White butterfly, p.20
White Butterfly, page 20
I thought of Marlene opening the door for Mouse. She welcomed him.
“What about the reward?”
“It’s got to be verified, but if the investigation points at this guy then the money is yours.”
“Me and Mouse. He’s been lookin’ with me.”
Quinten frowned. “Where is he?”
“Where he belongs. More than I can say for us.”
“Well.” Quinten wouldn’t meet my gaze. “We’re gone after this. You want tickets to fly home?”
“I got a car, and some unwelcome questions to ask.”
“They’ll kill you up here, Easy. It’s just that simple.”
“Who sent that man, Quinten?”
“I don’t know. I called Violette and he called Voss and Bergman. After that there was a meeting down at city hall and a call was made to Oakland. Nobody asked me a thing.”
CHAPTER
29
QUEEN ANNE’S LANE was ugly in the light of day. People sat out in front of their apartments staring at me. They would have stared at each other if I wasn’t there. Children screamed and ran in the empty lots across the street. Boys played war while the little girls watched, half in envy and half bewildered.
I went up to Marlene’s apartment building. I was about to go in when I remembered why we had come there in the first place. So instead of going back to the apartment of dirty children, I went up the slender cement passageway to the address we’d looked up the day before.
The door was open and an old woman sat in front of it in a lawn chair. Behind her I could see people, mainly women, moving quietly about the house.
“Yah?” the old woman said.
“Hi.” I smiled and folded my hands in front of me. “I came to see Mrs. Saunders.”
“An’ why is that?”
I remembered the stick-figured Miss Cranshaw. She was white and this woman black, but they both had the same regard for me.
“I was here last night and she sent me down to deliver a message to James. I didn’t get to talk with him but I saw him get killed.”
Gray hairs battled with nappy white ones across the woman’s head. There was a bald patch toward the top of her pate.
“What’s your name?”
For a moment I froze, forgetting completely the name I had used. But then it came to me and I smiled. “Greer. Martin Greer.”
“Don’t you know your own name?” the elder lady asked. And I wondered if her mother had entertained a man like Mouse while she cared for her little brother.
I wondered but I didn’t answer. Finally the woman got up and went back into the house. She took her chair with her and closed the front door.
When the door opened again I was ashamed. The woman from the night before wore an expansive black dress that came down to her bare feet. She was widest at the thighs and her eyes were swollen and vulnerable.
I was a dog.
“Yes?” she said, holding her chin up.
“I was here last night.”
“I remember, Mr. Greer. But he’s dead now. I can’t send you to him now.” If she’d cried I would have had to run. I couldn’t comfort this woman.
“I know,” I said. “I saw it. I saw it all.”
“Why didn’t you do something?” The tears stayed in her eyes.
“It was too fast… ”
She nodded.
“It was like, like… I don’t know… ”
She put her hand out and I moved out of range.
“Tell me what happened,” she said softly.
I did tell her. And as I talked I wondered again if I really was the cause of this fine woman’s anguish.
“But you say that he had the gun and he was holding it on James Thomas?”
“Yeah.”
“But why would he shoot him?”
“I don’t know.”
“No. No,” she echoed.
“I went down to the police department to make a statement today. They said that they had been looking for J.T. havin’ to do with some dead women in the South Bay.”
She just looked at me.
“They said that he’s the one who killed those girls down in L.A.” I said.
I told her the dates of the last killings.
“It couldn’t have been.”
“He was here?”
“Not all those times, but the last one you said. He was here with me that day. All day.”
“You sure?”
“He was right here with me.”
MARLENE KISSED MOUSE good-bye with such passion that I felt it across the room. Mouse had a way of bringing out the love in people. It was because there was no shame in him. For the desperate souls in us all, Mouse was the savior. He brought out the dreams you had as a baby. He made you believe in magic again. He was the kind of devil you’d sell your soul to and never regret the deal.
We went back to the hotel and had fried chicken and broiled ribs from a stand called Fat Charlie’s. It was Sunday night, so Ed Sullivan was on television.
The food tasted like cardboard and the stories and acts didn’t make any sense.
“What’s wrong with you, Easy?” Mouse asked after we ate.
The women were working next door, but slower, as it was the Sabbath. There was a mild groan from the wall and an unconvincing “Ooo, baby.”
“Ain’t nuthin’ wrong.”
“No? Then why you droopin’ like a puppy just got weaned?”
“They killed ’im, man.”
“Killed who?”
“Saunders. They used me t’set’im up.”
“Who did?”
“I really don’t know. Maybe it was Quinten or one’a them men he took t’my house. Maybe it was all of ’em. Probably was. Somebody killed ’im, though. They got his name from me an’ killed him.”
“So?” Mouse was already bored with talking about my problems.
“So that makes it my fault. That’s so.”
“He killed them girls, right?” Mouse sighed. “I mighta killed’im my own self if I’da thought about it.”
“But he shoulda gone to court. People up here shoulda found out that some man was killin’ women and nobody even knew about it. That’s probably why they killed him. They didn’t want a trial to let people know that a killer had run free and nobody even knew.”
“He’s dead, Easy. It’s over, man.”
“But it ain’t right.”
“Naw, it ain’t that. It ain’t never right, Ease. Niggah ain’t gonna get nuthin’ right till they put’im under six feet of loose dirt. That’s as right as it gets ’round these parts.”
“So you sayin’ I should just drop it?”
“What else can you do?”
“I didn’t drop it when you was in jail, Raymond. I got you outta there.”
“Uh-huh. An’ I thank you fo’that too. But you know we partners, brother. Shit! You better not fuck wit’ my partner or I put you down.”
There was nothing to argue about. Mouse didn’t understand guilt or abstract responsibility. He’d go up against a platoon of men to protect me or EttaMae, his ex-wife, or their boy LaMarque. He’d shoot it out with the law for his own people, but Mouse couldn’t hold a moral concept in his brain. Explaining right to him was like trying to explain the color red to a man who was born blind.
And he was right anyway. I tried my best. I did what I thought was right. I found the man killing black women. I did it all.
I couldn’t take on the cops. I’d never work for them again, but that’s all I could do. I had a wife and children of my own to look after. And Saunders was a killer; I knew that from the moment I laid eyes on him.
WE WENT TO SLEEP EARLY, but Mouse got up in the middle of the night. He sat at the foot of his single bed and smoked a cigarette. I listened to him breathe and to the women talking to each other through the wall.
After a while Mouse went out the door. A moment later I heard a woman’s voice say, “Who’s there?”
“It’s your neighbor,” Mouse said. “I brought a bottle’a Jim Beam.”
The door opened and the ladies laughed. They partied until six in the morning. Toward the end the women wanted to go to sleep. Finally they sent Mouse back home to me.
CHAPTER
30
THE RIDE DOWN the Coast Highway was beautiful. Mouse slept almost the whole time.
Between the motor humming and the sea air coming in my window I started feeling better about J. T. Saunders. He was a killer, after all, and I had my life to go back to. It was wrong for the police to cover up the killings but I couldn’t change the world.
It was a windy afternoon. White rags tore from the navy-blue sea. There was a sonic boom somewhere around Ventura. That roused Mouse for a moment.
“What was that?” he asked.
“Nuthin’. You must’a been havin’ a dream.”
He gave a big grin and said, “Know what I’ma do, Easy?”
“What?”
“First thing I get that money I’ma buy me a ’57 T-Bird.”
I didn’t argue with him. Mouse knew how to enjoy his life.
* * *
I GOT HOME AT ABOUT FIVE. Regina’s car wasn’t parked out front yet. Gabby Lee and Edna weren’t to be seen. Jesus’s scooter lay on its side near the garden. Everything looked very good.
I had owned that house for more than ten years, but since Regina had moved in, it was more like a home than ever.
I still remember the day I met her. It was at a club in Compton. I was following a man named Addison Prine for his fiancée’s father. The old man, Tony Spigs, was sure that Addison had a girlfriend and he wanted me to find her name. Spigs was a jealous old man and he wanted to keep his only daughter at home as long as he could. Spigs was also Mofass’s preferred carpenter and I thought I could get a good carpentry job out of him for a hefty favor.
Addison was at a small table with another man and a woman. Near to them a woman sat alone. She was wearing a simple brown dress. She had the dregs of a bright red drink with a straw in it before her.
“Can I sit here?” I asked her in a businesslike manner.
She looked up at me and her eyes laughed. That’s when I fell in love. Her eyes laughed without a smile crossing her lips. Then she looked around the room. There were quite a few empty tables around, because it was late afternoon and the Toucan was still waiting for its crowd.
“I like this one,” was my answer to her gaze.
She looked the other way and I sat down.
Addison put his hand over the hand of the woman at his table. A waiter came up and took my whiskey order.
Regina didn’t avoid my face but she just looked straight ahead, past me rather than at me.
“No, Nancy,” Addison said. “I ain’t gonna forget you. I got the tickets right-chere in my pocket.”
The woman, a chesty specimen in a checkered dress suit, laughed. I thought about Addison’s fiancée. Iona Spigs was a pretty but tight-mouthed girl. She liked a neat house and church-filled Sundays.
Nancy liked to get her hands dirty. When she leaned over to kiss Addison it was with her smile showing.
I shook my head and sighed.
My fake date glanced at me, but no more.
I sipped my drink.
Nancy swabbed Addison’s mouth with her tongue.
I motioned for the waiter to come over. When he stood there before me I asked my wife-to-be, “Would you like something else?”
She nodded at her empty glass and the waiter went away.
I sighed again.
“What would you do?” I asked my glass.
“What?”
“What would you do if you had a friend and his daughter was gonna marry that man over there?” I swung my head in Addison’s direction.
The eyes did their laugh.
“Is that your friend’s daughter he kissin’?”
“Not hardly.”
She laughed for real then. It was a good laugh in a woman. She let her head fall backward and her mouth open wide. Then she bent forward and thrummed the table with her short, unpainted nails.
I laughed too. Not quite as hard. The waiter brought our drinks.
“I don’t think you should do nuthin’,” Regina said.
“Why not?” I asked.
“She picked that man. She got a reason that maybe even she don’t know.”
“But what if he break her heart?”
“She live with her daddy?”
“Yeah.”
“At least she be on her own then. Maybe that’s what she wants.”
JESUS WAS SITTING at the kitchen table. His hands were out in front of him and there was no food or anything else there. He looked up at me when I tousled his hair.
“Run on outside now. Go on an’ play, boy. You shouldn’t be inside,” I said.
I was glad that Regina and Edna were still gone. I had them with me anyway. I enjoyed the feeling of them in the house. On the couch that Edna always jumped from. At the sink where Regina cleaned every night.
“I’m a poor woman and from a long line of proud poor people,” she told me that night. I’d told Tony Spigs that I couldn’t find anything on Addison.
Regina wasn’t an inventive lover. She didn’t do tricks or bellow or jibber. But when we came together it was like everything she had was mine. She came on me like waves on the shore. She was constant and strong.
THERE WAS A FOLDED PIECE OF PAPER on the TV. Under the note lay the nine hundred dollars I’d given her. When I saw the money I knew I was lost.
Dear Easy:
It is hard for me to say honey but I found a man that I love. And I am going away with him. You know I have tried but I cannot stay.
You are wonderful Easy but I need something that we don’t have. I love you. I do love you but I have to go.
Don’t hate me for taking Edna. She needs her mother.
Good-bye.
The dictionary was on the coffee table. She’d looked up the words she couldn’t spell. The tears came and my knees buckled. After a long while I looked up and saw Jesus sitting on his haunches. He was sitting watch over me.
CHAPTER
31
I WENT TO THE SAFEWAY MARKET the next morning and bought a gallon of vodka and an equal amount of grapefruit soda. Jesus slipped off to school and I drank. I drank deliberately as if I were working.
Lift hand to lip and sip, swallow and sip again, put glass on table but don’t let it go. After twenty-one double-sips, refill and start over.
I slept in the afternoon.
Jesus came back at about three-thirty. He came banging in the front door and ran across to his room dropping books and clothes as he went. When he came back I grabbed him by the arm and hefted him into the air.
“What the hell do you think this is, boy, a pigsty?”
He shied away from me after that. I felt wrong about handling him that way but whenever it bothered me I just drank some more.
The phone rang at four. Jesus ran in from the front. He stared worriedly after the bell. I kept up the sipping regimen. Double-sip, ring, double-sip, ring. Finally the phone stopped ringing but the liquor still flowed.
Jesus had warmed two cans of spaghetti for our dinner. I sat at the table but the smell made my stomach lurch. I leaned away from the smell in my chair.
There was a song playing in my head, “I Cover the Waterfront.” I was humming the lyrics when I looked up and saw Mouse. He appeared as if by magic right there in my dinette.
“Hey, Easy,” Mouse said.
Jesus jumped out of his chair and hugged the crazy killerman.
“Mouse,” I replied. I wasn’t actually seeing double but Mouse’s visage shimmied a little. My voice, and his, carried the slight quality of an echo chamber.
“Better sit up, man. That’s how Blackfoot Whitey died.”
“What?”
“Sittin’ back, drunk in his chair, till he went too far one day an’ busted his neck.”
“She’s gone, man.”
“Yeah. I know.”
“You do? How’d you find out?”
There were very few times that Mouse actually looked serious. The only times I had ever seen him somber was when he was getting ready to go out on a criminal job. So his grave stare made me wonder, almost forget my sorrow.
“It was Dupree,” he said.
I watched my eyelids flutter. My heart did the same. I tried to think of her in that big man’s arms. I tried to think of her not with me.
“He been after her at the hospital. You know how he always be bad-mouthin’ California… ”
“How you know?”
“Sophie said it. She was mad that a brother of hers could do that to a friend. She told me so I could tell you.”
Up until that moment Regina was still with me. I still loved her and wanted her back. I planned to follow her first letter and beg for her to come back to me. But the thought of her in Dupree Bouchard’s arms tainted my brain. There was a smell and an ugly color that became a part of everything we had been. I was sick.
Jesus was at my side with his slender boy’s arm around my neck. He put his face against my cheek.
“Mind if I mix me one, Easy?” Mouse asked. He was already pouring a drink.
I nodded and bowed. My wife had left me, had taken my child, had gone off with my friend. There was no song on the radio too stupid for my heart.
THAT NIGHT IS STILL MIXED UP in my mind. I remember Mouse getting me outside to see his canary-yellow ’57 T-Bird. It was a classic from the day it came off the line.
He told me that a loan shark fronted him the money; that he couldn’t wait for the reward to buy his new car.
I remember women’s breasts held barely in check by loose blouses, and how seeing that sight made me sick inside.
I remember loud music and dancing so hard that my clothes were soaked through with sweat.
I remember a man with tears in his eyes and a kitchen knife in his hand. He was coming toward me. I moved to put my arm out but then I saw that I had my arm around a woman. She yelled in my ear, “Derek! Stop!”
There were other images but most of them were even less coherent. I saw Mouse smiling next to me in the car. He was driving fast and the night wind tore across my face. I was laughing too.
