Little Scarlet (3 page)

Deputy Commissioner Jordan was a terror on the TV. He called the rioters thugs and criminals who had no respect for property and no reason to riot other than their own immoral desires to loot and destroy. Jordan’s inflammatory words had probably caused the violence to last a day longer than it would have. On television he always wore a black dress uniform with medals across the left breast. That’s why I hadn’t recognized him in the makeshift morgue.

“Well, Deputy Commissioner, what is it you want from me?”

“I’m not here, Mr. Rawlins,” he said.

“No? Am I here?”

“Not with me. As far as any records are concerned, we had you come down to identify Nola Payne. You failed to do so and were taken home.”

“And who brought me here?”

“Detective Suggs brought you, and Captain Fleck debriefed you.”

“I see.”

Jordan smiled. I liked him. I liked him the way a slave learns to love his master or a prisoner develops an affinity with his warden. Gerald Jordan was the white man in charge. He was the closest I had ever come to the source of our problems. I wondered if I killed him right then, would the problems of my people become that much lighter? Of course the idea was ridiculous. Realizing the impotence of my fantasy, I laughed.

“Something funny, Mr. Rawlins?” Jordan asked.

“Not you, sir.”

“Let’s get down to business, shall we?”

“It’s your show.”

“Lee?” Jordan said.

The bald captain cleared his throat.

“Nola Payne was found by her aunt in the living room of her third-floor apartment on Grape Street earlier today,” the sour captain reported.

“Not to me, Lee,” the deputy commissioner said. “Mr. Rawlins is the one who will need this information.”

Fleck would have much rather spit in my face but he controlled himself. He did a quarter turn in the visitor’s chair and fixed his gaze on my forehead.

“She was strangled to death and then shot —”

“Was she raped?” I asked.

“She had intercourse within six hours of her death. It might have been rape but there are no bruises, cuts, or tears to back that up.”

He twitched his mustache as if to ask, Anything else?

I shook my head.

“Miss Landry,” he continued, “that’s Miss Payne’s aunt, called the police immediately but it took a while for anyone to come because of the problems in that area. When the patrolmen finally arrived they found Miss Landry in a hysterical state. She was screaming that a white man had murdered her niece. No matter how much they tried to calm her she kept shouting that a white man had raped and killed her niece. The officers took her into custody because they were afraid her ranting would incite another riot.”

“So they arrested her?” I asked.

“No, Mr. Rawlins,” Gerald Jordan said. “She was distraught. The officers were directed to bring Miss Landry here, where the doctors could sedate her, ease her pain.”

Whenever Jordan smiled I wanted to slap his skinny face. The riots were still going on in my chest.

“You drugged her?”

“Would you rather I let her start up the riots again?”

“Where is she?”

“Down the hall,” Fleck said. “She won’t be awake until the morning.”

“We need to know what happened down there, Mr. Rawlins,” Jordan said, pretending to care.

“Why?”

“Because we want L.A. to get back to normal.”

“You mean you want businessmen back at their desks, the shoppers to go back to the stores, and tourists buying mouse ears at Disneyland.”

“This is no joke, Rawlins.” That was Fleck. “The LAPD needs your help and if you know what’s good for you you will cooperate.”

“What is it you want me to do exactly?”

“Talk to Miss Landry when she awakens,” Jordan said. “Go down to Grape Street and find out the circumstances of Miss Payne’s death if you can.”

“I don’t get it. Why are you so worried about a dead black woman? You’re not doin’ this for every Negro killed.”

The captain and his boss shared glances. Jordan shrugged.

“On the second day of the riots we had a report that a white man was dragged from his car down on Grape Street. He was harassed and beaten but finally managed to escape. No one has heard about him since. Under any other circumstance we could ignore the report. Maybe the man got away and went home. But a story about a black woman being murdered by a white man across the street from where a white man fled could cause rumors that might flare up into something ugly.”

Like Nola Payne, I thought.

“So you want me to find the white man?” I asked.

“We want you to find out anything you can,” Jordan said.

“And what will you do with what I find?”

“Try to keep a lid on the flow of information.”

“What if a white man did kill her?”

Jordan and Fleck shared glances again.

“We don’t want a murderer going free,” Jordan said. “No matter his color. In this case if it came out that a white man killed Miss Payne and we put that man up on trial, then the people will see that we mean to maintain the balance of justice.”

His words might have been an ad for cigarettes or whiskey. He didn’t care about justice. He didn’t care about a dead black woman or her killer. The only way that either one of them could ever bother him was if someone came around and held him accountable for the consequences of their actions.

“Okay,” I said.

“What does that mean?” Captain Fleck asked.

“I’ll do it. I’ll go down there and ask around. I’ll try and see what happened.”

Jordan might have been smiling. I couldn’t quite tell. His lips moved about an eighth of an inch and the flesh around his eyes eased up a bit.

“Thank you,” he said.

“But I’m going to need something in order to get this done.”

“And what is that?”

“There’s a white man in this someplace. That might mean that I’ll have to go around in white neighborhoods. In order to do that I’ll need some kind of identification from the police department.”

“Once you find out anything you come to me,” Captain Fleck said. “You don’t have any business in a white neighborhood.”

“Then forget it,” I said.

I stood up from the comfortable doctor’s chair and took three steps toward the door.

“Wait outside, will you, Mr. Rawlins?” Jordan asked. “I’ll see about what you need.”

I passed through the door and waited around for a few moments. But I didn’t like that, so I wandered down the hallway, pretending that I wasn’t waiting on the policemen’s whims.

The corridors of the clinic were a maze. I turned a few times before passing a wide white door that had a glass portal. Inside I could see a black woman in bed under a thin white sheet. From where I stood she seemed to have no arms.

When I pushed the door open I could hear her moans. She was in a straitjacket, saying things I didn’t understand. Her head was flailing back and forth. Drool covered her jaw. When I reached out to touch her face, her eyes came open and fastened onto me just like the women used to do down in New Iberia when I was a child doing something wrong.

“Where am I, Roger?” she asked me.

“In the hospital,” I said.

“Am I sick? Am I dyin’?” she asked in a distraught tone.

“No ma’am. I think you had a shock and the policemen brought you here to the doctor.”

“Yes,” she said in a very knowing way. “I have seen terrible things. Things you wouldn’t ever want to see, Roger.”

I thought about what it must have been like for her to come upon the corpse of Nola Payne, a woman she had probably known since Nola was a child.

“Why am I tied up?”

“Because the doctors thought you might hurt yourself.”

“It wasn’t that white man, was it?” she asked over my reply.

“What white man?”

“The one with Nola. The one that choked her and shot her and ran.”

“What white man?” I asked again.

I had learned over the years that when someone is in shock you can ask them the same question again and again, getting a different answer each time — every answer bringing you closer to the truth.

“The one in her house. The one she tried to save. All them white men wanna do is beat you and stick their things in your behind like you was a whore.”

“Who did she try and save?”

The woman closed her eyes and moaned.

“They were tryin’ to kill him, the people. And he runned and Nola took him in. He was bleedin’ and bloody. She didn’t know about white men. I never told her and now she’s dead.”

“What was his name?” I whispered.

She sighed and then passed back into the stupor the doctors had induced. I sat with her a bit just to be some company. I wondered where Nola’s story ended and her aunt’s began.

After a while I left the sleeping, tortured prisoner and made my way back toward Dr. Turner’s office.

THEY WERE WANDERING
the halls, looking for me. Both Fleck and Jordan had removed their borrowed doctor’s smocks. Fleck wore a dark blue uniform and Jordan had on a cream-colored suit.

“Where are you coming from?” Fleck asked me.

If he had been a brother or a young beatnik I would have thought he was talking in slang. But I knew it was just that the language he spoke and hipster talk sometimes overlapped.

“Out lookin’ for a place to smoke,” I said. “I got lost in these damn white halls.”

I was trying to sound down-home, half ignorant — but it was too late for that now. I had already talked to the white man in his own tongue and he would know from that day forth that his bastion had been breached.

“Here you go,” Jordan said, handing me a folded sheet of paper.

I unfolded the white sheet and read it silently.

It was a letter composed on the typewriter.

August 18, 1965
To Whom It May Concern:
The bearer of this letter, Mr. Ezekiel Rawlins, is hereby empowered by the writer, Deputy Commissioner of Police Gerald Jordan, to be given free access by the police and any other security employee as he is conducting private consultations for the Los Angeles Police Department. If there are any questions as to his authority you should contact the central office of the police department and inquire at the desk concerning the police commissioner’s business.
Gerald Jordan
Deputy Commissioner Gerald Jordan

“This is enough?” I asked.

“It should be,” Jordan said.

“And when does it go into effect?”

Past the deputy commissioner’s shoulder I could see Suggs and the third white-man-in-white coming down the hall.

“Right now, Mr. Rawlins. I called it in before coming to find you.”

I refolded the letter and put it in my shirt pocket.

“I have to leave, Mr. Rawlins,” Jordan said. “Is there anything else you need?”

“No sir.”

“What about remuneration?”

“I don’t usually take on white clients, Mr. Jordan.”

“So you want a higher fee?”

“I don’t want no fee whatsoever,” I said. “I’ll do this thing but not for you. I’ll do it for the people I care about.”

For one instant Gerald Jordan’s smug, superior attitude wavered. Behind the mask of sophistication was a face that made Nola Payne’s death mask look benign.

But then he was the politician again. Smiling and nodding at me.

“The city appreciates your goodwill, Mr. Rawlins. It’s too bad that your community doesn’t have more citizens with such a sense of civic responsibility.”

Before I could come up with a fitting reply Jordan was walking away, with Fleck scuttling behind.

“I’ll give you a ride back to your office,” Suggs said to me.

“No thanks. I think I’ll stick around here for a while. Maybe Miss Landry will come to. And I’d like to talk to the doctor.”

“That’s me,” the third white-man-in-white said. “Dr. Dommer.”

He put out a hand and I shook it.

“I don’t really have very much time, Mr.… ?”

“Rawlins. People call me Easy.”

“Well, Easy, I can give you a few minutes but I have to prepare for surgery this afternoon.”

“I’ll be quick.” I turned to Suggs and asked, “How do I get in touch with you, Detective Suggs?”

“The Seventy-seventh Precinct will be my home until this is finished.”

“You got it,” I said.

Suggs looked at me a moment, and then he realized that he was being dismissed. At that moment I realized the same thing. The world was changing so quickly that I was worried about making a misstep in the new terrain.

“Okay,” Suggs said. “You call me when you got anything.”

He hesitated a moment more and then turned away.

Before he was out of sight in the long white hall Dr. Dommer asked, “How can I help you, Easy?”

“How did she die?”

Dommer wasn’t a large man. His chest was concave and his brown eyebrows were bushy. His lips were normal size but flaccid and his brown eyes were on the way to becoming yellow. He had hands like a woman, long and slender, soft and tapered.

“Strangled.”

“Then why did he shoot her?”

“I can’t tell you that, Easy. Maybe he wanted to make sure that she was dead.”

“Was there anything else you found?”

“I didn’t do an autopsy. That’s the coroner’s job. But I’d say that she was knocked around quite a bit before she was killed.”

“Was she raped?”

“She had sex with someone,” the doctor said. “But considering the way she was beaten I doubt if he raped her too. There was no trauma in the vaginal area at all. This guy wouldn’t have been a gentle lover.”

“What about Miss Landry?” I asked.

“What about her?”

“Why do you have her all trussed up in that straitjacket?”

“How do you… ? The commissioner asked us to keep her sedated and secured.”

“Isn’t there some law against that?”

“Not if we believe that she’s a danger to herself or others.”

“Do you?”

“Is that all, Mr. Rawlins?”

“I’m coming back here tomorrow, Dr. Dommer. Please try and have Miss Landry out of those restraints.”

The doctor and I made eye contact. When I was sure that we understood each other I turned away and walked down the white maze.