A Red Death

by Mosley, Walter

  I could feel her tears in my own eyes. Nothing had changed since the night before. I was still traitorous and evil.

  Shirley got up and went into the kitchen. Actually she ran there.

  “WOULD YOU LIKE some more toast, Mr. Rawlins?” Shirley asked when she’d come back in from the kitchen. Her eyes were red.

  “No thanks,” I said. “What time you got?”

  “Almost twelve.”

  “Damn. I better get down there to help your father or he’s gonna wonder what we been doin’.”

  Shirley smiled. “I can drive you.”

  It was a nice smile. I shuddered to see her trust me, because her father’s ruin was my only salvation.

  “YOU’RE PRETTY QUIET,” Shirley Wenzler said in the car.

  “Just thinkin’.”

  “About what?”

  “About how you got the advantage on me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  I leaned over and whispered, “Well, you got to give your opinion on my chest but the jury still out on yours.”

  She focused her attention back on the road and blushed nicely.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I always like to flirt with pretty girls.”

  “I think that was a little bit more than flirting.”

  “ ’Pends on where you come from,” I said. “Down here that was just a little compliment from an admirer.” That was a lie, but she didn’t know it.

  “Well, I’m not used to men talking to me like that.”

  “I said I’m sorry.”

  She let me out at First African. I shook her hand, holding it a little longer than I should have. But she smiled and was still smiling as she left.

  I watched the little Studebaker drive away. After that I noticed the dark Buick with the two dark-suited men. They were parked across from the church then. Just sitting there as if they were salesmen breaking for an afternoon lunch.

  — 22 —

  FIRST AFRICAN HAD AN empty look to it on weekdays.

  Christ still hung over the entrance but he looked like more of an ornament when the churchgoers weren’t gathered around the stairs. I always stopped to look up at him, though. I understood the idea of pain and death at the hands of another—most colored people did. As terrible as Poinsettia’s death was, she wasn’t the first person I’d seen hung.

  I’d seen lynchings and burnings, shootings and stonings. I’d seen a man, Jessup Howard, hung for looking at a white woman. And I’d seen two brothers who were lynched from two nooses on the same rope because they complained about the higher prices they were charged at the county store. The brothers had ripped off their shirts and gouged deep scratches in each other’s skin in their struggles to keep from strangling. Both of their necks, broken at last, were horribly enlongated as they hung.

  Part of that powerful feeling that black people have for Jesus comes from understanding his plight. He was innocent and they crucified him; he lifted his head to tell the truth and he died.

  While I looked at him I heard something, but it was like something at the back of my mind. Like a crackle of a lit match and the sigh of an old timber in a windstorm.

  Chaim was down in the basement, already working on boxes of clothes. He was holding up an old sequined dress, squinting at the glitter.

  “Looks good,” I said.

  “Not bad, eh, Easy? Maybe Mrs. Cantella could find a new husband?” His smile was conspiratorial.

  “Probably won’t be no better than the last nine men she had.”

  We both laughed. Then I started helping him. We moved clothes from one box to another while putting prices on them with little eight-sided paper tags and safety pins. For plain dresses we charged a dollar and for a fancy one we charged one seventy-five. All pants were sixty-five cents, and hats and handkerchiefs ran about a quarter.

  “Shirley’s a good girl,” Chaim said after a while.

  I nodded. “I guess so. Takes a generous woman to take in some drunk that she don’t even know.”

  “Sometimes you have to drink.”

  “Yeah, I guess that’s true too.”

  “You’re a good man, Easy. I’m glad to have you in my daughter’s house.”

  We moved boxes around for another few minutes in silence.

  I was just beginning to think seriously about how I could stay out of jail without getting Chaim in trouble when we heard the scream. It sounded far off but you could tell that it was full of terror.

  Chaim and I looked at each other and then I headed for the stairs. I was halfway to the second floor when Winona Fitzpatrick came at me. She was running down with her arms out so I couldn’t avoid her. She was crying and yelling and one of her shoes was off.

  “Winona!” I cried. “Winona!”

  “Blooddead,” she moaned and then she fell into my arms.

  Winona weighed at least two hundred pounds. I did my best to slow her fall till we came to the first floor. Then I let her down as gently as I could, but I still had to put her on the floor.

  “Dead,” she said.

  “Who?”

  “Dead. Blood,” she said.

  I decided that Chaim would come and take care of her and so I sprinted up the stairs. When I got to the minister’s apartment on the second floor I slowed a bit. I began to wonder, at that very moment, what was happening to me. I gazed at the plywood door and thought about the Texas swamplands southeast of Houston. I thought about how a man could lose himself in those swampy lands for years and nobody could find him. I knew things had to be bad if I was missing that hard country.

  Reverend Towne was sprawled back on the couch. His pants were down around his ankles and his boxer shorts were just below his knees. His penis was still half erect and I’m sure the pious men and women of the congregation would have been surprised that it was so small. You think of a Baptist minister as being a virile man, but I’d seen little boys that had more than him.

  Another strange thing was the color of his skin. Most black men’s skin gets darker in the genital area, but his was lighter, some strange quirk in his lineage.

  The blood on his white shirt and his stunned expression told me that he was dead. I would have run to him to check it out but my way was blocked by the woman doubled over her own lap, sitting on her heels, at his feet. There was blood at the back of her head.

  Nothing seemed to be out of place other than the two corpses. It was a modern apartment, there were no walls separating the rooms. The pine kitchen to the left had an electric range and a window that looked out the front of the church. On the right the bedroom, all made up and neat, sported African masks, shields, and tapestries on the far wall. A bright red blanket lay at the foot of the bed. The center of the apartment had a floor that was lower than the rooms that flanked it.

  The center room was carpeted in white. The dead man reclined on a white leather couch. Towne’s empty gaze lay on the modern fireplace that was shielded by a golden screen.

  Everything was clean and made up except in a corner by the door; there was a pile of vomit. The murderer had eaten cole slaw and meatloaf for lunch. The strong smell of alcohol emanated from that corner.

  When I looked out of the kitchen window I saw the stairs where I’d stood not fifteen minutes before; I remembered the crackle and sigh. I wondered if it could have been a volley of small-caliber shots. Could have been.

  I went back to the lovers, if that’s what you could call them.

  It looked more like the convenience that we GIs enjoyed across Europe when there wasn’t much time or money. She was still fully dressed, she even wore her shoes. It was the same woman I had seen him with in the basement.

  Then I wondered who would be investigating the case. Magnolia Street wasn’t that far away.

  While I considered the telephone and the east Texas swamps, Chaim entered.

  “What’s this?” he stammered.

  “Dead.”

  “Who?” he asked back. In real life you don’t need very much language.

 
“I dunno, man. Winona was comin’ down an’ yellin’ an’ here they was.”

  “She kill them?”

  “You wanna call the police, Chaim?”

  “Where?” he asked. I was happy that he didn’t ask why.

  I pointed out the phone and looked around while he dialed. When he’d finished talking to the police dispatcher I asked him if he’d seen anything strange downstairs. He said no. Then I asked if he’d seen anyone other than me. He said that he saw one of the younger deacons, Robert Williams, earlier in the day.

  The uniformed police came in around ten minutes. They called in the same report that Chaim had made, then they separated us and began asking questions.

  Winona was led upstairs. She sat on the floor just outside the apartment crying and mumbling about blood.

  My cop asked if Winona had known the minister. I said that I didn’t know what their relationship was, and he got suspicious.

  “You don’t know her? Then how do you know her name?”

  “I know her to say hello, I just don’t know if she knew the minister. I mean, she’s on the church council, so she knew him, but I don’t know what they had to do with each other.”

  “How long was she up there with him?”

  “Beats me.”

  He started pacing and clenching his fists. He was a fat man with a red face and bright blue eyes. He was taller than I was, and he had a habit of talking to himself.

  “He knows her name,” he said. “But after that he’s stupid.”

  I said, “I was down in the basement,” but he didn’t even hear it.

  He went, “Something wrong with that. Yes, something wrong.”

  Then he asked me, “You know where she lives?”

  “No.”

  That started him pacing again.

  “Boy’s fooling around here, hiding something. Yeah, hiding something.”

  It was said that there were still crocodiles deep in the Texas swamps. I would have preferred a cuddly reptile right then.

  “Fine,” someone said from the door.

  The crazy policeman turned as if someone had called him. It was Andrew Reedy.

  “What’s happening here?” Reedy asked.

  “Two spooks blasted and salt-and-pepper here acting like it was God done it. Girl out in the hall found them.”

  Quinten Naylor came in behind Reedy. I don’t know if he heard what the crazy cop had said but you could see that there was no love lost between the two. They didn’t even acknowledge each other.

  “Well, well, well,” Reedy was saying. “Here you are again, Mr. Rawlins. Were they evicting these two?”

  “That’s the minister of the church on the couch. I don’t know the girl.”

  I could see the mood shift in Reedy’s face. A dead minister was a political problem, no matter what color he was.

  “And why were you here?”

  “Just workin’ downstairs, that’s all.”

  “Working?” Naylor said. “People always turn up dead when you’re working?”

  “No sir.”

  “Did you know the minister?”

  “To speak to, that’s all.”

  “You a member of this church?”

  “Yes sir.”

  Naylor turned his head to the uniforms.

  “Cover them up,” he said. “Don’t you guys know procedure?”

  The fat cop made like he was going to go at Naylor but Reedy grabbed him by the arm and whispered to him. Then the uniforms left with the fat cop swaggering through the door.

  On the way out the fat one said to Naylor, “Don’t worry, son, lotsa killin’s on nigger patrol. Wait till you see how the nigger bitches cut up on each other.” Then he was gone.

  “I’ll kill that son of a bitch,” Naylor said.

  Reedy didn’t say anything. He’d gone up to the bedroom and gotten sheets to cover the dead.

  “What about you?” Naylor asked Chaim.

  “I am Wenzler, officer. Easy and I are working in the basement and we hear the screams. He runs up, I come in, and poor Dr. Towne was here, and the girl. It’s terrible.”

  “Mr. Rawlins work for you?”

  “Together,” Chaim said. “We do charity for the church.”

  “And you were down there when you heard the screams?”

  “Yes.”

  “What about shots?”

  “No shots, just screams. Weak little screams like she was far away, in a hole.”

  “Let’s take ’em all down and get statements, Quint,” Reedy said. “I’ll call for more uniforms and we’ll take ’em. I’ll call the ambulance and the coroner, too.”

  — 23 —

  I HADN’T BEEN TO the Seventy-seventh Street station for questioning in many years. It looked older in the fifties but it smelled the same. A sour odor that wasn’t anything exactly.

  It wasn’t living and it wasn’t dead, it wasn’t food and it wasn’t excrement. It wasn’t anything I knew, but it was wrong, as wrong as the smells in Poinsettia’s apartment.

  The last time I was taken there I had been under arrest and the police put me in a raw-walled room that was made for questioning prisoners. The kind of questioning that was punctuated by fists and shoes. This time, though, they sat me at a desk with Quinten Naylor. He had a blue-and-white form in front of him and he asked me questions.

  “Name?”

  “Ezekiel Porterhouse Rawlins,” I answered.

  “Date of birth.”

  “Let’s see now,” I said. “That would be November third, nineteen hundred and twenty.”

  “Height.”

  “Close to six feet, almost six-one.”

  “Weight.”

  “One eighty-five, except at Christmas. Then I’m about one ninety.”

  He asked more questions like that and I answered freely. I trusted a Negro, I don’t know why. I’d been beaten, robbed, shot at, and generally mistreated by more colored brothers than I’d ever been by whites, but I trusted a black man before I’d even think about a white one. That’s just the way things were for me.

  “Okay, Ezekiel, tell me about Poinsettia, Reverend Towne, and that woman.”

  “They all dead, man. Dead as mackerel.”

  “Who killed them?”

  He had an educated way of talking. I could have talked like him if I’d wanted to, but I never did like it when a man stopped using the language of his upbringing. If you were to talk like a white man you might forget who you were.

  “I’ont know, man. Poinsettia kilt herself, right?”

  “Autopsy report on her will be in this evening. You got something to say about it now?”

  “They ain’t got to that yet?” I was really surprised.

  “The coroner’s working a little hard these days, Mr. Rawlins. There was that bus accident on San Remo Street and the fire in Santa Monica. Up until now we were only half sure that this was even a case,” Quinten said. “He’s been butt-high in corpses, but your turn is coming up.”

  “I don’t know nuthin’, man. I know the minister and the girl was murdered ’cause I seen the blood. I’ont know who killed ’em an’ if I get my way I ain’t gonna know. Murder ain’t got nuthin’ t’do wit’ me.”

  “That’s not how I hear it.”

  “How’s that?”

  “I hear that there were quite a few murders that you were intimate with a few years ago. Your testimony put away one of the killers.”

  “That’s right! Not me.” I pointed at my chest. “Somebody else did a killin’ an’ I told the law. If I knew today I’d tell you now. But I was dumb-assed in the basement, movin’ some clothes, when I heard Winona yell. I went up to help but I could see that they was beyond what I could do.”

  “You think Winona did it?”

  “Beats me.”

  “You see anybody else around?”

  “No,” I said. Chaim had mentioned Robert Williams, but I hadn’t seen him.

  “Nobody?”

  “I seen Chaim, an’ Chaim seen me. Tha
t’s it.”

  “Where were you before you got to work?”

  “I was at breakfast, with a friend’a mines.”

  “Who was that?”

  “Her name was Shirley.”

  “Shirley what?”

  “I don’t know the girl’s last name but I know where she lives.”

  “How long were you at the church before you went down to the basement?”

  “I went right down.”

  So we started from the top again. And again.

  One time he asked me if I heard the shots.

  “Shots?”

  “Yeah,” he answered gruffly. “Shots.”

  “They were shot?”

  “What did you think?”

  “I’ont know, man, they coulda been stabbed fo’all I know.”

  That was it for Officer Naylor. He got up and left in disgust. A few minutes later he returned and told me I could go. Chaim and Winona had been gone for hours. The police didn’t suspect them. Winona was too hysterical to be faking it, and nobody knew that Chaim was part of the Red Terror.

  I went out on the street and caught a bus down Central to the church, then I drove home. Nothing seemed quite right. Everything was off. It was strange enough that so much had happened. But now people were dying and still it didn’t make sense.

  AS IF TO PROVE MY FEARS, Mouse was on my swinging sofa on the front porch, drinking whiskey. I could smell him from ten feet away.

  He was usually a natty dresser. He wore silk and cashmere as another man might wear cotton. Women dressed him and then took him out to show the world what they had.

  He told me once that a woman had the pockets in his pants taken out and replaced them with satin so that she could stroke him under the table, or at a show, the way she did at home.

  But it wasn’t the smooth dresser I saw on my porch. He hadn’t shaved in days, and Mouse had that kind of sparse beard that looked ratty on a man. His clothes were soiled, his disposition was taciturn. And he was drunk. Not the one-night kind of drunk but a drunk that you can only get from days of booze.

  “Hiya, Easy.”

  “Mouse.”

  I sat down next to him and all of a sudden I had the feeling that we were young men again, as if we’d never left Texas. I guess that’s what I was hoping for, simpler times.