A Red Death

27

From Ettamae’s I went over to Mercedes Bark’s house on Bell Street. Bell was a short block of large houses with brick fences and elaborate flower gardens. During Christmas everyone on Bell put out thousands of colored lights around their trees and bushes and along the frames of their houses. People lined up in their cars to see that street for three weeks either side of Christmas Day. It was just that kind of a neighborhood. Everybody worked together to make it nice.

It was all good and well but there was a down side to the Bell Street crowd; they were snobs. They thought that their people and their block were too good for most of the rest of the Watts community. They frowned on a certain class of people buying houses on their street and they had a tendency to exclude other people from their barbecues and whatnot. They even encouraged their children to shun other kids they might have met at school or at the playground, because it was the Bell Street opinion that most of the black kids around there were too coarse and unsophisticated.

Mercedes had a three-story house in the middle of the block. The walls were painted white and the trim was a deep forest green. There were chairs and sofas set out along the porch and a bright green lawn surrounded by white and purple dahlias, white sweetheart roses, and dwarf lemon trees.

Mercedes’s husband, Chapman, had been a dentist and could afford the upkeep on so large a domicile. But when he died the widow was quick to realize that his life insurance wasn’t enough to maintain the family in the way they had lived before. So she took the money and turned the upper floors into a boardinghouse. She could accommodate as many as twelve tenants at one time.

The neighborhood association took Mercedes to court. They complained that their beautiful street would be ruined by the kind of riffraff that had to live in a single room for weekly rent. But the county court didn’t agree and Mrs. Bark started her rooming house.

Mofass was her first and most long-lasting tenant. He didn’t need a kitchen because he took his meals at the Fetters Real Estate Office. And he certainly didn’t want to be bothered with leaky roofs and shaggy lawns after doing that kind of work all day.

I got to the Bell Street Boardinghouse at about nine-thirty that morning. I knew that Mrs. Bark was sitting in a stuffed chair just inside the front door but I couldn’t see her. She was hidden in the shadow of a stairwell and by the screen door, but she still had a good view of whoever came to visit.

I waited patiently, ringing the bell even though I knew damn well that she could see me. I carried a tan rucksack in which I had two quart bottles of Rainier Ale.

“Who is that?” Mrs. Bark asked after the fourth ring.

“Easy Rawlins, ma’am. On some business for Mofass.”

“You too late, Easy Rawlins. Mofass done moved out already.”

“I know that, ma’am, that’s why I’m here. Mofass called me from down south and said that I should get some papers that he left in his room by mistake.”

I wasn’t taking much of a chance. If Mofass had moved out all of a sudden he might have left something that would give me an idea about his relationship with Poinsettia. If he’d moved out clean I would have just been caught in a white lie by one of the snobs of Bell Street.

“What?” she cried. The audacity of Mofass forced Mercedes Bark to her feet, which was no easy task. She waddled her great body to the door and then rested by leaning her upper arm against the jamb. Mercedes wasn’t tall, and if you only looked at her bespectacled face you would never have guessed how large she was. Even her shoulders were small, you might have called them slender. But from there on down Mercedes Bark was a titan. Her breasts and buttocks were tremendous. She took up the entire lower half of the doorway.

“He got some nerve,” she said. “Sendin’ you here when he left me a room fulla mess and now I cain’t even rent the place until I hire somebody to clean it out.”

“But that’s just it, ma’am. Mofass told me that he was sorry but that his mother got sick so fast that he didn’t have time to think things out. He don’t wanna move outta this place. He told me to pay you the sixty dollars for his next month’s rent.”

I had the money in my hand. Mrs. Bark turned from a snapping wolf to a loon, crooning her sorrows for Mofass’s poor mother and complimenting a son’s deep love.

She got the key, after taking my money, and even came out of her apartment to point me on the way. Mofass’s room was far from being a mess. It was neat as a pin and as orderly as a pharaoh’s tomb. In the center drawer of his desk were his pencils, pens, pads of paper, and ink pads. In the right-hand drawers were all of the receipts of his bills for his entire life. He still kept ticket stubs for movies he’d seen in New Orleans twenty years before. In the lower left drawer he kept folders detailing his daily business. One folder was for expenses, another for expenditures, and like that.

He also had a drawer full of cigars. I knew something was wrong when I saw them. For Mofass to leave fifty good cigars he must have been really shaken.

I searched the rest of the place without finding very much. Nothing under the bed or between the mattresses or even in his clothes. No loose boards or envelopes taped under the drawers.

Finally I sat down at his desk again and put my hand flat on top of it. Really it wasn’t flat because there was a blotter there. I lifted it but there was nothing underneath so I let it fall back. And it made a little sound: flap flap. Not a single flap but two, as if there were two blotter sheets.

Mofass had slit his blotter in two and then taped it back together so he could keep things in there secret without calling any attention to them. But the tape had worn thin and the pages had separated.

I found a few items of interest there. First there was a receipt signed by William Wharton (Mofass’s real name) from the Chandler Ambulance Service of Southern California. The bill was $83.30, issued for the transmission of a patient from Temple Hospital to 487 Magnolia Street on January 18, 1952. There was another hospital bill for $1,487.26 for two weeks of hospitalization of a P. Jackson. I couldn’t imagine Mofass spending twenty dollars on a date and here he was spending six months’ salary for a girl he urged me to evict.

The last two items were both envelopes. One had a hundred dollars in twenty-dollar bills and the other had a list of eight names, addresses, and phone numbers. The addresses were widely spread around the city.

While I was trying to make sense of what I’d found I sensed someone, or maybe I heard him there behind me.

Chester Fisk was standing in the doorway. A tall and slender elderly gentleman, Mr. Fisk was Mercedes’s father and a permanent resident of the Bell Street Boardinghouse. His skin color was somewhere between light brown and light gray highlighted in certain places, like his lips, with a brownish yellow.

“Mr. Rawlins.”

“Hey, Chester. How’s it goin’?”

“Oh.” He contemplated for a few seconds. “All right. Sun’s a li’l too strong and the night’s a li’l too long. But it beats the hell outta bein’ dead.”

“Maybe I could take a little of that heat off,” I said. Then I pulled out the two bottles of ale.

For a moment I thought Chester might cry. His eyes filled with gratitude so docile that it was almost bovine.

“Well, well, well,” he said. He rested his hand around the neck of the closest bottle.

“You seen Mofass just before he moved out, Chester?”

“Sure did. Everybody else was asleep but old men hardly need t’sleep no more.”

“Was he upset?”

“Powerful.” Chester accented his answer with a nod.

“Did you talk with him?”

“Not too much I didn’t. He just had this one li’l bag packed. Prob’ly just had a toothbrush and a second pair a drawers in it. I ast’im was somethin’ wrong an’ he said that things were bad. Then he said that they was real bad.”

“That’s it? Did he say anything about his mother?”

“Nope. Didn’t say nuthin’ else ’bout nuthin’. Just rush in in a hurry an’ run out the same way.”

On the drive back to my house I tried to figure what it all meant. I knew that Mofass had paid for Poinsettia’s hospital bill and probably for her rent, maybe for a year or more. I also had some names that I didn’t know all around L.A.

Maybe his mother was sick.

Maybe he killed Poinsettia. Maybe Willie did. Everything was just cockeyed.