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

ledge and saw the magazine,
The Saturday Evening Post.
    Agent Lawrence’s office was just down the hall from the reception desk on the third floor, but when the woman called him he told her that I had to wait.
    “He’s going over your case,” the fat brunette told me.
    I sat down in the most uncomfortable straight-back chair ever made. The lower back of the chair stuck out farther than the top so I had the feeling that I was hunched over as I sat there watching the big woman rub pink lotion into her hands. She frowned at her hands, and then she frowned again when she saw me staring through her glistening fingers.
    I wondered if she would have been performing her toilet like that in front of a white taxpayer.
    “Rawlins?” a military-like voice inquired.
    I looked up.
    There I saw a tall white man in a crayon-blue suit. He was of a good build with big hands that hung loosely at his sides. He had brown hair, and small brown eyes and was clean-shaven, though there would always be a blue shadow on his jaw. But for all his neat appearance Agent Lawrence seemed to be somehow unkempt, disheveled. I took him in for a few seconds. His bushy eyebrows and the dark circles under his eyes made him seem pitiful and maybe even a little inept.
    It was my habit to size up people quickly. I liked to think I had an advantage on them if I had an insight into their privatelives. In the tax man’s case I figured that there was probably something wrong at home. Maybe his wife was fooling around, or one of his kids had been sick the night before.
    I dropped my speculations after a few moments, though. I had never met a government man who admitted to having a private life.
    “Agent Lawrence?” I asked.
    “Follow me,” he said with a gawky nod. He turned around, avoiding eye contact, and went down the hall. Agent Lawrence might have been a whiz at tax calculations but he couldn’t walk worth a damn; he listed from side to side as he went.
    His office was a small affair. A green metal desk with a matching filing cabinet. There was a big window, though, and the same morning sun that came into the Magnolia Street apartments flowed across his desk.
    There was a bookcase with no books or papers in it. There was nothing on his desk except a half-used packet of Sen-Sen. I had the feeling that if I rapped my knuckles on his cabinet it would resound hollow as a drum.
    He took his place behind the desk and I sat before him. My chair was of the same uncomfortable make as the one in the hall.
    Taped to a wall, far to my left, was a crumpled piece of paper on which was scrawled I LOVE YOU DADDY in bold red letters that took up the whole page. It was as if the child were screaming love, testifying to it. There was a photograph in a pewter frame standing on his windowsill. A small red-haired woman with big frightened eyes and a young boy, who looked to be the same age as LaMarque, both cowered under the large and smiling figure of the man before me.
    “Nice-lookin’ fam’ly,” I said.
    “Um, yes, thank you,” he mumbled. “I assume that you received my letter and so you know why I wanted to meet with you. I couldn’t find your home address in our files, and so I had to hope that the address we found in the phone book was yours.”
    I was never listed in a phone book from that year on.
    “The only address we had for you,” Lawrence continued, “was the address of a Fetters Real Estate Office.”
    “Yeah, well,” I said. “I been in that same house for eight years now.”
    “Be that as it may, I’d like you to write your current address and phone number on this card. Also any business number if I need to get in touch with you during the day.”
    He produced a three-by-five lined card from a drawer and handed it to me. I took it and put it down on the desk. He didn’t say anything at first, just stared until finally he asked, “Do you need a pencil?”
    “Um, yeah, I guess. I don’t carry one around with me.”
    He took a short,