Little Scarlet (13 page)

“How’s that?”

“A lot of times people call in wanting help but they have to rely on Nola to route the call to the right person. She was a smart girl so she knew a good prospect when it came in. And if it was good she’d give it to me if it seemed up my alley. Not a bad dividend for two cups of coffee a week.

“But after a while I started liking her. She was smart. Read all the magazines and papers that came through the office and she knew more about baseball than I did. We were friends.”

“So how does that turn into you making love to her with the city burning down around your heads?” I asked.

“When the riots started, Theda went down to La Jolla to visit her uncle and aunt. They’re her closest family and they were afraid that a race war was coming. Crazy. I went to work in the morning and Nola didn’t come in. I worried about her all day and then finally I called in the afternoon. She was so frightened. I could hear it in her voice. She hadn’t come to work because she had to take the bus and she was afraid of snipers. So I told her that I’d come and get her and drop her off with some friends that lived down around Venice.”

“So you worked until the end of the day and then drove down into the riot?”

I had always been amazed by the ignorance that white people showed about blacks. Most of the times I was angry at their lack of awareness — this time I was enthralled. Peter Rhone might have been the only white man in L.A. who wanted to drive down into Watts in order to save a colored woman from the riots.

“And they got you,” I said.

“Yeah.” Peter nodded his battered head. “Beat me pretty bad. All I could do was run toward Nola’s address. And there she was. She threw a blanket over me and took me into her building. They knocked out a tooth and I was bleeding from the head. There I was, trying to save her and she saved me instead.

“We talked for three days. She told me all about her family and her Aunt Geneva. I told her about my wife. She had a boyfriend but she wasn’t in love with him.”

His mentioning Geneva Landry reminded me of something.

“Why didn’t Geneva know your last name?” I asked.

“What?”

“Didn’t she talk to her aunt every day?”

“Yeah. Little Scarlet would call her aunt at sunset each day. Geneva would call at other times too — whenever she was scared.”

“What did you call her?”

“Little Scarlet. That was her nickname. After we got, uh, close she wanted me to call her that.”

I couldn’t see how a rapist-murderer could possibly learn his victim’s pet name.

“Well, why didn’t she tell her that the white man she saved was from her job?” I asked anyway.

“Because I’m married. She didn’t want to start any gossip about me.”

“And how did you get out of there?”

“Early… early on Wednesday morning Nola got her neighbor to take me home. I paid him fifty dollars.”

“Did he see you with Nola?”

“No. She just called him and told him to pick me up in front of the house at three.”

“And before all that you fell in love?” I didn’t mean to let my cynicism show but it was hard to hide.

“It’s true.”

And why not? A cute white boy was worth a second look, especially if he was willing to brave the riots to save a young damsel in her tenement tower. He might even be worth a third look. And if he told her that he’d leave his wife to marry her it could well have been too good to pass up. I mean, how many times are there in a young woman’s life when a man would give all that up for her? Imagine what kind of father a man like that would make.

“Who was the man who drove you?” I asked.

“Piedmont is what he called himself,” Rhone said. “I don’t even know if that’s a first or last name.”

“What did he look like?”

“Your height but not so filled out,” he said. “Same color as you are and he had very long fingers and arms. And… and he had a mole right in the center of his forehead. I remember because every once in a while he’d touch it.”

“Did you see anybody else while you were laid up at Nola’s?”

“No. Neither one of us left the apartment.”

“What about Theda?”

“What about her?”

“Didn’t she wonder where you were?”

“I called her at her relatives’ and said that I’d got caught in the riots and that a family took me in. I said that they didn’t have a phone and that I was using a phone booth to call.”

“And she believed that?”

“She was staying with people who believed there was a race war unfolding in the streets.”

I thought about Margie, a woman who was so afraid of the riots that she couldn’t even bring me my bill.

“I better call the police,” Peter said.

“No. No,” I said. “The last people in the world you wanna talk to right now are the cops. If one word gets out on the airwaves about Nola they’ll hang your butt out to dry.”

“Why?”

“You really don’t know, do you?” I asked.

“Know what?”

“That you crossed the line when you went down to Nola’s.”

“What should I do?” he asked. “I mean, I don’t want Nola’s killer to get away. Maybe I could help.”

If he was a liar he was good.

I had no idea of what happened in that neat little apartment. Maybe they went crazy after three days. Maybe they fell in love and then they began to hate each other.

All I had to do was give Rhone’s name over to Suggs or, better, to Deputy Commissioner Gerald Jordan, and I was free. I’d have a friend in a high place while the police tried to untangle the knots.

But I didn’t trust the police to do their job and I didn’t think that Rhone was guilty.

“If you’re lyin’ to me, man,” I said, “I will kill you myself.”

“I loved Nola,” he said with stiff conviction.

“Then wait twenty-four hours.”

“For what?”

“I’m gonna do what the cops asked me to do and look for the man killed Nola. If it’s you I’ll send the cops to your door. If you run I’ll find you. But if it ain’t you, well, then we’ll see.”

“Thank you,” he said.

“You don’t have to thank me, man,” I said. “This isn’t for you. I just don’t want the police to let that woman’s death slide by because they’re worried about somethin’ else.”

“That’s what I’m thanking you for.”

“Hello?” a black woman said in a gruff but not unfriendly tone.

“Juanda there?” I asked.

As the words came out of my mouth my heart twitched and my stomach turned. I had convinced myself that I was calling the fine young woman because I needed her help. And as I look back on the situation I realize that I really did need her. But there was more than that to the call. I loved Bonnie and had no intention of changing my situation but still I yearned to be in the presence of the chattering young woman who lied to save me and then led me to freedom.

“Hello?” she said in my ear.

“Juanda?”

“Mr. Rawlins.”

“Easy,” I said. “Call me Easy.”

“I was hopin’ you would call,” she said. There was no pretense in this woman. She wanted to know me and she let me know it.

“Yeah. Well, I think I might need some more help from you if you wouldn’t mind.”

“I don’t mind. You gonna come pick me up?”

I gulped and said, “Yeah.”

She gave me her address on a sigh.

I said that I’d be around in the early afternoon.

My next call was to Bonnie.

“Rawlins residence,” she said into the receiver.

“Were you ever thinking that we’d get married?” I asked without preamble.

Her response was silence.

“I didn’t mean to drop it on you, baby,” I said. “I mean… I guess I feel a little crazy out here.”

“Are you okay, Easy?”

“No.”

“What’s wrong?”

“I don’t think that white boy killed Nola.”

“That really isn’t up to you, is it?”

“No. But if I don’t look at it closely I can’t be sure the police will either.”

“Why not? That’s their job.”

“At best their job is keeping the peace,” I said. “And right here the peace will be best served by this white man takin’ the heat.”

“Oh,” she said.

“And if he didn’t kill her, then somebody else did. But the cops won’t care about that. They never worry about exactly who did what. Catchin’ crooks is like herdin’ cattle for them. So what if one or two get away? They’re bound to be caught somewhere down the line. And if they round up an innocent man, they’ll just tell ya that he probably did somethin’ else they didn’t catch him for.”

“But Easy,” Bonnie said.

“What?” I lit up a Lucky Strike.

“You don’t have the kind of resources that the police do. You can’t go out there and find some killer that you know nothing about.”

“You’re right about that, honey. But…”

“What?”

“That’s why those people were out there shootin’ and burnin’ and throwin’ rocks. Because they’re sick and tired of knowin’ that they can’t ever get it right. They’re tired’a bein’ told that they can’t win.”

“Did they win?” she asked me.

“They mighta been wrong,” I said. “But at least they tried.”

“Okay.”

It was more than her giving in to my hardheaded ways. She knew that I needed her blessing to go out so far from safety.

“I love you,” we both said together.

After she hung up I slammed the pay phone handset down so hard that it broke in my hand.

I DROPPED BY
my office at Sojourner Truth before going to meet Juanda. I had an extra suit of clothes in a locked closet there. It was a rabbit gray two-piece ensemble with a single-button jacket. I also had a cream-colored shirt and bone shoes. I took the clothes down to the boy’s gym, where I showered and shaved, powdered, and dabbed on cologne. There were still a few soldiers and policemen prowling the campus but the aftermath of the riot was winding down.

JUANDA WAS WAITING
out in front of her door on Grape Street. She had preened a bit too. She was wearing a white miniskirt and a tight-fitting multicolored striped blouse. She wore no hose or socks and only simple leatherlike sandals. She wore no jewelry and had nothing in her hair.

Juanda’s hair was not straightened, which was rare for Negro women in the ghettos of America at that time. Her hair was natural and only slightly trimmed. There was a wildness to it that was almost pubic.

She smiled for me when I hopped out to open her door.

“That’s another reason I like older men,” she said when we were both seated and on our way.

“What’s that?”

“They remember to be gentlemen even after you kissed ’em.”

“But you never kissed me,” I said.

“Not yet.”

I STARTED DRIVING
and Juanda began to talk. She told me about her cousin Byford who had recently come to Los Angeles from Texas by hitchhiking. His mother, Juanda’s mother’s sister, had died suddenly and he was alone in the world.

Juanda’s mother, Ula, had been angry at Byford’s mother for over twenty years. It seems that when their mother died, Ula suspected her sister Elba of having taken their mother’s set of cameos that she’d received from a rich white lady she worked for.

That was why Ula left Galveston, because she couldn’t stand living in the same town as her thieving sister.

The sisters were estranged, so all that Byford, who was only thirteen, knew was that his Auntie Ula lived somewhere in L.A. He stuck out his thumb and made it all the way to southern California, getting rides with young white longhairs mainly.

He found his auntie by walking the streets of Watts asking anybody he met, did they know an Ula Rivers.

“Byford is pure country,” Juanda was saying. “I mean, he go barefoot everywhere and only drink from jelly jars. Sometimes he even go to the baffroom in the backyard if somebody in the toilet an’ he cain’t hold it…”

I could have listened to her for weeks without getting tired. She was from down home, Louisiana and Texas. She was more than twenty years my junior but we could have been twins raised in the same house, under the same sun.

I knew many young teens like her who attended Sojourner Truth. But they were children and I harbored the mistaken belief that I had left my rude roots behind. I owned apartment buildings and a dozen suits that cost over a hundred dollars each. But a tight dress on a strong country body along with the prattle that I hadn’t heard since childhood sent a thrill through my heart.

Juanda’s conversation was like home cooking was to me after five years’ soldiering in Africa and Europe. I didn’t stop eating for a week after I got home.

WE HEADED WEST
toward Grand Street downtown. There we came to a small hotel called The Oxford. It had a fine restaurant on the first floor called Pepe’s. The maître d’ was a chubby, golden-hued Iranian named Albert who liked me because I once proved that he was in San Diego when his wife’s mother’s house had been robbed. Albert had married a white woman whose parents hated him. He had never experienced racism of that nature before. Being Persian, he disliked many other peoples but never for something as inconsequential as skin color or an accent.

“Mr. Rawlins,” he said, giving me a broad grin.

The room was dim because, like most L.A. restaurants, Pepe’s had no windows. That’s because the sun in the southland was too strong and the heat generated by windows didn’t make for comfortable dining.

Most of the fifteen tables were set for two at lunchtime. The chairs had leather padded arms and seats.

The dining room was nearly full. All of the other diners were white.

Albert led us to a secluded corner table that had a banquette made for two. He didn’t say anything about Juanda’s faux leather or revealing attire. He would have seated us if we were wearing jeans and straw hats.

Once we were comfortable Albert asked, “Is there anything that the lady does not eat?”

“Juanda?” I said, passing the question on to her.

“I don’t like squash or fish,” she told me.

“Then we won’t bring you any,” Albert said.

He went away and Juanda hummed a long appreciative note.