Little Scarlet

3

The Miller Neurological Sanatorium was a long, flat bungalow off of La Cienega just above Wilshire. If you drove by it you would have thought that it was a motel or maybe a factory for light manufacturing. The entrance was at the end of a long driveway and the bronze sign announcing its name was half the size of a sheet of notebook paper.

Suggs parked his car so close along a high white fence that I had to scoot across the seat to get out on the driver’s side.

A few steps ahead of me, he opened the door to the clinic and walked in. I followed cautiously.

A young white woman in a nurse’s uniform sat behind the desk in the reception area. She had a delicate face that was more red than white with thousands of freckles crowded around enormous brown eyes. Those eyes got bigger when we walked through the door.

“May I help you?” she asked the white man.

“We’re going to room G-sixteen,” Suggs told her.

We had taken two steps toward the double swinging doors behind the reception desk when the freckled fawn stood to block our way.

“I’m sorry but I can’t let you back there.”

Suggs frowned at the plucky youngster. I could imagine the bile roiling in his gut. First he had to explain himself to a Negro and now a mere woman was trying to block his way.

But he took it pretty well. The white man’s burden, I suppose.

He held out a worn leather wallet that had his detective’s badge on one side and his identity card on the other. The woman looked very closely at the wallet and mouthed the name.

I realized then that I hadn’t asked Suggs for his I.D. I was too well trained, knowing that asking for a cop’s badge might well expose you to manacles and blackjacks and a night of deep bruising.

“And who is he?” the nurse asked.

“Who are you?” Suggs asked back.

“Why . . . I’m not the one being identified,” she said.

“Neither is he,” Suggs said.

We went through the double doors, all three of us. Suggs led the way, I followed him, and she took up the rear.

The floor of the hallway was paved with shiny white tiles. The ceiling and walls were white too. There wasn’t a smudge or a streak anywhere along the way. It was by far the cleanest medical facility I had ever seen.

We got to the end of one hall and turned right onto another. Halfway down this corridor we came to a door marked G-16. Suggs reached for the knob but the nurse got in front of him again.

“I’m not supposed to let anyone in without first identifying them at the desk,” she said.

“Honey,” Suggs said, “this is way beyond you. I showed you the badge, so get out of the way before I twist your pretty wrist.”

“I will not.”

I wondered if the riots were just one symptom of a disease that had silently infected the city; a virus that made people suddenly unafraid of the consequences of standing up for themselves. For almost a week I had seen groups of angry black men and women go up against armed policemen and soldiers with nothing but rocks and bottles for weapons. Now this eighty-seven-pound girl-child was standing up to a gruff cop who outweighed her three to one.

“Ezekiel Rawlins, ma’am,” I said.

“What?” For the first time she looked directly at me.

“My name. It’s Ezekiel Rawlins. I’m here as a consultant to the police. If you had asked me I would have told you my name.”

“Oh,” she said, realizing that maybe she was the one that had been discourteous. “Rawlings?”

“No ‘g,’ ” I said.

“Oh.”

“Can we go in now?” Suggs asked.

The nurse stood aside, looking down.

I remember that moment very clearly. The white walls and floors, even the doorknobs were painted that colorless hue. And that brave young woman made shy by simple honesty. The cop who was the first piece of solid evidence I had that the white man’s grip on my throat was losing strength. All of that brought me to a doorway that I didn’t really want to go through. I should have turned away right then. I wanted to turn away. But it was as if there was a strong wind at my back. I had resisted it all through the riots: the angry voice in my heart that urged me to go out and fight after all of the hangings I had seen, after all of the times I had been called nigger and all of the doors that had been slammed in my face. I spent my whole early life at the back of buses and in the segregated balconies at theaters. I had been arrested for walking in the wrong part of town and threatened for looking a man in the eye. And when I went to war to fight for freedom, I found myself in a segregated army, treated with less respect than they treated German POWs. I had seen people who looked like me jeered on TV and in the movies. I had had enough and I wasn’t about to turn back, even though I wanted to.

The door opened and the wind blew me through.

The room we came into was bright. Three men were standing around a silver table that held the nude corpse of a Negro woman.

The men had on white smocks. Almost everything in this room was white. The walls and floor, the counters and the ceiling. Two of the men had on white shoes.

Just one pair of black dress shoes and Nola Payne brought any color into that lifeless room. And the shoes and Nola were just so much dead flesh.

“Yes, Detective Suggs,” a bald white man with a trim gray mustache said.

“This is the man I told you about, sir. Ezekiel Rawlins.”

“Why did you bring him here?”

“I thought he should see what we saw, Captain. I mean he is going to go out investigating.”

The bald man turned his eyes to me. He started at the floor and worked his way up. I knew what he saw. I had on brown-red leather shoes, gray slacks, and a square-cut charcoal shirt. I had gone casual down into SouthCentral, not expecting an interview with a white man standing in a black man’s hell.

“Investigate?” he said to me.

“And your name is?” I replied.

The captain looked over at Suggs. The detective had no response.

“I’m the one in charge here,” the captain said.

I made the mistake then of glancing at the corpse. She wasn’t young—thirty-three or -four. I couldn’t tell if she’d been pretty. Her hair had a reddish tint that some midwestern Negroes were prone to. One of her eyes was gone, probably due to a gunshot, and her tongue was sticking out of her mouth from her having been strangled, no doubt. The thing that caught my eye was the trickle of red blood that had started from somewhere above her lip, crossed over her teeth, and dribbled down her cheek. It was as if she died with her lips whispering vermilion secrets.

“Well if you’re in charge, then may I be excused?” I asked the arrogant white man.

“What is this, Melvin?” the captain asked. “A joke?”

“No sir,” Suggs said.

“What’s your name again?” the captain asked me.

“I haven’t got yours the first time yet.”

“Enough of this, Lee,” the other as yet unnamed white man said.

He was a head taller than the captain or Suggs, my height. He looked familiar but I didn’t remember where it was that I had seen him. His face was slender and hard. He had tight black eyes and black hair, no lips to speak of, and a tiny red mark under his right eye.

“I’m Captain Fleck,” the bald cop said. “And I asked you a question.”

“No sir, Captain, you did not. You said the word ‘investigate’ in an interrogative tone. But tone alone does not a question make.”

The third white man snickered. I appreciated the audience.

“Let’s get out of here,” the tall white man who was really in charge said.

I had no argument with that.