Somewhere around fifteen men and women sat in the dark room, leaning on mismatched tables, perched on chairs, stools, benches, and even a crate or two. The room stank of sour beer and cigarette smoke, but I can’t say that it didn’t feel like home. The dark despair contained within the walls of Cox Bar was the memory and sensibility that were contained within the confines of my skull. The darkness was a place to hide and plot and grieve.
I took a deep breath and walked toward the pine plank set upon two sawhorses that stood for the bar. I expected to see big black Ginny come around the closet that held the liquor bottles, but instead it was my old friend John from Fifth Ward, Houston, Texas. John — one of my oldest friends in California. Tall and broad and brown as the mud oozing up between an alligator’s claws.
John was born to be a bartender. For a few years he had tried to make it in the construction business. He bought lots and built houses. At night he’d go home pretending that he was just a regular guy, a businessman who never thought about straight liquor and prostitutes, payoffs and gangsters.
“Easy.”
“Alva’s gone for good, huh, John?”
Alva had been John’s wife for a few years. He had helped raise her son, hired me to save the brooding boy’s life one time there.
“Yeah,” John replied. “She wanted a daytime man, and you know I can’t even talk straight ’fore four in the afternoon.”
I sat on the bar’s one high stool, and he served me a glass of water with three ice cubes in it.
“Where’s Ginny?” I asked. “I don’t think I’ve ever been here when she wasn’t workin’ the bar.”
“Lupus.”
It was only a word, but we both knew that it might well be a death sentence for our old friend from Houston.
After an appropriate span of reverent silence, John asked, “Mouse in trouble?”
I laughed; I had to. Black folk of my generation and before had to be able to see around the corner to ensure their safety. We couldn’t afford to suffer surprise. I had a card that told anyone who was interested that I was a detective, but I was no more a private eye than John or Jackson or Gara or any soul sitting in that dark, dark room. Each and every one of us was examining and evaluating clues all the time, day and night.
“Why you ask?” I asked John’s question.
“He ain’t been in here in eight, nine days, an’ you don’t drink.”
“That’s a big jump.”
“Only if you fall,” John said with certainty.
I laughed again. “Yeah. Cops seem to think that Raymond killed somebody, an’ Etta wants me to check it out.” There was no reason to lie to John. He knew more secrets than a whole monastery of retired confessors.
“Cops just now thinkin’ that Ray killed somebody?” John said, his humor as deep as our history.
“Not just anybody, man.”
“Oh. You mean Pericles.”
“You know Tarr?”
“For three weeks before Raymond stopped comin’, him an’ Pericles was thick as thieves.”
“Friends?”
“Oh, yeah. Ray buy one drink an’ Perry buy the next. Women come up to ’em, an’ they sent ’em away. They was friends, but they was serious too.”
“How well you know this Pericles?”
“He come in here now and then for a long time, tryin’ to get away for a few minutes,” John said.
“Away from what?”
“All them ugly kids. He had a dozen of ’em an’ said that there was only one he could stand.”
“Leafa?”
It was John’s turn to smile.
“Yeah, that’s what he called her. He said that them kids even made a ruckus in their sleep. His wife always askin’ him for more money, and the kids screamin’ like they was in Bedlam.
“Perry sit down at the end of the bar and nurse two beers all night long. He’d tell his wife he had a second job, but you know he just couldn’t stand them chirren.”
I was thinking that maybe Perry had deserted his family. But why would Mouse be involved with that?
“Then, about three months ago, he hooked up with this woman,” John continued.
“What was her name?”
“Never said. You know how secretive a niggah can be, Ease. Pericles moved to a table when he was with his girl and he always got the drinks at the bar and brought them back to her. She liked scotch — neat.”
16
I got home not long after one. The dog grinned his hatred for me at the door. I could tell by the jumble of
