Little Scarlet (8 page)

WHEN I LEFT
Florence Avenue Bookshop I was a little lost. There were a few places I could go but I wasn’t sure which one I should try first. With no other choice in mind I drove over to Sojourner Truth Junior High School, where I held the position of supervising senior head custodian.

The main building on the upper campus showed some signs of the rioting. There was a blackened window or two and a great many more that had their panes smashed. The front door was open and a Negro National Guardsman stood sentry there, stepping aside now and again for men in uniform coming in and out.

The sentry was brown; actually, he was little more than tan. He was holding a machine gun and staring out into space as if maybe he were standing guard at the great expanse in front of the Pearly Gates.

“Halt!” he cried when I had only set one foot upon the concrete stairway.

I kept on walking.

“I said stay where you are,” he said loudly, hefting the machine gun but not exactly pointing it at me.

“I work here, brother.”

“School’s closed. National Guard using it as a base.”

“I’m the building supervisor. I want to see what damage there’s been.”

“Mr. Rawlins,” a woman’s voice called.

I looked to my right and saw Mrs. Masters, the school principal, waving at me from her office window, about a hundred feet down the salmon-colored plaster wall.

“I’m so glad you’re here,” she shouted. “Things are terrible.”

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“I’m fine but our poor school… Come to my office.”

“I’d like to,” I said. “But the general here has orders to keep me out.”

“It’s all right to let him in, sir,” the small woman said.

“No ma’am.” He kept his eye on me. “I have orders that only the military and police can get in here.”

“What rank is she?” I asked the sentinel.

He didn’t dignify the joke with a reply.

“At ease, soldier,” a white man in a colonel’s uniform said from just inside the wide double doors. “This man works here.”

“But sir — ,” the guard began.

He really didn’t like me. He was willing to argue with his superior officer over orders that would allow a smart-mouthed Negro like myself into the compound.

“That’s enough, soldier. This man is allowed in.”

I smiled at my brother. He scowled at me before standing aside.

And there I was again, caught in the contradictions brought to the surface by the riots.

The sentry took his job seriously. Who was the enemy? Black people. Even though he was colored himself it was his job to bar our entry and he intended to keep us out. Even though I didn’t know it at the time, that was the beginning of the breakup of our community. It was the first time you could see that there was another side to be on. If you identified with white people, you had a place where you were welcomed in.

I walked past him and nodded to the officer.

The white man merely watched my passage. As soon as he saw that I was headed in the right direction he turned on his heel and marched off, leaving the sentry and me at the opposite ends of a struggle that neither one of us had asked for.

“OH, MR. RAWLINS,”
Ada Masters cried.

We were on the third floor of the main building. Almost every door had been broken open and furniture was strewn in the halls. Here and there you could see where someone attempted to start a fire. But school buildings don’t burn easily. The wood was thick and the walls were as much stone and brick and plaster as they were anything else.

The damage looked bad but it wouldn’t take long to put everything back in order. I’d need painters and glazers, probably a carpenter or two, but I figured that the whole plant would be back to full capacity in two weeks’ time.

I told the principal this.

“It’s not just that, Mr. Rawlins,” she said. “It’s what they tried to do. Why would people want to burn and destroy their own community?”

She began to tremble and cry.

I folded the small white woman in my arms.

“It’s okay,” I crooned as if talking to a child.

“How can you say that? This is as much your neighborhood as the one you live in.”

“That’s just why I can say it,” I said.

“I don’t get what you mean.”

I let her go and sat two chairs upright for us. When she was comfortable and a little more relaxed, I said those things that I wished Paris had said to the hardware store owner.

“This is a tough place, Ada. You got working men and women all fenced in together, brooding about what they see and what they can’t have. Almost every one of them works for a white man. Every child is brought up thinking that only white people make things, rule countries, have history. They all come from the South. They all come from racism so bad that they don’t even know what it’s like to walk around with your head held high. They get nervous when the police drive by. They get angry when their children are dragged off in chains.

“Almost every black man, woman, and child you meet feels that anger. But they never let on, so you’ve never known. This riot was sayin’ it out loud for the first time. That’s all. Now it’s said and nothing will ever be the same. That’s good for us, no matter what we lost. And it could be good for white people too. But they have to understand just what happened here.”

Ada Masters had a look of both awe and terror on her face. It was as if she were seeing me for the first time.

At the far end of the hall I saw a soldier come up the stairs. When he saw us he waited around to watch.

“I’m going to have to be off the next few days, Mrs. Masters,” I said. “The police asked me to help them look into something.”

“The police?”

“Yeah. I’ll be here Monday. But if you need anything before then, call my house.”

I stood up but she remained in her chair.

“You coming?” I asked.

“Not right now,” she said. “I have to think, think about what’s happened and, and about what you said.”

Cox Bar was in a back alley off of Hooper. It was no more than a ramshackle hut but that was the place you would most likely find Raymond Alexander. Big Ginny Wright, the proprietor, was standing behind a high table used for a bar. She stood under a murky lamp that seemed to spread darkness instead of light. There was a pool table in the corner and a few chairs set around the room.

There were electric fans blowing from every side but it was still hot in there.

A small woman sat on a high stool at the far end of the tablebar, nursing a beer and staring off into space.

“Easy,” Ginny said. “How you, baby?”

“I’ve been better.”

Ginny laughed. “Me too. With these fools runnin’ the streets I been thinkin’ of movin’ back down to Texas. At least there you know what to expect.”

“Mr. Rawlins?” The young woman who had been drinking the beer had come up to me. She was slight and medium brown, the same color as Ginny.

“Yeah?”

“You remember me?” she asked. “I’m Benita, Benita Flag.”

I realized that I had met her before — with Mouse. She was beautiful then, wearing a little pink dress and red heels. Her hair, I remembered, was done up like a complex sculpture made of seashells. Now the hair was coarse and unkempt. She wore jeans and a stained white blouse that had been buttoned wrong.

“You seen Raymond?” she asked me.

“No.”

“’Cause he ain’t called me in two weeks and I’m worried he got hurt in all that’s happened. You know Ray wouldn’t just sit inside. I’m worried that maybe he got shot again.”

Mouse had been shot a few times in his life but the last wound was because he was helping me. For a long while I thought that he’d died and that I was the cause of his death.

“Can you help me find him?” Benita asked.

Ginny’s impatient sigh told me that Benita was just one more girlfriend that Mouse had let slide.

“I haven’t seen ’im in weeks, Benita. Really.”

She stared in my face, looking for a map to her boyfriend.

“I told her that even his wife don’t know where he is,” Ginny said. “But she just sit there drinkin’ beer and hopin’ he gonna walk in.”

Benita ignored Ginny’s barbs.

“Tell him to call me if you see him, Easy. I got to see him.”

“Excuse me, Benita,” Ginny said, “but Easy come in here to see me. I know that ’cause he don’t drink, so he must have somethin’ on his mind.”

Benita didn’t like being dismissed. She gave Ginny a hard look but then moved back to her lonely stool and flat beer.

“Raymond be lucky if that one don’t shoot ’im,” Ginny said in a low voice.

The comment unsettled me. It reminded me that the life we lived had always been perched at the edge of violence. That violence was Newell and Mouse and whoever killed Nola Payne. It was a constant threat eating away at happiness and any feeling of well-being.

“Do you know where Mouse is?” I asked, also in a soft voice.

Ginny studied me then. She scratched the mole at the left side of her mouth and snuffled.

“I could get him to call you,” she said. “But that’s all. Raymond’s workin’.”

Work for Mouse was never legal. The only time he ever held a real job was when he worked for me at Truth.

“That’s fine, Miss Wright. Tell him I need his help.”

“I’ll tell ’im but you know he’s busy and he ain’t got no time to be helpin’ you.”

Ginny wasn’t one of Mouse’s girlfriends but that didn’t matter. She was past sixty, three hundred pounds, and rough as lava stone, but she had a soft spot for Mouse just like Benita did. She believed, as did most of Raymond’s women, that she had the last word on him.

“All he has to do is call,” I said.

“All right.”

“Maybe you could help me too, Gin.”

“How’s that?”

“You ever hear of a man name of Loverboy?”

“Oh yeah,” Ginny said. “He’s what they call a prime suspect if ever your car is gone from its garage.”

“You wouldn’t happen to know where he work at?” I asked.

I knew she’d have the answer. Ginny had a mind like a steel trap. Nothing ever escaped her notice or her memory. She was so good at counting cards that Raymond was the only one I knew that would gamble with her. And when it came to her customers she knew every one of their histories all the way back to Africa — almost.

“He in Watts over near Menlo and Hoover. You know the junkyard over there?”

“Sure do.”

“It’s a house with a green roof across the street from there. It’s got a double garage in back. That’s where Loverboy and Craig Reynolds make over the cars for sale.”

“What’s Loverboy’s real name?”

“Nate Shelby,” Ginny said. “It sure is. But be careful, Easy. ’Cause you know Nate don’t play.”

Ginny’s last words stayed with me in the car. I rode with them all the way to West L.A., thinking that I wouldn’t go up against the car thief until I was sure of my footing.

MARIANNE PLUMP WAS
sitting at her post behind the reception desk at the Miller Neurological Sanatorium. It was about two in the afternoon. A young white man and an older woman were sitting on a small blue sofa set against the wall directly across from her. They both eyed me with fear.

“Miss Plump,” I said.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Rawlins,” she said with certainty.

She met my eye and even smiled. Overnight she had thought about our conversation and the morning brought on a resolution to live life the way she saw it.

That’s what I surmised anyway.

“May I see Miss Landry?” I asked.

“She’s in H-twelve. Dr. Dommer said that it was fine.”

As I moved toward the swinging door, the young man piped up.

“Excuse me, miss, but we’ve been waiting here for over half an hour.”

“The doctor is still with a patient,” Marianne said, not in an unfriendly tone.

“Then why is he going in?” the young man replied.

“Listen, friend,” I said. “You don’t want to go where I’m going. Believe that.”

He looked away from me and I laughed.

“You might turn your head, man, but I’ll still be here.”

Marianne Plump covered her mouth to stifle her grin.

I pushed open the door and never saw the young man or old woman again.

Geneva Landry was staring at the wall in front of her, wrapped in a cotton robe, and seated in a chair beside the high hospital bed. Whatever it was she saw, it had nothing to do with that room. The chair was made from chrome and blue padding. Sparrows chattered in a tree outside the window. Sunlight flooded the room without heating it. That was because of the air-conditioning.

Geneva hadn’t turned when I opened her door.

“Miss Landry.”

“Yes?” she asked, keeping her eye on the bare wall.

“My name is Easy Rawlins,” I said, moving into her line of vision.

When I blocked her view of the wall she winced.

“Hello.”

“I see they took you out of that straitjacket.”

She nodded and crossed her chest with her arms, caressing her shoulders with weak, ashen fingers.

“Why they got me in here, Mr. Rawlins?”

“May I sit down, ma’am?”

“Yes.”

I sat at the foot of the mattress.

“Do you remember what happened to Nola?”

I regretted the question when grief knotted up in her face.

“Yes.”

“The police are worried that if a white man killed her, the riots will start up again.”

“He did kill her,” she said. “And there’s nothin’ they can do about that.”

She glanced at me and then looked away.

“Did you see him do it, ma’am?”

“Are you the law, Mr. Rawlins?”

“No ma’am. I’m just tryin’ to find the man killed your niece.”

“But you not a policeman?”

“No. Why?”

“Because that’s what that sloppy cop asked me this morning. He kept askin’ if I saw her get killed. I told him that if I did he wouldn’t have to be lookin’ for the man ’cause I woulda kilt him myself.”

Her hands were pulling at the shiny arms of the chair.

“That was Detective Suggs?” I asked.

“I guess it was.”