Six Easy Pieces (9 page)

She could have been a wild night creature frozen in my headlights.

“Are you?” I insisted.

“What does a question like that have to do with anything?”

“I don’t know. If you were in love with him, you might wanna protect him, you might be mad that he was with another woman. I mean if he needed love, why not come to you?”

“I’m a married woman, Mr. Rawlins.”

“He’s a married man. Maybe that’s why your husband gets so mad when a man calls you. Mad ’cause he feel another man nearby.”

“I would never cheat on my husband,” Lena said. “The minister is the whole world to me, but I’d never cross that line.”

“And what about him? How did you feel about him crossin’ over into sin?”

“Men are weak, Mr. Rawlins. They’re strong of arm but frail in their hearts. They need forgiveness more than women do.”

“How about Etheline?” I asked. “She’s a woman. Did you forgive her?”

“Etheline was just a child. People had been usin’ her all her life. She didn’t know any better. Is there anything else?”

I shook my head.

Lena got up from her chair gracefully but she stumbled at the door.

WHEN I WAS HALFWAY through the pews, Bumpy and Fatso picked up my trail. They followed me across the wide church and into the side parking lot. The lot was full when I got there, so my car was parked in the alley.

They followed me back there.

I wasn’t worried. When I got to my car, I bent down to tie my shoe. I also got the .25-caliber pistol out of the elastic band of my sock. The deacons were twenty feet away from me. I could see that the hollow-chested one had found himself a lead pipe.

I palmed the pistol, stood up, and smiled. That smirk stopped them dead in their tracks. If they had been hyenas or wild dogs, they would have had their noses in the air, sniffing for danger. Something was different. The prey had gained confidence. The rules of the game had suddenly changed.

I unlocked my car door and opened it, but I didn’t climb in. I just stood there, daring the deacons to approach. They watched me, waiting for a sign. When I finally got in, Bumpy took a tentative step forward. I pointed my pistol at him, and he took two steps and one skip back.

After that they let me drive off unmolested.

IT WAS ABOUT FIVE when I got back home. The phone was ringing when I got to the front door, but whoever it was, they’d hung up before I got to the receiver. Feather and Jesus were in the backyard. I sat in my reading chair thinking about the last week.

Whorehouses and sinful ministers were nothing new to me. Even murder was an old friend, like Mouse. But for years I had been getting up and going to work, putting my paycheck into the bank. Paying my bills by check instead of cash. I was a member of the PTA. I had slept in my own bed every single night from Christmas to Christmas.

I followed the same routes every day, but all of a sudden I seemed to be lost. It was like I was a young man again, every morning leading me to someplace I never would have suspected. I wasn’t enjoying myself, though. I didn’t want to lose my way. But I had to find out about Mouse. I had to be sure whether he was dead or alive.

FEATHER AND JESUS came inside around six.

“Mail, Daddy,” Feather said when she saw me.

Jesus went to the console TV and grabbed a brown envelope that I’d failed to notice.

“What’s that?” I asked my son.

He shrugged his shoulders and said, “It was on the front step when we got home.”

He dumped the paper envelope on my lap and then went into the kitchen to make ready for dinner.

When I ripped the seam open, a sweet scent escaped. It was a black photo album. The cover was worn and stained, but the pages were all intact. I turned the pages, looking at all the Kodak snapshots neatly held by little paper divots built into the black leaves. Six pictures on each side of each page. Pictures of men, some of women. One woman appeared again and again. Etheline had been beautiful when she was alive.

“Who’s that, Daddy?” Feather leaned against my forearm and pointed, pressing her finger against Etheline’s dress.

“A pretty lady.”

“Uh-huh. She a friend’a yours?”

“L’il bit.”

“Is she gonna go to Knott’s Berry Farm with us?”

“No. She wanted me to look at this picture book and see if there was a picture of Uncle Raymond in it. You remember what Uncle Raymond looked like?”

“He looked funny,” she said, snickering.

She climbed onto my lap and the little yellow dog growled, peeking out from behind the drapes. There were over fifty pages of photographs in the bulging album. Feather made up stories about who the men were and what their relationship was to Etheline.

There were two pictures of Inez with men. She was lovely in those pictures. The thought crossed my mind that I could be with her for just thirty dollars.

“That one look like Uncle Raymond,” Feather said.

It did. A smallish man, not much taller than Etheline, with light eyes and
good
hair. If you had described Mouse to a police sketch artist, he might have drawn this man’s picture—but it wasn’t Raymond. His face was too round, his jaw too sharp. He was smiling, but it wasn’t the contagious kind of smile that Mouse had. It was just some mortal man, not the angel of death, my best friend, Raymond Alexander.

I studied the album for hours after Feather and Jesus went to bed, until I was pretty sure I knew who the murderer was.

I ENTERED THE DEEP LOT on 101st Street at nine-fifteen the next morning. Mrs. Boughman was sweeping the ground with a straw broom. I hadn’t seen anyone sweep bare earth since I’d left the South. It wasn’t a pleasant memory.

“Good morning, Mr. Rawlins. Cedric went to work this morning,” she said proudly.

“He did? That’s great. He must be feeling better.”

“I’ll tell him that you dropped by when he gets home,” she said. “You know, it’s funny. When you left the other day, he asked me who you were.”

“Yeah. I know. How are you, Mrs. Boughman?” I asked in a tone that was less than concerned.

“Fine.”

“You know I got a gift and a warning yesterday afternoon.”

“I don’t know what you mean, Mr. Rawlins.”

“One of the deacons from that department store you call a church dropped off an envelope at my doorstep. He left it because I asked for it. But the fact that he left it at my door meant that he knew where I lived; that was the threat.”

The elder Boughman shook her head as if nothing I said made sense.

“It was a photograph album,” I continued. “A woman named Etheline Teaman had put it together. It was full of snapshots of her and her friends. All the men she ever knew. All of ’em except for two.”

If Celia Boughman were thirty feet tall, she would have spun my head like a noisemaker and left my decapitated body to run around that yard bumping up against her leg.

“Missin’ is Medgar Winters and Cedric Boughman.”

“Cedric,” she said, with odd emphasis.

“She called you, didn’t she?”

“Who?”

“Etheline. She called you and left a message for Cedric. Or maybe she saw you at church Sunday last, and said something, a little too much. Maybe about wanting to see Cedric. Maybe about taking him on a vacation to Richmond. Whatever it was, you weren’t gonna lose your deacon son and he wasn’t gonna lose his soul to a whore.”

It was when Celia Boughman’s mouth fell open that I was sure of my logic.

“You stabbed her through the heart and took the evidence that your son had been so close to her,” I said. “And then when you couldn’t take it anymore, you brought the picture album and probably a stack of letters to Reverend Winters. You confessed your sins and left him with the evidence. That’s how I see it. I saw manila envelopes like the one the book was in at the church, and I could smell the slightest hint of cheap rose water on the pages of that book.”

“Don’t tell Cedric,” she said. “Don’t tell him. He wouldn’t understand. He didn’t know what a woman like that would do to his life.”

She leaned against her broom to keep from falling.

I shook my head and walked away.

“YOU SAY THAT you suspect the woman?” Detective Andre Brown asked me. We were sitting in his office at the 77th Precinct.

I had given him the photo album and told him of my adventures between the whorehouse and church, leaving out my discovery of the murdered girl.

“Yes sir, Detective Brown.”

“Because this book was in a manila envelope and you smelled perfume when you first opened it?”

“That’s about it.”

“That’s pretty slim evidence.”

“I know.”

“So what do you want me to do?” the tall and slender Negro policeman asked. “There weren’t any fingerprints on the knife.”

“I hope that you can’t do anything. There’s no court that could judge this crime.”

“Then why are you here?”

“Because an innocent young woman was murdered, officer. I owe it to her memory to tell somebody the truth.”

M
RS. MASTERS, I’d like you to meet Mr. Ezekiel Rawlins,” Kathy Langer said. “He’s our senior head custodian.”

I had just entered the secretary’s office. Masters was standing there next to Kathy’s desk.

“Nice to meet you,” I said to the new principal of Sojourner Truth Junior High School. “I hope you’re going to like it here at Truth.”

“Oh, yes,” Ada Masters replied. “I already love it. It’s a beautiful school. And it’s so good to meet you at last, Mr. Rawlins. Are you feeling better?”

I had missed a few days of work looking for the photograph of a man I might have known. It turned out to be the picture of a stranger. I had squandered my sick days and made a bad impression on the new boss. The worst thing about it was, I didn’t give a damn.

“Okay now,” I said. “One’a those seventy-two hour viruses. Woke up this morning and it was gone.”

Mrs. Masters’s pale blue eyes concentrated on me. She was at the midway point between fifty and sixty, petite and well dressed. The gray suit she wore was elegant, made from cashmere. The light gray blouse showing at the V of her jacket had the high sheen of silk. Her sapphire ring was real and her glasses were lined with nacre cut from a single shell. For all that expense her clothes weren’t showy; a careless eye might miss the finer touches and think that Masters was dressed according to a city employee’s salary.

The secretary, Kathy Langer, was an interesting contrast to her new boss. She was young, pert, and ready to make babies. Her coarse, nut-brown hair was almost shiny, her clothes came from the May Company bargain table or maybe JCPenny’s. A vegetarian could have eaten her blunt-toed brown shoes with a clear conscience. Her face wasn’t pretty but it was hungry, a thing most working-class men like. And she had a habit of lifting her chin to bare her throat, at least when I was in the room with her.

There I was, a big black man, in the room with two white women who would never meet traveling in their own social circles. It seemed odd to me and I wanted to say something about it. But I didn’t think that either one of them would understand or appreciate my views.

“Will you take a walk with me, Mr. Rawlins?” Mrs. Masters asked.

“Easy,” I said. “That’s the name I go by.”

I saw Kathy mouth the name. When she saw me regarding her she smiled and moved her shoulder like a lounging cat getting comfortable in a new corner.

“I’d like you to walk me around the lower campus,” Principal Masters said.

WE VISITED SEVERAL CLASSROOMS. The teachers looked wary until they saw Mrs. Masters smile at them and wave. She wasn’t like the previous principal, Hiram Newgate, who only dropped in to see what infractions he might find.

We also spent a while in the garden: the biology and agrarian science department of the school. Out there the students grew radishes and studied elementary anatomy.

Finally we came to the custodians’ bungalow. The rest of my crew was out working by then so we had the room to ourselves. It was a big rectangular space with a large table down the center of it. Along the walls were shelves crowded with cartons of paper towels, toilet tissue, and boxes filled with bottles of ammonia, window cleaner, and bleach. There were five-gallon cans of wax piled in one corner and an entire wall of pegboard hung with dozens of sets of keys next to the door. The table was strewn with newspapers, overflowing ashtrays, empty paper coffee cups, and plates with half-eaten cakes on them.

“Nice place,” Mrs. Masters said. “The kind of place where the job gets done.”

“Sorry about the mess. But, you know, if I want ’em to keep the school clean I can’t complain about this room until Friday after lunch.”

“I understand,” she said. “May I have a seat?”

“Please do.” I was thinking that Newgate never asked permission for anything. He’d stand up if you didn’t offer a seat and nurse a grudge against you from then on.

“Can I get you a cup of coffee?” I asked.

“No thank you. I am very happy that you’re back, Mr. Rawlins,” she said. “You know the faculty and the students talk a lot about you.”

“They do?”

“Yes. It seems that they’ve come to rely on you for many problems that have nothing to do with the maintenance of the plant. Many of the women teachers, some men too, say that they depend on you for discipline when some of the more aggressive students have problems.”

Ada Masters had a mild way about her. She was small and unthreatening. In that manner she had gotten more out of her new charges than harsh-mouthed Newgate ever could.

It was true that students and teachers alike came to me when there was a problem. I was a black man in charge at a black school. No boy student was big enough to challenge me and the parents trusted me more than they did the white teachers. I was well read too. I’d perused every textbook in the school and often found myself instructing the kids on how to do their homework and even how to use the library.

I never neglected my own work, at least not until the past few weeks. It was coming up on the first-year anniversary of the death of my friend, Raymond Alexander. I felt responsible for Raymond’s death. He had been trying to steer clear of trouble but he helped me out one last time and got a bullet in the chest. His wife, EttaMae Harris, carried him out of the hospital just before they were about to declare him dead. I’d been looking for him, for his grave if that’s where he was, but Etta had disappeared and there were only whispered rumors that Ray hadn’t actually died but had gone back to Texas or up to the Bay Area or down in Mexico.