“Don’t call him that.”
“I’ll give you an address and you come to me. If you don’t I’ll huff and puff right in your husband’s ear.”
“You can’t blackmail me, sir,” she said from a high saddle.
“I could if I wanted to, ma’am,” I replied humbly. “But all I want is Harold. You give me that and I’ll let you be.”
“And if I meet with you you’ll leave me and Simon alone?”
“I don’t care about you, Jocelyn. I never heard of you before yesterday and I won’t be thinkin’ about you tomorrow. But this evening when you come to see me I need you to tell me where I can lay my hands on Harold.”
“I told you I don’t know where he is.”
“Have you had letters from him?”
Silence.
“Do you have any adult pictures of him?” I asked.
Again no answer.
“I need to know anything you got,” I said.
“Hey, Easy,” Raymond Alexander said. He was rolling to the curb in a golden Continental. A brand-new car.
I held up a hand while telling Jocelyn Ostenberg my office address.
“I want to see you by seven, Jocelyn,” I said and then I hung up.
“WHAT YOU DOIN’ out here, Easy?” Mouse asked me when we were on our way back to SouthCentral L.A.
“Lookin’ for Harold.”
“You think some Negro bum gonna be out with the white peoples?”
“How are you, Ray?”
I asked because he didn’t look good. He was wearing an old pair of dress trousers held up by suspenders and a white T-shirt that was none too clean. He still wore the handmade alligator shoes but had no socks on. Most people would have looked at him and thought he was trying to achieve some kind of rough fashion statement but I knew better. When Mouse’s dress got rough, so did he. Something was bothering him and there was an even chance that he’d settle this problem with a gun or knife.
“I can’t find Benita,” he said.
“No? I’ve seen her just about everywhere I been.”
“I called her and she ain’t there,” Mouse said. “I asked her friends and they haven’t seen her since before you took her home. You know you got me worried about her with all your talk.”
There was an accusatory tone to his words, as if it were my fault she was gone.
“She mentioned that she might go see some family down in San Diego,” I said. “Why don’t you ask her mother if you could get their phone number?”
“Yeah. All right. You know her mother’s worried too.”
FOR THE ENTIRE ride Mouse was sour and silent. That wouldn’t have been pleasant in any companion but with Raymond there was always the added threat of homicide. He was more killer than anything else and so had to be handled gently and with great respect. An angry Mouse was like a grenade with a loose pin, like a hungry lion breathing down your neck.
When we neared my office I asked, “How’s business with you and that dude Hauser?”
“Okay, I guess. Mothahfuckah kept houndin’ me ’cause I wouldn’t let up on my private shit, kept sayin’ that he wanted his fair share. I finally had to say that we could either fight or he could get up off’a me. He didn’t even wanna pay you.”
“Me?”
“Yeah, Easy. You saved our butts, man. Shit, it wasn’t just the cops that night. You know them mothahfuckahs had the National Guard too. Even if we woulda killed them cops, they woulda had men with bazookas on us. As it was, we did three more runs and once the police even waved at us. Waved.”
With that he reached into a pocket and came out with a thick brown envelope. He handed the packet to me saying, “We made ’leven thousand dollars that night.”
The envelope contained a stack of hundred-dollar bills and an emerald ring wrapped in toilet paper.
“Three thousand dollars and a little sumpin’ from my private stash.”
I held the ring up to the light. The stone was very large, five or six carats at least.
“High-roller pawnshop over on Avalon,” Mouse said. “I been thinkin’ about them for years. They didn’t think anybody could get into their safe but I knew a torch man.”
By then we were in front of my office. I couldn’t turn down the lucre. Mouse was giving me the money partly because he was my friend and partly because he wanted me to be implicated in his criminal activity. Telling him no would have put us at odds.
I told him to call me if he hadn’t found Benita by morning. Then I went up to the only place where I could be the man I wanted to be.
I PUT THE money and the ring into the bottom drawer of my desk.
At home in the garage I had a little box where I kept all the extra monies I had taken in. That was for Feather’s college and Jesus’ future, whatever that might turn out to be. But Mouse’s money was something else. I had to do something with it that would redeem his crimes. I thought about how to achieve that goal but without much success.
After that I went to the window and looked out on the street. There were no National Guards to be seen, but six police cars cruised down my block in the time I stood there.
On my street, the effects of the riots were still in evidence. Small knots of people moved around listlessly from corner to corner. The police would break them up whenever they began to congregate. I saw one man getting arrested for refusing to move on. The riots were kind of like my fight with the wrong Harold. There was no real winner. Fear on one side, defeat on the other.
42
I was reading Banjo when she came to the door. The knock was so soft that I couldn’t place it at first. It might have been a cat playing with a ball of yarn in the hallway.
But it was Jocelyn Ostenberg. She was still wearing that gray dress and she’d added a brunette wig. There was enough powder on her face to bake bread and her lips looked like they were painted with red nail polish. Rather than trying to be a white woman, she seemed like she was attempting to pass as a member of a lost race of clowns.
“Come in,” I said to the garish woman. “Come have a seat.”
I returned to my chair after the older woman was seated. She was carrying a big tan bag. I wondered if she had a gun in that purse. It bothered me that the idea wasn’t very far-fetched at all.
“What do you want from me, Mr. Rawlins?”
“Your son owes me six hundred dollars,” I said. “He stopped me on the street, asking for a handout. I hired him to work on a wall I was building and he ran away with my power tools.”
The pinched expression returned to the tiny woman’s face.
“You brought the police to my house for a bunch of tools?”
“Good tools,” I said. “Power tools. And anyway, it’s the principle, not the money.”
“How did you find me?”
“On the day he was workin’ he talked about his life some. He talked about his mother, Jocelyn, so when he stole my property I looked you up in the book.”
It was a weak lie, very weak. But it was all I could manage.
“What do you do here?” she asked me.
“I do research,” I said. It was close enough to the truth that I would have probably passed a lie detector test.
“So then why were you building a wall?”
“Tell me where your son is or I will tell your husband that he’s married to a Negro woman who has a Negro son running around Watts committing crimes.”
“That’s extortion,” she said. “I could take you to court over that.”
“Where’s Harold?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t seen him in years.”
“He said that he comes to your house now and then.”
“Not for years,” she said. There were tears somewhere near.
“When was the last time you saw him?”
“You’re not doing this over some old tools.”
“I have your number right here, Miss Ostenberg. And I will call your house before you can get there.”