“It’s like you say,” I said. “She looked weak, fragile. I figured maybe you’d know.”
“Maybe so but . . . I mean she’s talkin’ to me because it’s a confidence and she thinks I’ll keep her secret.”
“Did she ask you not to tell?” I asked.
“No. But I’m sure she wouldn’t like it.”
“If what she told you didn’t have to do with who else might have killed Nola then I won’t tell anybody,” I said. “I just want to know how to understand why she thinks that white man killed Nola.”
“It’s ’cause of what happened to her that she’s so upset,” Tina said. “But that don’t mean that white man didn’t kill her.”
“What happened to her?”
“She, I mean her father used to work for this white man outside of Lafayette —”
“Louisiana?”
“Uh-huh. Anyway, they grew pecans down there and Miss Landry’s father would spend the whole day out on the plantation takin’ care of the trees. And when the white man knew that her father would be gone a long time he’d go up and find little Ginny and do things to her. Things that most women wouldn’t let their husbands do.”
“How old was she?”
“It started when she was twelve,” Tina said. “He did that to her three or four times a week. And when she’d cry and beg him not to, he’d tell her that if her father ever found out, they’d have to kill him because he would go crazy and try and kill a white man if they didn’t.”
“So she never told anyone?”
“No. And that’s why she’s so upset. She feels that if she had told Nola, then Nola woulda known that you couldn’t trust a white man. That all white men wanted to do was rape and defile black women.”
Tina felt the pain of her charge.
I took her hand and she grabbed on to me. What had happened to Geneva Landry could happen to any black woman. She had to take mountains of abuse while protecting her blood. She could never speak about the atrocities done to her while at the same time she dressed the wounds of her loved ones. Of course they both hated the white man who took refuge in a black woman’s home.
But even with all that I had to wonder—where did that pistol come from?
AT THE CASH register I had to wave to get the cook’s attention.
“How much we owe?” I asked him.
“Margie,” he shouted to the waitress. “The man wants his check.”
The blond waif shook her head and ran through a door at the back of the restaurant.
“Go on,” the cook said to me. “I guess it’s on the house today.”
20
I dropped Tina off at her bus stop on Pico and then drove toward the address for Peter Rhone on Castle Heights a few blocks south of Cattaraugus. I had all of Mr. Rhone’s information on his registration forms taken from the Galaxie 500.
I got lost for a while driving around the Palms area looking for a way to Rhone’s house. On the way I thought about Margie. I knew Nips Coffee Shop from the time I bought my house down on Genesee. I had seen the small waitress there for the past three years. She never remembered me, though. I gave my order and she filled it with neither a smile nor a frown on her face. But today she was afraid to be in my company. She still didn’t recognize me and so, as I drove around the white neighborhood, I began to see that my history with white people was much more complex than I had ever thought it was. On the one hand Margie had ignored my existence, and on the other I scared her to death. And even while she feared me she still didn’t know me. And what about that cook? How did his impatience with her fears fit in?
I didn’t come up with an answer. But after forty-five minutes of driving in circles I found Peter Rhone’s home.
It was coral pink and box shaped. The roof was flat and the drainpipes were painted a light rust color. The front door was turquoise, and white dahlias decorated the fence around his lawn. There was a lemon-yellow Chevy in the driveway and only one banister for the three wooden steps that led to the front door.
Four weeks ago this house would have sold for three times the amount that the same home would have gone for in Watts. Now the multiplier was more probably five.
“Hello,” she said, answering my knock.
She was a small woman with brown hair piled up into a helmet on the top of her head. She was thirty but wearing braces.
“Peter Rhone,” I said.
“He’s sick,” she told me.
“Yeah,” I said. “I know what happened to him. But you have to believe me when I tell you that he really needs to talk to me. Now.”
“What’s your name?”
“My name is John Lancer. I think I might have some information that he would want to know.”
“What is it about, Mr. Lancer?”
“It’s private.”
“I’m his wife.”
“And I’m sure he will want to talk to you about what I have to say. But believe me, ma’am, it is not my place to talk about it first.”
She blinked three times and then turned her head.
“Peter. Peter, it’s some man named Lancer.”
She turned back to me and looked me up and down. I was wearing the same work clothes I had on when I went down to Nola’s neighborhood. Realizing this set off a chain reaction of thoughts. First I thought that I needed a bath and a shave as soon as possible. Then I wondered why I hadn’t even yawned, when I’d been up and moving for well over twenty-four hours. I also realized that I hadn’t spoken to Bonnie since leaving with Mouse. Thinking of Bonnie reminded me of Juanda. Luckily, before I could go too far down that road a man appeared out of the mist of the Rhones’ screen door.
There was a deep cut on the left side of his swollen lower lip, a knot over his right eye, and two fingers of his left hand were taped together.
“Yes?” he asked affably in spite of his obvious discomfort.
“Peter Rhone?”
“Yes. And you are?”
“My name is John Lancer.”
“Oh. Do I know you?”
“I think you might have met my cousin Nola when you were down on Grape Street a few days ago.”
“I think so,” he said. “She was the neighbor of the people that took me in.”
Mrs. Rhone was paying close attention to our lies.
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s what she said. Anyway, Mr. Rhone, I have something very important to discuss with you. I’m sorry but it has to be private.”
“I told him that you were sick, Peter,” his wife said.
“That’s okay, Theda,” he told her. “You know I owe these people something. Mr. Lancer, there’s a park just a few blocks down from here. We could go sit on a bench there for a while.”
I smiled and nodded.
“Peter,” Mrs. Rhone said.
“It’s okay, honey.”
He pulled the screen door open and said, “It’s just a few blocks. We can walk.”
We walked out of the flowery yard and turned right onto Castle Heights.
Peter Rhone was a tall man and good-looking in a boyish kind of way. He was lean and fair with blond hair and blue eyes—just the kind of man who had no business in Watts when there was a riot going on.
I noticed that he limped slightly when he walked.
“Looks like it’s cooling down a bit,” he said as we strolled toward the corner.
“Yeah. But the heat’s still here,” I replied.
“I like a hot day,” he said. “It’ll be cold enough, long enough later on.”
We were at the corner.
“So tell me what happened when you were at Nola’s,” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean—what happened?”
“Are you her husband?” he asked then. That was the first moment I had an inkling that the situation was much more complex than I had even suspected.
“Nola’s dead,” I said.
Peter stopped walking. He grabbed me by the forearm.
“What? What happened?
” There were already tears in his eyes. “What happened?”
“That’s what I wanted to ask you.”
Peter glanced back toward his house. I did too.
Theda Rhone was standing on the sidewalk, looking at us.
“Come on,” Rhone said. “Let’s keep walking.”
He turned and started moving at a fast pace.
I kept up with him. Walking is what I did all day long at Sojourner Truth. There was both an upper and a lower campus and space enough for over thirty-five hundred students. Some days I didn’t sit at all.
As we walked he kept asking what happened. Finally I told him about Nola and Geneva and her claims.
At the end of the third block we came to a small park. It had four or five trees and two benches. Peter sat and started rocking.
“Who could have done such a thing?” he said. “Who?”
“Everybody I’ve talked to has got their money on you.”
“Me? Why would I? She saved my life.”
“Maybe she wanted something you couldn’t give,” I suggested.
“Like what?”
“Maybe she was going to call your wife.”
“Why would she? I was going to leave Theda. I told Nola that.”
“Come again?”
“I loved your cousin. Didn’t she tell you that?”
“Well,” I said. “I have to admit that I misled you, Mr. Rhone. My name is Easy Rawlins and the first time I saw Nola was on a coroner’s slab.”
“I, I don’t understand. What do you have to do with her . . .” His words trailed off because he didn’t want to call her dead.
“The police are stepping lightly around this murder —”
“Murder,” he repeated the word.
“Yeah. Anyway, the cops called on me because I know people around the neighborhood and I can ask questions without arousing too much attention. You know public attention to her murder could set off the riots all over again.”
“I don’t understand, Mr. Rawlins. Who would want to kill Nola?”
There we were again. By now I was more than half convinced that he hadn’t killed her. Rhone wasn’t trying to hide anything from me. He was frightened but not for himself. Nola was still alive in this man’s heart.
“Do you own a gun, Peter?”
“A twenty-five-caliber pistol.”
“Where is it?”
“In my house. In the dresser.”
It was a beautiful day. Low eighties and fairly clear. There was a robin singing somewhere and the traffic was sparse.
“Why don’t you tell me what happened, Peter? Then maybe I can help make some sense out of it all.”
21
I don’t understand, Mr. Rawlins,” Peter Rhone said. “Are you with the police department?”
“No. Not with them. If I was, I would have turned you in the minute I got your name. But they asked me to help them solve Nola’s murder before the newspapers got hold of it because they want to keep a lid on Watts.”
“So you’re a detective?”
“Think of me as a concerned citizen who has the ear of the police and you have a good idea of what I’m doing here.”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe I shouldn’t be talking to you.”
“Fine,” I said. “But when I give the police your address they’ll have you in jail and up on charges before you can explain to your wife what you were doing down there in a black woman’s arms.”
Peter Rhone was staring deeply into my eyes. His face was quivering and his fingers were more jittery than those of a two-year-old who’s just eaten a chocolate bar.
“The news hasn’t said anything about Nola . . . There were no reports.”
“She was strangled and then she was shot. Beaten too,” I said.
It was no proof but it broke the man down emotionally. His head lowered nearly to his knees.
“I wondered why she wasn’t home,” he said. “I’ve been calling every chance I get. She didn’t come in to work either.”
“She’s dead,” I said again.
“What did you want to know?” he asked.
“Did you kill Nola?”
“No. No.”
“Did you have sex with her on Tuesday night?”
His forehead touched his left knee.
“Yes,” he said.
“She was willing?”
“Very much. Very much. She was so happy that I was there and, and . . . she kissed me. That’s what started it. She kissed me.”
“Why did you go to her house in the first place?”
“I had driven down to Grape Street looking for her.”
“You already knew her?”
“Yes. Didn’t you know? She works in the office where I do on Wilshire. Nola’s the daytime switchboard operator at Trevor Enterprises.”
“What do you do there?”
“I broker advertising deals. You see, people come to us to find out where they should advertise. We have contacts throughout the southland, so people, especially companies with out-of-town staffs, rely on us for intelligence.”
“And how well did you know Nola?” I asked.
“The operator’s room is next to my office,” he said. “And somehow we started bringing in coffee for each other every other day. Usually it was just a drop-off but sometimes we’d gab a little bit before getting to work. At first, you know, I was just nice to her because the operator is the most important job at Trevor Ent.”
“How’s that?”
“A lot of times people call in wanting help but they have to rely on Nola to route the call to the right person. She was a smart girl so she knew a good prospect when it came in. And if it was good she’d give it to me if it seemed up my alley. Not a bad dividend for two cups of coffee a week.
“But after a while I started liking her. She was smart. Read all the magazines and papers that came through the office and she knew more about baseball than I did. We were friends.”
“So how does that turn into you making love to her with the city burning down around your heads?” I asked.
“When the riots started, Theda went down to La Jolla to visit her uncle and aunt. They’re her closest family and they were afraid that a race war was coming. Crazy. I went to work in the morning and Nola didn’t come in. I worried about her all day and then finally I called in the afternoon. She was so frightened. I could hear it in her voice. She hadn’t come to work because she had to take the bus and she was afraid of snipers. So I told her that I’d come and get her and drop her off with some friends that lived down around Venice.”
“So you worked until the end of the day and then drove down into the riot?”
I had always been amazed by the ignorance that white people showed about blacks. Most of the times I was angry at their lack of awareness—this time I was enthralled. Peter Rhone might have been the only white man in L.A. who wanted to drive down into Watts in order to save a colored woman from the riots.
“And they got you,” I said.
“Yeah.” Peter nodded his battered head. “Beat me pretty bad. All I could do was run toward Nola’s address. And there she was. She threw a blanket over me and took me into her building. They knocked out a tooth and I was bleeding from the head. There I was, trying to save her and she saved me instead.
“We talked for three days. She told me all about her family and her Aunt Geneva. I told her about my wife. She had a boyfriend but she wasn’t in love with him.”
His mentioning Geneva Landry reminded me of something.
“Why didn’t Geneva know your last name?” I asked.
“What?”
“Didn’t she talk to her aunt every day?”
“Yeah. Little Scarlet would call her aunt at sunset each day. Geneva would call at other times too—whenever she was scared.”
“What did you call her?”
“Little Scarlet. That was her nickname. After we got, uh, close she wanted me to call her that.”
I couldn’t see how a
rapist-murderer could possibly learn his victim’s pet name.
“Well, why didn’t she tell her that the white man she saved was from her job?” I asked anyway.
“Because I’m married. She didn’t want to start any gossip about me.”
“And how did you get out of there?”
“Early . . . early on Wednesday morning Nola got her neighbor to take me home. I paid him fifty dollars.”
“Did he see you with Nola?”
“No. She just called him and told him to pick me up in front of the house at three.”
“And before all that you fell in love?” I didn’t mean to let my cynicism show but it was hard to hide.
“It’s true.”
And why not? A cute white boy was worth a second look, especially if he was willing to brave the riots to save a young damsel in her tenement tower. He might even be worth a third look. And if he told her that he’d leave his wife to marry her it could well have been too good to pass up. I mean, how many times are there in a young woman’s life when a man would give all that up for her? Imagine what kind of father a man like that would make.
“Who was the man who drove you?” I asked.
“Piedmont is what he called himself,” Rhone said. “I don’t even know if that’s a first or last name.”
“What did he look like?”
“Your height but not so filled out,” he said. “Same color as you are and he had very long fingers and arms. And . . . and he had a mole right in the center of his forehead. I remember because every once in a while he’d touch it.”
“Did you see anybody else while you were laid up at Nola’s?”
“No. Neither one of us left the apartment.”
“What about Theda?”
“What about her?”
“Didn’t she wonder where you were?”
“I called her at her relatives’ and said that I’d got caught in the riots and that a family took me in. I said that they didn’t have a phone and that I was using a phone booth to call.”
“And she believed that?”
“She was staying with people who believed there was a race war unfolding in the streets.”
I thought about Margie, a woman who was so afraid of the riots that she couldn’t even bring me my bill.
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