Little Scarlet

by Walter Mosley

  I started with the 1964 file of residents’ names. There were one hundred eighty-three sign-in sheets, filled in on both sides, one side for each evening. I scanned the far left side for the letter “H.” I found quite a few Henrys and fewer entries with the name Hank. Harvey made a better showing than I would have figured. Howard was the most common name and there was one each for Hudie, Hildebrandt, and Hy. There were six Harolds. Brown, Smith, Smith, Lakely, Ostenberg, and Bryant.

  I was writing down the last name when I felt the breeze on the back of my neck. Instantly the temperature dropped down to what it was in the freezer of my nightmare. I knew before I spun around that it would be Bill and not Lewis facing me.

  He was wearing an impossibly large white terry cloth robe and somehow he seemed to have gotten even taller and broader.

  “Hey, Bill,” I said with hardly a waver.

  “What are you doing there, Willy?”

  “Lookin’ up names.”

  “What for?”

  “There’s a man I need to find and I was hoping that he spent a night or two here with you.”

  It was the calmness Bill showed that frightened me. It carried all of the certainty of a powerful predator eyeing a snack.

  “I don’t keep any money in here, Willy,” he said.

  I handed him the list that I had scrawled. I had only written the last names.

  He glanced at the list and said, “You’ve been lying to me, haven’t you, Willy?”

  I didn’t respond because I didn’t know which lie he was referring to.

  “This handwriting,” he said. “It’s not done by some man who can’t quite catch hold. I’ve told Lewis to look at the way the men sign in. He doesn’t understand but I bet you do.”

  “He murdered two women,” I said.

  “Who did?”

  “The man I’m looking for.”

  “And you think he stayed here?”

  “I’m sure of it,” I said. “He was just the kind of man who would need a place like this from time to time. If it was raining too hard for too long or maybe if he was too sick to hustle up a meal.”

  I had a small pistol in my pocket, that and the letter from Gerald Jordan. I didn’t want to shoot anybody but if Bill got mad I knew that my only defense would be homicide.

  He crushed the list in his hand.

  “Get out of here, Willy,” he said. “I don’t know who you are or what it is you’re really after but my guys here have the right to their own private lives. I won’t help you.”

  He was standing in front of the door.

  Realizing that I wouldn’t move until he did he took a step to the side. I went by him quickly and, just as swiftly, he followed me until I reached the front door of the shelter.

  I went through and turned to him.

  “I’m sorry, Bill,” I said. “I know that you’re doing a good thing down here and I didn’t mean to cause you trouble.”

  I think he smiled briefly before closing the door. That made me wonder if he knew that I’d submitted the names on that list to memory, making his gesture more perfunctory than it seemed.

  I thought about that all the way through the early-morning streets, so dark and empty. Somewhere out there Harold was hiding. But soon I’d find him. I didn’t think that he’d survive our second meeting.

  32

  Los Angeles is a desert city. Plants don’t grow except for the sufferance of irrigation. The soil is hard and yellow and the sun shines more than three hundred days a year. It doesn’t rain much and there’s no snow at all. People come here to escape the necessity of seasons. They talk about the weather like it was their personal pot of gold.

  They come here for the daylight and the warmth of the sun, flocking to the beaches and planning barbecues. Los Angeles is a town of baseball and football, croquet and golf. The city is oriented toward the heat of the sun. And when the night comes, people curl up in their beds and dream about the morning and all the promise of light.

  L.A. is not a town for night owls. You come for the acreage and the vistas but in order to pay for that, most people work so hard that night is only a place to rest.

  Those people who finally understand that perfect weather only means that you could work even harder often become disillusioned. After that they either move back to where they came from or they drop out and live in the shadows.

  Those folks need a nightlife. And where there’s a need there’s always an offering.

  Stud’s All Night Holiday was one such offering. It was a bungalow built to be a school. But there was a property dispute and lawsuit and finally the city backed off. I don’t know how Ronette Lee got hold of the lease but every night she ran a bar/coffeehouse/restaurant from sundown till sunup out of that would-be school.

  It was off the road but the cops knew she was there. They knew but didn’t bother her because she filled the needs of all the people who needed respite—and also she was a good tipper.

  THE CLASSROOM HAD a dozen round tables and a bar. A door behind the bar led to another classroom, where Ronette’s daughter, Maxine, cooked and stewed.

  The women didn’t get along. That’s because Ronette hated men and Maxine couldn’t get enough of us. And that was only the beginning of their discord. Maxine didn’t like the taste of salt, so Ronette criticized her cooking. Ronette wanted to move back to St. Louis but Maxine hated the cold. I had never heard either one of them say a kind word to the other but I rarely saw them apart.

  At four a.m. there were maybe a dozen souls at Stud’s. When I entered I waved at Ronette and made the gesture for coffee. For someone else the signal might have meant beer. But Ronette knew I had given up alcohol.

  Benita Flag was sitting at a small table alone and miserable. Her shoulders sagged and her hair was a mess. When she looked up I could see that her makeup had been running with her tears.

  Sadness is a kind of beacon for me. That’s why I frequented the late-night spot.

  “Hey, Benny,” I said, moving a chair to her table.

  “Did you see him?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Is he okay?” she asked. Her voice was rising toward hysteria. I realized that she really was worried about his well-being.

  “Oh yeah,” I said. “Mouse is fine. You know any kind of social upheaval makes for business opportunities. And Raymond is definitely what you call an opportunist.”

  I smiled and she at least tried to.

  “You know what I’m sayin’, don’t you?” I asked.

  “What?”

  “Mouse is like a thundershower at the end of a hot day. If lightning don’t strike you the rain will cool you down. It brings you back to life.”

  Benita smiled and took a very deep breath.

  “Yeah,” she said. “That’s Raymond.”

  “But a storm like that just passes by, Benny. And when it’s gone it’s gone. I mean even if it hits you again it won’t stay around.”

  Benita was staring into my face. Her intensity brought back the beauty I knew.

  “But I love him, Easy. He come into my life and I never even knew you could feel like that for anybody else. When he walk out to go to the store I ache till he’s back again. When he say my name in conversation I feel somethin’ so strong I get dizzy.”

  What could I say to that? She was in love—or something. And whatever that was, it would be wrong to take it away.

  “You got any relatives outta town?” I asked.

  “A cousin in San Diego.”

  “Maybe after a while you should go visit her. Maybe the sea will do you some good.”

  Ronette came up to the table then.

  “Easy,” she said, setting down my coffee, and to Benny, “Girl, you need to go to the bathroom and fix your face.”

  Ronette was solidly built and the color of tarnished bronze. She had straightened hair that swirled at the top of her head like a squat tornado that had been turned upside down.

  “I’m lookin’ for a Harold,” I said to Ronette.

/>   “Funny, it look like you lookin’ for a Helen.”

  Benita was touching her face to see if she should follow Ronette’s suggestion.

  “His last name,” I said, ignoring her joke, “could be Lakely or Ostenberg or Bryant.” I decided to leave out Brown and Smith. I concentrated on the less common names, hoping my man would be one of them.

  “Excuse me,” Benita said.

  She got up and went toward the bathroom.

  “Sounds like white men,” Ronette said.

  “It ain’t a woman and it ain’t a white man,” I replied. “Have you heard their names?”

  “No, Easy. I don’t know no Harolds at all. Not no black ones.”

  “You know we all have white men’s names,” I said.

  “Say what?”

  “Our names. None of them come from Africa.”

  “That’s why you always frownin’, Easy,” she said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Studyin’ somethin’ till it don’t even look like what it is no more. That’s what makes you so sad.”

  I couldn’t deny it. She was right.

  Ronette saw my silence as a victory. She snorted and smiled and strode off to her bar. I watched her. She had a good figure for a woman in her mid-forties. She liked being watched by men, and women too. She just didn’t want their opinions.

  When Benita got back to the table she looked like another woman. There was a store-bought sexiness about her, from the false eyelashes to the fire-engine-red nails.

  She sat down and started in as if she had never heard of Raymond or had a broken heart. She asked me about my job at Sojourner Truth and my kids. I found out all about her grandfather who was descended from chiefs of the Seminole tribe out of Florida. She talked until the sky began to lighten.

  When I said that I had to leave she asked for a ride.

  When we got to her door on San Pedro she asked me inside. I could tell that she was fragile and for some reason I felt responsible for Raymond’s romantic misdemeanor.

  Once inside she made me another coffee. She wanted a kiss for her troubles but I suggested that she might want to bathe first.

  I ran the tub for her, making it especially warm.

  She came in wearing a pink robe. Before I could leave the bathroom she let the garment drop to the floor. I saw why Mouse once wanted her and then I closed the door.

  BENITA HAD A very small place. It was just two rooms and a hot plate. And the rooms were small. The telephone sat on a small triangular table that had three legs. Underneath it sat a phone book.

  The Smiths alone took up seven pages. The Browns only had a page and a column.

  Lakely and Ostenberg had five listings apiece and Bryant was little more than a third of a column of names.

  I studied the book, jotting down numbers until the sun was bright. Then I peeked into the bathroom.

  Benita was sound asleep in the tub, snoring and dreaming of real love.

  33

  I left Benita’s before she woke up. That way she could feel kindly toward me without having to face her drunken failure at seducing her lover’s best friend.

  I needed to talk to Detective Suggs but in the light of morning and with a few hours’ sleep from Bill’s Shelter, I knew that I shouldn’t go waltzing into the Seventy-seventh after the argument of the day before. So I went to a phone booth on Hooper and called like any other ordinary citizen.

  “Seventy-seventh Precinct Police Station,” the male operator said.

  “Detective Suggs.”

  “Who is this?”

  “Ezekiel Rawlins.”

  “And what is the call pertaining to?”

  “He called me,” I said to avoid further bad blood with the department. “So I wouldn’t know.”

  The operator hesitated but then he connected the pin in the switchboard.

  The phone only rang once.

  “Suggs.”

  “I need to speak with you, Detective.”

  “You got something?”

  “Enough to talk about.”

  “Bring it in,” he said.

  “No. Let’s meet. At my office. I’ll be there by nine.” I hung up after that. I couldn’t help it. The letter in my pocket gave me true power for the first time ever in my life. I didn’t have to answer to Suggs but I wanted even more. I wanted him to answer to me.

  I STOPPED BY Steinman’s Shoe Repair before going up to my office. The doorway was boarded over and a sign that read CLOSED DUE TO DAMAGES had been nailed from the center plank. I made up my mind to call Theodore soon, to find out what he needed. It came to me then that my side job of trading favors had become more geographic than it was racial. I felt responsible for Theodore because he lived in my adopted neighborhood, not because of the color of his skin.

  My office was a comfort to see. The plain table desk and bookshelves were filled with hardbacks I’d purchased from Paris Minton’s Florence Avenue Bookshop. He’d introduced me to the depth as well as the breadth of American Negro literature. I had always known that we had a literature but Paris showed me dozens of novels and nonfiction books that I had never known existed.

  I started reading a copy of Banjo by Claude McKay that I’d bought from Paris a few weeks before. It was a beautiful edition, orange with black silhouettes of jazz musicians and women and swimmers on the wharf in Marseilles. It was a rare find at that time: a book about people of many colors getting together on foreign shores. The dialect McKay wrote in was a little too country for my sensibilities but I recognized the words and their inflections. On the title page, just below the title, there was a little phrase, A Story Without a Plot. I think that’s what I liked best about the book. After all, isn’t that the way most of the people I knew lived? We went from day to day with no real direction or endpoint. We just lived through the day, praying for another. Even in the best of times that was the best you could hope for.

  The knock on the door was soft, almost feminine, but I knew it was Suggs.

  “Come on in.”

  He wore a black suit. You know it has to be bad when you can see the wrinkles in black cloth. His white shirt seemed askew even with the red tie, and today he wore a hat. A green one with a yellow feather in the band.

  “You didn’t have to get dressed up for me,” I said.

  He was carrying a white paper bag in one hand and a briefcase in the other. He walked up to my visitor’s chair and sat down heavily. I could see in his exhausted posture that he had missed as much sleep as I had.

  “Coffee and some doughnuts,” he said, placing the bag on the desk.

  Another seminal moment in my life that I associated with the riots: a cop, a city official, bringing me coffee and cake. If I had gone down to the neighborhood barbershop and told the men there that tale, they would have laughed me into the street.

  I took the coffee and a cherry-filled doughnut. And then I rolled out an edited version of my visit to Bill’s Shelter.

  “How can you be sure that our Harold was one of the ones who stayed at this joint?” the cop asked.

  “I can’t be,” I said. “But it’s someplace to start. Bill’s is the kinda place let a man like Harold be crazy but not have to answer for it. They don’t try and sell you anything or change you. It’s just a bed and a meal—a perfect place for our man. I figured that you could put some muscle into the Smiths and Joneses and I’ll concentrate on the others.”

  Suggs stared at me with those watercolor eyes of his. He had mastered the textbook cop expression—the look that didn’t give away a thing.

  “There could be as many as twenty-one,” he said at last.

  “Twenty-one what?”

  “Women.”

  I was back in the frozen slaughterhouse, surrounded by dead women cut down in the prime of their lives; black women who shared their love with a white man and then paid the ultimate price for betraying Harold’s stiff sense of morality.

  I clenched my jaw hard enough to crack a tooth.

  Suggs opened h
is briefcase and handed me a sheaf of single-page reports.

  Each page contained two photographs of a young black woman—one in life and the other in death.

  “The bodies were almost all left on their backs,” Suggs was saying. “A couple weren’t quite dead when he left them. That accounts for the few odd positions.”

  “You think it was all him?” I asked.

  “Maybe not every one,” Suggs said. “But there are also probably some that I missed. It’s a shame. The homicide detectives should have picked it up. I’m really very sorry about this, Mr. Rawlins.”

  An apology. A week before, it would have meant something to me. But right then I couldn’t even meet his eye. I was afraid that if I saw his sorrow, it might dredge up the rage and impotence I felt. So instead, I kept my eyes down and my mouth shut.

  After a few minutes I heard the chair scrape the floor and his footsteps trailed away. Finally my door closed and I was alone with the dead women.

  Suggs had done a good job. He’d read the files and typed up an abbreviated report, which he stapled to the back of each one.

  Phyllis Hart was thirty-three when she died, choked to death in her auntie’s backyard on the fourteenth of July.

  Many of them had known white men. Maybe all of them had. Suggs had called family members to get some of the details. He even asked about a man living in the street named Harold. There were three people who had seen a hobo hanging around.

  Solvé Jackson was killed in her own bed. Her boyfriend, Terry McGee, was arrested for the crime. He had an alibi and witnesses to his whereabouts but still the jury found him guilty.

  I sat there reading about dead women until I knew everything Sugg’s report had to say.

  After a while I noticed that the tape on Jackson’s recording device had moved. I flipped the switch to “rewind” and then to “play.”

  “Hello,” a man’s voice said. “This is Conrad Hale of the Cross County Fidelity Bank. Your company’s name was given as a reference for a Mr. Jackson Blue. Could you please return this call as soon as possible? We are considering hiring Mr. Blue in a responsible position and were wondering about his work history with your firm. I’m calling on Saturday, so you may not get this until Monday morning. But if you get this message earlier I’ll give you my home phone too. We are anxious to get going with Mr. Blue. We’d like to put him to work as soon as possible.”