A red death, p.10
A Red Death, page 10
I don’t remember going down to Mrs. Trajillo’s apartment. I have a feeling that I tried to use Poinsettia’s phone, but it had been disconnected.
“SURE,” SAID OFFICER ANDREW REEDY, a rangy and towheaded policeman. “She kicks over the chair after tying the knot.” He was looking at the overturned chair that lay halfway across the room, then continued, “And bingo! She’s hung. You said she was despondent, right, Mr. Rawlins?”
“Yeah,” I answered him. “She was being evicted by Mofass.”
“Who’s that?” asked Quinten Naylor. He was Reedy’s partner and the only Negro policeman I’d ever seen, up to that time, in plainclothes. He was also looking at that chair.
“He manages the place, collects the rent and the like.”
“Who does he manage for?” Naylor asked me.
While I was considering how to answer, Reedy said, “Who cares? This is a suicide. We just tell ’em that she killed herself and that’s that.”
Naylor was of medium height but he was wide and so gave the feeling of largeness and strength. He was the opposite of his partner in every way, but they seemed to have a kind of rapport.
Naylor walked up to, almost under, the hanging corpse. It seemed as if he were sniffing for something wrong.
“Aw, com’on, Quint,” Reedy whined. “Who wants to murder this girl? I mean all sneaky-like, pretending she killed herself? Did she have any enemies, Mr. Rawlins?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Look at her face, though, Andy. Those could be fresh bruises,” Naylor said.
“Sometimes strangulation from hanging does that, Quint,” Reedy pleaded.
“Hey listen,” the fat ambulance attendant shouted from the hall. I’d called the hospital too, even though I knew she was dead. “When can we cut ’er down an’ get outta here?”
He was not my favorite kind of white man.
“Hold up on that,” Naylor said. “We got an investigation going here and we can’t have the evidence disturbed. I want someone to photograph the room first.”
“Aw, geez,” Reedy sighed.
“Shit,” the fat man said. Then, “Okay, we go, but who signs for the call?”
“We didn’t call so you can’t charge us,” Naylor said.
“What about you, son?” the ambulance attendant asked me. He looked to be in his mid-twenties, almost ten years younger than I.
“Can’t say that I know. I just called the police.” I lied. It was a kind of warm-up lie. I was getting ready for the real lies I’d have to tell later.
The fat man glared at me but that’s all he could do.
When the ambulance men left I turned away and saw Poinsettia hanging there. She seemed to be swaying slightly and my stomach started to move with her, so I turned to leave.
Naylor touched my arm and asked, “Who did you say that Mr. Mofass represented?”
“It’s just Mofass. He don’t go by no other name.”
“Who does he represent?” Naylor insisted.
“Can’t say I know. I just clean fo’ him.”
“Geez, Quint,” Reedy said. He’d taken out a handkerchief and covered his mouth and nose. That seemed like a good idea, so I pulled out my own rag.
Reedy was an older man, past fifty. Naylor was young, the ambulance attendant’s age. He had probably been a noncommissioned officer in Korea. We got all kinds of things out of that war. Integration, advancement of some colored soldiers, and lots of dead boys.
“Don’t look right, Andy,” Naylor said. “Let’s give it a little bit more.”
“Who’s gonna care about this one girl, Quint?”
“I care,” was all the young policeman answered. And it made me proud. It was the first time I had ever seen civilian blacks and whites dealing with each other in an official capacity. I mean, the first time I’d seen them acting as equals. They were really working together.
“You need me for that?” I asked.
“No, Mr. Rawlins,” Reedy sighed. “Just give me your address and phone number and we’ll call you for a statement if we need to.”
I gave him my address and phone. He wrote them down in a leather-bound notepad that he took from his pocket.
Downstairs, I told Mrs. Trajillo what was happening with the police. She was not only the burglar alarm but she was also a kind of newsletter for the neighborhood.
CHAPTER
11
I LAMENTED POINSETTIA’S DEATH. She’d come down in the world, but that was no reason to wish her ill. It was a senseless and brutal death whether she killed herself or somebody else did it. But if it was suicide I dreaded the thought that she did herself in over the threat of eviction; an eviction I knew was wrong. I tried to put that thought out of my mind but it burrowed there, in the back of my thoughts, like a gopher tunneling under the ground.
BUT, NO MATTER HOW I FELT, life had to go on.
I picked EttaMae up on Sunday morning. She was wearing a royal-blue dress with giant white lilies stitched into it. Her hat was eggshell-white, just a layered cap on the side of her head. Her shoes were white too. Etta never wore high heels because she was a tall woman, just a few inches shorter than I.
On the way I asked her, “You talk to Mouse?”
“I called him yesterday, yeah.”
“An’ what he say?”
“Just like always. He start out fine, but then he get that funny sound in his voice. Then he talkin’ ’bout how he will not be denied, like I owe ’im sumpin’. Shit! I’ma have t’kill Raymond if he start comin’ ’round scarin’ LaMarque like he did in Texas.”
“He say anything to LaMarque?”
“Naw. He won’t even talk to the boy no more. Why you ask?”
“I dunno.”
FIRST AFRICAN BAPTIST CHURCH was a big salmon-colored building, built on the model of an old Spanish monastery. There was a large mosaic that stood out high on the wall. Jesus hung there, bleeding red pebbles and suffering all over the congregation. Nobody seemed to notice, though. All the men and women, and children too, were dressed in their finest. Gowns and silk suits, patent-leather shoes and white gloves. The smiles and bows that passed between the sexes on Sunday would have been scandalous anywhere else.
But Sunday was a time to feel good and look good. The flock was decked out and bouncy, waiting for word from the Lord.
Rita Cook came with Jackson Blue. He probably sniffed after her and moved in when Mouse got bored. That’s the way most men do it, they let other men break the ice, then they have clear sailing.
Dupree and his new wife, Zaree, were there. She had once told me that her name was from Africa and I asked her from what part of Africa. She didn’t know and was angry at me for making her look foolish—after that we never got along too well.
I saw Oscar Jones, Odell’s older brother, on the stairs to the church. Etta was saying hello to all the people she hadn’t seen yet, so I moved toward where Oscar stood.
As I suspected, Odell was there standing in the shadow of a stucco pillar facade.
“Easy,” Oscar said.
“Howdy, Oscar. Odell.”
They were brothers, and closer than that. Two men with slightly different faces whose clothes hung on them the same way. They were both soft-spoken men. I’d seen them talking but I’d never heard a word that one said to the other.
“Odell,” I said. “I got to talk to you.”
“Why don’t you come over here.”
I waved at Oscar and he bowed to me, that was about a year of conversation for us.
Odell and I walked around the side of the church, down a narrow cement path.
When we were alone I told him, “Listen, man, I got some business with a white man work here.”
“Chaim Wenzler?”
“How you know ’bout it?”
“He the only white man here, Easy. I don’t mean here today, ’cause he a Jew an’ they worship on Saturday—or so I hear.”
“I need to get next to ’im.”
“What do you mean, Easy?”
“I gotta find out about him fo’ the law. Tax man got me by the nuts on this income tax thing an’ if I don’t do this he gonna bust me.”
“So what you want?”
“A li’l introduction is all. Maybe something like workin’ fo’ the church. I could take it from there.”
He didn’t answer right away. I know that he was uncomfortable with me nosing around his church. But Odell was a good friend and he proved it by nodding and saying, “Okay,” when he had thought it out.
But then he said, “I heard about Poinsettia Jackson.”
We stood before a small green door. Odell had his hand on the knob but he was waiting for my reply before he’d open up.
“Yeah.” I shook my head. “Cops wanna chase it down, but I can’t see that somebody killed her. Who’d wanna kill a sick woman like that?”
“I don’t know, Easy. All I do know is that you talkin’ ’bout all kindsa trouble you in an’ the next thing I see one’a the people live in your buildin’ is dead.”
“Ain’t got nuthin’ to do with me, Odell. It’s just a crazy coincidence is all.” That is what I believed, and so Odell believed it too.
He led me down the stairs to the basement of the church, where the deacons gathered and suited up before the service. We came upon five men wearing identical black suits and white gloves. Above the left-hand breast pocket of each jacket was sewn a green flag that said First African in bright yellow letters. Each man carried a dark walnut tray with a green felt center.
The tallest man was olive brown and had a pencil-thin mustache. His hair was cut short but it was straightened so that he could comb a part on the left side of his head. He smelled of pomade. This man was handsome in a mean sort of way. I knew that the women of the congregation all coveted his attention. But once they got it, Jackie Orr left them at home crying. He was the head deacon at First African and women were only the means to his success.
“How ya doin’, Brother Jones?” Jackie smiled. He came over to us and grabbed Odell’s right hand with his two gloved ones.
“Brother Rawlins,” he said to me.
“Mo’nin’, Jackie,” I said. I didn’t like the man, and one thing I can’t stand is calling a man you don’t like “brother.”
Odell said, “Easy say he wanna do some work fo’ the church, Jackie. I tole’im ’bout Mr. Wenzler, you know how you said Chaim might need a driver.”
It was the first I’d heard of it.
But Jackie said, “Yeah, yeah, that’s right. So you wanna help out, huh, Brother Rawlins?”
“That’s right. I heard that you been doin’ some good work wit’ old people an’ the sick.”
“You got that right! Reverend Towne don’t believe that charity is just a word. He knows what the Lord’s work is, amen on that.”
A couple of the deacons seconded his amen.
Two of the deacons were just boys. I guess they had to join a gang one way or another, and the church won out.
The other two were old men. Gentle, pious men who could hold a jostling, impetuous baby boy in their arms all day and never complain, or even think about complaining. They’d never want Jackie’s senior position, because that was something outside their place.
Jackie was a political man. He wanted power in the church, and being deacon was the way to get it. He might have been thirty but he held himself like a mature man in his forties or fifties. Older men gave him leeway because they could sense his violence and his vitality. The women sensed something else, but they let him get away with his act too.
I said, “I got a lotta free time in the day, Jackie, and I could get my evenings pretty free if I had t’. You know Mofass an’ me got a understandin’ so that I can always make a little time. An’ Odell says that’s what you need, a man who could make some free time.”
“That’s right. Why’ont you come over tomorrow, around four. That’s when we have the meetin’.”
We shook hands and I went away.
Etta was looking for me. She was ready for the word of God.
I could have used a drink.
CHAPTER
12
FIRST AFRICAN WAS A BEAUTIFUL CHURCH on the inside too. A large rectangular room with a thirty-foot ceiling that held two hundred chairs on a gently sloping floor. The rows of seats came down in two tiers toward the pulpit. The podium that stood up front was a light ash stand adorned with fresh yellow lilies and draped with deep purple banners. Behind the minister’s place, slightly off to the left, rose thirty plush velvet chairs, in three rows, for the choir.
There were six stained-glass windows on either side of the room. Jesus at the mountain, John the Baptist baptizing Jesus, Mary and Mary Magdalen prostrate before the Cross. Bright cellophane colors: reds, blues, yellows, browns, and greens. Each window was about fifteen feet high. Giants of the Bible shining down on us mortals.
We might have been poor people but we knew how to build a house of prayer, and how to bury our loved ones.
Etta and I went to seats toward the middle of the room. She sat next to Ethel Marmoset and I sat on the aisle. Odell and Mary sat in front of us. Jackson and Rita stood at the back. People were coming in through the three large doors at the back of the church, and they were all talking, but in hushed tones so that there was a feeling of silence against the hubbub of voices.
When everybody was seated or situated in back, Melvin Pride came down the center aisle with Jackie Orr at his heel. Melvin was what First African called a senior deacon, a man who has paid his dues. While they came in I noticed that the other deacons had spaced themselves evenly along either side of the congregation. The choir, dressed in purple satin gowns, entered from behind the pulpit and stood before the red velvet chairs.
Finally, Winona Fitzpatrick came down the aisle, twenty feet behind Melvin and Jackie. She was the chairwoman of the church council. Winona was large woman in a loose black gown and a wide-brimmed black hat that had a sky-blue satin band. The room was so quiet by then that you could hear the harsh rasp of Winona’s stockinged thighs.
As I watched her progress I noticed a large young man watching me from across the aisle. He was wearing a decent brown suit that had widely spaced goldenrod stripes. His broad-rimmed fedora was in his lap. His stony dull eyes were on me.
Jackie took his place as lead singer of the choir, and Melvin stood before the group with his hands upraised. Then he looked down behind him, and for the first time I saw a small woman sitting at a large organ just below the podium.
Then there was music. The deep strains of the organ and Jackie’s high tenor voice. The choir sang in back of that.
“Angels,” Etta muttered. “Just angels.”
They sang “A Prayer to Sweet Baby Jesus.” After Melvin was sure he’d guided them into harmony he turned to add his bass to Jackie’s high voice.
Melvin was Jackie’s height, but he was black and craggy. When he sang he grimaced as if in pain. Jackie seemed more like a suitor trying to talk his way into the bedroom.
The song filled the church and I loved it even though I was there for something else. Even though I was going to go against a member, or at least a helper, of that flock, still the love of God filled me. And that was strange, because I had stopped believing in God on the day my father left me as a child in poverty and pain.
“Brothers and sisters!” Reverend Towne shouted. I hadn’t been looking when he came to the dais. He was a very tall man with a big belly that bulged out from his deep blue robes. He was dark brown with strong African features and dense, straightened hair that was greased and combed back away from his forehead.
He ran his left hand over his hair as the last members of the crowd went silent, then he looked out over the faces and grinned and shook his head slowly as if he had seen someone who had been missing for years.
“I’m happy to see you all here this Sunday morning. Yes I am.”
No one spoke but there was a kind of shudder in the room.
He held his big open hands out toward us, relishing our human warmth as if he stood before a fire.
“Was a time once when I saw a lotta empty chairs out there.”
“Amen,” one of the elder deacons intoned.
“Was a time,” the minister said, and then he paused. “Yes. Was a time that we didn’t have no peanut gallery in the back. Was a time ev’rybody could sit and listen to the word of the Lord. They could sit and meditate on his spirit.
“But no more.”
He looked around the room, and I did too. Everyone else had their eyes on him. The women had a kind of stunned look on the whole, their heads tilted upward in order to bask in the peculiar and cool light that flowed from the stained-glass windows. The men were serious, by and large. They were concentrating every fiber of their wills to understand the ways of righteousness and the Lord in their everyday lives. All except the man in the brown suit. His stony glare was still on my profile, and I was wondering about him.
“No, no more,” the minister almost sang. “Because now He is marching.”
“Yes, Lord!” an old woman shouted from down front.
“That’s right,” the minister spoke. “We are going to have to go to the church council to expand the roof of the Lord. Because you know he wants all of you in his flock. He wants all of you to praise his name. Say it. Say, yes Je-sus.”
We did, and the sermon started in earnest.
Towne didn’t quote from the Bible or talk about salvation. The whole sermon was aimed at the dead and maimed boys coming back home from Korea. Reverend Towne worked in a special clinic that tended to the severely wounded. He spoke especially long and poignantly about Wendell Boggs, a young man who’d lost his legs, most of his fingers, one eye, the other eyelid, and his lips in the service of America. Bethesda Boggs, a member of the congregation, wailed as if to underscore his terrible litany.
Together they, mother and minister, had us all squirming in our chairs.
After a while he started talking about how war was a product of man and of Satan, not God. It was Satan who waged war against God in his own home. It was Satan who had men kill when they could turn the other cheek. And it was Satan who led us in war against the Koreans and the Chinese.
