“That’s right.”
“Why?”
“He had a way of gettin’ you to talk about stuff. Merc and me don’t like to brag that much about the old days, but the first night we saw Strong, Mercury started in on how when we were teenagers we’d break into candy stores. Strong wheedled it outta him. I was always too busy for drinks after I seen that.”
I glanced at Chapman’s plastering job. It was excellent. He used a circular motion of his knife to make every application neat and perfect. The swirls were all of equal size and depth. When he came back to level the wall, it would be just right.
“Blesta told me that you and Merc would go off and play snooker after work a few times a week,” I said.
“Used to,” Chapman said. “Used to, but we ain’t played in months.”
“Where you think he been goin’ lately?” I asked.
“Gettin’ his hambone greased,” Chapman said. He looked me in the face.
“Who wit’?”
“He never said a word about it,” Chapman replied. “I just knew by the way he was actin’ that he was gettin’ it on with some girl.”
Chapman looked me in the eye for a second and then he looked down.
“That all you got, Easy?” John asked me.
“Yeah.”
“Then I got a question,” the bartender said to Kenneth Chapman. “Why didn’t you tell me when Brawly’s father come around here?”
“Brawly’s a man, John,” Chapman replied. “I cain’t be workin’ with him and treatin’ him like a child, too.”
“Do you think Merc left town?” I asked Chapman.
“I don’t know.”
“You still don’t wanna help me after what I told you?”
“What you said is just talk, Easy. And talk is cheap.”
John walked me down to my car after our chat with Chapman.
“What you think about Mercury?” he asked me.
“Once a thief...,” I said.
“What’s that got to do with that group Brawly’s messed up with?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe nothing.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Maybe I been lookin’ at this whole thing wrong. Maybe you were right from the beginning. Maybe Brawly’s tied up with a bunch’a thugs and thieves.”
“What are they gonna steal?”
“If Mercury’s in it, it’s likely to be a payroll. There any big ones out around here?”
“Manelli,” John said. “They’re big and they pay once a month — in cash.”
“Oh yeah,” I said. “That’s the top of the list. You know when the next payday is?”
John just shook his head and scowled.
— 38 —
When i knocked on Mercury Hall’s door later that morning, I had my hand on the.38-caliber pistol in my pocket. Blesta opened the door as far as the guard chain would allow. She stuck her face into the crack and so did little Artemus two feet below.
“Boo!” the child said.
“He’s gone,” Blesta said.
“Say what?” I asked her.
“Down to Texas to get a job,” she said.
There were bags under her eyes and a strained quality to her voice.
“He said he’s gonna send for us,” she added.
“Can I come in?”
“I’m sorry, but no, Mr. Rawlins,” she said. “You know with Merc gone, I got to be careful.”
“Careful of me?”
Her stare was all the answer she offered.
“What’s wrong, Blesta?” I asked.
“Mercury told me not to talk to you,” she said. She was an honest young woman. The truth was a balm to her.
“Lotta men been sayin’ that about me lately. You think I might hurt your man?”
“Where’s Daddy?” Artemus asked. Maybe it was the first time he realized his father was gone.
“Not now, Arty,” Blesta said.
“You tell Mercury, when he calls you from the road, that I’m out here lookin’ for him. Okay?”
“I don’t think he’s gonna call for a few days,” Blesta said.
“Not till Sunday?” I asked.
Blesta nodded, though I believe it was against her will.
“Where’s Daddy?” Artemus asked in an anxious tone.
“If he calls you before then, you tell him what I said.”
Blesta looked down to avoid my gaze. She closed the door.
“Where’s my daddy?” Artemus shouted from behind the door.
I walked down to my car, hoping that Mercury really was on the road down South.
Isolda answered her shanty apartment door in nothing but a bathrobe. That was at eleven o’clock in the morning. I wondered how she managed to pay her nickel rent — or her dollar mortgage, for that matter.
When she smiled at me the questions in my mind dimmed somewhat. Sexual charm will do that to a man.
“Mr. Rawlins.”
“Miss Moore.”
Her kissing lips turned into an inviting smile and I found myself in a chair on her little island of luxury amid the shambles of the room. The smell of lilac was in the air, and a frosty glass of iced tea was soon to find its way into my hand.
“Have you found Brawly?” she asked.
“I just don’t understand it,” I said.
“What?”
“Why a woman like you — so beautiful and able to create beauty even in a hole like this — why would you need to seduce a fourteen-year-old boy?”
Isolda Moore was no pushover. Her smile diminished slightly. Her head tilted a bit to the side.
“You’re right,” she said. “You don’t understand.” Five words that she meant to be a confession, an explanation, and absolution.
But I wasn’t having it her way.
“No, I don’t,” I said. “I don’t get that at all. I got me a teenager up in the house right now and I could tell you this — I wouldn’t stand for no woman north of thirty with her hands in his under-pants.”
“It wasn’t like that,” Isolda said. “It wasn’t like you said.”
“How else could it be?” I asked angrily. I wasn’t really mad, at least not at what had happened to Brawly all those years before.
“He called me from a phone booth on Slauson. Called me collect. I was all the way up in Riverside and he was cryin’ his eyes out and mumbling because of his swollen mouth. I broke every speed limit comin’ down to get him. I found him sittin’ on a park bench with the tears still in his eyes. The first night up at my house he didn’t even want to sleep alone in his own bed. He begged me to sleep with him and when I said no he crawled in next to me when he thought I was asleep.”
“Why didn’t you send him away?” I asked.
“Send him where? His mother was in the madhouse and his father nearly broke his jaw. If it wasn’t for me, they would’a put him out as a foster child or in the orphanage.” Isolda’s voice was full of passion that she had not shown before. “And after a couple of nights in the bed together I felt his want. I knew it was wrong, but he needed me.”
“His girlfriend said that you walked around naked, that you seduced him into your bed.”
“That’s the way he has to remember it,” Isolda said with a nod. “Because after it went on for a while I told him that it had to end. I told him that he needed to have a girl his own age. That’s when he took up with BobbiAnne. But, you know, even when he had been with her he’d come back home and wanna climb in the bed with me.” There was pride in her voice. “And when I refused him he got mad and blamed me for the way he felt.”
It was a solid argument, good enough to have been in a play. Sometimes you did things bad because of love and hurt the people you cared for most. Maybe if Isolda was some bucktoothed third-grade teacher, I might have believed her. But every part of her life was so perfectly arranged, I couldn’t see her giving in to the whirlpool of someone else’s passion.