White Butterfly

by Mosley, Walter

  “He didn’t say nuthin’ like that to me. Matter’a fact he said that J.T. got him a job. Yeah, Randy said that J.T. was good at havin’ some fun.”

  “And what about you?” she asked Mouse. “What do you want?”

  “Uh… well… ” Mouse gaped at her. There was a certain kind of woman that just had him cowed. She could have slapped his face and he would have apologized for hurting her hand.

  “What do you want?” Viola Saunders asked again. She was older than us, sixty or more, and commanding.

  “Could we come inside?” I asked.

  For a moment she stared at me. I tried to open my face, to let her know that I was going to be honest with her. Later, when we sat down in her house, I could lie.

  Viola opened the door and I felt a touch at my shoulder.

  “I’ma wait out here, Ease,” Mouse whispered at my ear.

  THE ROOM SHE LED ME TO was large but there was very little floor space because of the crowd of furniture. Bookshelves covered with knickknacks and books lined every wall. Two couches, three stuffed chairs, a walnut coffee table, a cherry dining table, and a piano were stabled there. The deep green carpet was thick. It swallowed up the sounds walking might have made. The walls were green too.

  “Have a seat, Mr. Greer.”

  “Thank you, ma’am. You sure have a nice house.”

  “What do you want with my son?” She stood next to the piano.

  “Nuthin’ special. I just heard that he knew how to have a good time in Oakland and… ”

  “Don’t lie to me, son. What James do to you?”

  My muscles went lax and my ability to lie just flowed away from me.

  “Nothing to me personally, Mrs. Saunders. But maybe he knows something about a girl he was with a few weeks ago.”

  “She pregnant?”

  “She’s dead.”

  Viola Saunders pulled back on her neck like a viper does before she strikes. Her eyes glassed over and her shoulders rose.

  “What her die from?”

  “Somebody killed her. She wasn’t the only one.”

  “And you t’ink it were James?”

  “All I know is that somebody saw her with him and there was a fight.”

  The elegant woman from the islands closed her eyes. Her lips went in and out a little and her neck quivered ever so slightly.

  “Is James staying here, ma’am?”

  “He’s a good son, Mr. Greer. He always bring me somet’ing when he goes away. He always bring me somet’ing.”

  The house was empty, silent and sad.

  “He’s a good son,” she said again. “But he’s different now. It’s like he’s not himself no more. He get so angry sometimes that I worry. I lock my door against him, sometimes. My own son.”

  I knew that she’d tell me anything I wanted as long as I let her talk.

  “You going to hurt my son, Mr. Greer?” She used my fake name to have power over me. Even that one lie was almost too much to bear.

  “No, ma’am.”

  “What about your friend?”

  “We just want to talk to him, that’s all.”

  “He was always a gentle boy.”

  “Do you know where I could find him?”

  “I don’t want to hear that you hurt my boy ’cause I help you, Mr. Greer.”

  “I just want to ask him what happened.”

  “Was it a young girl?”

  “Yeah, she was seen with your son but nobody says that he killed her. I just want to ask him a few questions.”

  Mrs. Saunders trusted me. But she was worried.

  “If I tell him about this he will be warned, Mrs. Saunders. He’ll know that he was the last one to see her.”

  “You find him at Tiny Bland’s. It’s down there on Chino Street near Lake Merritt. He go down there for the whores on Friday.”

  Viola walked with me out into the front yard.

  “You let my son be, hoodlum,” she said to Mouse.

  He scuffed his toe on the sidewalk and watched the ground. “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Look at me,” Viola demanded.

  Mouse looked her in the eye; the fact of him feeling fear frightened me.

  “Don’t you hurt my son.”

  “You got it.” Mouse nodded and turned away.

  When she had gone back into the house, Mouse relaxed again. He was fully calm as we descended toward the street.

  “You think Marlene wanna go with us?” he asked when we’d gotten to the car.

  “I think she got five kids need a momma stay with’em, Raymond.”

  He scratched his chin and said, “Yeah. You right.” Then he smiled. “I come back after they in bed.”

  — 27 —

  THE BROAD RED NEON SIGN said Tiny Bland’s in bold script. It shone behind a black glass wall that made up the facade of the nightclub.

  Cars drove up letting out fancy Negro men and Negro women dressed in furs and silk. The women also wore gaudy costume jewelry and carried bags made of soft leather.

  Across the street winos shambled and skinny teenagers played. Two young men in T-shirts and jeans leaned against an old Chevrolet and eyed the patrons of Tiny Bland’s with sullen stares. The kind of stares that say, “I wanna fuck you or kill you or eat you.” Or maybe all three.

  But the club-goers weren’t bothered. They were telling jokes and laughing. Two weeks’ pay went into one evening at Tiny Bland’s.

  A tall black man wearing a metallic gold suit stood at the front door. He greeted the patrons and warded off any undesirable element that might seek entry.

  A young man who worked parking the cars was at the bouncer’s beck and call. He wore a dark blue uniform with gold satin stripes along the sides of his pants. He was full of “yessir” and “yes’m.” He had more teeth than all of those smiling women. He had a pocketful of tip change and his body danced with expectations.

  “How we gonna get in here?” I asked Mouse. “I didn’t think our boy’d go someplace like this.”

  Mouse shrugged. “Just walk in the front door, man, like everybody else.”

  “We ain’t dressed fo’it, Raymond.”

  But Mouse ignored me. He got on the short line that had formed at the door. I stood there with him, glad that we were going to be refused entry. I had sobered a little and thought that we’d do better following Saunders at a distance. We could wait across the street with the winos and muggers and follow our quarry to wherever he lived.

  The doorman was letting a couple up at the front of the line go in. It was an orangish Negro, who sported a crew cut, and his blond date. Everybody on the line was let in.

  Until the guard laid eyes on me, that is.

  I was wearing ocher slacks and a gray shirt that had two tiny cigarette holes in the pocket.

  He looked at those holes like they might have been plague warts and asked, “Yeah? What you want?”

  “I wanna come in. You got air conditioning in there?”

  “Don’t matter if I do, ’cause you ain’t comin’ in.” He looked over my shoulder, indicating that our audience was through and that he was ready for the next applicant.

  “Open that do’, man, fo’ I put you’ head th’ough it.” That was Mouse.

  He hadn’t noticed Mouse before. Maybe he thought that the short one was my ugly date.

  Anyway, he looked down then and said, “What?”

  “You heard me, Leonard, I said open up that door.”

  Mouse had a big grin on his face. The man in the gold suit was grinning too.

  “Mouse,” he said.

  “Thatta be Mr. Mouse to you.” They shook hands and laughed some.

  Then Mouse asked, “Man, what they got you wearin’?”

  Leonard spread a big hand across his golden chest and looked down shyly.

  “That’s what they pay me for, brother,” he said.

  “I hear ya,” Mouse intoned.

  We were waved in.

  The hostess at the podium was black. As were the
waiters, the musicians on the platform up front, and most of the patrons.

  Mouse asked for a table but I interrupted and said that we’d stand at the bar for a while.

  I ordered a triple shot of scotch. Mouse ordered beer.

  “Nice place, huh, Easy?”

  He was grinning and looking around the room. It was a large room with low ceilings, painted black from the floor up. The waitresses wore white satin gowns and the waiters wore tuxedos.

  There were people and more people. The band was playing upbeat jazz, not like the religious refrains of Lips McGee. A crystal globe hung in the center of the room throwing off bright fragments of light that made everything seem a little unreal. Maybe Tiny Bland’s was worth two weeks’ pay.

  “How’d you know that dude?” I asked Mouse.

  “I hung out here for a while.”

  “When?”

  “When Terry Peters got killed.”

  It was in the street that Mouse had killed Terry in a dispute over two thousand dollars.

  “How long you up here?”

  “Until somebody else got killed and the cops started worryin’ ’bout that.”

  The bar was long and shiny black. A few feet down from us, Crew Cut was drinking and telling a story to his white date.

  She was making eyes at the man next to them.

  I don’t know if the woman wanted to start trouble but she was well on her way with that flirtation. The man she was making eyes at was of normal height but you could tell by looking at him that he was brawny and full of violence. He had shaggy hair and a thin mustache. His eyes were murky and unfocused even though he stared directly in the white woman’s face. But none of these features matched the gash in his neck. There was a wide and jagged scar at his throat, made all the more unsightly because it was lighter, yellowish actually, than his medium-brown skin.

  I wondered what kind of accident or war could have caused such a catastrophe. I was more than a little awed that this burly fellow, or anyone, could have survived that pain and bloodletting.

  But he just smiled and flirted with the white woman while Crew Cut talked about how he had installed a shortwave radio in his Pontiac.

  “Easy,” Mouse said. I turned back to him. He was looking around the room.

  “Yeah?”

  “He ain’t here, man.”

  “We ain’t even looked good yet, Raymond.”

  “I looked.”

  “You mean you wanna get back to that sloppy girl’s house. That’s what you mean.”

  Mouse beamed and smoothed his mustache. “I know what’s waitin’ back at home, man.”

  “An’ what if she got a boyfriend come in at twelve? What you gonna do then?”

  “I do what I do, Easy. An’ you know I do it good.”

  “Hey, man, back off,” someone behind me declared. It was said with such anger that I turned quickly and took a step back.

  The orange man was pulling his date’s hand from the scarred man’s caress. The scarred man held his hands out, palms up, and smiled just like Mouse had smiled. I felt the force of the triple shot hit my hands; they felt weak and impotent.

  The woman in front of me got out of the way but I was too slow. The scarred man flipped his right hand over and made it into a fist that went crashing into Crew Cut’s face. The next thing I knew I was being struck in the chest by the orange man’s back. His fuzzy head was at my chin. He pushed against me and went back up against his foe.

  It was a mistake he paid for.

  By the time he was on the floor he was bleeding from the mouth and nose. There was a circle around the two men. Nobody moved for a brief moment. The orange man was panting on his back, propped up by both elbows. The scarred man was in a crouch with a vacant look on his face. The last time I had seen a look like that was in the Battle of the Bulge. It was on a German foot soldier who intended to send me to hell.

  The scarred man reached into his gray jacket.

  The orange man smiled.

  The scarred man came out with short thick-bladed knife and took a step.

  Somebody screamed.

  The orange man took out a pistol and pointed it.

  I could see the knife-wielder’s eyes change. He was defeated and the murder was gone from him; maybe he even started to lower the blade.

  I’ll never know, because the smiling orange man began pulling off shots. At the first shot the scarred man started to genuflect. Pow!… and a cursory bow. Pow!… and chin comes down to hide the scar. By the sixth shot he was prostrate over his knees on the floor.

  The orange man never stopped smiling.

  People were either running or kissing the floor. One very fat woman in a vast sky-blue gown tried to squeeze herself down into a corner. I saw the orange man’s date run out the front door, but her boyfriend hardly moved.

  After a few moments he got to his feet. He dusted himself off in a ritual fashion, slightly patting his forearms and knees. He put the gun in his pocket and sat down at the bar. The room had almost emptied out by then.

  “Com’on, man, let’s get outta here,” Mouse said at my side. “Cops be here any minute. An’ you know I ain’t gonna answer no questions when I could be with Marlene.”

  Being at the scene of a murder meant no more to Mouse than a dead cow meant to Randall Abernathy. All us poor Southern Negroes had lived and breathed death since we were children, but Mouse was different—he accepted it. To him death was as natural as rain.

  I agreed that we should leave but I was bothered by the murder. Everything seemed logical. I mean, one man has been killing the other over women for a hundred thousand years. But why didn’t he even look for his date? Why didn’t he run?

  Outside we joined the crowd across the street. I thought that we might catch a glimpse of Saunders.

  The ambulance was there in under ten minutes. The police were there before that. They hustled the killer off. I couldn’t be sure but the orange man’s hands seemed to be free. Unshackled.

  While Mouse talked to the doorman I moved around looking for the bearded man. I didn’t catch sight of him.

  I did see the two toughs who were eyeing the club earlier. They were talking to some of the men from the club. Thinking that they might know why the killing was so unusual I moved near to them and listened.

  At first a big man in a tan cotton suit was talking.

  He said, “Yeah. The short-haired dude seen that man you said holding on to his girl’s hand. You know he was lookin’ right down her dress an’ lickin’ his lips… ”

  “Yeah, yeah,” a smaller, mutt-faced man said. “I’da kilt him too. You see that? Guy says leggo my-my girl and here-here he go kickin’ his ass. Th-that ain’t right.”

  “Yow main,” said one of the T-shirts. “Sand’r’n them allus like’n take it. Shit, he fock my cousin an’ a’most kilt Bobby Lee.”

  “Who you said that was?” I asked the boy.

  He glared at me because of my tone. Maybe I reminded him of his truant officer.

  “Sander,” he said, almost swallowing the word.

  “Did he useta wear a beard?” I held my hand under my chin to show him what I meant.

  “Yeah.”

  “Where he from?”

  “Who the fuck’re you, man?” the other boy shouted.

  The mutt-faced man and his friend walked away. I remember thinking that they were smart men. I thought that I’d never do this kind of work again.

  Then I thought about fighting those youngsters. They were in their late teens, maybe one was older. The one on the left had well-defined arms in the lamplight. I was still young enough that I could take them. I might have gotten a bloody nose but those boys’ lives were in my hands.

  They moved apart, watching my hands and eyes. Maybe they did this for a living. More probably for fun.

  I reached into my pocket and pulled out two five-dollar bills, handing one to each of them.

  “Where’d you say that man Saunders was from? I mean where was he born?” I aske
d.

  “He talk funny,” the first boy said. He snatched the bill at the same time as his partner did.

  “Yeah,” the other boy said. “He always say ‘mon’ insteada ‘main.’ ”

  “He been gone for a while?” I asked them. But now that they had my five dollars they had somewhere to go. I could see it in their eyes again.

  “Hell, main, I ain’t been’ paid t’watch that crazy mothahfuckah. Shit!”

  With that they both took off.

  — 28 —

  I WAS THINKING about what I had to say while the phone rang. The girls next door were having a party with two men and the neon light from the motel sign was flashing through the gauzelike curtains.

  Mouse was at Marlene’s house. I’d let him off there.

  “Hello?” Quinten’s voice was thick.

  “Sorry t’be botherin’ you, man, but I got somethin’.”

  “Where you calling from?”

  “San Francisco.”

  “You find Saunders?”

  “Yeah, I found’im.”

  “It’s late, Easy. I don’t have time to play with you.”

  His father probably said the same words when Quinten was just a baby cop.

  “He’s dead.”

  “Where?”

  “Probably in the morgue over in Oakland.”

  “You sure?”

  “Pretty much so. I saw’im get shot. I saw them carry him off with a sheet over his eyes.”

  “Who killed him?”

  “Nobody I know. The police got him too.”

  There was a silence on the other end of the line. Maybe I was needlessly worrying about how the man I sought out in another city was murdered before my eyes.

  “You go to police headquarters office downtown, in Oakland, at about noon. Where are you now?”

  I gave him the number of the motel.

  “You be at police headquarters at noon unless I call you to say something else.”

  “Okay, Quinten. All right, man. I’ll be there. But if this is the dude I want the reward and I want you people to get off my ass and to stay off it too.”

  “Noon,” he said, and then he hung up.

  “HELLO.” Her voice was soft and sweet and inviting.