Little Scarlet

19

Nip’s Coffee Shop on Olympic opened at six. We got there fifteen minutes later but there were already a dozen or more customers eating scrambled eggs and doughnuts, drinking reconstituted orange juice and coffee that tasted mostly like the urn it came from.

We sat in a window booth across from each other.

Tina didn’t have a beautiful face. It would have been plain if it weren’t for that inner light young people have. As it was she probably had her pick of the young men down in the riot area. I tried not to think about it and so I started talking.

“Marianne said that you two see each other in the morning,” I said.

“Uh-huh,” Tina replied. “She usually comes in at about eight-fifteen and then we talk until she has to be on the job at nine.”

“But you get off at six.”

“I use the coffee room to study for my RN tests after work,” she said. “And when Marianne come in we talk about it. She’s real sweet. Don’t know nuthin’ but at least she willin’ to find out.”

“What can I get for ya?” a man asked.

It was the chef. He was skinny everywhere but his stomach, which was half the size of a volleyball. He wore white pants with a checkered T-shirt and a pale blue apron. If he shaved that morning it didn’t take. His chin was still gray. His eyebrows were so long that they resembled horns. There was even hair growing out of the man’s ears.

He’d come from behind the stove to take our orders. The waitress, a small strawberry-blond thing, was behind the counter, staring at us with a terrified expression on her face.

“I could use a couple’a scrambled eggs and ham with orange juice and some dark toast,” I said, smiling for the man. “And coffee for the both of us.”

“Juice and an English muffin,” Tina added.

He jotted down our order and strode back to the kitchen. On the way he threw the receipt pad at the waitress.

She took up two coffee cups and brought them to our table. She was so shaky that the saucers under our cups were filled with coffee.

I watched the waitress going back to the counter. Once she looked over her shoulder. When our eyes met she bumped into a customer sitting on his stool.

“Watch it there, Margie,” the jovial man said to the waitress. “My wife might have spies in the kitchen.”

Margie, I thought.

“She’s a good woman,” Tina said.

“Miss Landry?”

“Yes.”

“She seems nice,” I said, “but I guess she’s had a real hard time.”

“You don’t know the half of it,” Tina said. “Miss Landry been through the wringer three times and now the Lord got her goin’ back again.”

“You mean Nola’s death.”

“Yes I do. Her niece gettin’ killed like that is gonna take years off that poor woman’s life. She’s getting weaker every day.”

“What did happen to her?” I asked.

“Nola?”

“No. What happened to Geneva? She told me that there were things that happened to her that she never told Nola, that if she had told her maybe she’d still be alive. What do you think she meant by that?”

“I . . .”

“Here you go,” a woman said.

It was Margie again. She was trembling, barely able to put our order down on the table. She wouldn’t look either one of us in the eye. And as soon as the plates and glasses were down she scurried away.

I took a big mouthful of scrambled egg. It was delicious. Cooked in butter and just an instant past runny. That skinny chef knew what he was doing.

“What do you have to do with all this, Mr. Rawlins?” Tina asked me.

“I got a little office down on Central and Eighty-six,” I said. “It’s just a room with a toilet down the hall. On one side of me there’s a guy sells dollar life insurance to people doin’ day work. Across the hall is Terry Draughtman. He’s the pool table expert for all of Watts and thereabouts. If you got trouble with your pitch or your bumpers you come to Terry and he’ll fix you right up.

“My office door says ‘Easy Rawlins—Research and Delivery.’ And that’s what I do. You can find me any Tuesday or Thursday evening and most of the day on Saturday. If you have a problem and you want some advice, I do that.”

“What about the office on the other side of you?” Tina asked.

“It used to be a bookkeeper, but he had a heart attack and died. After that nobody has stayed in there more than a month or two.”

For some reason that made Tina smile.

“So who are you helping right now?” she asked.

“You,” I said.

“Me?”

“You live down in SouthCentral L.A., don’t you?”

“Yeah?”

“Now what do you think is gonna happen down there when people find out that a pious colored woman was killed by a white man? When they find out that he raped her and strangled her and then shot her in the eye?”

“Oh.”

“I’m lookin’ for that white man and I’d like to know what happened.”

“But Miss Landry already told you,” Tina said.

“She didn’t see her niece get killed. She never even saw him. And Nola didn’t have a pistol or any other gun in her house.”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“If Nola didn’t have a gun, then what did this white man shoot her with?”

“His own gun,” she said.

“And if he brought a gun with him, then why didn’t he open fire on the mob that beat him?”

That argument made her forehead furrow and her head cock to the side.

“So you think Miss Landry’s makin’ it all up?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “I think that she’s just filling in some of the spaces with her own experiences.”

“And that’s why you wanna know about what Miss Landry said about what she shoulda told Nola?”

I nodded and took another big forkful of egg.

“Why didn’t you ask her yourself when we were in her room?”

“It’s like you say,” I said. “She looked weak, fragile. I figured maybe you’d know.”

“Maybe so but . . . I mean she’s talkin’ to me because it’s a confidence and she thinks I’ll keep her secret.”

“Did she ask you not to tell?” I asked.

“No. But I’m sure she wouldn’t like it.”

“If what she told you didn’t have to do with who else might have killed Nola then I won’t tell anybody,” I said. “I just want to know how to understand why she thinks that white man killed Nola.”

“It’s ’cause of what happened to her that she’s so upset,” Tina said. “But that don’t mean that white man didn’t kill her.”

“What happened to her?”

“She, I mean her father used to work for this white man outside of Lafayette —”

“Louisiana?”

“Uh-huh. Anyway, they grew pecans down there and Miss Landry’s father would spend the whole day out on the plantation takin’ care of the trees. And when the white man knew that her father would be gone a long time he’d go up and find little Ginny and do things to her. Things that most women wouldn’t let their husbands do.”

“How old was she?”

“It started when she was twelve,” Tina said. “He did that to her three or four times a week. And when she’d cry and beg him not to, he’d tell her that if her father ever found out, they’d have to kill him because he would go crazy and try and kill a white man if they didn’t.”

“So she never told anyone?”

“No. And that’s why she’s so upset. She feels that if she had told Nola, then Nola woulda known that you couldn’t trust a white man. That all white men wanted to do was rape and defile black women.”

Tina felt the pain of her charge.

I took her hand and she grabbed on to me. What had happened to Geneva Landry could happen to any black woman. She had to take mountains of abuse while protecting her blood. She could never speak about the atrocities done to her while at the same time she dressed the wounds of her loved ones. Of course they both hated the white man who took refuge in a black woman’s home.

But even with all that I had to wonder—where did that pistol come from?

AT THE CASH register I had to wave to get the cook’s attention.

“How much we owe?” I asked him.

“Margie,” he shouted to the waitress. “The man wants his check.”

The blond waif shook her head and ran through a door at the back of the restaurant.

“Go on,” the cook said to me. “I guess it’s on the house today.”