Little Scarlet (9 page)

“He’s the one wanted me to talk to you and to ask around about who it was that hurt Nola.”

“Killed her,” the distraught woman said. “He killed her. Shot Li’l Scarlet in her eye.”

“What did you call her?” I asked.

“Li’l Scarlet,” Geneva said. “Her daddy, my brother, called her that because’a her red hair. When she was a child she was just a peanut and so everybody called her Li’l Scarlet. Li’l Scarlet Payne.”

I nodded and smiled. I placed my hand on hers but she pulled away.

“Did Nola have a gun, Miss Landry?”

“No. Of course not. She wasn’t that kind’a girl. She went to church and praised Jesus. It was a sin to kill her.”

“Did she keep an address book?”

“She had a small green tin I gave her when she came here from Mississippi. It was for a little holiday whiskey cake. It was just the right size for the note cards she kept. That way she said if somebody’s numbers changed she could just write up a new card and not have to scratch it out. She was very clean, Mr. Rawlins.”

“I know she was.”

“Are you gonna find that white man?”

“Yes I am. Do you want me to talk to the doctor about taking you home?”

“I don’t know.”

“Are you afraid to go home?”

“I don’t know. I mean I don’t think so, not afraid of nobody but… when I’m alone…”

“Do you have a husband or some family? Maybe I could tell them that you’re okay. Maybe they can come and see you.”

“My husband had a heart attack and Nola was my family after that,” she said. “It’s just that I get lost when there’s nobody around, like I don’t know where I am. There’s a nice colored nurse at night who sits with me.”

“So you want to stay here for a while?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

“Did Nola have a boyfriend?” I asked.

“A piece’a one,” she said. “I mean Toby wasn’t around too much and she broke up with him about every other week.”

“Where does this Toby live?”

“In the big gray slum.”

I knew the building. It was a block down from the Imperial Highway. An empty lot that some real estate syndicate turned into a series of five twelve-story apartment buildings. The quality of the building was substandard and the rents were too much for our neighborhood. Between the high turnover and the crumbling walls the place became known as the big gray slum.

“What’s Toby’s last name?”

“McDaniels.”

I hesitated to ask the next question.

“Did you talk to your niece when the riots were going on, Miss Landry?”

“Every day and every night. We didn’t see each other ’cause I was too scared to go out and she was nursin’ that white man she saved.”

“How did she save him?”

“Rioters beat on him and he ran. He ran past Nola’s front door and she called to him… called to him. She took him upstairs and tended to his wounds and then he killed her.”

“Did she tell you his name?”

“Pete. All she ever called him was Pete.”

Geneva Landry turned back to the wall, looking for a way back to Nola. Her hands gripped the arms of her chair and big veins stood out on her dark temples.

“I should have told her about them white men,” she said. “I shoulda told her.”

“Told her what?” I asked.

“Never mind,” Geneva Landry said. “It doesn’t matter now.”

I wanted to ask her more but she seemed so vulnerable in her chair. It was as if she were wasting away as she sat there staring at the wall and regretting words she never spoke.

MELVIN SUGGS WAS
waiting for me in the white hall.

“So whataya think?” he asked me.

“She says that Nola didn’t own a gun.”

“Yeah.”

“Nobody saw the white man go into Nola’s apartment,” I added. “And Geneva didn’t see her niece get killed.”

“You think she’s makin’ it up?” Suggs asked.

“No.”

“No,” he repeated, nodding at the floor.

“What are the visiting hours here at night, Detective Suggs?”

“Early evening. Why?”

“Could you ask Dr. Dommer to have them let me in if I come by after then?”

“Yeah but… I mean, you already talked to her.”

“She needs some company. If I have the time, maybe…” I shrugged and Suggs did too.

It wasn’t that he didn’t like me or was unconcerned about his job. He just didn’t have much sympathy for the woman and her situation. She was a witness or a suspect but nothing more than that.

The only one home when I got there was Frenchie the dog. He barked from the moment I walked in the door. It was a high-pitched, yapping sort of a bark that told me who my mother was and who my father was and how badly my butt stank. Accepting the abuse, I read the newspaper while sitting on the love seat in the no-man’s-land between the kitchen and the living room.

The police had opened fire on a Muslim mosque on Fifty-sixth and South Broadway. They rushed the building and found nineteen men sprawled on the blood-stained floor. No one was shot, the article said, but they were lacerated by flying glass.

The reason given for the attack was that a shot was fired from an upper floor of the building. But the real reason was in the adjacent article saying that twelve of fifteen thousand National Guardsmen had been pulled out of Los Angeles overnight. The police were afraid of losing their authority, so they responded with deadly force.

Nola’s death took on a new importance as I read the reports. I didn’t want the police killing our dark-skinned citizens any more than the deputy commissioner wanted to rekindle the riots. Gerald Jordan and I probably wouldn’t agree about what time the sun rose in the morning but we were together on wanting to find Little Scarlet’s killer.

Gemini 5
had lifted off by then and the Marines claimed to have killed 550 Vietcong guerrillas in a coordinated attack. Martin Luther King had been in Watts talking about the aftermath of the riots with Negro leaders, and astrophysicists were worried that an asteroid named Icarus would collide with Earth in three years’ time.

To some people that space rock would have come as a blessing from God. Something sent down to Earth to shake off the invisible chains and manacles holding down five people for every one that’s walking around free.

The school bus brought Feather home a few minutes shy of four and Bonnie came home only moments later. Those kids were less hers than mine but she loved them as much as two blood mothers. The fact that she was a few minutes late made her very unhappy. But Feather didn’t notice because she had me there. And she was a daddy’s girl from the word go.

Feather read to me from her textbook. It was a story about an old walrus who had to swim five thousand miles from somewhere in South America to Antarctica. Along the way the walrus saw all kinds of amazing things in the water and on the shore. He saw whales as big as islands and sea birds of every size and shape.

Feather started reading her lessons out loud because that’s what I had done with her brother when he dropped out of school. She loved Jesus more than anyone else in the world and patterned herself after him even though she was a much better student.

After the reading we talked and after that we watched TV as a family. I had my hand on Bonnie’s thigh and my mind a little further up than that but our night of passion was not to be.

The phone rang at 8:30, half an hour after Feather had gone to bed and in the middle of the dishes. I thought it would be Juice telling us that he was staying with friends at the shore but it wasn’t.

“Easy,” Bonnie said after answering the line. “It’s Raymond.”

Taking the phone I said, “Hey, Mouse.”

“Hey, Easy. You callin’ for a discount?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I figure you musta heard that I’m in business and you callin’ in for some cut-rate prices.”

“What kinda business?”

“Sellin’,” he said impatiently.

“Sellin’ what?”

“You name it, Ease. I got everything from steaks to Smirnoff, from stuffed chairs to diamond rings.”

It made perfect sense that Mouse would have been a part of the black market that had to grow up out of the riots. He had already been in the business of moving merchandise stolen by people he knew who worked at various warehouses. A looting event like the riots would have presented itself as a golden opportunity. And Raymond Alexander wasn’t one to let an opportunity go to waste.

“I don’t want to buy anything, Ray.”

“Then why you callin’?”

“I need some help, man.”

“Help?”

“I’m lookin’ into this thing and I might need somebody to stand at my back.”

“Easy, I’m doin’ business here, brother. I can’t be runnin’ around like it was a party. I got to be at work.”

I smiled to myself. If Raymond were going out to rob a bank, he’d have EttaMae make him a sandwich for lunch on the run.

“That’s okay, man. You all right?”

“I got money comin’ outta my pockets, they so full.”

“Okay. I’ll call you later.”

“Hold up, Ease.”

“What?”

“You in trouble?”

“Naw. Don’t worry. It’s just somethin’ I’m lookin’ into.”

“What is it?”

I told him about Nola Payne and her aunt, about the white man and the car thief named Loverboy.

“Okay,” he said. “You know I got to go make a pickup anyway. You wait at your place and me an’ Hauser be over in forty-five.”

“Where you comin’ from?”

“Santa Monica. That’s where I’m set up.”

I TRIED TO
apologize to Bonnie but she kissed it away.

“I know you have to go, baby,” she told me. “I’m proud of you.”

“I like to spend time with you when you’re home, honey,” I said. “I just have to go out and —”

“Be our hero,” she whispered.

We were standing on the front porch, between the spaces where I once grew roses to celebrate our love. Later I cut the roses down when I thought Bonnie loved another man. I did it to show her how angry I was but somehow the emptiness came to mean more to us than the flowers had.

A big Andy’s Supermarket truck was rumbling up the street. I was surprised to see such a big truck on a side street. I was amazed to see it stop in front of my house.

“Easy!” Mouse yelled from the passenger’s window about two stories high. “Come on up, man.”

Bonnie and I laughed and embraced each other. She kissed me again and I ran toward the semi.

I remember thinking, as Mouse reached down to help me, that it was as if I were living in one of Feather’s fairy-tale books. Only this was an adult fairy tale. So instead of a flying carpet I had a six-axle produce delivery truck and instead of an evil ogre I had a well-to-do white man who shot virtuous young black women after raping and strangling them.

Easy Rawlins, meet Randolph Hauser,” Mouse said as I took my place next to the passenger’s window. When I pulled the door shut I could see Bonnie going back into the house. Watching our door close brought a tightening around my heart — the symptom of a premonition that was indecipherable and unsettling.

“How you doin’?” the big, redheaded white man said to me.

He stuck out a hand bulging with the muscle of a working man. I shook it and was immediately convinced of his strength.

“Good,” I said. “You on a delivery run.”

“Deliverin’ the goods,” he said and then he let out a big laugh.

Randolph Hauser was the opposite of Mouse in almost every way. He was white, nearly fat with muscle, and he had blunt features compared to Ray’s chiseled and fine ones.

“What’s that mean?” I asked simply.

The white man slipped the truck into gear and took off with a roar.

“Don’t your boy know the score, Raymond?” Hauser asked.

“He can count higher than you can think, white boy,” Mouse replied. “Easy walk up to a haystack and pick up a gold pin quicker than you could find a straw.”

“What are you doin’ with this truck, Ray?” I asked.

“I do my pickups around this time, Easy. It’s late but not too late. And with Hauser here drivin’, the cops let us be.”

“Not too late for what?” I asked.

It always took a while to get a bead on what Mouse was doing. He was naturally crafty, keeping in practice even when talking to people he trusted.

“I already told you. The pickup.”

“What are we picking up?”

“Don’t never know till we get there.” He gave me a broad smile. “That’s the wonder of this here job. Ain’t that right, white boy?”

“Yesiree, son,” Hauser said. “This is the best job I had since drivin’ shotgun on a regular route we used to bring in from Baja.”

He shifted gears again and we rumbled east on Olympic.

The streets were pretty quiet and so was I.

We were just turning onto Western when Hauser asked, “So what about the stuff they take over to your place?”

“What about it?” Mouse said in a less than friendly tone.

“We said that we were going to split the profits —”

“On what we move outta your place, brother. Out of there. Whatever I keep for me is mine.”

I could see that Hauser wasn’t happy about loot he was missing out on. But I knew, and he did too, that despite his size Mouse was unafraid of any man. If Hauser wanted to argue he’d better be serious because Mouse was always ready to arrange a meeting with Death.

Hauser drove us all the way down Western past El Segundo, to a lonely spot between the Western Avenue public golf course and the Gardenia Airport. We backed up to a dark warehouse down there. While we were climbing out of the cab the door to the loading dock came open.

I realized that Hauser was even bigger than I thought. He was at least six four and right around three hundred pounds. His red hair was thick and wavy and his shoulders were so big that they seemed like some other creature rising up behind him. He wore jeans and a light blue work shirt over a dark blue T-shirt.

Looking at him I wondered about the origin of Nola Payne’s red hair color. Maybe Hauser’s ancestors owned Nola’s. Maybe they ran together, hiding from the English.

Mouse was clad in white coveralls with a white T-shirt that looked to be silk. There was a sapphire hat pin stuck to his lapel and he carried a canvas money bag like the ones tellers use in banks.