Little Scarlet

31

I was walking through a full meat locker, wearing only a T-shirt and cotton pants. It was freezing in there. The carcasses were black women hanging from hooks. I recognized all of them but couldn’t put a name to anyone. Women I had known from Texas to California as lovers and co-workers, neighbors and friends. They were naked and hard, beyond hope for any heaven or afterlife. They were hung in rows that went on forever and it came to me that I might be in hell. There wasn’t much light but I could see. And as long as I kept on walking, I thought, I wouldn’t freeze.

Then I came across Nola Payne. Her reddish hair was plastered down over her eyes. I stopped even though I knew I ran the risk of freezing. I almost brushed the hair from her face but then I understood that if I touched any one of the dead women He would know I was there.

I turned around and saw Bonnie and Juanda side by side on hooks. They were both cramped and uncomfortable looking as if they had been frozen in quarters too small for them to spread out in. I felt crystalline tears form in my eyes and I reached out . . .

The moment I touched Bonnie a heavy hand fell on my shoulder. It spun me around and there was Bill, King of the Underworld.

“Don’t mess with my dinner, Easy,” he proclaimed.

I shouted and sprang up out of the cot where I had fallen asleep. My heart felt as if it had grown two sizes too large for my chest. And the despair I felt was beyond anything I had ever imagined except when I was a child and my mother died while I slept.

The room smelled of sixteen men down on their luck. There were snores and farts and sighs and darkness. I knew where I was but for a moment I couldn’t remember how I got there.

Slowly it came to me.

After dinner I talked with Lewis for a while. He asked me about Jackson Blue from every angle he could think of. How long had I known him? What kind of gig was he into? Where was he going? And even how was he dressed?

I realized that the men that had been after Jackson must have put out a bounty on the Coal Coyote’s hide.

I tried to mask it well enough. I said that I saw him now and again in Compton, that he was involved with a counterfeiter that printed down in L.A. but distributed his product in Frisco and Vegas. But that was all hearsay, I added. I also said that Jackson was wearing the outlandish styles of Carnaby Street, elevator shoes and bell-bottoms, ruffled shirts and a feather in his hat.

After that I retreated to the dormitory cot, where I pretended to sleep for a few minutes.

When I awoke it was very late.

I rose up from my cot and moved through the maze of sleeping men toward a strip of light that betrayed the door.

“Do you see that man, Rod?”

“Uh-huh, yeah I do.”

“I wonder where he’s goin’?”

“It ain’t none’a your business, mister. Keep your eyes to yourself.”

I smiled at Roderick’s conversation with himself. He wasn’t crazy, just obvious and out loud. I would have had the same thoughts if I had seen someone walk by my bunk in that dark and hopeless room.

THE DOOR BEHIND Lewis’s desk was unlocked and the light switch was on the left. The filing cabinet stood against yet another boarded-up window. It was locked but that didn’t matter. I had lifted a steel spoon from the dinner table and the bolt gave with very little pressure.

I started with the 1964 file of residents’ names. There were one hundred eighty-three sign-in sheets, filled in on both sides, one side for each evening. I scanned the far left side for the letter “H.” I found quite a few Henrys and fewer entries with the name Hank. Harvey made a better showing than I would have figured. Howard was the most common name and there was one each for Hudie, Hildebrandt, and Hy. There were six Harolds. Brown, Smith, Smith, Lakely, Ostenberg, and Bryant.

I was writing down the last name when I felt the breeze on the back of my neck. Instantly the temperature dropped down to what it was in the freezer of my nightmare. I knew before I spun around that it would be Bill and not Lewis facing me.

He was wearing an impossibly large white terry cloth robe and somehow he seemed to have gotten even taller and broader.

“Hey, Bill,” I said with hardly a waver.

“What are you doing there, Willy?”

“Lookin’ up names.”

“What for?”

“There’s a man I need to find and I was hoping that he spent a night or two here with you.”

It was the calmness Bill showed that frightened me. It carried all of the certainty of a powerful predator eyeing a snack.

“I don’t keep any money in here, Willy,” he said.

I handed him the list that I had scrawled. I had only written the last names.

He glanced at the list and said, “You’ve been lying to me, haven’t you, Willy?”

I didn’t respond because I didn’t know which lie he was referring to.

“This handwriting,” he said. “It’s not done by some man who can’t quite catch hold. I’ve told Lewis to look at the way the men sign in. He doesn’t understand but I bet you do.”

“He murdered two women,” I said.

“Who did?”

“The man I’m looking for.”

“And you think he stayed here?”

“I’m sure of it,” I said. “He was just the kind of man who would need a place like this from time to time. If it was raining too hard for too long or maybe if he was too sick to hustle up a meal.”

I had a small pistol in my pocket, that and the letter from Gerald Jordan. I didn’t want to shoot anybody but if Bill got mad I knew that my only defense would be homicide.

He crushed the list in his hand.

“Get out of here, Willy,” he said. “I don’t know who you are or what it is you’re really after but my guys here have the right to their own private lives. I won’t help you.”

He was standing in front of the door.

Realizing that I wouldn’t move until he did he took a step to the side. I went by him quickly and, just as swiftly, he followed me until I reached the front door of the shelter.

I went through and turned to him.

“I’m sorry, Bill,” I said. “I know that you’re doing a good thing down here and I didn’t mean to cause you trouble.”

I think he smiled briefly before closing the door. That made me wonder if he knew that I’d submitted the names on that list to memory, making his gesture more perfunctory than it seemed.

I thought about that all the way through the early-morning streets, so dark and empty. Somewhere out there Harold was hiding. But soon I’d find him. I didn’t think that he’d survive our second meeting.