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 facades. 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.
“Harry’s very sick,” she said. “He can’t talk.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “What’s wrong with him?”
“Same thing’s wrong with all men,” the white woman said in a husky voice. “Thinkin’ about a woman’s butt and then wonderin’ why they got shit for brains.”
I laughed hard, not so much at her joke but at the shock of hearing such language from a white woman in those sedate surroundings.
“My name’s Alice,” the woman said. “You wanna come in, Jay?”
“Can’t think of anything better,” I said.
THE ENTRANCE HALL had yellow stone floors lit by slender three-story windows, which also threw light on the curving, cream-colored staircase leading to the higher floors. To the left was a dining room with a table set for fifteen, and a maroon carpet. To the right was a sunken living room with yellow sofas, chairs, and carpeting.
Alice led me into the living room.
She offered me scotch but I demurred. She poured herself a shot. It wasn’t the first one she’d had that afternoon. She asked if I had a cigarette. I gave her a Chesterfield and lit it. She steadied my hand with her fingers. Her hands were large and powerful, callused and misshapen by a life of hard work or hard time.
“I knew a girl got lynched just for touchin’ a nigger,” she said after her first lungful of smoke. “Selena was her name. The boy was Richard Kylie. You know, they had known each other since they were babies. They wanted each other all the more since it was a crime. She told me about their first kiss. Said it was so sweet it was like drinkin’ water from Jesus’ own hand. Said that all he had to do was kiss her neck and she’d shout out for the Lord.”
“I wish you would keep from saying the word ‘nigger,’” I said. “It hampers conversation.”
“It bothers you?” She sounded surprised. “It’s just a word back where I come from. I’m a cracker, you’re a nigger, Pablo’s a beaner, and Chin’s a chink. But okay. I don’t have to use the word, though.”
I nodded, thanking her for the restraint.
“Richard fucked Selena every day for six weeks,” Alice said, continuing with her story. “Every time she told me about it she was more upset. At first she was just playin’. It was taboo and sweet to her evil side. But sometimes her and Richard would steal away for a whole day. She’d say she was in school and he pretended to be lookin’ for a job down Minorville. You know, Jay, when a man make a woman feel like she turn inside-out, she cain’t help but be in love with him—nigger or not. Oh, excuse me.”
I took a breath. Alice was missing an upper front tooth but other than that she started looking good. Forty maybe. She had a tight body in her button-up cotton blouse and her yellow pants. I was almost glad for the insults; they meant that I would never let my guard down for the sex-crazed southern woman.
