Little Scarlet (28 page)

“They find him?”

Suggs shook his head while saying, “Hide nor hair.”

We drove a little further.

I was tired by then. The wounds and drugs and company of death had weakened me. There would have been little I could do to subdue Harold even if he were standing in front of me. I doubted that I could have climbed out of my seat without help.

“You got any leads on the man, Rawlins?”

“No.”

“Why would he kill his mother?”

“Same reason he killed all those other women. Because she preferred the company of a white man to him.”

Suggs grimaced.

“Geneva Landry died this morning,” he said.

“What? Who did it?”

“Nobody. The doctors think that she might have been allergic to an antibiotic that they gave her. They won’t be sure until they do an autopsy.”

“She just died in her bed?”

“I’m sorry, Ezekiel.”

“Just died?” I said. “If you motherfuckers didn’t put her in there she would have been fine. But you were so worried about yourselves you didn’t even stop to find out about her.”

Suggs drove the car, his big hands tight on the wheel.

“You killed her just as well as you killed all those other women,” I continued.

“I didn’t kill anybody,” he said softly.

“No? Then who did? Who did? I told the people at the Seventy-seventh what I knew months ago. I told you just the other day.”

“Nobody saw the pattern,” he said, his voice getting fainter still.

“No,” I said. “They didn’t. But they heard Geneva yellin’ about it. They sure enough threw her in a hospital and started shootin’ her with drugs. They let her slip away right under their noses. Another woman dead and Gerald Jordan gets a party at the mayor’s house.”

Suggs said something else but it was too soft to hear over the car engine.

“What you say?” I asked him.

“Where are we going?”

“Take me to my office. Take me there and I will call you if I find out anything.”

“We can’t just let this go, Easy,” Suggs said. “The man is a killer and Payne is innocent.”

“I know that,” I said. “So you go to the papers and tell them. Tell the
Examiner
and the
Times
and the
Los Angeles Sentinel
. Tell ’em that there’s a Jack the Ripper goin’ up and down the streets killin’ black women. Give them Harold’s full name. Put that picture I gave you on the news.”

Melvin was already looking at the road but still it felt as if he were turning away from me.

“Mayor’s office doesn’t want any publicity,” he whispered.

“Say what?”

Those two words were the last of our conversation. Suggs had a job. He saved banks from being robbed and protected innocent victims from predators in the night. He hid the truth about a killer for the betterment of people that had never been that murderer’s victims. I was on the other side of the board. My queen and rooks and bishops were all gone. My pawns were exhausted, while he had a full complement of men. All I had left was a king behind a lazy pawn, flanked by a drunken man on a horse. He could have beaten me at any time he wanted to. And all I did was keep pushing ahead with no plan or hope.

If I were driving that car I might have run it into a wall.

SUGGS LET ME
out in front of my building. I limped up the stairs and to my office. The door was open, I could see that and the damage that Harold’s gun had done from ten feet away. The key to Jewelle’s glove compartment was in my stomach and even if it weren’t, she and her .45 were many miles away. I was unarmed and my door was open. I couldn’t remember if I had left it that way or if Harold had shot me before I’d unlocked it.

I couldn’t run because of my wounds. I should have shuffled off but I didn’t. Instead I jumped through the doorway and yelled.

Mouse looked up from my chair. He had his feet on the tabledesk, leaning back against the windowsill. He smiled when he saw me.

“Hey, Ease,” he said. “How you doin’?”

I sighed but said nothing. I just walked to the visitor’s chair and sat down with my wounded leg out straight in front of me.

“I saw Benita,” Mouse said. “She was at the hospital with Bonnie and them.”

I nodded and wondered where I could find Harold.

“She told me that she almost did herself in, that you busted down her door and took her to the hospital.”

“Was my door open when you got here, Ray?”

“Naw. I jimmied it. I figured it didn’t matter ’cause it was already fucked up from that gunfire.”

“How long you been here?”

Raymond shook his head and pointed his gray eyes at the ceiling. “Couple’a hours. More.”

“What you want?” I asked.

“You saved her life, Easy. Here I fucked around and almost got the girl killed but you showed up. There you were and now Benita got a new chance. That ain’t half bad. I just wanted to tell you.”

I noticed that Jackson’s tape had moved. Between the desk and the back of my chair I was able to press myself into a standing position. I turned the arrow switch to “rewind” and then I switched it to “play.”

“Easy, are you there?” Bonnie’s worried voice asked. “The hospital called and said that you checked out without paying your bill. I’m calling everyone to find you. Raymond said that he’d look for you and if you called and had trouble, he said to leave a message with EttaMae.”

“Where are you, Mr. Rawlins?” Juanda said then. “I been waitin’ for you to call me. I wanna see you real bad.”

Mouse’s eyes lit up at Juanda’s tone. He gave me a look that almost made me laugh but I was knee-deep in dead black women. From where I stood laughter was a sin.

“Mr. Rawlings? Are you there?” a timid woman’s voice asked. If I didn’t know better I would have said that it was a slender child talking. But I did know better.

“I need you to come over here, Mr. Rawlings. It’s Honey May. I think you might wanna hear what I got to say.”

Jackson left me a message and so did Jewelle. Both of them were thanking me.

I picked up the phone and called Bonnie.

“Hello,” a musical male Spanish voice answered.

“Hey, Juice. How you doin’, boy?”

“Daddy,” he said.

That one word called up a deep emotion in me. Jesus hadn’t called me daddy since we were alone with no Feather or Bonnie or nice house in West L.A. He was my baby boy again and it hurt me that I’d put him through so much pain.

“I’m okay, Juice. Just had to do a thing or two before getting to you.”

“Where are you?”

“At the office with Raymond. He’s gonna help me close out my business and then you and me and Bonnie and your sister are all going to San Francisco for a vacation like we used to do a long time ago.”

“Okay,” the boy said. “But you’re okay?”

“Those bullets just stung.”

Feather stayed on the phone with me for ten minutes asking about my leg and my arm and my fingers one at a time. She knew each wound and wanted to know what they looked like and how they felt.

Bonnie didn’t speak many words. She was waiting for me. That’s all I needed to know.

“Baby,” she said. “Benita wants to say hi.”

“Mr. Rawlins?” Benita said. She never called me Easy again. “I just wanted to say that I know you’re busy and I’m sorry that you got shot. And thank you so much for takin’ the time to help me get back on my feet. I told Raymond that you saved my life and he said that you were the only good man that he ever knew.”

I looked up at my crazy friend then. He smiled and nodded as if he knew what she was saying.

“I’ll see you later on, Miss Flag,” I said. Then I hung up the phone and limped back to the chair.

“What’s up, Ease?” Mouse asked just as if it was a normal day and we were sitting on the front porch watching the children playing with a water hose.

“You got a gun, Mouse?”

“Hell, yeah. I got two.”

Finally something I could laugh about.

I wasn’t too worried about Honey May. She wasn’t the type to take a shot at you and she was too kindhearted to lie and bushwhack someone. Raymond and I went to the door and knocked.

“Who is it?”

“Easy Rawlins, Honey. Me and a friend.”

“I didn’t expect you to bring a party, Mr. Rawlins,” the closed door said.

“It’s all right, ma’am. He’s family.”

Honey pulled the door open and waved for us to hurry up into the small purple room.

I say purple instead of violet because the shades were pulled and the lighter color had taken a more sinister hue. This was accented by the corpse of Harold Ostenberg, which lay on the little couch that wasn’t quite large enough to contain him.

One eye was open. There was dried foam on his lips. His jeans had been starched by street living and his shirt was a color that no manufacturer could duplicate. There was blood near the shoulder of his army surplus jacket. I pulled the fabric back to see the wound.

There was a glass next to him on a small table. It contained the dregs of a milky fluid. Next to the bed was a fancy pillow — probably from his mother’s house.

“He died,” Honey said.

Mouse nodded.

Someone had taken Harold’s shoes off. His feet were chafed from too much weight and motion, the twin banes of a homeless man’s life.

“Why did you call me, Honey?”

“I didn’t know what to do.”

I picked up the water glass and sniffed it.

“What do you want me to do?”

“Tell the police that he’s dead,” she said. She went to a chair and sat down heavily. “I don’t know.”

“How long has he been here?”

“Since late last night,” she whimpered.

“When did he die?”

“’Bout daybreak, I suppose.”

“Did he say anything before?” I didn’t want to upset her but I had to know.

“Oh yeah. It was awful. Women he hunted and then killed and robbed. He said that his mama shot him and that he killed her to protect himself. I pretended to go down to the store and I called her house and the po-lice answered. I hung right up then.

“He killed women just like you said, Mr. Rawlings —”

“Hey, Easy,” Mouse said.

He had pulled back Harold’s coat, revealing a pistol, .22 caliber from the looks of it.

“Go on, Honey,” I said.

“That’s all really. He was scared from bein’ shot. He said that his mama shot him. But when he talked about it I could tell that she shot him tryin’ to save her life. It sounded like he done killed a dozen women.”

“Did he name them?”

Honey just shook her head.

“So you decided that you would kill him,” I said.

She looked up at me as if I had just discovered the secret of eternal life. There was no denial. How could there be? The sleeping powders were in the glass next to the couch.

“No,” she said feebly.

“If I call the cops,” I said, “they will come here and arrest you for homicide.”

“You better believe that,” Mouse crooned.

“What we have to do is to get this body out from here,” I said. “If we don’t, you’ll just be another black woman on Harold’s long list of names.”

RAYMOND, EVER THE
pragmatist, suggested that we cut Harold up but Honey wouldn’t hear of it. She blamed it on her Christian beliefs but I believe that neither her nor my stomach could have dealt with the hacking or the blood.

Originally I thought that we could build a box around him and then move him at night down the stairs.

“You crazy, Easy?” Mouse said. “A coffin’s a coffin. Any fool could see that. And somethin’ that big we’d have to tie on the top’a your car. What you think the cops gonna say about that?”

Finally we decided to drop the body out of the window later that night. I went down to the driveway that Honey’s window looked over and put the mattress from her bed down so that there wouldn’t be too much noise.

At ten past two Raymond and Honey threw the body out of the window. Harold landed mostly on the mattress but his passage was not silent. I dragged the stiff corpse into the backseat before Mouse rushed down to help me. I had the engine turned over and was headed down the block before any alarms or sirens could be sounded.

WE LEFT HAROLD
in the last empty lot that I knew he’d inhabited. He was a little beat up, and no detective would believe that he’d actually died there on that lot. Any coroner could have testified that he died of an overdose of phenobarbital and not the shot to his shoulder. All of that was true but I wasn’t worried. What would matter was that his name was Ostenberg and that he had on his person the weapon that most probably was used on the bodies of Nola Payne, Jocelyn Ostenberg, and me.

The police would have their murderer, and all the witnesses were dead. They didn’t even have to pay for a trial or execution. All they had to do was slap their hands together to knock off the graveyard dust.

They called me to Gerald Jordan’s office three days later. The riots were dead by then. Vietnam and the space shuttle dominated the news. There was no coverage of the nearly forty funerals held in memory of those who had died.

It was just Jordan and me at the meeting. No Suggs, no uniforms, no elite cadre of police bodyguards.

“You’ve heard about the discovery of the body of the man you claim killed Nola Payne?” he asked after the preliminaries.

“Uh-huh.”

“He had the gun on him that was used to shoot her,” Jordan continued. “That lends credence to your story.”

“I don’t need any credence, Deputy Commissioner. Harold killed Nola and a dozen other women. You got men in jail right now today that were railroaded because your department don’t give a damn about a black woman’s death.”

“So you say,” he said with a smile. “Detective Suggs agrees with you. I’ve given him permission to reopen certain cases. If he can come up with something, my office will support him. I also had Peter Rhone released.”

“Okay,” I said. “That’s it, I guess.”

“The coroner says that Harold was poisoned, that he was killed somewhere else and brought to that lot on Grape.”

“Really?”

Jordan’s eyes were like the twin bodies of black widow spiders hovering in space, waiting for an opportunity.