After he was gone conversation became easier.
“Other than this Durgen, are there any other men that she might have known, Miss McKenzie?”
“She had started to see a man named Bob Henry. He’s got a gas station on Alameda. And then there’s Matthew Munson. He does taxes down here on Central.”
“How old was Jackie?” I asked.
“She told everybody she was nineteen. She looked twenty-one but she was just seventeen, Mr. Rawlins. Just a girl.” Miss McKenzie’s eyes filled with tears. “When she moved out she took all of her dolls. And you know she was a good girl. She always said that she was going to buy me my own house in the country where I could have a garden and Trevor could have him a horse.”
“WHY YOU WANT me wit’you on this, Ease?” Mouse asked as we rode down Hooper.
He had one foot up on my dashboard and the other knee laid flat on the seat. He wore a yellow short-sleeved shirt that was loose fitting with soft gray slacks and maroon-colored shoes with no socks. Those were his “slumming” clothes.
“Somethin’ to wear but not to go nowhere in,” as he’d told me more than once.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess I missed runnin’ around with you when I thought you were dead. And if the guy who hired me is right and he didn’t kill that girl, then I thought I might need you to back me up.”
“So you was lyin’ when you said that you were tryin’ to prove Mustard did it.”
“Musa,” I said. “And, yeah, I was lyin’ but either way I’ll do what she would want. If Musa did it I’ll find out and if he didn’t I’ll find out who it was instead.”
“An’ what’s he payin’?”
“It’s just a country trade, Raymond. No money.”
“Then what do I get wastin’ my time when I could be winnin’ money off’a Ginny?”
“Theodore asked me to look into this,” I said.
“So?”
“That means he will owe me a pair of handmade shoes.”
Raymond lit up there next to me. He might have been a child he was so pleased.
“Drive on, my man,” he said. “Drive on.”
* * *
OUR FIRST STOP was a small apartment building on Manchester. Doreen McKenzie had given us the key to her daughter’s apartment mostly because she seemed to have a deep regard for Mouse.
“How do you know that woman?” I had asked my friend.
“Don’t know her far as I can remember, Ease.”
“Then why she show you so much respect?”
“I got a rep, man. People know who I am. You know that.”
“Yeah.”
Her apartment was built on the model of shotgun architecture of the Deep South. Three rooms in a line from front to back. And because she was on the first floor there was a back door too.
We entered into her bedroom. It was furnished with a big mattress held aloft by a cherry frame, and a vanity with lipsticks, powder cases, and bottles of perfume scattered about. The next room was the toilet. There was makeup crowding the sink and nylons hanging from a rack above the tub.
The last room was the kitchen. It was stacked with dirty dishes and fashion magazines. She had been cutting out pictures of women in sexy poses.
The only food she had was milk that had gone bad and cornflakes, both of them kept in the refrigerator.
Other than the magazines there was no reading material in the house. There were no photographs, no calendar, phone book, telephone directory, or television set. There was a radio on the kitchen counter. It was set on the station KGFJ which specialized in soul music. I knew that because Mouse turned it on.
There were condoms in her medicine cabinet—dozens of them.
There was nothing under the bed.
I was looking between the mattress and box springs when Mouse asked, “What you lookin’ for, Easy?”
“Something that might give us an idea about who killed Jackie,” I said, a little vexed that he wasn’t giving me a hand.
“You mean like this here?” He was holding out a thick sheaf of legal documents.
“Where’d you get that?”
“In the vanity drawer.”
Sooner or later I would have checked that drawer. But I had got it in my mind that Jackie was a devious child, that she would have kept her secrets in some pretty obvious hiding place.
It was the deed to a house at the southern outskirts of Compton. She’d paid twelve thousand dollars in cash for the place. It was large enough for a garden but I didn’t know if it was zoned for stabling a horse.
On a small piece of paper, folded in between the various documents, she had listed a dozen or so names under
