A Red Death

10

The next morning I called Etta to tell her about my talk with Mouse. She snorted once and had nothing else to say. I offered to escort her to church on Sunday. She accepted and excused herself, polite and cold.

As a kind of treat for my new freedom from the IRS and Raymond Alexander, I decided to let myself loll in the sunny halls of the Magnolia Street apartments.

Mrs. Trajillo was at her window rolling out corn tortillas on a breadboard balanced on the windowsill. Her skin was a deep olive color dappled with various-size freckles and one large mole at the center of her chin. Her long hair was salt and pepper and hung in one thick braid down to about the middle of her thigh. She was short but sturdily built, and though she had never had a job, her hands were strong from years of doing housework, raising children, and making food from scratch.

“Good morning, Mr. Rawlins,” she greeted me.

“Hello, ma’am. How’re you today?”

“Oh, pretty good I guess. My granddaughter had her confirmation last Sunday.”

“That a fact?”

“You look good,” she said. “I was worried about you and poor Mr. Mofass the other day. You weren’t smiling at all, and that terrible girl…” She brought her fingers to her chest and made an O-shape with her lips. “The things she yelled at him. You know I was glad the children were still in school.”

“I guess Poinsettia was upset. You know how she’s sick and all.”

“God gives you what you earn, Mr. Rawlins.”

That seemed like a terrible curse coming from such a kind woman.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“The way she was with men before. No girl of mine would be like that. I’m not telling you anything, Mr. Rawlins, but God knows.”

It didn’t bother me much. I know that older women often forget how it is to be loved by young men. Or maybe they do remember and hate it all the more.

I went upstairs and stood on the second floor for an hour or more just feeling the sun and looking at nothing. But after a while I picked up the trace of a foul scent.

The sun was shining in on the third floor too. It was beautiful but the smell was bad. The door to Apartment J was ajar; that’s where the smell came from.

Really what I should call it is smells. There was the sweet smell of three or four kinds of incense that she used in her prayer altar and the odor of sickness that had been bottled up in her small rooms for the most part of six months. There were all kinds of rotting odors beyond that smell.

But now, I figured, she was gone, moved out after Mofass had threatened her with eviction. The door was open and I knew she had probably left me a major cleaning job.

Poinsettia had gone off for a vacation weekend six months before and come back two weeks later in a private ambulance. The attendants had told Mrs. Trajillo that Poinsettia had been in a bad car accident and that her boyfriend had paid to have her moved from the hospital back home. Her bones and bruises healed, but something happened to her nerves. She couldn’t work anymore or even walk right. Somewhere in her late twenties, she had been a beautiful woman until that accident. It was a shame to see her come down so far. But what could I do about it? Mofass was hard but he was right when he said that I couldn’t pay her rent.

The living room was a mess. The shades were drawn and the curtains pulled, so it was twilight in the musty rooms. Ghostly white cartons of Chinese food were open and moldering on the table, trash everywhere. I flicked the light switch, but the bulb had burned out. Against a far wall there sat an altar she had made from a small alcove. Inside she had glued a picture of Jesus. It was painted like a mosaic. He had a halo and held two fingers and a thumb above three saints who were bowing to receive his blessing. All around the painting there were old flowers wired to the walls. They were unidentifiable brown things that she’d probably brought home from mass or after a funeral.

At the foot of the painting was the bronze dish that she also used to burn the incense. The sweet smell was much stronger there. Little ashes, like white maggots, were littered around the brimming dish. And there was a black, gummy substance on the ledge and down the wall to the floor.

The bathroom was disgusting. All kinds of cosmetic bottles open and dried until the liquids had caked and cracked. Mildewed towels on the floor. A spider spun its web over the bathtub faucet.

The worst smells came from the bedroom, and I hesitated to go in there. It’s a funny thing how smell is such an animal instinct. The first thing a dog will do is sniff. And if it doesn’t smell right there’s a natural reluctance to get any closer.

Maybe I should have been a dog.

Poinsettia was hanging from the light fixture in the middle of the ceiling. She was naked and her skin sagged so that it seemed as if it would come right off the bone any second. Directly under her was the cause of the worst smells. Even as I watched a thick drop of blood and excrement fell from her toe.

I don’t remember going down to Mrs. Trajillo’s apartment. I have a feeling that I tried to use Poinsettia’s phone, but it had been disconnected.

“Sure,” said officer Andrew Reedy, a rangy and towheaded policeman. “She kicks over the chair after tying the knot.” He was looking at the overturned chair that lay halfway across the room, then continued, “And bingo! She’s hung. You said she was despondent, right, Mr. Rawlins?”

“Yeah,” I answered him. “She was being evicted by Mofass.”

“Who’s that?” asked Quinten Naylor. He was Reedy’s partner and the only Negro policeman I’d ever seen, up to that time, in plainclothes. He was also looking at that chair.

“He manages the place, collects the rent and the like.”

“Who does he manage for?” Naylor asked me.

While I was considering how to answer, Reedy said, “Who cares? This is a suicide. We just tell ’em that she killed herself and that’s that.”

Naylor was of medium height but he was wide and so gave the feeling of largeness and strength. He was the opposite of his partner in every way, but they seemed to have a kind of rapport.

Naylor walked up to, almost under, the hanging corpse. It seemed as if he were sniffing for something wrong.

“Aw, com’on, Quint,” Reedy whined. “Who wants to murder this girl? I mean all sneaky-like, pretending she killed herself? Did she have any enemies, Mr. Rawlins?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Look at her face, though, Andy. Those could be fresh bruises,” Naylor said.

“Sometimes strangulation from hanging does that, Quint,” Reedy pleaded.

“Hey listen,” the fat ambulance attendant shouted from the hall. I’d called the hospital too, even though I knew she was dead. “When can we cut ’er down an’ get outta here?”

He was not my favorite kind of white man.

“Hold up on that,” Naylor said. “We got an investigation going here and we can’t have the evidence disturbed. I want someone to photograph the room first.”

“Aw, geez,” Reedy sighed.

“Shit,” the fat man said. Then, “Okay, we go, but who signs for the call?”

“We didn’t call so you can’t charge us,” Naylor said.

“What about you, son?” the ambulance attendant asked me. He looked to be in his mid-twenties, almost ten years younger than I.

“Can’t say that I know. I just called the police.” I lied. It was a kind of warm-up lie. I was getting ready for the real lies I’d have to tell later.

The fat man glared at me but that’s all he could do.

When the ambulance men left I turned away and saw Poinsettia hanging there. She seemed to be swaying slightly and my stomach started to move with her, so I turned to leave.

Naylor touched my arm and asked, “Who did you say that Mr. Mofass represented?”

“It’s just Mofass. He don’t go by no other name.”

“Who does he represent?” Naylor insisted.

“Can’t say I know. I just clean fo’ him.”

“Geez, Quint,” Reedy said. He’d taken out a handkerchief and covered his mouth and nose. That seemed like a good idea, so I pulled out my own rag.

Reedy was an older man, past fifty. Naylor was young, the ambulance attendant’s age. He had probably been a noncommissioned officer in Korea. We got all kinds of things out of that war. Integration, advancement of some colored soldiers, and lots of dead boys.

“Don’t look right, Andy,” Naylor said. “Let’s give it a little bit more.”

“Who’s gonna care about this one girl, Quint?”

“I care,” was all the young policeman answered. And it made me proud. It was the first time I had ever seen civilian blacks and whites dealing with each other in an official capacity. I mean, the first time I’d seen them acting as equals. They were really working together.

“You need me for that?” I asked.

“No, Mr. Rawlins,” Reedy sighed. “Just give me your address and phone number and we’ll call you for a statement if we need to.”

I gave him my address and phone. He wrote them down in a leather-bound notepad that he took from his pocket.

Downstairs, I told Mrs. Trajillo what was happening with the police. She was not only the burglar alarm but she was also a kind of newsletter for the neighborhood.