Bobby Grant wasn’t in the phone book but that was no surprise. Back in 1965 a good half of your poor people didn’t have phones. They used one in the hall or maybe a relative’s line across the street.
WHEN RAYMOND “MOUSE” Alexander first moved to L.A., he gave Information his name to go along with my number. I still remember the look he gave me when I told him that I had his listing removed.
Mouse was a serious man who had killing in his blood. Telling him no was as dangerous a task as moving nitroglycerine in a truck with no shock absorbers.
“What you say, Easy?” the little gray-eyed killer asked. I remember that he was wearing an outrageous orange suit and a brown porkpie hat.
“It’s either that or you gonna have to shoot me,” I said.
“Huh?”
“Ray,” I said, “you got women callin’ me on the line day and night. ‘Where’s Raymond? Do you know how I can find Mouse? What’s your name, honey? You sound nice.’ I know you don’t like nobody messin’ with your women but it’s a little confusin’ when they wake you out of a deep sleep and there you are all alone in the bed.”
The evil stare turned into a grin and a shrug.
“Easy, you a fool, you know that?”
“Not me, Raymond. Not me.”
I PARKED THREE blocks from Nola Payne’s address and walked the rest of the way to her block. There was a group of men, and a few women, standing around on the corner of Grape and 114th. These were working people who got paid a dollar fifteen an hour, when there was a job to be had. But most of their potential employers had gone up in flames over the past five days.
In order to fit in with that working-class crowd I was wearing faded blue jeans and a T-shirt with a few small tears and paint stains on it. My brown leather shoes were cracked and stained too.
The men were for the most part loud and blustering, laughing about their adventures and the exploits of their friends.
“Cops chased Marlon Jones up into the White Front Department Store on Central,” one man was saying when I got there. “They run him up against the back of the store and told him to lay down or die. But you know he out on parole and so he jumped up on a shelf, climbed to the top and popped right out the window before they could catch a bead on his ass.”
The crowd broke out into loud laughter. His audience didn’t ask why the storyteller wasn’t arrested instead of Marlon Jones. They didn’t want proof. All they asked for was a good laugh in the face of the hard times coming up the line.
“Lonnie Beakman is dead,” an older man said. “Shot him in the back while he was runnin’ down Avalon.”
That sobered the group.
A skinny young man wearing overalls and no shirt said, “Lonnie? He was engaged to my cousin a while last year.”
“How is she takin’ it?” a young woman asked.
“I’ont know,” the youth replied. “She broke it off with him after she found him down the hall with her sister three weeks ago.”
No one laughed at the story but that opened up the floor for a new line of talk.
“Meany got about a thousand pint cans of forty-weight oil,” somebody said. “He sellin ’em for five cents a can.”
“Motherfucker,” a squat dark man said. “Motherfuckers killed Lonnie B and all Meany thinkin’ about is nickels. It ain’t funny, you know. It ain’t funny at all. Cops come down here and murder us and we track through the blood to make a pocket full’a change.”
On cue a police cruiser turned the corner.
As the cops drove past us one lowered his window and said, “No congregating on the street. Move along.”
Almost as if it were choreographed, every one of the dozen people standing there started moving in a different direction. We each made it about a dozen feet or so, just far enough for the cops to have driven out of sight. Then we drifted back to the corner.
“Who are you?” the angry man asked me when I sidled up against the lamppost.
The police had broken the friendly mood, so I was seen for what I was—a stranger and possible threat.
“Easy Rawlins,” I said.
“What you doin’ sneakin’ around the sidelines?”
“Just hangin’ around, brother. I’m lookin’ for somebody and I was waitin’ for a break in the conversation.”
The man wasn’t really squat, that was an illusion caused by his unusually broad shoulders. He was nearly six feet. Less than two inches shorter than me. Other than his shoulders his most noticeable features were his big hands and yellow teeth, which he showed without smiling—like a feral dog or a wolf.
“I ain’t never seen you before.”
I could see that we were going down the road to war and I wondered how to make a truce without fighting first.
“That’s Easy Rawlins,” a woman in a blue-checkered dress said. She looked like a well-stacked pile of black pears held in place by a farmer’s tablecloth.
“I never heard’a no Easy Rawlins live around here,” the skinny youth said.
“That’s Raymond Alexander’s best friend, Newell,” the woman said to the angry, broad-shouldered man. “Him
