Black Betty (10 page)

“You didn’t believe him?”

“I don’t know what to…” I said. Then, with no warning, the commander leaped to his feet and hit me in the chest with a vicious uppercut.

The chair fell as I was knocked to my feet. I staggered back until I hit the wall and then crumpled like a crushed bug.

At first the only problem was that I couldn’t breathe. It felt as if my whole chest had caved in. With breath came a hurt so deep that it scared me. And then there was a noise like an angry goose honking at intruders into his harem.

After a few moments I realized that the honking was me trying to catch my breath.

“Come on, Rawlins,” the commander said. He grabbed my shoulder and yanked me up.

The little man was fiddling with his tape recorder. The neat and pleated police officer stood at attention at the door. Neither one of them moved to help me. They wouldn’t have moved if that crazy man had been beating me to death.

“Let me help you to your chair,” the commander offered.

He dropped me into an empty seat and regained his perch on the table.

“What were you doing at the Cain house now?”

“Lynx offered me…” I started coughing phlegm from way down in my lungs. I must have coughed a full minute, but Styles didn’t care. He waited patiently to continue with his interrogation.

“Lynx offered two hundred dollars up front and more if I could come up with Eady,” I said at last. “I thought he was for real. Why would he lie about something like that?”

“I don’t know,” Styles said, prompting me.

When he brought his hand to his chin I put my arms up over my head and chest—and I wasn’t the least bit ashamed.

“What about Albert Cain?” Styles asked.

“Who’s that?” I asked, but I had a sinking feeling in my gut.

“He’s the old man,” Styles said. “Just died a couple’a weeks ago.”

“I don’t know nuthin’ about him,” I answered. “Lynx didn’t even tell me about him. All he said was that the lady of the house wanted her servant back. All I was trying to do was to pay my rent. I didn’t think that there was anything wrong with looking for a woman for her boss.”

“You don’t know anything about Albert Cain?”

“Not a thing.”

“But this man… this, this…” He snapped his fingers thinking of the name.

“Lynx,” I said.

Styles smiled. It was a genuine smile, friendly—one of the most chilling things about a natural killer is his smile. It was as if my submission filled him with glee.

“Lynx,” he repeated. “He told you to go to the Cain place?”

“No. He wanted me to find Elizabeth Eady, at least that’s what he said.”

“But if it was the rich lady who wanted her, why would you look for her up there?” He sounded like a three-year-old wondering, without the slightest fear, why the ocean didn’t rush up and flood the land.

“Lynx said that he didn’t know the name of the lady. He said that a lawyer hired him.”

“What lawyer?” There was a wolf grin on Styles’s face.

“I don’t know. He didn’t say.”

“What did he tell you?”

“Just that he needed to find Betty—”

“Betty? You know her?”

“Knew her. When I was a kid. A long time ago, in Texas.”

“So that’s why you went up to the Cains’? You knew this girl worked up there.”

“I haven’t seen Betty in twenty-five years.”

“Do you know where this, this Betty might be?” He was trying to sound casual about it. But I could tell that Betty was the only thing he really wanted to know about.

“No, sir.”

“And so if you don’t know anything about her and haven’t seen her in all these years, then how did you know to go out there to the Cains’?”

“The check,” I whispered.

“Yeah. The check,” he said. “Now where’d that big ole check come from?”

“I found it at Marlon’s house… down on Hooper.”

Hooper?
Styles mouthed the word silently. The question all over his face.

I was back in that outhouse—on my knees and surrounded by Marlon’s dry blood. Styles knew I was lying but he wasn’t going to expose me on a police tape recording. It was then that I knew that my life was hanging by a hair.

There was a long silence between us.

I counted the time by the throbbing ache each heartbeat brought to my chest.

Finally Styles said, “Thank you for your cooperation, Mr. Rawlins. Let me go and check this story out.”

Commander Styles smiled and stood, then turned away and back again as if he had remembered one more question; I didn’t see it coming at all. I suppose he just hauled off and hit me on the chin. My chin sure hurt later that evening when I woke up in my new jail cell.

MY CHEST HURT TOO, and my arm and the back of my head. A big knot had swollen up above my diaphragm and my side ached awfully. He must have hit me after I was out. That’s the only way I could understand it, all those aches and bruises.

“You all right?”

“Yeah, right,” I answered.

There was a man standing next to my cot. He wore a tan shirt and pants of the same color with a dark belt. From my prone position he looked like a great big Boy Scout who had yet to earn his first merit badge. It was so funny that I started to laugh—and paid for it.

“Oh! Shit!”

“You need a doctor?”

“I’d settle for my one call.”

The Boy Scout squatted down halfway, hands on his knees. Up close the white man’s long face looked worried.

“I can get you a doctor,” he said.

The sadness in his face scared me. I thought that I could see my death in his eyes.

“Please,” I said. “Just a couple’a calls.”

He stood up and went through a cell door, sliding it shut behind him.

There was a toilet seat next to my bed, I could smell it. I still had the urge to go to the bathroom but I didn’t because I was afraid that half of my insides would come out if I gave them the chance.

It was a regular jail. Cells on either side of me and concrete floors. I was alone there too. The rest of the prisoners probably died in interrogation. That thought made me laugh again and the pain sent me to my feet.

The bars were cold to my grip. I liked that. I pressed my cheeks against the chilly steel. All I had wanted up to that moment was to get away from this job; to give it up. But now someone was going to have to pay.

“Mr. Rawlins?” The Boy Scout had returned.

“What’s your name?” I asked him.

“Connor,” he answered. “Are you okay?”

“Can I make my call, Officer Connor?”

His mouth opened into a smile and said, “Yes. Yes you can.”

He went away for a few minutes and then returned with two young cops who carried truncheons.

THERE WAS A PHONE BOOTH in a concrete hallway just outside the corral of cells. My first call was home. It rang thirty-two times before I hung up.

The next call was to the Horns. They had Feather and Jesus with them. I talked to Jesus but he didn’t say anything back.

Feather got on the line then and said, “You got stuckted in trafferic, Daddy?”

“Yeah, honey.”

“I got a red cherry on my head, Daddy. It gotsa funny face an’ Juice wanted it but I wouldn’t let him and he made a funny face too.” Feather laughed.

“I love you, honey,” I said.

“Uh-huh. Daddy, Mr. Horn here.”

I told him that I’d been arrested by mistake but that I’d be home as soon as I could. I don’t think he understood but that was okay because I didn’t either. He was going to see after the kids. That’s all I could ask for.

Mouse came next.

Etta answered the phone quickly. “Hello.”

“Etta?”

“Easy, what’s wrong, baby?”

“They got me down in the jail here in Beverly Hills. Mouse there?”

“Somethin’ wrong wit’ Raymond, Easy.”

“Is he there, Etta?”

“No. He’s out tryin’ t’find whoever it was turnt him in. It’s like he’s all crazy-like again, Easy. He gettin’ on LaMarque’s nerves and I’m scared’a what he’s gonna do.”

“I’ll go look for him when I’m…”

“You will?”

“But first I need to talk to Faye Rabinowitz. You got her home phone number?”

“Somewhere here,” she said. I could hear her going through drawers and shuffling papers. I could see her in the kitchen in her country house. She would be wearing a light nightgown and have a handkerchief wrapped around her head.

“Here it is, baby. What they got you in jail for?”

“I’ll tell ya later, Etta.”

“Okay. Here it is.”

It was an Axminster exchange. Mouse’s female lawyer was the only reason he didn’t go down for second-degree murder. She worked with the ACLU and the NAACP. I only hoped that she would be in the mood to help me.

OFFICER CONNOR was helpful like a Boy Scout too. He told me that Commander Styles (his real rank was captain but nobody, not even his superiors, called him that) was home until the next day. Styles had left orders to leave me alone in the cell. He didn’t even want other prisoners talking to me, so they put me alone in a special wing designed to take the overflow on those special days when there was some kind of protest or other civil unrest.

But Connor didn’t like Styles and he wasn’t about to let a prisoner die while he was in charge of him.

“Men have died in here before,” Connor told me. “But never when I was the one on duty.”

It wasn’t very reassuring to have Connor as my protector, though. He was a clerk with a big heart. Commander Styles would have eaten him for a snack before dropping me into the Pacific Ocean.

WHEN I WAS ALONE in my cell I took off the mattress and loosened one of the twelve-inch metal stays that held the springs in place. It weighed about a quarter of a pound and even though it wasn’t sharp it had a nasty snap to it when I swung it slicing through the air. If the commander wanted another piece of me I’d make sure he got more than he wanted.

I was willing to play the game, but that man was crazy. Insane. And no matter where I find myself I will not lie down and die without a fight.

AT ABOUT MIDNIGHT Connor came down to my cell with the guards.

“You got visitors, Rawlins.”

“Who?”

“Come on,” he said sliding open the cell door.

I had put the stay back under the mattress and couldn’t get to it without letting the policemen see.

Connor took me to a small room where Faye Rabinowitz and a well-dressed white man were waiting.

I knew Faye. She was a white woman, definitely, but her skin ran toward the darker shades. She was slim and hardy-looking, like a weed growing out of a stone. Her eyes meant business and her nose flared slightly as if maybe she’d just smelled something not quite right. Faye wasn’t out of her twenties yet but she’d never been a child.

Faye Rabinowitz didn’t like anybody. Men were beneath her contempt and women were no good unless they did some kind of important job and talked hard. I’d met her when Mouse was indicted for Bruno’s killing. She brought me into her office to answer her questions so she could be certain that I would stand up under cross-examination in the real trial.

“Why’d you take Raymond’s case?” I asked after forty-five minutes of practice grilling.

“Because the law is shit,” she said. She was only twenty-four at the time, one of the youngest people who had ever passed the bar. There wasn’t a hint of makeup on her face and her hair was short and combed straight back.

“But you’re a lawyer. You’re part of the law.”

Faye looked down at her watch. She was finished with me and couldn’t have cared less about my questions.

It made me mad, the way she dismissed my presence as if I were no one and no good. She was trying to help my friend as if she were some kind of liberal but her attitudes were straight out of the plantation.

“So you’re doin’ this because he’s some poor black man and he won’t get a fair deal in court?” I really wanted to know.

“I don’t care about your friend,” she said, rising from her chair. “He’s a killer and in a better world he’d hang. But the people who run this world have no right to put anybody to death. They’re the ones who should die.”

The man was older and dressed in three hundred dollars’ worth of midnight-blue suit. There was a white flower in his lapel, giving me the idea that he’d recently been at some social gathering.

“Is this the man?” he asked Faye.

She nodded, somber as a Valkyrie pronouncing my fate.

The man, who was white-haired, turned his hard stare to Connor. “Why’s he limping? Did he come in limping?”

“I don’t know, your honor,” Connor said. He might have hated Styles but he wasn’t going to turn him in.

“Did you?” the judge asked me.

“Am I gettin’ outta here?” I asked anyone who wanted to answer.

“There’s not even a record of his arrest, your honor,” Faye Rabinowitz said.

“Is that true?” The judge had nothing but questions for the Boy Scout.

“I’m just holding the fort, Judge Mellon. He was in the cell when I got here. Somebody said that he’d been in a fight.”

Judge Mellon. He was on the state supreme court. An outspoken critic of racism and champion of the rights of the poor. I’d read about him in the paper now and then.

The judge was silent for a few heartbeats.

“There’s no paper on him, your honor,” Faye said. “There’s no reason he should be in here.”

“What’s your name?” the judge asked Connor.

“Connor, sir.”

“Do you have a record of this man’s arrest?”

“It doesn’t appear so, sir.”

“Do you know who brought this man in here?”

“I came on at six, sir. He was already in his cell,” Connor lied.

The judge waited for his heart to beat some more and then said, “Let him go. And I want a report from your commander in the morning.”

I could tell by Connor’s hard gaze that he rued letting me use the phone. I hoped he could see in my eyes how sorry I was that he got into trouble.

“YOU SHOULD PRESS CHARGES,” Faye Rabinowitz was telling me outside Beverly Hills City Hall. “The only way we can get some attention to this kind of thing is if we can take it to court.”