White Butterfly

by Mosley, Walter

  “And a couple of days ago the woman, just a girl really, comes up from the table to ask me for a glass of water. But when she reaches for the glass she grabs my finger and passes this note. I think she was worried… ”

  “What did this note say?”

  “It was a corner of a newspaper, a racing form with your name and phone number in one margin and a note saying, ‘Call the police, we’re at the Seacrest,’ and it’s signed ‘Sylvia.’ ”

  “Why’d you wait two days, man?”

  “I don’t know. It was just so weird. I don’t want any trouble. You see… I can’t talk to the police.”

  “Where’s this Seacrest place?”

  “It’s a motel at the corner of Adams and La Brea. Do you think… ”

  “Have they been in your place since then?”

  “The next day I had off. I went to San Diego and really forgot about… ”

  “Was she in there today?”

  “No. Just the man, I mean. That’s why I called.”

  I hung up the phone and rushed to the closet to get my gun.

  Jesus followed me around the house and kept grabbing me. Finally I stopped and asked him, “What?”

  He just stared at the pistol in my hand.

  “It’s not Regina,” I told him. “She’s gone. It’s not her.”

  At first Jesus didn’t believe me. But I sat down and convinced him after a while. I told him that I’d be back soon. Then I drove off in the direction of the Seacrest.

  At every red light I tried to persuade myself to call the cops. On every straightaway I imagined killing Vernor Garnett. He was everything I hated. He’d killed his own child and his wife still stayed behind him. He’d got me in jail by just telling a lie. A white man.

  THE SEACREST was a single-story motel facing a large parking lot with the entrances to all of the rooms facing out. I parked across the street at three in the afternoon and waited.

  I sat there for three hours. And the whole time all I thought about was Regina. I’d tried to think about her before but all I encountered was pain. But somehow, waiting for that evil man, I didn’t feel the pain. I only felt cold rage.

  By the time Garnett walked out of the last room on the end I hadn’t figured out a thing. I couldn’t say for a fact why she left me. I couldn’t say that I would have been different.

  Garnett had grown some facial hair and wore a trench coat with the lapels turned up. He walked down the street to the Chicken Pit with his head down.

  I jimmied his door and went in.

  Sylvia was dead. He’d laid her out on the floor of the closet and closed the door. But she was already starting to smell. Her temple was caved in. The room was a shambles. Clothes and bags of food were thrown around. A newspaper spread on the bed was open to the travel section. Three special fares to Mexico were circled.

  I turned out the light and stood behind the door. I just waited there forever. The gray forms of the bed and dresser got fainter. The pistol was cold on my fingers.

  When Garnett came back he opened the door and closed it before flicking on the light. I hadn’t expected to be blinded by the sudden light.

  “What?” Vernor called out loudly as if maybe he was with somebody. But he was alone.

  Maybe if he had jumped me in that second I would have been keeping Sylvia company. But instead he clawed at the doorknob for two seconds, three.

  I flat-handed him with the pistol. He shook his head as if assailed by a sudden and unpleasant memory. I hit him again and he went down to his knees like J. T. Saunders had done for the police assassin.

  “Please,” he said in a small voice.

  A voice was screaming in my head, “Kill him!” Over and over. My neck quivered. I honestly felt that if I didn’t pull the trigger I would die. The tears came from my eyes, a guttural cry escaped my lips. My diaphragm undulated so that it was hard to keep the pistol steady.

  Garnett cowered against the door. He held his hands up before his face. We were both madmen at the end of our lives. We were madmen but only he was a lawyer.

  He started talking. At first I was too upset to hear him but then after a while his gibbering began to make sense. He told me that he didn’t mean it. He hadn’t planned to kill his daughter. But after he had, he faked Saunders’s MO, because he’d heard about it down at the courthouse.

  He had killed her in his car also.

  “What about Sylvia?”

  “I just wanted the diary,” he pleaded. “They didn’t bring it with them.”

  “Why’d you kill her?”

  “It was too late,” he said. “She wouldn’t give me. She wanted… wanted… ”

  I hog-tied Garnett and gagged him; put him in the closet with Sylvia Bride.

  “Hello?” Quinten Naylor said.

  I gave him the address and told him that somebody had called. I didn’t know who.

  Maybe to some people revenge is sweet. All I know is that I had to stop my car five blocks away and vomit for a full minute before I could breathe again.

  BULL HORKER’S COOK, Bailey, was more than happy to tell me where Cyndi stayed in Redondo Beach. For another fifty dollars he would have shed blood for me.

  The house on Exeter was inhabited by an old woman named Charla Fine. She was holding the baby for Bull Horker and she was none too happy that the Bull had died. But Feather seemed hale and more or less happy. When I first saw her she was sucking her toe. I looked down and she smiled at me and said something in baby talk that I thought meant “Tickle my stomach and push my nose.”

  Five hundred dollars and the baby was mine.

  THE PAPERS THE NEXT DAY detailed the crime. The dead stripper Sylvia Bride (her real name was Phyllis Weinstein) had her picture on the front page all over California.

  The trial was front-page news for weeks. Everything the prosecutor wanted to avoid came out in public. His daughter’s wild life, and death. The father’s crime, the mother’s cover-up.

  Nobody cared much about the baby. Most of the speculation was that the child had probably been killed by the mother. This was substantiated by the fact that no one had seen the baby after she was born.

  Anyway, the birth certificate had the baby listed as white. Feather was safe with me.

  Vernor Garnett died in prison two years after he was sentenced. His wife moved back east somewhere after she was found innocent of conspiracy.

  There wasn’t much written about Milo.

  — 40 —

  WE MOVED THREE MONTHS LATER. I bought a small house in an area near West Los Angeles called View Park. Middle-class black families had started colonizing that neighborhood, and I wanted to get away from people who knew me and Regina.

  Jesus liked his new school, and all the work of moving got my mind off the trouble in my life. Regina still lived in my dreams. Sometimes I’d wake up in the middle of the night in despair.

  But when I’d wake up, little Feather needed her bottle and a change of diapers. She wasn’t my little Edna but she was beautiful and happy almost all of the time. I’d lost Regina and Gabby Lee, but Jackson Blue would baby-sit at least once a week and I didn’t mind caring for her.

  Jesus never got tired of playing with Feather. He’d take her everywhere once she started to walk.

  And I decided to let Dupree and Regina leave for good. Mouse found out where they had gone. He offered to go down to kill Dupree, and Regina, and bring Edna back. But I told him to give me the address and let it lie.

  Enough people had died. I would have been happy if not one more person in the world ever had to face that fate.

  «——THE END——»

 

 

 
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