White Butterfly

by Mosley, Walter

  “Hey, honey, I wake you?”

  “Easy?”

  “Yeah, baby.”

  “When you comin’ home?”

  “Prob’ly not till day after tomorrow. Around dinner. Did I get you outta bed?”

  “No.”

  “You up at midnight?”

  “I couldn’t sleep so I was cleanin’ the kitchen.”

  “I love you, honey. You know I got a lot t’tell when I get home.”

  “Okay,” she said so softly that I almost didn’t hear.

  “You know I got money, baby, but it’s yours too. I never… ”

  “Tell me when you get here, Easy.”

  “Cain’t we talk now?”

  “I don’t wanna talk like this, on the phone. You come on home, Easy.”

  “I love you,” I said.

  “We’ll talk when you get home,” she whispered back.

  THE NEXT MORNING found me at Marlene’s apartment door.

  “Momma an’ them in the bedroom,” the dirty-blond girl told me. She had the disdain of a woman in her voice. She was learning early to hate men for their indifference, and to lament the treachery of her mother.

  “Will you tell the man, Mouse, something for me?”

  She just stared at the floor.

  I took a silver fifty-cent piece from my pocket and handed it to her.

  Her frown never left her face but her eyes widened and she took the coin. She started to run but I touched her arm.

  “You tell him that I will be back at four. Okay?”

  “ ’kay,” she told my wrist. Then she ran hard into the house calling her sister’s name.

  “EZEKIEL RAWLINS,” I told Miss Cranshaw for the third time.

  “How do you spell that?” the gray-haired, stick-figured old secretary asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “What?”

  “I ain’t never been to school an’ my momma us’ly signs all my papers. Ain’t nobody evah axed me t’spell it at all really. You the first one.”

  I had been standing there in my best brown suit with a cream-colored shirt, real gold cufflinks, brown blucher shoes, and argyle socks. I had on a hand-painted silk tie, double-knotted to perfection. And this woman had called everybody but me. I had been there, and in the chair in front of her, for over an hour.

  I had told her, in my best white man’s English, “I would like to be announced to the chief’s office. I know that this is an unusual request, but a police officer from Los Angeles, a Sergeant Quinten Naylor, told me to meet him, with the chief, concerning a case in Los Angeles that seems to overlap with a case in your lovely city.”

  “You should go to your own precinct to give information you have there, sir,” she said and then opened a drawer to look in, giving me a chance to withdraw.

  I insisted.

  She asked me my name.

  I gave it, and spelled it, and she called the aide to the captain of the precinct we were in.

  She told me that he had never heard of me.

  I restated my speech.

  She asked me my name.

  We might have gotten to hate each other if one of the aides to the assistant mayor hadn’t been informed that there actually was an L.A. cop in with the chief. They were waiting on an informant from L.A.

  Miss Cranshaw almost spit bile as she made the call for me. Her jaws clenched so that I thought her teeth might crack.

  It might have been the first time she’d had to serve a Negro. I was working for progress.

  “IS THIS THE MAN you were looking for from Los Angeles?” Chief Wayland T. Hargrove asked me.

  We were in the Oakland City morgue standing over a lab table that bore the remains of J. T. Saunders. He was naked and mottled. He smelled sour like old vegetables smell just before they sprout fungus.

  His eyes were open and his head turned slightly toward the left. The gash in his neck was less pronounced in death.

  “I think he is, sir,” I said. “He certainly is the one I saw getting shot. I saw the man that shot him too. I don’t know whether I’d call it self-defense or what.”

  “No need to bother about that,” spectator Bergman from the governor’s office said. He appeared at the Oakland morgue a few minutes after we did. “What we want to know is if this is the man who killed those women in the South Bay.”

  “You mean in L.A.”

  “No, Easy,” Quinten Naylor said. “There were three murders up here last year. This man is a suspect.”

  “Black women?”

  “All of them.” Quinten was looking me straight in the eye. He wanted me to keep quiet, and I knew why. He had to answer for the murders in L.A. before hysteria eroded his ability to work there. Trouble with Wayland T. Hargrove or, more especially, Mr. Bergman, was the last thing he needed.

  But I was mad. “What?”

  Chief Hargrove lifted his eyebrows at my indignation. He was wearing gray pinstripes and had a headful of blue-gray hair.

  “This man has been a problem in the Bay for fifteen years,” Hargrove said to no one in particular. “He spent five years away for manslaughter. He was suspected in the killing of his first wife but there was no evidence. We’d even brought him in on these mutilation killings, but… ”

  “You mean women been gettin’ killed up here the same way and nobody knows?”

  “That’s why the governor had me go to Los Angeles, Mr. Rawlins,” Mr. Bergman said. “We were aware of the killings in Oakland, but when it started down in Los Angeles too we became nervous.”

  “ ’Specially when he started in on white girls,” I sneered.

  “It was prudent, Mr. Rawlins, to keep the investigation secret. We had no hard evidence that it was a single perpetrator.”

  I was quiet because it took every ounce of willpower I had to keep from tearing that head from those shoulders.

  “We understand,” Roland Hobbes said. “All we want is to lift this guy’s prints and check them against the ones we got at the site of the Scott killing.”

  “Of course,” the chief said. “Of course.”

  “What about the guy killed this man?” I asked.

  “That’s Oakland police business,” said Bergman.

  “I saw it, man. I saw it, and it looked like a setup to me.”

  “Watch it, Easy,” Naylor said under his breath. “You’re just a guest here.”

  “Ain’t you guys here to find crime and stop it? What if that other guy was part of it?”

  “He wasn’t,” the spectator said.

  “How do you know?”

  “He’s a cop.”

  He might as well have hit me with a sledgehammer. My brain turned to jelly. My heart almost stopped in my chest.

  Bergman’s any-color eyes complemented the smile he aimed at me.

  “A cop?”

  The chief cleared his throat. “I hope you men get what you need here,” he said. “If there’s anything else I can do for you, please ask. Give my regards to Mr. Voss and Captain Violette.”

  He turned, as did his entourage of two plainclothes bodyguards, two uniformed policemen, and the assistant. Bergman, the porcelain devil, accompanied them. Quinten Naylor, Roland Hobbes, and I were left with a white-coated morgue assistant and a diminutive doctor who’d come in from a game of golf to oversee this postmortem.

  “Do you have the materials you need?” the little doctor asked Quinten.

  “Um,” Quinten answered, looking rather squeamishly at the corpse.

  “I’ll do it,” Roland Hobbes said.

  He began bringing out fingerprinting paraphernalia from a small tan suitcase that he carried. Quinten touched my arm and said, “Let’s talk outside for a minute.”

  In the morgue corridor Quinten looked a little healthier. He wasn’t so afraid of dead people as long as he didn’t have to touch them.

  “It’s over, Easy,” he said in the wide green hall.

  “It is?”

  “For you. There might be questions. There might be an in
vestigation as to the killing of Saunders. But you’ve done your job. You can stay here if you want, but I don’t think you’ll be welcome. I don’t think you’ll be welcome at all.”

  I thought of Marlene opening the door for Mouse. She welcomed him.

  “What about the reward?”

  “It’s got to be verified, but if the investigation points at this guy then the money is yours.”

  “Me and Mouse. He’s been lookin’ with me.”

  Quinten frowned. “Where is he?”

  “Where he belongs. More than I can say for us.”

  “Well.” Quinten wouldn’t meet my gaze. “We’re gone after this. You want tickets to fly home?”

  “I got a car, and some unwelcome questions to ask.”

  “They’ll kill you up here, Easy. It’s just that simple.”

  “Who sent that man, Quinten?”

  “I don’t know. I called Violette and he called Voss and Bergman. After that there was a meeting down at city hall and a call was made to Oakland. Nobody asked me a thing.”

  — 29 —

  QUEEN ANNE’S LANE was ugly in the light of day. People sat out in front of their apartments staring at me. They would have stared at each other if I wasn’t there. Children screamed and ran in the empty lots across the street. Boys played war while the little girls watched, half in envy and half bewildered.

  I went up to Marlene’s apartment building. I was about to go in when I remembered why we had come there in the first place. So instead of going back to the apartment of dirty children, I went up the slender cement passageway to the address we’d looked up the day before.

  The door was open and an old woman sat in front of it in a lawn chair. Behind her I could see people, mainly women, moving quietly about the house.

  “Yah?” the old woman said.

  “Hi.” I smiled and folded my hands in front of me. “I came to see Mrs. Saunders.”

  “An’ why is that?”

  I remembered the stick-figured Miss Cranshaw. She was white and this woman black, but they both had the same regard for me.

  “I was here last night and she sent me down to deliver a message to James. I didn’t get to talk with him but I saw him get killed.”

  Gray hairs battled with nappy white ones across the woman’s head. There was a bald patch toward the top of her pate.

  “What’s your name?”

  For a moment I froze, forgetting completely the name I had used. But then it came to me and I smiled. “Greer. Martin Greer.”

  “Don’t you know your own name?” the elder lady asked. And I wondered if her mother had entertained a man like Mouse while she cared for her little brother.

  I wondered but I didn’t answer. Finally the woman got up and went back into the house. She took her chair with her and closed the front door.

  When the door opened again I was ashamed. The woman from the night before wore an expansive black dress that came down to her bare feet. She was widest at the thighs and her eyes were swollen and vulnerable.

  I was a dog.

  “Yes?” she said, holding her chin up.

  “I was here last night.”

  “I remember, Mr. Greer. But he’s dead now. I can’t send you to him now.” If she’d cried I would have had to run. I couldn’t comfort this woman.

  “I know,” I said. “I saw it. I saw it all.”

  “Why didn’t you do something?” The tears stayed in her eyes.

  “It was too fast… ”

  She nodded.

  “It was like, like… I don’t know… ”

  She put her hand out and I moved out of range.

  “Tell me what happened,” she said softly.

  I did tell her. And as I talked I wondered again if I really was the cause of this fine woman’s anguish.

  “But you say that he had the gun and he was holding it on James Thomas?”

  “Yeah.”

  “But why would he shoot him?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “No. No,” she echoed.

  “I went down to the police department to make a statement today. They said that they had been looking for J.T. havin’ to do with some dead women in the South Bay.”

  She just looked at me.

  “They said that he’s the one who killed those girls down in L.A.” I said.

  I told her the dates of the last killings.

  “It couldn’t have been.”

  “He was here?”

  “Not all those times, but the last one you said. He was here with me that day. All day.”

  “You sure?”

  “He was right here with me.”

  MARLENE KISSED MOUSE good-bye with such passion that I felt it across the room. Mouse had a way of bringing out the love in people. It was because there was no shame in him. For the desperate souls in us all, Mouse was the savior. He brought out the dreams you had as a baby. He made you believe in magic again. He was the kind of devil you’d sell your soul to and never regret the deal.

  We went back to the hotel and had fried chicken and broiled ribs from a stand called Fat Charlie’s. It was Sunday night, so Ed Sullivan was on television.

  The food tasted like cardboard and the stories and acts didn’t make any sense.

  “What’s wrong with you, Easy?” Mouse asked after we ate.

  The women were working next door, but slower, as it was the Sabbath. There was a mild groan from the wall and an unconvincing “Ooo, baby.”

  “Ain’t nuthin’ wrong.”

  “No? Then why you droopin’ like a puppy just got weaned?”

  “They killed ’im, man.”

  “Killed who?”

  “Saunders. They used me t’set’im up.”

  “Who did?”

  “I really don’t know. Maybe it was Quinten or one’a them men he took t’my house. Maybe it was all of ’em. Probably was. Somebody killed ’im, though. They got his name from me an’ killed him.”

  “So?” Mouse was already bored with talking about my problems.

  “So that makes it my fault. That’s so.”

  “He killed them girls, right?” Mouse sighed. “I mighta killed’im my own self if I’da thought about it.”

  “But he shoulda gone to court. People up here shoulda found out that some man was killin’ women and nobody even knew about it. That’s probably why they killed him. They didn’t want a trial to let people know that a killer had run free and nobody even knew.”

  “He’s dead, Easy. It’s over, man.”

  “But it ain’t right.”

  “Naw, it ain’t that. It ain’t never right, Ease. Niggah ain’t gonna get nuthin’ right till they put’im under six feet of loose dirt. That’s as right as it gets ’round these parts.”

  “So you sayin’ I should just drop it?”

  “What else can you do?”

  “I didn’t drop it when you was in jail, Raymond. I got you outta there.”

  “Uh-huh. An’ I thank you fo’that too. But you know we partners, brother. Shit! You better not fuck wit’ my partner or I put you down.”

  There was nothing to argue about. Mouse didn’t understand guilt or abstract responsibility. He’d go up against a platoon of men to protect me or EttaMae, his ex-wife, or their boy LaMarque. He’d shoot it out with the law for his own people, but Mouse couldn’t hold a moral concept in his brain. Explaining right to him was like trying to explain the color red to a man who was born blind.

  And he was right anyway. I tried my best. I did what I thought was right. I found the man killing black women. I did it all.

  I couldn’t take on the cops. I’d never work for them again, but that’s all I could do. I had a wife and children of my own to look after. And Saunders was a killer; I knew that from the moment I laid eyes on him.

  WE WENT TO SLEEP EARLY, but Mouse got up in the middle of the night. He sat at the foot of his single bed and smoked a cigarette. I listened to him breathe and to the women talking to each other through the wall.
<
br />   After a while Mouse went out the door. A moment later I heard a woman’s voice say, “Who’s there?”

  “It’s your neighbor,” Mouse said. “I brought a bottle’a Jim Beam.”

  The door opened and the ladies laughed. They partied until six in the morning. Toward the end the women wanted to go to sleep. Finally they sent Mouse back home to me.

  — 30 —

  THE RIDE DOWN the Coast Highway was beautiful. Mouse slept almost the whole time.

  Between the motor humming and the sea air coming in my window I started feeling better about J. T. Saunders. He was a killer, after all, and I had my life to go back to. It was wrong for the police to cover up the killings but I couldn’t change the world.

  It was a windy afternoon. White rags tore from the navy-blue sea. There was a sonic boom somewhere around Ventura. That roused Mouse for a moment.

  “What was that?” he asked.

  “Nuthin’. You must’a been havin’ a dream.”

  He gave a big grin and said, “Know what I’ma do, Easy?”

  “What?”

  “First thing I get that money I’ma buy me a ’57 T-Bird.”

  I didn’t argue with him. Mouse knew how to enjoy his life.

  * * *

  I GOT HOME AT ABOUT FIVE. Regina’s car wasn’t parked out front yet. Gabby Lee and Edna weren’t to be seen. Jesus’s scooter lay on its side near the garden. Everything looked very good.

  I had owned that house for more than ten years, but since Regina had moved in, it was more like a home than ever.

  I still remember the day I met her. It was at a club in Compton. I was following a man named Addison Prine for his fiancée’s father. The old man, Tony Spigs, was sure that Addison had a girlfriend and he wanted me to find her name. Spigs was a jealous old man and he wanted to keep his only daughter at home as long as he could. Spigs was also Mofass’s preferred carpenter and I thought I could get a good carpentry job out of him for a hefty favor.

  Addison was at a small table with another man and a woman. Near to them a woman sat alone. She was wearing a simple brown dress. She had the dregs of a bright red drink with a straw in it before her.