The Best American Mystery Stories 2003

Walter Mosley Lavender

From Six Easy Pieces

It was a Tuesday morning, about a quarter past eleven. The little yellow dog hid in among the folds of the drapes, peeking out now and then to see if I was still in the reclining living room chair. Each time he caught sight of me, he bared his teeth and then slowly withdrew into the pale green fabric.

The room smelled of lavender and cigarette smoke.

The ticking of the wind-up clock, which I had carried all the way from France after my discharge, was the only sound except for the occasional passing car. The clock was encased in a fine dark wood, its numerals wrought in pale pink metal — copper and tin, most probably.

The cars on Genesee sounded like the rushing of wind.

I flicked my cigarette in the ashtray. A car slowed down. I could hear the tires squealing against the curb in front of our house.

A car door opened. A man said something in French. Bonnie replied in the same language. It was a joke of some sort. My Louisiana upbringing had given me a casual understanding of French, but I couldn’t keep up with Bonnie’s Parisian patter.

The car drove off. I took a deep drag on the Pall Mall I was nursing. She made it to the front step and paused. She was probably smelling the mottled yellow and red roses that I’d cultivated on either side of the door. When I’d asked her to come live with us she said, “As long as you promise to keep those rosebushes out front.”

The key turned in the lock and the door swung open. I expected her to lag behind because of the suitcase. She always threw the door open first and then lifted the suitcase to come in.

My chair was to the left of the door, off to the side, so the first thing Bonnie saw was the crystal bowl filled with dried stalks of lavender. She was wearing dark blue slacks and a rust-colored sweater. All those weeks in the Air France stewardess uniform made her want to dress down.

She noticed the flowers and smiled, but the smile quickly turned into a frown.

“They came day before yesterday.”

Bonnie yelped and leapt backward. The little yellow dog jumped out of hiding, looked around, and then darted out through the open door.

“Easy,” she cried. “You scared me half to death.”

I stood up from the chair.

“Sorry,” I said. “I thought you saw me.”

“What are you doing home?” Her eyes were wild, fearful.

For the first time I didn’t feel the need or desire to hold her in my arms.

“Just curious,” I said.

“What are you talking about?”

I took two steps toward her. I must have looked a little off wearing only briefs and an open bathrobe in the middle of a workday.

Bonnie took a half-step backward.

“The flowers,” I said. “I was wondering about the flowers.”

“I don’t understand.”

“They been sittin’ there since the special delivery man dropped them off. Me and the kids were curious.”

“About what?”

“Who sent ’em.” The tone of my voice was high and pleasant, but the silence underneath was dead.

“I don’t understand,” Bonnie said. I almost believed her.

“They’re for you.”

“Well?” she said. “Then you must have seen the note.”

“Envelope is sealed,” I said. “You know I always try to teach my children that other people’s mail is private. Now what would I look like openin’ your letter?”

She heard the my in “my children.”

Bonnie stared at me for a moment. I gestured with my right hand toward the tiny envelope clipped to an upper stem. She ripped off the top flowers getting the envelope free. She tore it open and read. I think she must have read it through three times before putting it in her pocket.

“Well?”

“From one of the passengers,” she said. “Jogaye Cham. He was on quite a few of the flights.”

“Oh? He send all the stewardesses flowers?”

“I don’t know. Probably. He’s from a royal Senegalese family. His father is a chief. He’s working to unite the emancipated colonies.”

There was a quiet pride in her words.

“He was on at least half of the flights we took, and I was nice to him,” Bonnie continued. “I made sure that we had the foods he liked, and we talked about freedom.”

“Freedom,” I said. “Must be a good line.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said, suddenly angry. “Black people in America have been free for a hundred years. Those of us from the Caribbean and Africa still feel the bite of the white man’s whips.”

It was an odd turn of a phrase — “the white man’s whips.” I was reminded that when a couple first become lovers they begin to talk alike. I wondered if Jogaye’s speeches concerned the white man’s whips.

I didn’t respond to what she said, just inhaled some more smoke and looked at her.

After a brief hesitation, Bonnie picked up her suitcase and carried it into our bedroom. I returned to the big chair, put out the butt, and lit up another, my regimen of only ten cigarettes a day forgotten. After awhile I heard the shower come on.

I had installed that shower especially for Bonnie.

If someone were to walk in on me right then, they might have thought that I was somber but calm. Really, I was a maniac trapped by a woman who would neither lie nor tell the truth.

I’d read the note, steamed it open, and then glued it shut. It was written in French, but I used a school dictionary to decipher most of the words. He was thanking her for the small holiday that they took on Madagascar in between the grueling sessions with the French, the English, and the Americans. It was only her warm company that kept his mind clear enough to argue for the kind of freedom that all of Africa must one day attain.

If she had told me that it was a gift from the airlines or the pilot or some girlfriend that knew she liked lavender, then I could have raged at her lies. But all she did was leave out the island of Madagascar.

I had looked it up in the encyclopedia. It’s five hundred miles off the West African coastline, almost a quarter million square miles in area. The people are not Negro, or at least do not consider themselves so, and are more closely related to the peoples of Indonesia. Almost five million people lived there. A big place to leave out.

I wanted to drag her out of the shower by her hair, naked and wet, into the living room. I wanted to make her tell me everything that I had imagined her and her royal boyfriend doing on a deserted beach eight thousand miles away.

The bouquet had been sent to her care of the Air France office. Her boyfriend expected them to hold it there. But some fool sent it on, special delivery.

I decided to go into the bathroom and ask her if she expected me to lie down like a dog and take her abuse. My hands were fists. My heart was a pounding hammer. I stood up recklessly and knocked the glass ashtray from the arm of the chair. It shattered. It probably made a loud crashing sound, but I didn’t notice. My anger was louder than anything short of a forty-five.

“Easy,” she called from the shower. “What was that?”

I took a step toward the bathroom and the phone rang.

“Can you get that, honey?” she called.

Honey.

“Hello?”

“Easy, is that you?”

I recognized the voice but could not place it for my rage.

“Who is this?”

“It’s EttaMae,” she said.

I sat down again. Actually, I fell into the chair so hard that it tilted over on its side. The end table toppled, taking the lamp with it. More broken glass.

“What?”

“I called Sojourner Truth,” she was saying, “and they said you had called in sick.”

“Etta, it’s really you?”

Bonnie came rushing out of the bathroom.

“What happened?” she cried.

Seeing her naked body, thinking of another man caressing it, holding on to the phone and hearing a woman that I had been searching for for months — I was almost speechless.

“I need a minute, baby,” I said to both women at once.

“Hold on a minute,” I said to Etta while waving Bonnie back to her shower. “Hold on.”

Bonnie stared for a moment. She seemed about to say something and then retreated to the bathroom.

I sat there on the floor with the phone in my lap. If I had had a gun in my hand, I would have gone outside and killed the yellow dog.

The receiver was making noise, so I brought it to my head.

“... Easy, what’s goin’ on over there?”

“Etta?”

“Yes?”

“Where have you been?”

“There’s no time for that now, Easy. I got to talk to you.”

“Where are you?”

She gave me an address on the Pacific Coast Highway, at Malibu Beach.

I hung up and went to the bedroom. Three minutes later I was dressed and ready to go,

“Who was that?” Bonnie called from the bathroom.

I went out of the front door without answering because all I had in my lungs was a scream.

I don’t remember the drive from West L.A., where I lived, to the beach. I don’t remember thinking about Bonnie’s betrayal or my crime against my best friend. My mind kind of shorted out, and all I could do for a while there was drive and smoke.

There wasn’t another building within fifty yards of the house, but it looked as if it belonged nestled between cozy neighboring homes. The wire fence had been decorated with clam and mussel shells. The wooden railing around the porch had dozens of different-colored wine bottles across the top. The house had been built on ground below street level so that it would have been possible to hop on the roof from the curb. It was a small dwelling, designed for one or maybe one and a half.

I opened the gate and descended the concrete stairs. She met me at the door. Sepia-skinned and big-boned, she had always been my standard for beauty. EttaMae Harris had been my friend and my lover in turns. I hadn’t seen her for almost a year because I was the man who had gotten her husband shot.

“You look wild, Easy,” was the first thing she said.

“What?”

“Your hair’s all lumpy and you ain’t shaved. What’s wrong?”

“Where’s LaMarque?”

“He’s with my people up in Ventura.”

“What people?” I asked. My heart skipped, and for an instant Bonnie Shay was completely out of my mind.

“Just a cousin’a mines. She got a little place out in the country around there.”

“Where’s Mouse?”

Etta peered at me as if from some great height. She was a witch woman, a Delphic seer, and Walter Cronkite on the seven o’clock news all rolled into one.

“Dead,” she said. “You know he is.”

“But the doctor,” I said, almost pleading. “The doctor hadn’t made the pronouncement.”

“Doctor don’t decide when a man dies.”

“Where is he?”

“Dead.”

“Where?”

“I buried him out in the country. Put him in the ground with my own two hands.”

It was certainly possible. EttaMae was the kind of black woman who made it so hard for the rest. She was powerful of arm and iron-willed. She had thrown a full-grown man over her shoulder and carried him from the hospital after knocking out a big white orderly with a metal tray.

“Can I go to the grave?”

“Maybe one day, baby,” she said kindly. “Not soon, though.”

“Why not?”

“Because the hurt is too fresh. That’s why I ain’t called you in so long.”

“You mad at me?”

“Mad at everything. You, Raymond. I’m even mad at LaMarque.”

“He’s just a child, Etta. He ain’t responsible.”

“The child now will become the man,” she preached. “And when he do, you can bet he will be just as bad if not worse than what went before.”

“Raymond’s dead?” I asked again.

“The only thing more I could wish would be if he would be gone from our minds.” Etta looked up over my head and into the sky as if her sermon of man-hating had become a prayer for deliverance from our stupidity.

And we were stupid, there was no arguing about that. How else could I explain being ambushed in an alley when I should have been at home lamenting the assassination of our president? How could I ever tell Mouse’s son that he got killed trying to help me out with a little problem I had with gangsters and thugs?

“Come on in, Easy,” she said.

The living room was decorated like a sea captain’s cabin in a Walt Disney film. A hammock in the corner with fish nets full of glass-ball floats beside it. The floor was sealed with a clear coating so that it looked rough and finished at the same time. The windows were round portals, and the chandelier was made from a ship’s wheel.

“Sit down, Easy.”

I sat on a bench that could have easily been an oarsman’s seat. Etta lowered herself onto a blue couch that had gilded clamshells for feet.

“How have you been?” she asked me.

“No no, baby,” I said. “It’s you who called me outta my house after more than eleven months of me searchin’ high and low. Why am there?”

“I just wondered if you were sick,” she said. “They said at work that—”

“Talk to me, Etta. Talk to me or let me go. ‘Cause you know as much as I want to see you and try to make it up to you, I will walk my ass right outta here if you don’t tell me why you called after all this time.”

Her face got hard and, I imagined, there were some rough words on the tip of her tongue. But Etta held back and took a deep breath.

“This ain’t my house,” she said.

“I could see that.”

“It belongs to the Merchant family.”

“Pierre Merchant?” I asked. “The millionaire from up north?”

“Lymon,” Etta said, shaking her head, “his cousin runs the strawberry business north’a L.A. I work for his wife. She has me take care’a the house and her kids.”

“Okay. And so she let you stay here when you come down to town. So what?”

“No. She don’t know I’m here. This is a place that Mr. Merchant has for some’a his clients and business partners when they come in town.”

“Etta,” I said. “What you call me for?”

“Mrs. Merchant have four chirren,” she said. “The youngest one is thirteen and the oldest is twenty-two.”

I was about to say something else to urge her along. I didn’t want there to be too much silence or space in the room. Silence would allow me to think about what I had just learned — that my best friend since I was a teenager was dead, dead because of me. For the past year I had hoped that he was alive, that somehow EttaMae had nursed him where the hospital could not. But now my hopes were crushed. And if I couldn’t keep talking, I feared that I would fall into despair.

But I didn’t push Etta because I heard a catch at the back of her throat. And EttaMae Harris was not a woman to show that kind of weakness. Something was very wrong, and she needed me to make it right. I grabbed on to that possibility and took her hand.

A tear rolled down her face.

“It was hard for me to call on you, Easy. You know I blame you for what happened to Raymond.”

“I know.”

“But I got to get past that,” she said. “It’s not just your fault. Raymond always lived a hard life an’ he did a lotta wrong. He made up his own mind to go with you into that alley. So it’s not just that I need your help that I’m here. I been thinkin’ for some time that I should talk to you.”

I increased the pressure of my grip. EttaMae had a working woman’s hands, hard and strong. My clenching fingers might have hurt some office worker, man or woman, but it was merely an embrace for her.

“Mrs. Merchant’s second-to-oldest is a girl named Sinestra. She’s twenty and wild. She been a pain to her mama and daddy too. Kicked out of school an’ messin’ around with boys when she was a child. Runnin’ from one bad egg to another now that she’s a woman.”

“She too old for you to look after, Etta,” I said.

“I don’t care about that little bitch. She’s one’a them women that ambush men one after the other. Her daddy think that they doin’ to her, but he don’t see that Sinestra the rottenest apple in the barrel.”

“What’s that got to do with me?”

“Sinestra done run away.”

“She’s twenty,” I said. “That means she can walk away without havin’ to run.”

“Not if her daddy’s one of the richest men in the state,” Etta assured me. “Not if she done run off with a black boy don’t have the sense to come in outta the rain.”

“Who’s that?”

“Willis Longtree. Hobo child from up around Seattle. He showed up one day with a crew to do some work for the Merchants. You know the foreman of their ranch would go down near the railroad yards in Oxnard whenever he needed to pick up some day labor. They got hobos ride the rails and Mexicans between harvests all around down there. Mr. Woodson—”

“Who?” I asked.

“Mr. Woodson, the foreman,” she said. “He brought about a dozen men down to the lower field around four months ago. They was buildin’ a foundation for a greenhouse Mr. Merchant wanted. He grows exotic plants and the like. He’s a real expert on plants.”

“Yeah,” I said. “So was my cousin Smith. He could grow anything given the right amount’a light and rainfall.”

“Mr. Merchant don’t have to rely on nature.”

“That’s why they build greenhouses instead’a churches,” I said.

“Are you gonna let me talk?”

“Sure, Etta. Go on.”

“All that Willis boy owned was a guitar and a mouth harp on a harness. Whenever they took a break, he entertained the men playin’ old-time tunes. Minstrel, blues, even some Dixieland. I went down there one day after young Lionel Merchant, the thirteen-year-old. The music was so fine that I stayed all through lunch.”

“I bet Sinestra loved his barrelhousin’,” I said.

“Yes, she did. Everybody did. It took the crew four days to dig the foundation. After that Mr. Merchant himself offered Willis a job. He made him the assistant groundskeeper and had him playin’ music for his guests when he gave parties.”

“Mighty ungrateful of that boy to think he deserved the boss’s daughter,” I said.

“It’s not funny, Easy. Mr. Merchant got a whole security force work for him. They use it to keep the Mexicans in line on the farms. He told the top man, Abel Snow, that he’d pay ten thousand dollars to solve the problem.”

“And he sees the problem as what?”

Etta held up her point finger. “One is Sinestra bein’ gone from home, and two,” Etta held up the next finger, “is Willis Longtree breathing the same air as him.”

“Oh.”

“Is that all you got to say? Oh?”

“No,” I replied. “I could also say, what’s it to you? Boys run away with girls every day. Daddies get mad when they do. Sometimes somebody ends up dead. Most of the time she comes home cryin’ and it’s all over. That’s the way it was in Fifth Ward when we were kids. I remember more than one time that Mouse got jealous’a you. Usually we got the poor fool outta sight before Ray’s .41 could thunder.”

“Grow up, Easy Rawlins. We ain’t in Houston no more, and this ain’t no joke I’m tellin’ you.” There was that catch in her throat again.

“What’s wrong, Etta?”

“Willis ain’t no more than nineteen. He thinks he’s a man but he barely older than LaMarque. And Abel Snow is death in a blue suit.”

“You like the boy, huh?”

“He’d come around the kitchen in the afternoon and play for me, tellin’ me all the great things he was gonna do. If you just closed your eyes and listened to him, you might believe it’d all come true.”

“Like what?”

“All kindsa things. One minute he was gonna be in a singin’ band and then he talked about bein’ in the movies. He said that he looked like Sidney Poitier and maybe he could play his son in some film. He wanted to be a star. And then Sinestra got her hooks in him. She couldn’t help it. It was just kinda like her nature. Girl like that see a man-child beautiful as Willis and she cain’t think straight. She just wanna make him crazy, make him run like a dog with her scent in his nose. I saw it happen, Easy. I tried to talk sense to him.”

“Maybe you worried about nuthin’, Etta,” I said. “L.A.’s a big town. The police hardly catch anybody unless they committin’ a crime or they just turn themselves in.”

“Abel Snow ain’t no cop. He’s a stone killer. And he got Merchant’s money behind him.”

“That don’t mean he’s gonna find Willis. Where would he look?”

“Same place I would if I was him. Jukes and nightclubs on Central. Movie studios and record studios and any place a fool like Willis would look for his dreams. He told everybody his plans, not just me.”

“You know I’m still just a janitor, Etta.”

“Easy Rawlins, you owe me this.”

“If he’s big a fool as you say, it’s really only a matter of time. You know no matter how hard he try, a fool cain’t outrun his shadow.”

“All I know is that I got to try,” she said.

“Yeah. Yeah,” I said. “I know.”

I was thinking about Bonnie and her African prince. It still hurt, but the pain was dulled in the face of Etta’s maternal desperation. And she seemed to be offering me absolution over the death of her husband.

“I don’t even know what the boy looks like,” I said. “I don’t know the girl. It’s a slim chance that I’ll even catch a glimpse of them before this Snow man comes on the scene.”

“I know that.”

“So this is just some kinda blind hope?”

“No. I can help you.”

“How?”

“Drive me up to the Merchant ranch outside of Santa Barbara.”

I grinned then. I don’t know why. Maybe it was the idea of a long drive in the country.

Lymon Merchant was known as the Strawberry King, that’s what EttaMae told me. But there wasn’t a strawberry field within ten miles of his ranch. Lymon lived up in the mountains east of Santa Barbara. The dirt road that snaked up the mountain looked down on the blue Pacific. We strained and bounced and even slid a time or two, but finally made it to the wide lane at the top. The dirt boulevard was flanked by tall eucalyptus trees. I rolled down my window to let in their scent.

“This the place?” I asked when we came to a three-story wood house.

“No,” Etta said. “That’s the foreman’s house.”

The foreman’s house was larger and finer than many a home in Beverly Hills. The big front door was oak and the windows were huge. The cultivated rosebushes around the lawn reminded me of Bonnie. I felt the pang in my stomach and drove on, hoping I could leave my heartache on the road behind.

The Merchant mansion was only two floors, but it dwarfed the foreman’s house just the same. It was constructed from twelve- and eighteen-foot pine logs, hundreds of them. It was a fantastic structure looking like the abode of a fairy tale giant — not for normal mortals at all.

The double front doors were twelve feet high. The bronze handles must have weighed ten pounds apiece.

Before we could knock or ring a bell the front door swung open. I realized that there must have been some kind of private camera system that monitored our approach.

A tall white man in a tuxedo appeared before us.

“Miss Harris,” the man said in a soft, condescending voice.

“Lawrence,” she said, walking past him.

“And who are you?” Larry asked me.

“A guest of Miss Harris.”

I followed her through the large foyer and down an extremely wide hall that was festooned with the heads and bodies of dead animals, birds, and fish. There were boar and swordfish, mountain lion and moose. Toward the center hall was a rhino head across from a hippopotamus. I kept looking around, wondering if maybe Lymon Merchant had the audacity to put a human trophy up on his wall.

We then came into the family art gallery. The room was twenty feet square, floored with three-foot-wide planks of golden pine. Along the walls were paintings of gods and mortals, landscapes, and of course, dead animals. In one corner there stood a white grand piano.

“Easy, come on,” Etta said when I wandered away from her lead.

There was something off about the color of the piano. The creamy white seemed natural and I wondered what wood would give off that particular hue. Close up it was obvious that it was constructed completely from ivory. The broad lid and body were made from fitted planks, while the legs were formed from single tusks.

“Easy,” Etta said again. She had come up behind me.

“They must’a killed a dozen or more elephants to build this thing, Etta.”

“So what? That’s not why I brought you here.”

“Does anybody ever even play it?” I asked.

“Willis did now and then when they had cocktail parties in here.”

“He played piano too?”

“Willis was as talented as he thought he was,” Etta said with motherly pride. “That’s why it broke my heart when he talked about his dreams.”

“If he got the talent, maybe he’ll get the dream.”

“What drug you takin’?” Etta said. “He’s a poor black child in a white man’s world.”

“Louis Armstrong was a poor black boy.”

“And for every one Armstrong you got a string of black boys’ graves goin’ around the block. You know how the streets eat up our men, especially if they got dreams.”

She turned away from me then and made her way toward yet another door. I lagged back for a moment, thinking about a black woman’s love being so strong that she tried to protect her men from their own dreams. It was a powerful moment for me, bringing Bonnie once more to mind. She loved me and urged me to climb higher. And now that I was way up there, the only way to go was down.

The next room was a stupendous kitchen. Three gas stoves, and a huge pit built into the wall like a fireplace. Cutting-board tables and sinks of porcelain and a dozen cooks, cooks’ helpers, and service personnel. The various workers stared at me, wondering, I supposed, if I was a new member of the hive. A man in a chef’s hat actually stopped me and asked, “Are you the new helper?”

“Yes,” I said. “But I only work with one food.”

“What’s that?”

“The jam.”

The next room was small and crowded with hampers overflowing with cloth. Even the walls were covered in fabric. The only furniture was a pedal-powered sewing machine built into its own table and two stools, all near a window that was flooded with sunlight.

On one of the stools sat a white woman with long, thick brown hair. She was working her foot on the pedal, pulling a swath of royal-blue cloth under the driving needle.

“Mrs. Merchant,” Etta said.

The woman turned from her sewing to face us.

She was in her forties, but young-looking. Etta was in her forties then too, though I always thought of her as being older. Etta’s skin was clear and wrinkle-free, but the years she’d lived had still left their mark. Etta was a matron, while the white woman was more like a child. Mrs. Merchant’s face was round and her eyes were gray. She’d been crying, was going to cry again.

“Etta,” she said.

She rose from her stool. Etta walked toward her and they embraced like sisters. EttaMae was much the larger woman. Mrs. Merchant was small-boned and frail.

“This is the man I told you about, Brian Phillips,” Etta said, using a name I had suggested on the drive up.

The white woman put on a smile and held out her hand to me. I took it.

“Thank you for coming, Mr. Phillips,” she said.

“I’m here for Etta, Mrs. Merchant.”

“Sheila. Call me Sheila.”

“What is it you need?” I asked.

“Hasn’t Etta told you?”

“Your daughter has run away with one of your employees. That’s really about all I know.”

“Sin is a full-grown woman,” Sheila Merchant said. “She didn’t run away, she just left. But she also left a note behind for her father, informing him that she was leaving with Willis. That poor boy has no idea what game she’s playing with him.”

“Now let me get this straight, Mrs. Merchant,” I said. “You’re worried about the black man? His well-being?”

“Sin is like a cat, Mr. Phillips. She’ll always land on her feet, and on a pile of money too. This is just a game she’s playing with her father. She doesn’t believe he loves her unless she can make him mad.”

“I guess shackin’ up with a poor black hobo is about as mad as he’s gonna get.”

“He loves Sin more than any of the other children,” she said. “It’s really unhealthy.”

I waited for her to say something else; maybe she wanted to, but at the last moment she held back. I noticed then the errant strands of gray in her hair.

“When Etta told me about your daughter and Willis,” I said, “I told her that there wasn’t much I could do. I mean, L.A.’s a big town. People around there move from house to house like you might go from one room to another.”

“I know something,” she said. “Something that neither Lymon or Abel are aware of.”

“What’s that?”

Sheila Merchant looked from side to side as if there might be spies in her sewing room.

“There’s a big bush next to the left-hand post that marks the beginning of the eucalyptus drive. It bears red berries.”

“I saw it.”

“Under that bush is a basket. It’s in there.”

“What is?”

“A little journal that Willis carried with him. He could barely read or write, but there are some notes and lots of clippings.”

“Excuse me, Sheila, but what are you doin’ with Willis’s diary?”

“He asked me to hold it for him,” Sheila Merchant said. “He didn’t want somebody to steal it out of the bunkhouse. And we were always talking about music. In my house, when I was a child, we all played an instrument. All except for Father, who had a beautiful tenor voice. None of my children are musical, Mr. Phillips.”

“What about that ivory piano I saw?”

“That is an abomination. It cost thirty thousand dollars to build, and the only one who ever played it was Willis Longtree.”

“I see,” I said. “So you said he was talkin’ to you one day...”

“Yes. He was telling me about how much he loved music and performing. He showed me his journal, really it was just a ledger book like the accountants use. He had articles clipped about movie stars and L.A. nightclubs.”

“If he couldn’t read, then how would he know what to clip?” I asked.

“You not here to give nobody the third degree,” Etta warned.

“No, I’m not. I’m here to help you. Now if you want me to do that, just button up and let me ask the questions I see fit.”

EttaMae glared at me. I’d seen her strike men for less.

“It’s all right, Etta,” Sheila said. And then to me, “Willis had people read to him. He’d go through the newspaper until he saw words he knew, like Hollywood, or pictures of performers, and then he’d have someone read the article to him.”

I got the feeling that she had read to the young man once or twice.

“What do you want from me, Mrs. Merchant?”

“Find Willis before Abel does,” she said. “Tell him what Sin did. Try and get him somewhere safe.”

Sheila Merchant reached into her apron and came out with a white envelope.

“There’s a thousand dollars in here,” she said. “Take it and find Willis, make sure that he’s safe.”

“What about your daughter?”

“She’ll come home when she runs out of money.”

Sheila Merchant looked away, out the window. I looked too. There was a beautiful pine forest under a pale blue and coral sky. It seemed impossible that someone with all that wealth, surrounded by such natural beauty, could be even slightly unhappy.

“I’ll see what I can do,” I said.

On the front porch Etta and I were confronted by a sandy-haired man with dead blue eyes.

“Hello, Mr. Snow,” Etta said quickly. She seemed nervous, almost scared.

“EttaMae,” he replied.

He was wearing gray slacks and a square-cut aqua-colored shirt that was open at the collar. Folded over his left arm was a dark blue blazer. He wore a short-brimmed straw hat, tilted back on his head.

His smile was malicious, but that’s not what scared me about him.

EttaMae Harris had lived with Mouse most of her adult life; and Mouse was by far the deadliest man I ever knew. Not once had I seen fear in Etta’s face while dealing with Mouse’s irrational rages. I had never seen her afraid of anybody. Abel Snow therefore had a unique standing in my experience.

“And who is this?” Abel asked.

“Brian Phillips,” I said.

“What are you doing here?”

“Seein’ how the other half lives.”

I smiled and so did Abel.

“You lookin’ for trouble, son?”

“Now why I wanna be lookin’ for somethin’ when it’s standin’ right there in front’a me, pale as death?”

Etta cleared her throat.

“You here about Willis Longtree?” Abel Snow asked me.

“Who?”

Snow’s smile widened into a grin.

“You got something I should know about in your pocket, Brian?”

“Whatever it is, it’s mine.”

Snow was having a good time. I wondered if his heart was beating as fast as mine was. We stared at each other for a moment. That instant might have stretched into an hour if Etta hadn’t said, “Excuse me, Mr. Snow, but Mr. Phillips is givin’ me a ride to L.A.”

He nodded and stepped aside, grinning the whole time.

The basket was where Sheila Merchant said it was. I flipped through the ledger for a minute or two and then put it in the trunk.

Etta fell asleep on the long ride back to L.A. I asked her a few more questions about Mouse, but her story never wavered. Raymond was dead and buried by her own hand.

I dropped her off at the mariner’s house in Malibu and then drove back home. That was about nine o’clock.

Bonnie was waiting for me at the front door wearing the same jeans and sweater.

“Hi, baby,” she said.

“Can I get in?” I asked, and she stepped aside.

The house was quiet and clean. I had straightened up now and then, but this was the first time it had been clean since she was gone.

“Where the kids?”

“They’re staying with Mrs. Riley. I sent them because I thought we might want to be alone.” Bonnie’s eyes followed me around the room.

“No,” I said. “They could be here. I don’t have anything to say they can’t hear.”

“Easy, what’s wrong?”

“EttaMae called.”

“After all this time?”

“Mouse is definitely dead and she knows a young boy who’s in trouble.” I sat in my recliner.

“What? You found out all that?” Bonnie went to sit on the couch. “How do you feel?”

“Like shit.”

“We have to talk,” she said in that tone women have when they’re treating their men like children.

I stood up.

“Maybe later on,” I said. “But right now I got to go out.”

“Easy.”

I strode into the bathroom, closed the door, and locked it. I showered and shaved, cut my nails, and brushed my teeth. When I went to the closet to get dressed, Bonnie was already in the bed.

“Where are you going?” she asked me.

“Out.”

“Out where?”

“Like I told you, to look for that boy Etta wants me to help.”

“You haven’t even kissed me since I’ve been home.”

I pulled out my black slacks and yellow jacket. Then I went to the drawer for a black silk T-shirt. It wasn’t going to be Easy Rawlins the janitor out on the town tonight. A janitor could never find Willis Longtree or Sinestra Merchant.

I had put on dark socks that had diamonds at the ankles. I was tying my laces when Bonnie spoke to me again.

“Easy,” Bonnie said softly. “Talk to me.”

I went to the bed, leaned over, and kissed her on the forehead.

“Don’t wait up, honey. This kinda business could take all night.”

I walked to the door and then halted.

Bonnie sat up, thinking I wanted to say more.

But I went to the closet, reached back on the top shelf, and took down my pistol. I checked that it was working and loaded, and then walked out the door.

The Grotto was the first black entrepreneurial enterprise I knew of that cast its net beyond Watts. It was a jazz club on Hoover. Actually, the entrance was down an alley between two buildings that were on Hoover. The Grotto had no real address. And even though the owners were black, it was clear that the Mob was their banker.

Pearl Sondman was the manager and nominal owner of the club. I remembered her from an earlier time in Los Angeles; a time when I was between the street and jail and she was with Mona El, the most popular prostitute of her day.

Mona seduced everybody. She loved men and women alike. If you ever once spent the night with her, you were happy to scrape together the three hundred dollars it cost to do it again — that’s what they said. Mona was like heaven on Earth and she never left a John, or Jane, unsatisfied.

The problem was that after one night with Mona, a certain type of unstable personality fell in love with her. Men were always fighting and threatening, claiming that they wanted to save her. It wasn’t until Mona met Pearl that that kind of ruckus subsided.

Pearl had a man named Harry Riley, but after one kiss from Mona, or maybe two, Pearl threw Riley out the door. For some reason, most men didn’t want to be implicated in trying to free Mona from a woman’s arms.

A trumpet, a trombone, and a sax were dueling just inside the Grotto’s door. It brought a smile to my face if not to my heart.

“Hi, Easy,” Pearl said.

She was wearing a scaly red dress and maybe an extra twenty pounds from the last time we met. Her face was flat and sensual, the color of a chocolate malted.

“I thought you was dead,” she told me.

“That was the other guy,” I replied.

Pearl’s laugh was deep and infectious — like pneumonia.

“How’s Mona?” I asked.

“She okay, baby. Thanks for askin’. Had another stroke last Christmas. Just now gettin’ around again.”

“That’s a shame.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Pearl said. “Mona says that she’s lived more than most’a your everyday people by three or four times. You know she once had a prince over in Europe pay her way, first class, every other month for two years.”

“What ever happened to him?”

“He wanted her to be his mistress. Offered her all kindsa money and grand apartments, but she said no.”

“Why?”

“‘Cause she liked the life she was livin’. With me and our two crazy dogs.”

I wanted to ask her how she could share a love with some stranger, but I held it back.

“I’m lookin’ for a boy named Longtree,” I said.

“Pretty boy with a wild white bitch?”

“That’s him.”

“He come in here Sunday night. Said he could play. When I asked him what, he said, ‘Guitar, piano, or whatever.’ ”

“Not too shy, huh?”

“Not a bit. An’ he wasn’t wrong neither. He played the afternoon shift for twenty bucks. I think he might’a got twice that in tips. He didn’t play nuthin’ like bebop, but he was good.”

“I need to find him.”

“Just look on the sidewalk and follow the trail’a blood.”

“It’s that bad?”

“That girl’s eyes made contact with every dangerous man in the room. She flirted with one of ’em so much that he told Willis that he wanted to borrow her for the night.”

“Did they fight?” I asked.

“No. I told that big nigga to sit’own ‘fore I shot him. They know around here that I don’t play. I told Willis to take his woman outta here, and damn if she didn’t give that big man a come-on look while they were goin’ out the door.”

“You think she might’a told him where they were stayin’?”

“I wouldn’t put it past her.”

“What was this guy’s name?”

“Let’s see, um, Art. Yeah, Art, Big Art. Big Art Farman. Yeah, that’s him. He lives down Watts somewhere. Construction worker.”

I found an address in the phone booth of the Grotto. Listening to jazz and worrying about how big Big Art was made Bonnie fade to a small ache in my heart.

The man who came to the apartment door was not big at all. As a matter of fact, he was rather tiny.

“Art?” I asked.

“No,” he said.

“Does Art Farman live here?”

“Do you know what time it is, man?”

I pulled a wad of cash from my pocket.

“It’s never too late for a hundred bucks,” I said.

The small man had big eyes.

“Wha, what, what do you want?”

“I come to buy somethin’ off’a Art. He know what it is.” I could be vague as long as the money was real.

“I could give it to him when he comes in,” the little man offered.

“You tell him that Lenny Charles got somethin’ for him if he come in in the next two hours.”

“Why just two hours? What if he don’t come in before then?”

“If he don’t, then somebody else gonna have to sell me what I need.”

“What’s that?” the little man asked. His coloring was uneven, running from a dark tan to light brown. He had freckles that looked like a rash and had hardly any eyebrow hair at all.

“I need to find a white girl called Sinestra.”

“What for?” The greedy eyes turned suspicious.

“Her daddy asked his maid, my cousin, to ask me to ask her to come back home. He’s willin’ to pay Art a century if he can help me out.”

“What’s your name again?”

“Len,” I lied. “Yours?”

“Norbert.” He was staring at my wad. “What you pay me to find Art?”

“Where is he?”

“No. Uh-uh. I get paid first.”

“How much you want?”

“Fifty?” he squeaked.

“Shit,” I said.

I turned away.

“Hold up. Hold up. What you wanna pay?”

“Thirty.”

“Thirty? That’s all? Thirty for me and a hundred for Art?”

“Art can give me the girl, can you?”

“I can give you Art. And she’s with him. That’s for sure.”

I considered taking out my gun but then thought better of it. Sometimes the threat of death makes small men into heroes.

“Forty,” I said.

“You got to bring it higher than that, man. Forty ain’t worth my time.”

“I’ll go find Willis myself then,” I said.

“You mean that skinny little kid?” Norbert laughed. “Art kicked his ass and took his girlfriend from him.”

“He did?”

“Yeah,” Norbert bragged. “Kicked his ass and dragged that white girl away. Course she wanted to go.”

“She did?”

“Course she did. Why she want that skinny guitar man when she could have Big Art in her bed?”

I handed Norbert a twenty-dollar bill.

“Where was it that Art did this?”

“Next to that big ‘partment buildin’ down on Avalon. Near the Chevron station with the big truck for a sign.”

I handed him another twenty.

“It was the only blue house on the block.”

“How do you know all that?” I asked.

“I drove him over there.”

“Did Sinestra mind Art beating up her boyfriend?”

“Didn’t seem to,” Norbert shrugged.

I handed him another twenty-dollar bill.

“Where’s Art now?”

“At Havelock’s Motel on Santa Barbara. That’s where we go when we got a woman, you know, to let the other man get some sleep. I mean, we ain’t got but two rooms up in here.”

I handed over another leaf of Sheila Merchant’s money and went away.

Once in my car I had a small dilemma. Should I go after the girl or Willis? It seemed to me that no one really cared about her, except maybe her father. Willis was the one that Etta was worried about. I knew that if I asked her, she would have told me to make Willis my priority.

But I was raised better than that. No matter what she had done, I couldn’t leave Sinestra Merchant at the mercy of a kidnapper and possible rapist. I couldn’t take Norbert’s word that she maybe wanted some rough action from some big black man in Watts.

Havelock’s was a long bungalow in the shape of a horseshoe. When I got there it was closing on midnight. A night clerk was in the office, sitting at the front desk with his back to the switchboard. I parked across the street and considered.

The motel sign said that there was a TV and a phone in each room.

I went to a phone booth and dialed a number that hadn’t changed in sixteen years.

“Hola,” a sleepy Spanish voice said.

“Primo.”

“Oh, hello, Easy. Man, what you doin’ callin’ me at this time’a night?”

“You got a pencil and a clock?”

I gave Primo a number and asked him to call in seven minutes exactly. I told him who to ask for and what to say if he got through. He didn’t ask me any questions, just said “Okay” and hung up the phone.

“Hi,” I said to the night clerk five minutes later. “Can you help me with a reservation?”

It was a carefully constructed sentence designed to keep him from getting too nervous about a six-foot black man coming into his office in the middle of the night. Thieves don’t ask for reservations. They rarely say hello.

“Um,” the white clerk said. He first looked at my hands and then over my shoulder to see if somebody else was coming in behind. “I can’t make reservations. I just rent out rooms for people when they come.”

“Yeah,” I said. “That’s what I thought. But you know, I work at a nightclub down the street here, and the only time I can really make it in is after work. Do the daytime people take reservations?”

“I don’t know,” the clerk said, relaxing a bit. “People usually just look at the sign. If there’s a vacancy they drive in, and if not they drive on.”

He smiled at me and the phone rang. He turned his back and lifted the receiver.

“Havelock’s Motel,” he said in a stronger tone than he’d used with me. “Who? Oh yes. Let me put you through.”

He pushed the plug into a slot labeled “Number Six.” I was smiling honestly when he turned back to me.

“That’s really all I can say,” he said. “Just look for the sign.”

“All right.”

I counted the doors on the north side of the building and then I went around the back, counting windows as I went. Number six’s curtains were open wide. The only light on in the room was coming from a partially closed door, the bathroom, I was sure. There were two double beds. One was neat, either stripped or made. The other one had something on it, a pair of shoes tilted at an uncomfortable angle.

The window was unlocked.

Big Art — his driver’s license said Arthur — Farman had been dead for some hours. The cause of death probably being a bullet through the eye. Before he’d been killed he was bound, gagged, and beaten. A pillow on the floor next to him had been used to stifle the shot.

There was no trace of the girl named Sinestra. But that didn’t mean she hadn’t been there at the time of Art’s death.

I climbed out of the window and made it back to my car. The dead man, who I’d never met in life, was the strongest presence in my mind.

It’s hard looking for a blue house at three in the morning. There’s white, black, and gray, and that’s it. But I saw the big apartment building. It was on a corner with only one house nearby. It helped that the lights were on.

I knocked on the door. Why not? They were just crazy kids. There was no answer so I turned the knob. The house was a mess. Pizza cartons and dirty dishes all over the living room and the kitchen. Half-gone sodas, a nearly full bottle of whiskey; it was the kind of filth that many youths lived in while waiting to grow up.

I couldn’t tell if the rooms had been searched. But there wasn’t any blood around.

I got home a few minutes before four.

Etta picked up the receiver after the first ring.

“Hello.”

I told her about Big Art and Sinestra’s games.

“Old Willis don’t have to worry about Abel Snow with that girl in his bed,” I said.

“She called her daddy,” Etta said. “She told him where she was and asked him to come and get her.”

“Then she lit out?”

“I don’t know. All I know is what Mrs. Merchant said. She told me that Mr. Merchant sent Abel down to get her.”

“Did he bring her back?”

“No.”

“Damn.”

“Do you think he’s found ’em, Easy?”

“I’m not sure, but I don’t think so. Mr. Snow don’t mind leavin’ blood and guts behind him.”

“Maybe you better leave it alone, Easy.”

“Can’t do that, Etta. I got to see it through now.”

“I don’t want you to get killed, baby,” she said.

“That’s the nicest thing I been told all day.”

I slept on the couch for the few hours left of the night.

When I opened my eyes, she was sitting right in front of me.

“We have to talk,” Bonnie said.

“I got to go.”

“No.”

“Bonnie.”

“His name is Jogaye Cham,” she said. “We, we talked on the plane when everybody else was asleep. He talked about Africa, our home, Easy. Where we came from.”

“I was born in southern Louisiana, and I still call myself a Texan ’cause Texas is where I grew into a man.”

“Africa,” she said again. “He was working for democracy. He worked all day and all night. He wanted a country where everyone would be free. A land our people here would be glad to migrate to. A land with black presidents and black professionals of all kinds.”

“Yeah.”

“He worked all the time. Day and night. But one time there was a break in the schedule. We took a flight to a beach town he knew in Madagascar.”

“You could’a come home,” I said, even though I didn’t want to say anything.

“No,” she said, and the pain in my chest grew worse. “I needed to be with him, with his dreams.”

“Would you be tellin’ me this if them flowers didn’t come?”

“No. No.” She was crying. I held back from slapping her face. “There was nothing to tell.”

“Five days on a beach with another man and there wasn’t somethin’ to say?”

“We, we had separate rooms.”

“But did you fuck him?”

“Don’t use that kind of language with me.”

“Okay,” I said. “All right. Excuse me for upsetting you with my street-nigger talk. Let me put it another way. Did you make love to him?”

The words cut much deeper than any profanity I could have used. I saw in her face the pain that I felt. Deep, grinding pain that only gets worse with time. And though it didn’t make me feel good, it at least seemed to create some kind of balance. At least she wouldn’t leave unscathed.

“No,” she whispered. “No. We didn’t make love. I couldn’t with you back here waiting for me.”

A thousand questions went through my mind. Did you kiss him? Did you hold hands in the sunset? Did you say that you loved him? But I knew I couldn’t ask. Did he touch your breast? Did he breathe in your breath on a blanket near the water? I knew that if I asked one question they would never stop coming.

I stood up. I was dizzy, light-headed, but didn’t let it show.

“Where are you going?” she asked.

“I got a job to do for Etta. A woman already paid me, so I got to move it on.”

“What kind of job?”

“Nuthin’ you need to know about. It’s my business.” And with that I showered and shaved, powdered and dressed. I left her in the house with her confessions and her lies.

With no other information available to me, I went to see Etta at the Merchants’ seaside retreat. She only pulled the door open enough to see me.

“Go away, Easy,” she said.

“Open the door, Etta.”

“Go away.”

“No.”

Maybe I had gained some strength of will working for the city schools. Or maybe Etta was getting worn down between losing her husband and working for the rich. All I knew was that at another time she could have stared me down. Instead the door swung open.

Inside, sitting on the blue couch with golden clamshell feet, was a young black man and young white woman, both of them beautiful. They were holding hands and huddling like frightened children. They were frightened children. If it wasn’t for the broken heart driving me, I would have been scared too.

“They came after you called me, Easy,” Etta said.

“Why didn’t you call back?”

“You did what I asked you to already. You found them. That’s all I could ask.”

“I’m Easy,” I said to the couple.

“Willis,” the boy said. He made a waving gesture, and I noticed that his hands were bloody and bandaged.

“Sin,” the girl said. There was something crooked about her face, but that just stoked the fires of her dangerous beauty.

“What happened to Big Art, Sin?”

Her mouth dropped open while she groped for a lie.

“I already know you called your father,” I said.

“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 goodbye 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 toolbox. 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 rosebushes. 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 lay 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.