“DeFranco,” I said easily. “Bobby DeFranco. He’s a white boy.”
“I see.”
“Do the bare feet mean something?” I asked.
“Jesus went barefoot in the world,” Lister said. “So did our ancestors under the African sun.”
I wondered if Africa was all that barefooted but I didn’t want to argue. I wanted to keep the minister talking so as not to have to tell him too many lies.
I took a sip of the lemonade. It was sweet for my taste but fresh-squeezed.
“What about Vica?” I asked.
“What about her?”
“She work for you?”
“She works for our master, as we all do, brother.”
There was a minor strain of fanaticism in the minister’s tone. But I didn’t care. I once heard that extreme times call for extreme measures. Living in Watts was extreme three hundred and sixty-five days a year.
“Twenty-three adults live here among us, Brother Rawlins,” Lister said. “The women serve and raise children while the men work to pay for our bread.”
“I don’t hear any kids.”
“The school is in the basement.” He smiled and then added, “I thought that you had come to join us.”
“Join you what?”
“We’ve had six converts since the riots,” he said. “People looking for hope in a world gone crazy.”
“Might not be a bad idea,” I speculated. “What do you have to do to join up?”
“Not much. Give yourself over to our master. Dedicate your life and worldly possessions to our family.”
“That’s all?”
Reverend Lister smiled.
“Do you know him, Harley?” he said, looking at me but talking to someone else.
“No suh.”
The voice came from a door behind the red minister. A tall brown man with long arms and bulging eyes came out. He wore a gray Nehru jacket and blue jeans. There was a raised mole in the center of his forehead.
As Piedmont approached us the minister rose.
“I will leave you men to your business,” he said. “And, Brother Rawlins . . .”
“Yes sir?”
“Your life is the only thing you truly have to give.”
He turned and walked away. I watched him, thinking, rather resentfully, that what he had said might prove to be the most important lesson of my life.
“Do I know you, brother?” Piedmont asked as he lowered himself onto the couch.
“Nola Payne,” I said. “And Peter Rhone.”
Even as I spoke he rose up.
“Let’s take it outside,” he said.
Piedmont had long legs too. I had to jump up and scurry to make it with him to the door. He went through and I followed but after I crossed the threshold I turned to look once more at the consecrated living room. Vica had come back and was removing the lemonade glass I’d put on the floor in my haste to leave. She had gotten down on one knee, a voluptuous purple sail with a yellow flag dipping into a crimson sea. My breath caught as Piedmont pulled the orange door shut.
I believed at that moment that I would one day be compelled to give up my life and that when the time came I would go gladly.
I shivered at the thought and turned away.
24
On the sidewalk and two houses down Harley Piedmont stopped walking and confronted me.
“What the fuck you want, niggah?”
I remembered that the googly-eyed Piedmont had been a boxer. Boxers as a rule are peaceful men outside the ring but when they feel cornered they can be very dangerous.
“No problem, Brother Piedmont,” I said mildly, keeping my hands at my sides. “I just been hired by a woman named Geneva Landry to find out what happened to her niece—Nola.”
Piedmont’s eyes grew even larger and a bead of sweat ran a jagged line from his forehead down between his eyes, forming into a large drop at the tip of his nose. The droplet hung there precariously like a long ash at the end of a burning cigarette.
Watching him sweat reminded me that it was a hot day. Maybe he was simply overheated. Or maybe he’d come back to Nola’s place and raped and murdered her.
“What happened to Nola?” he asked.
“That’s what I asked Mr. Rhone,” I said. “He told me that she called you to take him home over in Palms. So I wondered if you had talked to the young lady again after letting him off.”
“Why would I do that?”
“Maybe to tell her that he got home all right,” I suggested. “Maybe because you all are friends. All I know is that Geneva is beside herself and the police don’t wanna hear from her.”
“Police? What do the god-danged police got to do with this?”
“Are you listenin’?” I asked. “Nola’s missin’. That’s a police matter.”
“Man, who knows where she’s gone or why? Maybe she’s with her boyfriend. Maybe, maybe . . .” But there were no other explanations he could imagine.
“Yeah,” I said, agreeing with his silence.
“So what the fuck is it to you?” Piedmont was feeling cornered again.
“I just need to know did you see her again after you took Rhone home.”
“No,” he said brusquely.
He took a step away from me.
“Maybe somebody else at the red house knows,” I said.
That simple speculation stopped him in his tracks.
“No. I’m the one drove the man. Why the hell you think the congregation knows?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “After you turned in your fifty dollars to the community jar, maybe they sent somebody over to thank her or something.”
I knew damn well that Piedmont hadn’t turned in the money he’d gotten for driving Rhone. When he’d joined the congregation he probably didn’t have twenty dollars to his name. Now that he was a member in good standing he probably did little jobs now and then, donating that money to the community pot. But something big like the fifty dollars he collected from Pete Rhone went in his pocket as silently as a shark sinking down under a swimmer’s dangling feet.
“Why you wanna be messin’ wit’ me, man?” he said.
“All I want, Mr. Piedmont, is for you to tell me what you know about the night you drove that white man home.”
“I pulled up in front of her house,” he said. “The white man jumped in, told me where he lived, and I drove off. That’s it.”
“Did Nola come down to see him off?”
“Yeah. I think so. I mean, he waved at the doorway but she didn’t come out.”
“Did you see anything else?”
“Naw, man. It was three o’clock in the mornin’. And they still had the curfew. Wasn’t nobody out except me and that white boy . . . and a old bum push a shoppin’ cart an’ live in a vacant lot down the street.”
For a moment I saw only white. It was like I had been struck by lightning and everything was bleached out and bright.
“What old bum?” I whispered.
“I’ont know his name. All I know is he live in a cardboard lean-to over off’a Grape.”
“How long?”
“How long what?” he asked.
“How long has he lived there?”
“Couple’a months. I don’t know. Bums come and go around here. On’y reason I even knew who he was is ’cause one day he asked me for a dime. I told him to get a job.”
“Where off Grape?” I asked.
“Why?”
“Not why,” I said. “Where?”
For an instant I think Piedmont was angry at my tone. There was even a shift in his shoulders indicating he was considering throwing something at me. It would have been the biggest mistake in his boxing career. The rage in my blood right then would have broken his jaw and a few ribs. He saw the fury and told me where to find the empty lot.
I WENT TO my car first. There I pulled the tire iron from the trunk and made my way to the lot. It was between what was once a grocery store and the chain-link fence of a single-family h
ome. He’d piled ten or twelve sheets of heavy cardboard against the market wall. I cleared away the makeshift paper roof with two swipes of my iron club. I was ready to swing again but there was no one home. Lucky for me because I would have killed him if it was who I suspected.
There were all the comforts of a camping life in the hovel. A glass bottle half filled with water, a dirty green blanket on a foam mat. He had a fork and three cans of sardines, a chipped china plate, and three Playboy magazines. On his one solid wall he’d scrawled a poem in red lipstick:
Dirty girls get mud in their eye
They eat maggots and die
Break brains bad things bad things
They all die down in my pantry.
Under his filthy pillow was a square green tin with the emblem of a crown on the silhouette of a man’s head at the center of the lid. Inside the tin there were three .22 caliber shells.
I went down on my knees in the dirt and rested my head against the wall. The anger in my heart was monumental. I thought back some months to a young woman named Jackie Jay and her Middle Eastern boyfriend, Musa Tanous. Jackie had been beaten to death and the cops thought that the killer was Musa. But I came to believe that a hobo named Harold had done it. I’d found Jackie’s doll collection in Harold’s lean-to and I’d seen some of her clothes in his stolen shopping cart.
The police didn’t believe me and I never saw Harold again. But I was convinced that he killed Jackie because he thought that Musa was a white man and he wanted revenge on the black woman who dared to become a white man’s lover.
“Hey you, Easy Rawlins!” someone shouted.
I didn’t respond. I didn’t know who it was calling me but I couldn’t take my mind off of Harold and Jackie and now Nola on a silver bed in a white room hidden by the same police department that refused to believe my story.
“Hey!” the voice shouted again.
Hearing the threat in his tone my body rose without my willing it to do so. I turned to see that I was faced with four men, the foremost of whom was Newell.
“You sucker punched me yesterday,” the broad-shouldered man said.
I lifted my iron in reply.
Two of the men who were with him took involuntary steps backward.
“Whu-oh,” the third one said.
“You think I’m ascared’a that crowbar?” he asked me.
I kicked him in the groin and then swung the iron at his cohorts, hitting one of them in the shoulder.
“Get the fuck outta here or I’ma kill you motherfuckahs!” I shouted at the men.
They ran and I didn’t blame them. Easy Rawlins was a crazy man right then. Insane.
Newell was in the dirt moaning when I knelt down next to him.
“Do you want me to start hittin’ you with this thing?” I asked him.
He shook his head.
“Are you scared of this crowbar now?” I asked.
He nodded so I knew he could distinguish between the words I said.
“What was the name of the bum lived in here?”
“Harold,” he said in a pained whisper.
I left him there for someone else to save. Saving wasn’t my business right then. I was ready to go out and kill a man named Harold.
25
I entered the Seventy-seventh Street police station not fifteen minutes after leaving Newell. I’d gotten out of the car with the tire iron in my hand but when a woman passing by jerked her head and skipped away from me I realized that I should put my weapon down.
Walking back to the car, I felt every step like I was walking through water. I was wasting time. What I needed to do was find Harold and kill him. I opened the trunk and threw the tire iron in and then I sprinted for the police station.
I ran up to the front door breathing hard and sweating. Anyone looking at me would have thought that I was a man in trouble. I’m sure that’s what the desk sergeant thought.
“Yes?” he asked, scrutinizing me from head to toe.
“Detective Suggs, please,” I said.
“And who are you?”
The only feature I remember about that white man was that he had red hair. Red hair like Nola Payne had. Little Scarlet murdered by Harold the tramp. If thoughts could kill, people would have fallen dead for a mile all around me.
“Easy Rawlins,” I said. “Easy Rawlins.”
“And what’s your problem, Mr. Rawlins?”
“Murder,” I said. “He asked me about a murder and I found out something he wants to know.”
I could see the cop trying to block me with some unspoken logic in his mind. The man looks crazy, he seemed to be thinking, but then again Suggs was only visiting the Seventy-seventh. I probably did know him.
There were quite a few policemen in the station. I suppose they were on overtime, making sure the people in the neighborhood didn’t burn them down.
“Have a seat,” Red said.
I went over near the bench across from his desk but stayed on my feet.
“I said sit down,” the desk sergeant commanded.
“Don’t wanna sit,” I said.
“You heard the man,” a voice to my right said.
It was from a tall uniformed cop standing nearby. He had gray hair, a young face, and a hand on his baton. I didn’t say anything to him, just stood there and stared.
“Do you want me to sit you down?” the gray-haired, boy-faced man asked.
“Fuck you.”
“Corless,” a voice I recognized said. “Stand down.”
“But, Lieutenant —”
“Stand down,” Detective Suggs said again.
He came in between me and the angry uniform.
“Fuck you,” I said again.
The gray head lunged at me but he was met by a surprisingly quick left hook thrown by the sloppy detective. Corless went down quickly and though he tried to jump back up he couldn’t find his legs.
Suggs took me by the arm and led me down a hall behind the sergeant’s desk and to an office that was a storage room not three days before. A dozen reams of paper were piled on the table he used for a desk and a three-foot pile of first-aid kits was stacked against the wall. There was a rack of shotguns on the floor and a gaping file cabinet filled with parking tickets and other traffic citations that kept the door from fully opening.
Suggs slammed the door shut.
“What’s wrong with you, Rawlins?” he said. “You off your rocker?”
“I know who killed Nola Payne.”
“Who?”
“A guy named Harold.”
“Harold what?”
“Don’t know his last name. But he killed her. I’m sure of that.”
“How do you know?”
I told Suggs about Musa Tanous and Jackie Jay, about how I met Harold once and then saw his lean-to filled with her belongings. I told him about the crazy notes he left near both crime scenes.
“Nola and the white man she was with either became lovers or Harold thought that they had. Either way, he killed her for having that white man in her place.”
I decided to leave Peter Rhone, Harley Piedmont, and Juanda out of my story. I knew who the killer was but if I threw any more names at the cops, they’d go off on some other track. And I wasn’t about to let that happen.
“How do you know that Harold was in the neighborhood?” Suggs asked. He was a good cop.
“I walked around,” I said. “Just lookin’ to get the lay of the land and I saw his teepee. It was made the same way as the last one I saw.”
“Have a seat, Mr. Rawlins,” Suggs offered.
He lifted a box full of files from a folding metal chair and slapped the seat a couple of times to move the dust around. Then he climbed over some other boxes to get to the chair behind the ancient maple desk.
I sat too.
Suggs’s fawn-colored eyes seemed to be asking me for something. He took a deep breath and let out a sigh.
“I’m not leavin’ here until you do somethin’ about Harold,” I said. �
�Last time I told the cops—right here in this station—they said I was crazy to think that a bum could be that good at killin’.”
“I believe you,” Suggs said.
I didn’t know what he meant by that. I mean, he could have been saying that he believed that the cops in the station would say such a thing. But that didn’t mean he bought my story about Harold.
Suggs laid his hand on a green folder filled with maybe two hundred sheets of paper.
“While I’ve been here waiting for you to come up with something,” he said, “I’ve been taking up my time looking at the files of the open homicide cases of women in the neighborhood. At first I only went back one year but now I’m up to seven . . .”
It had only been a couple of days. That kind of work would have meant he was on the job almost around the clock.
“. . . and I found something disturbing,” he continued, opening the file. On the front page he had typed a long list of names down the left side with a shorter list to the right. “Thirty-seven unsolved homicides of women under forty. Most of them were in relationships with violent men. But six were not and four more were involved with men who had no history of violence. Your Jackie Jay was one of those.”
He turned the page to a handwritten sheet.
“Each of the ten was strangled, a few of them were beaten, and one was stabbed after she was dead. None were raped. I don’t believe that Nola Payne was raped either. Two of the women were married to white men.”
He looked up at me and I felt that a door opened somewhere. It was as if I had been held prisoner for so long that I’d forgotten there ever was a door to freedom. And now that it was open I didn’t know exactly what to do.
“You found that just by lookin’ through the files?” I asked.
Suggs nodded.
“You mean somebody around here could have sat down in this messy room and read the files and come up with this list?”
“Yeah.” Suggs’s admission carried a heavy weight with it. “I mean, I’m pretty good at this kind of work. That’s why they have me on the case but somebody should have picked it up before this.”
“And what about women killed that you found killers for?” I asked. “What about some innocent men up in jail for women that Harold killed?”
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