Little Scarlet (19 page)

I smiled and she at least tried to.

“You know what I’m sayin’, don’t you?” I asked.

“What?”

“Mouse is like a thundershower at the end of a hot day. If lightning don’t strike you the rain will cool you down. It brings you back to life.”

Benita smiled and took a very deep breath.

“Yeah,” she said. “That’s Raymond.”

“But a storm like that just passes by, Benny. And when it’s gone it’s gone. I mean even if it hits you again it won’t stay around.”

Benita was staring into my face. Her intensity brought back the beauty I knew.

“But I love him, Easy. He come into my life and I never even knew you could feel like that for anybody else. When he walk out to go to the store I ache till he’s back again. When he say my name in conversation I feel somethin’ so strong I get dizzy.”

What could I say to that? She was in love — or something. And whatever that was, it would be wrong to take it away.

“You got any relatives outta town?” I asked.

“A cousin in San Diego.”

“Maybe after a while you should go visit her. Maybe the sea will do you some good.”

Ronette came up to the table then.

“Easy,” she said, setting down my coffee, and to Benny, “Girl, you need to go to the bathroom and fix your face.”

Ronette was solidly built and the color of tarnished bronze. She had straightened hair that swirled at the top of her head like a squat tornado that had been turned upside down.

“I’m lookin’ for a Harold,” I said to Ronette.

“Funny, it look like you lookin’ for a Helen.”

Benita was touching her face to see if she should follow Ronette’s suggestion.

“His last name,” I said, ignoring her joke, “could be Lakely or Ostenberg or Bryant.” I decided to leave out Brown and Smith. I concentrated on the less common names, hoping my man would be one of them.

“Excuse me,” Benita said.

She got up and went toward the bathroom.

“Sounds like white men,” Ronette said.

“It ain’t a woman and it ain’t a white man,” I replied. “Have you heard their names?”

“No, Easy. I don’t know no Harolds at all. Not no black ones.”

“You know we all have white men’s names,” I said.

“Say what?”

“Our names. None of them come from Africa.”

“That’s why you always frownin’, Easy,” she said.

“What’s that?”

“Studyin’ somethin’ till it don’t even look like what it is no more. That’s what makes you so sad.”

I couldn’t deny it. She was right.

Ronette saw my silence as a victory. She snorted and smiled and strode off to her bar. I watched her. She had a good figure for a woman in her mid-forties. She liked being watched by men, and women too. She just didn’t want their opinions.

When Benita got back to the table she looked like another woman. There was a store-bought sexiness about her, from the false eyelashes to the fire-engine-red nails.

She sat down and started in as if she had never heard of Raymond or had a broken heart. She asked me about my job at Sojourner Truth and my kids. I found out all about her grandfather who was descended from chiefs of the Seminole tribe out of Florida. She talked until the sky began to lighten.

When I said that I had to leave she asked for a ride.

When we got to her door on San Pedro she asked me inside. I could tell that she was fragile and for some reason I felt responsible for Raymond’s romantic misdemeanor.

Once inside she made me another coffee. She wanted a kiss for her troubles but I suggested that she might want to bathe first.

I ran the tub for her, making it especially warm.

She came in wearing a pink robe. Before I could leave the bathroom she let the garment drop to the floor. I saw why Mouse once wanted her and then I closed the door.

BENITA HAD A
very small place. It was just two rooms and a hot plate. And the rooms were small. The telephone sat on a small triangular table that had three legs. Underneath it sat a phone book.

The Smiths alone took up seven pages. The Browns only had a page and a column.

Lakely and Ostenberg had five listings apiece and Bryant was little more than a third of a column of names.

I studied the book, jotting down numbers until the sun was bright. Then I peeked into the bathroom.

Benita was sound asleep in the tub, snoring and dreaming of real love.

I left Benita’s before she woke up. That way she could feel kindly toward me without having to face her drunken failure at seducing her lover’s best friend.

I needed to talk to Detective Suggs but in the light of morning and with a few hours’ sleep from Bill’s Shelter, I knew that I shouldn’t go waltzing into the Seventy-seventh after the argument of the day before. So I went to a phone booth on Hooper and called like any other ordinary citizen.

“Seventy-seventh Precinct Police Station,” the male operator said.

“Detective Suggs.”

“Who is this?”

“Ezekiel Rawlins.”

“And what is the call pertaining to?”

“He called me,” I said to avoid further bad blood with the department. “So I wouldn’t know.”

The operator hesitated but then he connected the pin in the switchboard.

The phone only rang once.

“Suggs.”

“I need to speak with you, Detective.”

“You got something?”

“Enough to talk about.”

“Bring it in,” he said.

“No. Let’s meet. At my office. I’ll be there by nine.” I hung up after that. I couldn’t help it. The letter in my pocket gave me true power for the first time ever in my life. I didn’t have to answer to Suggs but I wanted even more. I wanted him to answer to me.

I STOPPED BY
Steinman’s Shoe Repair before going up to my office. The doorway was boarded over and a sign that read
CLOSED DUE TO DAMAGES
had been nailed from the center plank. I made up my mind to call Theodore soon, to find out what he needed. It came to me then that my side job of trading favors had become more geographic than it was racial. I felt responsible for Theodore because he lived in my adopted neighborhood, not because of the color of his skin.

My office was a comfort to see. The plain table desk and bookshelves were filled with hardbacks I’d purchased from Paris Minton’s Florence Avenue Bookshop. He’d introduced me to the depth as well as the breadth of American Negro literature. I had always known that we had a literature but Paris showed me dozens of novels and nonfiction books that I had never known existed.

I started reading a copy of
Banjo
by Claude McKay that I’d bought from Paris a few weeks before. It was a beautiful edition, orange with black silhouettes of jazz musicians and women and swimmers on the wharf in Marseilles. It was a rare find at that time: a book about people of many colors getting together on foreign shores. The dialect McKay wrote in was a little too country for my sensibilities but I recognized the words and their inflections. On the title page, just below the title, there was a little phrase,
A Story Without a Plot
. I think that’s what I liked best about the book. After all, isn’t that the way most of the people I knew lived? We went from day to day with no real direction or endpoint. We just lived through the day, praying for another. Even in the best of times that was the best you could hope for.

The knock on the door was soft, almost feminine, but I knew it was Suggs.

“Come on in.”

He wore a black suit. You know it has to be bad when you can see the wrinkles in black cloth. His white shirt seemed askew even with the red tie, and today he wore a hat. A green one with a yellow feather in the band.

“You didn’t have to get dressed up for me,” I said.

He was carrying a white paper bag in one hand and a briefcase in the other. He walked up to my visitor’s chair and sat down heavily. I could see in his exhausted posture that he had missed as much sleep as I had.

“Coffee and some doughnuts,” he said, placing the bag on the desk.

Another seminal moment in my life that I associated with the riots: a cop, a city official, bringing me coffee and cake. If I had gone down to the neighborhood barbershop and told the men there that tale, they would have laughed me into the street.

I took the coffee and a cherry-filled doughnut. And then I rolled out an edited version of my visit to Bill’s Shelter.

“How can you be sure that our Harold was one of the ones who stayed at this joint?” the cop asked.

“I can’t be,” I said. “But it’s someplace to start. Bill’s is the kinda place let a man like Harold be crazy but not have to answer for it. They don’t try and sell you anything or change you. It’s just a bed and a meal — a perfect place for our man. I figured that you could put some muscle into the Smiths and Joneses and I’ll concentrate on the others.”

Suggs stared at me with those watercolor eyes of his. He had mastered the textbook cop expression — the look that didn’t give away a thing.

“There could be as many as twenty-one,” he said at last.

“Twenty-one what?”

“Women.”

I was back in the frozen slaughterhouse, surrounded by dead women cut down in the prime of their lives; black women who shared their love with a white man and then paid the ultimate price for betraying Harold’s stiff sense of morality.

I clenched my jaw hard enough to crack a tooth.

Suggs opened his briefcase and handed me a sheaf of single-page reports.

Each page contained two photographs of a young black woman — one in life and the other in death.

“The bodies were almost all left on their backs,” Suggs was saying. “A couple weren’t quite dead when he left them. That accounts for the few odd positions.”

“You think it was all him?” I asked.

“Maybe not every one,” Suggs said. “But there are also probably some that I missed. It’s a shame. The homicide detectives should have picked it up. I’m really very sorry about this, Mr. Rawlins.”

An apology. A week before, it would have meant something to me. But right then I couldn’t even meet his eye. I was afraid that if I saw his sorrow, it might dredge up the rage and impotence I felt. So instead, I kept my eyes down and my mouth shut.

After a few minutes I heard the chair scrape the floor and his footsteps trailed away. Finally my door closed and I was alone with the dead women.

Suggs had done a good job. He’d read the files and typed up an abbreviated report, which he stapled to the back of each one.

Phyllis Hart was thirty-three when she died, choked to death in her auntie’s backyard on the fourteenth of July.

Many of them had known white men. Maybe all of them had. Suggs had called family members to get some of the details. He even asked about a man living in the street named Harold. There were three people who had seen a hobo hanging around.

Solvé Jackson was killed in her own bed. Her boyfriend, Terry McGee, was arrested for the crime. He had an alibi and witnesses to his whereabouts but still the jury found him guilty.

I sat there reading about dead women until I knew everything Sugg’s report had to say.

After a while I noticed that the tape on Jackson’s recording device had moved. I flipped the switch to “rewind” and then to “play.”

“Hello,” a man’s voice said. “This is Conrad Hale of the Cross County Fidelity Bank. Your company’s name was given as a reference for a Mr. Jackson Blue. Could you please return this call as soon as possible? We are considering hiring Mr. Blue in a responsible position and were wondering about his work history with your firm. I’m calling on Saturday, so you may not get this until Monday morning. But if you get this message earlier I’ll give you my home phone too. We are anxious to get going with Mr. Blue. We’d like to put him to work as soon as possible.”

There was a similar call from Leighton Car Insurance but they didn’t leave a home phone.

I realized that I had been of two minds about giving Blue a fake recommendation. It hadn’t felt right. I needed his help, so I said I would do it, but I still didn’t like it. With that stack of dead black women on my desk now, I felt differently. Nobody cared about them. I had told the police about what I suspected about Jackie Jay’s death. I’m sure there had been other complaints with so many women dead. But the denizens of Watts were under the law with no say. We were no different than pieces on a game board.

I dialed the banker’s number. He answered on the first ring.

“Conrad Hale.”

“Mr. Hale,” I said, “this is Eugene Nelson, manager of Tyler Office Machines. I hope it isn’t a problem calling you on a Sunday.”

“Not at all, Mr. Nelson. I have to hire ten men in the assembler lab here at the bank and your Mr. Blue is only the third person we’ve interviewed who passed the IBM exam.”

My voice was devoid of any accent. My words were a plain wrapper over a five-pound lie. Jackson was a mechanical whiz kid, I told Hale. He understood any machine and its inner workings. He worked overtime. He handled sensitive information. He was the most trustworthy employee I’d ever had.

On Monday, if necessary, I would extend my lies to Leighton Car Insurance.

I was happy to have Jackson on the inside of the world that ignored the women on my desk. I would have put Mouse in the White House if I could have.

There came another knock on the door.

I wondered if Suggs had found another twenty-one dead women. Maybe there were children too and old people and ministers. Maybe there was a whole factory of death working twenty-four hours a day under the city. Black people being thrown down onto rolling spikes that chopped them into pieces and then dropped the pieces into vats of acid. Maybe they were selling our blood and using our teeth and bones for ivory.

“Mr. Rawlins,” Juanda said, peeking into the office from the half-open door. “Can I come in?”

I stood up as she entered, closing the door behind her.

She was wearing a pink dress that only came down to the middle of her thigh.

I walked toward her and she to me. I put my arms around her and held her as tight as I did my mother when I was six and she was still alive. We may have kissed — I really don’t remember.