Little Scarlet

by Walter Mosley

  One of them yelled, “Put your hands where I can see them!” He had a shotgun pointed at me.

  All the cops had guns out. Six of them took positions around the perimeter of the station and the rest pounced on me.

  In a normal state of mind I would have held out my hands in surrender. But with Mama Jo’s drug in me my whole body, from my fingers to my anklebones, went rigid. It took all of those young white men to subdue me. I didn’t say a word and I didn’t fight. I just stood there thinking that those men were no more than rodents trying to intimidate me with their squeals.

  Once they got me down they had a problem because there wasn’t any room in their cars for a prisoner. None of them wanted to be on foot and in uniform in the black neighborhood after nightfall. They had learned to respect the anger that glared at them from the darkness.

  It was the station attendant who suggested they use my car.

  It took three of them, one driving and the other two holding me in the backseat, to drive me to city hall.

  And when we got there it took five men to heft my dead weight into a large, well-appointed room.

  They dropped me on the floor but I didn’t feel it. I had become the soul of resistance. I could stay like that for years, I believed. No one would ever defeat me again. They’d have to kill me.

  “Get up, Mr. Rawlins,” Gerald Jordan said.

  I took what felt like my first breath since my arrest and stood up. At the door behind me were the five cops that had carried me. Detective Suggs was there. So were two high-ranking policemen in fancy dress.

  Somebody took the handcuffs from my wrists.

  Suggs looked a little subdued. But that was okay by me. I had the fortitude of ten men inside of me.

  “What the fuck you grab me off the street like that for, man?” I said to the deputy chief.

  A hand grabbed me from behind but I flung it off.

  Jordan raised his hand to tell the rank and file to stand back.

  “I’ve been talking to Detective Suggs,” Jordan said.

  He looked every bit as slick and evil as he had the first time we met. The only thing different about him was that the red mark under his eye seemed larger. I decided that this meant I had done something to upset him.

  I liked that.

  “Yeah,” I said. “So what?”

  “He tells me that you’re looking for a mendicant named Harold. He said that you don’t even know his last name but that you believe this Harold killed Nola Payne.”

  I didn’t say anything. Why should I?

  “Is this true?” Jordan asked.

  “What the fuck do you want, man?” I replied.

  “Don’t push your luck, son,” one of the fancy black uniforms said.

  That had an effect on me. I was born understanding those very words, delivered in that very tone. I and everybody I’d known had survived by gleaning the white man’s final threat.

  His words shook me but Jo’s potion poured over them like salt on a garden slug.

  “Listen, man,” I said to the uniform, “I’m here because you called on me. I got a job to do and I will do it. But I’m not gonna smile at you or kiss your mothahfuckin’ hand. I’m not gonna let you tell me what it is I should be doin’ neither. So if that’s why I’m here, either throw me in a cell or let me be.”

  Suggs, who had been looking at his feet, glanced upward at his bosses. I could tell that he was awed by my outburst and that they were stymied by my resolve.

  “This is not going to help your case, Rawlins,” Jordan said.

  “There’s only one thing I want, Jerry. I want to find the man who killed Nola Payne. I want him either on death row or dead. If you’re with me on that, then we don’t have a problem. If you not—that’s okay too.”

  “There is no Harold,” Jordan said. “I’ve spoken to every captain in the south L.A. precincts. These killings that you and Detective Suggs are talking about have other, better explanations.”

  “Sir,” Suggs said.

  “You be quiet,” the other fancy uniform said.

  “No sir,” Suggs replied, “I can’t do that. The people you’ve been talking to are just trying to cover their own oversights. The cases I brought to you were all done by the same man. I’m sure of that. Mr. Rawlins has a credible suspect . . .”

  “You don’t know that,” Jordan said.

  “Yes I do, sir. There’s a murderer running loose and if we find him we will be doing what you asked us to do.”

  “If,” Jordan said.

  “We ain’t gonna find shit stinkin’ in here with you,” I added.

  “You don’t want me as an enemy, Mr. Rawlins,” Jordan said.

  “I don’t have any choice about that, Jerry. You know it and I do too. Right here at this minute you and me on the same side even if you don’t know it. I’m gonna do what you want me to do but we still gonna be enemies. There ain’t no question about that. Never was. Never will be.”

  Jordan turned to Suggs then.

  “You have forty-eight hours,” he said. “Either you have a killer in a cell by then or I will have your ass. Both of you.”

  39

  It was close to midnight and I was on the street downtown standing side by side with the white man named Melvin Suggs. He was a cop by trade and I was a criminal by color. But there we were.

  “You are one crazy bastard,” Suggs said to me.

  “Yeah. You right about that.”

  “What are we going to do now?”

  “You got any leads?” I asked him.

  “A few. Nothing I can act on tonight.”

  “Call me at my office by noon tomorrow,” I said. “Then we can share notes and maybe get somewhere.”

  I GOT TO my office a little before one.

  There were two messages on my answering machine. The first one was from Bonnie.

  “Hi, Easy,” she said in that island-soaked, deep-toned voice. “I think I have something. I called a J. Ostenberg in Pasadena. A man named Simon Poundstone answered. He said that his wife, Jocelyn, was named Ostenberg before they were married. She kept her maiden name. He also said that he thought that once she had had a maid who had a son named Harold. I called back later to speak to her but she said that the maid’s son was named Harrison not Harold and that she hadn’t heard from either one of them for years. But there was something about the way she sounded that I didn’t like. I think that she was hiding something.

  “Feather misses you, honey,” she added. “I think she wants you to come home.”

  The next message was from Juanda.

  “Hi. It’s me. I was just sittin’ here thinkin’ about you and how much I wanted to see you. At first I was gonna call and tell you I saw that man Harold somewhere just to get you ovah heah. But then I thought you’d get mad. Call me, okay? I really wanna see you.”

  I disengaged Jackson’s answering machine and then turned out the light on my desk. I stood up with every intention of getting into my car and driving home to my little family.

  I took one step without a hitch. The next step was a little wobbly but still I kept my balance. Number three had me bending a little too far down. The fourth stride brought me to my knees.

  I had only enough presence of mind to realize that it was Mama Jo’s elixir wearing off. I tried to rise but instead I fell. I was on the floor and then I was floating. As I neared the roof everything went black.

  Then a bell started ringing. It was all over the place; loud then soft, long and then in short bursts. It sounded like water fountains and rain forests and waterfalls. But it was a bell. A loud bell. And then it stopped.

  I opened my eyes to bright sunlight coming in through the window. I was laid out exactly as I had fallen. The room was hot and my whole body was sweating. I had no headache or even a bad taste in my mouth. Mama Jo could bottle that medicine and make a mint among the down and out.

  The phone began to ring again. It sounded odd. There was a pulsing nature to the jingling bell. I got right up and went t
o the phone. I picked up the handset, said hello, and then fell into my chair. I realized that I couldn’t have gotten up again to save my mother’s life.

  “Rawlins, you okay?” Detective Melvin Suggs asked me.

  “What time is it?” I asked.

  “It’s after one.”

  “In the afternoon?”

  “What’s wrong with you?” the cop asked me.

  “Are you at the precinct?” I replied.

  “Nearby.”

  “Come and get me. I wanna take a ride out to the valley.”

  “What for?” he asked, but I was already hanging up the phone.

  I sat back in my chair as weak as water. It was a miracle that I didn’t spill out under the desk. Sounds came to me from the street crazily. A baby’s cry was loud and piercing but a car horn blaring was almost too low to hear. There were birds chattering clearly enough that they seemed to be speaking English, or maybe Spanish. Cars were moving but their mechanical sounds receded into a single rushing sound, like an engorged river flowing a few hundred feet away.

  I looked at my hand in awe. It moved and flowed, responded to my every whim like magic. I took a deep breath and felt thankful for the few moments of life I had under a sun that made me sweat and grin.

  I was an infant amazed by the miracles surrounding me. I couldn’t move but that didn’t seem to matter. Whatever I needed would come at the proper time.

  I had been meandering in my mind like that for some time when a knock came on the door. I tried to say “Come in,” but there wasn’t enough air in my lungs.

  The door opened and Detective Suggs entered.

  I was actually glad to see him. I don’t know how many white men I’d seen walk through doors but I doubted if I had ever been as happy as I was when a friend visited. I liked Suggs. Was that Mama Jo’s doing? Had my mind somehow been altered to leave behind all of my history, clear my eyes, a man cut loose from his own private anchor of hate?

  “What’s wrong with you, Rawlins?” the cop asked.

  As he approached me, strength flowed into my legs and then arms. I stood up from a long hibernation, hungry for movement, thinking only about my prey.

  “I’m fine. Perfectly fine.”

  “You sounded drunk on the phone.”

  “I was up late,” I explained. “Slept here in my chair. You woke me up.”

  “So why did you want to go to the valley?”

  I GOT J. OSTENBERG’S address out of the phone book. And then I turned on Jackson’s answering machine just in case someone called while I was out. On the drive over I explained what Bonnie had told me, only I said it was an assistant of mine that made the call.

  “SO WHEN WERE you going to tell me about Peter Rhone?” Suggs asked on the ride over the mountain.

  “Peter who?”

  “Don’t fool with me, Rawlins. I found him myself. All I had to do was locate the chop shops in the neighborhood. You put a little pressure on a man in an interrogation room and he’ll turn in his own mother.”

  “So he told you about me?”

  “No. He gave me the car and the dealer gave me Rhone. He told me about you.”

  “You arrest him?”

  “No. He didn’t kill Nola. He might have set fire to his life but he didn’t kill that girl.”

  “Woman,” I said.

  “Say what?”

  “Woman. Nola Payne was a woman just like you and me are men.”

  Suggs was driving. He turned to me and gave me a quizzical look.

  “I don’t like bein’ called boy,” I said. “I don’t like our Negro women to be called girls. That’s easy enough, right?” It was something I had always wanted to say but hadn’t. Between the riots and Mama Jo I was a real mess.

  “Oh yeah,” Suggs said.

  What did he care? He didn’t know what made me mad. All he wanted to do was make sure his job was done well.

  JOCELYN OSTENBERG LIVED in a nice house on Hesby Street off of Muerretta Avenue. It was a two-story Tudor with a broad green lawn and a crooked oak to the side.

  I followed Suggs to the front door. He pressed the button but I heard no bell. He knocked.

  A few moments later a woman’s voice said, “Who is it?”

  “Police,” Suggs uttered.

  “Oh. Wait a minute.”

  I heard a loud crack of a lock opening, a chain pulled, another bolt thrown back, and then the doorknob turned. I looked around and saw that all of the windows had bars on them.

  The white woman who answered was tiny. She wore a drab blue sweater and a long coal-gray skirt. She also wore a fancy black straw hat and gloves. It was midday and she didn’t look as if she were about to go out but she had on enough makeup to star in an opera. Her ears would have worked on a fat man five times her size.

  “Yes?” she asked Suggs, darting a worried glance at me and then looking away.

  Suggs held out his identification. She saw the badge and then nodded.

  “My husband is at work,” she said.

  “We came to ask you a few questions,” Suggs said.

  “Who is that man with you?” she asked in a confidential tone as if I were across the street, out of earshot.

  “He’s a material witness, ma’am. We wanted to ask you about a man named Harold. He might be using the same last name as yours.”

  There was a long silence. Jocelyn Ostenberg was maybe sixty, maybe more. It was hard to tell under all that pancake flour. She had gotten to the age where lies didn’t flow easily. She looked at me, at the floor, at the bent oak. Finally she said, “I don’t know any Harold.”

  “No?”

  “No sir. I once had a maid named Honey. She had a son named Harrison. Somebody called earlier. They wanted to know about a Harold. Was that someone from your office?”

  “No ma’am. What was Honey’s last name?”

  “Divine,” she said but I didn’t believe it. “Honey Divine. She died a few years ago, I heard.”

  “May we come in, ma’am?” Suggs asked then.

  “I don’t have men in my home when my husband is out, Officer. I’m sorry.” She waited for us to bow out.

  “Well, okay,” Suggs said, about to honor her request.

  “How long have you lived in this house, ma’am?” I blurted out before he could complete his sentence.

  “Thirty-five years.”

  I smiled and nodded.

  “Well thank you, ma’am,” Suggs said.

  She nodded and closed the door, making a racket with all of the locks she had to engage.

  “That’s a dead end,” the cop said to me on the stroll back to his car.

  “You gonna bust Rhone?” I asked him.

  “In thirty-six hours unless we come up with something solid.”

  “You know he didn’t do it.”

  “I’m comfortable letting the courts decide that.”

  40

  Suggs opened the driver’s side door but I just stood there on the patch of grass at the curb.

  “You getting in?” he asked me.

  “No.” I chewed on the word, drawing it out.

  “You gonna walk over that hill?”

  “They got buses out around here, Detective. I wanna stretch my legs, think a bit.”

  “You’re not about to find a Negro hobo around here, Rawlins. But you might find trouble.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Don’t you see where you are?”

  “Los Angeles,” I said. “That’s the city I live in, the city where I work and pay taxes.”

  Suggs shook his head, dropped into the driver’s seat, and took off. I liked him more all the time.

  I STARTED AT the far end of the opposite side of the block. Nobody was home at the first house. The lady at the second home looked out between the blinds of a side window at me but never came to the door. There were another few homes where the people were not at home or didn’t answer. Finally one door came open. The man standing there was thick around the middle but slender in the
shoulders and neck. He wore white pants and a green shirt and so resembled a leek or some other bulb plant.

  “What do you want?” he asked, none too friendly.

  “I’m looking for my wife’s second cousin Harold,” I said easily.

  “None’a your people livin’ around here,” he said.

  He had green eyes and a pale face.

  “He used to use an address around here,” I explained, “and my wife was worried about him —”

  “Didn’t you hear me?” the study in green and white asked.

  “So you don’t know a black Harold?” I replied.

  “I told you —,” he said.

  I didn’t hear the rest because I turned away from him. While I walked down the concrete path toward the sidewalk he shouted at my back.

  “You better get out of here, mister. We don’t want you or your relatives causing problems here. You aren’t welcome here.”

  On my way to the house next door, I counted the three times he used the word “here.” I quickened my pace because it was a toss-up whether his next move would be to get his gun or call the police.

  The next three places turned me away too. And then I came to a pink house edged in red toward the other end of the block. A tallish and older white woman in a banana-colored housecoat came to the door. She looked at me with no apparent fear. Maybe she had no radio or TV and no paperboy either. Maybe no one told her that Los Angeles had just been through a small-scale civil war or maybe she didn’t care.

  “Yes?”

  “Hello, ma’am,” I said. “I’m looking for a man, a Negro named Harold. I think he used to live on this block.”

  “That boy from the Ostenberg home,” she said.

  “You mean Jocelyn Ostenberg across the street?” I asked.

  “Yes sir. That’s the one. And it was a shame too.”

  Out of the corner of my eye I could see a police cruiser turn onto the far end of the block.

  “May I come in, ma’am?” I asked.

  “Oh yes. Please do,” she said.

  She moved away from the door and I took a long step into her home, hoping that the cops hadn’t seen me.

  The house smelled of cat piss and air freshener but that didn’t bother me. If the police didn’t come to the door within two minutes I was home free. I still had Jordan’s letter in my pocket but after my arrest at the gas station I didn’t know if it still held any official power.