“Do you know where Mouse is?” I asked, also in a soft voice.
Ginny studied me then. She scratched the mole at the left side of her mouth and snuffled.
“I could get him to call you,” she said. “But that’s all. Raymond’s workin’.”
Work for Mouse was never legal. The only time he ever held a real job was when he worked for me at Truth.
“That’s fine, Miss Wright. Tell him I need his help.”
“I’ll tell ’im but you know he’s busy and he ain’t got no time to be helpin’ you.”
Ginny wasn’t one of Mouse’s girlfriends but that didn’t matter. She was past sixty, three hundred pounds, and rough as lava stone, but she had a soft spot for Mouse just like Benita did. She believed, as did most of Raymond’s women, that she had the last word on him.
“All he has to do is call,” I said.
“All right.”
“Maybe you could help me too, Gin.”
“How’s that?”
“You ever hear of a man name of Loverboy?”
“Oh yeah,” Ginny said. “He’s what they call a prime suspect if ever your car is gone from its garage.”
“You wouldn’t happen to know where he work at?” I asked.
I knew she’d have the answer. Ginny had a mind like a steel trap. Nothing ever escaped her notice or her memory. She was so good at counting cards that Raymond was the only one I knew that would gamble with her. And when it came to her customers she knew every one of their histories all the way back to Africa—almost.
“He in Watts over near Menlo and Hoover. You know the junkyard over there?”
“Sure do.”
“It’s a house with a green roof across the street from there. It’s got a double garage in back. That’s where Loverboy and Craig Reynolds make over the cars for sale.”
“What’s Loverboy’s real name?”
“Nate Shelby,” Ginny said. “It sure is. But be careful, Easy. ’Cause you know Nate don’t play.”
Ginny’s last words stayed with me in the car. I rode with them all the way to West L.A., thinking that I wouldn’t go up against the car thief until I was sure of my footing.
MARIANNE PLUMP WAS sitting at her post behind the reception desk at the Miller Neurological Sanatorium. It was about two in the afternoon. A young white man and an older woman were sitting on a small blue sofa set against the wall directly across from her. They both eyed me with fear.
“Miss Plump,” I said.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Rawlins,” she said with certainty.
She met my eye and even smiled. Overnight she had thought about our conversation and the morning brought on a resolution to live life the way she saw it.
That’s what I surmised anyway.
“May I see Miss Landry?” I asked.
“She’s in H-twelve. Dr. Dommer said that it was fine.”
As I moved toward the swinging door, the young man piped up.
“Excuse me, miss, but we’ve been waiting here for over half an hour.”
“The doctor is still with a patient,” Marianne said, not in an unfriendly tone.
“Then why is he going in?” the young man replied.
“Listen, friend,” I said. “You don’t want to go where I’m going. Believe that.”
He looked away from me and I laughed.
“You might turn your head, man, but I’ll still be here.”
Marianne Plump covered her mouth to stifle her grin.
I pushed open the door and never saw the young man or old woman again.
14
Geneva Landry was staring at the wall in front of her, wrapped in a cotton robe, and seated in a chair beside the high hospital bed. Whatever it was she saw, it had nothing to do with that room. The chair was made from chrome and blue padding. Sparrows chattered in a tree outside the window. Sunlight flooded the room without heating it. That was because of the air-conditioning.
Geneva hadn’t turned when I opened her door.
“Miss Landry.”
“Yes?” she asked, keeping her eye on the bare wall.
“My name is Easy Rawlins,” I said, moving into her line of vision.
When I blocked her view of the wall she winced.
“Hello.”
“I see they took you out of that straitjacket.”
She nodded and crossed her chest with her arms, caressing her shoulders with weak, ashen fingers.
“Why they got me in here, Mr. Rawlins?”
“May I sit down, ma’am?”
“Yes.”
I sat at the foot of the mattress.
“Do you remember what happened to Nola?”
I regretted the question when grief knotted up in her face.
“Yes.”
“The police are worried that if a white man killed her, the riots will start up again.”
“He did kill her,” she said. “And there’s nothin’ they can do about that.”
She glanced at me and then looked away.
“Did you see him do it, ma’am?”
“Are you the law, Mr. Rawlins?”
“No ma’am. I’m just tryin’ to find the man killed your niece.”
“But you not a policeman?”
“No. Why?”
“Because that’s what that sloppy cop asked me this morning. He kept askin’ if I saw her get killed. I told him that if I did he wouldn’t have to be lookin’ for the man ’cause I woulda kilt him myself.”
Her hands were pulling at the shiny arms of the chair.
“That was Detective Suggs?” I asked.
“I guess it was.”
“He’s the one wanted me to talk to you and to ask around about who it was that hurt Nola.”
“Killed her,” the distraught woman said. “He killed her. Shot Li’l Scarlet in her eye.”
“What did you call her?” I asked.
“Li’l Scarlet,” Geneva said. “Her daddy, my brother, called her that because’a her red hair. When she was a child she was just a peanut and so everybody called her Li’l Scarlet. Li’l Scarlet Payne.”
I nodded and smiled. I placed my hand on hers but she pulled away.
“Did Nola have a gun, Miss Landry?”
“No. Of course not. She wasn’t that kind’a girl. She went to church and praised Jesus. It was a sin to kill her.”
“Did she keep an address book?”
“She had a small green tin I gave her when she came here from Mississippi. It was for a little holiday whiskey cake. It was just the right size for the note cards she kept. That way she said if somebody’s numbers changed she could just write up a new card and not have to scratch it out. She was very clean, Mr. Rawlins.”
“I know she was.”
“Are you gonna find that white man?”
“Yes I am. Do you want me to talk to the doctor about taking you home?”
“I don’t know.”
“Are you afraid to go home?”
“I don’t know. I mean I don’t think so, not afraid of nobody but . . . when I’m alone . . .”
“Do you have a husband or some family? Maybe I could tell them that you’re okay. Maybe they can come and see you.”
“My husband had a heart attack and Nola was my family after that,” she said. “It’s just that I get lost when there’s nobody around, like I don’t know where I am. There’s a nice colored nurse at night who sits with me.”
“So you want to stay here for a while?”
“I don’t know,” she said.
“Did Nola have a boyfriend?” I asked.
“A piece’a one,” she said. “I mean Toby wasn’t around too much and she broke up with him about every other week.”
“Where does this Toby live?”
“In the big gray slum.”
I knew the building. It was a block down from the Imperial Highway. An empty lot that some real estate syndicate turned into a series of five twelve-story apartment buildings. The quality of the building was substandard and the rents were too much for our neighborhood. Between the high turnover and the crumbling walls the place became known as the big gray slum.
“What’s Toby’s last name?”
“McDaniels.”