White Butterfly (25 page)

“Who’re you? Charlie Chan?”

“What’d he say I did?”

“What you did do. You threatened to go to the papers about his daughter. You were going to expose her life down in Watts.”

“I bet that’s what
she
did. I bet she was going to tell the family about her life and her daughter too. Yeah. He already knew about the baby.”

“You’re crazy, Rawlins. She didn’t have a kid. And Vernor didn’t know about her before you told him.”

“She did have a baby. She’d left home and had it at one of Bull Horker’s places.”

He hadn’t believed a word up until I mentioned Horker.

“Where were you going to meet this girl?” The cop was fully in charge now.

I told him my story again. He didn’t tell me a thing. When I was finished he just stood up, in a hurry to leave.

“What about me?” I asked him.

“Come up with the bail.”

“But I didn’t extort nuthin’.”

“That’s what you say. Maybe you just read the papers. We’ll see.”

“Listen, captain,” I said in a voice loud enough to stop him for a moment. “There’s somebody trying to kill me in here.”

Violette’s grin came back for a surprise visit. “He wasn’t going to kill you, Rawlins. He was going to stick you in the shoulder and twist a little. That’s all. You know, you need a little lesson.”

ALAMO AND I SHARED a few cigarettes that he got and sat up all that night. He was a career criminal. He’d done everything, if you were to believe him, from petty larceny to first-degree murder.

He’d been born in a small town in Iowa and hit the road after he was let loose from the army after World War I.

“It just warn’t never right after that. All them dead boys,” Alamo told me. He shook his head in real remorse. “And all them people, never felt it, act like they know life. Damn. I could take their money or their life. They wouldn’t even know it was gone.”

He was kind of crazy but I was comforted by him. After all, it was sane men who had put me in jail.

The next morning the guard came and took me from the cell. Alamo had passed me a sharpened spoon in the night, and I had it up the long sleeve of my gray jail shirt. We walked along the big tables and out through large double doors that led to a garage.

The guard told me to pick up a box that sat in a corner. I looked down in it to see my civilian clothes.

“Put ’em on,” the porky, crew-cut white man said.

I stripped right there in front of him, carefully leaving the spoon in the sleeve of the shirt. After I was dressed in my normal clothes I threw the prison garb into a corner and retrieved my weapon.

Another guard came up and they escorted me to the driveway in front of the factory. There sat a squad car with two cops in it. The cops got out and put manacles on me, hand and foot.

“Where’m I goin’?” I asked once.

The police just laughed.

I sat in the backseat on the way downtown. Every moment was very important. I looked at windows with manikins in them and got weepy. I saw a man make a left turn and I imagined myself turning the steering wheel. I thought of my baby girl and felt my inner organs shift.

It must have taken an hour to drive all the way downtown but it seemed like fleet moments to me. They hustled me out of the car and then put me in another holding cell. I was sure that someone was going to kill me. I had the spoon hidden in my pocket. I didn’t think that I could fight past guns with that spoon, but I could take somebody with me; at least I could do that.

In the afternoon they took me from the holding cell and brought me to a wire-cage kiosk. A young cop pushed a big manila envelope at me. Inside it I found my wallet and keys. Those simple items scared me so much that I began to tremble. I knew that I was being set up for the kill.

I walked out of the front door of the municipal building next to city hall with my shoulders hunched and my head down.

“Easy!” he yelled.

I looked up, ready to go down fighting, only to see Raymond Alexander in all his splendor. He wore a close-fitting bright checkered jacket and flared black slacks. His shoes were ivory and his hat close-brimmed. Mouse smiled for miles.

“You look terrible,” he said.

“What you doin’ here, Raymond?”

“I done made yo’ bail, Easy. I got you out.”

“What?”

“Com’on, man, let’s get outta here. Them cops prob’ly take us in fo’loiterin’ fo’long.”

In the car we went past the squat buildings of fifties L.A. down into Watts.

“Where you wanna go, Easy?” Mouse asked after a while.

“You came up with my bail?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Twenty-five hundred dollars?”

“Uh-uh. Twenty-five thousand. Bail bondsman wouldn’t touch it.”

“Where you come up wit’ money like that? You go to Mofass?”

“Tried to but he’s in the hospital.”

“Hospital?”

“Yeah. Some white boys tore him up. He told me to tell you that them men you been doin’ business wit’ is mad in the worst way.”

“Shit. So where’d you get the money?”

“You sure you wanna know?” He was smiling.

“Where?”

“There’s this private poker game out in Gardena. I robbed it.”

“An’ they had that much money?”

“An’ some to boot.”

“You kill anybody?”

“Shot this one guy but I don’t think he gonna die. Maybe just walk funny fo’awhile.”

Bull Horker was found in an alley in San Pedro. He’d been shot seven times in the chest. The police believed that he was killed somewhere else and dumped in that alley. He was found at eight P.M. on the day I was supposed to meet Sylvia and Vernor on the library steps.

The article said that there were signs of a struggle but there was no explanation of what the signs were.

PRIMO AND FLOWER were glad to see us. Jesus was so happy I thought he might even talk. He ran up and put his arms around me and he just wouldn’t let go. I had to walk with his embrace and sit with him on my lap.

MOFASS LOOKED PRETTY GOOD in his hospital bed. The rest gave him a little strength and they wouldn’t let him smoke in the ward. His only problems were a busted hand and three fractures in his left leg.

“They th’owed me down the steps, Mr. Rawlins. They didn’t care if I was dead. They told me that if I lived I should tell my partners that they ain’t playin’.”

Mouse grinned.

“I’ll take care of it, William. You just rest here and try to give up them cigars. You know they gonna kill you faster than DeCampo.”

“It’s killin’ me
not
to smoke.”

I GAVE MOUSE the names of DeCampo and his associates. I told him their Culver City office address and asked him to visit each and every one of them, on the most private terms.

“I want them to understand that killing Mofass won’t save their lives,” I said. “And, Raymond,” I pointed in his face, “I don’t want nobody dead or even wounded.”

I’ve read many a novel that extolled the virtues of capitalism. Not one of them ever came within a mile of the truth.

I WAS SITTING AT MY DESK in the early evening going over the accounts of the killing of Bull Horker. I was looking for something that might lead me to Vernor. But there was nothing I could see.

I was already used to the silence. The silence we’d lived with before Regina, and then Edna. Jesus was reading a red storybook. And I was still alive.

Then the screech of the gate brought me to the window. There was Quinten Naylor again. He was wearing the same suit he wore the day he brought me to see Bonita Edwards’s body.

I blamed him for Regina leaving me. I blamed him but I knew I was wrong.

He wasn’t surprised to see me open the door before he could knock. I nodded at a chair that stood where the crib had been and he sat down.

I lit a cigarette. He brushed his hand over the top of his head.

“The charges against you have been dropped,” Naylor said.

“Oh? How come?”

“They got the wife in custody.”

“What about Milo?” That little boy was the first one I thought of.

“Juvenile Hall.”

“Yeah. Take it out on the kid. Put him in jail ’cause’a what his old man did.”

“His mother was in on it. She confessed.”

“What? Naw, I don’t believe it. I saw how she acted when I showed her the pictures.”

“She didn’t know then. But after that she began to put things together. Garnett had told her something about the killings before their daughter was killed. She didn’t think anything until after he told her about their granddaughter. He’d been in touch with Robin even after she’d left school. He had to know that she was pregnant.”

“So she found out when he was planning to go after Sylvia?”

“He was scared over the diary. Robin had threatened to come to his office dressed like a whore and with a baby in her arms if he didn’t give her enough money to care for her child.”

“Killed his own child.” I was saddened by even the possibility.

“She drove him to it,” Quinten said. “She was a whore and she just wouldn’t straighten out. Then she threatened him.”

“She drove him to it,” I said. “Well then, what drove her?”

Quinten didn’t understand the question. There was right and wrong for him. He dealt with morality the way Mofass went after money. There is no such thing as a long-term investment, there’s money right now, there’s sin right now. Mofass didn’t see past the money those crooks blinded him with and Quinten Naylor couldn’t see that maybe Vernor Garnett had sown the seeds of his own destruction.

“Where is the father?” I asked.

“He ran after going to meet Sylvia. He killed Bull Horker, we’re pretty sure of that. Then he disappeared with the girl. We found his car in West Hollywood yesterday. Bull’s blood was all over the front seat.”

“What happened to the girl?”

“Nothing yet. All we know is what I said. His name and picture are out there. We’ll get him.”

“I’m sure of that.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You’re good at gettin’ people, Quinten. You got J. T. Saunders good. When Violette thought I mighta done somethin’ he had me set up faster than you could spit.”

“What are you talking about, Rawlins? When a prosecutor says that someone is extorting him we believe it. Especially when… ”

“When it’s a nigger. Especially then. Yeah. What are you doing here anyway, man? You gonna send me down to jail again?”

Naylor studied a few fingernails before he answered. “I wanted to say I’m sorry.” The words seemed to stick in his mouth. “I always thought that… I don’t know. I just always thought that I could work inside the police and keep my hands clean. I put myself above you. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that I think you live right. But maybe I’m not so much better.”

Maybe Naylor wasn’t so bad either. I didn’t tell him that, though. I didn’t tell him a thing.

OVER THE NEXT FEW DAYS things came back into order, after a fashion. Anybody who asked me was told that Regina had gone to visit her sick aunt in Arkansas.

Jack DeCampo came to Mofass’s hospital room—to apologize. He blamed the attack on
silent partners
and said that he didn’t know about the mayhem until it was already too late.

Mofass didn’t want to let him off at first but he remembered the kind of fear that Mouse could throw into a man.

“You know, Mr. Rawlins,” Mofass told me on the phone, “that man was so pale that he coulda been two white men.”

It was rare that Mofass and I laughed at the same joke.

“When I told’im that our friend was on the payroll and that he didn’t have to be scared I thought he mighta kissed me.”

“Okay, William,” I said. “Maybe next time you’ll fly right.”

“Uh-huh. But you know there is this one thing.”

“What?”

“They still wanna be partners. They say they’ll give a hunnert an’ twenty-five thousand just to be twenty-five percent.” He was making deals from what might have been his deathbed.

“Man… ”

“They got good connections, Mr. Rawlins. They could get us deals that no bank ever gonna give a Negro.”

The thought of DeCampo working for me sounded good. And I could use the cash for development.

“You tell’im eighteen percent and he’s got a deal.”

“Okay, man.” I could hear his grin over the phone.

THE TELEPHONE RANG four days after Quinten Naylor’s visit. I still got butterflies whenever I had to answer a phone. I still thought, What can I say to her?

“Hello?”

“Is this a Mr. Rawlins?” a young man’s voice said.

“Yeah.”

“Well… I don’t know, sir. This is kinda weird.”

“What’s that?”

“Well, you see this couple… have been eating here at the Chicken Pit for about a week now.”

The butterflies were beating up a storm.

“And a couple of days ago the woman, just a girl really, comes up from the table to ask me for a glass of water. But when she reaches for the glass she grabs my finger and passes this note. I think she was worried… ”

“What did this note say?”

“It was a corner of a newspaper, a racing form with your name and phone number in one margin and a note saying, ‘Call the police, we’re at the Seacrest,’ and it’s signed ‘Sylvia.’ ”

“Why’d you wait two days, man?”

“I don’t know. It was just so weird. I don’t want any trouble. You see… I can’t talk to the police.”

“Where’s this Seacrest place?”

“It’s a motel at the corner of Adams and La Brea. Do you think… ”

“Have they been in your place since then?”

“The next day I had off. I went to San Diego and really forgot about… ”

“Was she in there today?”

“No. Just the man, I mean. That’s why I called.”

I hung up the phone and rushed to the closet to get my gun.

Jesus followed me around the house and kept grabbing me. Finally I stopped and asked him, “What?”

He just stared at the pistol in my hand.

“It’s not Regina,” I told him. “She’s gone. It’s not her.”