Little Scarlet

by Walter Mosley

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m surprised you brought me this,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I figured you would go after this clown yourself. I was ready to cover you if he showed up dead after havin’ fallen on a bullet or some shit like that.”

  I laughed then. My head bowed in mirth and I had to hold on so as not to fall off of my stool. It wasn’t the joke but the notion that a white cop would let me do my business without interference or condescension tickled me. It was as if I’d died and gone to another man’s heaven. This man whose soul I inhabited had been white, and his heaven was filled with ordinary things that were like magic to me.

  “No,” I said. “I know too much about Harold to kill him like that. People been messin’ with him his whole life. Don’t get me wrong. I want you to arrest him and I want them to send him to the gas chamber too. But I don’t have to do it. No sir. Not me.”

  I felt the weight of Melvin Suggs’s hand on my shoulder. Another friendly gesture.

  The police detective stood up and threw a dollar bill on the counter.

  “Have some eggs, Rawlins,” he said. “You look like shit.”

  “Thanks. I will.”

  I had two more soft-boiled eggs and white toast with strawberry jam. You could buy a lot with a buck back then.

  I walked back to my building.

  Before going upstairs I stopped by Steinman’s Shoe Repair. The closed sign was still up but it was tacked on the door that had been wired back into place. I pushed it open and saw Sylvie, Theodore’s wife, muse, and best friend. She was a quarter of a head taller than him with the features of a Teutonic goddess. She was slender and I doubted if even her husband knew what her voice sounded like. Mostly she gestured, now and again she whispered, but Sylvie would never raise her voice. I don’t know how old she was but she had the kind of beauty that would not fade. Violet eyes and platinum hair, long thin hands and skin akin to the perfect milk that men like Plato dreamed of.

  She smiled when she saw me.

  “Mr. Rawlins,” Theodore said from somewhere behind her.

  “Hi, guys,” I said. “I saw that the door was open and I just dropped in to make sure things were okay.”

  Sylvie’s smile took on a trace of sadness.

  “I’m probably going to close up here, Mr. Rawlins,” Theodore said. “It’s too much. My insurance agent says that my policy doesn’t cover riots and the city refuses to help.”

  “What about the federal government?” I asked.

  He shook his head and Sylvie laid an ethereal hand upon the nape of his neck. The love between them always surprised me. It was like a fairy tale that you one day realized was true.

  “You need help moving?” I asked.

  It was Theodore’s turn to smile.

  “You know,” I continued, “there’s a corner store not far from my house that might be a good place to open a shoe repair shop. It’s been vacant a couple’a months. Maybe I could introduce you to the owner.”

  Sylvie took two steps and kissed me. Her lips formed the words “thank you,” and she might have made some sound.

  We set up a day for the move and a time to talk with the owner at the empty corner store near my house. It was once a clothes store near Stanley and Pico. It was a space and he was a cobbler and people wore shoes everywhere in the world.

  Theodore took the leather saddle from the ruined table and pushed it on me.

  “Take this, Mr. Rawlins—Easy,” he said.

  “I didn’t do anything, Theodore,” I said. “This is yours.”

  “But you are helping us,” he argued. “You are always trying to help. This is just a, what you call it, a token for our friendship.”

  I didn’t want to take it but Theodore held it out and Sylvie kept smiling. Finally I nodded in defeat and took the ancient riding gear.

  I CARRIED MY prize up the southern stairwell to the fourth floor. I walked down the long hall thinking that it was all over. Suggs would take Harold and somehow prove that he was the killer of Nola Payne. Theodore would move to West L.A. and Jackson Blue would become a computer expert for Cross County Fidelity Bank. I didn’t know what to do about Juanda but that was for another day.

  I decided to take Benita and Bonnie and the kids for a picnic at Pismo Beach. We could cook and Jesus could take us out fishing one at a time.

  I put the key in the lock, thinking that I had done fine. I’d done my job and broke it off before things could go bad. People had died but that wasn’t my fault. The city had gone up in flames but maybe that was like a forest fire, cleansing the underbrush, making room for new growth.

  When the wood of the doorjamb above my head shattered I thought that it must have been something that fell. But from where? Then the child’s cap gun exploding and more shattered wood and a quick pain in my left biceps.

  I turned toward the doorway at the far end of the hall, shouting and holding the thick leather saddle in front of my head and chest. I ran as hard as I could toward the door, screaming like a berserker in an ancient war. More shots were fired. One grazed the big knuckle of my left hand. I slammed into the stairwell door, hitting someone who grunted and fell back. The pistol clattered to the floor and I caught a glimpse of the man’s shoulder.

  As he lunged down the stairs I threw the saddle at him but it missed.

  I put a foot down the stairs, not realizing that I had been shot in the calf. The blood dripped down and made a slick on the step. I tumbled for a full flight before coming to a halt and losing consciousness.

  46

  I must’ve hit my head pretty hard because even though I thought I was conscious my mind wasn’t making the right connections in the ambulance.

  “Where did the Germans go?” I asked the medic from my litter.

  “What Germans?”

  “The ones that killed all those women,” I said. “The ones who tried to fool the Allies and killed the women with the white ribbons in their hair.”

  I remember saying these words. I can still feel the frustration when the attendant said, “You’ve been hurt but you’re going to be okay. Do you know the man who shot you?”

  “Must have been the Nazis,” I said. I knew that there was something wrong with that statement because of the look on the white kid’s face.

  “Hand me the hypo, Nick,” the attendant said to the man sitting next to the driver.

  For a while I was looking out of the window listening to the siren that I took for an air-raid warning. I could almost hear the booming of the Allied cannon.

  There was pain in my arm and leg and hand so I didn’t feel the morphine while he was injecting it. But soon the blue funk of war gave way to a sunlit yellow world that had never known of battle. The siren became the cry of a huge wild bird and the ambulance was a Greek chariot bringing me home after all those years in hell. I started crying. I asked the attendant if my mother was there.

  “What’s her phone number?” he asked me.

  That was the last thing I remembered for some time.

  I AWOKE IN darkness. There was the smell of alcohol and other acrid chemicals in the air. I was between crisp sheets on a bulging mattress in a too-warm room. There were small lights at odd places hovering here and there. The lights illuminated nothing. They merely glistened, like stars in the void.

  I had no idea where I was at first. My mind was fuzzy and there were dull aches somewhere on my person. I concentrated very hard and recalled the shots exploding around me. But at first my mind went all the way back to World War II, twenty years earlier, when I was a young man fighting for someone else’s freedom.

  Then I remembered the splinters from my doorjamb. The shots and Theodore’s saddle, which saved my life. It sounded like a cap gun. A .22 caliber, probably a pistol, with low velocity, not enough to rip through hard leather.

  I remembered a young German woman, twenty-two if she was a day. Kissing my forehead and learning English, asking me did I have chocolate and sewing needles.
I gave her both and then he shot me. No. The girl was a long time ago. I was shot and then I slipped in my own blood . . .

  I sat up in the hospital bed, in the warm room. I was alone. My left biceps felt like it was ripping open every time I moved. There was a lamp on the table to my left. I had to twist around and turn it on with my right hand.

  Also on the table there was a crayon drawing next to a glass of water. It was a crude green-and-blue picture of a man in a bed with three people standing beside him. My little family had been there. Feather would be in my life for many years. She would love me and I would love her long after all the pain I felt was over.

  In the drawer of the table Bonnie had left me a clean change of clothes. I knew it would be there. In the pants pocket was my letter from Gerald Jordan but Bonnie had taken my wallet. She knew that no one would steal a letter but money was another thing.

  Who shot me?

  It was a man with a pistol who waited for me to come to my office. Somebody who knew me and was afraid of me. A killer who wasn’t used to firing a gun. No one who was serious shot at you from that far away with a small-caliber pistol. Then again, nobody with any sense ran at a man shooting at him.

  I had three bandages and not too much pain except in my arm.

  It had to be Harold. Harold with the same gun he had used to shoot Nola in her dead eye.

  After I was dressed I lay back down and closed my eyes. I fell asleep and dreamt of a German girl sewing up my wounds. She was Sylvie, and Theodore was lurking at the bombed-out doorway with a pistol in his hand.

  I jerked upright and bounced on the springy bed to get to my feet. It wasn’t bad. Somebody had shot me less than a day ago and I could already get to my feet. I was a soldier, not some citizen or bystander. I had to go out now and find Harold and make sure that he couldn’t get at anybody else ever again.

  IT WAS VERY late. More than forty-eight hours had passed since Jordan had laid down his ultimatum. Nobody in the hospital hall was moving. At the nurse’s desk a small Asian woman, Japanese I think, was sitting reading a magazine. When I came up to her she jumped from her chair, gasping.

  “You shouldn’t be out of your bed, sir,” she told me.

  “Pay phone,” I said. “Where?”

  “You have to get back to bed.”

  “Got to make a call. Pay phone.”

  She scurried to my side and took my arm. I pushed her away and lurched down the hall toward a door marked EXIT. I staggered down the stairs until there were no more and then I pushed open a door.

  Across the street from Mercy Hospital was a phone booth. The operator gladly connected the collect call.

  “Hello?” she said.

  “Will you accept a collect call from Easy?” the operator asked.

  “A collect . . . ? Yes, operator. I will.”

  “Hey, Jewelle,” I said. I could hear the thickness in my throat.

  “Is that you, Easy?”

  “Yeah, baby. How you doin’?”

  “Fine. It’s four in the mornin’. What’s wrong?”

  “I been shot.”

  “What?”

  “I’m okay. I mean, not perfect but not bleedin’ no more neither.”

  “Do you need a doctor?”

  “Uh-uh. I’m across the street from Mercy Hospital. What I need is a ride. I was wonderin’ if Jackson could come get me.”

  “He’s ’sleep,” Jewelle said. “And you know he has to be at work tomorrow.”

  “Already?”

  “They need good computer people, Easy. They wanted him today. I’ll come get you.”

  “I didn’t mean to get you outta bed, JJ,” I said. “It’s just —”

  “I’ll be there, Mr. Rawlins. You just wait.”

  She hung up and I sat down in the phone booth, feeling the morphine and revenge slithering under my skin.

  47

  It was a little after five by the time Jewelle parked across the street from the hospital. She had put on a pink dress and dark makeup. I remembered when she was just sixteen, in jeans and in love with my property manager, the grumpy Mofass. Now he was gone and she was a woman.

  “I brought you some food and a gun, Easy,” she said as I dropped as delicately as I could into the passenger’s seat.

  I took the paper bag sitting between us and found a .45 pistol, a ham sandwich, and a silver thermos filled with hot black coffee.

  “Where to?” Jewelle asked me.

  I gave her Jocelyn Ostenberg’s address and we took off.

  I ate the sandwich even though my stomach didn’t want it. The coffee was strong, the way black people made it down South. The gun was loaded and the safety was off. I’m right-handed, so the wound wouldn’t deter me from killing Harold.

  “Who shot you, Easy?” the petite Jewelle asked me.

  “A man I’m after. A man who kills black women for loving white men. He pulled the trigger but his mother loaded the gun.”

  “Uh,” she grunted disparagingly. “You’d think that people would have enough trouble makin’ the rent without all this shootin’ and burnin’ and killin’ everybody.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “But you know there’s always somebody with some reason to be mad. I can’t hardly throw stones. I mean look at me. Here I am all shot up and bruised and still I’m out here with a gun.”

  “But you different, Mr. Rawlins,” she said. “You the only one I know tryin’ to do right by people.”

  “Jackson said that he’s getting’ that job to help you out, JJ. That sounds like he’s tryin’ to do right.”

  “Yeah. He loves me. I know he does. But you know straight as he tryin’ t’be, he still a pretzel in his heart. It tickles me to see him in that suit with those cute glasses don’t do nuthin’.”

  “You love him?”

  “Yeah. I love ’im but he ain’t you, Mr. Rawlins. No sir. You are the real thing. That’s why I got up outta my bed, because it ain’t too often that Easy Rawlins calls on somebody for help.”

  I drifted in my seat for a while then. I was angry at myself for inviting Jocelyn Ostenberg to my office, for giving her a way to come at me. But in that car, with the rising sun making silhouettes of the eastern mountains, beside a woman I’d seen grow up from a child, I felt at ease. I was at home in my own life in spite of everything. Maybe that was the drugs or maybe even shock but I remember feeling safe and comfortable on the drive toward the Ostenberg home.

  “Jackson said that you lost everything in the riots,” I said after a long time.

  “Naw,” Jewelle said easily. “It’s just tied up my resources. The property’s still there and there’s sure enough rent to pay the taxes. I got to be creative but the money’ll flow back in.”

  WE PARKED A block away from the Ostenberg house. I didn’t want Jocelyn seeing me out there waiting and I didn’t need a close-up view to know if Harold came in or if she went out.

  It was still very early when we got there, not yet six. Jewelle put her head down on my lap and fell asleep. She’d always felt comfortable with me, as if I had some kind of secret power to keep away danger. There she was with her brilliant business mind thinking that I was the one who could protect her.

  I wasn’t tired but all the drugs and trauma to my system made me drift in and out of various states of mind. I thought about Juanda and Howard and Jackson and Mouse. I thought about the riots and Gerald Jordan and Melvin Suggs all at the same time. Between all the chemicals and thoughts and wounds I seemed to be able to break up my thoughts and let them blend together.

  For most of my life I’d only been able to think about one thing at a time unless I was in danger and had to have eyes in the back of my head. But that morning, when I should have been concentrating on Harold and only Harold, I was putting all the pieces into place all at once.

  Jewelle took my hand in her sleep and rolled her head. I looked down on her lovely profile. She was smiling, thinking about Jackson most probably while holding my hand and feeling my warmth.

  I
realized then that I had almost died in my hallway. I had come within inches and moments of my own death and hadn’t stopped even to acknowledge my luck.

  I could see Juanda in Jewelle’s profile and I knew that we would never be lovers. That made me smile. I could see that Suggs hated Jordan as much as I did and that Harold felt the same pain that drove his mother. Mouse and Harold were in the same place in my mind. And Benita and Nola, and Honey and Geneva were right behind them. Black women at the mercy of black men who couldn’t help what they’d become.

  My heart was racing trying to keep up with all the overlays in my head. I wanted a cigarette but Jewelle was holding my hand.

  A light-colored ’sixty Cadillac drove up to Jocelyn’s driveway and pulled in. A man got out and walked up to the door. He fiddled around and then went in. It wasn’t Harold. I stayed where I was, wondering what I should do.

  A few minutes later the sirens began to howl. At first there was only one and it was pretty far off. It wasn’t a fire engine siren; either police or ambulance then. And then there was another, and another. They were coming closer with every moment.

  “Get up, baby,” I said to Jewelle.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “I don’t know but you should be awake.”

  The ambulance wailed up to the front of the Ostenberg home. Two attendants rushed out carrying the gurney. The man from the Cadillac ran out to meet them. Even at the distance I could tell that he was all broken up. His hands kept moving. The ambulance men had to push him aside.

  “What is it, Easy?” Jewelle asked.

  “I don’t know. But you better get out of here. I’ll get out and you go home.”

  “I’m not leavin’ you here. You come on with me.”

  Four police cars came up all at once. Cops rolled out of the cars and into the house. People were coming out of their houses on the next block. The sun was coming up as if even the sky was awakened by the racket.

  As the minutes went by, the ambulance attendants didn’t reappear. That meant there was either a false alarm or a death.

  “It’s him!” someone shouted in a maniacal tone. “It’s him! It’s him!”