Mouse said, “You gotta hear me, Ruby, Joppy killed Frank.”
“I ain’t kilt Frankie!” Joppy cried.
“Why you keep callin’ her that?” I asked.
“Me an’ Frank known each other way back, Ease, ’fore I even met you. I remember old Ruby here from her baby days. Half-sister. She more filled out now but I never forget a face.” Mouse pulled out a cigarette. “You know you a lucky man, Easy. I got it in mind to follah this mothafuckah when I seen ’im comin’ outta yo’ house this afternoon. I’as lookin’ fo’ you when I seen’im. I had Dupree’s car so I follahed him downtown and he hooked up with whitey. Once I seed that you know I was on his ass for the duration.”
I looked at Joppy. His eyes were big and he was sweating.
Watery blood was dripping from his chin. “I ain’t killed Frank, man. I ain’t had no cause. Why I wanna kill Frank? Lissen, Ease, only reason I got you in this was so you could get some money — fo’ that house.”
“Then why you wit’ Albright now?”
“She lied, man. Albright come t’me and he told me ’bout that money she got. She lied! She said she ain’t hardly had no money!”
“Alright, thas enough talk,” Mouse said. “Now, Ruby, I don’t wanna scare ya but I will have that money.”
“You don’t scare me, Ray,” she said simply.
Mouse frowned for just a second. It was like a small cloud passing quickly on a sunny day. Then he smiled.
“Ruby, you gotta worry ’bout yourself now, honey. You know men can get desperate when it comes to money…” Mouse let his words trail off while he took the pistol from his waistband.
He turned casually to his right and shot Joppy in the groin. Joppy’s eyes opened wide and he started honking like a seal. He rocked back and forth trying to grab his wound but the wires held him to the chair. After a few seconds Mouse leveled his pistol and shot Joppy in the head. One moment Joppy had two bulging eyes, then his left eye was just a bloody, ragged hole. The force of the second shot threw him to the floor; spasms went through his legs and feet for minutes afterward. I felt cold then. Joppy had been my friend but I’d seen many men die and I cared for Coretta too.
Mouse stood up and said, “So let’s go get that money, honey.” He picked up her clothes from behind the couch and dropped the heap into her lap. Then he went out the front door.
“Help me, easy.” Her eyes were full of fear and promise. “He’s crazy. You still have your gun.”
“I can’t,” I said.
“Then give it to me. I’ll do it.”
That was probably the closest Mouse had ever come to a violent death.
“No.”
“I found some blood in the road,” Mouse said when he returned. “I tole ya I got’im. I don’t know how bad it is but he gonna remember me.” There was childish glee in his voice.
While he talked I untied Joppy’s corpse. I took Mouse’s jammed pistol and put it in Joppy’s hand.
“What you doin’, Easy?” Mouse asked.
“I don’t know, Ray. Just confusing things I guess.”
Daphne Rode with me and Mouse followed in Dupree’s car. When we were a few miles away I threw Joppy’s extension cord bonds down an embankment.
“Did you kill Teran?” I asked as we swung onto Sunset Boulevard.
“I guess so,” she said, so softly that I had to strain to hear her.
“You guess? You don’t know?”
“I pulled the trigger, he died. But he killed himself really. I went to him, to ask him to leave me alone. I offered him all my money but he just laughed. He had his hands in that little boy’s drawers and he laughed.” Daphne snorted. I don’t know if it was a laugh or a sound of disgust. “And so I killed him.”
“What happened to the boy?”
“I brought him to my place. He just ran in the corner and wouldn’t even move.”
Daphne had the bag in a YWCA locker.
Back in East L.A. Mouse counted out ten thousand for each of us. He let Daphne keep the bag.
She called a cab and I went out with her to wait by the granite lamppost at the curb.
“Stay with me,” I said. Moths fluttered around us in that small circle of light.
“I can’t, Easy. I can’t stay with you.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“I just can’t.”
I put my hand out but she moved away saying, “Don’t touch me.”
“I’ve done more than touch you, honey.”
“That wasn’t me.”
“What you mean? Who was it if it wasn’t you?” I moved toward her and she got behind her bag.
“I’ll talk to you, Easy. I’ll talk to you till the car comes but just don’t touch me. Don’t touch me or I’ll yell.”
“What’s wrong?”
“You know what’s wrong. You know who I am; what I am.”
“You ain’t no different than me. We both just people, Daphne. That’s all we are.”
“I’m not Daphne. My given name is Ruby Hanks and I was born in Lake Charles, Louisiana. I’m different than you because I’m two people. I’m her and I’m me. I never went to that zoo, she did. She was there and that’s where she lost her father. I had a different father. He came home and fell in my bed about as many times as he fell in my mother’s. He did that until one night Frank killed him.”
When she looked up at me I had the feeling that she wanted to reach out to me, not out of love or passion but to implore me.
“Bury Frank,” she said.
“Okay. But you could stay here with me and we could bury him together.”
“I can’t. Do me one other favor?”
“What’s that?”
“Do something about the boy.”
I didn’t really want her to stay. Daphne Monet was death herself. I was glad that she was leaving.
But I would have taken her in a second if she’d asked me to.
The cabdriver could tell something was wrong. He kept looking around as if he expected to be mugged any second. She asked him to carry her bag. She put her hand on his arm to thank him but she wouldn’t even shake my hand good-bye.
“Why’d you kill him, Mouse?”
“Who?”
“Joppy!”
Mouse was whistling and wrapping his money in a package fashioned from brown paper bags.
“He the cause of all yo’ pain, Easy. And anyway, I needed to show that girl how serious I was.”
“But she already hated him fo’ Frank; maybe you could’a worked on that.”
“It was me killed Frank,” he said. This time it was Mouse reminding me of DeWitt Albright.
“You killed him?”
“So what? What you think he gonna do fo’ you? You think he wasn’t gonna kill you?”
“That don’t mean I had t’kill’im.”
“Hell it don’t!” Mouse flashed his eyes angrily at me.
It was murder and I had to swallow it.
“You just like Ruby,” Mouse said.
“What you say?”
“She wanna be white. All them years people be tellin’ her how she light-skinned and beautiful but all the time she knows that she can’t have what white people have. So she pretend and then she lose it all. She can love a white man but all he can love is the white girl he think she is.”
“What’s that got to do with me?”
“That’s just like you, Easy. You learn stuff and you be thinkin’ like white men be thinkin’. You be thinkin’ that what’s right fo’ them is right fo’ you. She look like she white and you think like you white. But brother you don’t know that you both poor niggers. And a nigger ain’t never gonna be happy ’less he accept what he is.”
Chapter 30
They found Dewitt Albright slumped over his steering wheel just north of Santa Barbara; it took him that long to bleed to death. I could hardly believe it. A man like DeWitt Albright didn’t die, couldn’t die. It frightened me even to think of a world that could kill a man like that; what could a world like that do to me?