Black Betty (23 page)

Alamo was already through the window and I was right behind him. It wasn’t until I grabbed the iron railing to let myself hang down the grated stairs that I realized my mistake. A pain went off in my shoulder louder than the alarm bells. I hit the roof of the hot dog stand and rolled right off of it, sprawling onto the sidewalk below. It was only luck that kept me from breaking a bone.

“You okay?” Alamo had me by the shoulders and was helping me up. His grip hurt so bad all I could do was nod.

“Half a block north of Pico, on Livonia,” I said. Alamo was gone, running south on Robertson. I ran across the street intending to throw them off by heading east. When I got to the middle of the street they threw down on me.

“Halt or I’ll shoot!” Right out of the movies. I never missed a step but in that one moment I could tell that the officer was still on the second floor of the office building. I weighed the chances of him hitting me with a pistol at that range.

I kept running.

At least eight shots were fired. Bullets ricocheted off the sidewalk around my feet. Everything inside me turned to water and I ran so hard that it seemed to me that I was invisible. I must have run seven blocks. The first four were a zigzag route away from my car. I had it in my mind that I wanted to confuse the cops, throw them off. But then I realized that they didn’t know where my car was—they were after me.

I made it to the car quickly after that. Two minutes later Alamo was coming down the street.

I headed west on Olympic toward Santa Monica, figuring we’d cross municipalities so the police couldn’t track us.

“Damn, that was close,” Alamo said. He was wheezing from his hard run. “That was a close one all right.”

My hands were sweating in the rubber gloves.

“I’ll go down to Santa Monica,” I said.

“You could drop me at a friend’a mines on Tuxedo Lane. Better if they don’t catch no salt and pepper in a car,” Alamo said. “When you wanna split?”

He was talking about the loot he’d taken.

“All I got was some papers to keep me out of trouble. That’s all I want. You need me to pay you something?”

“Naw. Naw, but maybe we could go into business, Easy. You’re good.”

“Yeah. Good enough to spill out my blood on the street corner.”

I DROPPED ALAMO off half a block from his friend’s house.

The desire to be home overwhelmed me. I couldn’t imagine a hotel or even a friend’s house. I wanted my chair and my lamp.

It was a fool’s move but I had to go home. I drove around the block twice. There were no suspicious-looking cars parked out front or down the street. The lights in my house were off. That didn’t mean much—the cops could have been laying for me in the dark. But that was an expensive proposition. I’d have to be a real top ten for them to spend that kind of money on overtime. I finally pulled into the driveway and took my chances with the front door.

THE FIRST FILE was labeled “Norman Styles.” There was a deposition indicating a charge of battery and sexual assault on a Mr. and Mrs. Bradley Rosen on North Stanley. The charges were dropped and Styles sued to get back pay for the time that he was suspended from the Beverly Hills Police Department.

He was questioned about an accidental death in 1954. The question concerned a prisoner (named John Doe) who died in his cell. John was drunk and disorderly before and after his arrest. He committed suicide by hanging himself from a leather belt.

The inquisitors wondered why John also wore suspenders.

Commander Styles also did private work for Mr. Hodge. He was a bodyguard for various Hollywood celebrities and businessmen. He was a security consultant on two occasions for meetings between men who were only referred to by first names.

The last page in Styles’s folder was an old arrest report from the Beverly Hills Police Department. On July 14, 1939, Marlon Eady was arrested on burglary charges. He’d been arrested at the house of Albert Cain.

CAIN’S FILE SAID ALMOST NOTHING. There was a medical report, all in Spanish, from a place called the Sisters of Mercy Hospital in Mexico City dating from 1940. From my little bit of Spanish I couldn’t make out what the treatment was—the patient was Jane Smith.

There was a legal letter from one lawyer, Bertrand Fresco, requesting a transfer of legal documents for Cain. That letter was dated June 4, 1959. I supposed that was why Cain’s file was so slim—everything else was with the new lawyer.

THE PHONE STARTED RINGING somewhere near two in the morning. There was a slight chance that it was an innocent call. A wrong number or maybe an old friend who’d gotten drunk and sad. But more likely it was trouble. Another brick in my cell.

I didn’t want to answer but it might have been about the children or maybe Jewelle.

“Yeah?”

“What is it, Easy? Did I do somethin’ to you?”

I could tell from the first word that he’d been drinking. “Odell, man, I got enough problems right now. If you got somethin’ t’say then get it out.”

“I got somethin’ t’say all right. Yeah. We been friends since you was a boy, Easy. I took you in my house when you didn’t have nuthin’ to eat and nowhere to sleep. I used to give you money when I didn’t hardly have nuthin’ myself. And then you turn it around an’ shit on my shoe.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Reverend Towne…”

“Odell, I know we got to talk about that one day, but there’s things happenin’ right now—”

Before I could finish Odell cut me off. “I know that! I know that! First Marlon gets killed. Betty’s only brother, and you know she loved him somethin’ terrible. And now you done killed her son.”

“Her son? What you talkin’ ’bout, man?”

“Terry.”

“The boxer?”

“He was hers. They let him live down here wit’ the Tyler fam’ly but he was hers. And you killed him.”

“I did not kill Terry Tyler.”

“How could you say that when I know you did?”

I waited for a moment, confused by the force of his accusations. I didn’t know if I was guilty or not. Maybe I had killed Terry. Not by my own hand, but maybe he was killed because of me.

“Who told you that?” I asked, coming out of my spell. “Who told you that I killed Terry?”

Odell went silent on his end of the phone.

“Odell.”

“Leave us alone, Easy Rawlins. Stay out of our life.” He hung the phone up in my ear.

I WAS DOWN to his house by three, knocking at the front door. I rapped on it for five minutes with no reply. But when I started shouting the porch light went on and Maude came out dressed in a pink nightgown.

“Do you know what time it is?”

“Let me in, Maudria!” I yelled at the top of my voice.

A look of fear went over her and she shrank back from the door. I came in towering over her, looking around the neat and well-ordered house.

“I told you to leave us alone, Easy.” His voice came from the side.

“Odell!” Maude shouted.

My old friend had come out of the door that led to his kitchen. There was a double-barreled twelve-gauge shotgun hanging through the crook of his arm.

I put my thumbs up next to my ears. “I didn’t kill Terry Tyler, Odell. I went to the house…”

“Odell, put down that gun!” Maudria screamed.

“…and I found him there. Somebody came up behind me and stabbed me in the shoulder and then hit me with a number ten cast-iron fryin’ pan.”

Odell’s stare was too deep to decipher.

“And I know two things.” Keep talking and keep talking. “One is that whoever stabbed me wasn’t the one who killed Terry, and two is that whoever it was they told you about me.”

“It was Betty!” Maude shouted. “Now, Odell, put down that gun!”

“Betty?” I wasn’t even looking at Odell anymore. “Betty stabbed me?”

“She went to the house to ask Terry where she could find Marlon and she fount him there. And then she heard somebody and figured that it was the killer and she laid for’im an’ stabbed him. When she told us what happened, Odell knew it was you.”

“Where is she?” I asked Odell.

“We don’t know,” Maude answered. “She just called to tell us about Terry. To ask us to see that he gets buried.”

“An’ did she tell you about Marlon too?”

The guilty stare that passed between husband and wife was a testament to decades of honesty. Neither one of them could hide their guilt. I would have laughed if it wasn’t so serious.

“Where is he?”

Both their heads retreated like a pair of turtles sensing a shadow from overhead.

“Naw. Here in this house?”

Odell let the shotgun hang down to his side and he stumbled backwards. He was aiming to land in a chair but missed it and slid against the wall until he was crouching on the floor.

Maude ran to him.

“Oh, baby,” she said as she knelt down and put her hands on his head.

I watched my old friends for a while, unwilling to interrupt their sorrow. It was a pain that they’d been holding in for days and it needed a time just to be. Maude cried and Odell looked around for tears that wouldn’t come.

“Where is he?” I asked again.

“Down in the bomb shelter.” Odell’s voice was weaker than Martin’s.

ONE EYE WAS WIDE OPEN while the other one was a glistening slit. His lip was swollen and curled up from where it had been split. A dead man’s snarl to be sure. He wore only a T-shirt. One hand was twisted backwards, pointing at his sad genitals. The other was at his side pushing away some overly friendly dog or errant thought. He lay on three burlap bags that were wet. On his chest and knees two other bags were laid.

“Ice,” Maude said. “To keep him from goin’ bad down here.”

“What happened to him?”

“They beat him, Easy.”

“Who did?”

“Some white men. They wanted him to tell’em where Betty was, but he didn’t know. They like to killed him. He played like he was dead and when they left him he stoled one’a their cars and used up his last mortal strength to drive to us.” Maude’s voice had a myth-making tone to it.

“Where’s the car?” I asked.

“Odell drove it a couple’a blocks over.”

“When did all this happen?”

“Right after you was here.”

“Who was it that beat’im?” I asked.

“He said that it was the police, Easy.” Maude’s eyes opened in the kind of terror that poor people have for the cops.

“Did you call the doctor?”

Maude shook her head. Tears welled up in her eyes. “He died right away, Easy. I seen enough dead men to know. We didn’t know what to do, because of the cops, so we took him down here.”

Odell stood at the door more gaunt than I’d ever seen him while Maude and I talked.

“Where’s Betty, Maude?”

“I don’t know. She wouldn’t say where she was.”

“You tell her about this here?” I asked while pointing at the icy corpse.

“No,” she sobbed. “She was so broke up when she told us about Terry we thought that more bad news would kill her.”

“What you gonna do with him?” I asked.

“I don’t know. He needs a burial. He’s got to be put in the ground,” Odell said.

“You can’t take him to an undertaker unless you want to tell the cops about him.”

“I can’t do that.”

“I could dig you a hole right down here. We could have a service for him right here.”

“We’ll see,” Odell said. Then he stumbled back up the basement stairs.

“Where’s Betty?” I asked Maude. “What’s she runnin’ from?”

“Will you bury him, Easy?” was her answer.

“Yeah, yeah, honey. Just keep him cold a couple’a more days until I can get some things worked out.”

I WAS UP WITH THE SUN AGAIN. In the morning the fear of the police returned. Policemen are working folks just like anybody else. They’d drop by the house in the early morning and maybe even at midnight but unless they were really upset they’d go home and go to bed in the wee hours.

I was down to my old house on 116th Street by six.

THE YARD WAS DIFFERENT. I kept neat little islands of flowers in a sea of thick St. Augustine grass when it was mine. But a family with so many children as Primo had couldn’t maintain a proper lawn. The ruthless feet of innocent children pound everything down into soil. Flower, Primo’s Panamanian wife, had grown a large garden where the children weren’t allowed to play. She had a dozen tomato bushes and rows of three-foot onion stalks that sported brain-shaped waxy bulbs full of seed. Where I had my potato patch she grew beans. Nine-foot giant sunflowers bloomed all along the front of the house.

The avocado tree was trimmed back a little but it was still there. I could see the platform that Jesus slept in.

It was no longer my yard but it was still a yard full of life.

THE FRONT DOOR WAS wide open. Flower was rolling out tortillas on a flat board in her lap. I could smell the bacon, eggs, and potatoes that she’d use to fill the tortillas for the children’s lunch bags. Feather loved the lunches from Flower. She’d told me more than once that she was going to be fat and black like Flower when she grew big.

Primo wasn’t doing much. He sat in the stuffed chair that he had in the kitchen keeping Flower company. He looked hungover. But he always looked like that in the morning.

“How’s it going, my friend?” Primo asked.

“Never good enough. How’s all my people out here?”

“Kids okay. But that Mofass is sick,” Flower said. “He’s always coughing and spitting.” She made a distasteful face. “You think the kids can get it?”

“Naw. He’s got lung trouble from smoking those damn cigars.”

“Daddy!” Feather came running in with Jesus standing behind her.

“Hi, Dad,” he said. Flower and Primo acted as if they didn’t even notice. As if they were thinking, “Well, he just didn’t talk the first fifteen years of his life. He must not have had anything to say.”

We caught up, the children and I. Feather wanted to know when she had to come home.