The door was ajar and those stairs were daring me to come on. It was twilight and the world around me was slowly blending into gray. Going to Mouse over this problem would, I knew, create problems of its own. With no exaggeration Mouse was one of the most dangerous individuals on the face of the earth.
And so I stopped to consider.
But I didn’t have a choice.
Still, I took the stairs one at a time.
The apartment door was also partly open. That was a bad sign.
I heard women’s voices inside. They were laughing and cooing.
“Raymond?” I said.
“Come on in, Easy.”
The sitting room was the size of a tourist-class cabin on an ocean liner. The only place to sit comfortably was a plush red couch. Mouse had the middle cushion and two large, shapely women took up the sides.
“Well, well, well. There you are at last. Where you been?”
“Gettin’ into trouble,” I said.
Mouse grinned.
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“This is Georgette,” he said, waving a hand at the woman on his right. “Georgette, this Easy Rawlins.”
She stood up and stuck out her hand.
“Hi, Easy. Pleased to meet you.”
She was tall for a woman, five eight or so, the color of tree bark. She hadn’t made twenty-five, which was why the weight she carried seemed to defy the pull of gravity. For all her size her waist was slender, but that wasn’t her most arresting feature.
Georgette gave off the most amazing odor. It was like the smell of a whole acre of tomato plants — earthy and pungent. I took the hand and raised it to my lips so that I could get my nose up next to her skin.
She giggled and I remembered that I was single.
“And this here is Pinky,” Mouse said.
Pinky’s body was similar to her friend’s but she was lighter skinned. She didn’t stand up but only waved her hand and gave me a half smile.
I hunkered down on the coffee table that sat before the couch.
“How you all doin’?” I asked.
“We ready to party tonight — right, girls?” Mouse said.
They both laughed. Pinky leaned over and gave Raymond a deep soul kiss. Georgette smiled at me and moved her butt around on the cushion.
“What you up to, Easy?” Mouse asked.
He planned to have a party with just him and the two women.
At any other time I would have given some excuse and beaten a hasty retreat. But I didn’t have the time to waste. And I knew that I had to explain to Mouse why I didn’t go on the heist with him before I could ask for help.
“I need to talk to you, Ray,” I said, expecting him to tell me I had to wait till tomorrow.
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“Okay,” he said. “Girls, we should have some good liquor for this party. Why’ont you two go to Victory Liquors over on Santa Barbara and get us some champagne?”
He reached into his pocket and came out with two hundred-dollar bills.
“Why we gotta go way ovah there?” Pinky complained.
“There’s a package sto’ right down the street.”
“C’mon, Pinky,” Georgette said as she rose again. “These men gotta do some business before we party.”
When she walked past me Georgette held her hand out —
palm upward. I kissed that palm as if it were my mother’s hand reaching out to me from long ago. She shuddered. I did too.
Mouse had killed men for lesser offenses but I was in the frame of mind where danger was a foregone conclusion.
After the women were gone I turned to Raymond.
He was smiling at me.
“You dog,” he said.
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Sorry ’bout the job, Ray.”
I moved over to the couch. He slid to the side to give me room.
“That’s okay, Ease. I knew it wasn’t your thing. But you wanted money an’ that Chicago syndicate’s been my cash cow.”
“Did I cause you a problem with them?”
“They ain’t gonna fuck wit’ me,” Mouse said with a sneer.
He sat back and blew a cloud of smoke at the ceiling. He wore a burgundy satin shirt and yellow trousers.
“What’s wrong then?” I asked.
“What you mean?”
“I don’t know. Why you send those girls off?”
“I was tired anyway. You wanna get outta here?”
“What about Pinky and Georgette?”
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“I’ont know. Shit . . . all they wanna do is laugh an’ drink up my liquor.”
“An’ you wanna talk?”
“I ain’t got nuthin’ t’ laugh about.”
Living my life I’ve come to realize that everybody has different jobs to do. There’s your wage job, your responsibility to your children, your sexual urges, and then there are the special duties that every man and woman takes on. Some people are artists or have political interests, some are obsessed with collecting sea-shells or pictures of movie stars. One of my special duties was to keep Raymond Alexander from falling into a dark humor. Because whenever he lost interest in having a good time someone, somewhere, was likely to die. And even though I had pressing business of my own, I asked a question.
“What’s goin’ on, Ray?”
“You have dreams, Easy?”
I laughed partly because of the dreams I did have and partly to put him at ease.
“Sure I do. Matter’a fact dreams been kickin’ my butt this last week.”
“Yeah? Me too.” He shook his head and reached for a fifth of scotch that sat at the side of the red sofa.
“What kinda dreams?”
“I was glass,” he said after taking a deep draft.
He looked up at me. I would have thought that wide-eyed vul-nerability was fear in another man’s face.
“Glass?”
“Yeah. People would walk past me an’ look back because they saw sumpin’ but they didn’t know what it was. An’ then, then I bumped inta this wall an’ my arm broke off.”
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“Broke off?” I said as a parishioner might repeat a minister’s phrase — for emphasis.
“Yeah. Broke right off. I tried to catch it but my other hand was glass too an’ slippery. The broke arm fell to the ground an’
shattered in a million pieces. An’ the people was just walkin’ by not even seein’ me.”
“Damn,” I said.
I was amazed not by the content but by the sophistication of Mouse’s dream. I had always thought of the diminutive killer as a brute who was free from complex thoughts or imagination.
Here we’d known each other since our teens and I was just now seeing a whole other side of him.
“Yeah,” Mouse warbled. “I took a step an’ my foot broke off. I fell to the ground an’ broke all to pieces. An’ the people jes’
walked on me breakin’ me down inta sand.”
“That’s sumpin’ else, man,” I said just to keep him in the conversation.
“That ain’t all,” he declared. “Then, when I was crushed inta dust the wind come an’ all I am is dust blowin’ in the air. I’m everywhere. I see everything. You’n Etta’s married an’ LaMarque is callin’ you Daddy. People is wearin’ my jewelry an’ drivin’ my car. An’ I’m still there but cain’t nobody see me or hear me. Ain’t nobody care.”
In a moment of sudden intuition I realized then the logic behind Etta’s periodic banishment of Mouse. She knew how much he needed her, but he was unaware, and so she’d send him away to have these dreams and then, when he came back again, he’d be pleasant and appreciative of her worth — never knowing exactly why.
“You know, Easy,” he said. “I been wit’ two women every night 1 8 9
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since I walked out on Etta. An’ I can still go all night long.
Got them girls callin’ in languages they didn’t know they could talk. But even if I sleep on a bed full’a women I still have them dreams.”
“Maybe you should give Etta another chance,” I suggested. “I know she misses you.”