Little Scarlet

24

On the sidewalk and two houses down Harley Piedmont stopped walking and confronted me.

“What the fuck you want, niggah?”

I remembered that the googly-eyed Piedmont had been a boxer. Boxers as a rule are peaceful men outside the ring but when they feel cornered they can be very dangerous.

“No problem, Brother Piedmont,” I said mildly, keeping my hands at my sides. “I just been hired by a woman named Geneva Landry to find out what happened to her niece—Nola.”

Piedmont’s eyes grew even larger and a bead of sweat ran a jagged line from his forehead down between his eyes, forming into a large drop at the tip of his nose. The droplet hung there precariously like a long ash at the end of a burning cigarette.

Watching him sweat reminded me that it was a hot day. Maybe he was simply overheated. Or maybe he’d come back to Nola’s place and raped and murdered her.

“What happened to Nola?” he asked.

“That’s what I asked Mr. Rhone,” I said. “He told me that she called you to take him home over in Palms. So I wondered if you had talked to the young lady again after letting him off.”

“Why would I do that?”

“Maybe to tell her that he got home all right,” I suggested. “Maybe because you all are friends. All I know is that Geneva is beside herself and the police don’t wanna hear from her.”

“Police? What do the god-danged police got to do with this?”

“Are you listenin’?” I asked. “Nola’s missin’. That’s a police matter.”

“Man, who knows where she’s gone or why? Maybe she’s with her boyfriend. Maybe, maybe . . .” But there were no other explanations he could imagine.

“Yeah,” I said, agreeing with his silence.

“So what the fuck is it to you?” Piedmont was feeling cornered again.

“I just need to know did you see her again after you took Rhone home.”

“No,” he said brusquely.

He took a step away from me.

“Maybe somebody else at the red house knows,” I said.

That simple speculation stopped him in his tracks.

“No. I’m the one drove the man. Why the hell you think the congregation knows?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “After you turned in your fifty dollars to the community jar, maybe they sent somebody over to thank her or something.”

I knew damn well that Piedmont hadn’t turned in the money he’d gotten for driving Rhone. When he’d joined the congregation he probably didn’t have twenty dollars to his name. Now that he was a member in good standing he probably did little jobs now and then, donating that money to the community pot. But something big like the fifty dollars he collected from Pete Rhone went in his pocket as silently as a shark sinking down under a swimmer’s dangling feet.

“Why you wanna be messin’ wit’ me, man?” he said.

“All I want, Mr. Piedmont, is for you to tell me what you know about the night you drove that white man home.”

“I pulled up in front of her house,” he said. “The white man jumped in, told me where he lived, and I drove off. That’s it.”

“Did Nola come down to see him off?”

“Yeah. I think so. I mean, he waved at the doorway but she didn’t come out.”

“Did you see anything else?”

“Naw, man. It was three o’clock in the mornin’. And they still had the curfew. Wasn’t nobody out except me and that white boy . . . and a old bum push a shoppin’ cart an’ live in a vacant lot down the street.”

For a moment I saw only white. It was like I had been struck by lightning and everything was bleached out and bright.

“What old bum?” I whispered.

“I’ont know his name. All I know is he live in a cardboard lean-to over off’a Grape.”

“How long?”

“How long what?” he asked.

“How long has he lived there?”

“Couple’a months. I don’t know. Bums come and go around here. On’y reason I even knew who he was is ’cause one day he asked me for a dime. I told him to get a job.”

“Where off Grape?” I asked.

“Why?”

“Not why,” I said. “Where?”

For an instant I think Piedmont was angry at my tone. There was even a shift in his shoulders indicating he was considering throwing something at me. It would have been the biggest mistake in his boxing career. The rage in my blood right then would have broken his jaw and a few ribs. He saw the fury and told me where to find the empty lot.

I WENT TO my car first. There I pulled the tire iron from the trunk and made my way to the lot. It was between what was once a grocery store and the chain-link fence of a single-family home. He’d piled ten or twelve sheets of heavy cardboard against the market wall. I cleared away the makeshift paper roof with two swipes of my iron club. I was ready to swing again but there was no one home. Lucky for me because I would have killed him if it was who I suspected.

There were all the comforts of a camping life in the hovel. A glass bottle half filled with water, a dirty green blanket on a foam mat. He had a fork and three cans of sardines, a chipped china plate, and three Playboy magazines. On his one solid wall he’d scrawled a poem in red lipstick:

Dirty girls get mud in their eye

They eat maggots and die

Break brains bad things bad things

They all die down in my pantry.

Under his filthy pillow was a square green tin with the emblem of a crown on the silhouette of a man’s head at the center of the lid. Inside the tin there were three .22 caliber shells.

I went down on my knees in the dirt and rested my head against the wall. The anger in my heart was monumental. I thought back some months to a young woman named Jackie Jay and her Middle Eastern boyfriend, Musa Tanous. Jackie had been beaten to death and the cops thought that the killer was Musa. But I came to believe that a hobo named Harold had done it. I’d found Jackie’s doll collection in Harold’s lean-to and I’d seen some of her clothes in his stolen shopping cart.

The police didn’t believe me and I never saw Harold again. But I was convinced that he killed Jackie because he thought that Musa was a white man and he wanted revenge on the black woman who dared to become a white man’s lover.

“Hey you, Easy Rawlins!” someone shouted.

I didn’t respond. I didn’t know who it was calling me but I couldn’t take my mind off of Harold and Jackie and now Nola on a silver bed in a white room hidden by the same police department that refused to believe my story.

“Hey!” the voice shouted again.

Hearing the threat in his tone my body rose without my willing it to do so. I turned to see that I was faced with four men, the foremost of whom was Newell.

“You sucker punched me yesterday,” the broad-shouldered man said.

I lifted my iron in reply.

Two of the men who were with him took involuntary steps backward.

“Whu-oh,” the third one said.

“You think I’m ascared’a that crowbar?” he asked me.

I kicked him in the groin and then swung the iron at his cohorts, hitting one of them in the shoulder.

“Get the fuck outta here or I’ma kill you motherfuckahs!” I shouted at the men.

They ran and I didn’t blame them. Easy Rawlins was a crazy man right then. Insane.

Newell was in the dirt moaning when I knelt down next to him.

“Do you want me to start hittin’ you with this thing?” I asked him.

He shook his head.

“Are you scared of this crowbar now?” I asked.

He nodded so I knew he could distinguish between the words I said.

“What was the name of the bum lived in here?”

“Harold,” he said in a pained whisper.

I left him there for someone else to save. Saving wasn’t my business right then. I was ready to go out and kill a man named Harold.