“Millie,” Raymond said.
She opened up her lips in a loose fashion, showing her teeth and smiling but with an edge that said she knew the stakes had just been raised.
“I thought you said that you was gonna be up north, Ray baby,” she said. And even though I was girding for fatal violence, I saw the attraction of a woman so brazen.
“Thought I’d stick around and see if you wanted to dance,” Raymond said pleasantly.
“Delmont Williams,” the bruiser said to Mouse, holding out his hand.
Ray looked at the hand but he didn’t take it.
I fought the urge to back out the way I’d come.
“Where you from, Del?” Mouse asked.
“Chi-town’s my home,” he said proudly. “Three generation outta Mississippi but I still eat hog maws and call my mother ‘ma’am.’”
“How long you been in town?” Mouse asked.
“What’s it to ya, little man?”
“Oh. I just wondered.”
Millie was beginning to understand the seriousness of the conversation. But she was more amused than she was worried. Men fighting over her charms was like a box of chocolate creams to her.
“’Bout a week or two,” Delmont said. “Long enough to meet the most beautiful woman in Los Angeles.”
He let his big hand rub over Millie’s breast. She didn’t even feel it, though, entranced as she was by the spectacle promising to unfold.
“I see,” Raymond said politely. “It’s Delmont — right?”
“Yeah.”
“Delmont, would you step outside with me?”
“What for?”
“’Cause I don’t wanna get no blood on my woman.”
A little sound came out of Millie’s throat then. Whether it was fear or humor, surprise or just a burp, I did not know.
Delmont looked at Millie and asked, “Are you his woman?”
“What do you think?” was her reply.
Delmont turned back to Mouse and said, “Get away from here ’fore I hurt you, boy.”
“Come on outside,” Mouse said. “And we’ll see just what kinda man yo’ ma’am made.”
Delmont was high on liquor and he was intoxicated by the wild and beautiful Millie Perette, but I think at the last minute there he got an inkling of the iron core of my friend. It wasn’t enough to stop him from getting to his feet, though. It wasn’t enough to keep him from going out the door.
Nobody followed them out there, because no one wanted to be witness to Mouse’s rage. Less than a minute after they’d gone outside, a shot was heard. Two minutes after that, Raymond returned to the restaurant. The horn had stopped playing by then.
Mouse walked up to Millie and whispered a few words into her ear. She hopped off her stool and walked out with him. I remember that she kept her thighs close together as she walked, making her posterior sway in the most intoxicating way.
Silence trailed in their wake.
A minute or two later a few of us went out to see what remained of the big man from Chicago. He wasn’t in the street, so we went down two doorways and turned into the alley there. Under a weak lamp I saw Delmont, a small puddle of blood next to his head.
When he moved and moaned I jumped. Then I leaned closer and saw that he’d only been wounded in the ear.
“Naw, man,” Mouse said to me a few days later, when we’d finally caught up with each other. “I didn’t intend to kill ’im. He was from Chi, didn’t know shit. I wouldn’ta even shot ’im but he had to go callin’ me names in there like I was some kinda chile. But you know, baby, Millie really liked that shit. She give it up all night long. I just touch her and she start to call on the Holy Spirit.”
Sitting out there in front of Hambones, I found myself smiling. Ray had a short life but just one day out of it was a year or more to most other men. I could never feel sorry for him — only guilty that in the final moments I had let him down.
— 13 —
Clarissa walked out of Hambones at about eleven-thirty. It was a Sunday night and Hambones wasn’t the hot spot that it had once been. She turned left and walked down the street. I let her go about a block or so before turning the engine over. I drove a block past her and then pulled over to the curb on the opposite side of the street.
When she walked past me again, I turned off the engine. After she was a block away I got out. She was walking swiftly, clacking her wooden heels. My shoes were rubber soled, however, so I could keep up without being heard.
She wasn’t nervous, but like any woman with some sense she cast a glance backward now and then. I avoided detection by keeping to the shadows across the street. We went like that for six or seven blocks. Then Clarissa turned right on Byron. She went a block and a half before coming to a squat three-story building that looked like an oversized incinerator. It was covered with kumquat-colored plaster and seemed to sag under its own weight. Clarissa went into a door on the ground floor. A light came on in a tiny window.
I went over to her door and strained to listen. The building was so cheap that I could hear her footsteps. She opened a door, put down something metal, probably a pot. Something like a chair or couch sagged and then a radio went on in the middle of the song “The Duke of Earl.”
She was cooking or brewing tea and listening to music. I figured that I’d wait around until she decided to go to bed.
Clarissa’s building had a sister structure across the street. On its north side was a small entryway where the garbage cans were stored until trash day. I climbed in behind the lidded metal cans, lit up a Chesterfield, and breathed through my mouth.
The desert quiet of southern California nights was always a pleasure to me. In the South around Texas and Louisiana there were loud bugs and night birds, wind in the trees, and less identifiable noises from the wetlands and its inhabitants. But in L.A. the night was wrapped in silence as if there were always a predator near, waiting to pounce on some hushed victim.
That night, I suppose, the predator was me.
Almost nothing happened for the next hour or so. A family of spiders had set up a system of webs above my head, so even the rare moth didn’t stay around long.
The entrance to Clarissa’s apartment was illuminated by a concrete lamp that was set in the lawn in front of her door. The light in her window stayed on, so I kept to my post.
My copper-faced Gruen watch said 12:48 when a lime green Cadillac drove up and stopped in front of Clarissa’s building. I could see the damage done by the wooden fence he’d hit broadside the night before. Handsome Conrad was still in the driver’s seat. He was still edgy, looking around nervously. He even glanced in my direction, but I was too deep in shadow to be seen.
Brawly hopped out of the passenger’s side and said something into the back window. Conrad squealed off down the street, as if he thought the police were still chasing him. Maybe they were.
Brawly knocked on Clarissa’s door. She answered with a kiss and an embrace. Brawly was a bulky kid, but Clarissa managed to get her arms around him. She was whispering something in his ear, holding on hard.
They retreated into the house, leaving me to wonder about my next move.
It didn’t take me long. I crossed the street and walked up to her door. There was some kind of argument going on.
“You didn’t answer my question!” Clarissa was saying in a loud tone.
I rapped on the hollow door much harder than was necessary. What followed was a sudden silence. I knocked again.
“Who is it?” came the voice that had sounded the alarm at the revolutionary headquarters the night before.