“Good food.”
“That shouldn’t be a problem.”
6
Most often, when it comes to the detecting profession, I prefer to work alone. I don’t want or expect assistance, but on the other hand, I try to give help where and whenever it might truly be needed. So, when I have to ask for aid, I do so with the feeling that I’ve earned it. This intricate excuse in mind, I went to a phone booth on Cherokee, after walking Ida back to the front door of her office building.
I called a number from memory.
“Hello?”
“Vu?”
“Easy?”
“I need to talk to him.”
“What’s your number?” the lapsed Vietcong asked.
I read it off the dial.
“Okay,” she said, and then she hung up.
I held down the receiver lever with a finger and two minutes later the pay phone rang.
After releasing the lever I said, “Ray?”
“Easy.” You could hear the smile on the killer’s lips. “How you doin’, brothah?”
“Okay here, not so much there.”
“I hear ya.”
“What’s goin’ on wit’ you?”
“Vu’s pregnant.”
The ground seemed to shift under my rubber soles. For a second, I wondered if this was another earthquake, like the half-billion-dollar one that happened in the San Fernando Valley the previous year. But then I realized this feeling was a response to Raymond’s news.
Raymond Alexander, called Mouse by many, was a man of violent moods. He could be your best friend or your executioner, a lover of epic proportions or a madman swinging from the rafters. And so any strong emotion coming from him was a sign of potential danger to anyone who knew him well.
“Congratulations,” I cheered.
“Yeah, man, this is a good thing. Very good.”
“How soon?”
“She won’t tell me.”
“Why not?”
“She say, because she don’t want me gettin’ all ovah-protective like Americans do, that her pregnant sistahs would do night work rebuildin’ the Ho Chi Minh Trail till the baby was about to drop.”
“That there’s a tough woman.”
“You bettah fuckin’ believe it, man.”
“So, what you gonna do?” I asked, knowing that there was something there.
“She and me lookin’ for a house.”
“Where?”
“Up in Laurel Canyon.”
“Really? Why there?”
“She says that that’s where the stars line up. It’s pretty safe and Vu like the sky ovah her head to be close up and clear. What about you? You still all heartbroken?”
“No,” I lied, knowing that he knew I was lying. “I’m okay now. I just met this woman might be right for a minute. How ’bout you, you readin’ anything good?”
This question had three purposes. One was to get him off the subject of my love life. Two was, since Mouse became a reader, he was always surprising me with the books he landed on. And three, you needed to give him time before getting down to business. If you didn’t, he’d feel used, even abused, and that was never good.
“Yeah, man,” he said. “I been readin’ this book about India and stuff. A guy name of Rag Heaven wrote it. Hol’ up, I got it right here.” I heard some shuffling around and then: “Here it is: 1971: A Global History of the Creation of Bangladesh. That’s it.”
“Why you readin’ that?”
“It’s all about war and revolution and shit and it’s international, you know? Vu’s always tellin’ me that Americans only worry about what we do and the world’s a helluva lot bigger’n that.”
Mouse was a madman and a killer, but he was also a lot more. If he’d been abused a little less, he might have been a professor at Harvard or, more likely, Howard.
“What about you, Easy?”
“What am I readin’?”
“No. Why the fuck you call me?”
“Yeah. It’s not too much,” I said. “I got hired by this guy lookin’ for a woman and I wondered if maybe you might know her.”
“What’s her name?”
“He says Lutisha James.”
The few seconds of silence over the line told me that I had crossed over into dangerous territory.
“In a hour, meet me at the place before last,” he said, and then he hung up.
Mouse lived a criminal’s life, at least in part. He was a heist man who did work with a continental syndicate that had the capability of striking anywhere in North America. Some branch of the federal government got on his scent a few years before, and so he had to limit the number of people who knew where he was at any particular moment. This meant that I had to keep a mental list of the last five places we’d met.
The place before last was the outside food court at the Farmers Market at Third and Fairfax. He was already there when I arrived, leaning back in a red rubber-coated metal wire chair and wearing a bright yellow suit with a royal blue shirt. His shoes were sharkskin dyed a uniform medium gray. His upper left incisor, which was on display from inside an affable grin, was embedded with a high-quality emerald that was at least half a carat.
“Ray,” I greeted.
“What you wanna eat?” he replied.
Mouse got a kind of gentrified Mexican food plate with hard-shell corn tortilla tacos, refried beans, so-called Spanish rice, and a few slices of avocado. I bought a hamburger and fries from one of the many food concessions.
When we were seated again, the emerald went away and Mouse asked, “How the hell you lose your way an’ end up at Lutie’s front door?”
“A man named Santangelo Burris, look like he come from the back end of a sharecropper’s outhouse, hired me to look for her.”
“He paid you?”
“He did.”
“How much?”
“Five hundred twenty-five dollars.”
“An’ he look like shit?”
I nodded.
“And that didn’t make you wonder?” he asked, nearly closing his left eye.
“I don’t know, Raymond. I guess it made me feel like the old days back down in Fifth Ward. You know, back when all we had was each other. I remember when the preacher, undertaker, blacksmith, and even any police we got were Black people. And you made a deal with anybody wanted your services, whether he had money or not.”
“But this dude didn’t ask for no deal. He pulled the bills out his pocket...” My friend looked up then, a question in mind. “Was they new, clean bills?”
“Dirty, and greasy too. I didn’t like handlin’ them.”
“Huh,” Raymond grunted.
“What?”
“If it was dirty money, then it coulda been his. So, you been out lookin’?”
“Some.”
“Where at?”
“I went down to the Orchid Hotel in Compton. She had stayed there but then she moved.”
Mouse glanced at his left wrist, where he wore an expensive-looking watch. Then he asked, “Where she move to?”
“I don’t know. Some old white woman hired her for live-in or somethin’.”
“Yeah,” he said nodding. “Where else?”
“Santangelo told me that she would be a phone runner for the numbers sometimes, down Texas. So, I went to John and he suggested I go see Brother Forest.”
Just the mention of the numbers man got Mouse to smile again.
“You went to see Pinky?”
“I did.”
“I hear he got this fine-ass woman workin’ there.”
“There was one. I don’t know if it’s the same girl, but she was fine.”
“What Pinky say?”
“He was scared that Lutisha was gonna try and take over his business. That’s when I knew I had to call you.”
“Had he seen her?”
“Not only that, she worked there for a while.”
“Oh, so this ain’t no jive. She out there, an’ people lookin’ for her.”