain’t hide from it. Shit. At least we friends, right?”

“Yeah,” I said. “We sure are.”

Mouse focused those cloud-colored eyes on me. “Domaque’s in trouble again.”

“What about?”

“Ugly,” the dapper killer said. “Ugly brought him into this world and ugly gonna take him out.”

“What’s wrong with him?”

“Wrong with him? Don’t you remember?”

Domaque was Mama Jo’s son. He had the soul of an artist, the strength of a mule, and the looks of a fairy-tale ogre. His nasal passages didn’t work right and so his drooling mouth was always open. One eye was larger than the other and between his arms and legs no two of them were the same length. He had a curve in his spine that made him hunchbacked and, though he was very intelligent, he had the emotional makeup of a twelve-year-old.

“I mean, what trouble is he in?”

“They say he robbed a armored car on its way to the Bank of America in Santa Barbara.”

“Did he?” I asked.

“No.”

“Did you?”

That made Mouse laugh. But it wasn’t his debutante titter. It was a snort that was meant to be a warning. I had seen dogs run away from him when he’d made that sound.

He’d only been alive for ten minutes and I was already under threat.

“So what did happen?” I asked.

“Some white girl been hangin’ ’round, that’s what Jo says. She met Dom down at this cove where he went fishin’ and started sweet-talkin’ him. One day she disappears and the next thing they know the cops come up to Jo and Dom’s house.”

“They get him?”

“Naw. Jo got a false floor with a hole for Dom to hide under. She told them cops that Dom was down in Texas, that he’d been there for two weeks. They didn’t believe her. But they couldn’t find Dom neither.”

“Where is he now?”

“Compton. With Etta.”

“Etta’s here?”

“Yeah. After you two killed that white man she decided to come back. You gonna help me with Domaque, Easy? You know you owe me after all the shit I gone through.”

There it was, the offer of redemption. I could pay Mouse back for the guilt I’d taken on. I just nodded. What else could I do?

“YEAH, EASE,” Mouse opined as we drove south toward Compton. “You ain’t got no reason to feel guilty. The way I see it it helped me gettin’ shot and all.”

“Helped you how?”

“Well, you know I was so upset back then, wonderin’ if all the violence I lived through was wrong. But when Jo patched me up she said that I’m just a part of a big ole puzzle, a piece. I fit in where I go and I do what I do. She said that and it stuck with me. Now I’m just fine with who I am.”

Etta’s new house wasn’t as nice as the servants’ quarters of the mansion she lived in, in the mountains above Santa Barbara. It was a small wooden cottage on a street of wooden cottages—all of them painted white. The only protection her little home had from harm was a wire fence that was twelve feet long and three-and-a-half feet high.

Mouse opened the gate and we scaled the three granite steps to the door. Before he could get his key into the lock it came open.

“Hey, Ray!” Domaque shouted. “Easy Rawlins!”

He was almost exactly the same as the last time I’d seen him, in the summer of 1939. Barrel-chested and lopsided, drooling and full of glee.

“I saw you comin’!”

“You don’t have to shout and spray like that, Dom,” Mouse said. “Damn.”

I offered my hand to Dom and he almost crushed it.

“Good to see you, Dom,” I said through clenched teeth.

“Wanna go fishin’ like we did back in Pariah?” he asked.

The outing came back to me with all the pain of those miserable days. I was coming down with a virus that nearly finished me. Mouse took Dom and me fishing with a pistol instead of a pole. He stunned the fish by shooting the water with a flat-nosed soft-lead bullet, shoveling them into a bag before they could regain their senses and escape. Raymond also killed three dogs and their master, his own stepfather. After that he married Etta and I joined the army for the comparative safety of World War Two.

“No time for relaxation, Dom,” Mouse said. “Easy got to get you outta trouble before Jo loses her mind.”

A pitiful emotion spread over Dom’s already damaged face.

The front door led into a makeshift dining room. There was a dark wood table just inside the door, surrounded by six chairs.

I grabbed a seat and turned it backward.

“Who was this girl you’d been seeing, Domaque?” I asked. I wanted to get down to business quickly.

“You ever learn how to read books, Easy?” he asked.

“Yeah. Yeah.”

When I’d met Dom and his mother I knew how to make out what words I needed to pick through instructions or read a love letter from a girl. But when I saw him read hard books out loud I got jealous because I realized that he could go further than I could in the world of his mind. It struck me that it was because of Dom that I learned to read.

“Her name is Merry,” Dom said. “E-R-R-Y Merry not A-RY the way it is usually. She was just on the beach one day while I was fishin’. You know you cain’t shoot the water in the sea for fish, Raymond. It’s too big.”

“Dynamite prob’ly work though,” Mouse replied.

“Tell me about Merry,” I said.

“She was real pretty, Easy. Real pretty and nice. She didn’t care I was ugly and humpbacked. She liked to laugh. For a few days she’d come around and talk to me. She even kissed me on the cheek and let me hold her hand.” A sigh shuddered through Domaque’s diaphragm. He was more upset about the girl than the police intent on sending him to prison. “But then she had me go to a supermarket-like place on the coast highway one day. She said that the guy who ran the place always tried to make her kiss him and she hated him. But she owed him some money and said for me to take it there.”

“Did the armored car come while you were there?” I asked.

“Uh-huh. It did. You know how much I like trucks and other big cars. I looked at it and they told me to get away.”

“Did Merry tell you that you could see the money car if you went down to pay her debt?”

“Sure did. But they didn’t have no record of her owin’ money and they told me to get away from there.”

“And the next thing you know the car is robbed?”

“Not till the next week,” Dom said, shaking his head. “It was a week later that we found that bag in the bushes.”

I glanced at Raymond. He just hunched his shoulders and looked away.

“What bag?”

“Jo fount a bag in the bushes outside our house,” Dom said.

“Was that after the cops came?”

“Uh-uh. She got the sight, you know. She felt somethin’ and started nosin’ around. That’s when she made me hide in the space. She knew the cops would be there.”

Before I could ask what was in the bag Raymond pulled it out from a closet next to the table.

It was a Wells-Fargo bag that had three stacks of a hundred twenty-dollar bills and a short .38 with a rough black handle the shape of a lightbulb. I didn’t touch the money or the gun.

It was a beautiful frame: the girl with the fake name that nobody ever saw; the witnesses at the country market and evidence poorly hidden in the bushes.

“But what about the guards?” I asked out loud. “I mean there’s no mask in the world that could hide Dom.”

“Dead,” Mouse said. “Both of ’em shot in the head. And I bet you ten to two that it was this here .38 done it.”

“Damn.”

“She prob’ly had partners,” Mouse said. “I mean Dom says she wasn’t big or tough or nuthin’.”

“Yeah,” Dom put in. “She was prob’ly tricked by some guy wanted to fool me too. I don’t wanna get her in trouble for that.”

“You see why I called on you, Easy,” Mouse said. “If I knew who they were it would be a piece’a cake. But I got to find ’em before I could convince ’em to let up on my cousin here.”

I had to laugh then. It was really funny. Maybe I wasn’t an African prince but I had my own domain. I wasn’t a sovereign maybe and I didn’t wear a crown or signet ring. But I too spent my time working for my people.

“What the hell you laughin’ about, Easy?” Mouse complained.

“It’s good to see you, Ray. It really is.”

THE FRONT DOOR OPENED and a tall and lanky youth came in tripping over his own big feet.

“LaMarque!” Dom shouted.

The boy, who was at least six foot three, winced.

“Is that you, LaMarque?” I asked.

“Hi, Mr. Rawlins.”

“Boy, you’ve grown a foot.”

“Yes sir.”

His skin had grown darker in just the few months since I’d last seen him, and he had brooding eyes. His shoulders slumped and his head hung down. He was Jesus’s age, seventeen, and prey to all of the sour emotions of an adolescent.

“Say a proper hello to Easy and your uncle,” Mouse ordered his son.

“He’s not my uncle,” LaMarque replied.

“What you say?” Mouse asked.

I stood up and stuck my hand out. “It’s great seeing you, son.”

After a moment’s hesitation LaMarque took my hand.

“Ray,” I said. “Let’s go somewhere where we can talk. This is some serious business and it should just be us three involved.”

“You gonna say hello to your uncle?” Mouse asked his son.

“Hello, Uncle Dom.”

Dom grinned and waved with his long arm.

The level of drama around Mouse was always higher than it was anywhere else in the world. A week in Raymond’s company would age a normal man a year or more.

He smiled at LaMarque and said, “Okay, Easy. I got a place we could go.”

“What you want me to tell mama?” LaMarque asked his father.

“That I went out. That you don’t know where I went or who I was wit’.”

The brooding boy nodded and turned away toward the kitchen.

WE CAME TO A SMALL HOUSE with a brick façade off of Denker. Mouse had the key and so we went in the front door. The door opened onto a good-sized living room. There was a picture of a shapely black woman and a bespectacled black man on the coffee table. The table was flanked by two sofas. Dom and I sat on one couch and Raymond took the other.

“Whose house is this?” I asked.

“Pamela Hendricks and her husband Bobby.”

“They friends of yours?”

“She is. I don’t think he likes me too well.”

“Where are they?” I was wondering what Mouse thought I meant when I asked for privacy.

“He took her up to Frisco for a vacation. They gonna be gone another ten days.”

“And they gave you keys to their house?”

“She did. He prob’ly don’t know about it. But even if he did—what’s he gonna do?”

“So nobody’s gonna come around?”

“No sir.” Mouse grinned.

I shook my head. Mouse still lived in the fever of our youth. At that degree he should have died long before he was shot down in that alley.

“Did Merry have a last name, Dom?”

“Not that I know.”

“Did she tell you anything about herself, anything? About her parents, her school, where she’s from—”

“She said she was from Pasadena,” Domaque blurted out. “She said that when she moved out from her parents she moved to, to…” the damaged man pressed his powerful fingers against his dark brow. “…Culver City. Uh-huh, Culver City.”

“Think hard, Dom,” I said. “Did she ever say anything about her last name or her parents’ last name?”

“I think,” he said. “I think that it had the sound ‘Bick’ in it somewhere.”

“Bickman? Becker? Buck somethin’?”

“Uh-uh. No. Not like that. I don’t know, Easy.”

“She have any scars or marks? What color was her hair?”

“Light, light blond. Almost white. But brown eyes though. Most’a your blond-haired peoples got blue eyes but not Merry. And she had a little nose and her canine teef was sharp. She bit me one time and laughed.”

Mouse sighed and stood up. “I’ma go in the other room,” he said. “Stretch out a minute.”

He walked out. I knew he was bored by all of my questions. The only questions Mouse had patience for could be answered by “yes” or “no,” either that or with a number.

“How tall?” I asked Domaque when Raymond was gone.

“Five-five,” he said, and then he ducked his head and grinned. “She showed me her butt,” he whispered.

“What?”

“She showed me her butt. One day we was playin’ around down by the sand at Horth’s Cove. She’d pushed me and then run before I could push her back. I got kinda hard an’ she point at my pants and laughed. Then she pulled down her jeans and said was that what I wanted. I told her yeah and she said to go down to the market and wait for her in two days. And I did but then the people who owned the place made me go away.”