His lips protruded a quarter inch; maybe he smiled. “I’ve heard of you,” he ventured.
“I got a proposition. You wanna hear it?”
Ghostly hands rose from the table, giving his assent.
“There’s a group of wealthy colored businessmen, from pimps to real estate agents, who wanna start a regular poker game. It’s gonna float down around South L.A., some places I got lined up.”
“So? Am I invited to play?”
“Five thousand dollars against thirty percent of the house.”
Haas grinned. He had tiny teeth.
“You want I should just turn it over right now? Maybe you want me to lie down on the floor and let you walk on me too.”
Haas’s voice had become like steel. I would have been afraid, but because I was using Mouse’s name, there was no fear in me.
“I’d be happy to walk on you if you let me, but I figure you got the sense to check me out first.”
The grin fled. It was replaced by a twitch in the gangster’s left eye.
“I don’t do penny-ante shit, Mr. Alexander. You want to have a card game it’s nothin’ to me.” He adjusted his shoulders like James Cagney in Public Enemy.
“Okay,” I said. I stood up.
“But I know a guy.”
I said nothing.
“Emile Lund,” Haas continued. “He eats breakfast in Tito’s Diner on Temple. He likes the cards. But he doesn’t throw money around.”
“Neither do I,” I said, or maybe it was Raymond who said it and I was just his mouthpiece in that dark dark room way outside the limit of the law.
The old folks were gone when I emerged from the hotel. I missed seeing the old lady. I remember thinking that that old woman would probably be dead before I thought of her again.
FEATHER WAS ASLEEP in front of a plate with a half-eaten hot dog and a pile of baked beans on it. Astro Boy, her favorite cartoon, was playing on the TV. Jesus was in the backyard, hammering sporadically. I picked up my adopted daughter and kissed her. She smiled with her eyes still closed and said, “Daddy.”
“How you know who it is?” I asked playfully. “You too lazy to open your eyes.”
“I know your smell,” she said.
“You have hot dogs?”
“Uh-huh.”
“What you do at school all day?”
At first she denied that anything had happened or been learned at Carthay Circle elementary school. But after a while she woke up and remembered a bird that flew in her classroom window and how Trisha Berkshaw said that her father could lift a hundred pounds up over his head.
“Nobody better tickle him when he’s doin’ that,” I said, and we both laughed.
Feather told me what her homework assignment was, and I set her up at the dinette table to get to work on her studies. Then I went outside to see Jesus.
He was rubbing oil into the timbers of his sailboat’s frame.
“How’s it goin’, Popeye?” I asked.
“Sinbad,” he said.
“Why you finishin’ it before it’s finished?”
“To make it waterproof inside and out,” he said. “That’s what the book says to do. That way if water gets inside it won’t rot.”
His face was the color of a medium tea; his features were closer to the Mayans than to me. He had deeper roots than the American Constitution in our soil. Neither of my children were of my blood, but that didn’t make me love them less. Jesus was a mute victim of sex abuse when I found him. Feather’s own grandfather had killed her mother in a parking lot.
“I got a lot to do the next few days, son,” I said. “Could you keep close to home for Feather?”
“Can I have a friend come over?”
“Who?”
“Cindy Needham.”
“Your girlfriend?”
Jesus turned his attention back to the frame. He could still be a mute when he wanted to be.
* * *
I MIGHT HAVE CLOSED my eyes sometime during the night, but I certainly didn’t fall asleep. I kept seeing Raymond in that alley, again and again, being shot down while saving my life. At just about the same time John F. Kennedy was assassinated, but I never mourned our slain president. The last time I saw Mouse, his lifeless body was being taken to the hospital with a blanket covering his wounds.
TITO’S WAS A RECTANGULAR BUILDING raised high on cinder blocks. The inside had one long counter with two tables at the far end. Only one of the tables had an occupant. I would have bet the .38-caliber pistol in my pocket that that man was Emile Lund.
More than anything he looked like an evolved fish. There were wrinkles that went across his forehead and down along his balding temples. His eyes bulged slightly and his small mouth had pouting, sensual lips. His chin was almost nonexistent, and his hands were big. His shoulders were massive, so even though he looked like a cartoon, I doubted if anyone treated him that way.
The fish-man had been making notes in a small journal, but when I opened the door he looked up. He kept his eyes on me until I was standing at his table.
“Lund?” I asked. “I’m Alexander.”
“Do I know you?”
“You wanna talk business or you wanna talk shit?” I said.
He laughed and held his big fins out in a gesture of apology.
“Come on, man. Don’t be so sensitive. Sit down,” Lund said. “I know your rep. You’re a man who makes money. And it’s money makes my car go.
“Mona,” Lund said to the woman behind the counter.
She was wearing a tight black dress that probably looked good on her twenty years before. Now it was just silly, like her brittle blond-dyed hair, her deep red lipstick, and all the putty pressed into the lines of her face and neck.
She waited for a bit, just to show that she didn’t jump the minute someone called her name, and then walked over to our table. “Yeah?” the waitress said.
“What’s your pleasure, Mr. Alexander?” Lund inquired.
“Scrambled eggs with raw onions on ’em, and a bottle of Tabasco sauce on the side.” It was Mouse’s favorite breakfast.
The waitress went away to pass my order on to the cook. Lund made a final note in his small journal, and then put the book away in a breast pocket.
“So, Mr. Alexander,” he said. “You wanna play cards.”
“I’m gonna play cards,” I assured him. “I need a little seed money and some insurance against Roke Williams and the cops.”
“From what I hear about you, you never buy insurance,” the fish said.
“Man gets older he gets a little more conservative, smarter—you know.”
The fish smiled at me, tending more toward shark than sardine. I took it in stride. After all, I wasn’t the moderate custodian/landlord Easy Rawlins, I was the crazy killer Raymond Alexander. I was dangerous. I was bad. Nobody and nothing scared me.
The waitress came over with my eggs. I doused them with the hot sauce and shoveled them down.
“When do I get to see your game?” Lund asked me.
“Tonight if you want.”
“Where?”
“We got a garage over on Florence.” I took a slip of paper from my pocket and put it on the table. “That’s the address.”
“What time?”
“Nine-thirty would be too early. But anytime after that.” My eggs were gone. I never liked raw onions and eggs before but I loved them right then. “You could sit in if you wanted to.”
“Maybe so,” he said. “Maybe so.”
I WENT FROM TITO’S to the 77th Precinct.
Sergeant Andre Brown was in his small office. He was the highest-ranking black policeman in the station. And we had developed a sort of friendship.
Earlier that year there had been a gang killing of a student from Truth, and rumblings about bad blood between the gangs. I was able to point Brown in the direction of some bad eggs, making it possible for him to break up the trouble before it flared into a war.
Brown was in his thirties, tall and thin, with a thick mustache and a surprising deep laugh. He was a very clean man. Perfect nails and skin. His office had every book in place and every file in order. His graduation ring was from UCLA.