Little Green (23 page)

“I don’t dislike anybody, Mr. Rawlins.” The cop’s voice was as cold as his eyes. “I just call a spade a spade.”

He was baiting me, and Mama Jo’s medicine wanted to rise to the hook. But I inhaled deeply, putting that urge down.

“You needed a whole shoppin’ bag for one sheet’a paper?” I asked.

“Oh, yeah. I got something else in here, something JP thought you might be interested in.”

He pulled out a manila folder. It contained well over a hundred sheets of various kinds and colors of paper. It was the thickness of a small town’s white pages.

When I got it in my hands I saw a familiar name on the filing tab—
EZEKIEL PORTERHOUSE RAWLINS
.

There were reports filed on me that went all the way back to the late forties. Other than Mouse it contained briefs on my friends Odell, John, EttaMae, Jackson, Primo, and a dozen or more others. There were all kinds of crimes I had been a suspect in—some of them I actually committed.

I must have spent five minutes engrossed in the life that the LAPD attributed to me.

“Damn,” I said at last. “You got one’a these on Ray Alexander?”

“I’d need a helper to bring down the file cabinet we got on him.”

“I guess you need this back, huh?” I asked.

“No. You can keep it.”

“Won’t it be missed?”

“If they go lookin’ for it they’ll just think it got lost.”

“They’re that careless about their files at the LAPD?”

“Look at the last page.”

I turned the tome over and opened it from the back. The final page of the damning document was mostly blank except for the sentence:
SUBJECT DECEASED DUE TO A SINGLE-VEHICLE ACCIDENT ON PCH. INVESTIGATION CLOSED
.

I was so engrossed in those twelve words that I didn’t notice the man who called himself Tim Richards rising from the bench.

“Keep your nose clean and they’ll never know you’re out here,” he advised.

He walked away, leaving me with my epitaph in my lap.

Every morning was a new experience since coming out from the semicoma. That day I was feeling pretty spry, even though the effects of Jo’s medicine had waned. I didn’t need rest, and I had information that could possibly lead to an end of Evander Noon’s problem—one way or another.

Carrying the city-authorized biography, I went to a phone booth that overlooked the Pacific Ocean, smoked the last menthol, and thought about how lucky a man could be to sit in a glass box set at the edge of a vastness like that.

It was five minutes before I dropped the dime and dialed a number.

“Hello?” Jackson Blue said on the fourth ring.

“Hey, Jackson, I wake you up?”

“No, man, I was readin’ your copy of
Cotton Comes to Harlem
.”

“You never read it before?”

“Course I did, when it came out two years ago. But you know I got to be readin’ if nuthin’s goin’ on. Got to or else I’d go crazy.”

I smiled to myself at Jackson’s impotent self-awareness.

“I want you to call Huggins and tell him you’re ready to sign the loan papers,” I said.

“Why?”

“Get Jean-Paul to set us up in a suite with a connecting room in a hotel downtown. Tell Huggins to bring the papers and Portia and to meet us in the suite. Let’s make it tonight about eight … no, no, nine.”

“What if somebody says no?”

“They won’t.”

“But what if they do?”

“Find a place where you, me, JP, and anybody else he wants to bring can meet at seven thirty.”

“But, Easy—”

“Can’t talk now, Jackson; I’m on a schedule. Call Etta’s and give the information to Peter Rhone. If he’s not there try Primo’s garage. And I’m sorry, Blue, but you’re gonna have to make it to work on your own.”

The address the cop gave me was on Crest View Drive, a street that followed a hill up to the highest point of the solidly upper-middle-class community. The houses were mostly large and prosperous-looking, like architectural versions of fat burghers at a Dutch theater before the blemish of the world wars.

Maurice’s two-story house had a magnificent weeping willow dominating the front yard.

I parked pretty far up in the driveway and walked briskly to the front door, trying to look as if I belonged there. I was wearing work jeans and the kind of rough cotton shirt that a gardener or a day worker might have. Of course, I was a black man in 1967, so anybody looking at me in that neighborhood would look again.

I didn’t care. I didn’t have patience for people’s suspicions. There was a job to do.

I knocked and rang and knocked again. The front door was on a raised porch partially concealed by a trellis that had a vine of sweetheart golden roses covering it. To the left of the heavy oak door were three large windows that were completely hidden from view.

I tried the knob but the door, of course, was locked.

Then I wondered how much noise the breaking of one of those three-by-three-foot panes would make. I spent way too long thinking about breakage.

Why don’t you just try to open it?
I said to myself.

The window didn’t come open, but it jostled more than a snug lock should have allowed. I grabbed the two handles and pulled hard. The wood along the frame had rotted, and so the lock tore out from its pulpy mooring.

I donned the cloth gloves that I always carried while working and climbed through the window.

The first room was set up for dining. There was a long wooden table, dark brown and shiny, surrounded by eight equally dark chairs that had plush, bright vermilion-cushioned seats like so many panting tongues. Leading from the dining area was a doorway with no door that brought me to a boothlike space that had no purpose except the transition from here to there.

“Hello?” I called.

No answer.

Through the booth I came into a living room. The colors here were gay pastels with lots of padding. There was an extra-long sofa and four chairs, upholstered cousins of the couch. On one wall hung three framed prints of chubby Renoir nudes: one bathing, one drying off after bathing, and another bending over to test the temperature of the lake. There was a glass-and-cast-iron coffee table with huge tomes that contained photographs and paintings of nudes. Thick, creamy carpeting muffled my footsteps, but I didn’t go far.…

There was an interloper in this soft landscape: a chrome-and-purple-vinyl kitchen chair with arms held a dead man in dark green trousers, bare feet, and a bloodstained wife-beater T-shirt. His wrists and ankles were bound to chromium arms and legs. The dead man had a receding hairline. He’d been wounded in the left shoulder and bandaged up before this last bit of torture did him in. His head was thrown back and there was a neat little bullet hole in the temple above his right eye. Probably a .22, I thought, with a steel-jacketed shell. One of his eyes was open, bloodshot, and brown. His lips had formed a rictus to which there was not even the hint of humor.

The skin was cool to the touch. His fingers curled toward their palms like a bird’s talons. There were cigarette burns and bloody marks on his chest and face. I wondered how loudly he had screamed and then noticed a stiffened wad of white cloth on the floor next to him. This, I imagined, was the rag that had been shoved into his mouth at the worst moments.

He might have been handsome. It was hard to tell through his death mask.

His wallet identified him as Maurice Potter. He was forty-seven, my age, and weighed one hundred and seventy-one pounds at the time his driver’s license was issued. He had seven hundred and thirty-three dollars, not counting change, and two credit cards.

I sat on the edge of the coffee table and studied the man that had died. There was no real reason for this amateur examination except that death had been much on my mind of late.

Potter had stubble on his chin. He seemed like a fastidious man, and I wondered if the facial hair had grown out since his demise.

It was while having these thoughts that I noticed the heavy, dark blue trunk set in a far corner, behind two squat stuffed chairs.

I made a quick reconnaissance of the house; there were two bedrooms, a yellow kitchen, an office the size of a workingwoman’s dream closet. All the rooms had been violently and yet meticulously searched.

On my way out I went back through the dying room, gave Maurice a parting look, and then stopped.

That blue trunk.

It was banded in metal, heavy, and completely out of place in the soft-colored sitting room—like Maurice himself, it was an eyesore.

I observed that the creamy carpeting around the trunk was a bit darker and yellowy. Upon closer inspection I realized that the dark area was wetness. There were no plants, overturned glasses, leaks from the ceiling or walls, just wetness all around the front of the blue trunk.

I felt my heart throbbing in my chest. It wasn’t beating fast but preparing to. I hadn’t been afraid in a very long time, and so these biological preparations amused me.

I crouched down, flipped the two latches holding the lid of the trunk in place, and stood as I lifted the top.

Inside was a naked white girl, maybe eighteen, maybe not quite. She was in a fetal position. Her stringy blond hair was well on the way to getting matted. Her eyes were shut. For a moment I thought that she too was dead. I was trying to make sense of the dead man lashed to a chair while a dead girl lay hidden a few feet away when she blinked at me.

She stared up, squinting at the light and a little confused. Who could blame her?

“Are you okay, miss?” I asked.

She sat up, covering her small breasts with crossed arms. I took off my shirt, helped her to stand, and wrapped the rough cloth around her shoulders. I still had a T-shirt on.

“Where is he?” she asked in a voice that vibrated with fear.

“Maurice?”

She nodded.

“He’s dead,” I said, indicating the corpse with a slight movement of my head.

When the girl saw Maurice a smile flickered across her lips and then she began to cry.

The girl smelled bad but I didn’t mind. The odor reminded me of how I smelled just a few days before.

“How long have you been in there?” I asked after ten or twelve minutes of shivering and sporadic crying.

I’d ushered her into the kitchen, where she downed three big glasses of water between sobs and tremors.

“I don’t know … maybe a week, maybe more. He … he made me stay there for hours and told me I had to hold it for the bathroom. He only gave me three minutes in the toilet and then he’d put me back in the trunk. That’s when he’d give me a jar of water and two cookies to have in the dark.”

“Why?” I asked. “Was he mad about something?”

“I didn’t even know him. We met at the bus station. I only just got into town and he started talking to me near the gate. He was nice. He bought me lunch and said he owned a restaurant. He offered me a job. I thought I was lucky. We came to his house because he said he had the waitress uniforms here.

“Then he … he slapped me around, ripped off my clothes, and … and … and he made me get in the trunk. He said that when he got through with me I would do anything he wanted.

“But then, two days ago, I think, maybe three or four, he came in and he was shot in the shoulder. He handcuffed me to the chair and made me help him put on some bandages. He kept saying, ‘Damn niggers this’ and ‘Damn niggers that.’ I was so scared. I begged him to let me go, but he punched me and threw me back in.”

I noticed a blue-and-red bruise on the left side of her jaw.

“Then what?” I asked.

“I was hungry and I had to go, but he wouldn’t let me out. He told me not to make any noise or he’d kill me. I knew he would, so I just laid there and prayed. I never prayed before. Even in church I’d just lower my head but I didn’t say the words in my head.…”

“Did you hear what happened to him?”

“It was another man’s voice,” she said, looking up from the floor. Her eyes were blue and red, her skin pink with a hint of gray. “He was very angry and he hit Maurice. He kept hitting him and Maurice was begging him to stop. But he didn’t stop.…”

The flickering evil grin worked its way back into her face. At her early age she had already experienced hate deeper than I would ever know.

“What did the man ask Maurice?”

“He kept asking, where was the nigger? He kept saying that, over and over.”

“And did he open the trunk?”

She nodded and looked down again. “When I heard him I turned my head away and pretended that I was unconscious or dead or something. I thought he’d kill me but he didn’t.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. I just heard the top open and felt the light on my eyelids. Then he closed it up again and I didn’t hear anything else.”

I sat back and watched the white slave in the mustard work shirt. Her hands were balled into useless fists, and a kind of tuneless humming came from deep in her throat.

“Did you have a suitcase when Maurice got you?”

She nodded and said, “He put it in the backseat of his car.”

“Where’s that?”

“In the garage.”

I stared at the girl for a long time. She twisted her shoulders to get away from the scrutiny.

“What’s your name?” I asked, mostly to relieve the pressure.

“Sue.”

“Where did you come from, Sue?”

“Flagstaff … in Arizona.”

“Can you go back there?”

She shook her head miserably, and I wondered if what she was running from was worse than even Maurice.

“Did the man who beat on Maurice say any names that you remember?”

“He said something about a guy named Giles,” she said. “Just before he opened the trunk he said, ‘This is for Giles,’ and there was this sound like my brother’s cap gun.”

“Did you see the man through a crack or something?”

She shook her head.

“How old are you, Sue?”

“Sixteen. I’ll be seventeen in September. What are you going to do with me?”

She looked up again for that question.

I brought my palms to chest level and shook my head. “After what you’ve been through I will do whatever it is you want.”

Sue’s brows knitted as she tried to comprehend what I was saying.