“They didn’t kill him?”
“Nope. Just a citizen that some’a our boys beat on. They say he run off so quick that nobody could catch him. Nobody said nuthin’ about no body.”
“I ain’t read about that at all.”
“That’s street talk, brother. You know what it’s like.”
“So you sayin’ a white boy come down here in his car and gets dragged out and beaten and the papers don’t even cover it?” I shook my head as if to say that that just couldn’t be true.
“Oh yeah, Easy. Yes sir. Bobby Grant told me himself and he live right around the corner from there.”
I sucked the lemon custard out of its pastry pocket. I liked Trini’s mother’s lemon filling because she didn’t add so much sugar that the lemon lost its tang.
“You got some cigarettes back there, Trini?”
“What’s your brand this week?” he asked.
“I’m gonna need a man’s cigarette down around here,” I said. “How about Chesterfields or Pall Malls.”
“I only got Lucky Strike in the filterless, Easy.”
“Gimme one’a them then . . . no, no. Gimme two packs.”
I COULD HAVE asked Trini for Bobby Grant’s address or phone number—if I wanted everybody who came into his shop for the next three days to know about it. The reason so many people braved the violent streets to come to Trini’s café was that they knew all the information of the neighborhood filtered through him. Anything he heard he repeated. And Trini had a piercing voice, so he could be talking to a man at one end of the counter and you heard every word six stools away.
Bobby Grant wasn’t in the phone book but that was no surprise. Back in 1965 a good half of your poor people didn’t have phones. They used one in the hall or maybe a relative’s line across the street.
WHEN RAYMOND “MOUSE” Alexander first moved to L.A., he gave Information his name to go along with my number. I still remember the look he gave me when I told him that I had his listing removed.
Mouse was a serious man who had killing in his blood. Telling him no was as dangerous a task as moving nitroglycerine in a truck with no shock absorbers.
“What you say, Easy?” the little gray-eyed killer asked. I remember that he was wearing an outrageous orange suit and a brown porkpie hat.
“It’s either that or you gonna have to shoot me,” I said.
“Huh?”
“Ray,” I said, “you got women callin’ me on the line day and night. ‘Where’s Raymond? Do you know how I can find Mouse? What’s your name, honey? You sound nice.’ I know you don’t like nobody messin’ with your women but it’s a little confusin’ when they wake you out of a deep sleep and there you are all alone in the bed.”
The evil stare turned into a grin and a shrug.
“Easy, you a fool, you know that?”
“Not me, Raymond. Not me.”
I PARKED THREE blocks from Nola Payne’s address and walked the rest of the way to her block. There was a group of men, and a few women, standing around on the corner of Grape and 114th. These were working people who got paid a dollar fifteen an hour, when there was a job to be had. But most of their potential employers had gone up in flames over the past five days.
In order to fit in with that working-class crowd I was wearing faded blue jeans and a T-shirt with a few small tears and paint stains on it. My brown leather shoes were cracked and stained too.
The men were for the most part loud and blustering, laughing about their adventures and the exploits of their friends.
“Cops chased Marlon Jones up into the White Front Department Store on Central,” one man was saying when I got there. “They run him up against the back of the store and told him to lay down or die. But you know he out on parole and so he jumped up on a shelf, climbed to the top and popped right out the window before they could catch a bead on his ass.”
The crowd broke out into loud laughter. His audience didn’t ask why the storyteller wasn’t arrested instead of Marlon Jones. They didn’t want proof. All they asked for was a good laugh in the face of the hard times coming up the line.
“Lonnie Beakman is dead,” an older man said. “Shot him in the back while he was runnin’ down Avalon.”
That sobered the group.
A skinny young man wearing overalls and no shirt said, “Lonnie? He was engaged to my cousin a while last year.”
“How is she takin’ it?” a young woman asked.
“I’ont know,” the youth replied. “She broke it off with him after she found him down the hall with her sister three weeks ago.”
No one laughed at the story but that opened up the floor for a new line of talk.
“Meany got about a thousand pint cans of forty-weight oil,” somebody said. “He sellin ’em for five cents a can.”
“Motherfucker,” a squat dark man said. “Motherfuckers killed Lonnie B and all Meany thinkin’ about is nickels. It ain’t funny, you know. It ain’t funny at all. Cops come down here and murder us and we track through the blood to make a pocket full’a change.”
On cue a police cruiser turned the corner.
As the cops drove past us one lowered his window and said, “No congregating on the street. Move along.”
Almost as if it were choreographed, every one of the dozen people standing there started moving in a different direction. We each made it about a dozen feet or so, just far enough for the cops to have driven out of sight. Then we drifted back to the corner.
“Who are you?” the angry man asked me when I sidled up against the lamppost.
The police had broken the friendly mood, so I was seen for what I was—a stranger and possible threat.
“Easy Rawlins,” I said.
“What you doin’ sneakin’ around the sidelines?”
“Just hangin’ around, brother. I’m lookin’ for somebody and I was waitin’ for a break in the conversation.”
The man wasn’t really squat, that was an illusion caused by his unusually broad shoulders. He was nearly six feet. Less than two inches shorter than me. Other than his shoulders his most noticeable features were his big hands and yellow teeth, which he showed without smiling—like a feral dog or a wolf.
“I ain’t never seen you before.”
I could see that we were going down the road to war and I wondered how to make a truce without fighting first.
“That’s Easy Rawlins,” a woman in a blue-checkered dress said. She looked like a well-stacked pile of black pears held in place by a farmer’s tablecloth.
“I never heard’a no Easy Rawlins live around here,” the skinny youth said.
“That’s Raymond Alexander’s best friend, Newell,” the woman said to the angry, broad-shouldered man. “Him and Ray been friends since Texas. Ain’t that right, mister?”
I nodded.
“Yeah,” another woman said. “I seen him wit’ Mouse, down at EttaMae Harris’s place. They was havin’ a barbecue.”
Newell raised his chin a bit then. Everybody knew about Mouse. He was one of the most dangerous men in L.A. No one but a fool would jump on his friend.
“Newell? That your name?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
“I’m just lookin’ for a guy I heard live around here. A guy name of Bobby Grant.”
“What you want wit’ Bobby?” Newell asked. He was just as afraid of Raymond as everybody else but Ray wasn’t there and Newell didn’t want to be seen as a coward.
“A woman I met, a Miss Landry, wanted me to ask him a question.”
“You know Geneva?” the woman in blue asked.
“Met her.”
“How do I know that?” Newell asked angrily. “You could just be a lyin’ motherfucker out here.”
“Why he wanna lie about Bobby and Geneva, Newell?” the older man asked reasonably. “You know Bobby live two doors away from her niece.”
“All I know is that the motherfucker could be lyin’,” Newell countered.