Devil in a Blue Dress Read online

  CRITICAL ACCLAIM

  FOR WALTER MOSLEY’S

  EASY RAWLINS NOVELS

  DEVIL IN A BLUE DRESS

  “Devil in a Blue Dress is a brilliant novel. Period. Mosley’s prose is rich, yet taut, and has that special musical cadence that few writers achieve. His psychological insights are on-target without being self-indulgent and never get in the way of a sensationally suspenseful story.”

  —Jonathan Kellerman

  “The social commentary is sly, the dialogue fabulous, the noir atmosphere so real you could touch it. A first novel? That’s what they say. Amazing. Smashing.”

  —Cosmopolitan

  “A strong novel, with a skillful understanding of the genre and a lively talent for invention.”

  —The New Yorker

  “A sparkling debut novel … [A] rich storytelling legacy is constantly and wonderfully present in Devil in a Blue Dress.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “A beautifully realized homage to hard-boiled fiction…. Mosley has given American crime fiction another unique hero and a solid mystery, all the way to the brilliant, existential last page.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “Mosley has a lot of fun upending our preconceptions…. Best of all is Mosley’s main creation, Easy Rawlins, a man as hard-nosed as he needs to be, yet still capable of relishing decency when he finds it.”

  —Newsweek

  “This guy has the magic. Devil in a Blue Dress is, without question, the most self-assured, uniquely voiced first novel I’ve ever read. Mosley’s going to be compared with Chandler, but he has a clarity and precision that Chandler never achieved—and a relevance.”

  —Andrew Vachss

  “Mosley writes well. The scenes between Easy and his adversaries, both black and white, are nicely handled, and the dialogue’s shifts in tone and temper, depending on which race Easy is dealing with, are worth remarking.”

  —Washington Post

  “Mosley re-creates the era convincingly … evoking the uneasy combination of freedom and disillusion in the postwar black community and revealing a tough, fresh perspective on Los Angeles history.”

  —Los Angeles Times Book Review

  GONE FISHIN’

  “It is, in some respects, the best of Mosley’s novels…. Gone Fishin’ firmly establishes Mosley as a writer whose work transcends the thriller category and qualifies as serious literature. … Mosley displays a pitch-perfect gift for capturing the cadences of black speech that rivals the dialogue in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.”

  —Time

  “A powerfully raw, lyrical coming-of-age story…. This late encounter with the early Easy offers an extra dimension to readers who have met, in previous stories, the man he grew to be.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  A LITTLE YELLOW DOG

  “The best book yet in this fine series. Easy Rawlins [is] one of the most distinctive voices in crime fiction.”

  —Seattle Times

  “[A] well-energized and crafty volume.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  BLACK BETTY

  “Detective fiction at its best-bold, breathtaking, and brutal.”

  —Chicago Sun-Times

  “As always, Mosley’s grip on character is compelling.”

  —People

  WHITE BUTTERFLY

  “Rawlins … might be the best American character to appear in quite some time.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  “Compelling…. In all of American fiction, only Richard Wright treats America’s race problem more savagely.”

  —Village Voice Literary Supplement

  A RED DEATH

  “Fascinating and vividly rendered … exotic and believable, filled with memorable and morally complex situations.”

  —The Wall Street Journal

  “Exhilaratingly original.”

  —Philadelphia Inquirer

  BOOKS BY WALTER MOSLEY

  PUBLISHED BY POCKET BOOKS

  Devil in a Blue Dress

  A Red Death

  White Butterfly

  Black Betty

  A Little Yellow Dog

  Gone Fishin’

  WALTER MOSLEY

  DEVIL IN A BLUE DRESS

  AN EASY RAWLINS MYSTERY

  The sale of this book without its cover is unauthorized. If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that it was reported to the publisher as “unsold and destroyed.” Neither the author nor the publisher has received payment for the sale of this “stripped book.”

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  A Washington Square Press Publication of

  POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  Copyright © 1990 by Walter Mosley

  “Crimson Stain” copyright © 2002 by Walter Mosley

  Published by arrangement with W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  For information address W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110

  ISBN: 0-7434-5179-1

  eISBN: 9-781-4516-1248-6

  First Washington Square Press trade paperback printing September 2002

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  WASHINGTON SQUARE PRESS and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  Cover art by Don Kilpatrick III

  Printed in the U.S.A.

  For information regarding special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact Simon & Schuster Special Sales at 1-800-456-6798 or [email protected]

  FOR JOY KELLMAN, FREDERIC TUTEN,

  AND LEROY MOSLEY

  FROM WALTER MOSLEY’S SIX EASY PIECES

  CRIMSON STAIN

  ETHELINE,” SHE SAID, repeating the name I’d asked for.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Etheline Teaman. I heard from my friend that she works here.”

  “Who is your friend?” the short, nearly bald black woman asked. She was wearing a stained, pink satin robe that I barely glimpsed through the crack of the door.

  “Jackson Blue,” I said.

  “Jackson.” She smiled, surprising me with a mouthful of healthy teeth. “You his friend? What’s your name?”

  “Easy.”

  “Easy Rawlins?” she exclaimed, throwing the door open wide and spreading her arms to embrace me. “Hey, baby. It’s good to meet you.”

  I put one hand on her shoulder and looked around to the street, making sure that no one saw me hugging a woman, no matter how short and bald, in the doorway of Piney’s brothel.

  “Come on in, baby,” the woman said. “My name is Moms. I bet Jackson told you ’bout me.”

  She backed away from the entrance, offering me entrée. I didn’t want to be seen entering that doorway either, but I had no choice. Etheline Teaman had a story to tell and I needed to hear it.

  The front door opened on a large room that was furnished with seven couches and at least the same number of stuffed chairs. It reminded me of a place I’d been twenty-five years earlier, in the now defunct town of Pariah, Texas. That was the home of a pious white woman—no prostitutes or whiskey there.

  “Have a seat, baby,” Moms said, waving her hand toward the empty sofas.

  It was a plush waiting room where, at night, women waited for men instead of trains.

  “Whiskey?” Moms asked.
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  “No,” I said, but I almost said yes.

  “Beer?”

  “So, Moms. Is Etheline here?”

  “Don’t be in such a rush, baby,” she said. “Sit’own, sit’own.”

  I staked out a perch on a faded blue sofa. Moms settled across from me on a bright yellow chair. She smiled and shook her head with real pleasure.

  “Jackson talk about you so much I feel like we’re old friends,” she said. “You and that crazy friend’a yours—that Mouse.”

  Just the mention of his name caused a pang of guilt in my intestines. I shifted in my chair, remembering his bloody corpse lying across the front lawn of EttaMae Harris’s home. It was this image that brought me to the Compton brothel.

  I cleared my throat and said, “Yeah, I been knowin’ Jackson since he was a boy down in Fifth Ward in Houston.”

  “Oh, honey,” Moms sang. “I remember Fifth Ward. The cops would leave down there on Saturday sunset and come back Sunday mornin’ to count the dead.”

  “That’s the truth,” I replied, falling into the rhythm of her speech. “The only law down there back then was survival of the fittest.”

  “An’ the way Jackson tells it,” Moms added, “the fittest was that man Mouse and you was the fittest’s friend.”

  It was my turn to throw in a line but I didn’t.

  Moms picked up on my reluctance and nodded. “Jackson said you was all broke up when your friend died last year. When you lose somebody from when you were comin’ up it’s always hard.”

  I didn’t even know the madam’s Christian name but still she had me ready to cry.

  “That’s why I’m here,” I said, after clearing my throat. “You know I never went to a funeral or anything like that for Raymond. His wife took him out of the hospital and neither one of them was ever seen again. I know he’s dead. I saw him. But Etheline met somebody who sounded a lot like him a few months ago, up in Richmond. I just wanted to ask her a couple’a questions. I mean, I know he’s dead, but at least if I asked her there wouldn’t be any question in my mind.”

  Moms shook her head again and smiled sadly. She felt sorry for me, and that made me angry. I didn’t need her pity.

  “So is Etheline here?”

  “No, darlin’,” she said. “She moved on. Left one mornin’ ’fore anybody else was up. That’s almost four weeks ago now.”

  “Where’d she go?”

  Another woman entered the room. She wore a man’s white dress shirt and nothing else. All the buttons except the bottom one were undone. Her lush figure peeked out with each step. She was maybe eighteen and certain that any man who saw her would pay for her time.

  When she sneered at me, I understood her pride.

  “Inez,” Moms said. “You know where Etheline got to?”

  A man came stumbling out from the doorway behind Inez. He was fat, in overalls and a white T-shirt. “Bye, Inez,” he said as he went around the sofas, toward the door.

  “Bye,” she said. But she wasn’t looking at him. Her eyes were on me.

  “Well?” Moms asked.

  “What?” Inez’s sneer turned into a frown at Moms’s insistence.

  “Do you know where Etheline has got to?”

  “Uh-uh. She just left. You know that. Didn’t say nuthin’ to nobody.” Inez kept her gaze on me.

  “Well,” Moms said. “That’s all, Easy. If Inez don’t know where she is, then nobody do.”

  “You wanna come on back to my room?” Inez asked, sneering again.

  She undid the one button and lifted the tails of the shirt so I could see what she was offering. For a moment I forgot about Etheline and Mouse and why I was there. Inez was the color of pure chocolate. But if chocolate looked like her I’d have weighed a ton. She was young, as I said, and untouched by gravity or other earthly concerns.

  “How much?” I asked.

  “Thirty dollars up front,” Moms said, no longer pitying or even friendly.

  I handed the money over and followed the woman-child down a short hallway.

  “You got thirty minutes, Easy,” Moms called at my back.

  At the end of the hallway we came to a right turn that became another, longer passage. Inez stopped at the fourth door down.

  Her room was done up in reds and oranges. It smelled of cigarette smoke, sex, lubricant, and vanilla incense. Inez let her shirt drop to the floor and sneered at me.

  I closed the door.

  “You shy?” she asked.

  I scanned the room. There were no closets. The bed was just a big mattress on box springs. There was no frame that someone could hide under.

  “How do you want me?” Inez asked.

  “On a desert island for the rest of my life,” I said.

  There was a bench at the foot of her bed. It was covered with an orange and cream Indian cloth that had elephants parading around the edges. I took a seat and gestured for Inez to sit on the bed. She mistook my meaning and got down on her knees before me.

  “No-no, baby. On the bed, sit on the bed.” I lifted her by the elbows and gently guided her to sit.

  “How you gonna fuck me like that?”

  “I need to find Etheline.”

  “I already told you. She left. She didn’t say where she was goin’.”

  “What did she say before she left?”

  “What do you mean?” Inez was getting a little nervous. She covered her breasts under crossed arms.

  “Did she have any friends? Was there some neighborhood she lived in before she came here?”

  “You family to her?”

  “She might know something about a friend’a mine. I want to ask her about him.”

  “You paid thirty dollars to hear about where she lived before here?”

  “I’ll give you twenty more if I like what I hear.”

  I hadn’t noticed how large her eyes were until then. When she put her arms down I saw that her nipples had become erect. They were long and pointed upwards. This also reminded me of my long-ago visit to Pariah.

  “I don’t know,” Inez said. “She had a regular customer name of Cedric. And, and she went to … yeah, she went to The Winter Baptist Church. Yeah.” Inez smiled, sure that she had earned her twenty dollars.

  “What was Cedric’s last name?”

  The girl put one hand to her chin and the other to her ear. She pumped the heel of her left foot on the floor.

  “Don’t tell me now,” she said. “I know it. We’d be sittin’ on the purple couch after dinnertime, waitin’ for the men. Shawna would be playin’ solitaire and then, and when Cedric came Etheline always smiled like she really meant it. She always saw him first and said, ‘Hi, Cedric,’ and Moms would say, ‘Good evenin’, Mr. Boughman.’ Moms always calls a man in a suit mister. That’s just the way she is.” Inez grinned at her own good memory. She had a space between her front teeth. I might have fallen in love right then if another woman didn’t hold my heart.

  “What kinda suit?” I asked.

  “All different kinds.”

  “Black man?”

  “We don’t cater to white here at Piney’s,” Inez said.

  I stood up and took out my wallet, giving Inez four five-dollar bills. “You supposed to walk me out?” I asked.

  “You don’t want me?”

  “Don’t get me wrong, honey,” I said. “I don’t even remember the last time I’ve seen a girl lovely as you. You might be the prettiest girl ever. But I got a woman. She’s away right now but I feel like she’s right here with me. You know what I mean?”

  “Yeah,” Inez whispered. “I know.”

  ☼ ☼ ☼

  IT WAS STILL EARLY when I left Piney’s, about noon. I drove up toward Watts thinking that I should have been at work instead of in the company of naked women. Whorehouses and prostitutes belonged in my past. I had a job and a family to worry about. And as much as I missed him, Mouse, Raymond Alexander, was dead.

  But just his name mentioned on the phone ten days earlier had thrown me ou
t of my domestic orbit. He was on my mind every morning. He was in my dreams. Jackson Blue had told me that Etheline talked about a man who might have resembled Mouse. I kept from seeking her out for seven days, but that morning I couldn’t hold back.

  Maybe if Bonnie wasn’t off being a stewardess in Africa and Europe, things would have been different. If she were home, I’d be too, home with my Mexican son and my mixed-race daughter. Home with my Caribbean common-law wife. Either at home or at work, making sure the custodians at Sojourner Truth Junior High School were picking up the vast lower yard and clearing away the mess that children make.

  But there was no one to stop me. Bonnie was gone, little Feather was at Carthay Circle Elementary, and Jesus had left early in the morning to study the designs of sailboats at Santa Monica pier.

  I was living out the dream of emancipation—a free man in America, desperate for someone to rein me in.

  WINTER BAPTIST CHURCH was just a holy-roller storefront when I came to Los Angeles in 1946. Medgar Winters was minister, deacon, treasurer, and pianist all rolled into one. He preached a fiery gospel that filled his small house of worship with black women from the Deep South. These women were drawn to the good reverend because he spoke in terms of country wisdom, not like a city slicker.

  By 1956 Medgar had bought up the whole block around 98th and Hooper. He’d moved his congregation to the old market on the corner and turned the storefront into a Baptist elementary school.

  In 1962 he bought the old Parmeter’s department store across the street and made that his church. Parmeter’s space seated over a thousand people, but every Sunday it was standing room-only because Medgar was still a fireball, and black women were still migrating from the South.

  That February, 1964, Medgar was sixty-one and still going strong. He might have been the richest black man in Los Angeles, but he still wore homemade suits and shined his own shoes every morning. The old market had become the school, and the storefront was now the church business office.

  I got to the business office a few minutes shy of one o’clock.

  The woman sitting behind the long desk at the back of the room was over sixty. She wore glasses with white frames and a green blouse with a pink sweater draped over her shoulders. Six of eight fingers had gold rings on them and, when she opened her mouth, you could see that three of her teeth were edged in gold. She was buxom but otherwise slender. She seemed unhappy to see me, but maybe that was her reaction to anyone coming in the door.