Six Easy Pieces

Crimson Stain

ETHELINE,” SHE SAID, repeating the name I’d asked for.

“Yeah,” I said. “Etheline Teaman. I heard from my friend that she works here.”

“Who is your friend?” the short, nearly bald black woman asked. She was wearing a stained, pink satin robe that I barely glimpsed through the crack of the door.

“Jackson Blue,” I said.

“Jackson.” She smiled, surprising me with a mouthful of healthy teeth. “You his friend? What’s your name?”

“Easy.”

“Easy Rawlins?” she exclaimed, throwing the door open wide and spreading her arms to embrace me. “Hey, baby. It’s good to meet you.”

I put one hand on her shoulder and looked around to the street, making sure that no one saw me hugging a woman, no matter how short and bald, in the doorway of Piney’s brothel.

“Come on in, baby,” the woman said. “My name is Moms. I bet Jackson told you ’bout me.”

She backed away from the entrance, offering me entrée. I didn’t want to be seen entering that doorway either, but I had no choice. Etheline Teaman had a story to tell and I needed to hear it.

The front door opened on a large room that was furnished with seven couches and at least the same number of stuffed chairs. It reminded me of a place I’d been twenty-five years earlier, in the now defunct town of Pariah, Texas. That was the home of a pious white woman—no prostitutes or whiskey there.

“Have a seat, baby,” Moms said, waving her hand toward the empty sofas.

It was a plush waiting room where, at night, women waited for men instead of trains.

“Whiskey?” Moms asked.

“No,” I said, but I almost said yes.

“Beer?”

“So, Moms. Is Etheline here?”

“Don’t be in such a rush, baby,” she said. “Sit’own, sit’own.”

I staked out a perch on a faded blue sofa. Moms settled across from me on a bright yellow chair. She smiled and shook her head with real pleasure.

“Jackson talk about you so much I feel like we’re old friends,” she said. “You and that crazy friend’a yours—that Mouse.”

Just the mention of his name caused a pang of guilt in my intestines. I shifted in my chair, remembering his bloody corpse lying across the front lawn of EttaMae Harris’s home. It was this image that brought me to the Compton brothel.

I cleared my throat and said, “Yeah, I been knowin’ Jackson since he was a boy down in Fifth Ward in Houston.”

“Oh, honey,” Moms sang. “I remember Fifth Ward. The cops would leave down there on Saturday sunset and come back Sunday mornin’ to count the dead.”

“That’s the truth,” I replied, falling into the rhythm of her speech. “The only law down there back then was survival of the fittest.”

“An’ the way Jackson tells it,” Moms added, “the fittest was that man Mouse and you was the fittest’s friend.”

It was my turn to throw in a line but I didn’t.

Moms picked up on my reluctance and nodded. “Jackson said you was all broke up when your friend died last year. When you lose somebody from when you were comin’ up it’s always hard.”

I didn’t even know the madam’s Christian name but still she had me ready to cry.

“That’s why I’m here,” I said, after clearing my throat. “You know I never went to a funeral or anything like that for Raymond. His wife took him out of the hospital and neither one of them was ever seen again. I know he’s dead. I saw him. But Etheline met somebody who sounded a lot like him a few months ago, up in Richmond. I just wanted to ask her a couple’a questions. I mean, I know he’s dead, but at least if I asked her there wouldn’t be any question in my mind.”

Moms shook her head again and smiled sadly. She felt sorry for me, and that made me angry. I didn’t need her pity.

“So is Etheline here?”

“No, darlin’,” she said. “She moved on. Left one mornin’ ’fore anybody else was up. That’s almost four weeks ago now.”

“Where’d she go?”

Another woman entered the room. She wore a man’s white dress shirt and nothing else. All the buttons except the bottom one were undone. Her lush figure peeked out with each step. She was maybe eighteen and certain that any man who saw her would pay for her time.

When she sneered at me, I understood her pride.

“Inez,” Moms said. “You know where Etheline got to?”

A man came stumbling out from the doorway behind Inez. He was fat, in overalls and a white T-shirt. “Bye, Inez,” he said as he went around the sofas, toward the door.

“Bye,” she said. But she wasn’t looking at him. Her eyes were on me.

“Well?” Moms asked.

“What?” Inez’s sneer turned into a frown at Moms’s insistence.

“Do you know where Etheline has got to?”

“Uh-uh. She just left. You know that. Didn’t say nuthin’ to nobody.” Inez kept her gaze on me.

“Well,” Moms said. “That’s all, Easy. If Inez don’t know where she is, then nobody do.”

“You wanna come on back to my room?” Inez asked, sneering again.

She undid the one button and lifted the tails of the shirt so I could see what she was offering. For a moment I forgot about Etheline and Mouse and why I was there. Inez was the color of pure chocolate. But if chocolate looked like her I’d have weighed a ton. She was young, as I said, and untouched by gravity or other earthly concerns.

“How much?” I asked.

“Thirty dollars up front,” Moms said, no longer pitying or even friendly.

I handed the money over and followed the woman-child down a short hallway.

“You got thirty minutes, Easy,” Moms called at my back.

At the end of the hallway we came to a right turn that became another, longer passage. Inez stopped at the fourth door down.

Her room was done up in reds and oranges. It smelled of cigarette smoke, sex, lubricant, and vanilla incense. Inez let her shirt drop to the floor and sneered at me.

I closed the door.

“You shy?” she asked.

I scanned the room. There were no closets. The bed was just a big mattress on box springs. There was no frame that someone could hide under.

“How do you want me?” Inez asked.

“On a desert island for the rest of my life,” I said.

There was a bench at the foot of her bed. It was covered with an orange and cream Indian cloth that had elephants parading around the edges. I took a seat and gestured for Inez to sit on the bed. She mistook my meaning and got down on her knees before me.

“No-no, baby. On the bed, sit on the bed.” I lifted her by the elbows and gently guided her to sit.

“How you gonna fuck me like that?”

“I need to find Etheline.”

“I already told you. She left. She didn’t say where she was goin’.”

“What did she say before she left?”

“What do you mean?” Inez was getting a little nervous. She covered her breasts under crossed arms.

“Did she have any friends? Was there some neighborhood she lived in before she came here?”

“You family to her?”

“She might know something about a friend’a mine. I want to ask her about him.”

“You paid thirty dollars to hear about where she lived before here?”

“I’ll give you twenty more if I like what I hear.”

I hadn’t noticed how large her eyes were until then. When she put her arms down I saw that her nipples had become erect. They were long and pointed upwards. This also reminded me of my long-ago visit to Pariah.

“I don’t know,” Inez said. “She had a regular customer name of Cedric. And, and she went to…yeah, she went to The Winter Baptist Church. Yeah.” Inez smiled, sure that she had earned her twenty dollars.

“What was Cedric’s last name?”

The girl put one hand to her chin and the other to her ear. She pumped the heel of her left foot on the floor.

“Don’t tell me now,” she said. “I know it. We’d be sittin’ on the purple couch after dinnertime, waitin’ for the men. Shawna would be playin’ solitaire and then, and when Cedric came Etheline always smiled like she really meant it. She always saw him first and said, ‘Hi, Cedric,’ and Moms would say, ‘Good evenin’, Mr. Boughman.’ Moms always calls a man in a suit mister. That’s just the way she is.” Inez grinned at her own good memory. She had a space between her front teeth. I might have fallen in love right then if another woman didn’t hold my heart.

“What kinda suit?” I asked.

“All different kinds.”

“Black man?”

“We don’t cater to white here at Piney’s,” Inez said.

I stood up and took out my wallet, giving Inez four five-dollar bills. “You supposed to walk me out?” I asked.

“You don’t want me?”

“Don’t get me wrong, honey,” I said. “I don’t even remember the last time I’ve seen a girl lovely as you. You might be the prettiest girl ever. But I got a woman. She’s away right now but I feel like she’s right here with me. You know what I mean?”

“Yeah,” Inez whispered. “I know.”

* * *

IT WAS STILL EARLY when I left Piney’s, about noon. I drove up toward Watts thinking that I should have been at work instead of in the company of naked women. Whorehouses and prostitutes belonged in my past. I had a job and a family to worry about. And as much as I missed him, Mouse, Raymond Alexander, was dead.

But just his name mentioned on the phone ten days earlier had thrown me out of my domestic orbit. He was on my mind every morning. He was in my dreams. Jackson Blue had told me that Etheline talked about a man who might have resembled Mouse. I kept from seeking her out for seven days, but that morning I couldn’t hold back.

Maybe if Bonnie wasn’t off being a stewardess in Africa and Europe, things would have been different. If she were home, I’d be too, home with my Mexican son and my mixed-race daughter. Home with my Caribbean common-law wife. Either at home or at work, making sure the custodians at Sojourner Truth Junior High School were picking up the vast lower yard and clearing away the mess that children make.

But there was no one to stop me. Bonnie was gone, little Feather was at Carthay Circle Elementary, and Jesus had left early in the morning to study the designs of sailboats at Santa Monica pier.

I was living out the dream of emancipation—a free man in America, desperate for someone to rein me in.

WINTER BAPTIST CHURCH was just a holy-roller storefront when I came to Los Angeles in 1946. Medgar Winters was minister, deacon, treasurer, and pianist all rolled into one. He preached a fiery gospel that filled his small house of worship with black women from the Deep South. These women were drawn to the good reverend because he spoke in terms of country wisdom, not like a city slicker.

By 1956 Medgar had bought up the whole block around 98th and Hooper. He’d moved his congregation to the old market on the corner and turned the storefront into a Baptist elementary school.

In 1962 he bought the old Parmeter’s department store across the street and made that his church. Parmeter’s space seated over a thousand people, but every Sunday it was standing-room-only because Medgar was still a fireball, and black women were still migrating from the South.

That February, 1964, Medgar was sixty-one and still going strong. He might have been the richest black man in Los Angeles, but he still wore homemade suits and shined his own shoes every morning. The old market had become the school, and the storefront was now the church business office.

I got to the business office a few minutes shy of one o’clock.

The woman sitting behind the long desk at the back of the room was over sixty. She wore glasses with white frames and a green blouse with a pink sweater draped over her shoulders. Six of eight fingers had gold rings on them and, when she opened her mouth, you could see that three of her teeth were edged in gold. She was buxom but otherwise slender. She seemed unhappy to see me, but maybe that was her reaction to anyone coming in the door.

“Hi,” I said. “My name is Rawlins. I’m looking for someone.”

She peered over the rim of her spectacles but didn’t say a word.

“She’s one of your congregation.”

Again the silent treatment.

“Etheline Teaman,” I said as a final effort.

“We don’t give out information on our members, Rawlins,” she said.

“I understand, ma’am. That makes sense. You don’t know who I could be or what I’m after.”

The woman’s eyes tightened a little, trying to divine if there was some kind of threat in my words.

“But,” I continued, “I have a serious problem. I’m very upset. You see, my cousin, Raymond, moved up to Oakland last year to work for these people clearin’ forest up north of San Francisco. Nine months ago his mother gets a letter sayin’ that there was an accident, that Raymond fell into the Russian River where they were movin’ logs, and he was lost. You can imagine the grief she must have felt. Here some white man writes her a letter sayin’ that her blood was gone and there wasn’t even a body for her to cry over and put in the ground with a few words from her minister.”

The woman behind the desk gave a little. Maybe she had a son or nephew.

“A few weeks ago I found out that a woman here in your congregation had seen Raymond at some services up in Richmond. She might know him, something about how he died. You know my auntie would love to hear anything.”

“I’m sorry—” the church bureaucrat said, but I cut her off.

“Now I know you can’t break the rules, but maybe you could give her a note from me. Then if she wants to she can give me a call.”

“I guess that would be okay. I mean it wouldn’t be breaking any rules.”

“Can I use a piece of your note paper?”

My note was simple. I told her my name and number, saying that I needed some information, that my friend Jackson Blue suggested I talk to her. I also added that I didn’t want to bother her at church and that I would pay her expenses if there was trouble with making time to meet me. The church lady frowned momentarily when she read it over, but then she seemed to accept it.

“I’ll try and get it to her by Sunday, Mr. Rawlins,” she said. “I sure will.”

I COOKED DINNER that night. Fried chicken, macaroni with real yellow cheddar, collard greens, and unsweetened lemonade. The lemonade was for Jesus, who didn’t like anything sweet. Feather put sugar in hers and mixed it happily as we sat at the dinette table.

“When Bonnie comin’ home, Daddy?” she asked.

“Two or three weeks still. You know she got a heavy schedule for a month and then she can stay with us for a long time.”

“Then can we go to Knott’s Berry Farm?”

“Uh-huh.”

“And, and the tar pits again?”

“You bet.”

“I wish she was home already so we could go this weekend,” Feather said.

“I’ll take you Saturday if you want, baby sister,” Jesus said.

He was working on his fourth piece of chicken. I didn’t use a batter on my chicken the way many Southerners did. I just dredged it in flour seasoned with salt, pepper, and garlic powder. That way the skin got crispy and you didn’t have to feel like you had to eat through bread to get to the meat.

“We can all go,” I said. “I mean, Bonnie’s fun, but the three of us can still have fun together too.”

“Oh boy!” Feather shouted.

Jesus, who rarely smiled, always did so when his little sister was happy. He’d gotten a haircut that day. The straight black hairs stood up like bristles on his tea-brown head.

“How’s the boat comin’?” I asked my adopted son.

“Good.”

“You work on it today?”

“Yeah.”

“How much did you get done?”

“I don’t know.”

Jesus was seventeen. He’d dropped out that school year and spent his days building a single-mast sailboat. I asked him many times what he planned to do with that boat, but he didn’t seem to know.

“How was work today?” I asked him.

“Okay. They need you to sign a letter saying that I can work when I’m supposed to be in school.”

“Okay. You go down to Santa Monica?”

“I saw this guy,” Jesus said, his voice suddenly full of emotion. “He was fixing a sail. Sewin’ it. He told me that a long time ago people from Europe and Africa on the sea in between them had big colored sails with pictures on them.”

“The Phoenicians,” I said. “The Athenians too, I bet.”

“Are there pictures?” Jesus asked.

“In the library.”

The light dimmed a little in his eyes. Jesus was always adrift around too many books.

“That’s okay, honey,” I said. “I’ll go with you. I’ll find the book and sit there while you read it to me. That’ll be our lessons for the next couple’a weeks.”

Since Jesus dropped out of school I had a reading session with him every day for an hour and a half. He’d read to me out loud for forty-five minutes and then we’d talk, or he’d write about what he’d read for another forty-five. If either of us missed a day, we had to make it up on the weekend.

After hearing about books on sails, Jesus sat up straight and made conversation. He was a good boy. At seventeen he was a better man than I.

I WENT TO WORK on Friday. We had no principal since Hiram Newgate’s attempted suicide. He was now bedridden, mostly paralyzed. I checked out the work of my custodians. I had to get on Mrs. Plates, because she didn’t empty the big cans in the main hall of the Language Arts building.

“I’m just a woman, Mr. Rawlins,” she complained. “You cain’t expect me to lift them big heavy things.”

One year before I arrived at Truth, a man came on the campus without any business. Mrs. Plates asked him to leave, and he cursed at her. A fistfight ensued, and the man had to be taken away in an ambulance. Helen Plates was stronger than most of the men who worked for me. But I couldn’t say that to her. She was a woman, and therefore had to be treated more delicately.

“Well,” I said. “I’ll tell you what. I’ll get Ace to empty your cans, and then you can do all his toilets.”

“Toilets!”

“Yeah. No heavy liftin’ in toilets.”

“Mr. Rawlins, you know three little cans ain’t worf two floors of toilets.”

“I know,” I said. “But Ace got to come all the way up to the upper campus to unload them things for you.”

Helen sighed heavily. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll empty the cans. But if I hurt my back, the school board gonna have to pay my disability.”

* * *

SATURDAY THE KIDS and I went to the tar pits and the art museum. I found a book on ancient sailboats that Jesus and I read that night. On Sunday we went to the marina, where Jesus pointed out all kinds of boats to Feather and me.

THE CALL CAME a little before nine o’clock Sunday night.

“Mr. Rawlins?” a young woman’s voice asked.

“Who is this?”

“Etheline Teaman.”

“Oh. Hello, Miss Teaman. Thank you for calling.”

“I didn’t understand your note,” she said. But she did. She was insinuating that she didn’t want me to put her business out there at the church.

“You know my friend—Jackson Blue,” I said.

“Um. I don’t think I know anybody with that name.”

“Oh, yeah,” I said. “You know him. He used to come and see you at Piney’s.”

“What do want from me, Mr. Rawlins?” Her voice had turned cold.

“Before you left Richmond and came down here, you met a man named Ray.”

“What if I did?”

“Did he have gray eyes?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. They were light, I remember that.”

“Did he have a last name?”

“If he did I don’t know it.”

“How about a nickname?”

“Some people used to call him Mr. Slick ’cause he was always so well dressed.”

“Where was he from?”

“I don’t know.” She was getting tired of my questions.

“Did he have a Southern accent?”

“Maybe. But not real deep like country or somethin’ like that.”

“Listen, Etheline,” I said. “I’m tryin’ to find out if this man you knew was my friend. Can you describe him?”

“Hell,” she said. “I could show you a picture if that would get you to leave me alone.”

“A photograph?” I asked.

“Uh-huh. I got it in my trunk, with all the rest’a my letters and stuff.”

“Honey, I sure would like to see that.”

“You said somethin’ in that note you gave to Miss Bristol about money?”

“I’ll give you a hundred dollars just to have a look at that photograph.”

I could have offered twenty; that was a lot of money. But I wanted to pay what the picture was worth to me. I guess it was a little superstition on my part. I felt that if I tried to skimp on the value of her gift, somehow things would turn out bad.

She gave me an address on Hedly, a small street between downtown and south L.A.

Feather and Jesus were both asleep by then. Feather was only eight and needed her rest. Jesus was an early riser, intent on finishing his boat.

I WAS NERVOUS on the ride over. In my mind I knew that Mouse was dead, but in my heart I had never accepted it. The attending nurse said that he had no pulse minutes before EttaMae came and carried him out of the emergency room bed. But I could never find EttaMae after that, and some deep part of me still held out hope.

I pulled up in front of the house near ten. There was a light on on the front porch and another behind a drawn shade inside the house. The house looked nice enough, but nighttime is kind on the eyes. I walked up on the front porch feeling all right. Going to Piney’s had made me feel that I was slipping back into the street life, that I had lost my grip on being a citizen. But going to see Etheline, a reformed, churchgoing prostitute, was almost a normal thing.

I knocked.

I knocked again. Maybe she was in the bathroom.

I found a button and pushed it. I could hear the buzzer through the door. That jangling noise got under my scalp and I felt a moment of fear.

I tried the knob. It was locked but the door wasn’t fully closed. The dead bolt was keeping it open. That couldn’t have been good. I went inside, hoping for a reasonable explanation. I didn’t have to go far. She was there in the entranceway, wearing her cream colored church suit, a crimson stain over her heart. The knife was on the floor next to her body. She’d been a beauty in life, I could see that. But now her pretty face was hardening into clay.

I went around the house, looking for the trunk she’d mentioned. I found it at the foot of her bed. Someone else had already been there. The trunk was open, and all of its contents were strewn across the bed. There were no photographs, not a one.

I went back into the door where Etheline lay dead. I pulled up a chair from the living room and sat there next to her. I didn’t sit there long, maybe five minutes.

The problem was simple. I had asked the church lady, Miss Bristol, to give Etheline a note with my name and number on it. She’d given the note to the girl at church that day, and now Etheline was dead. There was a good chance that the police would come to see me, trying to place me at the scene of the crime. If I called them right then, they’d come over and I’d become the prime suspect. No matter how innocent or law-abiding I was, they’d take me to jail and beat me until I confessed. That was a foregone conclusion—at least in my mind.

My other choice was to drive home and go to bed. If the police called me, I’d tell them that I didn’t know a thing. If someone saw my license plate parked out in front of her house, I could say I dropped by but no one answered the door.

The first way was the honest, law-abiding way, the kind of life I craved. But the second way was smarter. Leaving that poor dead girl was the wise choice for a black man down at the bottom of the food chain. I walked out of that front door, wiped the doorknob clean, and, though I didn’t realize it at the time, drove off into a new period in my life.

THE POLICE DIDN’T CALL me the next day or the day after that. I read about the murder in the Sentinel, L.A.’s black newspaper. They reported that Etheline AnnaMaria Teaman was found dead in her foyer by a neighbor who came by to drive her to work at her new job at Douglas Aircraft. The murder weapon was found at the scene. Theft seemed to be the motive. As of yet, there were no suspects in the crime.

It seemed a strange coincidence that she was murdered between the time she called me and the time I arrived. If Raymond was alive, maybe he had something to do with her, more than she let on. After all, why would she have had a photograph of a man that she’d only seen a couple of times in a bar?

I didn’t think that Mouse would have killed that girl. It isn’t that he was above killing women. But in the times I knew him, he would more likely seduce a girl or threaten her. He got no pleasure out of killing people who couldn’t fight back.

But maybe he’d changed. Or maybe he was in trouble.

I pulled out the phone book and began looking for Cedric or C. Boughman. I was lucky that day. The only Cedric Boughman lived on 101st Street.

The address took me to a small house at the far end of a deep lot in the heart of Watts. Instead of a lawn, Boughman’s yard had corn and tomatoes, huge fans of collard greens, and rows of carrots. Near the house there was a wire enclosure where eight hens clucked and pecked. They set up a loud din of protest as I reached the front door.

A small woman, somewhere near fifty, appeared in the shadowy screen. Caramel-colored and delicate, she wore glasses with very thick lenses. She stared at me for a moment before saying anything.

“Yes?” she asked.

“Hi. My name is Rawlins. I’m lookin’ for Cedric.”

“He ain’t doin’ too well today, Mr. Rawlins,” the woman said sadly. “Been sittin’ back there for almost a week just shakin’ his head and sobbin’.”

“What’s wrong?”

“He won’t say,” she replied. “But it must be some girl. Young men pour their whole heart and soul out for just one kiss. It takes a while to get back on your feet after somethin’ like that.”

“He’s been like that a whole week?” I asked.

“Just about. He ain’t eat hardly a thing, and you know, he won’t even put on his pants.”

“He don’t even go to work?”

The woman smiled when I mentioned work. “You know he work for the church,” she said happily. “Stay home with his mother and make her proud down at Winter Baptist. He’s the youngest deacon they ever had.”

“And the church don’t mind him stayin’ home?” I asked.

“God bless Minister Winters,” she said, closing her eyes in reverence. “He sent a man down here to tell us that Cedric could take off all the time he needed to.”

“He’s a good man,” I said. “Almost a saint.”

The woman took in a deep breath and smiled as if she had just inhaled God. “He was me and Mr. Boughman’s savior when we come out here from Arkansas. Every Sunday we’d go to that little chapel and hear about how the Lord was testin’ us, makin’ us stronger and better for our kids.” The feeling in her face, the curl of her lip, was ecstatic. “There was always apple pies and pork sandwiches after the sermon so even if you hadn’t eaten all week, at least that one day your body would be satisfied along with your spirit. Mr. Boughman used to say to me, ‘Celia, the Lord put that man on earth to save the poor black man.’”

“Do you think I could see Cedric a minute, Mrs. Boughman?”

“Oh, I don’t know.”

“He might be able to help me find out what happened to my cousin,” I said. “You see, my cousin, Ray, died in a logging accident. Cedric might know somebody who talked to him before he died.”

Mrs. Boughman peered at me as if trying to puzzle out what I was saying.

“Maybe helpin’ somebody else will help Cedric throw off his blues,” I suggested.

This argument won Celia over. She pushed the door open and pointed the way. When I walked in, I caught a whiff of her perfume, simple rose water.

The house had a low ceiling that gave the feeling it was sinking into the earth. There were no windows except on the front wall, and these were covered with thick, floor-length drapes. There were pictures and plaster statues of saints and Jesus on every wall and surface. The air was stagnant as if it were the ether of an ancient tomb that had just been cracked open after six thousand years.

I went through the living room into a long hallway.

“Keep goin’,” Celia Boughman said at my back. “It’s all the way at the end.”

It was a very long hall. The house looked small from outside, especially because the yard was so deep, but that hallway was long enough to be a building of its own. When I finally came to the end, I found a half-open door. Inside, Italian opera music was playing.

“Cedric,” I called. “Cedric.”

No answer.

I pushed the door open. He was sitting on a piano stool, wearing only blue striped boxers, supporting his big head with the long fingers of his left hand.

“Cedric Boughman,” I said, trying to sound like a parent wanting their child to know it was time to pay attention.

It worked. He looked up at me. A sob came from his chest.

“What?” he said.

“My name’s Rawlins,” I said. “Easy Rawlins. I’m lookin’ for a friend’a mine—Raymond Alexander.”

“I don’t know him,” Cedric said. He let his head back down into the basket of fingers. He was thin and quite a bit darker than his mother.

“Maybe not, but I think Etheline Teaman did.”

When I mentioned her name, Cedric not only looked up, but got to his feet. It was like he was a puppet, and my words were the strings that gave him life.

“What about Etheline?”

“I think she knew Raymond up in Richmond.”

“Is that where she is? In Virginia?”

“No, man. Richmond, California. Etheline told me that she had a picture of Raymond. Did you ever see it?”

“She had lots of pictures. Lots of ’em. She took snapshots of everybody she knew with that little Brownie camera of hers.”

Cedric stumbled over to a cluttered desk and sifted around, looking for something. He found a small photograph and handed it to me. It was a picture of him and the young woman that I first saw as a corpse. They were standing side by side, but there was something wrong. I realized that it wasn’t Etheline standing there next to Cedric, but her reflection in a full-length mirror. She was taking the picture with a camera held at waist level in her left hand. They were standing next to each other, and at the same time gazing across a distance into one another’s eyes.

“That’s some picture,” I said. “She’s good.”

“She’s real smart,” Cedric agreed. “She’s going be a real magazine photographer one day. And she’s an artist too. This is only half of the picture. After we took this one, she made me take the picture of her with me in the mirror. She has that one in her photo book. I told mama that I wanted to get them both blown up and put ’em on either side of my room. Then it’d be like us lookin’ at each other and takin’ pictures of each other too.”

“You gonna do that?” I asked, to pull him further out of his shell.

“Mama didn’t like it. She said it looked wrong to her. I think she’s afraid that I’ll move out or somethin’.”

“When’s the last time you saw Etheline?” I asked.

“A week ago today,” he said, as if he were talking about the creation of the world.

“Where’d you see her?”

“At the church,” he said, the sadness back in his tone and demeanor. “At the church.”

“Winter Baptist?”

“Yes sir. She told me that we should be friends. She had spoken to Reverend Winters and decided to be by herself for a while. She said that, that…”

“You haven’t seen her since then?”

“No.”

“She ever talk to you about Raymond? A little brother with gray eyes and light skin.”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so,” he said. “Have you talked to her?”

I tried to read his eyes, to see if he was crazy or lying or being sincere. But the pain of his broken heart hid the truth from me.

“Just on the phone,” I said gently. “To ask her if she heard from my friend.”

The music had been soft during our talk. But now a powerful soprano was professing some deep emotion—love or hate, I couldn’t tell which.

CELIA BOUGHMAN was leaning over the wire chicken coop when I came out of the house. By the time I’d come up to her, she’d grabbed one of the frantic hens by the throat.

“Mrs. Boughman?”

“Yes, son?” She held the chicken up and tested it for plumpness.

“Has your son been at home all the time for the past week?”

“Yes he has. Haven’t left his room except to go to the toilet. Haven’t even bathed.”

“Have you been here all that time?”

“Except Monday. Monday’s my shoppin’ day. I have Willard, the boy down the street, drive me to the store and I buy all I need till the next week.”

“How about Sunday?” I asked. “Didn’t you go to church?”

“No. Cedric was so sad, I felt bad leavin’ him to go to the church that he loved. No. I stayed here and made him dinner.”

With that she took the chicken by its head and spun the body around like a child’s noisemaker. She grabbed the neck and twisted it until the head came off of the body, and then dropped them both on the ground. The body jumped up and started running in circles. It bumped into my leg and then headed off in the opposite direction.

“Did Cedric talk to you?” Celia asked pleasantly.

“Yes he did.”

“Oh that’s good. Maybe he’s gettin’ over his broken heart.”

The chicken ran into me again. This time she fell over and lay there on the ground, kicking in the air.

“Thank you, Mrs. Boughman,” I said. “I’m sorry to have bothered you.”

“You want to stay for dinner, Mr. Rawlins? We’re havin’ fried chicken.”

“No thanks,” I said. “I just had chicken the other night.”

I ENTERED the department store that had become a church at sunset. Two men in dark suits saw me from up near the pulpit. They headed my way.

“Hold it right there,” one of the men said. If he were standing behind me, I would have worried that there was a rifle aimed at my back.

The front of the church was half a lot away, so I waited patiently. They were deep brown men with frowns on their faces.

“Can I help you?” said one of the men. His big belly protruded so far that it created a cavern in the chest area of his suit.

“Lookin’ for the reverend,” I said.

“He ain’t here,” the other man said. He had small fleshy bumps all over his face and hands.

“That’s funny,” I said. “A man over in the office just told me that he was here, gettin’ ready for the Wednesday night meetin’.”

“Well he ain’t,” Bumpy said.

“That’s too bad—for him,” I replied.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” the fat man asked.

“It means that I got a problem in my pocket that he needs to know about. He needs it bad.”

“What you sayin’, man?”

“You just tell the minister that Easy Rawlins wants to talk to him about something of paramount concern. I’ll be sittin’ in this chair right here till you get back.”

Fatso took the message, and Bumpy waited with me. I sat there looking around Winter Baptist. It didn’t feel like a church then, but I knew when the organ started playing and the minister was in his groove that a holy light would shine in. I had friends who didn’t believe in Heaven or its Host, but still they never missed a Sunday sermon at Winter Baptist.

Birds were chirping from somewhere up around the ceiling. They had come into the church and set up their nests. I thought that the minister probably left them there to make that sacred space seem something like the Garden of Eden.

“Do I know you?” a gravelly voice asked.

He had come in from behind me, probably hoping to see if he knew me and my implied threat.

“No, sir,” I said, rising to my feet. “My name’s Easy Rawlins.”

“What do you want?” Reverend Winters looked more country than usual that evening. He wore blue jeans and a checkered red work shirt. The brown leather of his shoes was old and worn out. You could see the impression of his baby toes on the outer edges. A pair of shoes like that might have outlasted a marriage.

“Can we talk privately for a moment, Reverend Winters?”

The minister made a gesture with his head, and Bumpy started patting me down. I didn’t like it, but I didn’t lay him out either. Bumpy grunted and Winters motioned toward the other side of the room.

We walked together, under the scrutiny of his private guards.

“Well?” he asked me. “Let’s get this over with. I got a sermon to deliver in just an hour and a half.”

Winters wasn’t tall or striking, neither was he delicate or particularly strong. His chin was subpar, and the top of his head was almost large enough to indicate a whole new species of man. His skin had the color and luster of dark honey standing on the windowsill. But it was his voice that set him apart from mortal men. As I said, it was raspy, but it was also rich and commanding. His voice alone made you want to go along with whatever words he was making. It was very disconcerting, but other things bothered me more.

“Cedric Boughman and Etheline Teaman,” I said.

That brought the minister up short. He seemed to be studying his own reflection in my eyes.

“This some kinda blackmail or somethin’?” he whispered.

“Never did like that word,” I said. “And you don’t have nuthin’ I want, except maybe the truth.”

“Fuck you.” The words shocked me. For some reason I never expected a man of God to be coarse in that way. But the shock went deeper than that. It was like a slap in my face, making me aware of my situation.

“Somebody stole somethin’ from Etheline,” I said. “An album of photographs.”

“How the hell would you know that?”

“I got my ways, Brother Winters. Believe me. Someone stole her photograph album.”

“So what?”

“Do you know where it is?”

“Why would I?”

“Etheline was a prostitute not a month ago,” I said. “She had a regular, a man in your employ name of Cedric Boughman. She also attended your church. She got special instructions from you—in person. Now Cedric is cryin’ in his bedroom and you sendin’ him his salary until he’s fit to come back to work.”

“This is a Christian institution, Mr. Rawlins. We don’t turn away lost sheep. We don’t persecute a man when he loses someone he cares for.”

“That sounds good, but it’s a lie. Cedric is either crazy or he don’t even know that Etheline is dead.”

“What does that have to do with me?”

“I don’t know what’s goin’ on,” I said. “I don’t know who killed Etheline or why. All I know is that there’s a picture I need to see lost somewhere, and I intend to find it. I will keep on asking questions until I do find it.”

“Easy,” the minister said. “That’s your Christian name?”

“Ezekiel.”

“Good name. Where you from, Ezekiel?”

“Texas mostly. I was born in Louisiana.”

“New Orleans?”

“New Iberia.”

“Country, huh? Like me.”

Just that quickly, Winters had gotten the upper hand. If we were boxing, I would have been the tomato can from Podunk, and he would have been Archie Moore.

“You know country is plain and simple,” the minister said. “A country man does what he does, day in and day out. If the year is good then his wife got a few extra pounds on her. If it’s bad he works a little harder. That’s all.”

I would have bet that those words were destined for that evening’s sermon.

“Brother Boughman is in charge of school administration. He’s a good boy, but young. He gave in to temptation. He had congress with the devil, but what he found in that devil’s pit was a lost angel. He talked her into coming to church. Then he talked her into leaving that house of sin. And when she did that, he sent her here to me.”

“Then you told her to leave him and come to you,” I said. “Then somebody stabbed her in the heart.”

The minister winced. “I been workin’ hard for more’n eighteen years, Brother Rawlins. Eighteen years on the front lines against Satan and his crew. I work every day, all day. I’ve pulled men out of the bottle and the needle out of young women’s arms. I teach black chirren to love themselves and I give old women a place to feel like they make a difference. I work hard and I get tired sometimes.”

“Was Etheline a rest stop?” I asked.

“I loved her.” His voice lost its power. I almost believed him. “She was like a gift from God. At first it was just a physical thing. She had learned how to make men melt and holler. Some days she would come up into my rooms and I’d tell her to leave. But she would push my protests aside and grab hold of my spirit. She would stay with me deep into the night, listenin’ to all the weak things that I could never say to anyone in the congregation. I had to be strong for them, but with her I could let down. I could be that country boy.”

“Are you married, Reverend Winters?”

“Yes, son. Yes I am.”

“So all that love was secret and stolen,” I said. “Dangerous for a man in your position.”

“What you gettin’ at?”

“Did she take a snapshot of you, Reverend? Did she have a picture of the two’a you together?”

“What if she did?”

“Well,” I said. “Some might say that a picture like that would be like Joshua at Jericho: It could bring down these walls.”

“And you think I would hurt that girl from fear of somebody findin’ out about us?”

“It wouldn’t be the first time somethin’ like that happened. Did you write to her?”

He didn’t answer the question, but his face admitted the indiscretion.

“It’s like I said in the beginning, Reverend Winters. I didn’t know the girl. She’s not my concern. But I need to see that photograph. And I will have it. So if you know where I should look, it might be very helpful to your cause.”

The minister took a seat then. He looked down at his old comfortable shoes for succor, but even they couldn’t help him.

“You’re wrong in this, Mr. Rawlins. I had nothing to do with that girl’s death. I loved her. And even though she broke it off with me, I would have never hurt her. Never.”

“She broke up with you too?”

He nodded and held his head the same way Cedric had done.

“When?” I asked.

“On Sunday, right after service. She left me a note, said that she would only bring me grief, that she had to make a new life where no one knew her and no one could hurt the ones she loved.”

The minister lowered his head and grieved. I stayed quiet for a minute or two.

“Did she have any friends other than Cedric?” I asked.

“My secretary,” Winters whispered. “Lena McCoy. Lena helped Etheline to get on her feet when she came to us. She got her a job at Douglas where her husband works.”

“If you tell me how to get in touch with her, maybe I can figure this stuff out without causing you grief.”

“You okay, Reverend Winters?” Bumpy asked. He and the fat man had come to investigate their pastor’s obvious dismay.

“Okay, Reggie,” Winters said. He stood up to meet his followers. “Mr. Rawlins is gonna need Lena’s phone number. Call her up and tell her to help him all she can.”

Bumpy didn’t like it, but he was a soldier in the army of the Lord. The commander and chief had spoken, so all he could do was heed and obey.

ON MY DRIVE HOME I wondered at the sequence of recent events. Etheline broke up with Reverend Winters the same Sunday that she heard from me. If she had read my note first, then it could have been the reason she was getting ready to leave. She wrote to Winters, she called me—maybe she got in touch with somebody else. And if my note was the reason she was burning her bridges, then it could have also been the cause of her death.

That is, if the minister was telling the truth. There was no way for me to know what Medgar Winters really felt or knew. The only thing that I was sure of was that if I had caused that girl’s death, I would make sure that the killer didn’t have a happy ending either.

JESUS HAD MADE DINNER and eaten with Feather by the time I’d gotten home. He made hamburger patties with tomato soup and baked potatoes. She was asleep and he was in the backyard, under electric light, working on his small boat.

Moths of all shapes and sizes flitted around in the halo of light. Jesus was working a plane across a plank of wood that he intended for one of the benches of his boat. I came up to him, took the other plank, and began work on it. After forty-five minutes we’d finished leveling the seats. Then we stained and sealed them. No more than a dozen words passed between us in two and a half hours. We had the kind of kinship that didn’t need many words.

THE NEXT MORNING I made Feather’s lunchbox and drove her to school. She was happy to spend the time with me, and it was joy in my heart to talk to her. She was missing Bonnie, and so was I.

“How come you miss Bonnie, Daddy?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Lots of reasons, I guess. Mostly I just like seeing her in the morning. Why do you miss her?”

“Because,” she said, “because when Bonnie’s home it’s two boys and two girls.”

* * *

I CALLED LENA MCCOY from the custodians’ bungalow on the lower campus of Sojourner Truth junior high.

“Hello,” a man’s voice answered.

“Lena McCoy, please,” I said.

“Who is this?”

“Mr. Rawlins.”

“What do you want with my wife, Mr. Rawlins?”

“I had a meeting with Reverend Winters yesterday. I asked him some questions that he couldn’t answer, and he suggested I ask Lena.”

“Do you know what time it is?” Mr. McCoy asked.

“Yes sir, I do,” I said. “Eight o’clock in the morning, workin’ man’s time. Time to get up and out of the bed. Time to go out and earn that daily bread.”

“What questions do you have for my wife?”

“It has to do with church activities, Mr. McCoy. This isn’t any scam. I’m not tryin’ to put somethin’ over on you. I don’t want any money or anything. Just a little information about the church.”

“Why can’t you—”

Mr. McCoy cut off what he was saying and mumbled something to someone in the room with him. At one point he raised his voice, but I couldn’t make out the words. I could hear the phone jostling around, and then a woman came on the line.

“Yes? Who is this?” the woman asked.

“Lena McCoy?”

“Yes?”

“My name is Easy Rawlins. Reverend Winters—”

“Oh, oh yes, Mr. Rawlins. Deacon Latrell told me about you. I’d be happy to talk to you, but I’m late for work as it is. Could you meet me at the church later today?”

“Sure. What time?”

“How about four? That would be good for me. I have to go with the minister to an interfaith dinner at six.”

“Four’ll be fine.”

WHEN I ENTERED the church that afternoon, I ran into a small, elderly man wearing overalls and pushing a broom.

“Afternoon, brother,” the older custodian hailed.

“Afternoon,” I replied. “I’m supposed to be meetin’ a Lena McCoy.”

“You wanna go all the way to the pulpit and turn right. You’ll see a green door, it opens onto a stairwell. Take the stairs two flights up. Go in that do’ and you’ll see a woman.”

“Mrs. McCoy?”

“Naw. That’s Mrs. Daniels. She’ll show you to Lena.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“Nuthin’ to it.”

As I walked toward the pulpit, I could hear the swish of the janitor’s broom on the concrete floor. It was a comforting sound, reminding me of my job at Truth. It felt like a long-ago fond memory, even though I had just come from work.

I needed Bonnie even more than I let on.

“MR. RAWLINS?” Mrs. Daniels said, repeating my name. “I don’t have no Rawlins on the minister’s schedule today.”

“I’m here to speak to Mrs. McCoy,” I said.

The church receptionist was round and pleasant-looking, but she didn’t like me much. “Is this church business?” she asked.

“Yes, ma’am,” I said.

She stared at me a moment too long.

“Listen, lady. I have important business with your minister’s assistant. If I walk outta here, it will be you who has to answer for it.”

I’d lost another opportunity at making a friend. The receptionist waved her hand toward a door behind her.

I knocked, and woman’s voice said, “Come in.”

I entered, coming upon a medium-sized black woman who was sitting behind an oak desk in the middle of a large, sunny room.

“Mr. Rawlins?”

The room had a plain pine floor with bookcases against the wall behind the desk. There was a baby avocado tree in a terra cotta pot next to one window.

“Mrs. McCoy?”

The woman got from behind the desk and went to a door between the bookcases. She opened this door and turned back to me.

“Come with me, please,” she said.

That half-turn told me a lot about Mrs. McCoy—the woman. She was around thirty-five, but still had the bloom of youth to her face and figure. It was a nice figure, but her deep green dress played it down. The color of the dress also blunted the richness of her dark skin. She wore makeup like an older woman might have, with little color or accentuation. But the sinuous motion of her turn revealed the sensual woman that lived underneath her clamped-down style. She was at home in her body, dancing with just that little turn.

We came into a room that was even simpler than the assistant’s office. The minister’s office had a plain floor with no bookcases at all. There was a podium holding a large Bible next to the window, and a simple painting of the face of a white Christ hung on the far wall. He didn’t even have a desk, just a table with two chairs pulled up to it. The only means of comfort in the room was a wide-bed couch pressed into the corner.

“This is Reverend Winters’s office,” she said. “No one will bother us in here.”

She took one of the chairs at the table, and I sat in the other.

“What can I do to help you, Mr. Rawlins?”

“Your husband was unhappy to hear me on the phone this morning,” I said. I decided to find out a little bit more about the woman before hearing what she had to say about Etheline.

Lena looked down and then back again. “Foster is old-fashioned,” she said. “He doesn’t like gentlemen unknown to him calling me on the telephone.”

“You’d think Reverend Winters would have known that and had me call you at the office.”

“He has so much on his mind,” Lena said. Her face took on a soft glow when talking about her boss. Even the severe makeup couldn’t hide the feeling she had for him.

“Did he tell you why I was here?”

“Yes. It’s about that poor young girl.”

“Dead girl,” I said.

Tears appeared in the luscious woman’s eyes. She nodded and looked down again. Lena McCoy was so full of love and compassion that any man would be drawn to her. It’s not that she was beautiful, not even pretty, really. But there was something physical there, and caring. If there was music in a room and I saw Lena McCoy, I would have asked her to dance, even though I didn’t like dancing.

“I have some hard questions to ask you about Etheline, Lena. And I want you to answer them.”

She nodded again.

“She was having an affair with your boss, right?”

“Yes.”

“Right here in this room.”

Her assent was a simple movement of her head, like a bird makes when warbling softly.

“What did you think about that?”

“I was happy for him.”

“Happy?”

“Yes. Medgar gives of himself like some kind of saint. He meets fifty people in this room every day. And they’re all askin’ for somethin’. They want money or a soapbox or for him to travel fifty miles to talk to a roomful’a people who don’t even care. They cry on his shoulder. They confess their sins. And he takes it all in, Mr. Rawlins. Twelve hours every day, seven days a week.”

“And Etheline was different?”

“The first day she came here, she brought homemade brownies and a bunch of little white flowers. Medgar had those daisies in a glass of water for two weeks. I finally had to throw them out.”

“Why did she meet the minister?” I asked.

“To apologize. To apologize for her sins. To ask him if she was worthy to be in his congregation.”

“You heard this?”

“Medgar tells me everything.” It was the first hint of pride in Lena’s tone.

“Everything?”

“Yes.”

“He tell you when they became lovers?”

“He didn’t need to, but he did. After the first time I would sneak her in through the side door so that no one else would know.”

“You helped him cheat on his wife?”

“His wife helps herself to everything he has. They been married since before he came to Los Angeles. You know he seems the same, but inside he’s changed. He’s gotten bigger. Mrs. Winters changed on the outside. She wears nice clothes and drives a big car. But on the inside she’s hungry and jealous. She ain’t never so much as brought him a cupcake on his birthday.”

“What happened when Lena broke it off with the reverend?”

“He cried,” she said. “He put his head on my shoulder and cried like a child.”

“Was he angry?”

“He knew that they’d have to stop one day. He knew it was wrong what he did. But you know sometimes a man is weak.”

“Do you know Cedric Boughman?”

“Sure I do. He brought Etheline to Medgar’s attention.”

“Do you think that Cedric might have harmed Etheline?”

“Why would he?”

“Because she left him for your boss.”

“But she left Medgar to go back with Cedric.”

“What?”

“Didn’t the minister tell you?” She was really surprised. “Etheline left him a note Sunday after services. She said that she was going away with Cedric, back up to the Bay Area where she was from.”

“Then why did Winters keep paying Cedric?”

“He did that before Etheline left him, and he would have done it for any of his inner circle. He’s a good man.”

“Are you in love with Reverend Winters?” I asked.

She could have been a wild night creature frozen in my headlights.

“Are you?” I insisted.

“What does a question like that have to do with anything?”

“I don’t know. If you were in love with him, you might wanna protect him, you might be mad that he was with another woman. I mean if he needed love, why not come to you?”

“I’m a married woman, Mr. Rawlins.”

“He’s a married man. Maybe that’s why your husband gets so mad when a man calls you. Mad ’cause he feel another man nearby.”

“I would never cheat on my husband,” Lena said. “The minister is the whole world to me, but I’d never cross that line.”

“And what about him? How did you feel about him crossin’ over into sin?”

“Men are weak, Mr. Rawlins. They’re strong of arm but frail in their hearts. They need forgiveness more than women do.”

“How about Etheline?” I asked. “She’s a woman. Did you forgive her?”

“Etheline was just a child. People had been usin’ her all her life. She didn’t know any better. Is there anything else?”

I shook my head.

Lena got up from her chair gracefully but she stumbled at the door.

WHEN I WAS HALFWAY through the pews, Bumpy and Fatso picked up my trail. They followed me across the wide church and into the side parking lot. The lot was full when I got there, so my car was parked in the alley.

They followed me back there.

I wasn’t worried. When I got to my car, I bent down to tie my shoe. I also got the .25-caliber pistol out of the elastic band of my sock. The deacons were twenty feet away from me. I could see that the hollow-chested one had found himself a lead pipe.

I palmed the pistol, stood up, and smiled. That smirk stopped them dead in their tracks. If they had been hyenas or wild dogs, they would have had their noses in the air, sniffing for danger. Something was different. The prey had gained confidence. The rules of the game had suddenly changed.

I unlocked my car door and opened it, but I didn’t climb in. I just stood there, daring the deacons to approach. They watched me, waiting for a sign. When I finally got in, Bumpy took a tentative step forward. I pointed my pistol at him, and he took two steps and one skip back.

After that they let me drive off unmolested.

IT WAS ABOUT FIVE when I got back home. The phone was ringing when I got to the front door, but whoever it was, they’d hung up before I got to the receiver. Feather and Jesus were in the backyard. I sat in my reading chair thinking about the last week.

Whorehouses and sinful ministers were nothing new to me. Even murder was an old friend, like Mouse. But for years I had been getting up and going to work, putting my paycheck into the bank. Paying my bills by check instead of cash. I was a member of the PTA. I had slept in my own bed every single night from Christmas to Christmas.

I followed the same routes every day, but all of a sudden I seemed to be lost. It was like I was a young man again, every morning leading me to someplace I never would have suspected. I wasn’t enjoying myself, though. I didn’t want to lose my way. But I had to find out about Mouse. I had to be sure whether he was dead or alive.

* * *

FEATHER AND JESUS came inside around six.

“Mail, Daddy,” Feather said when she saw me.

Jesus went to the console TV and grabbed a brown envelope that I’d failed to notice.

“What’s that?” I asked my son.

He shrugged his shoulders and said, “It was on the front step when we got home.”

He dumped the paper envelope on my lap and then went into the kitchen to make ready for dinner.

When I ripped the seam open, a sweet scent escaped. It was a black photo album. The cover was worn and stained, but the pages were all intact. I turned the pages, looking at all the Kodak snapshots neatly held by little paper divots built into the black leaves. Six pictures on each side of each page. Pictures of men, some of women. One woman appeared again and again. Etheline had been beautiful when she was alive.

“Who’s that, Daddy?” Feather leaned against my forearm and pointed, pressing her finger against Etheline’s dress.

“A pretty lady.”

“Uh-huh. She a friend’a yours?”

“L’il bit.”

“Is she gonna go to Knott’s Berry Farm with us?”

“No. She wanted me to look at this picture book and see if there was a picture of Uncle Raymond in it. You remember what Uncle Raymond looked like?”

“He looked funny,” she said, snickering.

She climbed onto my lap and the little yellow dog growled, peeking out from behind the drapes. There were over fifty pages of photographs in the bulging album. Feather made up stories about who the men were and what their relationship was to Etheline.

There were two pictures of Inez with men. She was lovely in those pictures. The thought crossed my mind that I could be with her for just thirty dollars.

“That one look like Uncle Raymond,” Feather said.

It did. A smallish man, not much taller than Etheline, with light eyes and good hair. If you had described Mouse to a police sketch artist, he might have drawn this man’s picture—but it wasn’t Raymond. His face was too round, his jaw too sharp. He was smiling, but it wasn’t the contagious kind of smile that Mouse had. It was just some mortal man, not the angel of death, my best friend, Raymond Alexander.

I studied the album for hours after Feather and Jesus went to bed, until I was pretty sure I knew who the murderer was.

I ENTERED THE DEEP LOT on 101st Street at nine-fifteen the next morning. Mrs. Boughman was sweeping the ground with a straw broom. I hadn’t seen anyone sweep bare earth since I’d left the South. It wasn’t a pleasant memory.

“Good morning, Mr. Rawlins. Cedric went to work this morning,” she said proudly.

“He did? That’s great. He must be feeling better.”

“I’ll tell him that you dropped by when he gets home,” she said. “You know, it’s funny. When you left the other day, he asked me who you were.”

“Yeah. I know. How are you, Mrs. Boughman?” I asked in a tone that was less than concerned.

“Fine.”

“You know I got a gift and a warning yesterday afternoon.”

“I don’t know what you mean, Mr. Rawlins.”

“One of the deacons from that department store you call a church dropped off an envelope at my doorstep. He left it because I asked for it. But the fact that he left it at my door meant that he knew where I lived; that was the threat.”

The elder Boughman shook her head as if nothing I said made sense.

“It was a photograph album,” I continued. “A woman named Etheline Teaman had put it together. It was full of snapshots of her and her friends. All the men she ever knew. All of ’em except for two.”

If Celia Boughman were thirty feet tall, she would have spun my head like a noisemaker and left my decapitated body to run around that yard bumping up against her leg.

“Missin’ is Medgar Winters and Cedric Boughman.”

“Cedric,” she said, with odd emphasis.

“She called you, didn’t she?”

“Who?”

“Etheline. She called you and left a message for Cedric. Or maybe she saw you at church Sunday last, and said something, a little too much. Maybe about wanting to see Cedric. Maybe about taking him on a vacation to Richmond. Whatever it was, you weren’t gonna lose your deacon son and he wasn’t gonna lose his soul to a whore.”

It was when Celia Boughman’s mouth fell open that I was sure of my logic.

“You stabbed her through the heart and took the evidence that your son had been so close to her,” I said. “And then when you couldn’t take it anymore, you brought the picture album and probably a stack of letters to Reverend Winters. You confessed your sins and left him with the evidence. That’s how I see it. I saw manila envelopes like the one the book was in at the church, and I could smell the slightest hint of cheap rose water on the pages of that book.”

“Don’t tell Cedric,” she said. “Don’t tell him. He wouldn’t understand. He didn’t know what a woman like that would do to his life.”

She leaned against her broom to keep from falling.

I shook my head and walked away.

“YOU SAY THAT you suspect the woman?” Detective Andre Brown asked me. We were sitting in his office at the 77th Precinct.

I had given him the photo album and told him of my adventures between the whorehouse and church, leaving out my discovery of the murdered girl.

“Yes sir, Detective Brown.”

“Because this book was in a manila envelope and you smelled perfume when you first opened it?”

“That’s about it.”

“That’s pretty slim evidence.”

“I know.”

“So what do you want me to do?” the tall and slender Negro policeman asked. “There weren’t any fingerprints on the knife.”

“I hope that you can’t do anything. There’s no court that could judge this crime.”

“Then why are you here?”

“Because an innocent young woman was murdered, officer. I owe it to her memory to tell somebody the truth.”