“An’ Mouse doesn’t mind?”
“Naw. The first day I brought him home he called Raymond Mr. Alexander. You know Ray always been a sucker for a white boy with manners.”
We both laughed.
Etta reached into her purse and pulled out the Luger that had been under the seat of my Ford. She put it on the desk.
“Primo got your car out the pound. He left his Pontiac parked out back.” She brought out a silver key and placed it next to the pistol. “He said that he’ll have your Ford ready in two weeks.”
I had friends in the world. For a moment there I had more than an inkling that things would turn out okay.
Etta stood up.
“Oh yeah,” she said. “Here.”
She reached into her purse and came out with a roll of twenty-dollar bills.
“Raymond told me to give you this.”
I took the money even though I knew he’d see it as a down payment on the heist he wanted me to join him in.
*
*
*
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t h e ’ 5 6 p o n t i a c p r i m o left for me was aqua-colored with red flames painted down the passenger’s side and across the hood. It wasn’t the kind of car I could shadow with but at least it had wheels.
Sitting upright in the passenger’s seat was the teddy bear I’d bought in San Francisco. It had been forgotten in our rush to the airport. Primo must have found it along with the pistol.
When I got home there was a note from Benny on the kitchen table. She and Jesus were going to Catalina Island for two days.
They were going to camp on the beach but there was a number for the harbormaster of the dock where they were staying. I could call him if there was an emergency.
I showered and shaved, shined my shoes, and made a pan of scrambled eggs and diced andouille sausages. After eating and a good scrubbing I felt ready to try to find any trail that Cinnamon Cargill might have left. I dressed in black slacks and a peach-colored Hawaiian shirt and sat down to the phone.
“ h e l l o ? ” She answered the phone after three rings.
“Alva?” I said.
“Oh.” There was a brief pause.
I knew what her hesitation meant. I had saved her son from being killed in a police ambush a few years before. At that time she had been married to John, one of my oldest and closest friends.
In order to save Brawly I’d had to shoot him in the leg. The doctors said that he’d have that limp for the rest of his life.
“Hello, Mr. Rawlins.” I’d given up getting her to call me Easy.
“I need to speak to Lena Macalister. She’s a friend of yours isn’t she?”
More silence on the line. And then: “I don’t usually give out my friends’ numbers without their permission, Mr. Rawlins.”
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“I need her address, Alva. This is serious.”
We both knew that she couldn’t refuse me. Her boy had survived to shuffle in the sun because of me.
She hemmed and hawed a few minutes more but then came across with the address.
“Thanks,” I said when she finally relented. “Say hi to Brawly for me.”
She hung up the phone in my ear.
I was going toward my East L.A. hot rod when the next-door neighbor, Nathaniel Pulley, hailed me.
“Mr. Rawlins.”
He was a short white man with a potbelly and no muscle whatsoever. His blond hair had kept its color but was thinning just the same. Nathaniel was the assistant manager of the Bank of Palms in Santa Monica. It was a small position at a minuscule financial institution but Pulley saw himself as a lion of finance.
He was a liberal and in his largesse he treated me as an equal.
I’m sure he bragged to his wife and children about how wonderful he was to consider a janitor among his friends.
“Afternoon, Nathaniel,” I said.
“There was a guy here asking for you a few hours ago. He was scary looking.”
“Black guy?”
“No. White. He wore a jacket made out of snakeskin I think.
And his eyes . . . I don’t know. They looked mean.”
“What did he say?”
“Just if I knew when you were coming back. I asked him if he had a message. He didn’t even answer. Just walked off like I wasn’t even there.”
Pulley was afraid of a car backfiring. He once told me that he couldn’t watch westerns because the violence gave him 1 3 5
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nightmares. Whoever scared him might have been an insurance agent or a door-to-door salesman.
I was taken by his words, though, Like I wasn’t even there. Pulley was a new neighbor. He’d only been in that house for a year or so. I’d been there more than six years — settled by L.A. standards. But I was still a nomad because everybody around me was always moving in or moving out. Even if I stayed in the same place my neighborhood was always changing.
“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll look out for him.”
We shook hands and I drove off, thinking that nothing in the southland ever stayed the same.
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21
My first destination was the Safeway down on Pico. I got ground round, pork chops, calf ’s liver, broccoli, cauliflower, a head of lettuce, two bottles of milk, and stewed tomatoes in cans. Then I stopped at the liquor store and bought a fifth of Johnnie Walker Black.
After shopping I drove back down to South L.A.
Lena Macalister lived in a dirty pink tenement house three blocks off Hooper. I climbed the stairs and knocked on her door.
“Who is it?” a sweet voice laced with Houston asked.
“Easy Rawlins, Lena.”
A chain rattled, three locks snapped back. The door came open and the broad-faced restaurateur smiled her welcome as I had seen her do many times at the Texas Rose.
“Come in. Come in.”
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She was leaning on a gnarled cane and her glasses had lenses with two different thicknesses. But there was still something stately about her presence.
The house smelled of vitamins.
“Sit. Sit.”
The carpet was blue and red with a floral pattern woven in.
The furniture belonged in a better neighborhood and a larger room. On the wall hung oil paintings of her West Indian parents, her deceased Tennessee husband, and her son, also dead. The low coffee table was well oiled and everything was drenched in sunlight from the window.
When I set the groceries down on the table I realized that I’d forgotten the scotch in the backseat of my car.
“What’s this?” she asked, pointing at the bag.
“Your name came up recently and I realized that I had to ask you a couple’a questions. So I thought, as long as I was comin’, you might need some things.”
“Aren’t you sweet.”
She backed up to the stuffed chair, made sure of where she was standing, and let herself fall.
“Let’s put them away later,” she said with a deep sigh.
“You know it takes a lot outta me these days just to answer the door.”
“You sick?”
“If you call getting old sick, then I sure am that.” She smiled anyway and I let the subject drop.
“How long has it been since you closed the Rose?”
“Eight years,” she said, smiling. “Those were some days. Hu-bert and Brendon were both alive and working in the kitchen.
We had every important black person in the country, in the world, coming to us for dinner.”
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She spoke as if I were a reporter or a biographer coming to get down her life story.
“Yeah,” I said. “That was somethin’ else.”
Lena smiled and sighed. “The Lord only lets you have breath for a short time. You got to take it in while you can.”
I nodded, thinking about Feather and then about Jesus out on some beach with Benita.
“Alva called. Why are you coming to see me, Mr. Rawlins?”