Little Scarlet

48

What were you doing in front of the house?” a police sergeant asked me.

We were in the kitchen of the Ostenberg house. I was sitting in a white chair, at a white table, across from a white enamel stove, dripping blood on the white linoleum floor.

Somewhere else in the house the white man was crying.

“I was down the block,” I said. “Sitting in the car with my girl.”

“How did you get shot?” The sergeant was in his mid-thirties. When he was a teenager he had a bad bout with acne. The scars covered both of his fat cheeks.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I was going to my office when somebody opened fire.”

They had Jewelle in another room but I wasn’t worried about her. Jewelle would just say that we were parking, that there was no law against that.

I had given them Jordan’s letter but with a black suspect in a crime in a white neighborhood less than a week after the riots, they had to have more than a tardy note from the deputy commissioner.

“What are you doing in this neighborhood?” the scarred sergeant asked.

“Nuthin’ special, Officer. Just hangin’ around.”

“Tell me about this note from Jordan’s office.”

“That’s nothing,” I said. “Why don’t you tell me what’s wrong here. I didn’t do anything and haven’t seen any crime.”

“You open your smart mouth again, nigger,” a uniformed officer said, “and I’ll break your face for you good.”

“Yeah?” I said.

It was as if Mama Jo’s elixir was waiting for some insult. The blood in my veins turned hot and I was suddenly ready to fight.

The sergeant didn’t know what to do. And I was of no help. I couldn’t seem to control my mouth or my actions and I had no proof of what crime had been committed—though I did have my suspicions.

There were four cops with me in the white kitchen. The angry one was meaty and tall. The sides of his neck were red and his eyes were blue. He’d cut himself shaving recently. The scab was near the right corner of his mouth.

I was ready to fight even sitting there with my hands cuffed behind me. It was as if Mama Jo’s medicine had opened a door of foolish bravery in my heart and now it came on me whenever I was in jeopardy.

Just then the phone rang. In between the ringing I could hear the white man’s cries.

“This is Dietrich,” the sergeant said into the phone.

He looked up at me. “Yes.”

He gestured at another policeman to undo my handcuffs. “Certainly. Yes sir. I understand.”

The manacles were tight on my wrists and they held me in such a way that the ache in my arm worsened. With release I felt a moment of surcease.

“Are you sure?” Sergeant Dietrich said into the phone. “Yes sir. I will. Completely.”

He hung up the line and said, “Come with me . . . Mr. Rawlins.”

The meaty cop who had threatened me scowled. He wanted to strike out at me but was restrained by the respect that his superior was forced to show. He got close to me though. I’m sure he was hoping that someone would give him permission to drop the hammer on my skull.

Sergeant Dietrich walked me up the stairs to an open door that led into a bedroom with the corpse of Jocelyn Ostenberg lying across it. Her tongue was protruding and her eyes were wide with fright.

He finally got the one he was after, I thought.

There was a small pistol on the floor next to the bed. About half a soda bottle of blood had been spilled down the bedspread and onto the floor.

“Do you know her?” the sergeant asked.

“Jocelyn Ostenberg,” I said. “She’s a black woman.”

“What?” the meaty cop said.

“Her son is a man named Harold. He killed a woman down in Watts a few days ago.”

The police all around me peered closer at the dead face on the bed.

“And what do you have to do with it?” Dietrich asked.

I was staring at the corpse, looking for Harold somewhere in the folds underneath. After he shot me he came back to her, I thought. Was it her plan to kill him? Did she want to get rid of him for good once he took care of me?

“Was there a trail of blood?” I asked.

“What?”

“Leading from the house? I mean, she shot her attacker, right?”

“You look like you’ve been shot,” the meaty cop who had called me a nigger said.

I ignored him.

“Can you help me out here, Sergeant Dietrich?” I asked.

“Go look around the backyard, Samuels,” the sergeant said to my self-proclaimed enemy.

“But, Sergeant —”

“The backyard,” Dietrich repeated.

After Samuels was gone Dietrich said, “There was a little blood. Not much. We figured that he used a pillow or something to stanch the bleeding and then made his way out. Mr. Poundstone said that his wife’s car was missing. The man who killed her —”

“Harold Ostenberg,” I said.

“— he probably took the car.”

“Can I go, Sergeant?” I asked.

“Detective Suggs is coming to pick you up,” Dietrich said. “They wanted you to wait for him.”

“Well, let me talk to Jewelle,” I said. “She can go, right?”

“I guess.”

JEWELLE DIDN’T WANT to leave me there but I told her that I had everything under control. I walked her to her car and apologized for swallowing her key.

“Don’t worry, Easy,” she replied. “You ain’t never taken nuthin’ from me that you ain’t given back tenfold. Helpin’ Jackson get his job means that he can finally lift up outta the street and make an honest woman outta me.”

I was wondering if Jackson could make an honest man of himself but I didn’t say it out loud. JJ drove off and white neighbors up and down the block stared at me as I made my way back to the crime scene. The man who had told the police about me ran to his door when I came near. He stood there at the entrance, shaking all over and slamming his right fist into his left palm. His deep consternation made me laugh. Here this guy didn’t know me from the man in the moon but still he was beside himself with hatred for me just walking down the street.

SUGGS ARRIVED AT about eight-thirty. He wore a stained beige suit and brown brogans. He shook my hand in front of a dozen cop witnesses and then toured the crime scene with a hard eye.

By that time there were three plainclothes detectives on the scene. They seemed to know Suggs. They all talked for forty-five minutes or so.

“Jordan had Peter Rhone arrested as a material witness in the Payne murder,” Suggs told me on the way to his car. “I had to give up his name.”

“He didn’t do it,” I said.

“I know.”

“Where we goin’?” I asked my new friend.

“That’s up to you, Ezekiel,” he said.