I waited maybe thirty seconds before speaking. I wanted Pericles Tarr as frightened as possible so that I could get down to the truth quickly and switch back onto the track of Christmas Black.
“Get up.”
INSIDE, JACKSON BLUE, Pretty Smart, and Jean-Paul Villard were sitting in the sunken living room, gabbing like old friends. Pretty was leaning forward in her chair, asking J.P. a question.
She was wearing a blue wrapper now, with sandals that had yellow ribbons to hold them in place. When she saw me, she stood up and said, “You,” with a kind of emphasis that implied I was in trouble. But then she saw the pistol in my hand and decided it was time to sit down.
“Hey, Easy,” Jackson said, “come on in. Pretty was just tellin’ us how she live in this cute li’l house all by herself.”
I was wondering how my accomplices had insinuated themselves into the mercenary young woman’s good graces, but I didn’t have time to consider that for long.
“Yeah,” I said. “She’s been known to stretch the truth in my brief experience with her. She also said she don’t know Mouse.”
“I said I didn’t know that nickname for him,” Pretty said.
“Uh-huh. Listen up. You people stay out here and continue on with your chat. Me and Perry gonna go in the bedroom and figure a few things out.”
Perry glanced at Pretty, looking for some kind of support or help, but she turned her head away.
“Come on,” I said to the dead man.
DOWN THE HALL on the right side was a bedroom with two single beds. The one on the right was tousled. I sat on the made bed and gestured with the pistol to the one that Pretty and Perry had used for sex.
Perry sat down, clasping his hands. He slapped the palms together and rubbed them like an anxious fly.
“So?” I said.
“What you worried ’bout, man?” he whined. “I ain’t dead, so they cain’t hang Ray.”
“They can if they don’t find you,” I said.
“I wouldn’t let ’em take Ray down.”
“Don’t look like that to me.” I was speaking a street dialect that was filled with unspoken threats. This was a language that black people all over the nation knew.
“I give you my word,” Pericles pleaded.
“An’ what you give to Leafa?”
“Leafa?”
“I’m a detective, Pericles. Your wife borrowed three hunnert dollars for me to hunt you down. She told me about when you got ambushed in the war, about how you smeared the blood of your dead friends on your own face to keep from gettin’ killed. She said that she knew you weren’t dead.”
My claim was so shocking that it knocked the fear right off Perry’s face. He was trying to understand how his ploy had failed.
“Who gonna lend Meredith three hunnert dollahs?”
“EttaMae Harris, that’s who. Meredith went to EttaMae and told her that she didn’t believe Ray killed you. She said that she would hire me if Etta lent her the money.”
“What? She borrowed three hunnert dollahs just in case I was alive? She some kinda fool?”
“She’s desperate, man,” I said as if I were an enemy pretending he was a friend. “She ain’t got nuthin’. You gone. They wanna kick her outta that rented house.”
“I got money for her,” Pericles said, squaring his shoulders at the insult to his manhood.
“You do?”
“Thirty thousand dollars.”
My mind went blank for a moment. There wasn’t one Negro out of a thousand that I ever knew who could say that they had held thirty thousand dollars in their hands. As for the ones who could make such a claim, they were all gamblers or criminals.
Mouse.
“Armored car or payroll?” I asked Pericles.
“Say what?”
“You heard me, niggah,” I said, lifting the .38 three inches.
“Payroll.”
“What state?”
“Washington.”
“Are you a fool, Mr. Tarr?”
“What you mean? What you tryin’ to do, man?”
“Lemme tell you,” I said. “You went up there in a blue Pontiac you and Ray bought from Primo. You had regular plates up to Washington, but then you put on stolen ones when you got near the job. Early in the mornin’ you walked into the shop where guards were movin’ the money, two hunnert fifty thousand or more. The guards let you hit ’em in the head, and you and Ray moved all that money into the trunk, went to a motel, put it in boxes, and
