Six Easy Pieces by Walter Mosley

anybody with that name.”
    “Oh, yeah,” I said. “You know him. He used to come and see you at Piney’s.”
    “What do want from me, Mr. Rawlins?” Her voice had turned cold.
    “Before you left Richmond and came down here, you met a man named Ray.”
    “What if I did?”
    “Did he have gray eyes?”
    “I don’t know. Maybe. They were light, I remember that.”
    “Did he have a last name?”
    “If he did I don’t know it.”
    “How about a nickname?”
    “Some people used to call him Mr. Slick ’cause he was always so well dressed.”
    “Where was he from?”
    “I don’t know.” She was getting tired of my questions.
    “Did he have a Southern accent?”
    “Maybe. But not real deep like country or somethin’ like that.”
    “Listen, Etheline,” I said. “I’m tryin’ to find out if this man you knew was my friend. Can you describe him?”
    “Hell,” she said. “I could show you a picture if that would get you to leave me alone.”
    “A photograph?” I asked.
    “Uh-huh. I got it in my trunk, with all the rest’a my letters and stuff.”
    “Honey, I sure would like to see that.”
    “You said somethin’ in that note you gave to Miss Bristol about money?”
    “I’ll give you a hundred dollars just to have a look at that photograph.”
    I could have offered twenty; that was a lot of money. But I wanted to pay what the picture was worth to me. I guess it was a little superstition on my part. I felt that if I tried to skimp on the value of her gift, somehow things would turn out bad.
    She gave me an address on Hedly, a small street between downtown and south L.A.
    Feather and Jesus were both asleep by then. Feather was only eight and needed her rest. Jesus was an early riser, intent on finishing his boat.
     
     
    I WAS NERVOUS on the ride over. In my mind I knew that Mouse was dead, but in my heart I had never accepted it. The attending nurse said that he had no pulse minutes before EttaMae came and carried him out of the emergency room bed. But I could never find EttaMae after that, and some deep part of me still held out hope.
    I pulled up in front of the house near ten. There was a light on on the front porch and another behind a drawn shade inside the house. The house looked nice enough, but nighttime is kind on the eyes. I walked up on the front porch feeling all right. Going to Piney’s had made me feel that I was slipping back into the street life, that I had lost my grip on being a citizen. But going to see Etheline, a reformed, churchgoing prostitute, was almost a normal thing.
    I knocked.
    I knocked again. Maybe she was in the bathroom.
    I found a button and pushed it. I could hear the buzzer through the door. That jangling noise got under my scalp and I felt a moment of fear.
    I tried the knob. It was locked but the door wasn’t fully closed. The dead bolt was keeping it open. That couldn’t have been good. I went inside, hoping for a reasonable explanation. I didn’t have to go far. She was there in the entranceway, wearing her cream colored church suit, a crimson stain over her heart. The knife was on the floor next to her body. She’d been a beauty in life, I could see that. But now her pretty face was hardening into clay.
    I went around the house, looking for the trunk she’d mentioned. I found it at the foot of her bed. Someone else had already been there. The trunk was open, and all of its contents were strewn across the bed. There were no photographs, not a one.
    I went back into the door where Etheline lay dead. I pulled up a chair from the living room and sat there next to her. I didn’t sit there long, maybe five minutes.
    The problem was simple. I had asked the church lady, Miss Bristol, to give Etheline a note with my name and number on it. She’d given the note to the girl at church that day, and now Etheline was dead. There was a good chance that the police would come to see me, trying to place me at the scene of the crime. If I called them right then,