Little Scarlet

13

Cox Bar was in a back alley off of Hooper. It was no more than a ramshackle hut but that was the place you would most likely find Raymond Alexander. Big Ginny Wright, the proprietor, was standing behind a high table used for a bar. She stood under a murky lamp that seemed to spread darkness instead of light. There was a pool table in the corner and a few chairs set around the room.

There were electric fans blowing from every side but it was still hot in there.

A small woman sat on a high stool at the far end of the tablebar, nursing a beer and staring off into space.

“Easy,” Ginny said. “How you, baby?”

“I’ve been better.”

Ginny laughed. “Me too. With these fools runnin’ the streets I been thinkin’ of movin’ back down to Texas. At least there you know what to expect.”

“Mr. Rawlins?” The young woman who had been drinking the beer had come up to me. She was slight and medium brown, the same color as Ginny.

“Yeah?”

“You remember me?” she asked. “I’m Benita, Benita Flag.”

I realized that I had met her before—with Mouse. She was beautiful then, wearing a little pink dress and red heels. Her hair, I remembered, was done up like a complex sculpture made of seashells. Now the hair was coarse and unkempt. She wore jeans and a stained white blouse that had been buttoned wrong.

“You seen Raymond?” she asked me.

“No.”

“’Cause he ain’t called me in two weeks and I’m worried he got hurt in all that’s happened. You know Ray wouldn’t just sit inside. I’m worried that maybe he got shot again.”

Mouse had been shot a few times in his life but the last wound was because he was helping me. For a long while I thought that he’d died and that I was the cause of his death.

“Can you help me find him?” Benita asked.

Ginny’s impatient sigh told me that Benita was just one more girlfriend that Mouse had let slide.

“I haven’t seen ’im in weeks, Benita. Really.”

She stared in my face, looking for a map to her boyfriend.

“I told her that even his wife don’t know where he is,” Ginny said. “But she just sit there drinkin’ beer and hopin’ he gonna walk in.”

Benita ignored Ginny’s barbs.

“Tell him to call me if you see him, Easy. I got to see him.”

“Excuse me, Benita,” Ginny said, “but Easy come in here to see me. I know that ’cause he don’t drink, so he must have somethin’ on his mind.”

Benita didn’t like being dismissed. She gave Ginny a hard look but then moved back to her lonely stool and flat beer.

“Raymond be lucky if that one don’t shoot ’im,” Ginny said in a low voice.

The comment unsettled me. It reminded me that the life we lived had always been perched at the edge of violence. That violence was Newell and Mouse and whoever killed Nola Payne. It was a constant threat eating away at happiness and any feeling of well-being.

“Do you know where Mouse is?” I asked, also in a soft voice.

Ginny studied me then. She scratched the mole at the left side of her mouth and snuffled.

“I could get him to call you,” she said. “But that’s all. Raymond’s workin’.”

Work for Mouse was never legal. The only time he ever held a real job was when he worked for me at Truth.

“That’s fine, Miss Wright. Tell him I need his help.”

“I’ll tell ’im but you know he’s busy and he ain’t got no time to be helpin’ you.”

Ginny wasn’t one of Mouse’s girlfriends but that didn’t matter. She was past sixty, three hundred pounds, and rough as lava stone, but she had a soft spot for Mouse just like Benita did. She believed, as did most of Raymond’s women, that she had the last word on him.

“All he has to do is call,” I said.

“All right.”

“Maybe you could help me too, Gin.”

“How’s that?”

“You ever hear of a man name of Loverboy?”

“Oh yeah,” Ginny said. “He’s what they call a prime suspect if ever your car is gone from its garage.”

“You wouldn’t happen to know where he work at?” I asked.

I knew she’d have the answer. Ginny had a mind like a steel trap. Nothing ever escaped her notice or her memory. She was so good at counting cards that Raymond was the only one I knew that would gamble with her. And when it came to her customers she knew every one of their histories all the way back to Africa—almost.

“He in Watts over near Menlo and Hoover. You know the junkyard over there?”

“Sure do.”

“It’s a house with a green roof across the street from there. It’s got a double garage in back. That’s where Loverboy and Craig Reynolds make over the cars for sale.”

“What’s Loverboy’s real name?”

“Nate Shelby,” Ginny said. “It sure is. But be careful, Easy. ’Cause you know Nate don’t play.”

Ginny’s last words stayed with me in the car. I rode with them all the way to West L.A., thinking that I wouldn’t go up against the car thief until I was sure of my footing.

MARIANNE PLUMP WAS sitting at her post behind the reception desk at the Miller Neurological Sanatorium. It was about two in the afternoon. A young white man and an older woman were sitting on a small blue sofa set against the wall directly across from her. They both eyed me with fear.

“Miss Plump,” I said.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Rawlins,” she said with certainty.

She met my eye and even smiled. Overnight she had thought about our conversation and the morning brought on a resolution to live life the way she saw it.

That’s what I surmised anyway.

“May I see Miss Landry?” I asked.

“She’s in H-twelve. Dr. Dommer said that it was fine.”

As I moved toward the swinging door, the young man piped up.

“Excuse me, miss, but we’ve been waiting here for over half an hour.”

“The doctor is still with a patient,” Marianne said, not in an unfriendly tone.

“Then why is he going in?” the young man replied.

“Listen, friend,” I said. “You don’t want to go where I’m going. Believe that.”

He looked away from me and I laughed.

“You might turn your head, man, but I’ll still be here.”

Marianne Plump covered her mouth to stifle her grin.

I pushed open the door and never saw the young man or old woman again.