Devil in a Blue Dress Read online

  “Afternoon,” I replied. “I’m supposed to be meetin’ a Lena McCoy.”

  “You wanna go all the way to the pulpit and turn right. You’ll see a green door, it opens onto a stairwell. Take the stairs two flights up. Go in that do’ and you’ll see a woman.”

  “Mrs. McCoy?”

  “Naw. That’s Mrs. Daniels. She’ll show you to Lena.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “Nuthin’ to it.”

  As I walked toward the pulpit, I could hear the swish of the janitor’s broom on the concrete floor. It was a comforting sound, reminding me of my job at Truth. It felt like a long-ago fond memory, even though I had just come from work.

  I needed Bonnie even more than I let on.

  “MR. RAWLINS?” Mrs. Daniels said, repeating my name. “I don’t have no Rawlins on the minister’s schedule today.”

  “I’m here to speak to Mrs. McCoy,” I said.

  The church receptionist was round and pleasant-looking, but she didn’t like me much. “Is this church business?” she asked.

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said.

  She stared at me a moment too long.

  “Listen, lady. I have important business with your minister’s assistant. If I walk outta here, it will be you who has to answer for it.”

  I’d lost another opportunity at making a friend. The receptionist waved her hand toward a door behind her.

  I knocked, and woman’s voice said, “Come in.”

  I entered, coming upon a medium-sized black woman who was sitting behind an oak desk in the middle of a large, sunny room.

  “Mr. Rawlins?”

  The room had a plain pine floor with bookcases against the wall behind the desk. There was a baby avocado tree in a terra cotta pot next to one window.

  “Mrs. McCoy?”

  The woman got from behind the desk and went to a door between the bookcases. She opened this door and turned back to me.

  “Come with me, please,” she said.

  That half-turn told me a lot about Mrs. McCoy—the woman. She was around thirty-five, but still had the bloom of youth to her face and figure. It was a nice figure, but her deep green dress played it down. The color of the dress also blunted the richness of her dark skin. She wore makeup like an older woman might have, with little color or accentuation. But the sinuous motion of her turn revealed the sensual woman that lived underneath her clamped-down style. She was at home in her body, dancing with just that little turn.

  We came into a room that was even simpler than the assistant’s office. The minister’s office had a plain floor with no bookcases at all. There was a podium holding a large Bible next to the window, and a simple painting of the face of a white Christ hung on the far wall. He didn’t even have a desk, just a table with two chairs pulled up to it. The only means of comfort in the room was a wide-bed couch pressed into the corner.

  “This is Reverend Winters’s office,” she said. “No one will bother us in here.”

  She took one of the chairs at the table, and I sat in the other.

  “What can I do to help you, Mr. Rawlins?”

  “Your husband was unhappy to hear me on the phone this morning,” I said. I decided to find out a little bit more about the woman before hearing what she had to say about Etheline.

  Lena looked down and then back again. “Foster is old-fashioned,” she said. “He doesn’t like gentlemen unknown to him calling me on the telephone.”

  “You’d think Reverend Winters would have known that and had me call you at the office.”

  “He has so much on his mind,” Lena said. Her face took on a soft glow when talking about her boss. Even the severe makeup couldn’t hide the feeling she had for him.

  “Did he tell you why I was here?”

  “Yes. It’s about that poor young girl.”

  “Dead girl,” I said.

  Tears appeared in the luscious woman’s eyes. She nodded and looked down again. Lena McCoy was so full of love and compassion that any man would be drawn to her. It’s not that she was beautiful, not even pretty, really. But there was something physical there, and caring. If there was music in a room and I saw Lena McCoy, I would have asked her to dance, even though I didn’t like dancing.

  “I have some hard questions to ask you about Etheline, Lena. And I want you to answer them.”

  She nodded again.

  “She was having an affair with your boss, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Right here in this room.”

  Her assent was a simple movement of her head, like a bird makes when warbling softly.

  “What did you think about that?”

  “I was happy for him.”

  “Happy?”

  “Yes. Medgar gives of himself like some kind of saint. He meets fifty people in this room every day. And they’re all askin’ for somethin’. They want money or a soapbox or for him to travel fifty miles to talk to a roomful’a people who don’t even care. They cry on his shoulder. They confess their sins. And he takes it all in, Mr. Rawlins. Twelve hours every day, seven days a week.”

  “And Etheline was different?”

  “The first day she came here, she brought homemade brownies and a bunch of little white flowers. Medgar had those daisies in a glass of water for two weeks. I finally had to throw them out.”

  “Why did she meet the minister?” I asked.

  “To apologize. To apologize for her sins. To ask him if she was worthy to be in his congregation.”

  “You heard this?”

  “Medgar tells me everything.” It was the first hint of pride in Lena’s tone.

  “Everything?”

  “Yes.”

  “He tell you when they became lovers?”

  “He didn’t need to, but he did. After the first time I would sneak her in through the side door so that no one else would know.”

  “You helped him cheat on his wife?”

  “His wife helps herself to everything he has. They been married since before he came to Los Angeles. You know he seems the same, but inside he’s changed. He’s gotten bigger. Mrs. Winters changed on the outside. She wears nice clothes and drives a big car. But on the inside she’s hungry and jealous. She ain’t never so much as brought him a cupcake on his birthday.”

  “What happened when Lena broke it off with the reverend?”

  “He cried,” she said. “He put his head on my shoulder and cried like a child.”

  “Was he angry?”

  “He knew that they’d have to stop one day. He knew it was wrong what he did. But you know sometimes a man is weak.”

  “Do you know Cedric Boughman?”

  “Sure I do. He brought Etheline to Medgar’s attention.”

  “Do you think that Cedric might have harmed Etheline?”

  “Why would he?”

  “Because she left him for your boss.”

  “But she left Medgar to go back with Cedric.”

  “What?”

  “Didn’t the minister tell you?” She was really surprised. “Etheline left him a note Sunday after services. She said that she was going away with Cedric, back up to the Bay Area where she was from.”

  “Then why did Winters keep paying Cedric?”

  “He did that before Etheline left him, and he would have done it for any of his inner circle. He’s a good man.”

  “Are you in love with Reverend Winters?” I asked.

  She could have been a wild night creature frozen in my headlights.

  “Are you?” I insisted.

  “What does a question like that have to do with anything?”

  “I don’t know. If you were in love with him, you might wanna protect him, you might be mad that he was with another woman. I mean if he needed love, why not come to you?”

  “I’m a married woman, Mr. Rawlins.”

  “He’s a married man. Maybe that’s why your husband gets so mad when a man calls you. Mad ’cause he feel another man nearby.”

  “I would ne
ver cheat on my husband,” Lena said. “The minister is the whole world to me, but I’d never cross that line.”

  “And what about him? How did you feel about him crossin’ over into sin?”

  “Men are weak, Mr. Rawlins. They’re strong of arm but frail in their hearts. They need forgiveness more than women do.”

  “How about Etheline?” I asked. “She’s a woman. Did you forgive her?”

  “Etheline was just a child. People had been usin’ her all her life. She didn’t know any better. Is there anything else?”

  I shook my head.

  Lena got up from her chair gracefully but she stumbled at the door.

  WHEN I WAS HALFWAY through the pews, Bumpy and Fatso picked up my trail. They followed me across the wide church and into the side parking lot. The lot was full when I got there, so my car was parked in the alley.

  They followed me back there.

  I wasn’t worried. When I got to my car, I bent down to tie my shoe. I also got the .25-caliber pistol out of the elastic band of my sock. The deacons were twenty feet away from me. I could see that the hollow-chested one had found himself a lead pipe.

  I palmed the pistol, stood up, and smiled. That smirk stopped them dead in their tracks. If they had been hyenas or wild dogs, they would have had their noses in the air, sniffing for danger. Something was different. The prey had gained confidence. The rules of the game had suddenly changed.

  I unlocked my car door and opened it, but I didn’t climb in. I just stood there, daring the deacons to approach. They watched me, waiting for a sign. When I finally got in, Bumpy took a tentative step forward. I pointed my pistol at him, and he took two steps and one skip back.

  After that they let me drive off unmolested.

  IT WAS ABOUT FIVE when I got back home. The phone was ringing when I got to the front door, but whoever it was, they’d hung up before I got to the receiver. Feather and Jesus were in the backyard. I sat in my reading chair thinking about the last week.

  Whorehouses and sinful ministers were nothing new to me. Even murder was an old friend, like Mouse. But for years I had been getting up and going to work, putting my paycheck into the bank. Paying my bills by check instead of cash. I was a member of the PTA. I had slept in my own bed every single night from Christmas to Christmas.

  I followed the same routes every day, but all of a sudden I seemed to be lost. It was like I was a young man again, every morning leading me to someplace I never would have suspected. I wasn’t enjoying myself, though. I didn’t want to lose my way. But I had to find out about Mouse. I had to be sure whether he was dead or alive.

  ☼ ☼ ☼

  FEATHER AND JESUS came inside around six.

  “Mail, Daddy,” Feather said when she saw me.

  Jesus went to the console TV and grabbed a brown envelope that I’d failed to notice.

  “What’s that?” I asked my son.

  He shrugged his shoulders and said, “It was on the front step when we got home.”

  He dumped the paper envelope on my lap and then went into the kitchen to make ready for dinner.

  When I ripped the seam open, a sweet scent escaped. It was a black photo album. The cover was worn and stained, but the pages were all intact. I turned the pages, looking at all the Kodak snapshots neatly held by little paper divots built into the black leaves. Six pictures on each side of each page. Pictures of men, some of women. One woman appeared again and again. Etheline had been beautiful when she was alive.

  “Who’s that, Daddy?” Feather leaned against my forearm and pointed, pressing her finger against Etheline’s dress.

  “A pretty lady.”

  “Uh-huh. She a friend’a yours?”

  “L’il bit.”

  “Is she gonna go to Knott’s Berry Farm with us?”

  “No. She wanted me to look at this picture book and see if there was a picture of Uncle Raymond in it. You remember what Uncle Raymond looked like?”

  “He looked funny,” she said, snickering.

  She climbed onto my lap and the little yellow dog growled, peeking out from behind the drapes. There were over fifty pages of photographs in the bulging album. Feather made up stories about who the men were and what their relationship was to Etheline.

  There were two pictures of Inez with men. She was lovely in those pictures. The thought crossed my mind that I could be with her for just thirty dollars.

  “That one look like Uncle Raymond,” Feather said.

  It did. A smallish man, not much taller than Etheline, with light eyes and good hair. If you had described Mouse to a police sketch artist, he might have drawn this man’s picture—but it wasn’t Raymond. His face was too round, his jaw too sharp. He was smiling, but it wasn’t the contagious kind of smile that Mouse had. It was just some mortal man, not the angel of death, my best friend, Raymond Alexander.

  I studied the album for hours after Feather and Jesus went to bed, until I was pretty sure I knew who the murderer was.

  I ENTERED THE DEEP LOT on 101st Street at nine-fifteen the next morning. Mrs. Boughman was sweeping the ground with a straw broom. I hadn’t seen anyone sweep bare earth since I’d left the South. It wasn’t a pleasant memory.

  “Good morning, Mr. Rawlins. Cedric went to work this morning,” she said proudly.

  “He did? That’s great. He must be feeling better.”

  “I’ll tell him that you dropped by when he gets home,” she said. “You know, it’s funny. When you left the other day, he asked me who you were.”

  “Yeah. I know. How are you, Mrs. Boughman?” I asked in a tone that was less than concerned.

  “Fine.”

  “You know I got a gift and a warning yesterday afternoon.”

  “I don’t know what you mean, Mr. Rawlins.”

  “One of the deacons from that department store you call a church dropped off an envelope at my doorstep. He left it because I asked for it. But the fact that he left it at my door meant that he knew where I lived; that was the threat.”

  The elder Boughman shook her head as if nothing I said made sense.

  “It was a photograph album,” I continued. “A woman named Etheline Teaman had put it together. It was full of snapshots of her and her friends. All the men she ever knew. All of ’em except for two.”

  If Celia Boughman were thirty feet tall, she would have spun my head like a noisemaker and left my decapitated body to run around that yard bumping up against her leg.

  “Missin’ is Medgar Winters and Cedric Boughman.”

  “Cedric,” she said, with odd emphasis.

  “She called you, didn’t she?”

  “Who?”

  “Etheline. She called you and left a message for Cedric. Or maybe she saw you at church Sunday last, and said something, a little too much. Maybe about wanting to see Cedric. Maybe about taking him on a vacation to Richmond. Whatever it was, you weren’t gonna lose your deacon son and he wasn’t gonna lose his soul to a whore.”

  It was when Celia Boughman’s mouth fell open that I was sure of my logic.

  “You stabbed her through the heart and took the evidence that your son had been so close to her,” I said. “And then when you couldn’t take it anymore, you brought the picture album and probably a stack of letters to Reverend Winters. You confessed your sins and left him with the evidence. That’s how I see it. I saw manila envelopes like the one the book was in at the church, and I could smell the slightest hint of cheap rose water on the pages of that book.”

  “Don’t tell Cedric,” she said. “Don’t tell him. He wouldn’t understand. He didn’t know what a woman like that would do to his life.”

  She leaned against her broom to keep from falling.

  I shook my head and walked away.

  “YOU SAY THAT you suspect the woman?” Detective Andre Brown asked me. We were sitting in his office at the 77th Precinct.

  I had given him the photo album and told him of my adventures between the whorehouse and church, leaving out my discovery of the m
urdered girl.

  “Yes sir, Detective Brown.”

  “Because this book was in a manila envelope and you smelled perfume when you first opened it?”

  “That’s about it.”

  “That’s pretty slim evidence.”

  “I know.”

  “So what do you want me to do?” the tall and slender Negro policeman asked. “There weren’t any fingerprints on the knife.”

  “I hope that you can’t do anything. There’s no court that could judge this crime.”

  “Then why are you here?”

  “Because an innocent young woman was murdered, officer. I owe it to her memory to tell somebody the truth.”

  READ SIX EASY PIECES FOR THE CONCLUSION.

  DEVIL IN A

  BLUE DRESS

  CHAPTER 1

  I WAS SURPRISED TO SEE A WHITE MAN walk into Joppy’s bar. It’s not just that he was white but he wore an off-white linen suit and shirt with a Panama straw hat and bone shoes over flashing white silk socks. His skin was smooth and pale with just a few freckles. One lick of strawberry-blond hair escaped the band of his hat. He stopped in the doorway, filling it with his large frame, and surveyed the room with pale eyes; not a color I’d ever seen in a man’s eyes. When he looked at me I felt a thrill of fear, but that went away quickly because I was used to white people by 1948.

  I had spent five years with white men, and women, from Africa to Italy, through Paris, and into the Fatherland itself. I ate with them and slept with them, and I killed enough blue-eyed young men to know that they were just as afraid to die as I was.

  The white man smiled at me, then he walked to the bar where Joppy was running a filthy rag over the marble top. They shook hands and exchanged greetings like old friends.

  The second thing that surprised me was that he made Joppy nervous. Joppy was a tough ex-heavyweight who was comfortable brawling in the ring or in the street, but he ducked his head and smiled at that white man just like a salesman whose luck had gone bad.

  I put a dollar down on the bar and made to leave, but before I was off the stool Joppy turned my way and waved me toward them.

  “Com’on over here, Easy. This here’s somebody I want ya t’meet.”

  I could feel those pale eyes on me.