Little Scarlet

25

I entered the Seventy-seventh Street police station not fifteen minutes after leaving Newell. I’d gotten out of the car with the tire iron in my hand but when a woman passing by jerked her head and skipped away from me I realized that I should put my weapon down.

Walking back to the car, I felt every step like I was walking through water. I was wasting time. What I needed to do was find Harold and kill him. I opened the trunk and threw the tire iron in and then I sprinted for the police station.

I ran up to the front door breathing hard and sweating. Anyone looking at me would have thought that I was a man in trouble. I’m sure that’s what the desk sergeant thought.

“Yes?” he asked, scrutinizing me from head to toe.

“Detective Suggs, please,” I said.

“And who are you?”

The only feature I remember about that white man was that he had red hair. Red hair like Nola Payne had. Little Scarlet murdered by Harold the tramp. If thoughts could kill, people would have fallen dead for a mile all around me.

“Easy Rawlins,” I said. “Easy Rawlins.”

“And what’s your problem, Mr. Rawlins?”

“Murder,” I said. “He asked me about a murder and I found out something he wants to know.”

I could see the cop trying to block me with some unspoken logic in his mind. The man looks crazy, he seemed to be thinking, but then again Suggs was only visiting the Seventy-seventh. I probably did know him.

There were quite a few policemen in the station. I suppose they were on overtime, making sure the people in the neighborhood didn’t burn them down.

“Have a seat,” Red said.

I went over near the bench across from his desk but stayed on my feet.

“I said sit down,” the desk sergeant commanded.

“Don’t wanna sit,” I said.

“You heard the man,” a voice to my right said.

It was from a tall uniformed cop standing nearby. He had gray hair, a young face, and a hand on his baton. I didn’t say anything to him, just stood there and stared.

“Do you want me to sit you down?” the gray-haired, boy-faced man asked.

“Fuck you.”

“Corless,” a voice I recognized said. “Stand down.”

“But, Lieutenant —”

“Stand down,” Detective Suggs said again.

He came in between me and the angry uniform.

“Fuck you,” I said again.

The gray head lunged at me but he was met by a surprisingly quick left hook thrown by the sloppy detective. Corless went down quickly and though he tried to jump back up he couldn’t find his legs.

Suggs took me by the arm and led me down a hall behind the sergeant’s desk and to an office that was a storage room not three days before. A dozen reams of paper were piled on the table he used for a desk and a three-foot pile of first-aid kits was stacked against the wall. There was a rack of shotguns on the floor and a gaping file cabinet filled with parking tickets and other traffic citations that kept the door from fully opening.

Suggs slammed the door shut.

“What’s wrong with you, Rawlins?” he said. “You off your rocker?”

“I know who killed Nola Payne.”

“Who?”

“A guy named Harold.”

“Harold what?”

“Don’t know his last name. But he killed her. I’m sure of that.”

“How do you know?”

I told Suggs about Musa Tanous and Jackie Jay, about how I met Harold once and then saw his lean-to filled with her belongings. I told him about the crazy notes he left near both crime scenes.

“Nola and the white man she was with either became lovers or Harold thought that they had. Either way, he killed her for having that white man in her place.”

I decided to leave Peter Rhone, Harley Piedmont, and Juanda out of my story. I knew who the killer was but if I threw any more names at the cops, they’d go off on some other track. And I wasn’t about to let that happen.

“How do you know that Harold was in the neighborhood?” Suggs asked. He was a good cop.

“I walked around,” I said. “Just lookin’ to get the lay of the land and I saw his teepee. It was made the same way as the last one I saw.”

“Have a seat, Mr. Rawlins,” Suggs offered.

He lifted a box full of files from a folding metal chair and slapped the seat a couple of times to move the dust around. Then he climbed over some other boxes to get to the chair behind the ancient maple desk.

I sat too.

Suggs’s fawn-colored eyes seemed to be asking me for something. He took a deep breath and let out a sigh.

“I’m not leavin’ here until you do somethin’ about Harold,” I said. “Last time I told the cops—right here in this station—they said I was crazy to think that a bum could be that good at killin’.”

“I believe you,” Suggs said.

I didn’t know what he meant by that. I mean, he could have been saying that he believed that the cops in the station would say such a thing. But that didn’t mean he bought my story about Harold.

Suggs laid his hand on a green folder filled with maybe two hundred sheets of paper.

“While I’ve been here waiting for you to come up with something,” he said, “I’ve been taking up my time looking at the files of the open homicide cases of women in the neighborhood. At first I only went back one year but now I’m up to seven . . .”

It had only been a couple of days. That kind of work would have meant he was on the job almost around the clock.

“. . . and I found something disturbing,” he continued, opening the file. On the front page he had typed a long list of names down the left side with a shorter list to the right. “Thirty-seven unsolved homicides of women under forty. Most of them were in relationships with violent men. But six were not and four more were involved with men who had no history of violence. Your Jackie Jay was one of those.”

He turned the page to a handwritten sheet.

“Each of the ten was strangled, a few of them were beaten, and one was stabbed after she was dead. None were raped. I don’t believe that Nola Payne was raped either. Two of the women were married to white men.”

He looked up at me and I felt that a door opened somewhere. It was as if I had been held prisoner for so long that I’d forgotten there ever was a door to freedom. And now that it was open I didn’t know exactly what to do.

“You found that just by lookin’ through the files?” I asked.

Suggs nodded.

“You mean somebody around here could have sat down in this messy room and read the files and come up with this list?”

“Yeah.” Suggs’s admission carried a heavy weight with it. “I mean, I’m pretty good at this kind of work. That’s why they have me on the case but somebody should have picked it up before this.”

“And what about women killed that you found killers for?” I asked. “What about some innocent men up in jail for women that Harold killed?”

Melvin hadn’t thought of that. He turned his eyes toward a tan filing cabinet in the corner.

“One thing at a time,” he said. “Tell me what you know about this Harold right now.”

I told him all I knew. It wasn’t much. He was on the short side and medium brown. I remembered that his hairline was beginning to recede and his beard hairs were at least half gray. When I’d met him he looked about fifty to me, but on thinking about it later, I thought that street life had aged him prematurely. He had big hands that seemed a little bloated. He had spent at least a few nights in the drunk tank and he drove a shopping cart. His mother was still alive and lived in L.A., a fact he let drop in the one three-minute conversation I had with him. He had never looked me directly in the eye.

Suggs took notes while I talked and when I was finished he snapped his little notepad shut.

“Not much,” he said.

“I know. I’ve spent months driving around South L.A. looking for him. But it’s a big city. I thought maybe he migrated away. But if his mother is here, I hoped that he either came back to see her or that he never left.”

“I’ll put out the word on this Harold,” Suggs said. “But you should be out there lookin’ for him too. Did you find out anything about the white man that stayed with Nola?”

“No.”

“Well,” he said, “that’s probably for the best anyway. Jordan’s office won’t care about our theories on some black Jack the Ripper out around here. No sir they sure wouldn’t. Find the white man and truss him up like a Thanksgiving turkey—that’s Jordan’s speed.”