I glanced at Raymond. He just hunched his shoulders and looked away.
“What bag?”
“Jo fount a bag in the bushes outside our house,” Dom said.
“Was that after the cops came?”
“Uh-uh. She got the sight, you know. She felt somethin’ and started nosin’ around. That’s when she made me hide in the space. She knew the cops would be there.”
Before I could ask what was in the bag Raymond pulled it out from a closet next to the table.
It was a Wells-Fargo bag that had three stacks of a hundred twenty-dollar bills and a short .38 with a rough black handle the shape of a lightbulb. I didn’t touch the money or the gun.
It was a beautiful frame: the girl with the fake name that nobody ever saw; the witnesses at the country market and evidence poorly hidden in the bushes.
“But what about the guards?” I asked out loud. “I mean there’s no mask in the world that could hide Dom.”
“Dead,” Mouse said. “Both of ’em shot in the head. And I bet you ten to two that it was this here .38 done it.”
“Damn.”
“She prob’ly had partners,” Mouse said. “I mean Dom says she wasn’t big or tough or nuthin’.”
“Yeah,” Dom put in. “She was prob’ly tricked by some guy wanted to fool me too. I don’t wanna get her in trouble for that.”
“You see why I called on you, Easy,” Mouse said. “If I knew who they were it would be a piece’a cake. But I got to find ’em before I could convince ’em to let up on my cousin here.”
I had to laugh then. It was really funny. Maybe I wasn’t an African prince but I had my own domain. I wasn’t a sovereign maybe and I didn’t wear a crown or signet ring. But I too spent my time working for my people.
“What the hell you laughin’ about, Easy?” Mouse complained.
“It’s good to see you, Ray. It really is.”
THE FRONT DOOR OPENED and a tall and lanky youth came in tripping over his own big feet.
“LaMarque!” Dom shouted.
The boy, who was at least six foot three, winced.
“Is that you, LaMarque?” I asked.
“Hi, Mr. Rawlins.”
“Boy, you’ve grown a foot.”
“Yes sir.”
His skin had grown darker in just the few months since I’d last seen him, and he had brooding eyes. His shoulders slumped and his head hung down. He was Jesus’s age, seventeen, and prey to all of the sour emotions of an adolescent.
“Say a proper hello to Easy and your uncle,” Mouse ordered his son.
“He’s not my uncle,” LaMarque replied.
“What you say?” Mouse asked.
I stood up and stuck my hand out. “It’s great seeing you, son.”
After a moment’s hesitation LaMarque took my hand.
“Ray,” I said. “Let’s go somewhere where we can talk. This is some serious business and it should just be us three involved.”
“You gonna say hello to your uncle?” Mouse asked his son.
“Hello, Uncle Dom.”
Dom grinned and waved with his long arm.
The level of drama around Mouse was always higher than it was anywhere else in the world. A week in Raymond’s company would age a normal man a year or more.
He smiled at LaMarque and said, “Okay, Easy. I got a place we could go.”
“What you want me to tell mama?” LaMarque asked his father.
“That I went out. That you don’t know where I went or who I was wit’.”
The brooding boy nodded and turned away toward the kitchen.
WE CAME TO A SMALL HOUSE with a brick façade off of Denker. Mouse had the key and so we went in the front door. The door opened onto a good-sized living room. There was a picture of a shapely black woman and a bespectacled black man on the coffee table. The table was flanked by two sofas. Dom and I sat on one couch and Raymond took the other.
“Whose house is this?” I asked.
“Pamela Hendricks and her husband Bobby.”
“They friends of yours?”
“She is. I don’t think he likes me too well.”
“Where are they?” I was wondering what Mouse thought I meant when I asked for privacy.
“He took her up to Frisco for a vacation. They gonna be gone another ten days.”
“And they gave you keys to their house?”
“She did. He prob’ly don’t know about it. But even if he did—what’s he gonna do?”
“So nobody’s gonna come around?”
“No sir.” Mouse grinned.
I shook my head. Mouse still lived in the fever of our youth. At that degree he should have died long before he was shot down in that alley.
“Did Merry have a last name, Dom?”
“Not that I know.”
“Did she tell you anything about herself, anything? About her parents, her school, where she’s from—”
“She said she was from Pasadena,” Domaque blurted out. “She said that when she moved out from her parents she moved to, to…” the damaged man pressed his powerful fingers against his dark brow. “…Culver City. Uh-huh, Culver City.”
“Think hard, Dom,” I said. “Did she ever say anything about her last name or her parents’ last name?”
“I think,” he said. “I think that it had the sound ‘Bick’ in it somewhere.”
“Bickman? Becker? Buck somethin’?”
“Uh-uh. No. Not like that. I don’t know, Easy.”
“She have any scars or marks? What color was her hair?”
“Light, light blond. Almost white. But brown eyes though. Most’a your blond-haired peoples got blue eyes but not Merry. And she had a little nose and her canine teef was sharp. She bit me one time and laughed.”
Mouse sighed and stood up. “I’ma go in the other room,” he said. “Stretch out a minute.”
He walked out. I knew he was bored by all of my questions. The only questions Mouse had patience for could be answered by “yes” or “no,” either that or with a number.
“How tall?” I asked Domaque when Raymond was gone.
“Five-five,” he said, and then he ducked his head and grinned. “She showed me her butt,” he whispered.
“What?”
“She showed me her butt. One day we was playin’ around down by the sand at Horth’s Cove. She’d pushed me and then run before I could push her back. I got kinda hard an’ she point at my pants and laughed. Then she pulled down her jeans and said was that what I wanted. I told her yeah and she said to go down to the market and wait for her in two days. And I did but then the people who owned the place made me go away.”
“That was the day of the robbery?”
“Yeah,” Dom said. There was a glimmer of suspicion in his eye but it faded quickly.
Raymond had left the Wells-Fargo bag on the sofa. I opened it and took out the gun. It was a peculiar design. The barrel was silver or at least silver-plated. It had ornate designs etched all over—wandering vines with small dog heads instead of flowers. The butt was made from ebony wood capped with hammered gold. The cylinder was extra-large with eight chambers. Four bullets had been discharged.
I used my shirttail to wipe my fingerprints off and then put the gun back and checked out the bag. It was double-ply canvas, tough and coarse. On the very bottom it was lined with a leather strip. Along the seam of the strip was a dark stain: blood of the corpses whose dead fingers pointed at one of the only people that Raymond loved.
Dom and Ray were raised together in the now defunct town of Pariah, Texas. They ran together because they were both outcast from the other poor children. Dom because of his birth defects and Raymond because he had always been crazy.
“Did Merry ever say that she had a boyfriend?” I asked Domaque.
He pouted and turned to the side, away from me.
“Did she?” I asked.
“That was all over. She said it was.”
“I’m sure it was,” I said, and he turned a quarter of the way back. “But maybe if I could locate him he might know something about her that could help me find out what happened.”
“Like what?”