“I went to pick up one of my men. His car broke down and he needed a ride.”
“You always give taxi service to your janitors?”
“He’s my night man. If I don’t have a night man we won’t be ready for the morning. The hour or so gets paid back with a full night’s work. Anyway, I took my lunchtime to do it.”
Sanchez just stared. He was a living lie detector.
I was a living lie.
“You two can go now,” he said. “Mr. Rawlins, tell your people that I’ll be around either this afternoon or tomorrow morning. I’ll need to talk to each one of them.”
“Will do,” I said. I wanted to cooperate. I wanted to do my duty. I didn’t have anything to do with that man’s death. But the way Sanchez looked at me made me feel guilty—maybe he could smell something that I had yet to sense.
CHAPTER 6
WHAT IS IT, EASY?” Etta asked me at the main office. She was there with Raymond. It wasn’t his shift yet and he was waiting for three o’clock to come. He was smoking another Chesterfield and staring off into space. Maybe he was still thinking about church.
“They found a body out in the garden.”
“Murdered?”
“Uh-huh. He had his head caved in out behind Mr. Ito’s bamboo.”
Raymond looked at me but he didn’t say anything.
“Did Simona find’im?” Etta asked.
“Her and Jorge.”
“Uh, uh, uh,” she grunted, swiveling her head for each syllable. “You shoulda had me out there, Easy. You know that young girl don’t know nuthin’ about the dead.”
I shrugged and went to sit down at my desk. I was worried that an investigation by Sanchez might cause trouble for me. I hadn’t gotten my job through the regular channels, and Mouse had come in on my recommendation. If Sanchez suspected either of us he would go to Newgate to ask why he had people like us on the payroll—and Newgate would have loved nothing better than to see me fired.
There was a foul odor in the air.
“Who was it, Easy?” Etta asked.
“I don’t know. Light-colored man. Not white. Maybe Negro, maybe not. Tall, nice suit. His hair was oiled so I don’t know what it was like really.”
“Colored like a deep tan?” Etta inquired.
“Yeah.”
“Kinda thin? With a lean-like face but he got some nose too?”
“You know him, Etta?”
“Sound like your girlfriend’s husband to me.”
At that moment I identified the scent in the air. “You said what?”
“ ’Bout two months ago, at the beginnin’ of the semester, her car was broke down and he had to pick her up an’ let her off. Light-complected guy, tall, straightened hair. He kinda looked like somebody from Hawaii or sumpin’ only his eyes was different.”
“Damn!” I stood up out of the chair.
“Where you goin’, Easy?” Mouse asked me.
“I got to check this shit out,” I said.
“ROGER! ROGER! Return to your seat,” Miss Falana was yelling at the McHenry boy. The flat-faced kid grinned and looked around him as if her words were arrows that had missed their mark.
But when I said, “Miss Falana,” Roger dove for his chair. He knew me from the yard.
The librarian gave me an exhausted and exasperated smile. “Mr. Rawlins,” she sighed.
“Where’s Mrs. Turner?”
The little woman wagged her hands in a beckoning gesture that made her look like a chubby chipmunk.
When I came over to her she whispered, “Mrs. Turner’s dog got hit by a car this morning. She rushed out to take him to the vet.”
“What time was that?” I asked in a regular voice.
She put her hands over her lips to show me, in sign language, that the children shouldn’t hear us. It was a conspiracy of most of the teachers to pretend that they didn’t have private lives.
“She left before first period. She got a call from her neighbor. It was terrible because we couldn’t get a substitute from downtown, so everybody has had to pitch in. You know I can’t handle these problem kids, not like her.”
Miss Falana didn’t like the way men and boys looked at Idabell. She thought that looking like the math teacher
