White Butterfly (3 page)

Mofass, taking on a conspiratorial tone, said, “The county gonna develop Willoughby Place into a main road, a four-lane avenue.”

I owned nine acres on one side of Willoughby. It came as part of a deal I made to find an old Japanese gardener’s lost property.

“So what?” I asked.

“These men will lend you the money for development. Hundred thousand dollars and they take you for a partner.”

“Cain’t wait t’give me money, huh?”

“All you gotta do is give me the okay, Mr. Rawlins, an’ I’ll tell’em that the board done voted.”

Whenever anybody wanted to do business with me they did it through Mofass. He represented the corporation I’d formed to do business. The
board
was a committee of one.

I had to laugh to myself. Here I was a woodchopper’s son. A Negro and an orphan and from the South too. There was never a chance in hell that I’d ever see five thousand dollars but here I was being courted by white real estate men.

“Set up a meeting with them,” I said. “I want to get a look at these men. But don’t get yo’ greedy hopes up, Willy, prob’ly won’t nuthin’ come from it.”

Mofass grinned, breathing in smoke through his teeth.

IT WAS A WARM EVENING. I parked down toward the end of my block. Zeppo and Rafael were gone. The cardboard box that Rafael had used for his table was flattened on the sidewalk. A dollop of blood festooned by a cracked tooth adorned the curb. Somebody had learned a bitter lesson in Rafael Gordon’s school of sleight-of-hand.

The drying blood made me think of the dead party girl again.

I still needed to be alone after all that had happened. So I decided to have a shot before I went back to my wife.

On the inside the Avalon was about the size of a walled-up display window. There was a bar and six stools—that’s it. Rita Coe served bottled beer and drinks mixed with water or ice.

There was only one customer, a big man facing the wall and hunkered down over a pay phone at the end of the bar.

“What you doin’ here, Easy Rawlins?” Rita was hard and small with beady eyes and thin lips.

“Whiskey was what I had in mind.”

“I thought you didn’t drink in no bar so close to your house?”

“Well, I will today.”

“Why not?” the big man asked the phone. “I’m ready.”

Rita poured my scotch into a bullet glass.

“How’s Regina and the baby?” Rita asked.

“Fine, both fine.”

She nodded and looked down at my hands. “You hear about them girls been gettin’ killed?”

“Nuthin’ but, seems like.”

“You know, I’m scared to walk out to my car when I close up at night.”

“You close up alone?” I asked her. But before she could answer the big man hung up the phone so hard that it gave out a brief ring of complaint.

Dupree Bouchard stood up and turned toward us—all six feet five inches of him. He saw me and then looked around as if he were searching for a back door. But the only door was the one I’d come through.

Dupree and I had been friends when we were younger men. One night he drank too much and passed out—leaving me and his girlfriend, Coretta, with nothing to hold but each other.

Maybe he heard our hushed cries through his alcoholic stupor. Or maybe he blamed me for her murder the next day.

“Hey, Dupree. How’s Champion treatin’ you?”

We’d both worked at Champion Aircraft ten years earlier. Dupree was a master machinist.

“They ain’t no good up there, Easy. Every time you turn around they got another rule to hold you up. And if you a niggah, they got two rules.”

“That’s true,” I said. “That’s true. Everywhere you go it’s the same.”

“It’s better back down home. At least down South a colored brother won’t stab you in the back.” He looked me in the eye when he said that. Dupree could never prove that I had done anything with or to Coretta. He just knew that I was with them one night and then she was gone from him forever.

“I don’t know, Dupree,” I said. “There hasn’t been all that many lynchings up here in L.A. County.”

“You wanna drink, Dupree?” Rita asked.

The big man sat down, two stools away from me, and nodded to her.

“How’s your wife?” I asked to get him talking about something brighter.

“She’s okay. I work at Temple Hospital now,” he said.

“Really? My wife works there. Regina.”

“What she look like?”

“Dark-complected. Pretty and kind of slim. She works in the maternity ward.”

“What time she work?”

“Eight to five usually.”

“Then I prob’ly ain’t even seen’er. I only been there two months and I’m on the graveyard shift. They got me doin’ laundry in the basement.”

“You like it?”

“Yeah,” he said bitterly. “Love it.”

Dupree took the drink that Rita brought and downed it in one swallow. He slapped two quarters on the bar and said, “I gotta go.”

He went past me and out the door, silent and sullen. I remembered how loud he had laughed that last night with Coretta and me. His laugh was like thunder in those days.

I wished I could take back what had happened to my friend, my part in his lifelong despair. I wished it but wishes don’t count for much in flesh and blood.

“Andre Lavender,” I said to Rita.

“Say what?”

“Andre. You know him?”

“Uh-uh.”

“Gimme some paper.”

I wrote Andre’s name and phone number and said, “Call him and say that I’d like him to come by and see you to your car at night.”

“He work for you?”

“I did him a favor once. Now he could help you.”

“Do I gotta pay him?”

“Shot of whiskey do him just fine.”

I pushed my glass closer to her and she filled it again.

JESUS WAS DOING CARTWHEELS across the lawn in the porch light. Little Edna kept herself upright by holding the bars of her crib. She laughed and sputtered at her mute brother. I came in the gate and picked up a football that was nestled in among the dahlia bushes along the fence. I whistled, then threw the ball just when Jesus turned to see me. He caught the football, held it in one hand, and waved to Edna as if he were beckoning her with the other. She rattled her baby bars, bounced on the balls of her feet, and yelled as loud as she could, “Akach yeeee!”

Jesus kicked the ball so hard that it crashed against the far link fence. The jangling of steel was a kind of music for city children.

“What’s goin’ on out here?” Regina was framed for a moment by the gray haze of the screen door. She came out on the porch and stood in front of our little girl as if protecting her. Edna let out a howl. She couldn’t see Jesus and the yard past her mother’s skirts.

“Aw, com’on, honey. She’s okay,” I said as I mounted the three stairs to the porch.

“He could miss a kick out there an’ tear her head off!”

Edna let herself fall hard on her diapered bottom. Jesus climbed up into the avocado tree.

“You got to be more careful, Easy,” my wife of two years said.

“Eathy,” echoed Edna.

I found it hard to answer, because it was always hard for me to think when looking at Regina. Her skin was the color of waxed ebony and her large almond-shaped eyes were a half an inch too far apart. She was tall and slender but, for all that she was beautiful, it was something else that got to me. Her face had no imperfection that I could see. No blemish or wrinkle. Never a pimple or mole or some stray hair that might have grown out of the side of her jaw. Her eyes would close now and then but never blink as normal people do. Regina was perfect in every way. She knew how to walk and how to sit down. But she was never flustered by a lewd comment or shocked by poverty.

I fell in love with Regina Riles each time I looked at her. I fell in love with her before we ever exchanged words.

“I thought it was okay, honey.” I reached for her unconsciously and she moved away, a graceful dancer.

“Listen, Easy. Jesus don’t know how to think about what’s right for Edna. You got to do that for him.”

“He knows more than you think, baby. He’s been around little children more than most women have. And he understands even if he doesn’t talk.”

Regina shook her head. “He got problems, Easy. You sayin’ that he’s okay don’t make it so.”

Jesus climbed down out of the tree and went to the side of the house to get into his room.

“I don’t know what you mean, honey,” I said. “Everybody got problems. How you handle your problems means what kinda man you gonna be.”

“He ain’t no man. Jesus is just a little boy. I don’t know what kind of trouble he’s had but I do know that it’s too much for him, that’s why he can’t talk.”

I let it drop there. I could never bring myself to tell her the real story. About how I rescued the boy from a missing woman’s house after he had been bought and abused by an evil man. How could I explain that the man who mistreated Jesus had been murdered and I knew who’d done it, but kept quiet?

Regina hoisted Edna into her arms. The baby screamed. I wanted to grab them both and hug them so hard that all this upset would squeeze out.

Talking to Regina was painful for me sometimes. She was so sure about what was right and what wasn’t. She could get me stirred up inside. So much so that sometimes I didn’t know if I was feeling rage or love.

I waited outside for a moment after they went in, looking at my house. There were so many secrets I carried and so many broken lives I’d shared. Regina and Edna had no part of that, and I swore to myself that they never would.

I went in finally, feeling like a shadow, stalking himself into light.

YOU BEEN DRINKIN’,” Regina said when I walked through the door. I didn’t think she could smell it and I hadn’t had enough to stagger. Regina just knew me. I liked that; it made my heart kind of wild.

Edna and Regina were both on the couch. When the baby saw me she said, “Eathy,” and pulled away to crawl in my direction. Regina grabbed her before she fell to the floor.

Edna hollered as if she had been slapped.

“You been down to the police station?”

“Quinten Naylor wanted to talk with me.” I always felt bad when the baby cried. I felt that something had to be done before we could go on. But Regina just held her and talked to me as if there were no yelling.

“Then why you come home all liquored up?”

“Com’on, baby,” I said. Everything seemed slow. I felt that there was more than enough time to explain to her, to calm everything down. If only Edna would stop crying, I thought, everything would be okay. “I just took a drink down at the Avalon.”

“Musta been a long swallow.”

“Yeah, yeah. I needed a drink after what Officer Naylor showed me.”

That got her attention, but her stare was still hard and cold.

“He took me over to a vacant lot on a Hundred and Tenth. Dead girl over there. Shot-in-the-head dead. It’s the same man killed them other two girls.”

“They know who did it?”

I had to suppress my smile. Taking that angry glare off her face made me want to dance.

“Naw,” I said, as soberly as I could.

“Then how do they know it’s the same man?”

“He crazy, that’s why. He marks ’em with a hot cigar.”

“Rape?” she asked in a small voice. Edna stopped crying and looked at me with her mother’s questioning eye.

“That,” I said, suddenly sorry that I had said anything. “And other stuff.”

I took Edna to my chest and sat there next to my wife.

“Naylor wanted me to help him. He thought I mighta heard somethin’.”

When Regina put her hand on my knee I could have cheered.

“Why’d he think that?”

“I don’t know. He knows that I used to get around pretty good. He just thought I might have heard somethin’. I told him that I couldn’t help, but by then I needed a drink.”

“Who was it?”

“Girl named Bonita Edwards.”

Her hand moved to my shoulder.

“I still don’t see why a policeman would come here to ask you about it. I mean, unless he thought you had something to do with it.”

Regina always wanted to know why. Why did people call me for favors? Why did I feel I had to help certain people when they were in trouble? She never did know how I got her cousin out of jail.

“Well, you know,” I said. “He probably thought that I was still in the street a lot. But I told him that I’m workin’ for Mofass full-time now and that I don’t get out too much.”

I had lived a life of hiding before I met Regina. Nobody knew about me. They didn’t know about my property. They didn’t know about my relationship to the police. I felt safe in my secrets. I kept telling myself that Regina was my wife, my partner in life. I planned to tell her about what I’d done over the years. I planned to tell her that Mofass really worked for me and that I had plenty of money in bank accounts around town. But I had to get at it slowly, in my own time.

The money wasn’t apparent in my way of living. So there was no need for her to be suspicious. I intended to tell her all about it someday. A day when I felt she could accept it, accept me for who I was.

“He knows that I get around the neighborhood is all, honey. They found that girl just twelve blocks from here.”

“Could you help them?”

Edna stuck her hand down my shirt pocket and drooled on my chest.

“Uh-uh. I didn’t know nuthin’. I told him that I’d ask around, though. You know it’s an ugly thing.”

Regina studied me like a pawnbroker looking for a flaw in a diamond ring. I bounced Edna in my arms until she started to laugh. Then I smiled at Regina. She just shook her head a little and studied me some more.

Edna felt like she weighed a hundred pounds and I laid her across my lap. I lay back myself.

Regina put her cool hand to my cheek. I could count each knuckle. I thought about that poor dead girl and the others.

Edna fell asleep. Regina took her to her crib. And I followed her to our bedroom. A room that was so small it was mostly bed.

She undressed and then moved to put on her nightclothes. But I embraced her before she got to her gown, my pants were down around my ankles. We fell back into the bed with her on top. She tried, weakly, to pull away but I held her and stroked her in the ways she liked. She gave in to my caresses but she wouldn’t kiss me. I rolled up on top of her and held her head between my hands. She let my leg slip between hers but when I put my lips to hers she wouldn’t open her mouth or her eyes. My tongue pushed at her teeth but that was as far as I got.