Little Scarlet Read online

  But he took it pretty well. The white man’s burden, I suppose.

  He held out a worn leather wallet that had his detective’s badge on one side and his identity card on the other. The woman looked very closely at the wallet and mouthed the name.

  I realized then that I hadn’t asked Suggs for his I.D. I was too well trained, knowing that asking for a cop’s badge might well expose you to manacles and blackjacks and a night of deep bruising.

  “And who is he?” the nurse asked.

  “Who are you?” Suggs asked back.

  “Why . . . I’m not the one being identified,” she said.

  “Neither is he,” Suggs said.

  We went through the double doors, all three of us. Suggs led the way, I followed him, and she took up the rear.

  The floor of the hallway was paved with shiny white tiles. The ceiling and walls were white too. There wasn’t a smudge or a streak anywhere along the way. It was by far the cleanest medical facility I had ever seen.

  We got to the end of one hall and turned right onto another. Halfway down this corridor we came to a door marked G-16. Suggs reached for the knob but the nurse got in front of him again.

  “I’m not supposed to let anyone in without first identifying them at the desk,” she said.

  “Honey,” Suggs said, “this is way beyond you. I showed you the badge, so get out of the way before I twist your pretty wrist.”

  “I will not.”

  I wondered if the riots were just one symptom of a disease that had silently infected the city; a virus that made people suddenly unafraid of the consequences of standing up for themselves. For almost a week I had seen groups of angry black men and women go up against armed policemen and soldiers with nothing but rocks and bottles for weapons. Now this eighty-seven-pound girl-child was standing up to a gruff cop who outweighed her three to one.

  “Ezekiel Rawlins, ma’am,” I said.

  “What?” For the first time she looked directly at me.

  “My name. It’s Ezekiel Rawlins. I’m here as a consultant to the police. If you had asked me I would have told you my name.”

  “Oh,” she said, realizing that maybe she was the one that had been discourteous. “Rawlings?”

  “No ‘g,’ ” I said.

  “Oh.”

  “Can we go in now?” Suggs asked.

  The nurse stood aside, looking down.

  I remember that moment very clearly. The white walls and floors, even the doorknobs were painted that colorless hue. And that brave young woman made shy by simple honesty. The cop who was the first piece of solid evidence I had that the white man’s grip on my throat was losing strength. All of that brought me to a doorway that I didn’t really want to go through. I should have turned away right then. I wanted to turn away. But it was as if there was a strong wind at my back. I had resisted it all through the riots: the angry voice in my heart that urged me to go out and fight after all of the hangings I had seen, after all of the times I had been called nigger and all of the doors that had been slammed in my face. I spent my whole early life at the back of buses and in the segregated balconies at theaters. I had been arrested for walking in the wrong part of town and threatened for looking a man in the eye. And when I went to war to fight for freedom, I found myself in a segregated army, treated with less respect than they treated German POWs. I had seen people who looked like me jeered on TV and in the movies. I had had enough and I wasn’t about to turn back, even though I wanted to.

  The door opened and the wind blew me through.

  The room we came into was bright. Three men were standing around a silver table that held the nude corpse of a Negro woman.

  The men had on white smocks. Almost everything in this room was white. The walls and floor, the counters and the ceiling. Two of the men had on white shoes.

  Just one pair of black dress shoes and Nola Payne brought any color into that lifeless room. And the shoes and Nola were just so much dead flesh.

  “Yes, Detective Suggs,” a bald white man with a trim gray mustache said.

  “This is the man I told you about, sir. Ezekiel Rawlins.”

  “Why did you bring him here?”

  “I thought he should see what we saw, Captain. I mean he is going to go out investigating.”

  The bald man turned his eyes to me. He started at the floor and worked his way up. I knew what he saw. I had on brown-red leather shoes, gray slacks, and a square-cut charcoal shirt. I had gone casual down into SouthCentral, not expecting an interview with a white man standing in a black man’s hell.

  “Investigate?” he said to me.

  “And your name is?” I replied.

  The captain looked over at Suggs. The detective had no response.

  “I’m the one in charge here,” the captain said.

  I made the mistake then of glancing at the corpse. She wasn’t young—thirty-three or -four. I couldn’t tell if she’d been pretty. Her hair had a reddish tint that some midwestern Negroes were prone to. One of her eyes was gone, probably due to a gunshot, and her tongue was sticking out of her mouth from her having been strangled, no doubt. The thing that caught my eye was the trickle of red blood that had started from somewhere above her lip, crossed over her teeth, and dribbled down her cheek. It was as if she died with her lips whispering vermilion secrets.

  “Well if you’re in charge, then may I be excused?” I asked the arrogant white man.

  “What is this, Melvin?” the captain asked. “A joke?”

  “No sir,” Suggs said.

  “What’s your name again?” the captain asked me.

  “I haven’t got yours the first time yet.”

  “Enough of this, Lee,” the other as yet unnamed white man said.

  He was a head taller than the captain or Suggs, my height. He looked familiar but I didn’t remember where it was that I had seen him. His face was slender and hard. He had tight black eyes and black hair, no lips to speak of, and a tiny red mark under his right eye.

  “I’m Captain Fleck,” the bald cop said. “And I asked you a question.”

  “No sir, Captain, you did not. You said the word ‘investigate’ in an interrogative tone. But tone alone does not a question make.”

  The third white man snickered. I appreciated the audience.

  “Let’s get out of here,” the tall white man who was really in charge said.

  I had no argument with that.

  4

  The tall man led Captain Fleck and me into an office that had a sign on it saying DR. TURNER, M.D. We left the third white man and Suggs in the colorless hallway.

  Turner’s office was a welcome relief. There was an orange-and-blue carpet, a brown desk, and four splashy landscapes on the wall.

  And there was a test there for us. The room had three chairs: one behind the desk and two in front. The tall man went to the guest chair on the left. Captain Fleck turned toward the doctor’s chair, but I was closer. I cut him off, taking the padded swivel chair for myself.

  Fleck stood over me and stared down, waiting for me to give up the preferred seat.

  It was crazy. All of it. I never did anything like that when involved with the intricate dance necessary to keep out of trouble with the law. I rarely spoke around white men with authority. I never willingly said anything intelligent. And to go so far as to tease a cop—that wasn’t even me.

  But there I was, sitting back in the head man’s chair with Captain Fleck staring death down on my head.

  “Sit down, Lee,” the tall white man said.

  For a moment Fleck remained motionless.

  “Lee.”

  He faltered and I smiled. If we were alone he would have drawn his pistol, I’m sure. But all he could do was obey his master’s call. It’s no wonder I always order sweet and sour when I go to a Chinese restaurant. You can’t enjoy the pleasures of one without at least the presence of the other.

  When we were all seated and comfortable the tall white man said, “It’s a pleasure to meet
you, Mr. Rawlins. My name is Jordan, Gerald Jordan.”

  “You’re the deputy chief,” I said, remembering at last, “the one in charge of the curfew.”

  “That’s right. But the curfew has been lifted. Everybody can go where they want when they want as long as they obey the law.”

  Deputy Commissioner Jordan was a terror on the TV. He called the rioters thugs and criminals who had no respect for property and no reason to riot other than their own immoral desires to loot and destroy. Jordan’s inflammatory words had probably caused the violence to last a day longer than it would have. On television he always wore a black dress uniform with medals across the left breast. That’s why I hadn’t recognized him in the makeshift morgue.

  “Well, Deputy Commissioner, what is it you want from me?”

  “I’m not here, Mr. Rawlins,” he said.

  “No? Am I here?”

  “Not with me. As far as any records are concerned, we had you come down to identify Nola Payne. You failed to do so and were taken home.”

  “And who brought me here?”

  “Detective Suggs brought you, and Captain Fleck debriefed you.”

  “I see.”

  Jordan smiled. I liked him. I liked him the way a slave learns to love his master or a prisoner develops an affinity with his warden. Gerald Jordan was the white man in charge. He was the closest I had ever come to the source of our problems. I wondered if I killed him right then, would the problems of my people become that much lighter? Of course the idea was ridiculous. Realizing the impotence of my fantasy, I laughed.

  “Something funny, Mr. Rawlins?” Jordan asked.

  “Not you, sir.”

  “Let’s get down to business, shall we?”

  “It’s your show.”

  “Lee?” Jordan said.

  The bald captain cleared his throat.

  “Nola Payne was found by her aunt in the living room of her third-floor apartment on Grape Street earlier today,” the sour captain reported.

  “Not to me, Lee,” the deputy commissioner said. “Mr. Rawlins is the one who will need this information.”

  Fleck would have much rather spit in my face but he controlled himself. He did a quarter turn in the visitor’s chair and fixed his gaze on my forehead.

  “She was strangled to death and then shot —”

  “Was she raped?” I asked.

  “She had intercourse within six hours of her death. It might have been rape but there are no bruises, cuts, or tears to back that up.”

  He twitched his mustache as if to ask, Anything else?

  I shook my head.

  “Miss Landry,” he continued, “that’s Miss Payne’s aunt, called the police immediately but it took a while for anyone to come because of the problems in that area. When the patrolmen finally arrived they found Miss Landry in a hysterical state. She was screaming that a white man had murdered her niece. No matter how much they tried to calm her she kept shouting that a white man had raped and killed her niece. The officers took her into custody because they were afraid her ranting would incite another riot.”

  “So they arrested her?” I asked.

  “No, Mr. Rawlins,” Gerald Jordan said. “She was distraught. The officers were directed to bring Miss Landry here, where the doctors could sedate her, ease her pain.”

  Whenever Jordan smiled I wanted to slap his skinny face. The riots were still going on in my chest.

  “You drugged her?”

  “Would you rather I let her start up the riots again?”

  “Where is she?”

  “Down the hall,” Fleck said. “She won’t be awake until the morning.”

  “We need to know what happened down there, Mr. Rawlins,” Jordan said, pretending to care.

  “Why?”

  “Because we want L.A. to get back to normal.”

  “You mean you want businessmen back at their desks, the shoppers to go back to the stores, and tourists buying mouse ears at Disneyland.”

  “This is no joke, Rawlins.” That was Fleck. “The LAPD needs your help and if you know what’s good for you you will cooperate.”

  “What is it you want me to do exactly?”

  “Talk to Miss Landry when she awakens,” Jordan said. “Go down to Grape Street and find out the circumstances of Miss Payne’s death if you can.”

  “I don’t get it. Why are you so worried about a dead black woman? You’re not doin’ this for every Negro killed.”

  The captain and his boss shared glances. Jordan shrugged.

  “On the second day of the riots we had a report that a white man was dragged from his car down on Grape Street. He was harassed and beaten but finally managed to escape. No one has heard about him since. Under any other circumstance we could ignore the report. Maybe the man got away and went home. But a story about a black woman being murdered by a white man across the street from where a white man fled could cause rumors that might flare up into something ugly.”

  Like Nola Payne, I thought.

  “So you want me to find the white man?” I asked.

  “We want you to find out anything you can,” Jordan said.

  “And what will you do with what I find?”

  “Try to keep a lid on the flow of information.”

  “What if a white man did kill her?”

  Jordan and Fleck shared glances again.

  “We don’t want a murderer going free,” Jordan said. “No matter his color. In this case if it came out that a white man killed Miss Payne and we put that man up on trial, then the people will see that we mean to maintain the balance of justice.”

  His words might have been an ad for cigarettes or whiskey. He didn’t care about justice. He didn’t care about a dead black woman or her killer. The only way that either one of them could ever bother him was if someone came around and held him accountable for the consequences of their actions.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “What does that mean?” Captain Fleck asked.

  “I’ll do it. I’ll go down there and ask around. I’ll try and see what happened.”

  Jordan might have been smiling. I couldn’t quite tell. His lips moved about an eighth of an inch and the flesh around his eyes eased up a bit.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  “But I’m going to need something in order to get this done.”

  “And what is that?”

  “There’s a white man in this someplace. That might mean that I’ll have to go around in white neighborhoods. In order to do that I’ll need some kind of identification from the police department.”

  “Once you find out anything you come to me,” Captain Fleck said. “You don’t have any business in a white neighborhood.”

  “Then forget it,” I said.

  I stood up from the comfortable doctor’s chair and took three steps toward the door.

  “Wait outside, will you, Mr. Rawlins?” Jordan asked. “I’ll see about what you need.”

  I passed through the door and waited around for a few moments. But I didn’t like that, so I wandered down the hallway, pretending that I wasn’t waiting on the policemen’s whims.

  5

  The corridors of the clinic were a maze. I turned a few times before passing a wide white door that had a glass portal. Inside I could see a black woman in bed under a thin white sheet. From where I stood she seemed to have no arms.

  When I pushed the door open I could hear her moans. She was in a straitjacket, saying things I didn’t understand. Her head was flailing back and forth. Drool covered her jaw. When I reached out to touch her face, her eyes came open and fastened onto me just like the women used to do down in New Iberia when I was a child doing something wrong.

  “Where am I, Roger?” she asked me.

  “In the hospital,” I said.

  “Am I sick? Am I dyin’?” she asked in a distraught tone.

  “No ma’am. I think you had a shock and the policemen brought you here to the doctor.”

  “Yes,” she said in
a very knowing way. “I have seen terrible things. Things you wouldn’t ever want to see, Roger.”

  I thought about what it must have been like for her to come upon the corpse of Nola Payne, a woman she had probably known since Nola was a child.

  “Why am I tied up?”

  “Because the doctors thought you might hurt yourself.”

  “It wasn’t that white man, was it?” she asked over my reply.

  “What white man?”

  “The one with Nola. The one that choked her and shot her and ran.”

  “What white man?” I asked again.

  I had learned over the years that when someone is in shock you can ask them the same question again and again, getting a different answer each time—every answer bringing you closer to the truth.

  “The one in her house. The one she tried to save. All them white men wanna do is beat you and stick their things in your behind like you was a whore.”

  “Who did she try and save?”

  The woman closed her eyes and moaned.

  “They were tryin’ to kill him, the people. And he runned and Nola took him in. He was bleedin’ and bloody. She didn’t know about white men. I never told her and now she’s dead.”

  “What was his name?” I whispered.

  She sighed and then passed back into the stupor the doctors had induced. I sat with her a bit just to be some company. I wondered where Nola’s story ended and her aunt’s began.

  After a while I left the sleeping, tortured prisoner and made my way back toward Dr. Turner’s office.

  THEY WERE WANDERING the halls, looking for me. Both Fleck and Jordan had removed their borrowed doctor’s smocks. Fleck wore a dark blue uniform and Jordan had on a cream-colored suit.

  “Where are you coming from?” Fleck asked me.

  If he had been a brother or a young beatnik I would have thought he was talking in slang. But I knew it was just that the language he spoke and hipster talk sometimes overlapped.

  “Out lookin’ for a place to smoke,” I said. “I got lost in these damn white halls.”

  I was trying to sound down-home, half ignorant—but it was too late for that now. I had already talked to the white man in his own tongue and he would know from that day forth that his bastion had been breached.