Little Scarlet

41

Hello?” a man’s voice asked.

“May I speak to Miss Ostenberg?” I said into the phone in a booth on Chandler Boulevard.

It was near four in the afternoon and I was waiting for a ride.

“Who is this?” the man asked me.

“Harold,” I said, “Ostenberg.”

There was a lull and then, “Yes?” a woman’s voice said.

“Was Harold’s father passing too?” I asked. “Or was Harold just a throwback from your side of the family?”

“Who is this?”

“If you don’t want me to have a talk with your husband, you had better tell me how I can get to your son, Jocelyn.”

“I’m going to hang up,” she warned.

“No you won’t,” I said. “Because if you do I’ll send that policeman to your husband’s place of work. He’ll be asking about you and your lineage, Jocelyn. How deep will he have to dig to find out who your parents are?”

“I don’t know where Harold is,” she said, answering two questions with one declaration.

“I need to meet with you, Jocelyn. I need to talk about your son.”

“Don’t call him that.”

“I’ll give you an address and you come to me. If you don’t I’ll huff and puff right in your husband’s ear.”

“You can’t blackmail me, sir,” she said from a high saddle.

“I could if I wanted to, ma’am,” I replied humbly. “But all I want is Harold. You give me that and I’ll let you be.”

“And if I meet with you you’ll leave me and Simon alone?”

“I don’t care about you, Jocelyn. I never heard of you before yesterday and I won’t be thinkin’ about you tomorrow. But this evening when you come to see me I need you to tell me where I can lay my hands on Harold.”

“I told you I don’t know where he is.”

“Have you had letters from him?”

Silence.

“Do you have any adult pictures of him?” I asked.

Again no answer.

“I need to know anything you got,” I said.

“Hey, Easy,” Raymond Alexander said. He was rolling to the curb in a golden Continental. A brand-new car.

I held up a hand while telling Jocelyn Ostenberg my office address.

“I want to see you by seven, Jocelyn,” I said and then I hung up.

“WHAT YOU DOIN’ out here, Easy?” Mouse asked me when we were on our way back to SouthCentral L.A.

“Lookin’ for Harold.”

“You think some Negro bum gonna be out with the white peoples?”

“How are you, Ray?”

I asked because he didn’t look good. He was wearing an old pair of dress trousers held up by suspenders and a white T-shirt that was none too clean. He still wore the handmade alligator shoes but had no socks on. Most people would have looked at him and thought he was trying to achieve some kind of rough fashion statement but I knew better. When Mouse’s dress got rough, so did he. Something was bothering him and there was an even chance that he’d settle this problem with a gun or knife.

“I can’t find Benita,” he said.

“No? I’ve seen her just about everywhere I been.”

“I called her and she ain’t there,” Mouse said. “I asked her friends and they haven’t seen her since before you took her home. You know you got me worried about her with all your talk.”

There was an accusatory tone to his words, as if it were my fault she was gone.

“She mentioned that she might go see some family down in San Diego,” I said. “Why don’t you ask her mother if you could get their phone number?”

“Yeah. All right. You know her mother’s worried too.”

FOR THE ENTIRE ride Mouse was sour and silent. That wouldn’t have been pleasant in any companion but with Raymond there was always the added threat of homicide. He was more killer than anything else and so had to be handled gently and with great respect. An angry Mouse was like a grenade with a loose pin, like a hungry lion breathing down your neck.

When we neared my office I asked, “How’s business with you and that dude Hauser?”

“Okay, I guess. Mothahfuckah kept houndin’ me ’cause I wouldn’t let up on my private shit, kept sayin’ that he wanted his fair share. I finally had to say that we could either fight or he could get up off’a me. He didn’t even wanna pay you.”

“Me?”

“Yeah, Easy. You saved our butts, man. Shit, it wasn’t just the cops that night. You know them mothahfuckahs had the National Guard too. Even if we woulda killed them cops, they woulda had men with bazookas on us. As it was, we did three more runs and once the police even waved at us. Waved.”

With that he reached into a pocket and came out with a thick brown envelope. He handed the packet to me saying, “We made ’leven thousand dollars that night.”

The envelope contained a stack of hundred-dollar bills and an emerald ring wrapped in toilet paper.

“Three thousand dollars and a little sumpin’ from my private stash.”

I held the ring up to the light. The stone was very large, five or six carats at least.

“High-roller pawnshop over on Avalon,” Mouse said. “I been thinkin’ about them for years. They didn’t think anybody could get into their safe but I knew a torch man.”

By then we were in front of my office. I couldn’t turn down the lucre. Mouse was giving me the money partly because he was my friend and partly because he wanted me to be implicated in his criminal activity. Telling him no would have put us at odds.

I told him to call me if he hadn’t found Benita by morning. Then I went up to the only place where I could be the man I wanted to be.

I PUT THE money and the ring into the bottom drawer of my desk.

At home in the garage I had a little box where I kept all the extra monies I had taken in. That was for Feather’s college and Jesus’ future, whatever that might turn out to be. But Mouse’s money was something else. I had to do something with it that would redeem his crimes. I thought about how to achieve that goal but without much success.

After that I went to the window and looked out on the street. There were no National Guards to be seen, but six police cars cruised down my block in the time I stood there.

On my street, the effects of the riots were still in evidence. Small knots of people moved around listlessly from corner to corner. The police would break them up whenever they began to congregate. I saw one man getting arrested for refusing to move on. The riots were kind of like my fight with the wrong Harold. There was no real winner. Fear on one side, defeat on the other.