Black Betty

by Mosley, Walter

  “Why you askin’, Easy? What you gonna do to Sooky?”

  “Just trust me. All right?”

  John didn’t swing so I guessed that meant okay.

  “Did you see her or Alfred the night Bruno got shot?” I asked again.

  John went back into the kitchen and threw down the meat into the frying pan. Then he came back to me.

  “Yeah, yeah. I saw ’em both. They was out in the street fightin’ like always.”

  “What time was that?”

  “What is this? You a cop?”

  “Was it around the time Bruno got it?”

  John’s nod was a small thing. Like a bullet in the brain.

  — 31 —

  THE POLICE WERE WAITING for me outside the bar. Two uniformed white men standing around my car. I thought about going back down the alley but one of them saw me and pointed. “Hey!”

  My odds at dodging bullets were going down so I decided to go meet my fate.

  “Hello, officers.”

  One was fair and handsome. The other looked like a fish. His big ears were almost parallel to the ground and his eyes were glass bowls.

  “Ezekiel Rawlins?” the looker asked.

  “Yes?”

  He smelled of cedar and his face was scrubbed so clean that his ears, forehead, and cheeks glistened—without sweat.

  “You’re under arrest,” he informed me.

  Officer Fish was a wizard at slapping on cuffs before you could think.

  “Get in the car,” the pop-eyed policeman whispered.

  I obliged him but he pushed me when I was off balance stepping into the cage of the backseat. I barely got my foot in before he slammed the door.

  “’Scuse me, officers!” I yelled as we cruised down Central. “What’s the charge on this here!” I was feeling playful. Maybe it was the lack of sleep. Maybe it was that I had just given up like so many men I’d known, putting up their fists against billy clubs, bullets, and hatred.

  The handsome cop turned and said, “Murder,” in a bland tone. “And conspiracy.”

  I was quiet for the rest of the ride.

  DETECTIVE LEWIS met us at the front desk. He told the uniforms that he had me now and we went back to his office—Quinten Naylor’s old office. Quinten was the previous black detective that they had at the station. He was kicked upstairs somewhere. I hadn’t seen him in years. But you could still make out the outline of Quinten’s name under the black letters that spelled “Detective Arno Lewis.”

  Lewis took off my cuffs when we were secure behind closed doors.

  “I’m under arrest?” I asked as soon as the door closed.

  Lewis was a tall, lean man. His box-shaped head was high on the pole, as Martin used to say about skinny men.

  Lewis took off his thick black-rimmed glasses and pressed the bones over his eyes. “You’re almost gone, Ezekiel.”

  Suddenly there was a little animal trying to claw his way out of my chest. I had to catch half a breath to sound normal.

  “What’s the problem, man?”

  “Sit down.”

  “I don’t wanna sit down. I want you to tell me what the problem is.”

  Arno sat. The thing that made him a good cop, probably the best cop I’d ever met, was the fact that he couldn’t be intimidated. He didn’t mind if I stood over him in that small room. Because that room was his office and he was boss no matter where you were.

  “I’ve two complaints here, Mr. Rawlins.” Lewis tapped a manila folder with his exceptionally long and bony point-finger. “Both of them concern murder charges.”

  “Shit!”

  “The second one came in after you pulled that joke on me with Clovis MacDonald. Oh, by the way, Clovis says that you kidnapped her boyfriend and her cousin. Anyway, the second complaint is that you were asking around Herford’s gym about Terry Tyler. He was found murdered in an abandoned house yesterday morning.”

  “I was lookin’,” I said. “I admit that. But I didn’t find’im. What else?” I found myself sitting on the chair across from Lewis.

  “Captain Styles of the Beverly Hills police tells me that he’s investigating a murder and that you are hiding information pertinent to the solution of that crime.”

  It struck me that all black policemen who want to rise in the ranks have to learn how to speak like half-educated white men.

  “What murder?”

  “A man named Albert Cain.”

  “He was murdered?” I asked more to myself than to Lewis.

  “Captain Styles said that the circumstances of his death were ‘suspicious.’ He thinks that you know about it.”

  “I never met the man. I sure in hell didn’t know that he was killed. I heard that he died. His family hired me to find one of their old employees.”

  “Who is this employee?”

  “Elizabeth Eady.”

  Lewis wrote down the name.

  “What about Tyler?” Lewis asked.

  “He was a bookie an’ I wanted to lay down a bet. That’s all.”

  “If that’s true then why do we have a report that a man who fits your description and he were practicing fisticuffs out in front of Herford’s gym two days ago?”

  “That was nuthin’, officer. Just horseplay. He’s a boxer, he was just showin’ me some moves.”

  “We’re going to have to arrest you, Easy. And turn you over as the Beverly Hills Police Department has requested.” Lewis didn’t dislike me. He was a cop and I was a suspect, that was all. He wasn’t going to beat me or humiliate me unless he had a good reason. He didn’t mind that I was lying. Everybody lies when you drag them down to jail. He would have lied if they took him in.

  “Arrest away, officer.” My heart was beating so hard that I was sure Arno could hear it. “But you wrong on this one.”

  “Wrong how?”

  “When Saul Lynx hired me—”

  “Who?”

  I told him about Lynx’s early-morning visit.

  “Anyway,” I continued, “when he hired me I went up to talk to the family. I mean, I didn’t know who they were, it’s just that I heard about them, if you see what I mean.”

  Lewis didn’t understand a word of what I said, but he was a patient man.

  “When I left them this Styles guy took me down to jail. He didn’t say a damn thing about Cain bein’ murdered. Not a damn thing. And now, all of a sudden, he was murdered. Not even that; he might have been murdered. That ain’t right.”

  The thing I liked the most about Lewis was that you could see when he was thinking. Something about Styles, or the way the complaints came in, bothered him. I could see it.

  “You’re not saying that you think that Styles has got something to do with all this.”

  “I don’t know, man.” I hunched my shoulders for him. “You got some desperate people here. I know that more’n twenty years ago when Styles was a sergeant he arrested Marlon Eady, that’s Elizabeth Eady’s half brother. Styles arrested him but then the arrest sheet never made it into the files.”

  That sat Lewis up straight. “Where’d you get this?”

  “Askin’ questions.”

  “And who should I ask about it, Ezekiel?”

  “I don’t know, brother. I don’t know.” I was coming dangerously close to giving Lewis a reason to want to hurt me but I wanted to keep quiet on what I’d had out of Hodge’s file a little longer.

  “If you want my help then you’ve got to help too,” Lewis said. “You know nobody from here to City Hall wants to hear about a cop gone bad. They’d rather see you on a short leash, or in a pine box.”

  Lewis wasn’t anything like Quinten Naylor. Naylor was idealistic, believing that law was a virtue and that the police were the tools of good. If a cop went bad, Quinten hated him. But Lewis knew that the law is just the other side of the coin from crime, that they’re both the same and interchangeable. Criminals were just a bunch of thugs living off what honest people and rich people made. The cops were thugs too; paid by the owners of prop
erty to keep the other thugs down.

  His threat was meant to save me from a wrong word that might end my life.

  “I don’t want no trouble with Styles.” I rubbed my bruised chest while I spoke. “I talked to him once and that’s enough, but I ain’t goin’ t’jail neither. Not for him.”

  I was on the edge of a shallow grave out past the county line. The darkness was at the corners of the room. All Lewis had to do was throw me into a cell and make a phone call; he’d never even have to think about me again.

  “You know I don’t want any trouble, Rawlins,” he said. The light made his glasses into bright opaque planes. “A cop’s name on a corruption charge hurts everybody. Nobody wants that.”

  “Let me go, man,” I said as clearly as I could.

  “What do I get out of that?”

  “When you get in the bed in fifteen years after this, after you retire, you won’t have my blood on your hands. That’s what. You’ll be able to sleep through the night.”

  “I sleep like a rock now.”

  “But everything gets soft. Everybody gets old,” I said, and then, “I swear that I ain’t done a thing wrong. Miss Eady is a black woman and there’s a whole lotta people wanna see her. But I’m the only one don’t want to hurt her. You let me walk now and I’ll owe you one. You turn me in and Styles will kill me. Ain’t no play to that brother—he will kill me.”

  “But what if I let you go and then, come morning, I find out you were in it? Yeah, you were in it but now nobody knows where you are. Styles tells my boss he warned me and those two nice white boys who took you in here say that they arrested you. Whose ass is in the sling then?”

  Logic is the most frightening talent that a man has. A man with logic can see death coming where a fly only sees a shadow. I saw death in Lewis’s reasoning.

  “It’s my ass, Mr. Lewis,” I said. “I don’t have a thing to do with these people. They asked me to look for a friend and I did. That’s it.” There was so much more that I wanted to say but there were no words.

  “Where do you live, Rawlins?” Lewis asked.

  I knew it was a test so I rattled off my real address.

  Lewis regarded me for a moment or two and then nodded. He took a scrap of paper from the desk and pointed a floppy corner at me. “We got this about an hour ago. It’s your address.”

  “So can I go?”

  “Okay,” he said. “For right now.”

  I was up and out of the door before another breath could pass. There was a phone booth right there in the station but I went three blocks away to make my call out on the street.

  “Raymond?” I asked when he answered the phone.

  “Yeah? Easy?” He was still asleep. Most days Mouse slept until noon.

  “Sit tight, man. I think I got a line on the one turned you in. It wasn’t none’a them men in the bar.”

  “Who is it then?”

  “I don’t know yet. But just hold on, ’cause I think I know how to find him.”

  “How?”

  “You got to trust me, Raymond.”

  There was a long silence on the line. The only sounds were our breath and the occasional car down Central.

  “Don’t you be fuckin’ wit’ me, Easy.”

  “I ain’t fuckin’, Ray.”

  “’Cause you know I’ma kill me somebody. That is true.”

  “I’ll talk to you tomorrow. I promise.”

  * * *

  I TOOK A BUS BACK TO JOHN’S.

  Out the window I watched Central Avenue pass by. There weren’t many people out in the street. In the early sixties nearly everybody was working. On the bus there were mainly old people and young mothers and teenagers coming in late to school.

  Most of them were black people. Dark-skinned with generous features. Women with eyes so deep that most men can never know them. Women like Betty who’d lost too much to be silly or kind. And there were the children, like Spider and Terry T once were, with futures so bleak that it could make you cry just to hear them laugh. Because behind the music of their laughing you knew there was the rattle of chains. Chains we wore for no crime; chains we wore for so long that they melded with our bones. We all carry them but nobody can see it—not even most of us.

  All the way home I thought about freedom coming for us at last. But what about all those centuries in chains? Where do they go when you get free?

  — 32 —

  I PICKED UP MY CAR and drove over to Brenner’s Lumberyard, where I bought a heavy spade. Then I drove back to Odell’s. He was sitting in a straight-back chair with his hands on his knees. I went downstairs and sledgehammered out a piece of the concrete floor in the basement. That took the better part of three hours; the whole time Marlon winked at me from his icy bed.

  The work took longer than it should have because I couldn’t use my left arm at all. It took almost an hour to develop my one-handed sledgehammer swing, cracking again and again against the hard floor. It felt right. Ten blows and then a sliver of rock breaks out. Then a long crack to work at.

  After three hours I had cleared away a piece of ground that was four feet by three. The clay soil was almost as hard as the concrete. The spade nor Odell’s broad-tined pitchfork could dig into it.

  Maudria borrowed three hoses from her neighbors. We screwed them together and snaked the thing down to the hole. I let water dribble into the soil and kept stabbing at it, one-handed, with the pitchfork. It was the best I’d felt in a long time. Hard work is good for a man. It’s something he can do without thinking or worrying.

  I got so tired that my fingers tingled. It was nine in the evening but I just kept jabbing at the earth. Finally the spade slid in.

  By midnight the hole was four feet deep. Maudria had gone up to lie in her bed. Odell was sitting in the kitchen next to the basement door.

  His hands were in his lap, palms up; his glass-bead eyes staring down into the tangle of fingers, trying to make sense out of a world that would never make sense.

  Odell was a religious man. He went to church and prayed and rejoiced. Eternal life came to the man who took the heavy blows of the Lord. But those blows hurt more in the later rounds. Sometimes a man just wants to give in.

  “It’s dug,” I told him. “In the morning I’ll get the cement and quicklime.”

  I made it into the living room, which also had a dining table against the wall for special occasions. The sofa looked comfortable but I climbed under the table with a cushion for my head. I felt safe under there on the hard floor.

  I WOKE TO THE SMELL of coffee. Maude was standing at the stove.

  “Breakfast, honey?” she asked me.

  While I was sitting at the kitchen table I began to think of a question.

  “Where’d you think Betty’d go if she was still around down here?” I asked.

  “I don’t know, Easy,” Maude said. But then, “Well, you know, Betty always went for the men. Men who liked her, men who loved her, that was always Betty’s weak spot.” Her tone of voice was the only evidence I ever had that Maude didn’t approve of Odell’s cousin.

  “You know any’a her boyfriends?” I asked.

  “Uh-uh. We ain’t hardly even seen Betty in all the years she been up here. Maybe she give up on men.”

  “Then what about Felix Landry?”

  “What about him?”

  “You know him?”

  “Yes I do,” she said in a proper tone. “He’s first deacon down at Christ Church on Normandie. We go down there every once in a while.”

  “Landry live over near Avalon?”

  “No. He got a little house right behind Christ Church. But, you know, he might have another house, ’cause he works for the post office and buys up little houses here and there. That’s why I know you’re wrong if you think that he’s with Betty.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Because Deacon Landry is not beguiled by the flesh,” she announced proudly. “He don’t take to women. And ’cause’a that he don’t waste his money. He buy
houses and rent them to elderly churchwomen. And you know you can always tell one’a his houses because they all painted turquoise with a short white fence out front.”

  “All his houses rented out to ladies from the church?”

  “I think so. I never heard’a no house near Avalon, though. That must be a new one.”

  “I’ll go get what we need for the burial,” I said. “Tell Odell that I need to take a drive with him when I get back.”

  * * *

  WHEN I GOT BACK to Odell’s house he was dressed in country jeans and a blouselike green Hawaiian shirt. He was standing at the gate, tall and grim, with his key chain in his hand.

  “Where we goin’, Easy?”

  “Take me to Felix Landry’s house.”

  Odell took a half step backwards. His left eye squinted nearly closed and I was glad that he was nowhere near that shotgun.

  “I think he knows where Betty is, Odell. I think she’s stayin’ in one’a his houses.”

  “This ain’t no play game, Ezekiel.”

  “I ain’t playin’, Odell.”

  ODELL DROVE a 1936 DeSoto. He’d bought it new, for cash, and had kept it in perfect condition. The plush leather front seat was like a sofa. I settled in remembering the first time I’d ridden in Odell’s car; I was sixteen years old and so proud to be seen in that chrome-and-jet automobile. Even grown men looked at me with envy down the wide lanes of Houston’s Fifth Ward.

  People were looking at us that day too. They were pointing and smiling but that was because there weren’t too many cars from 1936 out on the roads anymore.

  We went down toward Manchester and then up Normandie. We finally turned down a little street called Carpenter and pulled to a stop before a tiny block house that was surrounded by a white picket fence and painted turquoise.

  There I was again standing at some door I’d never been to before, a pistol in my pocket and a pain with every breath. It struck me at that moment that I was searching for death. Why else would I have been there?