“Is that you, LaMarque?” I asked.
“Hi, Mr. Rawlins.”
“Boy, you’ve grown a foot.”
“Yes sir.”
His skin had grown darker in just the few months since I’d last seen him, and he had brooding eyes. His shoulders slumped and his head hung down. He was Jesus’s age, seventeen, and prey to all of the sour emotions of an adolescent.
“Say a proper hello to Easy and your uncle,” Mouse ordered his son.
“He’s not my uncle,” LaMarque replied.
“What you say?” Mouse asked.
I stood up and stuck my hand out. “It’s great seeing you, son.”
After a moment’s hesitation LaMarque took my hand.
“Ray,” I said. “Let’s go somewhere where we can talk. This is some serious business and it should just be us three involved.”
“You gonna say hello to your uncle?” Mouse asked his son.
“Hello, Uncle Dom.”
Dom grinned and waved with his long arm.
The level of drama around Mouse was always higher than it was anywhere else in the world. A week in Raymond’s company would age a normal man a year or more.
He smiled at LaMarque and said, “Okay, Easy. I got a place we could go.”
“What you want me to tell mama?” LaMarque asked his father.
“That I went out. That you don’t know where I went or who I was wit’.”
The brooding boy nodded and turned away toward the kitchen.
WE CAME TO A SMALL HOUSE with a brick facade off of Denker. Mouse had the key and so we went in the front door. The door opened onto a good-sized living room. There was a picture of a shapely black woman and a bespectacled black man on the coffee table. The table was flanked by two sofas. Dom and I sat on one couch and Raymond took the other.
“Whose house is this?” I asked.
“Pamela Hendricks and her husband Bobby.”
“They friends of yours?”
“She is. I don’t think he likes me too well.”
“Where are they?” I was wondering what Mouse thought I meant when I asked for privacy.
“He took her up to Frisco for a vacation. They gonna be gone another ten days.”
“And they gave you keys to their house?”
“She did. He prob’ly don’t know about it. But even if he did—what’s he gonna do?”
“So nobody’s gonna come around?”
“No sir.” Mouse grinned.
I shook my head. Mouse still lived in the fever of our youth. At that degree he should have died long before he was shot down in that alley.
“Did Merry have a last name, Dom?”
“Not that I know.”
“Did she tell you anything about herself, anything? About her parents, her school, where she’s from—”
“She said she was from Pasadena,” Domaque blurted out. “She said that when she moved out from her parents she moved to, to…” the damaged man pressed his powerful fingers against his dark brow. “…Culver City. Uh-huh, Culver City.”
“Think hard, Dom,” I said. “Did she ever say anything about her last name or her parents’ last name?”
“I think,” he said. “I think that it had the sound ‘Bick’ in it somewhere.”
“Bickman? Becker? Buck somethin’?”
“Uh-uh. No. Not like that. I don’t know, Easy.”
“She have any scars or marks? What color was her hair?”
“Light, light blond. Almost white. But brown eyes though. Most’a your blond-haired peoples got blue eyes but not Merry. And she had a little nose and her canine teef was sharp. She bit me one time and laughed.”
Mouse sighed and stood up. “I’ma go in the other room,” he said. “Stretch out a minute.”
He walked out. I knew he was bored by all of my questions. The only questions Mouse had patience for could be answered by “yes” or “no,” either that or with a number.
