“Something that might give us an idea about who killed Jackie,” I said, a little vexed that he wasn’t giving me a hand.
“You mean like this here?” He was holding out a thick sheaf of legal documents.
“Where’d you get that?”
“In the vanity drawer.”
Sooner or later I would have checked that drawer. But I had got it in my mind that Jackie was a devious child, that she would have kept her secrets in some pretty obvious hiding place.
It was the deed to a house at the southern outskirts of Compton. She’d paid twelve thousand dollars in cash for the place. It was large enough for a garden but I didn’t know if it was zoned for stabling a horse.
On a small piece of paper, folded in between the various documents, she had listed a dozen or so names under an underlined title—$500. Bob Henry was on the list. Ted Durgen was too. Musa Tanous was the second to last name, just before Matthew Munson.
WHEN WE WALKED OUT of the front door I noticed a man pushing a wire shopping cart, stolen from some supermarket, down the street. I say stolen because he wasn’t coming home from the grocery store. Neither had he been to the laundromat in the past year or so. His cart was filled with junk he’d picked up along the way. Broken umbrellas, a painting of a white woman holding an apple up to her eye, bottles, cans, newspapers, and various types of clothing. There was a green felt derby in there with a yellow hatband that sported three green feathers and a new-looking powder-blue scarf, festooned with large black polka dots, tied to the guide bar.
Close up the man stank. Mouse refused to get within three steps of him.
“Excuse me,” I said. “My name’s Easy.”
“Hello, Easy,” he replied holding out a hand. “I’m Harold.”
His hand was big and soft, bloated almost. I didn’t want to shake it but I needed to gain the man’s confidence.
“You got a cigarette, Easy?” Harold asked me.
I handed him a Chesterfield and lit it. His bloated hand was quivering; there was a line of sweat across his upper lip.
Harold’s brown chin sported white stubble and his eyes saw everything and nothing all at once.
“Do you hang out around here much, Harold?”
“Oh yeah. I sleep in that empty lot down the street two, three days a week. You know—when John Bull ain’t beatin’ the bushes. Sometimes they catch on to me and send me to county jail. It’s alright except if it’s in with the drunks. You know I hate the smell in there. I stay with my mama sometimes—”
“Did you know a young woman live in here, down on the first floor? Her name is Jackie Jay?”
“Jackie Jay,” he said, considering the name for a moment or two. “Jackie Jay. No. No. No I cain’t say that I do. My mama’s name is Jocelyn—”
“You sure?” I asked. “She’s a young black woman…” I was wishing that I knew what the woman-child looked like. “…a young woman hangs out with men more my age.”
“No, sir. Uhp. Whop. Maybe. Did one’a her boyfriends drive a red T-Bird? Convertible?”
“I don’t know,” I said, honestly. “It could be.”
“There’s a real pretty young thing wear them, what my mama calls scandalous short skirts. She come outta there every once in a while and this Mexican picks her up in a red sports car. Then they drive off.”
“Did you see them last Thursday?”
“Thursday I was in the can,” Harold said.
He was short and powerful, maybe fifty years old, but his hairline had just begun to recede. And even though his skin was medium brown you could see the streaks of filth on the back of his hands and across his face.
“Yeah, yeah,” he said. “I had a stomach bug, couldn’t hardly walk but they said I was drunk and took me off. When I was still sick the next day they took me to the nurse’s office and she sent me home. There I was sick like some kinda dog. First they arrest me and then they throw me out on the street. It’s a wonder that a colored child ever makes it to be a man.”
“Did you notice anything else about the pretty girl and the man in the red car?” I asked. “Did they ever fight?”
But Harold was still thinking about the disservice that the nurse and the police had done him.
“Easy,” Mouse said from his three-step distance. “Let’s get outta here, man.”
“YOU STILL WORKING over at that school, Ease?” Mouse asked me.
We were on the road again, heading back for Ginny’s so that Mouse could retrieve his car.
“What else I’m gonna do?” I asked him. “I got to pay the bills.”
“What about them apartments you got? Don’t they make you some money?”
“I put that away, for Jesus and Feather.”
“How is Juice?”
“Almost finished with that boat. It looks good too.”
“Why’ont you come to work for me, Ease? I get you rich in no time.”
“Doin’ what?”
“I got this dockworker gig goin’.”
“What’s that?”
“I gotta couple’a guys movin’ anything from Swiss watches to French champagne for me. I get ’em to drop it off different places and then I make some calls. The people I do business wit’ pick the shit up and then they pay me.” When Mouse smiled his gray eyes flashed. “Everybody gets paid and the police be scratchin’ they heads.”
“What you need me for?”
“I don’t know, Easy,” Mouse shrugged. “You my friend, right? You cleanin’ up toilets, right?”
“I’m the supervisor, Raymond. I tell people what to do.”
“Whatever. It’s the same chump change all these workin’ fools bring home. You should live better’n that.”
“I like my life just the way it is thank you very much.”
“No, baby. That ain’t true.”
“Why not?”
“If you did like it you wouldn’t be out here takin’ a pair’a shoes to go out and find a murderer. No, man. You need to come around.”
“A man raising children has to set an example, Ray,” I said. “Our children, especially our sons look at us to tell what it is they should be doing with their own lives. That’s human nature.”
“I don’t know what you call it but Etta done raised LaMarque well enough to know that if he tried to do like me that he’d get killed inside of a week.”
“But it’s not just what they think they might be doing,” I said. “What they do is buried deep in their minds.”
“I don’t know about all that shit,” Mouse said. “But even if it is true you cain’t expect a man to give up everything he is ’cause one day one’a his kids might slip up. This is life, Easy. In the end it’s every man for himself.”
With those words he climbed out of the car and I drove off. On the way I castigated my friend for his mistaken beliefs. But as I drove I wondered about my own actions; about the late-night visitors, men and women, white and black. I wondered about what my own children saw when they looked at me. At least Raymond’s son had seen him seemingly lifeless with a hole ripped in his chest. He looked like a criminal so his son had the ability to make a choice. But to my kids I might have seemed like some kind of hero.
Maybe I was angry with myself and not Raymond at all.
IT WAS JUST A STOREFRONT with a hand-painted canvas sign in the window that read TAXES. There was a camel-colored young woman sitting at a desk set off to the right. She had a sensual face with big orange-tinted lips that must have motivated half the men in the neighborhood to ask her opinion on their taxes.
“Yeah?” she said to me before I could ask my question.
“I need to see Matthew,” I said.
“Why?”
“I wanted to talk to him about a five-hundred-dollar murder.”
If there had been a movie camera on the receptionist it would have stopped at that frame. She neither blinked nor breathed for a good five seconds.
“What did you say?” she asked at last.
“Get him for me will ya, sister?”
“Matt,” she said, raising her voice.