When I was a young man that was my sorrow.
“Hi, Easy.”
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W a lt e r M o s l e y
“Etta.”
“Come on in.”
The entrance to their small house was also the dining room.
There were stacks of paper on the table and clothes hung on the backs of chairs.
“ ’Scuse the mess, honey. I’m jes’ doin’ my spring cleanin’.”
“Where’s Mouse, Etta?”
“I don’t know.”
“When you expect him?”
“No time soon.”
“He left for Texas?”
“I don’t know where he went . . . after I kicked his butt out.”
I wasn’t ready for that. Every once in a while Etta would kick Mouse out of the house. I had never figured out why. It wasn’t for anything he’d done or even anything that she suspected. It was almost as if spring cleaning included getting rid of a man.
The problem was I needed Raymond, and with him being gone from the house he could be anywhere.
“Hello, Mr. Rawlins,” a man said from the inner door to the dining room.
The white man was tall, and even though he was in his mid-thirties his face belonged on a boy nearer to twenty. Blue eyes, blond hair, and the fairest of fair skin — that was Peter Rhone, a man I’d cleared of murder charges after the riots that decimated Watts. He’d met Etta at a funeral I gave for the young black woman, Nola Payne, who had been his lover. Gruff EttaMae was so moved by the pain this white man felt over the loss of a black woman that she offered to take him in.
His wife had left him. He had no one else.
He wore jeans and a T-shirt and the saddest face a man can have.
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C i n n a m o n K i s s
“Hey, Pete. How’s it goin’?”
He sighed and shook his head.
“I’m trying to get on my feet,” he said. “I’ll probably go back to school to learn auto mechanics or something like that.”
“I got a friend livin’ in a house I own on One-sixteen,” I said.
“Primo. He’s a mechanic. If I ask him I’m sure he’ll show you the ropes.”
Rhone had been a salesman brokering advertising deals with companies that didn’t have offices in Los Angeles. But he had a new life now, or at least the old life was over and he was waiting on Etta’s porch for the new one to kick in.
“Don’t take my boy away from me so quick, Easy,” Etta said.
“You know he earns his keep just workin’ round the house here.”
Peter flashed a smile. I could see that he liked being kept on the back porch by EttaMae.
“You know where I can find Mouse?” I asked.
“No,” Etta said.
Peter shook his head.
“Well okay then,” I said. “I got to find him, so if he calls tell him that. And if Bonnie or Jesus call just tell ’em to stay away until I say they can come back.”
“What’s goin’ on, Easy?” Etta asked, suddenly suspicious.
“I just need a little help on somethin’.”
“Be careful now,” she said. “I kicked him out but that don’t mean I want him in a casket.”
“Etta, how you expect somebody like me to be a threat to him?”
I asked even though I had once nearly gotten her man killed.
“You the most dangerous man in any room you in, Easy,” she said.
I didn’t argue with her assessment because I suspected that she might be right.
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28
There was a place called Hennie’s on Alameda. It took up the third floor of a building that occupied an entire block.
That building once housed a furniture store before the riots depleted its stock. Hennie’s wasn’t a bar or a
