'No,' she said with strength that she hadn't shown before.
'Listen. This is late at night, in a lonely neighborhood, in a big city. That door is open and that means something's wrong. And if something happens to one more person I know the police are gonna chase me down into the grave.'
'Okay,' she said. 'But only to see if it is alright. Then you go back to the car.'
I closed the front door before turning on the wall switch. Daphne called out, 'Richard!'
It was one of those houses that was designed to be a mountain cabin. The front door opened into a big room that was living room, dining room, and kitchen all in one. The kitchen was separated from the dining area by a long counter. The far left of the room had a wooden couch with a Mexican rug thrown across it and a metal chair with tan cushions for the seat and back. The wall opposite the front door was all glass. You could see the city lights winking inside the mirror image of the room, Daphne, and me.
At the far left wall was a door.
'His bedroom,' she said.
The bedroom was also simple. Wood floor, window for a wall, and a king-sized bed with a dead man on it.
He was in the same blue suit. He lay across the bed, his arms out like Jesus Christ—but the fingers were jangled, not composed like they were on my mother's crucifix. He didn't call me 'colored brother' but I recognized the drunken white man I'd met in front of John's place.
Daphne gasped. She grabbed my sleeve. 'It is Richard.'
There was a butcher's knife buried deep in his chest. The smooth brown haft stood out from his body like a cattail from a pond. He'd fallen with his back on a bunch of blankets so that the blood had flown upwards, around his face and neck. There was a lot of blood around his wide-eyed stare. Blue eyes and brown hair and dark blood so thick that you could have dished it up like Jell-O. My tongue grew a full beard and I gagged.
The next thing I knew I was down on one knee but I kept myself from being sick. I kneeled there in front of that dead man like a priest blessing a corpse brought to him by grieving relatives. I didn't know his family name or what he had done, I only knew that he was dead.
All the dead men that I'd ever known came back to me in that instant. Bernard Hooks, Addison Sherry, Alphonso Jones, Marcel Montague. And a thousand Germans named Heinz, and children and women too. Some were mutilated, some burned. I'd killed my share of them and I'd done worse things than that in the heat of war. I'd seen open-eyed corpses like this man Richard and corpses that had no heads at all. Death wasn't new to me and I was to be damned if I'd let one more dead white man break me down.
While I was down there, on my knees, I noticed something. I bent down and smelled it and then I picked it up and wrapped it in my handkerchief.
When I got to my feet I saw that Daphne was gone. I went to the kitchen and rinsed my face in the sink. I figured that Daphne had run to the toilet. But when I was through she hadn't returned. I looked in the bathroom but she wasn't there. I ran outside to look at my car but she was nowhere to be seen.
Then I heard a ruckus from the carport.
Daphne was there pushing the old suitcase into the trunk of a pink Studebaker.
'What's goin' on?' I asked.
'What'a ya think's goin' on! We gotta get out of here and it's best if we split.'
I didn't have the time to wonder at her loss of accent. 'What happened here?'
'Help me with my bag!'
'What happened?' I asked again.
'How the hell do I know? Richard's dead, Frank's gone too. All I know is that I have to get out of here and you better too, unless you want the police to prove you did it.'
'Who did it?' I grabbed her and turned her away from the car.
'I do not know,' she said quietly and calmly into my face. Our faces were no more than two inches apart.
'I cain't just leave it like this.'
'There's nothing else to do, Easy. I'll take these things so nobody will know that I was ever here and you just go on home. Go to sleep and treat it like a dream.'
'What about him?' I yelled, pointing at the house.
'That's a dead man, Mr. Rawlins. He's dead and gone. You just go home and forget what you saw. The police don't know you were here and they won't know unless you shout so loud that someone looks out here and sees your car.'
'What you gonna do?'
'Drive his car to a little place I know and leave it there. Get on a bus for somewhere more than a thousand miles from here.'
'What about the men lookin' for you?'
'You mean Carter? He doesn't mean any harm. He'll give up when they can't find me.' She smiled.
Then she kissed me.
It was a slow, deliberate kiss. At first I tried to pull away but she held on strong. Her tongue moved around under mine and between my gums and lips. The bitter taste in my mouth turned almost sweet from hers. She leaned back and smiled at me for a moment and then she kissed me again. This time it was fierce. She lunged so deep into my throat that once our teeth collided and my canine chipped.
