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

I held her as we walked because she would have fallen if I hadn’t. She was wailing by the time we reached the overhang.
    “Tell me about it, baby,” I said.
    “You shouldn’t be here, Easy. You shouldn’t.”
    “I ain’t gonna do nuthin’ unless you say to, JJ. But you know you got to talk this out.”
    “They’ll kill her.”
    “Not if it means that Clovis don’t get Equity. She’d set loose Satan in the kingdom of heaven if she could just make a dollar and not pay the tax.”
    It was true and JJ knew it. The woman-child smiled bitterly and pushed away from me.
    “I’d give her every dollar I got to keep Misty safe,” JJ said.
    “Has she told you that she has her?”
    “No. Not in so many words. She says that Misty would be happy, that she’d come over and make me a toast if I did the right thing by the MacDonald clan.”
    “Could she have heard that Misty was supposed to come down here? I mean if she knew that she was supposed to come and didn’t, then she could feed you a story and there’d be no way you could find out the truth.”
    “She had Mr. Sunshine,” JJ said with trembling lips.
    “Who’s that?”
    “It’s a rag doll, a lion with jade-green eyes. Misty had that thing since before she could even talk. She always kept him with her.”
    “And Clovis give this doll to you?”
    “No. She sent it in the mail. I got it two days ago.”
    “Any letter?”
    “No. Just the doll in a cardboard box.”
    “You got the box?”
    “Uh-huh.”
    “Let’s go see it.”
    M OFASS AND J EWELLE had a big house. The entrance was like a dais that stood high over a gigantic living room. The back wall of this room was all glass looking out onto the vista of L.A. There was a table and four high-back chairs next to this window. JJ left me in one of these while she went to look for the doll.
    I sat back and crossed my legs, appreciating the view in late afternoon. JJ was a real estate whiz kid. She bought and sold buildings around the county and turned a larger profit every year. She was able to lease that house, in a neighborhood most black people didn’t even know existed, because she was a valuable asset to the white men she dealt with.
    “Mr. Rawlins,” a faint but deep voice called.
    I turned my head slowly, not wanting to witness the demolition of one of my oldest L.A. friends. Mofass stood there leaning on two thick walking canes, one for each hand. He wore a heavy maroon-colored robe and had leather slippers on his ashen-black feet. He was breathing hard and looked like an old oil tanker that had been shipwrecked and washed up on land. He leaned to the side, sighed, and groaned. His breath was like the wind whistling through the rusted-out hull of the wrecked ship he resembled. His yellowy eyes were fog lamps in the deep night of his face.
    “Hey, William,” I hailed. “You up and around, huh?”
    “Not too much longer. Uh-uh, no.”
    “You been sayin’ that fo’ years, man. But I still see you every Christmas.”
    “It’s the tent,” he said.
    “Oxygen tent?”
    “Yeah. JJ got it hooked up over my bed. I gotta gas mask and’a oxygen tank too but I don’t use that too much. An hour under the tent and I can be almost normal for fifteen minutes. Then I got to get back there ‘fore I run outta air an’ cain’t walk no more.”
    The hulking wreck lowered himself in the chair opposite me.
    “Where JJ?” he asked suspiciously.
    “She went to get something to show me,” I said.
    Mofass leaned forward in his chair and made a motion that he wanted me to do the same.
    “I think she gotta boyfriend, Mr. Rawlins,” he whispered.
    “Why you say that?”
    “She got this pretty young thing named Rosa come up and take care’a me sometimes when she go out. She says she goin’to do business. But I smell her perfume and see them high heels. You know JJ was runnin’ around in tennis shoes before Rosa.”
    “She was a child before, William. She growin’ up and wants to dress more like a