“Take that sheet and bring it back out front,” I commanded.
She did as I said.
“Now tear it into five long strips,” I said handing her my pocket knife.
“We ain’t got no money, mister,” she said as she worked.
“But you will soon enough won’t you, Misty?”
She stopped cutting for a second.
When she was through with the sheets I used the strips to hogtie the cowboy and gag him. When I was through I had Misty sit down on the floor in front of me.
“You gonna rape me?” she asked.
“No.”
“What you want wit’ me an’ Crawford? And how come you know my name?”
“How much they payin’?”
“Who?”
“Clovis and them,” I said, falling into the rhythm of the Texan dialect.
Misty was good. She looked like and talked like a hick off the back of a watermelon truck, but she knew how to feint and lie.
“I don’t know no Clovis,” she said, her voice a fraction softer than it had been before.
“You made the right choice comin’ to L.A., girl,” I said. “But wrong in goin’ in against your half-sister. I know you know Clovis. Clovis is your family too. So now you tell me what’s happenin’ or I’ma make sure you spend your pretty years in jail for extortion.”
“I didn’t do nuthin’,” she said. “I just been livin’ in this shitty house.”
“I bet you Clovis owns the deed on this house.”
“What if she do?”
“Put that together with Clovis forcing JJ to sign over half her business to her and you got prison stamped all over it.”
“You can’t prove that.”
“Come with me,” I said. And we left the tethered cowboy dreaming of money that he would never collect.
“DID YOU PLAN IT from the beginning?” I asked her on the long drive back to Laurel Canyon.
“What?”
“Did you plan to steal your sister’s business when you were writin’ her from down Texas?”
“No. I didn’t even know she had nuthin’ when I was down there. She’d just write and say how she lived with this old man Mofass and how they loved each other. She said that he was too sick to work but she loved him anyway so I thought that they was poor.”
“So when did you get in with the plan?”
“I left Crawford a note tellin’ him that I was comin’ up here. He called Clovis an’ told her. He wanted her to talk me into comin’ back.”
“Yeah?” I prodded.
“She told him to get up here and then they all met me at the bus stop in San Diego.”
“How they know when you gonna get there?”
“They’s on’y one bus a day to L.A. from Dallas.”
“But why would you let them turn you against your sister?”
“I told you already.”
“Told me what?”
“She lied makin’ me think that her an’ her boyfriend was poor. She never sent me no money or tried to help me get on my feet. An’ she stole Clovis’s money in the first place.”
“So you wanted to steal it back from her?”
At that question Misty went silent.
For the rest of the ride she stared out of the window.
“WHERE WE GOIN’?” she asked when we turned off onto JJ’s road.
“Where you think?”
“You said to the police.”
“I figured I’d skip the constabulary and go straight to the judge,” I said.
When we got to Mofass’s door, I expected to have to pull JJ off of Misty. But there were no fireworks, no waterworks either. JJ grinned when she saw her missing sister. The smile faded when I told her what was what. JJ didn’t ask why and Misty offered no excuse.
“Well I guess that’s it,” JJ said when I was through explaining.
* * *
I TOOK MISTY back down to Compton and dropped her off about six blocks from her hogtied cowboy.
On the way home I thought about JJ. She must have been brokenhearted over her sister’s betrayal. Money, I thought, is a harsh master in poor people’s lives. It warps us and makes us so hungry that we turn feral and evil. If Misty and JJ had stayed back home in their poor shacks, they would have been friends for fifty years baking pies and raising children side by side.
JESUS HAD BOUGHT a sleeping bag with money he’d saved from work. We sat up late into the night talking about my experiences camping out in France and Germany with the small troop I belonged to.
“Did you kill a lotta Germans?” the bright-eyed boy asked.
“Yes I did.”
“Did you hate ’em?”
“I thought I did–—at first. But after a while I began to realize that the German soldiers and the white American soldiers felt the same about me. I used my rifle a little less after that.”
“How come?”
“Because I didn’t really know who it was I wanted to shoot.”
“So you didn’t kill any more?”
“I didn’t kill except if I absolutely had to.”
I showed Jesus how to camp so that nobody could see you. I cautioned him to stay low when he heard something in the bushes.
“Be careful out there, son,” I said to him. “You know I love you more than anything.”
* * *
THE PHONE RANG at two thirty-five.
“Yes,” I said, expecting it to be Bonnie.
“Easy,” she cried. “Easy, come quick. They’re dead. They’re all dead.”
I filled an empty mayonnaise jar with water and then drove the car I’d borrowed from Primo toward the canyons. At the base of the hills I got out and made mud from the dirt at the side of the road. I smeared the mud on Primo’s license plates.
THE DOOR TO THE HOUSE was open. The large living room was strewn with bodies and blood. Clovis was thrown back on the couch so that she was hanging over the backrest. Fitts and Clavell were lying one in front of the other. It seemed as if they had been running at someone but were cut down—–first Clavell and then his brother–—in the middle of their rush.
Mofass was leaning up against the wall that the brothers had rushed. The .22 caliber pistol was in his hand. JJ was kneeling next to him, trying to pull him up by the arm.
“Damn criminals,” Mofass said. I could barely hear him.
“Get up, Uncle Willy,” JJ pleaded. “Get up.”
“Take her outta here, Mr. Rawlins,” he said. His eyes were so blurry and yellow that they seemed to be melting right out of his head.
“What happened?” I asked.
“Ain’t no time for questions. Take her outta here.”
When I tried to pull JJ to her feet she clutched Mofass’s arm. Her grip was brittle though and I manged to pull her away.
“Get his oxygen tank,” I told her.
While she ran into the other room I interrogated my real estate manager.
“What happened?”
“They wanted to steal my property,” he said. “They wanted to hurt my girl. Fuck that. Fuck that.”
“We got to get you outta here, William,” I said.
“No, Mr. Rawlins. I got to stay here an’ cover up for the cops. They cain’t know JJ was in on this.”
I didn’t know for a fact what he meant. But I had my suspicions.
JJ returned with the oxygen tank and mask. When she held the mask to Mofass’s nose and mouth he sighed. He smiled at his child lover and then shook his head for us to go.
I dragged JJ to the car.
“We can’t leave him,” she said as we were driving away.
“We have to call the police, JJ.”
“No. He killed them.”
“Tell me what happened.”
“I called Clovis after you left. I told her that I decided against lettin’ her in the business. She said sumpin’ but I just hung up. Then, about two hours ago, they all came over with the contracts for me and Uncle Willy to sign. I told ’em no an’ Uncle Willy pretended that he was ’sleep.”
“Then what.”
“Fitts started twistin’ my arm like he used to when I was a kid. I guess I screamed and he slapped me. I fell down and heard this sound like a cap gun. I thought maybe it was my nose bone or sumpin’ but then Clovis made this squeakin’ sound. I looked up and seen her holdin’ her chest and then the crackin’ sound happened again and she fell back on the couch. Uncle Willy was standin’ at the do’ with his pistol in his hand. Fitts and Clavell run at him but Uncle Willy cut ’em down. He used one hand to hold himself up on the wall and the other to shoot.”