“I have friends in France.”
“Can you get on a flight?”
“I’d rather stay in L.A. until I know what’s happening. I mean, I want to be sure.”
“Why would you stay here in Los Angeles if you’re in trouble with gangsters and the police?” I asked. “You got somethin’ else on your mind?”
“You can’t run from trouble, Mr. Rawlins,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said. “I guess you’re right about that. Yeah. You can stay here for a while. After that we’ll see.”
I picked up the phone and dialed. Mouse answered on the seventh ring.
“Hello?”
“Raymond?”
“Hey, Easy. How you doin’?” He didn’t seem to care much.
“I need a ride in to the school today. You wanna come and get me?”
“Now? You mean you want me to come in to work early?”
“You could do some overtime. I can give it to you. I’m the boss.”
“Yeah, but for how long?”
“What’s that s’posed t’mean?”
“Nuthin’. I’ll talk to you later, man.”
Bonnie went back to bed.
After she was asleep again I bathed and shaved. By the time Mouse got there I was ready to go. He pulled up in front of the house in his tan Ford and tapped on the horn.
It felt good running out to get into a buddy’s car for a ride to work.
“What you mean about that crack about me not bein’ around?” I asked while he drove.
“Newgate come ’round askin’ ’bout you,” Mouse said. “He wondered if you missed work a lot. Then he asked me stuff about what you used to do — before you come to work for the Board.”
“That all?”
“He said that it was unusual for you to get such a high job of responsibility so fast without no college.” Mouse grinned. “Then he said that somebody like me might have to work a dozen years to get that high.”
“Oh,” I said. Then, “You know, Raymond, I might need some help from you later on.”
“Sumpin’ at the school?”
“No.”
Mouse cut his gray eyes at me. “You don’t want me to do sumpin’ wrong now, do ya?”
“If there’s any doin’ t’be done I’ll do it,” I said. “It would just be good if I had somebody to come with me.”
“Hm.” Mouse brought a finger to his chin. “ ’Cause you know I went down to Etta’s preacher yesterday afternoon.”
“Yeah?”
“Uh-huh. I asked him what a sinner could do to repent, an’ he said to admit my sins and to accept Jesus. He said that way I could be forgave. He said if I did that then the Lord would give me a sign, just like you said.
“I tried to confess right there but he heard the first few words and told me to shut up. He said that we wasn’t Catholics to hear confession. He said that my repentance was just between me an’ God.
“That was my first sign, I know.”
Mouse had answered my request, but I didn’t understand him.
“Will you come with me tonight?” I asked again.
“Sure, Easy. Who knows where my next sign might be?”
When we got to school I found four messages for me in the administration office. They were from the boys’ vice principal, the principal, Mr. Stowe down at the central office, and Sergeant Sanchez up in Mrs. Teale’s room.
I went to see Mr. Langdon in his wood shop.
His classroom was a bungalow like the ones on the lower campus but it was older and placed up next to the science building. The turtlelike teacher was pawing over thin flats of wood with four of his advanced students. They were building a large chest of six drawers, each of which was designed to be a unique size. You could see the intention by the frame of the chest that was standing behind them.
“Mr. Rawlins,” he said when he saw me.
His serious students looked up, and one of them even blinked like Langdon did.
“I have something to discuss with you, Mr. Langdon,” I said.
“I’m sorry,” he said, “but we’re in the middle of a very delicate operation right now. Maybe if you came by tomorrow morning, before class…”
Mr. Langdon had regained his confidence and so now I was the well-dressed janitor again; a man who would have to wait no matter what he needed to know.
“Okay,” I said mildly. “I just wanted to know about that special croquet set you worked on for our friend.”
To see a pale man turn white is a frightening thing.
“Go on, boys,” Langdon said. “We’ll start over tomorrow.”
“But the glue is ready, Mr.—”
“Go on now. Go, go,” the great white turtle stuttered and snapped.
The boys left complaining under their breath.
I sat down on the long bench of vises and smiled.
“What, what… what can I…” Langdon was floundering on his own tongue.
“You hollowed out a set of croquet balls and mallets for Roman Gasteau, right? Some Italian carpet balls and wooden dolls too.”
Now Langdon could only gasp.
“You did that,” I went on. “And he used them to smuggle drugs.”
“No, no, no,” Langdon said.
“Yes, yes, yes,” I said.
He looked around the room for help but we were alone. “It’s not so bad really, Mr. Rawlins. I did make the croquet set but it was just for grass. We used to have marijuana parties.” He was talking loudly. I knew then that Roman Gasteau had been a fool. Only a fool would have taken on a partner like Langdon. A child could have forced the truth out of that wood shop teacher.
“With Idabell, Roman, and Holland?”
“Lots of people would come over.”
“How could you be such a fool to get involved with dope smugglin’?”
“It’s not like it was real drugs,” Casper said. “It was only pot. Roman used to go down to Tijuana and stuff the mallets or the dolls or the lawn balls with grass, sometimes hash.”
I didn’t correct Casper because I couldn’t see why he should know more than he admitted. He was scared enough to be involved with marijuana.
“It’s a girl, right?” I asked.
Langdon looked down. He held out his hands in front of his face and big tears splatted down on his fingers.
“What’s her name, Mr. Langdon?”
“It’s not what you think,” he said.
“Yes it is,” I said. “Roman took you out an’ got you high. Then he showed you a girl didn’t need any kind of promises or flowers. I know. I know.”
“She liked me.” Langdon blinked his heavy lids. The droplets clung to his eyelashes.
“What’s her name?”
“Grace,” he said. “But I haven’t seen her in two months.”
Any hope that I had for innocence was gone with a name. Roman knew Grace. I knew Grace. Grace was how I came to my job. It was as if I had been looking for the criminal and came upon myself on the way.
“Grace Phillips?”
“Yes.”
I don’t know how long I stood there speechless, staring at his fat white cheeks.
Finally I turned away from him and went to the bungalow door.
“Mr. Rawlins?” Langdon called from across the room.
“What?”
“Are you going to tell the police or, or Mr. Newgate?”
“The cops haven’t talked to you about this?”
“No. They showed me a picture of Roman and asked me if I knew him. I told them that he was Mrs. Turner’s brother-in-law. That’s all they wanted to know.”
“Well, you better hope that they don’t come back to you, Mr. Langdon. But if they do come back you better be quiet about what you know. Roman might have told you that it was all right but I don’t think that Sergeant Sanchez would agree.”
“Oh my God.”
Sergeant Sanchez was sitting at Miss Teale’s desk.
“So, you decided to come in to work at last, eh, Rawlins?”