I’d fallen asleep on my back with my hands on my thighs. I woke up in the same position. I was completely rested and happy that Mouse’s dreams infected mine.
It was after two. I had no job so the calendar and the clock lost meaning to me. It was like when I was a youngblood, running the streets hunting down love and the rent.
My passion had cooled in that imagined grave. The cold earth 2 4 7
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had leached out the pain and rage in my heart. Feather had a chance and I had a hundred thousand dollars in pay-on-demand bonds. Maybe I’d lost my woman. But, I reasoned, that was like if a man had come awake after a bad accident. The doctors tell him that he’s lost an arm. It’s a bad thing. It hurts and maybe he sheds tears. But the arm is gone and he’s still there. That’s some kind of luck.
m i k e ’ s b a r was in a large building occupying what had once been a mortuary. It had one large room and four smaller ones for private parties and meetings. In the old days, before I ever moved to L.A., the undertakers had a speakeasy behind their coffin repository. Mourners would come in grieving and leave with new hope.
Mouse knew about the old-time club because people liked talking to him. So we took the private room that used to store coffins and he secreted himself behind the hidden door. From there he could spy on the meeting with Lee.
This plan had a few points to recommend it. First, if Lee got hinky Mouse could shoot him through the wall. Also Mouse had a good ear. Maybe Lee would say something that he understood better than I. But the best thing was to have Mouse at that meeting without Lee seeing him; there might come a day when Raymond would have to get close to Lee without being recognized.
I got to the bar at six-twenty, ten minutes before the meeting was to take place. Sam Cooke was singing on the jukebox about the chain gang. Mike, a terra-cotta-colored man, stood statuelike behind his marble-top bar.
“Easy,” he called as I came in the door.
I looked around for enemies but all I saw were men and 2 4 8
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women hunched over small tables, drinking and talking under a haze of tobacco smoke.
“He in there,” Mike told me when I settled at the bar.
“He say anything?”
“Nope. Just that you was comin’ an’ that a tiny little white man was comin’ too. Told me that there might be another white guy in snakeskin, that if I saw him to give him a sign.”
“When the little white guy gets here make sure he’s alone,” I said. “If he is then send him in.”
“I know the drill,” Mike said.
Mouse had done the bartender a favor some years before.
Mike once told me that he was living on borrowed time because of what Raymond had done.
“Any favor he ask I gotta do,” Mike had said. “You got to die one day.”
I remembered those last words as I walked into the small room that had once held a few dozen coffins.
i t w a s a b r i g h t r o o m with a square pine table that had
been treated with oak stain. The chairs were all of one general style, but if you looked closely you could see they weren’t an exact match. Mouse was bunged up in the back wall, behind white plasterboard. I wondered if Lee would appreciate the poetry of our deception. He had watched me from behind a similar wall in his own house.
Raymond didn’t talk to me. This was business.
I lit a cigarette and let it burn between my fingers while searching the room for living things. There were no plants in the sunless chamber, of course. But neither was there a solitary fly or mosquito, roach or black ant. The only visible, audible life in 2 4 9
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that room was me. It was more solitary than a coffin because at least in the ground you had gnawing worms for company.
There came a knock and before I could reply the door swung open. Red-skinned Mike stuck his head in and said, “He’s cool, Easy.” Then he moved back and Robert E. Lee entered.
Lee wore a big mohair overcoat and a black, short-brimmed Stetson. He looked from side to side and then stepped up to the table. His footsteps were loud for such a small man.
“Have a seat,” I said.
“Where’s Saul?”
“Hiding.”
“From you?”
I shook my head. “Me’n Saul are friends. He’s hiding from our enemies.”
“Saul told me that he’d be here.”
“You’re here, man. Have a seat and let’s talk some business.”
He knew he would have to hear me out. But the white man hesitated, pretending that he was weighing the pros and cons of my request.
“All right,” he said finally. Then he pulled out the chair opposite me and perched on the edge.
“I got the bonds,” I said. “Bowers is most likely dead. So’s Haffernon.”
“Haffernon was my employer,” Lee told me. “Turn over what you’ve got and we’ll both walk away.”
“What about my ten thousand?”
“I have no more employer,” he said by way of explanation.
“Then neither do I.”
“What do you want from me, Rawlins?”
“To make a deal. I get a piece of the action and you call Cicero off my ass.”
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“Cicero? Joe Cicero?”
The honesty of his fear made me understand that the situation was far more complex than I thought.
“I’d never do business with a man like that,” Lee said with in-cantatory emphasis, like he was warding off an evil spell I’d cast.
“How do you know the guy if you don’t work with him?” I asked. “I mean he’s not in the kind of business that advertises.”
“I know of him from the newspapers and some of my friends in the prosecutor’s office. He was tried for the torture and murder of a young socialite from Sausalito. Fremont. Patrick Fremont.”
“Well he’s been runnin’ around lookin’ for that briefcase you hired me to find. He told me that he killed Haffernon and Axel and that me and my family are the next ones on his list.”
“That’s your problem,” Lee said. He shifted as if he might stand and run.
“Come on, man. You the one hired me. All I got to do is tell Chickpea that you the one got the bonds, that Maya picked ’em up someplace. Then he be on your ass.”
“Saul said something about Maya on the phone,” Lee said.
“Do you know anything about that?”
“A few days ago she fired me,” I said.
“Nonsense.”
“Then she hired me again when I told her that I’d found Philomena but refused to share my information.”
“How can I believe anything you say, Mr. Rawlins? First you tell me that Joe Cicero is after the bonds, then you say that my client and your quarry are dead, that you have the bonds we were after, and that Maya has betrayed me. But you don’t offer one shred of evidence.”
“You never told me about no bonds, Bobby Lee,” I said, falling into the dialect that gave me strength.
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“Maybe you heard about them.”
“Sure I did . . . from the woman had ’em — Philomena Cargill. She gave ’em to me to keep Cicero from makin’ her dearly departed.”
Somewhere in the middle of the conversation Lee had changed from a self-important ass to something much closer to a detective — I could see it in his eyes.
“So you have these bonds?” he asked.
“Sure do.”
“Give them to me.”
“I don’t have ’em here, an’ even if I did you’d have to take ’em.
Because you didn’t tell me about half the shit I was gettin’ into.”
“Detectives take chances.”
“An’ if I take ’em,” I said, “then you gonna take ’em too.”
“You can’t threaten me, Rawlins.”