I couldn’t run because of my wounds. I should have shuffled off but I didn’t. Instead I jumped through the doorway and yelled.
Mouse looked up from my chair. He had his feet on the tabledesk, leaning back against the windowsill. He smiled when he saw me.
“Hey, Ease,” he said. “How you doin’?”
I sighed but said nothing. I just walked to the visitor’s chair and sat down with my wounded leg out straight in front of me.
“I saw Benita,” Mouse said. “She was at the hospital with Bonnie and them.”
I nodded and wondered where I could find Harold.
“She told me that she almost did herself in, that you busted down her door and took her to the hospital.”
“Was my door open when you got here, Ray?”
“Naw. I jimmied it. I figured it didn’t matter ’cause it was already fucked up from that gunfire.”
“How long you been here?”
Raymond shook his head and pointed his gray eyes at the ceiling. “Couple’a hours. More.”
“What you want?” I asked.
“You saved her life, Easy. Here I fucked around and almost got the girl killed but you showed up. There you were and now Benita got a new chance. That ain’t half bad. I just wanted to tell you.”
I noticed that Jackson’s tape had moved. Between the desk and the back of my chair I was able to press myself into a standing position. I turned the arrow switch to “rewind” and then I switched it to “play.”
“Easy, are you there?” Bonnie’s worried voice asked. “The hospital called and said that you checked out without paying your bill. I’m calling everyone to find you. Raymond said that he’d look for you and if you called and had trouble, he said to leave a message with EttaMae.”
“Where are you, Mr. Rawlins?” Juanda said then. “I been waitin’ for you to call me. I wanna see you real bad.”
Mouse’s eyes lit up at Juanda’s tone. He gave me a look that almost made me laugh but I was knee-deep in dead black women. From where I stood laughter was a sin.
“Mr. Rawlings? Are you there?” a timid woman’s voice asked. If I didn’t know better I would have said that it was a slender child talking. But I did know better.
“I need you to come over here, Mr. Rawlings. It’s Honey May. I think you might wanna hear what I got to say.”
Jackson left me a message and so did Jewelle. Both of them were thanking me.
I picked up the phone and called Bonnie.
“Hello,” a musical male Spanish voice answered.
“Hey, Juice. How you doin’, boy?”
“Daddy,” he said.
That one word called up a deep emotion in me. Jesus hadn’t called me daddy since we were alone with no Feather or Bonnie or nice house in West L.A. He was my baby boy again and it hurt me that I’d put him through so much pain.
“I’m okay, Juice. Just had to do a thing or two before getting to you.”
“Where are you?”
“At the office with Raymond. He’s gonna help me close out my business and then you and me and Bonnie and your sister are all going to San Francisco for a vacation like we used to do a long time ago.”
“Okay,” the boy said. “But you’re okay?”
“Those bullets just stung.”
Feather stayed on the phone with me for ten minutes asking about my leg and my arm and my fingers one at a time. She knew each wound and wanted to know what they looked like and how they felt.
Bonnie didn’t speak many words. She was waiting for me. That’s all I needed to know.
“Baby,” she said. “Benita wants to say hi.”
“Mr. Rawlins?” Benita said. She never called me Easy again. “I just wanted to say that I know you’re busy and I’m sorry that you got shot. And thank you so much for takin’ the time to help me get back on my feet. I told Raymond that you saved my life and he said that you were the only good man that he ever knew.”
I looked up at my crazy friend then. He smiled and nodded as if he knew what she was saying.
“I’ll see you later on, Miss Flag,” I said. Then I hung up the phone and limped back to the chair.
“What’s up, Ease?” Mouse asked just as if it was a normal day and we were sitting on the front porch watching the children playing with a water hose.
“You got a gun, Mouse?”
“Hell, yeah. I got two.”
Finally something I could laugh about.
50
I wasn’t too worried about Honey May. She wasn’t the type to take a shot at you and she was too kindhearted to lie and bushwhack someone. Raymond and I went to the door and knocked.
“Who is it?”
“Easy Rawlins, Honey. Me and a friend.”
“I didn’t expect you to bring a party, Mr. Rawlins,” the closed door said.
“It’s all right, ma’am. He’s family.”
Honey pulled the door open and waved for us to hurry up into the small purple room.
I say purple instead of violet because the shades were pulled and the lighter color had taken a more sinister hue. This was accented by the corpse of Harold Ostenberg, which lay on the little couch that wasn’t quite large enough to contain him.
One eye was open. There was dried foam on his lips. His jeans had been starched by street living and his shirt was a color that no manufacturer could duplicate. There was blood near the shoulder of his army surplus jacket. I pulled the fabric back to see the wound.
There was a glass next to him on a small table. It contained the dregs of a milky fluid. Next to the bed was a fancy pillow—probably from his mother’s house.
“He died,” Honey said.
Mouse nodded.
Someone had taken Harold’s shoes off. His feet were chafed from too much weight and motion, the twin banes of a homeless man’s life.
“Why did you call me, Honey?”
“I didn’t know what to do.”
I picked up the water glass and sniffed it.
“What do you want me to do?”
“Tell the police that he’s dead,” she said. She went to a chair and sat down heavily. “I don’t know.”
“How long has he been here?”
“Since late last night,” she whimpered.
“When did he die?”
“’Bout daybreak, I suppose.”
“Did he say anything before?” I didn’t want to upset her but I had to know.
“Oh yeah. It was awful. Women he hunted and then killed and robbed. He said that his mama shot him and that he killed her to protect himself. I pretended to go down to the store and I called her house and the po-lice answered. I hung right up then.
“He killed women just like you said, Mr. Rawlings —”
“Hey, Easy,” Mouse said.
He had pulled back Harold’s coat, revealing a pistol, .22 caliber from the looks of it.
“Go on, Honey,” I said.
“That’s all really. He was scared from bein’ shot. He said that his mama shot him. But when he talked about it I could tell that she shot him tryin’ to save her life. It sounded like he done killed a dozen women.”
“Did he name them?”
Honey just shook her head.
“So you decided that you would kill him,” I said.
She looked up at me as if I had just discovered the secret of eternal life. There was no denial. How could there be? The sleeping powders were in the glass next to the couch.
“No,” she said feebly.
“If I call the cops,” I said, “they will come here and arrest you for homicide.”
“You better believe that,” Mouse crooned.
“What we have to do is to get this body out from here,” I said. “If we don’t, you’ll just be another black woman on Harold’s long list of names.”
RAYMOND, EVER THE pragmatist, suggested that we cut Harold up but Honey wouldn’t hear of it. She blamed it on her Christian beliefs but I believe that neither her nor my stomach could have dealt with the h
acking or the blood.
Originally I thought that we could build a box around him and then move him at night down the stairs.
“You crazy, Easy?” Mouse said. “A coffin’s a coffin. Any fool could see that. And somethin’ that big we’d have to tie on the top’a your car. What you think the cops gonna say about that?”
Finally we decided to drop the body out of the window later that night. I went down to the driveway that Honey’s window looked over and put the mattress from her bed down so that there wouldn’t be too much noise.
At ten past two Raymond and Honey threw the body out of the window. Harold landed mostly on the mattress but his passage was not silent. I dragged the stiff corpse into the backseat before Mouse rushed down to help me. I had the engine turned over and was headed down the block before any alarms or sirens could be sounded.
WE LEFT HAROLD in the last empty lot that I knew he’d inhabited. He was a little beat up, and no detective would believe that he’d actually died there on that lot. Any coroner could have testified that he died of an overdose of phenobarbital and not the shot to his shoulder. All of that was true but I wasn’t worried. What would matter was that his name was Ostenberg and that he had on his person the weapon that most probably was used on the bodies of Nola Payne, Jocelyn Ostenberg, and me.
The police would have their murderer, and all the witnesses were dead. They didn’t even have to pay for a trial or execution. All they had to do was slap their hands together to knock off the graveyard dust.
51
They called me to Gerald Jordan’s office three days later. The riots were dead by then. Vietnam and the space shuttle dominated the news. There was no coverage of the nearly forty funerals held in memory of those who had died.
It was just Jordan and me at the meeting. No Suggs, no uniforms, no elite cadre of police bodyguards.
“You’ve heard about the discovery of the body of the man you claim killed Nola Payne?” he asked after the preliminaries.
“Uh-huh.”
“He had the gun on him that was used to shoot her,” Jordan continued. “That lends credence to your story.”
“I don’t need any credence, Deputy Commissioner. Harold killed Nola and a dozen other women. You got men in jail right now today that were railroaded because your department don’t give a damn about a black woman’s death.”
“So you say,” he said with a smile. “Detective Suggs agrees with you. I’ve given him permission to reopen certain cases. If he can come up with something, my office will support him. I also had Peter Rhone released.”
“Okay,” I said. “That’s it, I guess.”
“The coroner says that Harold was poisoned, that he was killed somewhere else and brought to that lot on Grape.”
“Really?”
Jordan’s eyes were like the twin bodies of black widow spiders hovering in space, waiting for an opportunity.
“What would you like from me, Mr. Rawlins?”
“I already told you that this job was for Nola and Geneva. They both might be dead but at least they weren’t forgotten.”
“You don’t like me,” Gerald Jordan said. “I understand that. You and I are on opposite sides of the street. But that doesn’t mean we don’t have common interests.”
I didn’t like the drift of his conversation. It was as if he were trying to pull me into something, something dirty and rife with disease. I was reminded of a conversation I had with a white man named DeWitt Albright in 1948. Up until that moment, I had thought that Albright was the most morally corrupt man I had ever met. But Jordan beat him easily.
“The only thing we have in common is what we hate about each other,” I said.
“I don’t hate you, Rawlins. I like you. I like you so much that I recommended to the chief that we give you an investigator’s license. So the next time you’re out there hustling, nobody will be able to say you have no right to be there.”
THERE WAS A small cemetery north of Inglewood where we laid Geneva and Nola to rest. Benita stayed home with Jesus and Feather. EttaMae came because she helped Bonnie with the service. I invited Peter Rhone because he was the only one I knew who truly loved Nola.
EttaMae’s minister, Zachary Tellford, gave the eulogy under a hot sun.
“These women were taken from us, Lord,” he said. “They were good women who worked hard and who loved each other so much that they come to you in one chariot. They are the best we have to offer, Lord. You may see millionaires and kings and queens this week. There may be saints and hardworking clergy at your door. But no one of them will shine brighter in your heaven. Our own lives will be less for their absence.”
Peter started crying from the first words. He cried harder and harder until EttaMae had to hold him up.
The service was brief and the caskets were lowered side by side into the grave. I drove Peter’s rented car to my house because he was too broken up to drive and EttaMae said that he could come home with her. His wife had thrown him out when he confessed his love for a dead black woman. He really had nowhere else to go.
THREE WEEKS LATER the riots were all but forgotten. Benita was still with us but she had a job and would move out soon. On the weekends she went sailing with Jesus. They both seemed to love the quietude and possibilities of being out on the Pacific.
Jackson bought five suits and worked eighty hours a week. He dropped by now and then to bring over bottles of French wine in appreciation for my lies.
One Tuesday I called Juanda and asked her to meet me for lunch at Pepe’s.
She was early and at the same banquette we sat at on our first date.
She wore a flouncy orange dress and white low-heeled shoes. When I came up to the table she stood and kissed me on the lips.
“Hi,” she said.
I exhaled, thinking that she was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen.
“I missed you,” she told me.
“I wanted to call you every day,” I said.
“You know, I don’t care if you got a girlfriend,” she said. “I mean, I want you all for myself but I need to see you sometime and I don’t mind if that has to be when you say.”
She had thought about it as much as I had. She’d made concessions in her own mind and offered them up to me. But I had other ideas. And where Juanda’s thoughts were young and about the light of love, my deliberations were of a much darker cast. I’d been thinking about Nola and Geneva and the lucky one, Benita—the woman who survived. I was thinking about Honey, who killed a boy that she’d help to raise, and Jocelyn, who hated the skin she came in and the blood that spawned her.
“There’s no way I could have you on the side, Juanda,” I said. “I love you the way you are and I want you to do the best you can. I went to LACC the other day and they have a high school equivalency program there. You can get your diploma and then start taking college classes.”
“I cain’t afford that,” she said.
I took out the envelope with the money Mouse had given me. That and the ring I handed to the young woman.
“I can’t be with you the way we both want to be,” I said. “But I’d like to help you get through this school thing and see you be what you want to be.”
There was no moment of weakness with Juanda. No secret assignation, no one-time love in the dark. We talked for a long time about the envelope between us. I talked to her about the riots and the dead women and the hatred we have for ourselves.
When I finished she said, “You know, I love the way you talk, Mr. Rawlins. You done talked the dress off my back and then talked it back on my shoulders. I’ll take your money if you promise to be my friend.”
“You better watch out, girl,” I said. “You might just make me into a happy man.”
WALTER MOSLEY is the author of the acclaimed Easy Rawlins series of mysteries and numerous other works of fiction and nonfiction. He has received a Grammy Award and the Anisfield-Wolf Award, among other honors. He was born in Los Angeles and lives in New York.
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Little Scarlet er-9 Page 23