Little Scarlet

by Walter Mosley

  I looked out and saw, not fifteen feet from Jewelle’s Citroën, the flabby man with the green eyes who had called the police on me the last time I was on Jocelyn’s block. He was shouting and jumping in his housecoat and slippers. When our eyes met he shrieked and ran straight for the cops.

  “You got a key for the glove compartment?” I asked Jewelle.

  “What’s wrong with him?” she said, referring to the screaming man.

  “Take it off of the key chain and gimme it,” I said.

  I took the forty-five out of the bag and Jewelle handed me the key. I threw the gun into the glove compartment, locked it, and then swallowed the little brass key just as if I were in some spy movie about to be arrested for attempting to go over the Berlin Wall.

  “What’s wrong with that man, Easy? Was he talking about us?”

  “The cops are going to grab us, JJ. Let’s get out of the car and cross our hands in front of us.”

  Jewelle was a fast study. She got out with me and we waited for the cops that were hurrying out of the Ostenberg house.

  Even though we were waiting peacefully we were both grabbed and thrown to the ground. The officers used rough language, calling us niggers and asking questions without waiting for or expecting replies. We were cuffed and yanked to our feet, dragged down the street and thrown through the Ostenberg front doorway.

  As we were pulled into the house more policemen arrived. All that pushing and shoving opened the wounds on my leg and arm.

  “This one’s bleeding,” one cop said.

  But I wasn’t paying attention to their overreactions or the stinging pain I felt. I was looking around the Ostenberg living room.

  It was all white.

  The carpets and walls, the sofa and even the coffee table were stark white. Even a painting on the wall was a big white house in snow with white children laughing in the window. I wondered if the rest of the house was the same. A policeman grabbed my bandaged arm and a drop of my blood fell onto the thick white rug.

  A white man in a brown suit was ushered into the room by two cops. He was an old man and miserable beyond his years. One cop whispered something into his ear and he looked up at me and Jewelle. Then he shook his head and collapsed into their arms. They led him to a white stuffed chair.

  He rolled out from the seat and onto the carpet, crying.

  I watched him as if he were a distant constellation. I didn’t care about Jocelyn’s husband any more than some far-off celestial event that occurred before humanity had blighted the earth. He was just a bystander who didn’t see the car coming at him. He wasn’t important.

  48

  What were you doing in front of the house?” a police sergeant asked me.

  We were in the kitchen of the Ostenberg house. I was sitting in a white chair, at a white table, across from a white enamel stove, dripping blood on the white linoleum floor.

  Somewhere else in the house the white man was crying.

  “I was down the block,” I said. “Sitting in the car with my girl.”

  “How did you get shot?” The sergeant was in his mid-thirties. When he was a teenager he had a bad bout with acne. The scars covered both of his fat cheeks.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I was going to my office when somebody opened fire.”

  They had Jewelle in another room but I wasn’t worried about her. Jewelle would just say that we were parking, that there was no law against that.

  I had given them Jordan’s letter but with a black suspect in a crime in a white neighborhood less than a week after the riots, they had to have more than a tardy note from the deputy commissioner.

  “What are you doing in this neighborhood?” the scarred sergeant asked.

  “Nuthin’ special, Officer. Just hangin’ around.”

  “Tell me about this note from Jordan’s office.”

  “That’s nothing,” I said. “Why don’t you tell me what’s wrong here. I didn’t do anything and haven’t seen any crime.”

  “You open your smart mouth again, nigger,” a uniformed officer said, “and I’ll break your face for you good.”

  “Yeah?” I said.

  It was as if Mama Jo’s elixir was waiting for some insult. The blood in my veins turned hot and I was suddenly ready to fight.

  The sergeant didn’t know what to do. And I was of no help. I couldn’t seem to control my mouth or my actions and I had no proof of what crime had been committed—though I did have my suspicions.

  There were four cops with me in the white kitchen. The angry one was meaty and tall. The sides of his neck were red and his eyes were blue. He’d cut himself shaving recently. The scab was near the right corner of his mouth.

  I was ready to fight even sitting there with my hands cuffed behind me. It was as if Mama Jo’s medicine had opened a door of foolish bravery in my heart and now it came on me whenever I was in jeopardy.

  Just then the phone rang. In between the ringing I could hear the white man’s cries.

  “This is Dietrich,” the sergeant said into the phone.

  He looked up at me. “Yes.”

  He gestured at another policeman to undo my handcuffs. “Certainly. Yes sir. I understand.”

  The manacles were tight on my wrists and they held me in such a way that the ache in my arm worsened. With release I felt a moment of surcease.

  “Are you sure?” Sergeant Dietrich said into the phone. “Yes sir. I will. Completely.”

  He hung up the line and said, “Come with me . . . Mr. Rawlins.”

  The meaty cop who had threatened me scowled. He wanted to strike out at me but was restrained by the respect that his superior was forced to show. He got close to me though. I’m sure he was hoping that someone would give him permission to drop the hammer on my skull.

  Sergeant Dietrich walked me up the stairs to an open door that led into a bedroom with the corpse of Jocelyn Ostenberg lying across it. Her tongue was protruding and her eyes were wide with fright.

  He finally got the one he was after, I thought.

  There was a small pistol on the floor next to the bed. About half a soda bottle of blood had been spilled down the bedspread and onto the floor.

  “Do you know her?” the sergeant asked.

  “Jocelyn Ostenberg,” I said. “She’s a black woman.”

  “What?” the meaty cop said.

  “Her son is a man named Harold. He killed a woman down in Watts a few days ago.”

  The police all around me peered closer at the dead face on the bed.

  “And what do you have to do with it?” Dietrich asked.

  I was staring at the corpse, looking for Harold somewhere in the folds underneath. After he shot me he came back to her, I thought. Was it her plan to kill him? Did she want to get rid of him for good once he took care of me?

  “Was there a trail of blood?” I asked.

  “What?”

  “Leading from the house? I mean, she shot her attacker, right?”

  “You look like you’ve been shot,” the meaty cop who had called me a nigger said.

  I ignored him.

  “Can you help me out here, Sergeant Dietrich?” I asked.

  “Go look around the backyard, Samuels,” the sergeant said to my self-proclaimed enemy.

  “But, Sergeant —”

  “The backyard,” Dietrich repeated.

  After Samuels was gone Dietrich said, “There was a little blood. Not much. We figured that he used a pillow or something to stanch the bleeding and then made his way out. Mr. Poundstone said that his wife’s car was missing. The man who killed her —”

  “Harold Ostenberg,” I said.

  “— he probably took the car.”

  “Can I go, Sergeant?” I asked.

  “Detective Suggs is coming to pick you up,” Dietrich said. “They wanted you to wait for him.”

  “Well, let me talk to Jewelle,” I said. “She can go, right?”

  “I guess.”

  JEWELLE DIDN’T WANT to leave me there b
ut I told her that I had everything under control. I walked her to her car and apologized for swallowing her key.

  “Don’t worry, Easy,” she replied. “You ain’t never taken nuthin’ from me that you ain’t given back tenfold. Helpin’ Jackson get his job means that he can finally lift up outta the street and make an honest woman outta me.”

  I was wondering if Jackson could make an honest man of himself but I didn’t say it out loud. JJ drove off and white neighbors up and down the block stared at me as I made my way back to the crime scene. The man who had told the police about me ran to his door when I came near. He stood there at the entrance, shaking all over and slamming his right fist into his left palm. His deep consternation made me laugh. Here this guy didn’t know me from the man in the moon but still he was beside himself with hatred for me just walking down the street.

  SUGGS ARRIVED AT about eight-thirty. He wore a stained beige suit and brown brogans. He shook my hand in front of a dozen cop witnesses and then toured the crime scene with a hard eye.

  By that time there were three plainclothes detectives on the scene. They seemed to know Suggs. They all talked for forty-five minutes or so.

  “Jordan had Peter Rhone arrested as a material witness in the Payne murder,” Suggs told me on the way to his car. “I had to give up his name.”

  “He didn’t do it,” I said.

  “I know.”

  “Where we goin’?” I asked my new friend.

  “That’s up to you, Ezekiel,” he said.

  49

  They found Miss Ostenberg’s car on Fifty-fourth Place in an alley,” Suggs told me as we headed back for South L.A.

  “They find him?”

  Suggs shook his head while saying, “Hide nor hair.”

  We drove a little further.

  I was tired by then. The wounds and drugs and company of death had weakened me. There would have been little I could do to subdue Harold even if he were standing in front of me. I doubted that I could have climbed out of my seat without help.

  “You got any leads on the man, Rawlins?”

  “No.”

  “Why would he kill his mother?”

  “Same reason he killed all those other women. Because she preferred the company of a white man to him.”

  Suggs grimaced.

  “Geneva Landry died this morning,” he said.

  “What? Who did it?”

  “Nobody. The doctors think that she might have been allergic to an antibiotic that they gave her. They won’t be sure until they do an autopsy.”

  “She just died in her bed?”

  “I’m sorry, Ezekiel.”

  “Just died?” I said. “If you motherfuckers didn’t put her in there she would have been fine. But you were so worried about yourselves you didn’t even stop to find out about her.”

  Suggs drove the car, his big hands tight on the wheel.

  “You killed her just as well as you killed all those other women,” I continued.

  “I didn’t kill anybody,” he said softly.

  “No? Then who did? Who did? I told the people at the Seventy-seventh what I knew months ago. I told you just the other day.”

  “Nobody saw the pattern,” he said, his voice getting fainter still.

  “No,” I said. “They didn’t. But they heard Geneva yellin’ about it. They sure enough threw her in a hospital and started shootin’ her with drugs. They let her slip away right under their noses. Another woman dead and Gerald Jordan gets a party at the mayor’s house.”

  Suggs said something else but it was too soft to hear over the car engine.

  “What you say?” I asked him.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Take me to my office. Take me there and I will call you if I find out anything.”

  “We can’t just let this go, Easy,” Suggs said. “The man is a killer and Payne is innocent.”

  “I know that,” I said. “So you go to the papers and tell them. Tell the Examiner and the Times and the Los Angeles Sentinel. Tell ’em that there’s a Jack the Ripper goin’ up and down the streets killin’ black women. Give them Harold’s full name. Put that picture I gave you on the news.”

  Melvin was already looking at the road but still it felt as if he were turning away from me.

  “Mayor’s office doesn’t want any publicity,” he whispered.

  “Say what?”

  Those two words were the last of our conversation. Suggs had a job. He saved banks from being robbed and protected innocent victims from predators in the night. He hid the truth about a killer for the betterment of people that had never been that murderer’s victims. I was on the other side of the board. My queen and rooks and bishops were all gone. My pawns were exhausted, while he had a full complement of men. All I had left was a king behind a lazy pawn, flanked by a drunken man on a horse. He could have beaten me at any time he wanted to. And all I did was keep pushing ahead with no plan or hope.

  If I were driving that car I might have run it into a wall.

  SUGGS LET ME out in front of my building. I limped up the stairs and to my office. The door was open, I could see that and the damage that Harold’s gun had done from ten feet away. The key to Jewelle’s glove compartment was in my stomach and even if it weren’t, she and her .45 were many miles away. I was unarmed and my door was open. I couldn’t remember if I had left it that way or if Harold had shot me before I’d unlocked it.

  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.”