A Red Death

37

At about seven A.M. I was parked down the street from 1135 1/2 Stanley Street. It was a block or so north of Olympic Boulevard, and a solidly white neighborhood, but I took the chance that the police wouldn’t see me. I had most of the plans wrapped up in an envelope, his name lightly taped in the center, next to me in the front seat. I wore black gloves, a porter’s cap, and a uniform from a hotel Dupree once worked for in Houston.

At eight-fifteen Lawrence walked out his front door. I scooted down, squinted, and jammed my tongue into the socket Primo and Flower had created in my jaw. He went to his car and drove off, leaving his wife and child at home.

I waited another half an hour so she wouldn’t be suspicious, and then I knocked at the door. There was crying in the background. It got louder when the door opened.

Mrs. Lawrence was small and redheaded, though there was lots of gray in the red. She seemed to be young, but her head hung forward as though it were weighed down. She had to lift her head and screw up her eyes to look at me. The stitched scar coming down the left side of her mouth was jagged, the flesh around her right eye puffy and discolored. There was bright red blood in the white of her eye.

“Can I help you?” she asked.

“Delivery, ma’am,” I said in the crisp tone I used to address officers in WWII.

“Delivery for whom?”

“I got it here for a Reginald A. Lawrence,” I said. “It’s from a law firm in Washington.”

She tried to smile, but the child started hollering. She turned away and then back to me, quickly. She put her hand out and said, “I’m his wife, I’ll take it.”

“I don’t know…” I stalled.

“Hurry, please, my baby’s sick.”

“Well… okay, but I still need one ninety-five for the COD.”

“Hold on,” she sighed on an exasperated note. She went back into the house, running in the direction of the crying.

I slipped in the front door, taking out a sheet of government secrets that I’d folded into eighths. The door opened into a little entrance hall that was designed to make the house seem larger. There was a coat rack and a lacquered ornamental desk in the hall. I opened the drawer to the desk and shoved the little slip of evidence under a pile of maps.

I moved into the living room, where the lady was fretting over a folding bed. The bed wasn’t big, but the child in it was so slight that you could have gotten four or five children his width to lie there. He was almost as long as the bed, but his arms and legs were so skinny that they could have belonged to an infant. His wrists were torn and scabrous; his naked chest was covered with sharp, blue-green bruises. One of his eyes drifted around and the other fastened onto me as he moaned.

“Ma’am?” I said.

“Yes?” She didn’t even turn to me, just cried as she wilted next to the child, who was weeping softly now that his mother was near.

I helped her to her feet.

“What happened to him?” I asked.

“Polio,” she replied.

Who knows? Maybe she believed it.

She shot a quick glance at the child and stood up.

“He needs me,” she said. “I have to be here. He needs me, he needs me.”

I folded my arms around her, thinking of how her husband tried to shoot me the last time I’d held a woman. I helped her to a chair.

I removed Lawrence’s name from the envelope and put the evidence in her lap.

“This ain’t nuthin’ important,” I whispered. “Just give it to him when you got the chance.”

I was at Griffith Park by seven P.M. I stopped my car on a fire trail below the observatory and hiked up through the trees behind the great domed building. It was a long hike, but I thought that it was worth the extra insurance to have a vantage point before the government man showed. There was a rustling of branches in the trees behind me as I made my way, but that didn’t worry me.

It was almost eight-fifteen before Lawrence showed. He walked right down the grassy hill behind the lower wall and walked almost to the line of trees. He stretched out his left arm and snapped his wrist to his face to look at his watch. He was still gawky and awkward, but there was a new kind of aggressiveness in his gait. He strutted like a rooster, cocking his head from side to side as if he were spoiling for a fight.

“Evenin’, Reggie,” I called out from behind a scraggly pine. I walked out of the trees to meet him with both hands in my pockets.

He made a gesture toward his breast, but I brought my right hand out to show him the little pistol I held, then I shoved it back in my jacket pocket.

He gave me a lopsided smile and hunched his shoulders. His big, bruising hands hung peacefully at his side.

“You got the money?” I asked.

He leaned forward slightly, indicating a brown paper parcel he held in his jacket.

“But if I give you this money, what guarantee do I have that you’ll let me be?” he asked.

“I know you a killer, man. I’ma run wit’ this here money. Run someplace you cain’t find me.”

He smiled at me, and we both froze in time. I could see that he didn’t plan to move until I said something else, so I asked, “Why, man?”

He jumped slightly from a tremor running through his body.

“Hey! Fuck you!” he said, twisting his neck from side to side. I could smell the gin.

“Uh-uh, really. I gotta know, man. Why you do all this shit?” I asked. I knew he was crazy, but I just wanted to have some reason.

There was a fever in Agent Lawrence’s eyes.

“Niggers and Jews,” he said. It was a toss-up whether or not he was talking to me.

“Like your wife an’ child?”

He looked me in the eye then. But he was quiet.

“I mean, why Towne? Why Poinsettia?”

“I told the nigger minister about you. You know what he did?”

Lawrence brought his fists to his shoulders, so I said, “Cool it, man.”

“Yeah.” Lawrence sputtered a laugh. “He threw me out. But I went back there. Yes sir, I did.”

He giggled again. I took the pistol from my pocket.

“And the bitch lived like a pig.” Agent Lawrence was breathing hard. “Filthy. And she acted like I could, could ever be like that… All you had to do was pay. All you had to do was follow the program. I didn’t want to kill them. But it was my ass out there on the line.”

“Chaim Wenzler wasn’t nuthin’ to you, man.”

“He was something to the FBI. If he was out of the way then they wouldn’t need you.”

“But then you tried t’kill me!”

Lawrence giggled again, and bit his thumb.

Twilight was falling. Actually it felt as if the darkness was rising out of the trees. It was time for me to collect my money and leave.

“Okay,” I said. I had my hand on the pistol like another time. “Gimme the money.”

I’d planned to act nervous when I took his money; but I didn’t need to act.

“I thought you might be a nigger with nuts,” he said, suddenly somber.

I felt my gorge rise, but I didn’t give in. The night was coming on faster, soon we’d just be shadows.

“You don’t really think that I’m going to let you get away with blackmailing me, do you?”

“Do somethin’ stupid an’ you’ll see what kinda nuts I got.”

Suddenly he made his decision. He took the package from the recess of his jacket and handed it to me.

I said, “Nice to do business with ya. You could go now.”

The moment I touched the envelope he lunged forward and shouldered me in the chest, hard. Because we were on a hill I had the feeling of flight again, but this time I landed on my backside, my hands shooting out behind.

I tried to bring my gun around but couldn’t. Lawrence ran down and kicked my shoulder. He grinned at me as he yanked awkwardly at the pistol in his pocket.

“Don’t do it, man!” I shouted in warning. But he had the pistol out.

He said the word, nigger, and then he flew backward about six feet. When he was in the air I heard the cannonlike pistol shot from down among the trees. I was running before the echoes were through shouting my name.

As fast as I ran, Mouse was already in the car by the time I got there.

He smiled at me and said, “You a damn fool, Easy Rawlins. We shoulda kilt that man the minute he showed his ugly face.”

“I had to know, Raymond. I had to know for me.”

We were driving down away from the observatory, through the forestlike park.

“You like some stupid cowboy, Easy. You wanna yell ‘Draw!’ ’fore you fire. That kinda shit gets ya killed.”

He was right, of course, but that way I convinced myself that I wasn’t a murderer. I gave him a chance to walk away from it-at least until I’d told the police about him.

“Was he the one?” Mouse asked. He really didn’t care.

“He did the killin’s.”

“What you gonna do now?”

“Pray nobody saw us an’ tell the FBI man that Lawrence forced me to tell about the work I was doin’. That he stole the papers from Wenzler. That he turned into a spy for profit. And I’ll prove it by sayin’ he was into tax cases fo’ profit.”

While I talked I counted out a five-hundred-dollar pile for Mouse.

I didn’t intend to keep anything. I gave to the families of the dead people, including Shirley Wenzler. I figured that Lawrence should at least pay dollars for the havoc he’d caused. I even donated a thousand dollars to the African Migration. Sonja Achebe has sent me postcards from Nigeria for over thirty years.

Mouse stuck out his lower lip. “Not too bad. Not too bad.”

I lit a couple of cigarettes while he drove. There were no sirens or any special activities on the road. I handed a cigarette to Mouse and breathed deep.

“Where you goin’ now?” He asked after five or six miles of driving. We were on Adams Boulevard and all the police cars ignored our progress.

“I tole LaMarque I’d come by and take him for hot dogs.”

And then I’d take him to Mexico, I thought.