A Red Death: Featuring an Original Easy Rawlins Short Story "Si (Easy Rawlins Mysteries) (22 page)

I
MADE THE CALL
while Mouse was in the shower.

“How’s it going, Mr. Rawlins?” Special Agent Craxton asked.

“Minister and his girlfriend got killed.”

“What?”

I told him about the murders. He asked all sorts of questions about the room.

Finally he said, “Sounds like a professional job.”

“Could just be a good shot.”

“Then why wasn’t anything moved around, messed up?”

“She was down on his peter, man, maybe her husband found ’em. Maybe Winona found ’em and she thought Towne was hers.”

“Maybe. Hear me,” he said. “I’ll look into things on my end. Meanwhile, you find out what you can about the minister. Who has he been seeing, what kind of political connections does he have?”

Craxton was the boss, so I said, “Okay.”

Raymond came out of the shower with a towel around his hips and a smile on his face.

“You look better,” I said.

“And you look like you just swallowed a pig. What’s wrong, Easy?”

“You might as well ask what’s right.”

“You gonna talk to LaMarque fo’ me?”

“Soon as I can, man.”

He laughed like a small boy, younger even than his son.

“Then tell me what’s wrong.”

“I owe a man some money an’ he holds the deed t’my houses. He want me to find some stuff on some men work down at First African.”

I lied to Mouse because I was afraid that if I told him the truth he might decide to do me a Louisiana kind of favor, like burning down the IRS office, records and all.

“Yeah?”

“So then the minister, Reverend Towne, and some girl gets killed and I was there when it happened. And another man work for the first man’s company still wants my houses and a girl live in one’a my places hung herself on account of I wanted t’ throw her out. Or maybe she was murdered.”

“You talk wit’ the boy an’ I kill the men, Easy.”

“Naw, man. They work fo’ big companies. You know, cut off one an’ two take his place.”

“White men?”

“Yeah.”

“You think about it, man. If you want sumpin’ just call me.”

He dressed in the bathroom and left soon afterward. He didn’t stay, because his good clothes were at Dupree’s and he was ready to look good again.

After he’d gone I went to my bed and drank three glasses of whiskey too fast. I passed out thinking that I should call EttaMae.

T
HE FAT AMBULANCE ATTENDANT
stood awkwardly on a high kitchen chair, a butcher’s knife in his hand.

He was sawing at the rope Poinsettia hung from. The sound was loud, like two men hacking at a tree. Finally she fell to the floor. The dead weight hit with a terrible impact. Her body had become soft and so punky that one of her arms and her head flew off. But it was the sound as she hit the floor that was the worst. The floorboards started rattling and the walls shook. The whole house vibrated with the power of an earthquake.

When I started awake it was barely dawn. The sky out my window had that weak blue of the early sun, but the racket hadn’t stopped. For a moment I thought that I was really in an earthquake. But then I realized that it was someone knocking at the door.

When that someone shouted, “Police!” I thought that I would rather it be a natural disaster.

“Hold on!” I shouted back. I hauled on some slacks and a T-shirt and stepped into a beat-up pair of slippers.

When I opened the door Naylor and Reedy each took hold of an arm.

“You’re under arrest,” Naylor said, then he spun me around and put on the handcuffs.

I wasn’t surprised, so I didn’t say anything. If somebody had taken me out behind the house and put a bullet in my head I wouldn’t have been surprised. There was nothing I could do, so I just hung my head and hoped I could ride out the storm.

I rode it out to the Seventy-seventh Street station. There they put me in a small room with the handcuffs still on. After a while the fat policeman with the red face, Officer Fine, came in to keep me company.

I asked him, “Am I under arrest?”

He showed me a mouth full of bad teeth.

“Well if I am I should be allowed a call, right?”

That didn’t even get him to smile.

After a short while Reedy came in and asked the fat man to sit in the hall. He looked at me with sad green eyes and said, “Do you want to confess, Mr. Rawlins?”

“I wanna make a call is all.”

Naylor came in then. They pulled up chairs on either side of me.

“I don’t have much patience with murderers, Mr. Rawlins, especially when those murderers have killed a woman. A Negro woman at that,” Naylor said. “So I want to know what happened or Reedy and I are going to go for coffee and we’re going to leave Fine to ask the questions.”

“That’s mighty white’a you, brother,” I grinned.

He slapped my face, not too hard though. I got the feeling that Quinten Naylor was trying to save me from real injury.

“Wanna get Fine?” Reedy asked while stifling a yawn.

“Who killed the minister and the girl?” Naylor asked me.

“I’ont know, man, I’ont know.”

“Who killed Poinsettia Jackson?”

“She killed herself, right?”

They both were looking at me hard.

“I found ’er hangin’ there, thas it, hangin’. I ain’t killed nobody.”

“But somebody hit her on the head, Easy. They knocked her unconscious and hung her from the light fixture,” Naylor said. “Then they knocked the chair over to make it look like she’d used it to hang herself, but the chair was too far from the body, that’s how we got onto them. They murdered her, Easy. Now do you know why anybody would want to do that?”

Philadelphia! It came to me just that fast. Quinten was an eastern Negro from Philadelphia, I’d’ve bet anything.

“Mr. Rawlins,” Reedy said.

“How should I know?”

“Maybe you know someone who had a motive, a reason,” Reedy continued. Naylor sat back and stared.

“Why anybody wanna kill a sick girl?”

“Maybe to get her ass outta that apartment.”

“How should I know? Why don’t you ask the owner?”

“I’m asking,” Reedy said. He was looking me in the eye.

I pretended that I was alone on a raft in a rough sea. The policemen were sharks cruising my craft. I was safe for the moment, but I was taking on water.

“I wanna lawyer, I wanna make some calls.”

“Why’d you lie to us, man?” Naylor asked. He sounded embarrassed, as if my little trick made him look bad at the station.

“Just gimme a phone, all right?”

“We’ll give you Officer Fine,” Reedy said.

“Send the mothahfuckah in then,” the voice in my head said. “Let’s see us some blood.”

I didn’t say a word but stared bullets at the cops instead. I knew how to take a beating. My old man used to take me out behind the house many a time before he finally left for good. Sometimes, when I was still a boy, I missed his whipping stick.

Reedy said, “Shit!” and walked out. Officer Fine replaced him by the door.

Naylor leaned close to me and said, “This could turn ugly, Ezekiel. I can’t protect you if you don’t give.”

“Cut that shit out, man. You one’a them. You dress like them an’ you talk like them too.”

“Detective Reedy wants you in the hall, Naylor,” Fine said. He was almost polite.

“Let me get a call or two, man,” I hissed at Naylor. “You wanna save my ass, gimme some rights.”

I held my breath while the black cop thought. Fine would have liked to kill me, I could tell that by the way he smelled.

“Come on,” Naylor finally said.

“Hey wha …” Fine started to say, but Quinten stood up to him, and Quinten Naylor looked to be made from bricks.

“He’s going to make a call. That’s his right,” Naylor said.

Naylor unlocked my handcuffs and led me down the hall toward a small area that was partitioned off by three frosted glass walls. Each one was about six feet high. There was a phone on a wooden stool in the cubicle.

“There you go,” Naylor said to me, then he stood back to show me some privacy. Reedy came down with Fine and the three men started to haggle. I was a dead longhorn and those men were vultures, every one of them.

I dialed Mofass’s office. No answer.

I dialed the boardinghouse he lived in. On the third ring Hilda Bark, the owner’s daughter, answered. “Yeah?”

“Mofass there?”

“He gone.”

“Gone where?”

“Gone. Don’t you understand English?” she scolded me the way her mother must have scolded her. “He left.”

“You mean he moved out?”

“Uh-huh,” she grunted and then she hung up.

The men were still haggling over my bones, so I quickly dialed Craxton’s number.

“FBI,” a bright male voice said.

“Yeah, yeah, right. Can I talk to Agent Craxton?”

“Agent Craxton is in the field today. He’ll be back tomorrow. Would you like to leave a message?”

“Is he gonna call in?”

“Hard to say, sir. Agent Craxton is a field agent. He goes where he wants to and calls when he feels like it.”

“Please tell him that this is Ezekiel Rawlins calling from the Seventy-seventh Street police station. Tell him that I need to see him down here right away.”

“What’s the nature of your business?”

“Just tell ’im, man.”

He hung up on me too.

The next place I dialed was First African Day School. The phone was ringing when Fine came up and grabbed me by the shoulder.

“Nobody else was home,” I told him.

“Okay,” he smiled. He’d wait until I was finished with this call and then he’d see how loud I could scream.

“Hello?” a voice I didn’t recognize said.

“May I speak to Odell Jones, please?”

There was a long wait but Odell finally came on the line.

“Yes?”

“Odell?”

“Easy?”

“Man, I’m in trouble.”

“That’s how you was born, man. Born to trouble an’ bringin’ everybody else down wit’ you.”

“They got me in jail, Odell.”

“That’s where criminals belong, Easy, in jail.” He even raised his voice!

“Listen, man, I ain’t had nuthin’ t’ do wit’ Towne. It wasn’t me, not at all.”

“If it wasn’t you then tell me this,” he said. “If you didn’t go out there to the church in the first place would he be dead now?”

It was a good question. I didn’t have an answer.

“So what you want?” he asked curtly.

“Come get me outta here, man.”

“How’m I gonna do that? I ain’t got no money. All I got is God.”

“Odell,” I pleaded.

“Call on someone else, Easy Rawlins, this well is dry.”

Three strikes and Fine took me by the arm.

“I’m off duty now, Mr. Rawlins,” Quinten Naylor said. “Officer Fine will continue your interrogation.”

O
FFICER
F
INE WAS A PATIENT MAN.
Patient and delicate. He and his partner, a wan-faced rookie called Gabor, taught me little secrets like how far an arm can be twisted before it will break.

“All you gotta do is take your time,” Fine said to no one in particular, as he twisted my right hand toward the base of my skull. “I could get these here fingers over the head and into the mouth and he’d probably bite ’em off t’ stop the hurt.”

“Don’t give in, Easy!” the voice screamed in my head.

“Why’d you kill her?” Gabor asked me. I wanted to hit him but my feet and my left hand were manacled to the chair.

We’d been playing the game for over an hour. I’d been slapped, kicked, beaten with a rolled-up magazine, and twisted like a licorice stick.

When I grimaced from the arm twisting I felt dry blood crack across my cheek.

That nearly broke me. I was almost ready to confess, confess
to anything they’d say. But the voice kept screaming for me.

The door opened and a tall silver-haired man walked in. I was grateful for the respite, but when Fine released me it felt as if he’d torn the arm from its socket.

I moaned, humiliated and in pain as I gazed at those shiny black shoes.

“Captain,” Gabor said.

Then I saw a second pair of shoes that were as bright as polished onyx.

“This is what you call questioning, John?” Special Agent Craxton asked.

“It’s a hard case, uh, Agent Craxton,” the silver-haired man answered. Then he said to Fine, “Agent Craxton here is with the FBI. He needs Mr. Rawlins for a case he’s working on.”

“What about the murders?” Fine asked.

“Unchain him and apologize or I tear off your prick and shove it down your throat,” Craxton said simply, almost sweetly.

Fine didn’t like that, he brought his fists up to his chest and pushed his body forward a little, but when he peered into Craxton’s eyes he backed down. He even unlocked my manacles, but he didn’t apologize and he looked defiant, like a child angered at his father.

Craxton just smiled. The spaces between his teeth made him look like an alligator that had evolved to human form.

“Send me this officer’s file, John.”

“Apologize, Charlie,” Captain John said.

The fat cop who had caused me so much pain said, “I’m sorry.” And even though I was so hurt, that sounded good to me. His humiliation was like sweet, cold ice cream on hot apple pie.

I rubbed the dried blood from my face and said, “Fuck you, mothahfuckah. Fuck you twice.”

It wasn’t smart but I never imagined that I’d live to be an old man.

A
GENT
C
RAXTON
was with two men who looked like real FBI. They wore dark suits and ties with white shirts and short-brimmed hats. They had black shoes and white socks and small bulges on the left side of their bulky jackets. They were clean-shaven and silent as stones.

They were also the same men that I saw Shirley talking to in front of her house.

The twins got in the front seat of a black Pontiac. Craxton and I got in behind. We headed out into the street, turning every three blocks or so. I don’t think we had a destination; at least not a place we were going to.

“They think you killed all of them, Easy. Killed the girl at your place and killed the minister too.”

“Yeah, I know.”