A Red Death: Featuring an Original Easy Rawlins Short Story "Si (Easy Rawlins Mysteries) by Walter Mosley Read Free Book Online Page A

yet.”
    “Mothahfuckin’ bastard!”
    “I’ll be out in the car then. Take your time.” Mofass waved his cigar in the air, leaving a peaceful trail of blue smoke.
    When the front door on the first floor closed, Poinsettia stopped shouting and slammed her own door. Everything was quiet again. The sun was still warming the concrete floor and everything was as beautiful as always.
    But it wasn’t going to last long. Soon Poinsettia would be in the street and I’d have the morning sun in my jail cell.

CHAPTER
2
    Y OU GOT YOUR CAR HERE ?” Mofass asked when I climbed into the passenger’s side of his car.
    “Naw, I took the bus.” I always took the bus when I went out to clean, because my Ford was a little too flashy for a janitor. “Where you wanna go?”
    “You the one wanna talk to me, Mr. Rawlins.”
    “Yeah,” I said. “Let’s go to that Mexican place then.”
    He made a wide U-turn in the middle of the street and drove off in the direction of Rebozo’s.
    While Mofass frowned and bit down on his long black cigar I stared out the window at the goings-on on Central Avenue. There were liquor stores and small clothes shops and even a television repair shop here and there. At Central and Ninety-ninth Street a group of men sat around talking—they were halfheartedly waiting for work. It was a habit that some Southerners brought with them; they’d just sit outside on a crate somewhere and wait for someone who needed manuallabor to come by and shout their name. That way they could spend the afternoon with their friends, drinking from brown paper bags and shooting dice. They might even get lucky and pick up a job worth a couple of bucksand maybe their kids would have meat that night.
    Mofass was driving me to his favorite Mexican restaurant. At Rebozo’s they put sliced avocado in the chili and peppered potato chunks in the burritos.
    We got there without saying any more. Mofass got out of the car and locked his door with the key, then he went around to my side and locked that door too. He always locked both doors himself. He never trusted that someone else could do it by holding the door handle so that the lock held. Mofass didn’t trust his own mother; that’s what made him such a good real estate agent.
    Another thing I liked about Mofass was that he was from New Orleans and, though he talked like me, he wasn’t intimate with my friends from around Houston, Galveston, and Lake Charles, Louisiana. I was safe from idle gossip about my secret financial life.
    Rebozo’s was a dark room with a small bar at the back and three booths on either side. There was a neon-red jukebox next to the bar that was almost always playing music full of brassy horns, accordions, and strumming guitars. But even if the box was silent when we walked in, Mofass would always drop a few nickels and push some buttons.
    The first time he did that I asked him, “You like that kinda music?”
    “I don’t care,” he answered me. “I just like to have a little noise. Make our talk just ours.” Then he winked, like a drowsy Gila monster.
    Mofass and I stared at each other across the table. He hadboth hands out in front of him. Between the fingers of his left hand that cigar stood up like a black Tower of Pisa. On the pinky of his right hand he wore a gold ring that had a square onyx emblem with a tiny diamond embedded in its center.
    I was nervous about discussing my private affairs with Mofass. He collected the rent for me. I gave him nine percent and fifteen dollars for each eviction, but we weren’t friends. Still, Mofass was the only man I could discuss my business with.
    “I got a letter today,” I said finally.
    “Yeah?”
    He looked at me, patiently waiting for what I had to say, but I couldn’t go on. I didn’t want to talk about it yet. I was afraid that saying the bad news out loud would somehow make it real. So instead I asked, “What you wanna do ’bout Poinsettia?”
    “What?”
    “Poinsettia. You know, the