With that he turned and walked out the door.
I’d met men with eyes like his before — killers, every one of them. I knew that his threats were serious. I would have shot him if I could have gotten away with it. But my floor had five other tenants and not one of them would have lied to save my ass.
Two minutes after Joe Cicero walked out the door I went to the hall to make sure that he was gone. I checked both stairwells and then made sure to lock my own door behind me.
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The second phone message was from Mouse.
“I called it off, Easy,” he said in a subdued voice. “I figure you don’t want it bad enough an’ I already got a business t’
run. Call me when you get a chance.”
The last message was from Maya Adamant.
“Mr. Rawlins, Mr. Lee is willing to come to an agreement about your information. And where he cannot see paying you the full amount, he’s willing to compromise. Call me at my home number.”
Instead I called the harbormaster at the Catalina marina and left a message for my son. Then the international operator connected me with a number Bonnie had left.
“Hello?” a man said. His voice was very sophisticated and European.
“Bonnie Shay,” I uttered in the same muted tones that Mouse had used.
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“Miss Shay is not in at the moment. Is there a message?”
I almost hung up the phone. If I were a younger man I would have.
“Could you write this down please?” I asked Joguye Cham.
“Hold a minute,” he said. Then, after a moment, he said,
“Go on.”
“Tell her that there’s a problem at the house. It could be dangerous. Tell her not to go there before calling EttaMae. And say that this has nothing to do with our talk before she left. It’s business and it’s serious.”
“I have it,” he said and then he read it back to me. He got every word. His voice had taken on an element of concern.
I disconnected the line and took a deep breath. That was all the energy I could expend on Bonnie and Joguye. I didn’t have time to act the fool.
I dialed another number.
“Saul Lynx investigations,” a woman’s voice answered.
It was Saul’s business line in his home.
“Doreen?”
“Hi, Easy. How’re you?”
“If blessings were pennies I wouldn’t even be able to buy one stick of gum.”
Doreen had a beautiful laugh. I could imagine her soft brown features raising into that smile of hers.
“Saul’s in San Diego, Easy,” she said, and then, more seriously,
“He told me about Feather. How is she?”
“We got her into a clinic in Switzerland. All we can do now is hope.”
“And pray,” she reminded me.
“I need you to give Saul a message, Doreen. It’s very important.”
“What is it?”
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“You got a pencil and paper?”
“Right here.”
“Tell him that the Bowers case has gone sour, rancid, that I had a visit from Adamant and a man came here that, uh . . . Just tell Saul that I need to talk to him soon.”
“I’ll tell him when he calls, Easy. I hope everything’s okay.”
“Me too.”
I pressed the button down with my thumb and the phone rang under my hand. Actually it vibrated first and then rang. I remember because it got me thinking about the mechanism of my phone.
“Yeah?”
“Dad, what’s wrong?” Jesus asked. “Is Feather okay?”
“She’s fine,” I said, glad to be giving at least one piece of good news. “But I need you to leave Catalina right now and go down to that place you dock near San Diego.”
“Okay. But why?”
“I crossed a bad guy and he knows where we live. Bonnie and Feather are safe in Europe but I don’t know if he got into the house and read Benny’s note. So go to San Diego and don’t come home until I tell you to. And don’t tell anybody, anybody, where you’re going.”
“Do you need help, Dad?”
“No. I just need time. And you stayin’ down there will give it to me.”
“I’ll call EttaMae if I need to talk to you?”
“You know the drill.”
i e r a s e d a l l t h e m e s s a g e s and then disconnected the answering machine so that Cicero wouldn’t be able to break in and listen to my news. I left the building by a little-used side en-1 7 6
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trance and walked around the block to get to my car. I drove straight from there over to Cox Bar.
Ginny told me that Mouse hadn’t been around yet that day and so he’d probably be there soon. I took a seat in the darkest corner nursing a Pepsi.
The denizens of Cox Bar drifted in and out. Grave men and now and then a wretched woman or two. They came in quietly, drank, then left again. They hunched over tables murmuring empty secrets and recalling times that were not at all what they remembered.
At other occasions I had felt superior to them. I’d had a job, a house in West L.A., a beautiful girlfriend who loved me, two wonderful children, and an office. But now I was one step away from losing all of that. All of it. At least most of the people at Cox Bar had a bed to sleep in and someone to hold them.
After an hour I gave up waiting and drove off in my souped-up Pontiac.
e t t a m a e a n d m o u s e
had a nice little house in Compton.
The yard sloped upward toward the porch, where they had a padded bench and a redwood table. In the evenings they sat outside eating ham hocks and greeting their neighbors.
Etta’s sepia hue and large frame, her lovely face and iron-willed gaze, would always be my standard for beauty. She came to the screen door when I knocked. She smiled in such a way that I knew Mouse wasn’t home. That’s because she knew, and I did too, that if there had been no Raymond Alexander we would have been married with a half-dozen grown kids. I had always been her second choice.
When I was a young man that was my sorrow.
“Hi, Easy.”
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“Etta.”
“Come on in.”
The entrance to their small house was also the dining room.
There were stacks of paper on the table and clothes hung on the backs of chairs.
“ ’Scuse the mess, honey. I’m jes’ doin’ my spring cleanin’.”
“Where’s Mouse, Etta?”
“I don’t know.”
“When you expect him?”
“No time soon.”
“He left for Texas?”
“I don’t know where he went . . . after I kicked his butt out.”
I wasn’t ready for that. Every once in a while Etta would kick Mouse out of the house. I had never figured out why. It wasn’t for anything he’d done or even anything that she suspected. It was almost as if spring cleaning included getting rid of a man.
The problem was I needed Raymond, and with him being gone from the house he could be anywhere.
“Hello, Mr. Rawlins,” a man said from the inner door to the dining room.
The white man was tall, and even though he was in his mid-thirties his face belonged on a boy nearer to twenty. Blue eyes, blond hair, and the fairest of fair skin — that was Peter Rhone, a man I’d cleared of murder charges after the riots that decimated Watts. He’d met Etta at a funeral I gave for the young black woman, Nola Payne, who had been his lover. Gruff EttaMae was so moved by the pain this white man felt over the loss of a black woman that she offered to take him in.
His wife had left him. He had no one else.
He wore jeans and a T-shirt and the saddest face a man can have.
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“Hey, Pete. How’s it goin’?”
He sighed and shook his head.