“What?” came a man’s voice from the room at the back.
“I think you better come out here.”
A medium-sized white man came out. He had thinning hair combed across his head to hide the encroaching baldness. His eyes were blue and his skin yellowy. His lips were almost as large as his secretary’s. But his were wrinkled like a day-old balloon that’s lost half its air.
“Mr. Munson?”
“Yes?” he asked warily.
“You knew Jackie Jay?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m here representing a man named Musa Tanous. Do you know him?”
“No.”
“He owns a building a couple’a blocks down. He was arrested a few days ago for murder.”
Matthew gulped and touched his throat with all the fingers of his left hand.
“Rita,” he said to the secretary. “I’ll be spending a few minutes with this gentleman.”
“Yes sir,” she said in a thick voice.
I turned her way in time to see her wiping tears from her eyes.
“Follow me, Mister—?”
“Rawlins.”
* * *
LIKE THEODORE, MUNSON had a backroom much larger than his front office. But most of the space back there went unused. The only furniture was a pine desk shoved into one corner. This was crowded with papers and files which were in turn covered in a fine layer of rubber eraser dust.
The accountant led me to the desk but he didn’t sit—neither did I.
“Now what’s this about Jackie?” he asked me.
“I was hired by a man, another man who knew Jackie. He wants me to make sure that Musa Tanous gets the chair for the crime.”
“You said something about her and a murder?”
“Don’t you know?”
“Know what?”
“Jackie was murdered three days ago.”
Munson’s mouth fell open. His eyelashes fluttered. If he was acting he was the best I had ever met.
“Who, who is this man? The one you’re working for?”
“I can’t tell you that, Mr. Munson,” I said. “He’s married and, well, you know—important. He doesn’t want it to get out that he was involved.”
Munson watched my eyes with a steady gaze. I wasn’t worried though. A good liar learns to use his eyes in the tales he spins. And I was a good liar, a very good one.
“Who are you, Mr. Rawlins?” Munson asked.
“I’m unofficial,” I said. “I look into things when people want to be sure that there’s no notes or forms to be filed or remembered. Right now I’m the man looking for Jackie Jay’s killer.”
Munson winced.
“I thought you said that this Muta guy did it?”
“That’s what I thought,” I said. “But then I found this list.”
I handed him the list I took from Jackie’s apartment.
He read it over, then over again.
He held it away from me and asked, “Isn’t this police evidence?”
“I got the mother’s permission to search Jackie’s house. There was no police notice telling me not to look around.”
“Well,” he said with sudden authority in his voice, “I think I’ll hold onto this for the cops if they need it.”
I have fast hands. I snatched the list out of Munson’s grasp before he could move. He tried to muscle and I slapped him. I didn’t think I’d hit him hard but he tipped over and fell on his side. He was up quickly though. There were tears in his eyes.
“Who the hell do you think you are hitting me?” he said.
“You try an’ take this paper from me again and I’ll kick your ass up and down the block.”
He reached for the phone on his desk.
“I’m calling the police.”
He picked up the receiver.
I watched him.
He watched me.
“Are you going to give me that list?” The threat was thick and ridiculous on his tongue.
“Why’d you give her the money, Matt?”
The tears were still streaming from his eyes. I doubted if any man ever hated me more than he did at that moment.
“When we met she told me that one day she would ask me for five hundred dollars. She said that I didn’t have to give it to her, that I should only do it if I wanted to.”
“And did you?”
“What’s it to you?” Munson said. He was regaining his feeling of superiority so I reminded him:
“It ain’t nuthin’ to me, man. But the cops’ll be more interested in you bein’ on this list than me havin’ it.”
The accountant’s lashes fluttered again. He was so upset that I wouldn’t have been surprised if he had started foaming at the mouth.
“Yes,” he said.
“You gave it to her?”
“Seven-hundred-and-forty-eight dollars,” Munson said, nodding. “And she gave me a letter stating that she owed me the money and that she’d pay off the loan at the rate of five dollars a month.”
“Long-term loan. Did she ever make a payment?”
“Yes. Two of them.”
I should have felt good. I got what I wanted and I was able to show a superior-feeling white man that he couldn’t bully me with his arm or his will. But seeing him so defeated only reminded me of all the defeats me and mine had experienced. I actually felt sorry for him.
“Is Rita’s last name Wilford?’ I asked.
“No. It’s Longtree,” he said. “Why?”
“I thought she was a Wilford from down Dallas. Guess I was wrong.”
LONG AND LEAN BOB HENRY was sitting at a desk behind a glass wall when I drove up to his Atlas gas station. I asked him about the $500 club and he was easy enough.
“Sure,” the copper-haired fifty year old said. “I’ve spent more on girls give me less in a week than she did in one night. That girl was sex-crazy. When’s the last time you had a twenty year old beggin’ you for sex?”
“Seventeen,” I said.
“What?”
“Seventeen years old.”
“I didn’t know that.” Bob Henry sat up in his swivel chair. “Any judge in the world look at her and he’d know that she looks twenty.”
“She looks dead.”
“What?” It was the same question but it took on a whole new tone.
“Murdered. Three days ago. In an alley off of Central.”
It’s a strange thing seeing a white man go white.
“Who is she to you?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“She’s a complex girl. I didn’t know about her until after she was dead but even still she’s full’a surprises. Did she start paying you five dollars a week?”
“Yeah. How did you know?”
“Jackie was a very organized young lady. It seems that she paid all of her gentleman friends five dollars a week for a long-term loan.”
“What did you say your name was?”
“Easy.”
“And what do you have to do with this?”
“I’m looking into it—for the family.”
“Isn’t this a police job?”
“You’d think so, but I haven’t seen one cop looking into it and I bet you haven’t either. Look, you didn’t even know the girl was dead.”
The red-headed man took in my claim with a certain amount of bewilderment.
“What are you saying?” he asked.
“Do you know who might have killed her?”
“No.”
“No enemies? No jilted lovers?”
“Jackie had a lot of boyfriends,” Bob said. “Sure she did. She never hid that. No. Nobody had any reason to kill her.”
TED DURGEN’S HARDWARE STORE was closed by the time I got there. I could wait a day to talk to him. I drove down to a Thrifty’s Drug Store on 54th Street and made a call from a phone booth near the ice cream counter.
“Hello,” Bonnie said in a musical voice.
“Hey, honey,” I said.
“Where are you, Easy? You said that you were just going to get a pair of shoes.”
There was a time, when we first got together, that neither one of us would have asked that question. But another man had crossed her path, and though she swore that her love for him was that of a friend, we still asked questions where once there would have been only trust.
“Theodore said if I did something for him that he’d let me have the shoes for free.”