My office was on the third floor of a block-long building between 76th Place and 77th Street. It was on a floor of various businesses owned by blacks and whites. There was a locksmith, a notary public, a seamstress from Eastern Europe, and a Negro lawyer who had whiter skin than most white men I knew. There was a theater company at the end of the hall, the Afro-American Mobile Theater Group, that had a room the size of a janitor’s broom closet where they rehearsed their civil rights plays seven nights a week.
The sign on my blue pine door still read, EASY RAWLINS—RESEARCH AND DELIVERY. That was the title I used before I had a valid PI’s license.
Mouse was blocking the sign. He wore a pink suit and a lime green dress shirt with a slender violet tie and a short-brimmed straw hat that had been woven by a master. There was no bulge or other evidence that he was armed, but that didn’t fool me.
“You plannin’ to go to some cotillion after our meeting?” I asked him as I worked the brass Sargent key in the lock of my door.
“Felt good to be alive this mornin’, Easy. Thought I’d put on something bright and happy.”
I just laughed and pushed the door open.
It was a midsize office, big enough for the extralarge desk that sat near the far window looking down on Central, and a blue sofa for the nights I might not make it home. I made my way behind the desk and took a seat. Mouse looked at the three visitors’ chairs and then at the closed door behind him. He moved the rightmost chair against the far corner in front of a little recess formed by the outcropping of a structural beam.
Most men worried about sitting with their backs to a door, but that was usually just self-inflation and pretense. Mouse, however, truly was a man with enemies.
“What’s up, Easy?” he asked, leaning his chair back into the recess.
“Frank Green.”
Mouse grinned and shook his head.
“I used to have a girlfriend,” he said. “A woman who was a minister in a storefront Baptist church. She told me that she wanted to save my soul. I figured that was as close to God as I was ever likely to get.
“Anyway, Reverend Antonia used to tell me that whatever goes around comes around. I thought that was just some Holy Roller hocus-pocus, but then here comes Evander, and damn if that fine young minister didn’t know her words.”
“He’s Frank Green’s son?”
“Frank was a wild man, Easy. He make me seem like some kinda angel. Back when you had all them problems with him and DeWitt Albright, he had falled in love with a fourteen-year-old girl.”
“Timbale?”
Mouse nodded. “Grabbed her right off the street and locked her in a room in his house. Made her into his woman like he was some kinda wild animal ruttin’ after a mate. Then I killed him and Timbale went home. When they found out she was pregnant they kicked her out, and I been givin’ her two hundred dollars a month evah since.”
“Why?”
“Because I killed Evander’s father and her parents wouldn’t stand up for what was right.”
“Evander thinks he should kill you,” I said. “He feels that that’s his duty.”
“I understand that. I murdered his father. What else he gonna do?”
“Ray.”
“Evander could no more kill a man like you than a fly could topple a lion.”
“So? It only matter that he try.”
“And if he does that?”
Raymond tilted his head to the side. “He’ll die like a man.”
“No.”
“No? What else could he do?”
“Not him, man, you,” I said.
“Me? What can I do?”
“I want you to deny killing Frank Green. If Evander asks you I want you to tell him that you didn’t do it.”
The consternation on Mouse’s face was almost comical. He pulled his chin in and raised his hands in a confused gesture.
I understood. He felt respect and responsibility for the boy. Mouse had killed his own stepfather and biological father at different times, in different conflicts. This was a way of life for him.
I wondered how I could explain that it was more important to keep Evander alive than to duel with him in order to show respect for his manhood. It was going to be a difficult discussion and possibly even dangerous.
It was almost a relief when the heavy thud came against my office door.
It wasn’t a knock but a strike meant to break the door in. There were a couple of extra bolts that engaged whenever I closed the door, so it took two more blows for them to break in. By that time Mouse was on his feet, plastered into the recess with that terrible long-barreled .41 in his hand, pointed, for the moment, at the ceiling.
For my part I grabbed the receiver of the telephone. There were two reasons for this: First, I thought that if the intruder had heard voices, the phone would be a good explanation for what he’d heard, and second, I wanted his attention on me and what I was doing.
Three big white men rushed in. They all wore cheap suits in dark hues: green and blue and gray.
Fear hit my heart like an electric jolt, and suddenly I was alive again for the first time since going over that cliff. It was a miracle that I had no time to contemplate.
I wasn’t worried for myself. It was these foolish men with their numbers and confidence, their last mistake if I, the living Easy Rawlins, didn’t think fast.
“Where is he?” the man on my right said.
“Who?”
“Evander.”
Just mentioning that name brought the white hoodlum closer to death.
“Who’s that?”
“Don’t try to shit us, brother man,” he said. “We talked to a girl named Vixie. She told us that she brought him out to a place in the woods up north.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. “I never go anywhere near the country.”
Incredibly the men hadn’t looked behind them. If they did Mouse would kill them. If they drew on me Mouse would kill them. If they mentioned Evander’s last name he’d do the same.
“Vixie took us to a house we know, and this guy named Yancy told us all about you. Black dick name of Easy Rawlins who went around asking people where this Evander was.”
The options for a living solution were diminishing. Mouse was slowly bringing the muzzle of the pistol down in line with the middle man’s head.
The good thing about my telephone is that I’m a restless talker. I like to wander around the room, looking out the window and then back to see who might be in the hall while I talked. That meant the curled wire to the receiver was very long. I threw the thing with all my might at the guy on the right. It hit him in the forehead, dead center.
It was my next action that surprised me. I climbed up on the desk and jumped at the guy in the middle. While I wrestled him backward, Mouse clocked the guy to the left with the heavy barrel of his gun. The man I’d jumped pushed me against the desk and was reaching for his gun when Mouse struck him.
I turned toward the guy I hit with the phone and hit him with an upthrust elbow to the chin. His head hit the wall and when he bounced back I elbowed him again.
The fight was over just that quickly. The men were down if not completely out. They floundered like stunned fish out of water while Mouse went from one to another, relieving them of their weapons and tapping them more or less lightly if they seemed about to rise.
Since getting my PI’s ticket I kept various law enforcement paraphernalia in my file cabinet. Mouse and I handcuffed the dazed men wrist to wrist in a circle with their backs facing one another. That way they had no real ability to escape.
“Damn, Easy,” Mouse said when this operation was complete. “You gonna make me into a mothahfuckin’ saint.”
“You go on, man. Leave the stooges with me.”
Mouse shrugged his pink shoulders and made his exit. On the way out he stepped on one man’s hand. The intruder yelled and Raymond slapped him with his pistol, as if to prove that his sainthood was only a temporary aberration.
I placed chairs over the chains that held them. The weight kept them on the floor and unbalanced. I also produced a pistol, which calmed their desire to complain.
Then I called the one policeman I trusted, Melvin Suggs, and told him that I had a surprise.