“Why you askin’ ’bout Strong and them places down the way?” Mercury asked.
“No reason really,” I said. “I saw him down at the place where Brawly’s been hangin’ out. I tell ya, tryin’ to get a handle on Brawly is givin’ me more trouble than I figured.”
“Yeah,” Mercury said. “That Brawly’s a mess.”
“Well,” I said. “I better be goin’.”
I stood up.
“Okay,” Mercury replied. “Honey, Mr. Rawlins’s leavin’.”
Blesta came out wearing a white apron over her housedress. There was a chocolate smudge under her left breast.
“Cain’t you stay for dinner... Easy?”
“Got to go.” I shook hands with her.
“This is for you,” little Artemus Hall said, holding up the clown torn from his coloring book.
I took the leaf and stared at it. The clown’s head was tilted slightly to the side. Artemus had made the face white and brown with big red tears coming out of the sad eyes.
“Thank you very much, Arty. I’m gonna put this one up in my kitchen. I gotta corkboard in there and I’m gonna put this one up on a tack.”
I could see Mercury in the boy’s smile.
— 24 —
The next person on my list was Tina Montes. She’d been kind to me the night the police broke in on the First Men and I pulled her out of there before they could crack her skull.
She lived in a rooming house on Thirty-first Street. The woman who owned it, Liselle Latour, was a pal of mine from the old days in Houston, Texas. Liselle had been born Thaddie Brown but changed her name when she ran away from home at thirteen. She’d turned to prostitution and had become a madam by the time she was twenty-five. She left Houston in ’44 with her partner/bodyguard/boyfriend Franklin Nettars. Frank had been pestering Liselle to leave Houston for years. He told her that the black folks up in L.A. made real money and that a small whorehouse around there would make them rich.
Liselle would have never left but for a fight that had come to pass in her house of ill repute. A white man — I never got his name — had a disagreement with one of the whores and wound up with a knife in his throat. The woman was arrested. Liselle managed to stay out of jail but she knew her name had been placed on the police list. And once you went on the police list in Houston, you either died, went to jail, or left town.
They took a sleeper cabin in a special colored car on the Sunset Express from Houston to L.A. The whole way Franklin was telling Liselle how great it would be when they got to California.
“He’d be sayin’,” Liselle told me, “that you could live pickin’ fruit off’a the trees while you was walkin’ down the street.” She always smiled when she mentioned his name.
The porter dropped by their cabin to tell them that they were just about to cross the California line.
“Ten seconds after that,” Liselle said, “he got a heart attack. Hit him so hard that he only felt it a few seconds before he was dead.”
I never thought about Liselle loving Franklin. I mean, they seemed more like business partners than soul mates. But when Franklin died, Liselle was a changed woman. She took her life savings and bought the place on Thirty-first. She made it a rooming house for single women and didn’t even let a male visitor past the ground floor. She never even dated another man and became very involved with the dealings of the church.
Liselle became virtuous and solitary but she didn’t forget her old friends. Neither did she pretend that she’d come from some up-standing moral background. Liselle told everyone what she had been because, as she’d say, “I don’t want you findin’ out someday and then gettin’ mad that I lied to ya.”
She was happy to see her old friends and even share a drop of spirits with them.
That’s why I felt no trepidations approaching her home.
There were two doors to the three-story wooden building, one up front and the other on the side. The front door was for the women and girls; the side was Liselle’s private entrance.
When I knocked, Liselle opened up almost immediately. Her front door was across the way from the inside door to the entrance hall of the rooming house. Liselle spent most of her day sitting in between the doors, sewing or reading her Bible. From there she’d greet her boarders and make sure that no man snuck upstairs.
“Easy Rawlins,” she cried. “Baby, how are you?”
“Just fine, Miss Latour. And you?”
“Workin’ off my sins one ounce at a time,” she said gladly.
The years had not been kind to Liselle. Her face had crossed over into middle age, and for every ounce of sin she’d lost she put on an ounce of fat. I hardly recognized the beautiful young woman that the men in the Fifth Ward used to throw their money at.
“What you doin’ here?” she asked. Her eyes narrowed.
“Why? Cain’t I come by and shout at an old friend some evenin’?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Why not?”
“What you want, Easy?”
“I want to sit down.”
Reminded of her manners, Liselle gestured toward the chair across from hers. She closed the hall door and slapped her hands down on her knees.
“Well?” she asked.
“I don’t get it,” I said. “Why you think I’m’a be here for some kinda business?”
“Because trouble follows you, Easy Rawlins. It always has, and it always will.”
“You talkin’ like I’m some kinda gangster,” I said. “But you know I’m not like that. I got a job at Sojourner Truth Junior High School and I’ve raised two kids on my own. What kinda gangster does that?”
“You the one said ‘gangster,’ not me. I just said that trouble follows you. Whenever I hear about you, I hear about somebody outta jail or back in, somebody gettin’ killed or robbed or beat up by the cops. Even them kids you got come outta worlds where adults would be hard-pressed to survive — that’s what I heard.
“But most of all, I know you married to trouble because of Raymond Alexander. Everybody who ever been anywhere around Mouse know that there’s some kinda mess on to brew. Young women cain’t help it. They see a man like Raymond an’ their tongues start to waggin’ an’ their panties get wet. But men who ran with Mouse are either fools or magnets for trouble their own selfs.”
“Mouse is dead,” I said.
“And if the stories I hear is right, you the one dropped the body off on EttaMae’s front grass.”
I had forgotten how thorough the grapevine was.
“Many a day,” Liselle continued, “I had to shoo Mr. Alexander away from my girls’ door. He come up at me all blustery, but I shook my broom at him. An’ you know evil as he was, he always backed down.
“But you know,” she added, “I don’t think that he really is dead.”
“You don’t? Why not?”
“Just how Etta left. I believe that if he had died, she would’a made a funeral, invited everyone who ever loved him and everyone who wanted to make sure that he was gone. ’Cause you know Mouse had many enemies. Like you have, Easy.”
“Now I got to look over my shoulder?” I said, trying to sound amused.
“Man who travel in bad company got to expect grief and misery at the do’.”
“I can see that I knocked on the wrong door today.”
“I’ll tell you what, Easy,” Liselle said. “I will prove to you that you come here because’a trouble.”
“All right, prove it.”
“Christina Montes,” she said.
That brought the curtain down on my repartee. I think I managed to keep my mouth closed, but still Liselle smiled.
“Am I right?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said with a sigh that I felt down in what the doctors called my bronchioles.
Liselle grinned and sat back in her wooden chair. She stretched her hand behind her and plucked a pint bottle from the edge of a bookcase. There was a small juice glass on the floor next to the chair. This she filled halfway with the amber fluid. She knew that I had given up drinking and so didn’t offer me a drink.