The Best American Mystery Stories 2003

  “Can I get in?” I asked, and she stepped aside.

  The house was quiet and clean. I had straightened up now and then, but this was the first time it had been clean since she was gone.

  “Where the kids?”

  “They’re staying with Mrs. Riley. I sent them because I thought we might want to be alone.” Bonnie’s eyes followed me around the room.

  “No,” I said. “They could be here. I don’t have anything to say they can’t hear.”

  “Easy, what’s wrong?”

  “EttaMae called.”

  “After all this time?”

  “Mouse is definitely dead and she knows a young boy who’s in trouble.” I sat in my recliner.

  “What? You found out all that?” Bonnie went to sit on the couch. “How do you feel?”

  “Like shit.”

  “We have to talk,” she said in that tone women have when they’re treating their men like children.

  I stood up.

  “Maybe later on,” I said. “But right now I got to go out.”

  “Easy.”

  I strode into the bathroom, closed the door, and locked it. I showered and shaved, cut my nails, and brushed my teeth. When I went to the closet to get dressed, Bonnie was already in the bed.

  “Where are you going?” she asked me.

  “Out.”

  “Out where?”

  “Like I told you, to look for that boy Etta wants me to help.”

  “You haven’t even kissed me since I’ve been home.”

  I pulled out my black slacks and yellow jacket. Then I went to the drawer for a black silk T-shirt. It wasn’t going to be Easy Rawlins the janitor out on the town tonight. A janitor could never find Willis Longtree or Sinestra Merchant.

  I had put on dark socks that had diamonds at the ankles. I was tying my laces when Bonnie spoke to me again.

  “Easy,” Bonnie said softly. “Talk to me.”

  I went to the bed, leaned over, and kissed her on the forehead.

  “Don’t wait up, honey. This kinda business could take all night.”

  I walked to the door and then halted.

  Bonnie sat up, thinking I wanted to say more.

  But I went to the closet, reached back on the top shelf, and took down my pistol. I checked that it was working and loaded, and then walked out the door.

  ~ * ~

  The Grotto was the first black entrepreneurial enterprise I knew of that cast its net beyond Watts. It was a jazz club on Hoover. Actually, the entrance was down an alley between two buildings that were on Hoover. The Grotto had no real address. And even though the owners were black, it was clear that the Mob was their banker.

  Pearl Sondman was the manager and nominal owner of the club. I remembered her from an earlier time in Los Angeles; a time when I was between the street and jail and she was with Mona El, the most popular prostitute of her day.

  Mona seduced everybody. She loved men and women alike. If you ever once spent the night with her, you were happy to scrape together the three hundred dollars it cost to do it again — that’s what they said. Mona was like heaven on Earth and she never left a John, or Jane, unsatisfied.

  The problem was that after one night with Mona, a certain type of unstable personality fell in love with her. Men were always fighting and threatening, claiming that they wanted to save her. It wasn’t until Mona met Pearl that that kind of ruckus subsided.

  Pearl had a man named Harry Riley, but after one kiss from Mona, or maybe two, Pearl threw Riley out the door. For some reason, most men didn’t want to be implicated in trying to free Mona from a woman’s arms.

  ~ * ~

  A trumpet, a trombone, and a sax were dueling just inside the Grotto’s door. It brought a smile to my face if not to my heart.

  “Hi, Easy,” Pearl said.

  She was wearing a scaly red dress and maybe an extra twenty pounds from the last time we met. Her face was flat and sensual, the color of a chocolate malted.

  “I thought you was dead,” she told me.

  “That was the other guy,” I replied.

  Pearl’s laugh was deep and infectious — like pneumonia.

  “How’s Mona?” I asked.

  “She okay, baby. Thanks for askin’. Had another stroke last Christmas. Just now gettin’ around again.”

  “That’s a shame.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Pearl said. “Mona says that she’s lived more than most’a your everyday people by three or four times. You know she once had a prince over in Europe pay her way, first class, every other month for two years.”

  “What ever happened to him?”

  “He wanted her to be his mistress. Offered her all kindsa money and grand apartments, but she said no.”

  “Why?”

  “‘Cause she liked the life she was livin’. With me and our two crazy dogs.”

  I wanted to ask her how she could share a love with some stranger, but I held it back.

  “I’m lookin’ for a boy named Longtree,” I said.

  “Pretty boy with a wild white bitch?”

  “That’s him.”

  “He come in here Sunday night. Said he could play. When I asked him what, he said, ‘Guitar, piano, or whatever.’”

  “Not too shy, huh?”

  “Not a bit. An’ he wasn’t wrong neither. He played the afternoon shift for twenty bucks. I think he might’a got twice that in tips. He didn’t play nuthin’ like bebop, but he was good.”

  “I need to find him.”

  “Just look on the sidewalk and follow the trail’a blood.”

  “It’s that bad?”

  “That girl’s eyes made contact with every dangerous man in the room. She flirted with one of ‘em so much that he told Willis that he wanted to borrow her for the night.”

  “Did they fight?” I asked.

  “No. I told that big nigga to sit’own ‘fore I shot him. They know around here that I don’t play. I told Willis to take his woman outta here, and damn if she didn’t give that big man a come-on look while they were goin’ out the door.”

  “You think she might’a told him where they were stayin’?”

  “I wouldn’t put it past her.”

  “What was this guy’s name?”

  “Let’s see, um, Art. Yeah, Art, Big Art. Big Art Farman. Yeah, that’s him. He lives down Watts somewhere. Construction worker.”

  I found an address in the phone booth of the Grotto. Listening to jazz and worrying about how big Big Art was made Bonnie fade to a small ache in my heart.

  ~ * ~

  The man who came to the apartment door was not big at all. As a matter of fact, he was rather tiny.

  “Art?” I asked.

  “No,” he said.

  “Does Art Farman live here?”

  “Do you know what time it is, man?”

  I pulled a wad of cash from my pocket.

  “It’s never too late for a hundred bucks,” I said.

  The small man had big eyes.

  “Wha, what, what do you want?”

  “I come to buy somethin’ off’a Art. He know what it is.” I could be vague as long as the money was real.

  “I could give it to him when he comes in,” the little man offered.

  “You tell him that Lenny Charles got somethin’ for him if he come in in the next two hours.”

  “Why just two hours? What if he don’t come in before then?”

  “If he don’t, then somebody else gonna have to sell me what I need.”

  “What’s that?” the little man asked. His coloring was uneven, running from a dark tan to light brown. He had freckles that looked like a rash and had hardly any eyebrow hair at all.

  “I need to find a white girl called Sinestra.”

  “What for?” The greedy eyes turned suspicious.

  “Her daddy asked his maid, my cousin, to ask me to ask her to come back home. He’s willin’ to pay Art a century if he can help me out.”

  “What’s your name again??
??

  “Len,” I lied. “Yours?”

  “Norbert.” He was staring at my wad. “What you pay me to find Art?”

  “Where is he?”

  “No. Uh-uh. I get paid first.”

  “How much you want?”

  “Fifty?” he squeaked.

  “Shit,” I said.

  I turned away.

  “Hold up. Hold up. What you wanna pay?”

  “Thirty.”

  “Thirty? That’s all? Thirty for me and a hundred for Art?”

  “Art can give me the girl, can you?”

  “I can give you Art. And she’s with him. That’s for sure.”

  I considered taking out my gun but then thought better of it. Sometimes the threat of death makes small men into heroes.

  “Forty,” I said.

  “You got to bring it higher than that, man. Forty ain’t worth my time.”

  “I’ll go find Willis myself then,” I said.

  “You mean that skinny little kid?” Norbert laughed. “Art kicked his ass and took his girlfriend from him.”

  “He did?”

  “Yeah,” Norbert bragged. “Kicked his ass and dragged that white girl away. Course she wanted to go.”

  “She did?”

  “Course she did. Why she want that skinny guitar man when she could have Big Art in her bed?”

  I handed Norbert a twenty-dollar bill.

  “Where was it that Art did this?”

  “Next to that big ‘partment buildin’ down on Avalon. Near the Chevron station with the big truck for a sign.”

  I handed him another twenty.

  “It was the only blue house on the block.”

  “How do you know all that?” I asked.

  “I drove him over there.”

  “Did Sinestra mind Art beating up her boyfriend?”

  “Didn’t seem to,” Norbert shrugged.

  I handed him another twenty-dollar bill.

  “Where’s Art now?”

  “At Havelock’s Motel on Santa Barbara. That’s where we go when we got a woman, you know, to let the other man get some sleep. I mean, we ain’t got but two rooms up in here.”

  I handed over another leaf of Sheila Merchant’s money and went away.

  ~ * ~

  Once in my car I had a small dilemma. Should I go after the girl or Willis? It seemed to me that no one really cared about her, except maybe her father. Willis was the one that Etta was worried about. I knew that if I asked her, she would have told me to make Willis my priority.

  But I was raised better than that. No matter what she had done, I couldn’t leave Sinestra Merchant at the mercy of a kidnapper and possible rapist. I couldn’t take Norbert’s word that she maybe wanted some rough action from some big black man in Watts.

  ~ * ~

  Havelock’s was a long bungalow in the shape of a horseshoe. When I got there it was closing on midnight. A night clerk was in the office, sitting at the front desk with his back to the switchboard. I parked across the street and considered.

  The motel sign said that there was a TV and a phone in each room.

  I went to a phone booth and dialed a number that hadn’t changed in sixteen years.

  “Hola,” a sleepy Spanish voice said.

  “Primo.”

  “Oh, hello, Easy. Man, what you doin’ callin’ me at this time’a night?”

  “You got a pencil and a clock?”

  I gave Primo a number and asked him to call in seven minutes exactly. I told him who to ask for and what to say if he got through. He didn’t ask me any questions, just said “Okay” and hung up the phone.

  ~ * ~

  “Hi,” I said to the night clerk five minutes later. “Can you help me with a reservation?”

  It was a carefully constructed sentence designed to keep him from getting too nervous about a six-foot black man coming into his office in the middle of the night. Thieves don’t ask for reservations. They rarely say hello.

  “Um,” the white clerk said. He first looked at my hands and then over my shoulder to see if somebody else was coming in behind. “I can’t make reservations. I just rent out rooms for people when they come.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “That’s what I thought. But you know, I work at a nightclub down the street here, and the only time I can really make it in is after work. Do the daytime people take reservations?”

  “I don’t know,” the clerk said, relaxing a bit. “People usually just look at the sign. If there’s a vacancy they drive in, and if not they drive on.”

  He smiled at me and the phone rang. He turned his back and lifted the receiver.

  “Havelock’s Motel,” he said in a stronger tone than he’d used with me. “Who? Oh yes. Let me put you through.”

  He pushed the plug into a slot labeled “Number Six.” I was smiling honestly when he turned back to me.

  “That’s really all I can say,” he said. “Just look for the sign.”

  “All right.”

  ~ * ~

  I counted the doors on the north side of the building and then I went around the back, counting windows as I went. Number six’s curtains were open wide. The only light on in the room was coming from a partially closed door, the bathroom, I was sure. There were two double beds. One was neat, either stripped or made. The other one had something on it, a pair of shoes tilted at an uncomfortable angle.

  The window was unlocked.

  Big Art — his driver’s license said Arthur — Farman had been dead for some hours. The cause of death probably being a bullet through the eye. Before he’d been killed he was bound, gagged, and beaten. A pillow on the floor next to him had been used to stifle the shot.

  There was no trace of the girl named Sinestra. But that didn’t mean she hadn’t been there at the time of Art’s death.

  I climbed out of the window and made it back to my car. The dead man, who I’d never met in life, was the strongest presence in my mind.

  ~ * ~

  It’s hard looking for a blue house at three in the morning. There’s white, black, and gray, and that’s it. But I saw the big apartment building. It was on a corner with only one house nearby. It helped that the lights were on.

  I knocked on the door. Why not? They were just crazy kids. There was no answer so I turned the knob. The house was a mess. Pizza cartons and dirty dishes all over the living room and the kitchen. Half-gone sodas, a nearly full bottle of whiskey; it was the kind of filth that many youths lived in while waiting to grow up.

  I couldn’t tell if the rooms had been searched. But there wasn’t any blood around.

  ~ * ~

  I got home a few minutes before four.

  Etta picked up the receiver after the first ring.

  “Hello.”

  I told her about Big Art and Sinestra’s games.

  “Old Willis don’t have to worry about Abel Snow with that girl in his bed,” I said.

  “She called her daddy,” Etta said. “She told him where she was and asked him to come and get her.”

  “Then she lit out?”

  “I don’t know. All I know is what Mrs. Merchant said. She told me that Mr. Merchant sent Abel down to get her.”

  “Did he bring her back?”

  “No.”

  “Damn.”

  “Do you think he’s found ‘em, Easy?”

  “I’m not sure, but I don’t think so. Mr. Snow don’t mind leavin’ blood and guts behind him. “

  “Maybe you better leave it alone, Easy. “

  “Can’t do that, Etta. I got to see it through now.”

  “I don’t want you to get killed, baby,” she said.

  “That’s the nicest thing I been told all day.”

  ~ * ~

  I slept on the couch for the few hours left of the night.

  When I opened my eyes, she was sitting right in front of me.