“I like my life just the way it is thank you very much.”
“No, baby. That ain’t true.”
“Why not?”
“If you did like it you wouldn’t be out here takin’ a pair’a shoes to go out and find a murderer. No, man. You need to come around.”
“A man raising children has to set an example, Ray,” I said. “Our children, especially our sons look at us to tell what it is they should be doing with their own lives. That’s human nature.”
“I don’t know what you call it but Etta done raised LaMarque well enough to know that if he tried to do like me that he’d get killed inside of a week.”
“But it’s not just what they think they might be doing,” I said. “What they do is buried deep in their minds.”
“I don’t know about all that shit,” Mouse said. “But even if it is true you cain’t expect a man to give up everything he is ’cause one day one’a his kids might slip up. This is life, Easy. In the end it’s every man for himself.”
With those words he climbed out of the car and I drove off. On the way I castigated my friend for his mistaken beliefs. But as I drove I wondered about my own actions; about the late-night visitors, men and women, white and black. I wondered about what my own children saw when they looked at me. At least Raymond’s son had seen him seemingly lifeless with a hole ripped in his chest. He looked like a criminal so his son had the ability to make a choice. But to my kids I might have seemed like some kind of hero.
Maybe I was angry with myself and not Raymond at all.
IT WAS JUST A STOREFRONT with a hand-painted canvas sign in the window that read TAXES. There was a camel-colored young woman sitting at a desk set off to the right. She had a sensual face with big orange-tinted lips that must have motivated half the men in the neighborhood to ask her opinion on their taxes.
“Yeah?” she said to me before I could ask my question.
“I need to see Matthew,” I said.
“Why?”
“I wanted to talk to him about a five-hundred-dollar murder.”
If there had been a movie camera on the receptionist it would have stopped at that frame. She neither blinked nor breathed for a good five seconds.
“What did you say?” she asked at last.
“Get him for me will ya, sister?”
“Matt,” she said, raising her voice.
“What?” came a man’s voice from the room at the back.
“I think you better come out here.”
A medium-sized white man came out. He had thinning hair combed across his head to hide the encroaching baldness. His eyes were blue and his skin yellowy. His lips were almost as large as his secretary’s. But his were wrinkled like a day-old balloon that’s lost half its air.
“Mr. Munson?”
“Yes?” he asked warily.
“You knew Jackie Jay?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m here representing a man named Musa Tanous. Do you know him?”
“No.”
“He owns a building a couple’a blocks down. He was arrested a few days ago for murder.”
Matthew gulped and touched his throat with all the fingers of his left hand.
“Rita,” he said to the secretary. “I’ll be spending a few minutes with this gentleman.”
“Yes sir,” she said in a thick voice.
I turned her way in time to see her wiping tears from her eyes.
“Follow me, Mister—?”
“Rawlins.”
* * *
LIKE THEODORE, MUNSON had a backroom much larger than his front office. But most of the space back there went unused. The only furniture was a pine desk shoved into one corner. This was crowded with papers and files which were in turn covered in a fine layer of rubber eraser dust.
The accountant led me to the desk but he didn’t sit—neither did I.
“Now what’s this about Jackie?” he asked me.
“I was hired by a man, another man who knew Jackie. He wants me to make sure that Musa Tanous gets the chair for the crime.”
