Little Scarlet

45

I called Bonnie and told her about the attempted suicide. I asked if we could put Benita up for a while.

“Doesn’t she have a mother?” Bonnie asked.

“I promised.”

“Okay,” Bonnie replied. “But she better understand that I don’t want any monkey business under my roof.”

I had breakfast at a diner on Success Avenue, soft-boiled eggs over toast. That’s what my mother fed me when I was sick. I also had tea with honey and only one cigarette. I ate and read the paper.

The riots were nearly over. There was only one article on the front page that referred to them and that was an argument between Chief Parker and Governor Brown. Brown thought that Parker hurt race relations in L.A., and Parker didn’t believe that his police department was guilty of brutality. Other than that, the space shot showed promise and might last eight days, the job prospect in the nation was the best since 1957, and the Vietcong had ambushed some South Vietnamese regulars.

There were no stories about Negro women being murdered by a deranged black man whose mother thought that she was white.

After I was finished I went down to the park benches where men gathered to play dominoes.

The tension from the riots was lifting around the city. People were on their way to work and mothers let their children come to the playground at the park. A few men gathered to play dominoes on the tables. None of them was Harold. I sat down on a slender bench under a tree and watched. I may have fallen asleep a few times because my watch said eleven and it hardly felt like nine-thirty to me. For a while I thought about asking the domino men if they knew Harold but then I decided against it. Someone might warn my quarry and then I would have driven him away.

“SEVENTY-SEVENTH PRECINCT.” A woman’s voice this time.

“Detective Suggs, please.”

“Hold a moment.”

The phone rang.

“Detective Suggs.”

“I’ve got a picture of him,” I said. “I borrowed it from a woman that wants it back.”

“I’ll come over to pick it up,” he said.

“Don’t bother. I’ll meet you at the dinette down the street from the station. I’m just callin’ to tell you that and that I know where he hangs out a lot.”

“Where?”

“Northeast part of Will Rogers Park. Where the men play dominoes.”

“Where’d you get that?”

“It doesn’t matter, does it, Detective?”

“Ten minutes?” he replied.

“You got it.”

I GOT THERE in less than ten minutes but Suggs was already at the counter, drinking coffee from a thick porcelain mug. There was a gutted jelly-filled doughnut on a plate in front of him and two cigarettes in his ashtray.

“Got a light?” I asked him as I sat.

He set fire to my cigarette and I handed him the photograph I got from Honey May.

“So this is Harold the Horror,” the cop said. “Just looks like some loser.”

“Yeah.”

“I’m surprised you brought me this,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“I figured you would go after this clown yourself. I was ready to cover you if he showed up dead after havin’ fallen on a bullet or some shit like that.”

I laughed then. My head bowed in mirth and I had to hold on so as not to fall off of my stool. It wasn’t the joke but the notion that a white cop would let me do my business without interference or condescension tickled me. It was as if I’d died and gone to another man’s heaven. This man whose soul I inhabited had been white, and his heaven was filled with ordinary things that were like magic to me.

“No,” I said. “I know too much about Harold to kill him like that. People been messin’ with him his whole life. Don’t get me wrong. I want you to arrest him and I want them to send him to the gas chamber too. But I don’t have to do it. No sir. Not me.”

I felt the weight of Melvin Suggs’s hand on my shoulder. Another friendly gesture.

The police detective stood up and threw a dollar bill on the counter.

“Have some eggs, Rawlins,” he said. “You look like shit.”

“Thanks. I will.”

I had two more soft-boiled eggs and white toast with strawberry jam. You could buy a lot with a buck back then.

I walked back to my building.

Before going upstairs I stopped by Steinman’s Shoe Repair. The closed sign was still up but it was tacked on the door that had been wired back into place. I pushed it open and saw Sylvie, Theodore’s wife, muse, and best friend. She was a quarter of a head taller than him with the features of a Teutonic goddess. She was slender and I doubted if even her husband knew what her voice sounded like. Mostly she gestured, now and again she whispered, but Sylvie would never raise her voice. I don’t know how old she was but she had the kind of beauty that would not fade. Violet eyes and platinum hair, long thin hands and skin akin to the perfect milk that men like Plato dreamed of.

She smiled when she saw me.

“Mr. Rawlins,” Theodore said from somewhere behind her.

“Hi, guys,” I said. “I saw that the door was open and I just dropped in to make sure things were okay.”

Sylvie’s smile took on a trace of sadness.

“I’m probably going to close up here, Mr. Rawlins,” Theodore said. “It’s too much. My insurance agent says that my policy doesn’t cover riots and the city refuses to help.”

“What about the federal government?” I asked.

He shook his head and Sylvie laid an ethereal hand upon the nape of his neck. The love between them always surprised me. It was like a fairy tale that you one day realized was true.

“You need help moving?” I asked.

It was Theodore’s turn to smile.

“You know,” I continued, “there’s a corner store not far from my house that might be a good place to open a shoe repair shop. It’s been vacant a couple’a months. Maybe I could introduce you to the owner.”

Sylvie took two steps and kissed me. Her lips formed the words “thank you,” and she might have made some sound.

We set up a day for the move and a time to talk with the owner at the empty corner store near my house. It was once a clothes store near Stanley and Pico. It was a space and he was a cobbler and people wore shoes everywhere in the world.

Theodore took the leather saddle from the ruined table and pushed it on me.

“Take this, Mr. Rawlins—Easy,” he said.

“I didn’t do anything, Theodore,” I said. “This is yours.”

“But you are helping us,” he argued. “You are always trying to help. This is just a, what you call it, a token for our friendship.”

I didn’t want to take it but Theodore held it out and Sylvie kept smiling. Finally I nodded in defeat and took the ancient riding gear.

I CARRIED MY prize up the southern stairwell to the fourth floor. I walked down the long hall thinking that it was all over. Suggs would take Harold and somehow prove that he was the killer of Nola Payne. Theodore would move to West L.A. and Jackson Blue would become a computer expert for Cross County Fidelity Bank. I didn’t know what to do about Juanda but that was for another day.

I decided to take Benita and Bonnie and the kids for a picnic at Pismo Beach. We could cook and Jesus could take us out fishing one at a time.

I put the key in the lock, thinking that I had done fine. I’d done my job and broke it off before things could go bad. People had died but that wasn’t my fault. The city had gone up in flames but maybe that was like a forest fire, cleansing the underbrush, making room for new growth.

When the wood of the doorjamb above my head shattered I thought that it must have been something that fell. But from where? Then the child’s cap gun exploding and more shattered wood and a quick pain in my left biceps.

I turned toward the doorway at the far end of the hall, shouting and holding the thick leather saddle in front of my head and chest. I ran as hard as I could toward the door, screaming like a berserker in an ancient war. More shots were fired. One grazed the big knuckle of my left hand. I slammed into the stairwell door, hitting someone who grunted and fell back. The pistol clattered to the floor and I caught a glimpse of the man’s shoulder.

As he lunged down the stairs I threw the saddle at him but it missed.

I put a foot down the stairs, not realizing that I had been shot in the calf. The blood dripped down and made a slick on the step. I tumbled for a full flight before coming to a halt and losing consciousness.