This gesture also gave me confidence.
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After six cups of coffee, four doughnuts apiece, and half a pack of cigarettes, we made our way back to Mouse’s pied-a-terre. He took the bedroom this time and I stretched out on the couch. That was a little shy of seven.
I didn’t get up again until almost eleven.
It was a great sleep. To begin with there was no light in the cabinlike living room, and the couch was both soft and firm, filled as it was with foam rubber. No one knew where I was and I had Mouse to ride with me when I finally had to go out in the world. I had to believe that Feather’s doctors would keep her alive and Bonnie didn’t enter my thoughts at all. It’s not that I was over her, but there’s only so much turmoil that a heart can keep focused on.
Bonnie was a problem that had to come later.
While I was getting dressed I heard the toilet flush. Mouse 2 0 0
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slept more lightly than a pride of lions. He once told me that he could hear a leaf thinking about falling from a tree.
He came out wearing a blue dress shirt under a herringbone jacket. His slacks were black. I went through to the restroom.
There I shaved and washed the stink from my body with a washrag because Mouse’s hideaway didn’t have a shower or a tub.
At the door, on the way out, he asked me, “You armed?”
“I got a thirty-eight in my pocket, a Luger in my belt, and that twenty-five you gave me in the band of my sock.”
He gave me an approving nod and led the way down the stairs.
i n 1 9 6 6 , L.A.’s downtown was mostly brick and mortar, plaster and stone. There were a few new towers of steel and glass but mostly squat red and brown buildings made up the business community.
I needed to gather some financial information and the best way to do that, I knew, was at the foot of the cowardly genius —
Jackson Blue.
Jackson had left his job at Tyler after going out on a mainte-nance call to Proxy Nine Insurance Group, a consortium of international bank insurers. Jackson had come in to fix their computer’s card reader and then (almost as an afterthought, to hear him tell it) he revamped the way they conducted their daily business. Their president, Federico Bignardi, was so impressed that he offered to double Jackson’s salary and put him in charge of their new data processing department.
I drove down to about a block from Jackson’s office and went to a phone booth. I was looking up the number in the white pages while Mouse leaned up against the door.
“Easy,” he said in warning.
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I looked up in time to see the police car rolling up to the curb.
I had found Jackson’s company’s number but I only had one coin. I didn’t drop the dime, reasoning that I might have to make the call later on, from jail.
The other reason I held back was because I had to pay very close attention to events as they unfolded. There was always the potential for gunplay when you mixed Raymond Alexander and the police in the same bowl. He saw them as his enemy. They saw him as their enemy. And neither side would hesitate to take the other one down.
As the two six-foot white cops (who might have been brothers) stalked up to us, each with a hand on the butt of his pistol, I couldn’t help but think about the cold war going on inside the borders of the United States. The police were on one side and Raymond and his breed were on the other.
I came out of the phone booth with my hands in clear sight.
Raymond grinned.
“Good morning,” one of the white men said. To my eyes only his mustache distinguished him from his partner.
“Officer,” Mouse allowed.
“What are you doing here?”
“Calling a Mr. Blue,” I said.
“Mr. Blue?” the policeman countered.
“He’s a friend’a ours,” I replied to his partial question. “He’s a computer expert but we’re here to ask him about bearer bonds.”
“Bonds?” the cop with the hairless lip said.
“Yeah,” Mouse said. “Bonds.”
The way he said the word made me think of chains, not mon-etary instruments.
“And what do you need to know about bonds for?” one of the cops, I can’t remember which one, asked.
