Little Scarlet

39

It was close to midnight and I was on the street downtown standing side by side with the white man named Melvin Suggs. He was a cop by trade and I was a criminal by color. But there we were.

“You are one crazy bastard,” Suggs said to me.

“Yeah. You right about that.”

“What are we going to do now?”

“You got any leads?” I asked him.

“A few. Nothing I can act on tonight.”

“Call me at my office by noon tomorrow,” I said. “Then we can share notes and maybe get somewhere.”

I GOT TO my office a little before one.

There were two messages on my answering machine. The first one was from Bonnie.

“Hi, Easy,” she said in that island-soaked, deep-toned voice. “I think I have something. I called a J. Ostenberg in Pasadena. A man named Simon Poundstone answered. He said that his wife, Jocelyn, was named Ostenberg before they were married. She kept her maiden name. He also said that he thought that once she had had a maid who had a son named Harold. I called back later to speak to her but she said that the maid’s son was named Harrison not Harold and that she hadn’t heard from either one of them for years. But there was something about the way she sounded that I didn’t like. I think that she was hiding something.

“Feather misses you, honey,” she added. “I think she wants you to come home.”

The next message was from Juanda.

“Hi. It’s me. I was just sittin’ here thinkin’ about you and how much I wanted to see you. At first I was gonna call and tell you I saw that man Harold somewhere just to get you ovah heah. But then I thought you’d get mad. Call me, okay? I really wanna see you.”

I disengaged Jackson’s answering machine and then turned out the light on my desk. I stood up with every intention of getting into my car and driving home to my little family.

I took one step without a hitch. The next step was a little wobbly but still I kept my balance. Number three had me bending a little too far down. The fourth stride brought me to my knees.

I had only enough presence of mind to realize that it was Mama Jo’s elixir wearing off. I tried to rise but instead I fell. I was on the floor and then I was floating. As I neared the roof everything went black.

Then a bell started ringing. It was all over the place; loud then soft, long and then in short bursts. It sounded like water fountains and rain forests and waterfalls. But it was a bell. A loud bell. And then it stopped.

I opened my eyes to bright sunlight coming in through the window. I was laid out exactly as I had fallen. The room was hot and my whole body was sweating. I had no headache or even a bad taste in my mouth. Mama Jo could bottle that medicine and make a mint among the down and out.

The phone began to ring again. It sounded odd. There was a pulsing nature to the jingling bell. I got right up and went to the phone. I picked up the handset, said hello, and then fell into my chair. I realized that I couldn’t have gotten up again to save my mother’s life.

“Rawlins, you okay?” Detective Melvin Suggs asked me.

“What time is it?” I asked.

“It’s after one.”

“In the afternoon?”

“What’s wrong with you?” the cop asked me.

“Are you at the precinct?” I replied.

“Nearby.”

“Come and get me. I wanna take a ride out to the valley.”

“What for?” he asked, but I was already hanging up the phone.

I sat back in my chair as weak as water. It was a miracle that I didn’t spill out under the desk. Sounds came to me from the street crazily. A baby’s cry was loud and piercing but a car horn blaring was almost too low to hear. There were birds chattering clearly enough that they seemed to be speaking English, or maybe Spanish. Cars were moving but their mechanical sounds receded into a single rushing sound, like an engorged river flowing a few hundred feet away.

I looked at my hand in awe. It moved and flowed, responded to my every whim like magic. I took a deep breath and felt thankful for the few moments of life I had under a sun that made me sweat and grin.

I was an infant amazed by the miracles surrounding me. I couldn’t move but that didn’t seem to matter. Whatever I needed would come at the proper time.

I had been meandering in my mind like that for some time when a knock came on the door. I tried to say “Come in,” but there wasn’t enough air in my lungs.

The door opened and Detective Suggs entered.

I was actually glad to see him. I don’t know how many white men I’d seen walk through doors but I doubted if I had ever been as happy as I was when a friend visited. I liked Suggs. Was that Mama Jo’s doing? Had my mind somehow been altered to leave behind all of my history, clear my eyes, a man cut loose from his own private anchor of hate?

“What’s wrong with you, Rawlins?” the cop asked.

As he approached me, strength flowed into my legs and then arms. I stood up from a long hibernation, hungry for movement, thinking only about my prey.

“I’m fine. Perfectly fine.”

“You sounded drunk on the phone.”

“I was up late,” I explained. “Slept here in my chair. You woke me up.”

“So why did you want to go to the valley?”

I GOT J. OSTENBERG’S address out of the phone book. And then I turned on Jackson’s answering machine just in case someone called while I was out. On the drive over I explained what Bonnie had told me, only I said it was an assistant of mine that made the call.

“SO WHEN WERE you going to tell me about Peter Rhone?” Suggs asked on the ride over the mountain.

“Peter who?”

“Don’t fool with me, Rawlins. I found him myself. All I had to do was locate the chop shops in the neighborhood. You put a little pressure on a man in an interrogation room and he’ll turn in his own mother.”

“So he told you about me?”

“No. He gave me the car and the dealer gave me Rhone. He told me about you.”

“You arrest him?”

“No. He didn’t kill Nola. He might have set fire to his life but he didn’t kill that girl.”

“Woman,” I said.

“Say what?”

“Woman. Nola Payne was a woman just like you and me are men.”

Suggs was driving. He turned to me and gave me a quizzical look.

“I don’t like bein’ called boy,” I said. “I don’t like our Negro women to be called girls. That’s easy enough, right?” It was something I had always wanted to say but hadn’t. Between the riots and Mama Jo I was a real mess.

“Oh yeah,” Suggs said.

What did he care? He didn’t know what made me mad. All he wanted to do was make sure his job was done well.

JOCELYN OSTENBERG LIVED in a nice house on Hesby Street off of Muerretta Avenue. It was a two-story Tudor with a broad green lawn and a crooked oak to the side.

I followed Suggs to the front door. He pressed the button but I heard no bell. He knocked.

A few moments later a woman’s voice said, “Who is it?”

“Police,” Suggs uttered.

“Oh. Wait a minute.”

I heard a loud crack of a lock opening, a chain pulled, another bolt thrown back, and then the doorknob turned. I looked around and saw that all of the windows had bars on them.

The white woman who answered was tiny. She wore a drab blue sweater and a long coal-gray skirt. She also wore a fancy black straw hat and gloves. It was midday and she didn’t look as if she were about to go out but she had on enough makeup to star in an opera. Her ears would have worked on a fat man five times her size.

“Yes?” she asked Suggs, darting a worried glance at me and then looking away.

Suggs held out his identification. She saw the badge and then nodded.

“My husband is at work,” she said.

“We came to ask you a few questions,” Suggs said.

“Who is that man with you?” she asked in a confidential tone as if I were across the street, out of earshot.

“He’s a material witness, ma’am. We wanted to ask you about a man named Harold. He might be using the same last name as yours.”

There was a long silence. Jocelyn Ostenberg was maybe sixty, maybe more. It was hard to tell under all that pancake flour. She had gotten to the age where lies didn’t flow easily. She looked at me, at the floor, at the bent oak. Finally she said, “I don’t know any Harold.”

“No?”

“No sir. I once had a maid named Honey. She had a son named Harrison. Somebody called earlier. They wanted to know about a Harold. Was that someone from your office?”

“No ma’am. What was Honey’s last name?”

“Divine,” she said but I didn’t believe it. “Honey Divine. She died a few years ago, I heard.”

“May we come in, ma’am?” Suggs asked then.

“I don’t have men in my home when my husband is out, Officer. I’m sorry.” She waited for us to bow out.

“Well, okay,” Suggs said, about to honor her request.

“How long have you lived in this house, ma’am?” I blurted out before he could complete his sentence.

“Thirty-five years.”

I smiled and nodded.

“Well thank you, ma’am,” Suggs said.

She nodded and closed the door, making a racket with all of the locks she had to engage.

“That’s a dead end,” the cop said to me on the stroll back to his car.

“You gonna bust Rhone?” I asked him.

“In thirty-six hours unless we come up with something solid.”

“You know he didn’t do it.”

“I’m comfortable letting the courts decide that.”