receipts of his bills for his entire life. He still kept ticket stubs for movies he’d seen in New Orleans twenty years before. In the lower left drawer he kept folders detailing his daily business. One folder was for expenses, another for expenditures, and like that.
He also had a drawer full of cigars. I knew something was wrong when I saw them. For Mofass to leave fifty good cigars he must have been really shaken.
I searched the rest of the place without finding very much. Nothing under the bed or between the mattresses or even in his clothes. No loose boards or envelopes taped under the drawers.
Finally I sat down at his desk again and put my hand flat on top of it. Really it wasn’t flat because there was a blotter there. I lifted it but there was nothing underneath so I let it fall back. And it made a little sound: flap flap. Not a single flap but two, as if there were two blotter sheets.
Mofass had slit his blotter in two and then taped it back together so he could keep things in there secret without calling any attention to them. But the tape had worn thin and the pages had separated.
I found a few items of interest there. First there was a receipt signed by William Wharton (Mofass’s real name) from the Chandler Ambulance Service of Southern California. The bill was $83.30, issued for the transmission of a patient from Temple Hospital to 487 Magnolia Street on January 18, 1952. There was another hospital bill for $1,487.26 for two weeks of hospitalization of a P. Jackson. I couldn’t imagine Mofass spending twenty dollars on a date and here he was spending six months’ salary for a girl he urged me to evict.
The last two items were both envelopes. One had a hundred dollars in twenty-dollar bills and the other had a list of eight names, addresses, and phone numbers. The addresses were widely spread around the city.
While I was trying to make sense of what I’d found I sensed someone, or maybe I heard him there behind me.
Chester Fisk was standing in the doorway. A tall and slender elderly gentleman, Mr. Fisk was Mercedes’s father and a permanent resident of the Bell Street Boardinghouse. His skin color was somewhere between light brown and light gray highlighted in certain places, like his lips, with a brownish yellow.
“Mr. Rawlins.”
“Hey, Chester. How’s it goin’?”
“Oh.” He contemplated for a few seconds. “All right. Sun’s a li’l too strong and the night’s a li’l too long. But it beats the hell outta bein’ dead.”
“Maybe I could take a little of that heat off,” I said. Then I pulled out the two bottles of ale.
For a moment I thought Chester might cry. His eyes filled with gratitude so docile that it was almost bovine.
“Well, well, well,” he said. He rested his hand around the neck of the closest bottle.
“You seen Mofass just before he moved out, Chester?”
“Sure did. Everybody else was asleep but old men hardly need t’sleep no more.”
“Was he upset?”
“Powerful.” Chester accented his answer with a nod.
“Did you talk with him?”
“Not too much I didn’t. He just had this one li’l bag packed. Prob’ly just had a toothbrush and a second pair a drawers in it. I ast’im was somethin’ wrong an’ he said that things were bad. Then he said that they was real bad.”
“That’s it? Did he say anything about his mother?”
“Nope. Didn’t say nuthin’ else ’bout nuthin’. Just rush in in a hurry an’ run out the same way.”
On the drive back to my house I tried to figure what it all meant. I knew that Mofass had paid for Poinsettia’s hospital bill and probably for her rent, maybe for a year or more. I also had some names that I didn’t know all around L.A.
Maybe his mother was sick.
Maybe he killed Poinsettia. Maybe Willie did. Everything was just cockeyed.
28
The phone rang eight times before Zaree Bouchard answered. “Hello?”
She sounded bored or fed up.
I said, “Hey, Zaree, how you doin’?”
“Oh, it’s you, Easy.” She didn’t sound happy. “Which one of ’em you want?”
“Which one you wanna part wit’?”
“You could have ’em both fo’a dollar twenty-five.”
I could see that we weren’t going to play, so I said, “Let me have Dupree.”
I heard her yell his name and then I winced at the hard knock of the receiver as she dropped it.
After a minute of quiet the phone started banging around again until finally Dupree said, “Yeah?”
“Mr. Bouchard,” I exclaimed. “Easy here.”
“Well, well, well.” His voice reminded me of an alto sax going down the scale. “Mr. Rawlins. What can I do for you?”
“You heard about Towne?”
“Ain’t done nuthin’ but hear about it. That was a shame.”
“Yeah. I was the one found the body, at least the one after Winona.”
“I heard that, Easy. I heard that an’ it made me think all over again how you was the last one saw Coretta ’fore Joppy Shag did her in.”
Dupree always blamed me for his girlfriend’s death. I never got mad at him, though, because I always felt a little responsible for it myself.
“Cops brought me in and I’m scared they might try an’ pin it on me.”
“Uh-huh,” Dupree said. Maybe he wouldn’t have minded the police finding me dirty.
“Yeah. Anybody know who the girl was they found with’im?”
“Couple’a folks I heard said that her name was Tania, somethin’ like that. But nobody said where she come from, or where she been.”
Dupree was a good man. No matter how he felt about me we were still friends. He wouldn’t lie.
“What’s goin’ on with Zaree?” I asked.
“She mad on Raymond.”
“How come?”
“First he all wild over Etta. Then he start drinkin’ an’ get all slouchy an’ filthy. Then, just yestiday, he gets all dressed up an’ last night he come in wit’ two white girls.”
“Yeah?”
“I tell ya, Easy.” The old friendliness returned to Dupree’s voice. “I couldn’t sleep wit’ the kinda racket they was makin’. I mean he had’em beggin’ fo’it! An’ if they asted fo’ a little more in a soft voice he’d say, ‘What you say?’ and they had to scream.”
“That got to Zaree?”
“Well, yeah,” Dupree chuckled. “But what really got to’er was that I got hard up ev’ry time he got one of ’em, and then I’d go after her. I told’er that if she didn’t want it then one’a them girls out there would.”
Mouse was a bad influence on anything domestic.
“Lemme talk to’im, okay, Dupree?”
“Yeah.” Dupree was still laughing when he got off the phone.
“Whas happenin’, Ease?” Mouse asked in his cool tone.
“You gotta call Etta, Ray.”
“Yeah?” You could hear the satisfaction in his voice.
“Yeah. Call’er an’ take LaMarque out, to the park or somethin’.”
“When?”
“Soon as you can, man, but you gotta remember some-thin’.”
