A Red Death: Featuring an Original Easy Rawlins Short Story "Si (Easy Rawlins Mysteries) Read Free

her the riot act on Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas. You know, you’n me talked about all that stuff ten years ago, more.”
    “Uh-huh,” I grunted. “So what?”
    “I figured out up at her house that she liked talkin’ about books and shit. But I didn’t know that it got her hot. I never met a black woman who got hot over a man’s book knowledge.”
    I wanted to tell him that he didn’t know my girlfriend, Bonnie Shay, but I thought better of it.
    “So what, Jackson? Mofass can’t hardly leave the house. I guess if JJ wants a boyfriend, it’s okay.”
    “It’s not that, man,” Jackson said. “I mean Jewelle made it plain from the start that she ain’t never gonna leave Mofass. She wants to be with me. She lets me stay in that apartment and helps me out if I need it. But I cain’t call her up at the house or stay with her the whole night because she got to get back up there to the canyon and take care’a him.”
    “So you’re kinda like a married man’s girlfriend on the side,” I said, cracking a smile in spite of my trepidations.
    “Laugh if you want to, man. But once I figure out the binary language of machines I’ll be inside them computers and you’ll be out in the cold.”
    “What’s the problem, Jackson?”
    “Clovis.”
    Another name, another universe of danger.
    “What about her?”
    “Really it ain’t her. Or maybe it is,” Jackson speculated.
    “What, Jackson? What you tryin’ t’say?”
    “Misty Stubbs.”
    “Who’s that?”
    “She’s Jewelle’s half-sister on her dead daddy’s side.”
    “Yeah? So?”
    “Jewelle’s been writin’ to Misty down in Texas all these years since she been up here. She been askin’ Misty to come up but the girl got married when she was fifteen and had to stay with her husband. You know, like it should be. Anyway, I guess her and the husband started not gettin’ along a while back and Misty finally decided to come out here. We went down to Greyhound and everything but she didn’t show up.”
    “But she said she was comin’?”
    “Give us the schedule and everything.”
    “Did JJ call her house in Dallas?”
    “How could she do that, man? Misty was leavin’ her husband.” “Maybe Misty changed her mind.”
    “They closer than full sisters is, Easy. Misty wouldn’t do somethin’ like that and not say.”
    “Well what do you want from me?” I said. “Girl got on a bus or she didn’t. Maybe her husband stopped her. Maybe she got pulled off somewhere on the road. Either way it’s the kinda story you tell to the cops.”
    “But I didn’t say about Clovis yet,” Jackson said.
    “Okay. Okay. Hit me.”
    “Clovis come over to the real estate office three days ago. She waltzed right up to Jewelle’s desk like they never had no problems. You know Jewelle ain’t scared’a Clovis and them no more ’cause she got Jackie and Lorenzo workin’ for her. Those boys always go around armed.”
    I knew Jackie and Lorenzo. They were okay. But Clovis MacDonald, Jewelle’s aunt, was deadlier than three men and almost as smart as her niece.
    “Clovis was all smilin’ and pleasant,” Jackson continued. “So Jewelle knew that somethin’ was wrong. She axed Clovis why she was there and Clovis said that Jewelle done stoled Mofass’s real estate company from her and she wanted a piece of the business back.”
    Clovis was wrong to have blamed Jewelle. It was really Mofass and I who pushed Clovis out of the business. But the real problem with her memory was that she had taken the business from Mofass in the first place. When Clovis was just a waitress, at a nameless diner we used to frequent, she seduced Mofass and then imprisoned him in her house. Jewelle helped him escape and then she took over the real estate office andturned it into a major concern. At one time I thought that I could be in the property business, but once I saw how good Jewelle was I realized that I would always be a little fish.
    “What did Jewelle say?”
    “She