Little Scarlet

50

I wasn’t too worried about Honey May. She wasn’t the type to take a shot at you and she was too kindhearted to lie and bushwhack someone. Raymond and I went to the door and knocked.

“Who is it?”

“Easy Rawlins, Honey. Me and a friend.”

“I didn’t expect you to bring a party, Mr. Rawlins,” the closed door said.

“It’s all right, ma’am. He’s family.”

Honey pulled the door open and waved for us to hurry up into the small purple room.

I say purple instead of violet because the shades were pulled and the lighter color had taken a more sinister hue. This was accented by the corpse of Harold Ostenberg, which lay on the little couch that wasn’t quite large enough to contain him.

One eye was open. There was dried foam on his lips. His jeans had been starched by street living and his shirt was a color that no manufacturer could duplicate. There was blood near the shoulder of his army surplus jacket. I pulled the fabric back to see the wound.

There was a glass next to him on a small table. It contained the dregs of a milky fluid. Next to the bed was a fancy pillow—probably from his mother’s house.

“He died,” Honey said.

Mouse nodded.

Someone had taken Harold’s shoes off. His feet were chafed from too much weight and motion, the twin banes of a homeless man’s life.

“Why did you call me, Honey?”

“I didn’t know what to do.”

I picked up the water glass and sniffed it.

“What do you want me to do?”

“Tell the police that he’s dead,” she said. She went to a chair and sat down heavily. “I don’t know.”

“How long has he been here?”

“Since late last night,” she whimpered.

“When did he die?”

“’Bout daybreak, I suppose.”

“Did he say anything before?” I didn’t want to upset her but I had to know.

“Oh yeah. It was awful. Women he hunted and then killed and robbed. He said that his mama shot him and that he killed her to protect himself. I pretended to go down to the store and I called her house and the po-lice answered. I hung right up then.

“He killed women just like you said, Mr. Rawlings —”

“Hey, Easy,” Mouse said.

He had pulled back Harold’s coat, revealing a pistol, .22 caliber from the looks of it.

“Go on, Honey,” I said.

“That’s all really. He was scared from bein’ shot. He said that his mama shot him. But when he talked about it I could tell that she shot him tryin’ to save her life. It sounded like he done killed a dozen women.”

“Did he name them?”

Honey just shook her head.

“So you decided that you would kill him,” I said.

She looked up at me as if I had just discovered the secret of eternal life. There was no denial. How could there be? The sleeping powders were in the glass next to the couch.

“No,” she said feebly.

“If I call the cops,” I said, “they will come here and arrest you for homicide.”

“You better believe that,” Mouse crooned.

“What we have to do is to get this body out from here,” I said. “If we don’t, you’ll just be another black woman on Harold’s long list of names.”

RAYMOND, EVER THE pragmatist, suggested that we cut Harold up but Honey wouldn’t hear of it. She blamed it on her Christian beliefs but I believe that neither her nor my stomach could have dealt with the hacking or the blood.

Originally I thought that we could build a box around him and then move him at night down the stairs.

“You crazy, Easy?” Mouse said. “A coffin’s a coffin. Any fool could see that. And somethin’ that big we’d have to tie on the top’a your car. What you think the cops gonna say about that?”

Finally we decided to drop the body out of the window later that night. I went down to the driveway that Honey’s window looked over and put the mattress from her bed down so that there wouldn’t be too much noise.

At ten past two Raymond and Honey threw the body out of the window. Harold landed mostly on the mattress but his passage was not silent. I dragged the stiff corpse into the backseat before Mouse rushed down to help me. I had the engine turned over and was headed down the block before any alarms or sirens could be sounded.

WE LEFT HAROLD in the last empty lot that I knew he’d inhabited. He was a little beat up, and no detective would believe that he’d actually died there on that lot. Any coroner could have testified that he died of an overdose of phenobarbital and not the shot to his shoulder. All of that was true but I wasn’t worried. What would matter was that his name was Ostenberg and that he had on his person the weapon that most probably was used on the bodies of Nola Payne, Jocelyn Ostenberg, and me.

The police would have their murderer, and all the witnesses were dead. They didn’t even have to pay for a trial or execution. All they had to do was slap their hands together to knock off the graveyard dust.