Little Scarlet by Walter Mosley

friends rushed to his side. My unexpected blows knocked the wind out of him and it was time for me to go.
    In my youth that would have been the moment for me to say something insulting about Newell’s manhood but I was past that kind of behavior. I just turned and walked across the street, hoping that I could finish my business with Bobby Grant before Newell asked for a rematch.
    I turned when I got to the opposite curb to make sure that no one was coming after me. Everyone had their attention on their fallen friend. Everyone except Juanda. Her eyes were on me.
     
10
     
    Robert Grant didn’t get any checks in the mail. No one in the five-floor gray building did. The mailbox was two wooden crates, each of which once contained six one-gallon bottles of milk. The crates were hung side by side on the wall with names and apartment numbers scrawled over each square in red ink.
    Bobby’s number was 4-D.
    With all the strength tapped in my blood I ran up the three flights without breathing hard.
    The stairs and wall, floors, and ceiling had once been painted white but most of that had worn away years before. Now the color was pitted, dirty pine.
    “Who is it?” a man called when I knocked.
    “Easy Rawlins.”
    The apartment doors on either side of his came open. An old man stuck his head out of one side and a child peered from the shadows of the other. Both of them looked frightened.
    I could imagine how they felt with buildings going up in flames around them and wild, angry voices shouting up and down the street. People were being shot dead in front of their homes and the law was helpless to keep the violence in check. Old people and children, working men and women, and any other peaceful soul had to hunker down in their living rooms and hope that the fires wouldn’t spread to their walls.
    “What?”
    The door had come open on a sand-colored man with hair that wasn’t much darker. He was slight but tall, young but already he had the slouching shoulders of someone who has been defeated by life.
    Maybe he read the judgment in my expression because he stood a little straighter and cocked his head with bravado.
    “Who are you?”
    “Easy Rawlins,” I said. “I’m here about Geneva Landry. The police got her and I’d like to help out if I could.”
    “The police got Miss Landry? What for?”
    “I don’t know for sure,” I said. “But I bet it’s got something to do with Nola Payne.”
    All Bobby had on was a pair of briefs. His sallow chest and knobby knees meant that any lover he had would have to be there because of the inner man — or a twenty-dollar bill.
    “Nola’s Geneva’s niece. What do the cops think an auntie gonna do to her own blood?” he asked.
    “I don’t know what it is exactly,” I said. “But from the sounds of it Nola’s missing and the cops think that Miss Landry had somethin’ to do with it. She don’t know neither, so I told her that I’d come down and ask around.”
    “So what you want with me?”
    “Can I come in?” I asked. “I mean, we don’t really need everybody in the buildin’ to know this stuff.”
    Grant studied me for a moment. He slouched down again and the sour taste came back into his mouth.
    “Yeah. Okay,” he said. “I guess.”
    I followed him into the one-room apartment. There was no real home furniture in evidence. The only thing his three chairs had in common was that they were all made from wood. The bed was a mattress on box springs on the floor and his curtain was a sheet that should have been shredded for rags.
    In the corner, away from the window, he had six crates of new dishes, three model-train box sets, and a dozen or more pairs of green work pants.
    He saw me looking and asked, “You wanna buy some dishes?”
    “Not right now.”
    I sat on a whitewashed wooden chair and Bobby followed suit.
    Despite his boy’s body Grant held himself like an old man. Bent over, rubbing his hands together as if he could never get warm.
    “What you got to do