Little Scarlet

5

The corridors of the clinic were a maze. I turned a few times before passing a wide white door that had a glass portal. Inside I could see a black woman in bed under a thin white sheet. From where I stood she seemed to have no arms.

When I pushed the door open I could hear her moans. She was in a straitjacket, saying things I didn’t understand. Her head was flailing back and forth. Drool covered her jaw. When I reached out to touch her face, her eyes came open and fastened onto me just like the women used to do down in New Iberia when I was a child doing something wrong.

“Where am I, Roger?” she asked me.

“In the hospital,” I said.

“Am I sick? Am I dyin’?” she asked in a distraught tone.

“No ma’am. I think you had a shock and the policemen brought you here to the doctor.”

“Yes,” she said in a very knowing way. “I have seen terrible things. Things you wouldn’t ever want to see, Roger.”

I thought about what it must have been like for her to come upon the corpse of Nola Payne, a woman she had probably known since Nola was a child.

“Why am I tied up?”

“Because the doctors thought you might hurt yourself.”

“It wasn’t that white man, was it?” she asked over my reply.

“What white man?”

“The one with Nola. The one that choked her and shot her and ran.”

“What white man?” I asked again.

I had learned over the years that when someone is in shock you can ask them the same question again and again, getting a different answer each time—every answer bringing you closer to the truth.

“The one in her house. The one she tried to save. All them white men wanna do is beat you and stick their things in your behind like you was a whore.”

“Who did she try and save?”

The woman closed her eyes and moaned.

“They were tryin’ to kill him, the people. And he runned and Nola took him in. He was bleedin’ and bloody. She didn’t know about white men. I never told her and now she’s dead.”

“What was his name?” I whispered.

She sighed and then passed back into the stupor the doctors had induced. I sat with her a bit just to be some company. I wondered where Nola’s story ended and her aunt’s began.

After a while I left the sleeping, tortured prisoner and made my way back toward Dr. Turner’s office.

THEY WERE WANDERING the halls, looking for me. Both Fleck and Jordan had removed their borrowed doctor’s smocks. Fleck wore a dark blue uniform and Jordan had on a cream-colored suit.

“Where are you coming from?” Fleck asked me.

If he had been a brother or a young beatnik I would have thought he was talking in slang. But I knew it was just that the language he spoke and hipster talk sometimes overlapped.

“Out lookin’ for a place to smoke,” I said. “I got lost in these damn white halls.”

I was trying to sound down-home, half ignorant—but it was too late for that now. I had already talked to the white man in his own tongue and he would know from that day forth that his bastion had been breached.

“Here you go,” Jordan said, handing me a folded sheet of paper.

I unfolded the white sheet and read it silently.

It was a letter composed on the typewriter.

August 18, 1965

To Whom It May Concern:

The bearer of this letter, Mr. Ezekiel Rawlins, is hereby empowered by the writer, Deputy Commissioner of Police Gerald Jordan, to be given free access by the police and any other security employee as he is conducting private consultations for the Los Angeles Police Department. If there are any questions as to his authority you should contact the central office of the police department and inquire at the desk concerning the police commissioner’s business.

Gerald Jordan

Deputy Commissioner Gerald Jordan

“This is enough?” I asked.

“It should be,” Jordan said.

“And when does it go into effect?”

Past the deputy commissioner’s shoulder I could see Suggs and the third white-man-in-white coming down the hall.

“Right now, Mr. Rawlins. I called it in before coming to find you.”

I refolded the letter and put it in my shirt pocket.

“I have to leave, Mr. Rawlins,” Jordan said. “Is there anything else you need?”

“No sir.”

“What about remuneration?”

“I don’t usually take on white clients, Mr. Jordan.”

“So you want a higher fee?”

“I don’t want no fee whatsoever,” I said. “I’ll do this thing but not for you. I’ll do it for the people I care about.”

For one instant Gerald Jordan’s smug, superior attitude wavered. Behind the mask of sophistication was a face that made Nola Payne’s death mask look benign.

But then he was the politician again. Smiling and nodding at me.

“The city appreciates your goodwill, Mr. Rawlins. It’s too bad that your community doesn’t have more citizens with such a sense of civic responsibility.”

Before I could come up with a fitting reply Jordan was walking away, with Fleck scuttling behind.

“I’ll give you a ride back to your office,” Suggs said to me.

“No thanks. I think I’ll stick around here for a while. Maybe Miss Landry will come to. And I’d like to talk to the doctor.”

“That’s me,” the third white-man-in-white said. “Dr. Dommer.”

He put out a hand and I shook it.

“I don’t really have very much time, Mr. . . . ?”

“Rawlins. People call me Easy.”

“Well, Easy, I can give you a few minutes but I have to prepare for surgery this afternoon.”

“I’ll be quick.” I turned to Suggs and asked, “How do I get in touch with you, Detective Suggs?”

“The Seventy-seventh Precinct will be my home until this is finished.”

“You got it,” I said.

Suggs looked at me a moment, and then he realized that he was being dismissed. At that moment I realized the same thing. The world was changing so quickly that I was worried about making a misstep in the new terrain.

“Okay,” Suggs said. “You call me when you got anything.”

He hesitated a moment more and then turned away.

Before he was out of sight in the long white hall Dr. Dommer asked, “How can I help you, Easy?”

“How did she die?”

Dommer wasn’t a large man. His chest was concave and his brown eyebrows were bushy. His lips were normal size but flaccid and his brown eyes were on the way to becoming yellow. He had hands like a woman, long and slender, soft and tapered.

“Strangled.”

“Then why did he shoot her?”

“I can’t tell you that, Easy. Maybe he wanted to make sure that she was dead.”

“Was there anything else you found?”

“I didn’t do an autopsy. That’s the coroner’s job. But I’d say that she was knocked around quite a bit before she was killed.”

“Was she raped?”

“She had sex with someone,” the doctor said. “But considering the way she was beaten I doubt if he raped her too. There was no trauma in the vaginal area at all. This guy wouldn’t have been a gentle lover.”

“What about Miss Landry?” I asked.

“What about her?”

“Why do you have her all trussed up in that straitjacket?”

“How do you . . . ? The commissioner asked us to keep her sedated and secured.”

“Isn’t there some law against that?”

“Not if we believe that she’s a danger to herself or others.”

“Do you?”

“Is that all, Mr. Rawlins?”

“I’m coming back here tomorrow, Dr. Dommer. Please try and have Miss Landry out of those restraints.”

The doctor and I made eye contact. When I was sure that we understood each other I turned away and walked down the white maze.