Six Easy Pieces (23 page)

“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?”

“Like her last name.”

This didn’t seem so bad to Dom. A name wasn’t like looking at the comely girl’s butt.

“His name was Dean,” he said. “That’s what she told me. But he wasn’t nice to her and I was and that’s why she liked to come see me at Horth’s Cove.”

“Was there anything else about him?” I asked. “A last name or maybe what he looked like.”

“He was strong but not as strong as I was. And he had stringy black hair that got in her eyes when he made her have sex with him.”

I asked a hundred questions but didn’t learn much else.

Finally I asked, “How did Merry come across you in the first place?”

“I go down to the cove all the time to fish. You know I love fishin’, Easy.”

“Anybody else know that you went down there?”

“Jo.”

“Other than Jo.”

“There’s Axel.”

“Who’s that?”

“Axel Myermann. He’s a guy live up in the hill over Santa Maria. Axel come down and fish wit’ me now and then.”

“Jo ever meet Axel?”

“Yeah. Onceit.”

“Did she like him?”

“Not too much. She said that he had twisted eyes.”

RAYMOND WAS ASLEEP. I reached for his shoulder but before I could touch him he grabbed my wrist. For a small man Raymond was very strong.

“You finished, Easy?”

“If your friends won’t be back for a few days I think you should leave Dom here,” I said. “You wouldn’t want the police showin’ up at Etta’s place and findin’ a suspected murderer.”

“Where we goin’ next?” Mouse asked with a smile.

“I’m gonna strike out solo for a while. You know, quiet like.”

“Okay, Ease. Do what you got to. But remember—I will do anything and kill anyone to keep Jo from comin’ to grief.”

Those words rattled around my mind for weeks after it was all over.

I SPENT THAT NIGHT with Bonnie and my brood. Feather had been reading her first book with no pictures while Jesus put the finishing touches on the hull of his single-sail schooner. Bonnie was reading a French-African journal published in Mali. I made pigtails and black-eyed peas with white rice. There was pumpkin pie in the refrigerator for dessert.

We ate and talked loudly, laughing and making fun. At least the ladies and I did. Jesus was almost always silent. But he had a good time. He loved the family I had cobbled together around him. He’d have done anything for Feather and the way he looked at Bonnie sometimes made me feel like putting my arm around her waist.

They spoke together in Spanish sometimes. Bonnie knew five languages.

She would reach out and touch my arm now and again, somehow sensing that I was giving her up in my heart, that I felt unequal to her black prince. We made love passionately every night. I think she was trying to hold on to me. For my part every moment was precious because I knew that one day soon she would leave me for her throne.

“Ray came by today.”

“What?” all three of them said.

“He’s alive. Etta lied. Our old friend Mama Jo nursed him back to health.”

“No,” Bonnie said. “You’re joking.”

“No ma’am. He walked right up to the front door and knocked.”

“What did he want?” Jesus asked.

There was feeling behind my adopted son’s question. He knew Ray almost as well as I did.

“Nuthin’ much,” I said, but I doubted if either Jesus or Bonnie believed me.

“ARE YOU IN TROUBLE, EASY?” Bonnie asked after we had made love.

“No. Why?”

“It was the way you mentioned Raymond. It was as if you were hiding something by being so simple.”

I turned toward her under the covers. The clock over her shoulder said 11:30.

“He’s got a friend in trouble and I’m the best one to figure it out.”

“Is it dangerous?”

“Not anymore. I’m just a snoop like. Just askin’ a few questions here and there.”

“Just don’t stick your neck out,” she said. “I wouldn’t know what to do without you.”

“Without me you’d be a queen.”

She kissed my lips and said, “Why would I want to settle for second best?”

I DROVE UP TO SANTA MARIA and looked Axel Myermann up in a phone booth at an Esso gas station. He lived at number five Elmonte Crook.

“What’s a crook?” I asked the station attendant.

“Say what?” He was over sixty but his thick hair was still mostly blond.

“I mean like a street,” I said. “It says here Elmonte Crook.”

“Oh,” the man said. He had the name DELL stitched on his breast pocket. “You mean Elmontey. Some rich old family bought up the land around there and started usin’ different names for streets. Lane and Circle and Way weren’t good enough for ’em so they started with that stuff like Crook and ‘Y’ and ‘U.’ If you got money you could do what you want. Now me, I can’t even get the town to come over and fill in a pothole. I been callin’ every Monday for three years almost. Every Monday and that hole gets bigger every time it rains.”

“Down where I used to live,” I said, “the city once left a dead dog in the street for over two weeks. It was one of those big dogs. Some guys and me tried to put it out for the trash collectors but they just left it moldering in the can.”

“Damn Democrats,” Dell said. “Damn Republicans.”

I didn’t have anything to add so we stood there a moment. I pulled out my wallet to pay for the three dollars’ worth of gas that he’d pumped. I handed him a five.

When he was giving me my change I asked, “How do I get up to this crook?”

“Follah Stockton all the way up the mountain till you get to Reynard. Turn there and stay on it till you get to a dirt road with no sign. Take that for a little less than a mile and you’ll see Elmontey. All the mailboxes are there together at the foot of the road.”

THE LOOSE DIRECTIONS worked perfectly. Twenty-three minutes after leaving the Esso station I was at the foot of Elmonte Crook. Number five did indeed belong to Axel Myermann. It was country out around there, dusty shrub country. There were no farms or even big trees. Just dirty green leaves, rocky terrain and blue sky.

Elmonte Crook was a hilly path that was well named. I passed two unlikely driveways before coming to a dark lane that had a small sign that read MYERMANN’S. The path was too steep for my car so I pulled off the road as far as I could and hiked my way down. I got as far as a small brook when I saw the house. Really it was just a cabin. Painted dull red and roofed in green, it had only one window that I could see and one step, even though the doorway was a good two feet above the ground.

The door was unlocked and Axel was not quite dead.

“Help me,” the elder man said.

He was sitting in a chair and holding his chest where blood was still escaping. He was small with a wiry build. Through his sparse beard you could see that he had a weak jaw. He wore a jeans jacket and denim pants too. His T-shirt had been white before the bleeding started. His shoes were brown with eyes but no laces.

“They shot me,” the man said.

“Dean and Merry?” I asked.

He nodded and winced.

“You Axel?” I asked him.

“Yeah. Who’re you?”

“Friend of Domaque.”

“I’m sorry ’bout him. It was just the money was all. The money they said we could get. I shouldn’ta done it. Shouldn’ta.”

Axel coughed and dribbled blood down into his beard.

“You better save your breath,” I said.

“Help me.”

“You got a phone?”

“They pult it outta the wall.”

“Why’d they shoot you?” I asked.

“So to keep the money and be sure I didn’t tell.”

“You told them about Domaque?”

“I’m sorry about that. I really am.”

I looked around for something to use to stop Axel’s bleeding. His home was just one big room, messy, unadorned, and pretty bare. There was a white-enameled wood stove in one corner and a bed in another. Next to the bed was a pile of clothing that he probably chose from now and then when he needed to change. I took out two long-sleeved shirts and shredded them to make a bandage that I could tie around his chest.

“What are you doin’ here, Mister?” Axel asked while I worked on his wound.

It wasn’t bleeding much. The hole, below his right nipple, was even and pretty small.

“Tryin’ to find Merry and Dean. They framed Dom and Dom’s my friend.”

“They’re in L.A.,” the old man said. “Spendin’ my money and laughin’ at us fools.”

“Where exactly?”

“He’s a surfer. Likes the water. So they’re down near the ocean somewhere, that’s for sure.”

“Did they live around here?”

“In a trailer on Bibi Wyler Road. Bibi Wyler Road,” he said again. Then he coughed up a great deal of blood and died.

I WENT BACK DOWN to the Esso station and called the cops, then I got a map and made my way to Bibi Wyler Road.

There was only one trailer on the three-block street. It was abandoned. There were clothes strewn around but no mail or written material of any kind. In one pants pocket I found an empty billfold with a photograph folded into the “secret compartment.” It was of a blond girl with a sharp smile standing arm in arm with a brutish-looking man whose black hair went down to the collar of his shirt.

I considered asking the neighbors about the occupants of the trailer but then I decided that the fewer people who saw me the better. After all, there had already been three murders in Santa Maria and the only suspect was a black man.

I GOT HOME in the late afternoon and played with my children. Bonnie watched me from the back door. I think she was worried but she didn’t say anything.

That night I dreamed about fishing in the ocean with Domaque and Raymond. We were in Jesus’s boat far out on the ocean. Mouse was catching one fish after the other, reeling them in to Domaque’s squeals of delight. I had my line in the water with bait on the hook but no fish nibbled or bit.

“Don’t worry, Easy,” Mouse said to me. “As long as you got friends you can eat.”

Those words soothed me and I clambered down into the bottom of the boat and slept on a rocking sea of deep silence.

“GOOD MORNING, MR. RAWLINS,” Ada Masters greeted. It was the next day and we were in the main hall of Sojourner Truth junior high school.

It was 5:30 A.M.

“Good morning to you too but you know you shouldn’t come to the school so early, Mrs. Masters,” I said. “It’s not safe for a woman alone.”

I was one of the few people who could tell it like it was to our new principal. She liked me. I liked her too.

“I’m not worried, Mr. Rawlins. And this is my school. I like to walk around and see what it looks like before children come in. How are you?”

Somehow Mrs. Masters knew that I had been in a funk. Her pale blue eyes saw past my façades. The suit she was wearing cost more than most other women’s wardrobes but you had to know something about clothes to tell that. We were perfect partners for the maintenance and care of the body and spirit of Truth.

“Doin’ pretty good,” I said. “Pretty good. If I don’t fall off, the horse I’m on might make me a winner.”

AFTER THE CUSTODIANS had left the maintenance office for their daily rounds, I pulled out the telephone and phone book. I made calls from eight o’clock until almost eleven. It was the thirty-second call that paid off.

“Why yes, Mr. Auburn,” Herschel Godfried said. “There was an eight-chambered thirty-eight caliber pistol and it did have a bulblike handle. It was a Lux-Tiger design from about 1895, an English design. The only one I know of in southern California is owned by Grant West in Pomona.”

Mr. West had sold the pistol in question to Harold Stout, a businessman who lived in Beverly Hills.

I left work at 1:45 and made it to Stout’s address by nine to two.

It was a large house on Doheny, only about two-and-a-half miles from my home.

He might have lived within walking distance from me but Stout was rich. I could tell by the pink marble that made up his walls and the manicured lawn surrounded by dozens of different varieties of rosebushes. I could tell by the imported stained-glass windows and the ugly Rolls-Royce parked in the driveway. The front door was heavy oak, at least ten feet high and five wide.

The small woman who answered the door wore cotton pants the color of a rotten lemon and a pink-and-white polka-dot shirt. Her hair was strawlike in both color and texture. She looked like she belonged in a trailer park drinking lemonade laced with straight alcohol.

“Yes?” she asked.

“Jay Auburn looking for Harold Stout.” If she had heard me over the phone she would have thought it was a white man speaking.