White Butterfly (5 page)

I pulled a copy of Plato’s writings from my shelf and read the “Phaedo” by the sunlight coming in my living-room window. My eyes hazed over when he died on that stone bench. I wondered at how it would be to be a white man; a man who felt that he belonged. I tried to imagine how it would feel to give up my life because I loved my homeland so much. Not the hero’s death in the heat of battle but a criminal’s death.

At eleven forty-seven a long black sedan parked in front of my house. Four men got out. Three of them were white men in business suits of various hues. The fourth was Quinten Naylor. They all got out of the car and looked around the neighborhood. They weren’t timid about being deep in Watts. That’s how I knew that they were all cops.

Quinten led the procession up to my door. They were all big men. The kind of white man who is successful because he towers over his peers. Almost every boss I had ever had was a white man and he was either a tall man or very fat; intimidation being the first requirement for obedience on the job.

I was at the door, behind a latched screen, when they mounted the porch.

“Good morning, Easy,” Naylor said. He wasn’t smiling. “We tried to call. I brought some men who want to discuss the news with you.”

“I got to be somewhere in forty-five minutes,” I said, not budging an inch.

“Open up, Rawlins.” That came from a tight-lipped, Mediterranean-looking man in a two-piece silvery suit. I thought I recognized him but most cops blended into one brutal fist for me after a while.

“You got some paper for me to read?” I asked, not impolite.

“This is Captain Violette, Easy,” Quinten said. “He’s precinct captain.”

“Oh,” I mocked surprise. “An’ these the other Pep Boys?”

Violette was my height, around six-one. The man next to him, behind Naylor, wore a threadbare baby-blue suit. He was an inch shorter and blunt in his appearance. His pasty white face was meaty and his ears were large. Black hairs sprouted everywhere on him. From his eyebrows, from his ears. He pushed his hand past Naylor to my door. It was blunt and hairy too.

“Hello, Mr. Rawlins. My name is Horace Voss. I’m a special liaison between the mayor’s office and the police.”

I could see that there was no turning this crowd away, so I unlatched the screen and shook Mr. Voss’s hand.

“Well, come on in if you want, but I ain’t even dressed yet, an’ I gotta be somewhere soon.”

Five big men made my living room seem like a small public toilet. But I got them all sitting somewhere. I leaned against the TV cabinet.

The man I hadn’t met yet was the tallest one of all. He wore a tan wash-and-wear Sears suit. My uncle, Ogden Willy, owned one exactly like it in the Louisiana swamplands thirty years before.

He was thin and bony with long tapered fingers and deep green eyes. He was hatless and nearly bald with just a little black hair around his ears.

He crossed his long legs easily and smiled. He reminded me of a porcelain devil that was popular around that time in the Chinatown curio shops. “My name is Bergman, Mr. Rawlins. I work for the state—the governor. I’m not here in an official capacity. Just keeping an eye on these terrible events.”

“Anybody want something to drink?” I asked.

“No,” Violette said for everyone. But I think Mr. Voss would have liked to use his blunt fingers on a glass.

“We’re here… ” Quinten Naylor started to say but he was cut off by his superior, Violette.

“We’re here to find out who’s killing these girls,” Violette said. He spoke with his upper lip tight against his teeth. “We don’t want this crazy man running our streets.”

“That’s some shit,” I said. “Excuse me, but I’ma have to go get me a beer if I gotta listen to this.”

I went to the kitchen. Being independently employed I didn’t have to worry about those officials getting me fired. I didn’t have to worry about them beating me either. They were too important for that. Of course, they might have sent some goons later on. Maybe I should have been a little more deferential. But those men coming into my house turned my gut.

I filled the largest tumbler I had with ale and went back to the room. Voss looked at the foamy head, barely restraining himself from licking his lips.

“What the hell are you trying to do, Rawlins?” Violette yelled.

“Man, I’m in my own house, right? I ain’t ask you over. Here you come crowdin’ up my livin’ room an’ talkin’ t’me like you got a blackjack in your pocket”—I was getting hot—“an’ then you cryin’ ’bout some dead girl an’ I know they’s been three before this one but you didn’t give one good goddam! Because they was black girls an’ this one is white!” If I had been on television every colored man and woman in America would have stood from their chairs and cheered.

Violette was up from his chair, but not to applaud. His face had turned bright red. That’s when I remembered him. He was only a detective when he dragged Alvin Lewis out of his house on Sutter Place. Alvin had beaten a woman in an alley outside of a local bar and Violette had taken the call. The woman, Lola Jones, refused to press charges and Violette decided to take a little justice into his own hands. I remembered how red his face got while he beat Alvin with a police stick. I remembered how cowardly I felt while three other white policemen stood around with their hands on their pistols and grim satisfaction on their faces. It wasn’t the satisfaction that a bad man had paid for his crime; those men were tickled to have power like that. A Nazi couldn’t have done it better.

“Calm down, Anthony,” the spectator Bergman ordered. “Mr. Rawlins, we’re sorry to interrupt your day, but there is an emergency in the city. A man is killing women and we have to do something. I didn’t know about this matter of the other women getting killed until today, but I promise you that we’ll be looking into that. Still, no matter what way you look at it, we have a job to do.”

“Police got a job to do. I’m just a citizen, a civilian. All I gotta do is cross on the green.”

Mr. Bergman probably didn’t even have a temper. He just smiled and nodded. “That’s right, of course. It’s Anthony’s job to bring this man to justice. But you know that he could use some help, don’t you, Mr. Rawlins?”

“I cain’t help him. I’m not the police.”

“But you can. You know all kinds of people in the community. You can go where the police can’t go. You can ask questions of people who aren’t willing to talk to the law. We need every hand we can get in on this, Mr. Rawlins.” He held his hand out toward me but I left it alone.

“I’m in the middle of my own business, man. I cain’t do nuthin’.”

“Yes you can,” Violette said in a guttural voice. I realized that I was wrong about men in that position. If Captain Violette had me alone I’d have been eating teeth about then.

“They already got a list of suspects, Easy,” Quinten said.

“What do I care?” I answered him. “Go get ’em, put ’em in jail.”

He mentioned a couple of names that I knew. But I told him that if he knew who did it there was no need to worry.

“We’re also looking into Raymond Alexander,” he said.

I felt every man in the room staring at me.

“You gotta be kiddin’,” I said. Raymond Alexander, known to his friends as Mouse, was crazy and a killer, no doubt. He was also the closest thing I had to a best friend.

“No, Easy.” Naylor was gritting his teeth. He was as mad as I was at those men. “Alexander frequents all the bars that the Negro women went to and he is known to go after white women.”

“Him an’ about thirty thousand other black men under the age of eighty.”

“Do you think there’s a flaw in the police approach, Mr. Rawlins?” Horace Voss asked.

“You just makin’ up names, man. Mouse didn’t kill no girls.”

“Then who did?” Voss’s blunt smile didn’t seem quite human, it was more like the cross of a hungry bear and a happy man.

“How you expect me to know?”

“I expect it,” Violette said. “Because if you don’t you’re going to find it very hard living down here among the blues.”

A policeman with a sense of poetry.

“Is that a threat?”

Violette glared at me.

“Of course it isn’t, Mr. Rawlins,” Bergman said. “No one wants to threaten you. We all want the same thing here. There’s a man killing women and he has to be brought to justice. That’s what we all want.”

Quinten was at the window peering out at the street. He knew that I had to go along with the program set out there before me. Captain Violette would run me to the ground if I didn’t. And Quinten was fuming because I refused to help when there were only black victims. Now that a white woman was dead I would agree to help. The air we breathed was racist.

“Lay off Raymond Alexander until I have time to nose around. He ain’t killed no woman an’ arrestin’ him won’t do nobody no good.”

“If he’s guilty, Rawlins, he’ll fry like anybody else,” Violette growled.

“I ain’t tryin’ to protect nobody, man,” I said. “Just lemme look if that’s what you want, an’ sit on these arrests for a couple’a days.”

Bergman stood up straight and tall. “That’s it for me then. I’m sure the police and the mayor can give you all the help you need, Mr. Rawlins.”

The other men rose.

Violette wouldn’t even look at me, he just went to the door. Naylor looked but he didn’t say anything. Bergman smiled and shook my hand warmly.

“Why are you down here, Mr. Bergman?” I asked.

“Just routine.” His bottom lip jutted out an eighth of an inch. “Just routine.”

Horace Voss took my hand in both of his.

“Call me at the Seventy-seventh,” he said. “I’m there until this thing is over.”

Then they were all gone from my house.

I hadn’t hit the streets since my wedding. I tried to bury that part of my life. In one way, looking for this killer was like coming back from the dead for me.

I FRIED BLOOD SAUSAGES with onions and heated up a saucepan of red beans and rice for lunch. After I ate I mowed the lawn. It really didn’t need it, but I wanted my new job to sink in and working in the garden calmed my nerves.

I couldn’t seem to think of Bonita Edwards without seeing Regina crying. The dead woman’s tragedy somehow resonated with Regina’s anger.

I decided that I’d work out my problems with Regina after I’d seen to the job that L.A.’s representatives had given me.

But then I had to wonder at the strangeness of all those important white men thinking that they had to come all the way to my house in order to draft me.

I’d worked for city hall before but usually they called me downtown. They would have me wait on a cold marble bench while they preened and primped. Sometimes they’d call me to the police station and threaten me before asking my favors. But I’d never had a delegation at my house.

I expected Quinten Naylor, and maybe his white sidekick, but the people that had come were important. They were more important than one dead white girl. Women got killed all the time, and unless they were innocent mothers raped in their husbands’ beds, the law didn’t kick up such a big fuss.

Even though I’d eaten I had an empty feeling in the pit of my stomach. I filled the hole with three straight shots of bourbon. After that I felt calmer. Enough whiskey can take the edge off sunshine.

BY ONE-THIRTY I was ready to go. I’d put on gray slacks and a gray square-cut shirt. My lapels were crimson, my shoes yellow suede. I had a light buzz on and my new Chrysler floated down the side streets like a yacht down some inland canals.

There was a small public library on Ninety-third and Hooper. Mrs. Stella Keaton was the librarian. We’d known each other for years. She was a white lady from Wisconsin. Her husband had a fatal heart attack in ’34 and her two children died in a fire the year after that. Her only living relative had been an older brother who was stationed in San Diego with the navy for ten years. After his discharge he moved to L.A. When Mrs. Keaton had her tragedies he invited her to live with him. One year after that her brother, Horton, took ill, and after three months he died spitting up blood, in her arms.

All Mrs. Keaton had was the Ninety-third Street branch. She treated the people who came in there like her siblings and she treated the children like her own. If you were a regular at the library she’d bake you a cake on your birthday and save the books you loved under the front desk.

We were on a first-name basis, Stella and I, but I was unhappy that she held that job. I was unhappy because even though Stella was nice, she was still a white woman. A white woman from a place where there were only white Christians. To her Shakespeare was a god. I didn’t mind that, but what did she know about the folk tales and riddles and stories colored folks had been telling for centuries? What did she know about the language we spoke?

I always heard her correcting children’s speech. “Not ‘I is,’ she’d say. “It’s ‘I am.’”

And, of course, she was right. It’s just that little colored children listening to that proper white woman would never hear their own cadence in her words. They’d come to believe that they would have to abandon their own language and stories to become a part of her educated world. They would have to forfeit Waller for Mozart and Remus for Puck. They would enter a world where only white people spoke. And no matter how articulate Dickens and Voltaire were, those children wouldn’t have their own examples in the house of learning—the library.

I had argued with Stella about these things before. She was sensitive about them but when you told her that some man standing on a street corner telling bawdy tales was something like Chaucer she’d crinkle her nose and shake her head. She was always respectful, though. They often take the kindest white people to colonize the colored community. But as kind as Mrs. Keaton was, she reflected an alien view to our people.

“Good morning, Ezekiel,” Mrs. Keaton said.

“Stella.”

“How is that little Jesus?”

“He’s fine, just fine.”

“You know, he’s in here every Saturday. He always wants to help more than he reads, but I think he’s getting somewhere. Sometimes I come up on him and it seems as if he’s mouthing the words and reading to himself.”