Six Easy Pieces (14 page)

“You look wild, Easy,” was the first thing she said.

“What?”

“Your hair’s all lumpy and you ain’t shaved. What’s wrong?”

“Where’s LaMarque?”

“He’s with my people up in Ventura.”

“What people?” I asked. My heart skipped and for an instant Bonnie Shay was completely out of my mind.

“Just a cousin’a mines. She got a little place out in the country around there.”

“Where’s Mouse?”

Etta peered at me as if from some great height. She was a witch woman, a Delphic seer, and Walter Cronkite on the seven o’clock news all rolled into one.

“Dead,” she said. “You know he is.”

“But the doctor,” I said, almost pleading. “The doctor hadn’t made the pronouncement.”

“Doctor don’t decide when a man dies.”

“Where is he?”

“Dead.”

“Where?”

“I buried him out in the country. Put him in the ground with my own two hands.”

It was certainly possible. EttaMae was the kind of black woman who made it so hard for the rest. She was powerful of arm and iron willed. She had thrown a full-grown man over her shoulder and carried him from the hospital after knocking out a big white orderly with a metal tray.

“Can I go to the grave?”

“Maybe one day, baby,” she said kindly. “Not soon, though.”

“Why not?”

“Because the hurt is too fresh. That’s why I ain’t called you in so long.”

“You mad at me?”

“Mad at everything. You, Raymond. I’m even mad at LaMarque.”

“He’s just a child, Etta. He ain’t responsible.”

“The child now will become the man,” she preached. “And when he do you can bet he will be just as bad if not worse than what went before.”

“Raymond’s dead?” I asked again.

“The only thing more I could wish would be if he would be gone from our minds.” Etta looked up over my head and into the sky as if her sermon of man-hating had become a prayer for deliverance from our stupidity.

And we were stupid, there was no arguing about that. How else could I explain being ambushed in an alley when I should have been at home lamenting the assassination of our president? How could I ever tell Mouse’s son that he got killed trying to help me out with a little problem I had with gangsters and thugs?

“Come on in, Easy,” she said.

THE LIVING ROOM was decorated like a sea captain’s cabin in a Walt Disney film. A hammock in the corner with fish nets full of glass-ball floats beside it. The floor was sealed with clear coating so that it looked rough and finished at the same time. The windows were round portals and the chandelier was made from a ship’s wheel.

“Sit down, Easy.”

I sat on a bench that could have easily been an oarsman’s seat. Etta lowered herself onto a blue couch that had gilded clamshells for feet.

“How have you been?” she asked me.

“No no, baby,” I said. “It’s you who called me outta my house after more than eleven months of me searchin’ high and low. Why am I here?”

“I just wondered if you were sick,” she said. “They said at work that—”

“Talk to me, Etta. Talk to me or let me go. ’Cause you know as much as I want to see you and try to make it up to you, I will walk my ass right outta here if you don’t tell me why you called after all this time.”

Her face got hard and, I imagined, there were some rough words on the tip of her tongue. But Etta held back and took a deep breath.

“This ain’t my house,” she said.

“I could see that.”

“It belongs to the Merchant family.”

“Pierre Merchant?” I asked. “The millionaire from up north?”

“Lymon,” Etta said, shaking her head, “his cousin run the strawberry business north’a L.A. I work for his wife. She has me take care’a the house and her kids.”

“Okay. And so she let you stay here when you come down to town. So what?”

“No. She don’t know I’m here. This is a place that Mr. Merchant has for some’a his clients and business partners when they come in town.”

“Etta,” I said. “What you call me for?”

“Mrs. Merchant have four chirren,” she said. “The youngest one is thirteen and the oldest is twenty-two.”

I was about to say something else to urge her along. I didn’t want there to be too much silence or space in the room. Silence would allow me to think about what I had just learned–—that my best friend since I was a teenager was dead, dead because of me. For the past year I had hoped that he was alive, that somehow EttaMae had nursed him where the hospital could not. But now my hopes were crushed. And if I couldn’t keep talking I feared that I would fall into despair.

But I didn’t push Etta because I heard a catch at the back of her throat. And EttaMae Harris was not a woman to show that kind of weakness. Something was very wrong and she needed me to make it right. I grabbed on to that possibility and took her hand.

A tear rolled down her face.

“It was hard for me to call on you, Easy. You know I blame you for what happened to Raymond.”

“I know.”

“But I got to get past that,” she said. “It’s not just your fault. Raymond always lived a hard life an’ he did a lotta wrong. He made up his own mind to go with you into that alley. So it’s not just that I need your help that I’m here. I been thinkin’ for some time that I should talk to you.”

I increased the pressure of my grip. EttaMae had a working woman’s hands, hard and strong. My clenching fingers might have hurt some office worker, man or woman, but it was merely an embrace for her.

“Mrs. Merchant’s second-to-oldest is a girl named Sinestra. She’s twenty and wild. She been a pain to her mama and daddy too. Kicked out of school an’ messin’ around with boys when she was a child. Runnin’ from one bad egg to another now that she’s a woman.”

“She too old for you to look after, Etta,” I said.

“I don’t care about that little bitch. She one’a them women that ambush men one after the other. Her daddy think that they doin’ to her but he don’t see that Sinestra the rottenest apple in the barrel.”

“What’s that got to do with me?”

“Sinestra done run away.”

“She’s twenty,” I said. “That means she can walk away without havin’ to run.”

“Not if her daddy’s one of the richest men in the state,” Etta assured me. “Not if she done run off with a black boy don’t have the sense to come in out the rain.”

“Who’s that?”

“Willis Longtree. Hobo child from up around Seattle. He showed up one day with a crew to do some work for the Merchants. You know the foreman of their ranch would go down near the railroad yards in Oxnard whenever he needed to pick up some day labor. They got hobos ride the rails and Mexicans between harvests all around down there. Mr. Woodson—”

“Who?” I asked.

“Mr. Woodson, the foreman,” she said. “He brought about a dozen men down to the lower field around four months ago. They was buildin’ a foundation for a greenhouse Mr. Merchant wanted. He grows exotic plants and the like. He’s a real expert on plants.”

“Yeah,” I said. “So was my cousin Smith. He could grow anything given the right amount’a light and rainfall.”

“Mr. Merchant don’t have to rely on nature.”

“That’s why they build greenhouses instead’a churches,” I said.

“Are you gonna let me talk?”

“Sure, Etta. Go on.”

“All that Willis boy owned was a guitar and a mouth harp on a harness. Whenever they took a break he entertained the men playin’ old-time tunes. Minstrel, blues, even some Dixieland. I went down there one day after young Lionel Merchant, the thirteen-year-old. The music was so fine that I stayed all through lunch.”

“I bet Sinestra loved his barrelhousin’,” I said.

“Yes she did. Everybody did. It took the crew four days to dig the foundation. After that Mr. Merchant himself offered Willis a job. He made him the assistant groundskeeper and had him playin’ music for his guests when he gave parties.”

“Mighty ungrateful of that boy to think he deserved the boss’s daughter,” I said.

“It’s not funny, Easy. Mr. Merchant got a whole security force work for him. They use it to keep the Mexicans in line on the farms. He told the top man, Abel Snow, that he’d pay ten thousand dollars to solve the problem.”

“And he sees the problem as what?”

Etta held up her point finger. “One is Sinestra bein’ gone from home, and two,” Etta held up the next finger, “is Willis Longtree breathing the same air as him.”

“Oh.”

“Is that all you got to say? Oh?”

“No,” I replied. “I could also say, what’s it to you? Boys run away with girls every day. Daddies get mad when they do. Sometimes somebody ends up dead. Most of the time she comes home cryin’ and it’s all over. That’s the way it was in Fifth Ward when we were kids. I remember more than one time that Mouse got jealous’a you. Usually we got the poor fool outta sight before Ray’s .41 could thunder.”

“Grow up, Easy Rawlins. We ain’t in Houston no more and this ain’t no joke I’m tellin’ you.” There was that catch in her throat again.

“What’s wrong, Etta?”

“Willis ain’t no more than nineteen. He thinks he’s a man but he barely older than LaMarque. And Abel Snow is death in a blue suit.”

“You like the boy, huh?”

“He’d come around the kitchen in the afternoon and play for me, tellin’ me all the great things he was gonna do. If you just closed your eyes and listened to him, you might believe it’d all come true.”

“Like what?”

“All kindsa things. One minute he was gonna be in a singin’ band and then he talked about bein’ in the movies. He said that he looked like Sidney Poitier and maybe he could play his son in some film. He wanted to be a star. And then Sinestra got her hooks in him. She couldn’t help it. It was just kinda like her nature. Girl like that see a man-child beautiful as Willis and she cain’t think straight. She just wanna make him crazy, make him run like a dog with her scent in his nose. I saw it happen, Easy. I tried to talk sense to him.”

“Maybe you worried about nuthin’, Etta,” I said. “L.A.’s a big town. The police hardly catch anybody unless they committin’ a crime or they just turn themselves in.”

“Abel Snow ain’t no cop. He’s a stone killer. And he got Merchant’s money behind him.”

“That don’t mean he’s gonna find Willis. Where would he look?”

“Same place I would if I was him. Jukes and nightclubs on Central. Movie studios and record studios and any place a fool like Willis would look for his dreams. He told everybody his plans, not just me.”

“You know I’m still just a janitor, Etta.”

“Easy Rawlins, you owe me this.”

“If he’s big a fool as you say, it’s really only a matter of time. You know no matter how hard he try a fool cain’t outrun his shadow.”

“All I know is that I got to try,” she said.

“Yeah. Yeah,” I said. “I know.”

I was thinking about Bonnie and her African prince. It still hurt but the pain was dulled in the face of Etta’s maternal desperation. And she seemed to be offering me absolution over the death of her husband.

“I don’t even know what the boy looks like,” I said. “I don’t know the girl. It’s a slim chance that I’ll even catch a glimpse of them before this Snow man comes on the scene.”

“I know that.”

“So this is just some kinda blind hope?”

“No. I can help you.”

“How?”

“Drive me up to the Merchant ranch outside of Santa Barbara.”

I grinned then. I don’t know why. Maybe it was the idea of a long drive in the country.

LYMON MERCHANT was known as the Strawberry King, that’s what EttaMae told me. But there wasn’t a strawberry field within ten miles of his ranch. Lymon lived up in the mountains east of Santa Barbara. The dirt road that snaked up the mountain looked down on the blue Pacific. We strained and bounced and even slid a time or two, but finally made it to the wide lane at the top. The dirt boulevard was flanked by tall eucalyptus trees. I rolled down my window to let in their scent.

“This the place?” I asked when we came to a three-story wood house.

“No,” Etta said. “That’s the foreman’s house.”

The foreman’s house was larger and finer than many a home in Beverly Hills. The big front door was oak and the windows were huge. The cultivated rosebushes around the lawn reminded me of Bonnie. I felt the pang in my stomach and drove on, hoping I could leave my heartache on the road behind.

THE MERCHANT MANSION was only two floors but it dwarfed the foreman’s house just the same. It was constructed from twelve-and eighteen-foot pine logs, hundreds of them. It was a fantastic structure looking like the abode of a fairy tale giant—–not for normal mortals at all.

The double front doors were twelve feet high. The bronze handles must have weighed ten pounds apiece.

Before we could knock or ring a bell the front door swung open. I realized that there must have been some kind of private camera system that monitored our approach.

A tall white man in a tuxedo appeared before us.

“Miss Harris,” the man said in a soft, condescending voice.

“Lawrence,” she said walking past him.

“And who are you?” Larry asked me.

“A guest of Miss Harris.”

I followed her through the large foyer and down an extremely wide hall that was festooned with the heads and bodies of dead animals, birds, and fish. There were boar and swordfish, mountain lion and moose. Toward the center hall was a rhino head across from a hippopotamus. I kept looking around wondering if maybe Lymon Merchant had the audacity to put a human trophy up on his wall.

We then came into the family art gallery. The room was twenty feet square, floored with three-foot-wide planks of golden pine. Along the walls were paintings of gods and mortals, landscapes, and of course, dead animals. In one corner there stood a white grand piano.

“Easy, come on,” Etta said when I wandered away from her lead.

There was something off about the color of the piano. The creamy white seemed natural and I wondered what wood would give off that particular hue. Close up it was obvious that it was constructed completely from ivory. The broad lid and body were made from fitted planks while the legs were formed from single tusks.