Black Betty (13 page)

“That’s me. It’s pretty late, ain’t it?”

“I just got home from work and I thought you felt some urgency about this matter. If it’s too late…”

“Noooo, no. What you got?”

“I did what you wanted, Mr. Rawlins. I asked the prosecutor’s office how my client was caught.”

“And?”

“Why do you want to know?”

“I already told ya. It’s because I want some kinda way of tellin’ Raymond that it wasn’t one of his friends turned him in. Maybe they got him on clues—I don’t know. I’m tryin’ to keep your client out of trouble.”

“Well. There really isn’t much to say. He
was
turned in. It was an anonymous tip. Somebody, probably male, probably Negro, called in even before the shooting was reported and said, I quote, ‘It was Raymond Alexander killed Bruno Ingram in the alley off Hooper. The Lord wouldn’t let me be quiet on a night like this.’ That’s it. That’s all they had. But that, along with the weapon, was enough for a conviction.”

“Thank you,” I said. “I’ll do what’s right.”

“Hm,” she answered.

After that we both hung up our phones.

“HEY, RAYMOND. How you doin’,” I said when he answered Etta’s phone.

“Yeah, Easy.”

“You still lookin’ t’see if somebody at John’s turnt you in?”

“I been lookin’ but ain’t nobody in town who was there. It’s almost like somebody warnt’em off.” He paused for a full fifteen seconds. Long enough to let me know that he suspected me. Sitting there at my kitchen table my life was in more danger than it had been in jail with Commander Styles. “But I told John that I better find me somebody quick or there will be hell to pay.”

I couldn’t think of anything more frightening than a face-off between Mouse and John.

“I want you to lay off doin’ anything till I see what I could see.”

“What you mean?”

“I got an idea, that’s all. I heard somethin’ and I wanna chase it down.”

“Uh-huh. Well, you do that, Easy. But I’ma be doin’ what I’m doin’ too. Maybe we meet in the middle somewhere.”

Jesus was standing around the kitchen table when I got off the phone with Mouse.

“How you doin’, boy?”

He nodded at me.

“It’s after eleven. Time for you to get to bed.”

He smiled again. Jesus was always smiling at me. Ever since I took him out of a life of child prostitution he loved me. My first wife, Regina, had told me that there was probably something wrong deep down inside him, that there was a dark anger going to come out someday.

Maybe so.

But I wasn’t going to treat him like a monster just because he was supposed to be one.

“You ever going to talk to me, boy?” I asked his back as he went through the door. He stopped for half a second and then kept on moving.

I WAS LOOKING THROUGH the want ads at one in the morning when the phone rang again.

I could have been a plumber, electrician, mechanic, or salesman. Gotten up every morning at six-thirty and dragged myself in to work by eight. I could have said “yessir” and “no sir” and taken home a paycheck. I could have been promoted because I was a good worker; spent every day for the next twenty-five years going into an office or workshop, and then one day they’d put me out and in a year there wouldn’t be a soul to remember that I had ever been.

“Hello?” I said into the phone.

Instead of an answer I got an earful of wet rolling coughs.

“Mofass?”

“Yeah…” He coughed some more. “Mr. Rawlins.”

“How you doin’, man?” I asked.

“Got this cold,” he hacked. “But I’m okay.”

“It’s kinda late t’be callin’, ain’t it?”

“I need to talk,” he said. I realized that he was whispering. Mofass’s regular voice, even with the emphysema, was loud and hearty.

“Talk then.”

“Not now. Tomorrow. You could come over here after ten.”

“Okay. I got stuff to talk to you about anyway.”

I FOLDED THE PAPER and put it in the trash. Maybe in a few weeks I’d get a job, but not that day.

MOFASS AND CLOVIS had a big house on Peters Lane up in the Baldwin Hills. I’d had a house down the hill from there once but money troubles forced me to sell it and move down into the rental neighborhood. Grover and Tyrone came out at nine and got into a Ford Galaxy that was wedged in between a Cadillac and a Falcon in the driveway. They drove right across the yard and onto the street, leaving deep furrows in the lawn.

Clavell, Renee, Antoinette, and Fitts came out, one after the other, over the next half hour. They all got into different cars and went in different ways. Clavelle drove right past my car but I just held up a newspaper with my paper coffee cup in one hand and he didn’t know me from any other laborer waiting for a friend.

Clovis was out of the door at nine forty-five. She said something into the house, I figured it was to Mofass. She shut the door, checking to make sure that it wouldn’t come open. Then she looked all around the house and up and down the street.

Maybe she smelled me.

Finally she got into her Caddy and drove off down the opposite way from where I was parked.

I waited until ten and then went to pay my respects.

I had expected Mofass to answer but it wasn’t him. It was Jewelle, a little cousin of Clovis’s who was brought along with the rest of the family up to L.A.

“Good morning, Mr. Rawlins,” she said as if having rehearsed the line in a grade-school chant. Jewelle was sixteen and already a senior in high school.

“Mofass here?”

“Uh-huh. He waitin’ for you.”

We went through the big messy house together. Men’s and women’s clothes were thrown everywhere. On the banister up the stairs, on the floor in the hall. There were empty plates on the dining-room table and cardboard boxes torn open and left on the chairs.

Thick drapes were pulled over the windows and all the lights in the house were on. There were newspapers spread out under a chair in the hallway with clumps of cut hair all over them.

“It’s a mess,” I said.

“You should see the kitchen,” Jewelle said. “An’ they want me t’clean it. They said I couldn’t go to school until the house gets clean. Do that look like my hair to you?” She had turned and was looking me in the eye.

“No, ma’am,” I answered obediently.

That got her to smile.

“Mr. Rawlins.” Mofass was standing in the doorway to the den. He wore a dark purple robe that hung open to his navel showing his huge gut and his once powerful chest.

We all went in. The den in that house was also the office, so it was kept neat. All the furniture was mahogany. A desk, two file cabinets, and two chairs upholstered with red velour. One of the chairs was actually large enough for two. Mofass and Jewelle sat in that one.

That girl, who was looking more like a woman every second, grabbed Mofass’s hand and squeezed it a brief moment before clasping her own hands together between her knees.

“What’s this all about?” I asked Mofass.

“What you mean?”

“All this sneakin’ around.”

Jewelle wore a one-piece rayon dress. The dress was tan, two shades lighter than her skin. Her hair was hot-comb-straightened and lightened around the edges to a gold color that women were fond of in those days.

Mofass on the other hand was an ebony man with sad and sagging yellow eyes. He took two breaths for each one of Jewelle’s.

“I hear you was down at Esquire the other day,” Mofass said.

I stayed quiet.

He took twenty little gasps before saying, “I want my business back.”

“Yeah? What you want me to do about that?”

“I need to get Jewelle here somewheres safe and then I need me some p’otection ’gainst Clovis’s brood.”

“What’s wrong with you and Clovis?”

“She been stealin’ from Uncle Willy,” Jewelle blurted out. “She took everything from outta his bank account and she won’t let him have nuthin’. Treatin’ him like he was some crazy old man.”

“She won’t even let me out the house, Mr. Rawlins. I’m sick, but that don’t mean I’m feebleminded, do it?”

“Naw,” I said. I was thinking that maybe this trouble could help me. The first thing a black man and a poor man learns is that trouble is all he’s got so that’s what he has to work with.

“I still gotta couple’a bank accounts she cain’t get into. She wants me to sign over my power of attorney. But if I do that then she could sell my stuff and…” Mofass paused for a moment. It had a melodramatic effect but I could tell that he was hurting, “…she got a husband that she done drug up from Dallas.”

“What?” I tried not to laugh. Sometimes you’re hoping that things will be different, that men and women will change over the years and become those good, if hard, folks that the preachers talk about. But it never changes. And if something does get good for a while you could be sure that it will turn sour before you have time to get any real pleasure.

“It ain’t funny, man,” Mofass wheezed. “Right down the hill.” There were tears in his eyes.

“She there right now.” Jewelle had snagged Mofass’s hand again.

“So what is it that you need from me?”

“Take Jewelle somewhere safe.”

“What for? Clovis is her family.”

“Yeah, but she knows how close we is. She’d send her back down Texas or make her life hell up here. She’d think Jewelle helped me if I cut outta here.”

Mofass was in his late fifties but he seemed older than that. He was from the old days when there was a black community almost completely sealed off from whites. He wore old-fashioned clothes. He belonged to a Negro social club that excluded poor blacks. Clovis got many of her investors from among Mofass’s friends.

Jewelle was just a child. But give a girl child a hard life and you make a woman out of her faster than she can make babies.

I took my time looking at them. There was a smell in the house. “The stink of corruption,” as my holy-roller voodoo grandfather used to say.

“Jewelle,” I said.

“Huh?”

“Go make me some tea, honey.”

“Uh-uh, I wanna stay here wit’ you and Uncle Willy.”

“You go on,” Mofass said. He patted the girl’s thigh and she gave in.

“You want lemon or milk?” she asked, pouting at me.

“I’ll take it straight.”

She went out of the door moving her hips in a way that I’m sure she was unaware of.

“What do I get outta this, William?” I used Mofass’s given name because suddenly I was mad.

“County planner, Mason LaMone, and the Save-Co corporation.” Mofass’s yellow eyes seemed to infect the words he spoke. “They all been down here. I heard ’em when they thought I was upstairs asleep.”

“What would men like that want down here, William?”

“You had a damn good idea, Mr. Rawlins. Damn good. The minute Clovis went down there with the application for permits, that sent shocks all the way up to the top man.” Mofass raised his voice in excitement and then had to cough. It was a hard sort of hacking that sounded as if he were torn and ragged on the inside.

I watched him with little sympathy. His news meant that there was no way out of my real estate problems and nobody I could trust.

“So what?” I asked. “They wanna invest wit’ us?”

Mofass shook his head slowly, not meeting my eye. Maybe he was afraid that if he looked straight at me while delivering his foul news I might take my rage out on him.

Maybe he was right.

“They got Clovis to work with’em. She done told them all about you and she give’em back all the papers they processed on yo’ property. They started talkin’, an’ the next thing you know, they’s this sanitation station they figure needs to be built. County planner in LaMone’s pocket and LaMone in bed wit’ Save-Co.”

“LaMone,” I said. “That the big real estate guy from downtown?”

Mofass stuck out his big lips and nodded. “That’s why I called you, Mr. Rawlins. He was here last night. Him an’ Clovis got a good ole laugh at how she was gonna make you spend yo’ money to pay her to rob you blind.”

“But why? Why’d Clovis wanna help the white man? We could build Freedom’s Plaza ourselves. We could own it ourselves.”

Mofass shook his head again. “Not the way she seen it. Them men tole her that they was gonna take that land one way or t’other. Save-Co was gonna build an’ they wasn’t gonna have no Negro competition. An’ they told her that she could manage the property by herself. You see? She don’t need me no more, so that’s why she wanna take my money now.”

The spout from Jewelle’s teapot began to whistle somewhere in the big house. It was a weak and strained peeping sound; something like my complaint against Mason LaMone and the Save-Co Corporation—the largest supermarket business in southern California.

“So why call me, William?” I asked. “If I cain’t beat’em then why I wanna help you?”

Mofass grinned at me then. If there was one thing I knew about Mofass it was that his smile meant money was somewhere to be had—money that he could trick out of someone.

“Maybe you cain’t beat them white men, Mr. Rawlins. I don’t know about that. But Clovis is usin’ Esquire Realty to represent Freedom’s Trust. And I own Esquire Realty. If you help me to get it back in my hands, at least you will get whatever profit Clovis made. At least that.”

I’d spent years having little back-room meetings like that with Mofass; years of hiding, pushing Mofass up front like he was the one who owned everything. I did that because of the weight of black life down where I was a child.

The logic of my childhood had never proven wrong.

If a man wore gold chains, somebody was going to hit him on the head. If he looked prosperous, women would pull him by his dick into the bed and then hit him with a paternity suit nine months later. If a woman had money, the man would just beat her until she got up off of it.

I always talk about down home like it really was home. Like everybody who looked like me and talked like me really cared about me. I knew that life was hard, but I hoped that if someone stole from me it would be because they were hungry and needed it. But some people will tear you down just to see you fall. They’ll do it even if your loss is their own.