Devil in a Blue Dress Read online

  “Hi,” I said. “My name is Rawlins. I’m looking for someone.”

  She peered over the rim of her spectacles but didn’t say a word.

  “She’s one of your congregation.”

  Again the silent treatment.

  “Etheline Teaman,” I said as a final effort.

  “We don’t give out information on our members, Rawlins,” she said.

  “I understand, ma’am. That makes sense. You don’t know who I could be or what I’m after.”

  The woman’s eyes tightened a little, trying to divine if there was some kind of threat in my words.

  “But,” I continued, “I have a serious problem. I’m very upset. You see, my cousin, Raymond, moved up to Oakland last year to work for these people clearin’ forest up north of San Francisco. Nine months ago his mother gets a letter sayin’ that there was an accident, that Raymond fell into the Russian River where they were movin’ logs, and he was lost. You can imagine the grief she must have felt. Here some white man writes her a letter sayin’ that her blood was gone and there wasn’t even a body for her to cry over and put in the ground with a few words from her minister.”

  The woman behind the desk gave a little. Maybe she had a son or nephew.

  “A few weeks ago I found out that a woman here in your congregation had seen Raymond at some services up in Richmond. She might know him, something about how he died. You know my auntie would love to hear anything.”

  “I’m sorry—” the church bureaucrat said, but I cut her off.

  “Now I know you can’t break the rules, but maybe you could give her a note from me. Then if she wants to she can give me a call.”

  “I guess that would be okay. I mean it wouldn’t be breaking any rules.”

  “Can I use a piece of your note paper?”

  My note was simple. I told her my name and number, saying that I needed some information, that my friend Jackson Blue suggested I talk to her. I also added that I didn’t want to bother her at church and that I would pay her expenses if there was trouble with making time to meet me. The church lady frowned momentarily when she read it over, but then she seemed to accept it.

  “I’ll try and get it to her by Sunday, Mr. Rawlins,” she said. “I sure will.”

  I COOKED DINNER that night. Fried chicken, macaroni with real yellow cheddar, collard greens, and unsweetened lemonade. The lemonade was for Jesus, who didn’t like anything sweet. Feather put sugar in hers and mixed it happily as we sat at the dinette table.

  “When Bonnie comin’ home, Daddy?” she asked.

  “Two or three weeks still. You know she got a heavy schedule for a month and then she can stay with us for a long time.”

  “Then can we go to Knott’s Berry Farm?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And, and the tar pits again?”

  “You bet.”

  “I wish she was home already so we could go this weekend,” Feather said.

  “I’ll take you Saturday if you want, baby sister,” Jesus said.

  He was working on his fourth piece of chicken. I didn’t use a batter on my chicken the way many Southerners did. I just dredged it in flour seasoned with salt, pepper, and garlic powder. That way the skin got crispy and you didn’t have to feel like you had to eat through bread to get to the meat.

  “We can all go,” I said. “I mean, Bonnie’s fun, but the three of us can still have fun together too.”

  “Oh boy!” Feather shouted.

  Jesus, who rarely smiled, always did so when his little sister was happy. He’d gotten a haircut that day. The straight black hairs stood up like bristles on his tea-brown head.

  “How’s the boat comin’?” I asked my adopted son.

  “Good.”

  “You work on it today?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How much did you get done?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Jesus was seventeen. He’d dropped out that school year and spent his days building a single-mast sailboat. I asked him many times what he planned to do with that boat, but he didn’t seem to know.

  “How was work today?” I asked him.

  “Okay. They need you to sign a letter saying that I can work when I’m supposed to be in school.”

  “Okay. You go down to Santa Monica?”

  “I saw this guy,” Jesus said, his voice suddenly full of emotion. “He was fixing a sail. Sewin’ it. He told me that a long time ago people from Europe and Africa on the sea in between them had big colored sails with pictures on them.”

  “The Phoenicians,” I said. “The Athenians too, I bet.”

  “Are there pictures?” Jesus asked.

  “In the library.”

  The light dimmed a little in his eyes. Jesus was always adrift around too many books.

  “That’s okay, honey,” I said. “I’ll go with you. I’ll find the book and sit there while you read it to me. That’ll be our lessons for the next couple’a weeks.”

  Since Jesus dropped out of school I had a reading session with him every day for an hour and a half. He’d read to me out loud for forty-five minutes and then we’d talk, or he’d write about what he’d read for another forty-five. If either of us missed a day, we had to make it up on the weekend.

  After hearing about books on sails, Jesus sat up straight and made conversation. He was a good boy. At seventeen he was a better man than I.

  I WENT TO WORK on Friday. We had no principal since Hiram Newgate’s attempted suicide. He was now bedridden, mostly paralyzed. I checked out the work of my custodians. I had to get on Mrs. Plates, because she didn’t empty the big cans in the main hall of the Language Arts building.

  “I’m just a woman, Mr. Rawlins,” she complained. “You cain’t expect me to lift them big heavy things.”

  One year before I arrived at Truth, a man came on the campus without any business. Mrs. Plates asked him to leave, and he cursed at her. A fistfight ensued, and the man had to be taken away in an ambulance. Helen Plates was stronger than most of the men who worked for me. But I couldn’t say that to her. She was a woman, and therefore had to be treated more delicately.

  “Well,” I said. “I’ll tell you what. I’ll get Ace to empty your cans, and then you can do all his toilets.”

  “Toilets!”

  “Yeah. No heavy liftin’ in toilets.”

  “Mr. Rawlins, you know three little cans ain’t worf two floors of toilets.”

  “I know,” I said. “But Ace got to come all the way up to the upper campus to unload them things for you.”

  Helen sighed heavily. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll empty the cans. But if I hurt my back, the school board gonna have to pay my disability.”

  ☼ ☼ ☼

  SATURDAY THE KIDS and I went to the tar pits and the art museum. I found a book on ancient sailboats that Jesus and I read that night. On Sunday we went to the marina, where Jesus pointed out all kinds of boats to Feather and me.

  THE CALL CAME a little before nine o’clock Sunday night.

  “Mr. Rawlins?” a young woman’s voice asked.

  “Who is this?”

  “Etheline Teaman.”

  “Oh. Hello, Miss Teaman. Thank you for calling.”

  “I didn’t understand your note,” she said. But she did. She was insinuating that she didn’t want me to put her business out there at the church.

  “You know my friend—Jackson Blue,” I said.

  “Um. I don’t think I know anybody with that name.”

  “Oh, yeah,” I said. “You know him. He used to come and see you at Piney’s.”

  “What do want from me, Mr. Rawlins?” Her voice had turned cold.

  “Before you left Richmond and came down here, you met a man named Ray.”

  “What if I did?”

  “Did he have gray eyes?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. They were light, I remember that.”

  “Did he have a last name?”

  “If he did I don’t know it.”


  “How about a nickname?”

  “Some people used to call him Mr. Slick ’cause he was always so well dressed.”

  “Where was he from?”

  “I don’t know.” She was getting tired of my questions.

  “Did he have a Southern accent?”

  “Maybe. But not real deep like country or somethin’ like that.”

  “Listen, Etheline,” I said. “I’m tryin’ to find out if this man you knew was my friend. Can you describe him?”

  “Hell,” she said. “I could show you a picture if that would get you to leave me alone.”

  “A photograph?” I asked.

  “Uh-huh. I got it in my trunk, with all the rest’a my letters and stuff.”

  “Honey, I sure would like to see that.”

  “You said somethin’ in that note you gave to Miss Bristol about money?”

  “I’ll give you a hundred dollars just to have a look at that photograph.”

  I could have offered twenty; that was a lot of money. But I wanted to pay what the picture was worth to me. I guess it was a little superstition on my part. I felt that if I tried to skimp on the value of her gift, somehow things would turn out bad.

  She gave me an address on Hedly, a small street between downtown and south L.A.

  Feather and Jesus were both asleep by then. Feather was only eight and needed her rest. Jesus was an early riser, intent on finishing his boat.

  I WAS NERVOUS on the ride over. In my mind I knew that Mouse was dead, but in my heart I had never accepted it. The attending nurse said that he had no pulse minutes before EttaMae came and carried him out of the emergency room bed. But I could never find EttaMae after that, and some deep part of me still held out hope.

  I pulled up in front of the house near ten. There was a light on on the front porch and another behind a drawn shade inside the house. The house looked nice enough, but nighttime is kind on the eyes. I walked up on the front porch feeling all right. Going to Piney’s had made me feel that I was slipping back into the street life, that I had lost my grip on being a citizen. But going to see Etheline, a reformed, churchgoing prostitute, was almost a normal thing.

  I knocked.

  I knocked again. Maybe she was in the bathroom.

  I found a button and pushed it. I could hear the buzzer through the door. That jangling noise got under my scalp and I felt a moment of fear.

  I tried the knob. It was locked but the door wasn’t fully closed. The dead bolt was keeping it open. That couldn’t have been good. I went inside, hoping for a reasonable explanation.

  I didn’t have to go far. She was there in the entranceway, wearing her cream colored church suit, a crimson stain over her heart. The knife was on the floor next to her body. She’d been a beauty in life, I could see that. But now her pretty face was hardening into clay.

  I went around the house, looking for the trunk she’d mentioned. I found it at the foot of her bed. Someone else had already been there. The trunk was open, and all of its contents were strewn across the bed. There were no photographs, not a one.

  I went back into the door where Etheline lay dead. I pulled up a chair from the living room and sat there next to her. I didn’t sit there long, maybe five minutes.

  The problem was simple. I had asked the church lady, Miss Bristol, to give Etheline a note with my name and number on it. She’d given the note to the girl at church that day, and now Etheline was dead. There was a good chance that the police would come to see me, trying to place me at the scene of the crime. If I called them right then, they’d come over and I’d become the prime suspect. No matter how innocent or law-abiding I was, they’d take me to jail and beat me until I confessed. That was a foregone conclusion—at least in my mind.

  My other choice was to drive home and go to bed. If the police called me, I’d tell them that I didn’t know a thing. If someone saw my license plate parked out in front of her house, I could say I dropped by but no one answered the door.

  The first way was the honest, law-abiding way, the kind of life I craved. But the second way was smarter. Leaving that poor dead girl was the wise choice for a black man down at the bottom of the food chain. I walked out of that front door, wiped the doorknob clean, and, though I didn’t realize it at the time, drove off into a new period in my life.

  THE POLICE DIDN’T CALL me the next day or the day after that. I read about the murder in the Sentinel, L.A.’s black newspaper. They reported that Etheline AnnaMaria Teaman was found dead in her foyer by a neighbor who came by to drive her to work at her new job at Douglas Aircraft. The murder weapon was found at the scene. Theft seemed to be the motive. As of yet, there were no suspects in the crime.

  It seemed a strange coincidence that she was murdered between the time she called me and the time I arrived. If Raymond was alive, maybe he had something to do with her, more than she let on. After all, why would she have had a photograph of a man that she’d only seen a couple of times in a bar?

  I didn’t think that Mouse would have killed that girl. It isn’t that he was above killing women. But in the times I knew him, he would more likely seduce a girl or threaten her. He got no pleasure out of killing people who couldn’t fight back.

  But maybe he’d changed. Or maybe he was in trouble.

  I pulled out the phone book and began looking for Cedric or C. Boughman. I was lucky that day. The only Cedric Boughman lived on 101st Street.

  The address took me to a small house at the far end of a deep lot in the heart of Watts. Instead of a lawn, Boughman’s yard had corn and tomatoes, huge fans of collard greens, and rows of carrots. Near the house there was a wire enclosure where eight hens clucked and pecked. They set up a loud din of protest as I reached the front door.

  A small woman, somewhere near fifty, appeared in the shadowy screen. Caramel-colored and delicate, she wore glasses with very thick lenses. She stared at me for a moment before saying anything.

  “Yes?” she asked.

  “Hi. My name is Rawlins. I’m lookin’ for Cedric.”

  “He ain’t doin’ too well today, Mr. Rawlins,” the woman said sadly. “Been sittin’ back there for almost a week just shakin’ his head and sobbin’.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “He won’t say,” she replied. “But it must be some girl. Young men pour their whole heart and soul out for just one kiss. It takes a while to get back on your feet after somethin’ like that.”

  “He’s been like that a whole week?” I asked.

  “Just about. He ain’t eat hardly a thing, and you know, he won’t even put on his pants.”

  “He don’t even go to work?”

  The woman smiled when I mentioned work. “You know he work for the church,” she said happily. “Stay home with his mother and make her proud down at Winter Baptist. He’s the youngest deacon they ever had.”

  “And the church don’t mind him stayin’ home?” I asked.

  “God bless Minister Winters,” she said, closing her eyes in reverence. “He sent a man down here to tell us that Cedric could take off all the time he needed to.”

  “He’s a good man,” I said. “Almost a saint.”

  The woman took in a deep breath and smiled as if she had just inhaled God. “He was me and Mr. Boughman’s savior when we come out here from Arkansas. Every Sunday we’d go to that little chapel and hear about how the Lord was testin’ us, makin’ us stronger and better for our kids.” The feeling in her face, the curl of her lip, was ecstatic. “There was always apple pies and pork sandwiches after the sermon so even if you hadn’t eaten all week, at least that one day your body would be satisfied along with your spirit. Mr. Boughman used to say to me, ‘Celia, the Lord put that man on earth to save the poor black man.’”

  “Do you think I could see Cedric a minute, Mrs. Boughman?”

  “Oh, I don’t know.”

  “He might be able to help me find out what happened to my cousin,” I said. “You see, my cousin, Ray, died in a logging accident. Cedric migh
t know somebody who talked to him before he died.”

  Mrs. Boughman peered at me as if trying to puzzle out what I was saying.

  “Maybe helpin’ somebody else will help Cedric throw off his blues,” I suggested.

  This argument won Celia over. She pushed the door open and pointed the way. When I walked in, I caught a whiff of her perfume, simple rose water.

  The house had a low ceiling that gave the feeling it was sinking into the earth. There were no windows except on the front wall, and these were covered with thick, floor-length drapes. There were pictures and plaster statues of saints and Jesus on every wall and surface. The air was stagnant as if it were the ether of an ancient tomb that had just been cracked open after six thousand years.

  I went through the living room into a long hallway.

  “Keep goin’,” Celia Boughman said at my back. “It’s all the way at the end.”

  It was a very long hall. The house looked small from outside, especially because the yard was so deep, but that hallway was long enough to be a building of its own. When I finally came to the end, I found a half-open door. Inside, Italian opera music was playing.

  “Cedric,” I called. “Cedric.”

  No answer.

  I pushed the door open. He was sitting on a piano stool, wearing only blue striped boxers, supporting his big head with the long fingers of his left hand.

  “Cedric Boughman,” I said, trying to sound like a parent wanting their child to know it was time to pay attention.

  It worked. He looked up at me. A sob came from his chest.

  “What?” he said.

  “My name’s Rawlins,” I said. “Easy Rawlins. I’m lookin’ for a friend’a mine—Raymond Alexander.”

  “I don’t know him,” Cedric said. He let his head back down into the basket of fingers. He was thin and quite a bit darker than his mother.

  “Maybe not, but I think Etheline Teaman did.”