A Red Death

by Mosley, Walter

  “I ain’t got my gun, man,” Mouse said.

  “No?”

  “Naw.”

  “How come?”

  “Might kill somebody, Easy. Somebody I don’t wanna kill.”

  “Whas wrong wit’ you, Ray? You sick?”

  He laughed, hunching forward as if he were having a seizure.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Sick. Sick t’ death of all this pain.”

  “What pain is that?”

  He looked into my eyes with a steely gray gaze. “You seen my boy?”

  “Yeah, when Etta come she brought him.”

  “He’s a beautiful boy, ain’t he?”

  I nodded.

  “He got big feet and a big mouf. Shit, that’s all you need in this world. That’s all you need.”

  Mouse stopped talking, so I said, “He’s a great boy. Strong, and he’s smart too.”

  “He’s the devil hisself,” Mouse whispered to his left arm.

  “What’s that you said?”

  “Satan. Evil angel’a hell. You could tell the way his eyebrows goes up, makin’ like horns.”

  “LaMarque kinda mischievous, but he ain’t bad, Raymond.”

  “Satan in hell. Black cats and voodoo curse. You ’member Mama Jo?”

  “Yeah.”

  I’d never forget her.

  Mouse had conned me into driving him, in a stolen car, to a small bayou town in eastern Texas called Pariah. We were barely in our twenties but Mouse’s true nature was already fully developed. He wanted a dowry his mother had promised him before she died. He was to marry EttaMae and he said, “I will get that money or Daddy Reese will be dead.” Reese was Mouse’s stepfather.

  But before we ever got to Pariah, Mouse had me drive to a place out in the middle of the swamplands. There we came to a house hidden on all sides by pear trees that doubled as pillars. And in that house lived the country witch, Mama Jo. She was a six-foot-six witch who lived by her wits out beyond the laws of normal men. She was twenty years older than I, and I was barely twenty. But she put a spell on me when we stayed with her for a night. Mouse was out planning the murder and Mama Jo had me by the hair. I was screaming love for her and talking out of my head. I remembered the smell of her breath: sweet chili and garlic, bitter wine and stale tobacco.

  “She always told me,” Mouse said, “that sometimes evil come down on ya when you live bad. Evil come out in your chirren if you don’t pay fo’ what you done.”

  “LaMarque ain’t like that, Ray.”

  “How you know?” he shouted, rearing up belligerently. “That boy done give me the eye, Easy. He tole me hisself that he hates me. He tole me hisself that he wisht I was dead. Now tell me it don’t take a evil son to make that kinda wish on his own daddy.”

  I was thinking about Etta. I was trying to figure out how I thought I could get away with being her lover and Mouse’s friend too.

  “He don’t hate you, Ray. He just a boy an’ he mad that you an’ Etta cain’t be together.”

  “Devil outta hell,” he whispered again. Then he said, “I did what a daddy’s s’posed, Ease. I mean, I ain’t ever seen my own daddy, an’ you know I killed Reese.”

  Mouse had finally murdered his stepfather despite my attempts to stop him.

  “Yeah,” Mouse continued. “Kilt ’im dead. But you know him an’ his son Navrochet beat me reg’lar an’ laughed on it too.”

  Mouse had also killed his stepbrother, Navrochet.

  “LaMarque don’t think’a you like that, Ray,” I said.

  “Yes he do. Yes he do. An’ you know I ain’t given him no reason, man. You know I loved that boy an’ I done right by him.” There were tears streaming down his face. “You know sometimes I pick him up an’ take ’im down t’ Zelda’s big-timin’ house. The ho’s there love it when you bring a boy. They jus’ fuss over him an’ give ’im chocolates. An’ I shows ’im how t’gamble an’ dance. But you know he start t’actin’ shy an’ scared an’ shit. Embarrass me in front’a Zelda herself.

  “But you know he always runnin’ after me t’go t’the baf-room at the same time.” Mouse smiled then. “He look at Dick like he ain’t never seen nuthin’ that big. Then, right after the las’ time we went, he tole me that he don’t wanna go nowhere wit’ me no mo’. He won’t even talk to’ me an’ if I try an’ make ’im he scream like a demon, right out there in the middle’a the street just like I was a bad man, like Reese.”

  Before Mouse got the drop on Reese the old farmer had us on the run through the swamp. Raymond had killed one of his hunting dogs, but he had two more and they were chasing us down through the trees. We finally escaped, but by then it was nightfall and we had to stay outside for the night. I had the grippe and Mouse curled around me like a momma cat, keeping me warm through the night. I might have died if he hadn’t cared for me.

  I reached out my hands and held him by the forearms while he cried. It was loud and embarrassing but I didn’t let go.

  “I’m sorry, Raymond,” I said after he stopped. He looked up at me, his eyes were red and his nose was running.

  “I love that boy, Easy.”

  “He loves you too, man. That’s your son, your blood. He loves you.”

  “Then why he act like that?”

  “He just a li’l boy, that’s all. You go down wit’ all them wild folks you know an’ he get so scared an’ worked up that he wanna get outta there. He cain’t stand it.”

  “Why don’t he tell me that? I take ’im fishin’.”

  “He prob’ly don’t know, man. You know kids don’t really think, ’cept ’bout what feel good, and what don’t.”

  Mouse sat back and stared at me as if I had just pulled a rabbit out of my ear. I could see the change come about in him. He sat up a little straighter, his eyes cleared.

  I said, “Why don’t you come on in? You get a shower and a good night’s sleep. I’ll talk wit’ LaMarque the next time I’m over there.”

  I MADE THE CALL while Mouse was in the shower.

  “How’s it going, Mr. Rawlins?” Special Agent Craxton asked.

  “Minister and his girlfriend got killed.”

  “What?”

  I told him about the murders. He asked all sorts of questions about the room.

  Finally he said, “Sounds like a professional job.”

  “Could just be a good shot.”

  “Then why wasn’t anything moved around, messed up?”

  “She was down on his peter, man, maybe her husband found ’em. Maybe Winona found ’em and she thought Towne was hers.”

  “Maybe. Hear me,” he said. “I’ll look into things on my end. Meanwhile, you find out what you can about the minister. Who has he been seeing, what kind of political connections does he have?”

  Craxton was the boss, so I said, “Okay.”

  Raymond came out of the shower with a towel around his hips and a smile on his face.

  “You look better,” I said.

  “And you look like you just swallowed a pig. What’s wrong, Easy?”

  “You might as well ask what’s right.”

  “You gonna talk to LaMarque fo’ me?”

  “Soon as I can, man.”

  He laughed like a small boy, younger even than his son.

  “Then tell me what’s wrong.”

  “I owe a man some money an’ he holds the deed t’my houses. He want me to find some stuff on some men work down at First African.”

  I lied to Mouse because I was afraid that if I told him the truth he might decide to do me a Louisiana kind of favor, like burning down the IRS office, records and all.

  “Yeah?”

  “So then the minister, Reverend Towne, and some girl gets killed and I was there when it happened. And another man work for the first man’s company still wants my houses and a girl live in one’a my places hung herself on account of I wanted t’ throw her out. Or maybe she was murdered.”

  “You talk wit’ the boy an’ I kill the men, Easy.”

  “Naw,
man. They work fo’ big companies. You know, cut off one an’ two take his place.”

  “White men?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You think about it, man. If you want sumpin’ just call me.”

  He dressed in the bathroom and left soon afterward. He didn’t stay, because his good clothes were at Dupree’s and he was ready to look good again.

  After he’d gone I went to my bed and drank three glasses of whiskey too fast. I passed out thinking that I should call EttaMae.

  — 24 —

  THE FAT AMBULANCE ATTENDANT stood awkwardly on a high kitchen chair, a butcher’s knife in his hand.

  He was sawing at the rope Poinsettia hung from. The sound was loud, like two men hacking at a tree. Finally she fell to the floor. The dead weight hit with a terrible impact. Her body had become soft and so punky that one of her arms and her head flew off. But it was the sound as she hit the floor that was the worst. The floorboards started rattling and the walls shook. The whole house vibrated with the power of an earthquake.

  When I started awake it was barely dawn. The sky out my window had that weak blue of the early sun, but the racket hadn’t stopped. For a moment I thought that I was really in an earthquake. But then I realized that it was someone knocking at the door.

  When that someone shouted, “Police!” I thought that I would rather it be a natural disaster.

  “Hold on!” I shouted back. I hauled on some slacks and a T-shirt and stepped into a beat-up pair of slippers.

  When I opened the door Naylor and Reedy each took hold of an arm.

  “You’re under arrest,” Naylor said, then he spun me around and put on the handcuffs.

  I wasn’t surprised, so I didn’t say anything. If somebody had taken me out behind the house and put a bullet in my head I wouldn’t have been surprised. There was nothing I could do, so I just hung my head and hoped I could ride out the storm.

  I rode it out to the Seventy-seventh Street station. There they put me in a small room with the handcuffs still on. After a while the fat policeman with the red face, Officer Fine, came in to keep me company.

  I asked him, “Am I under arrest?”

  He showed me a mouth full of bad teeth.

  “Well if I am I should be allowed a call, right?”

  That didn’t even get him to smile.

  After a short while Reedy came in and asked the fat man to sit in the hall. He looked at me with sad green eyes and said, “Do you want to confess, Mr. Rawlins?”

  “I wanna make a call is all.”

  Naylor came in then. They pulled up chairs on either side of me.

  “I don’t have much patience with murderers, Mr. Rawlins, especially when those murderers have killed a woman. A Negro woman at that,” Naylor said. “So I want to know what happened or Reedy and I are going to go for coffee and we’re going to leave Fine to ask the questions.”

  “That’s mighty white’a you, brother,” I grinned.

  He slapped my face, not too hard though. I got the feeling that Quinten Naylor was trying to save me from real injury.

  “Wanna get Fine?” Reedy asked while stifling a yawn.

  “Who killed the minister and the girl?” Naylor asked me.

  “I’ont know, man, I’ont know.”

  “Who killed Poinsettia Jackson?”

  “She killed herself, right?”

  They both were looking at me hard.

  “I found ’er hangin’ there, thas it, hangin’. I ain’t killed nobody.”

  “But somebody hit her on the head, Easy. They knocked her unconscious and hung her from the light fixture,” Naylor said. “Then they knocked the chair over to make it look like she’d used it to hang herself, but the chair was too far from the body, that’s how we got onto them. They murdered her, Easy. Now do you know why anybody would want to do that?”

  Philadelphia! It came to me just that fast. Quinten was an eastern Negro from Philadelphia, I’d’ve bet anything.

  “Mr. Rawlins,” Reedy said.

  “How should I know?”

  “Maybe you know someone who had a motive, a reason,” Reedy continued. Naylor sat back and stared.

  “Why anybody wanna kill a sick girl?”

  “Maybe to get her ass outta that apartment.”

  “How should I know? Why don’t you ask the owner?”

  “I’m asking,” Reedy said. He was looking me in the eye.

  I pretended that I was alone on a raft in a rough sea. The policemen were sharks cruising my craft. I was safe for the moment, but I was taking on water.

  “I wanna lawyer, I wanna make some calls.”

  “Why’d you lie to us, man?” Naylor asked. He sounded embarrassed, as if my little trick made him look bad at the station.

  “Just gimme a phone, all right?”

  “We’ll give you Officer Fine,” Reedy said.

  “Send the mothahfuckah in then,” the voice in my head said. “Let’s see us some blood.”

  I didn’t say a word but stared bullets at the cops instead. I knew how to take a beating. My old man used to take me out behind the house many a time before he finally left for good. Sometimes, when I was still a boy, I missed his whipping stick.

  Reedy said, “Shit!” and walked out. Officer Fine replaced him by the door.

  Naylor leaned close to me and said, “This could turn ugly, Ezekiel. I can’t protect you if you don’t give.”

  “Cut that shit out, man. You one’a them. You dress like them an’ you talk like them too.”

  “Detective Reedy wants you in the hall, Naylor,” Fine said. He was almost polite.

  “Let me get a call or two, man,” I hissed at Naylor. “You wanna save my ass, gimme some rights.”

  I held my breath while the black cop thought. Fine would have liked to kill me, I could tell that by the way he smelled.

  “Come on,” Naylor finally said.

  “Hey wha …” Fine started to say, but Quinten stood up to him, and Quinten Naylor looked to be made from bricks.

  “He’s going to make a call. That’s his right,” Naylor said.

  Naylor unlocked my handcuffs and led me down the hall toward a small area that was partitioned off by three frosted glass walls. Each one was about six feet high. There was a phone on a wooden stool in the cubicle.

  “There you go,” Naylor said to me, then he stood back to show me some privacy. Reedy came down with Fine and the three men started to haggle. I was a dead longhorn and those men were vultures, every one of them.

  I dialed Mofass’s office. No answer.

  I dialed the boardinghouse he lived in. On the third ring Hilda Bark, the owner’s daughter, answered. “Yeah?”

  “Mofass there?”

  “He gone.”

  “Gone where?”

  “Gone. Don’t you understand English?” she scolded me the way her mother must have scolded her. “He left.”

  “You mean he moved out?”

  “Uh-huh,” she grunted and then she hung up.

  The men were still haggling over my bones, so I quickly dialed Craxton’s number.

  “FBI,” a bright male voice said.

  “Yeah, yeah, right. Can I talk to Agent Craxton?”

  “Agent Craxton is in the field today. He’ll be back tomorrow. Would you like to leave a message?”

  “Is he gonna call in?”

  “Hard to say, sir. Agent Craxton is a field agent. He goes where he wants to and calls when he feels like it.”

  “Please tell him that this is Ezekiel Rawlins calling from the Seventy-seventh Street police station. Tell him that I need to see him down here right away.”

  “What’s the nature of your business?”

  “Just tell ’im, man.”

  He hung up on me too.

  The next place I dialed was First African Day School. The phone was ringing when Fine came up and grabbed me by the shoulder.

  “Nobody else was home,” I told him.

  “Okay,” he smiled. He’d wait until
I was finished with this call and then he’d see how loud I could scream.

  “Hello?” a voice I didn’t recognize said.

  “May I speak to Odell Jones, please?”

  There was a long wait but Odell finally came on the line.

  “Yes?”

  “Odell?”

  “Easy?”

  “Man, I’m in trouble.”

  “That’s how you was born, man. Born to trouble an’ bringin’ everybody else down wit’ you.”

  “They got me in jail, Odell.”

  “That’s where criminals belong, Easy, in jail.” He even raised his voice!

  “Listen, man, I ain’t had nuthin’ t’ do wit’ Towne. It wasn’t me, not at all.”

  “If it wasn’t you then tell me this,” he said. “If you didn’t go out there to the church in the first place would he be dead now?”

  It was a good question. I didn’t have an answer.

  “So what you want?” he asked curtly.

  “Come get me outta here, man.”

  “How’m I gonna do that? I ain’t got no money. All I got is God.”

  “Odell,” I pleaded.

  “Call on someone else, Easy Rawlins, this well is dry.”

  Three strikes and Fine took me by the arm.

  “I’m off duty now, Mr. Rawlins,” Quinten Naylor said. “Officer Fine will continue your interrogation.”

  — 25 —

  OFFICER FINE WAS A PATIENT MAN. Patient and delicate. He and his partner, a wan-faced rookie called Gabor, taught me little secrets like how far an arm can be twisted before it will break.

  “All you gotta do is take your time,” Fine said to no one in particular, as he twisted my right hand toward the base of my skull. “I could get these here fingers over the head and into the mouth and he’d probably bite ’em off t’ stop the hurt.”

  “Don’t give in, Easy!” the voice screamed in my head.

  “Why’d you kill her?” Gabor asked me. I wanted to hit him but my feet and my left hand were manacled to the chair.

  We’d been playing the game for over an hour. I’d been slapped, kicked, beaten with a rolled-up magazine, and twisted like a licorice stick.