White Butterfly

by Mosley, Walter

  “You paid your time, man. They cain’t take you back unless you want ’em to.” I pulled a chair up to his lonely table.

  “Motherfucker took my money.”

  Roger was drunk and loose in the tongue. I knew that if I let him talk he would help me all he could. But I might have to hear things I didn’t want to hear to get there. I was half drunk myself, otherwise I’d have bowed out right then.

  “Motherfucker been doin’ my wife. Right there in my own house. She come up to Soledad an’ be smilin’ at me. But all the time she comin’ home to him. She comin’ home t’him.”

  The glass broke in Roger’s grip; more like it just crumbled. Beer, mixed with a little blood, ran over the table. I threw some paper napkins from the dispenser on the spill and handed Roger my handkerchief. He looked at me with a depth of gratitude.

  “Thank you, Easy. You’re a friend, man. A real friend.”

  You could buy a drunk’s friendship with a handful of feathers and a sprinkle of salt.

  “Thanks, Roger,” I said. I patted his rocky shoulder across the table. “I was tryin’ t’find somethin’ out.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You knew Bonita Edwards?”

  “Uh-huh, yeah, I knew’er. You know that was a shame what happened that girl.”

  Blood soaked more and more into my rag.

  “Hold that thing tight, Roger. You bleedin’ pretty good there.”

  He gazed down at his hand and seemed surprised to see the bloody cloth. Then he clenched the hand into a fist and the whole thing disappeared.

  “What you wanna know ’bout Bonnie?”

  “She was a friend’a mines, Roger, so I’m askin’ if anybody seen’er ’round ’fore she got killed.”

  He shook his head slowly, his eyes moved loosely as he did. “Nope,” he said. “An’ you know if I did I’da kilt him jus’ like I’ma kill… ”

  “Did you know what she was doin’ that last week?” I asked, partly because I wanted to know and partly to distract him.

  “I don’t wanna cause you no pain, Easy, but I think she was down on Bethune.”

  I tried to look like I was bothered by this information. When somebody said Bethune they meant a whorehouse run by a white man named Max Howard and his wife, Estelle.

  “Thank you, Roger,” I said, as seriously as I could.

  “Woman tear your heart out, man.” Roger shook his head again. “An’ that’s what I’ma do to Charles Warren. He got my kids callin’ him Daddy. He got my wife callin’ him Daddy too. She be fuckin’ me like it’s all that love an’ stuff. But she goin’ t’see him Friday. I seen it on a note in her purse.”

  It was time for me to go. I should have gone. But instead I said, “Man, you don’t know what it is.”

  Roger’s head moved slowly as he turned his face upward to look at me. The rest of his body was rock-solid and tense.

  He said, “What?”

  “All I’m sayin’ is give’er a chance, man. Maybe it ain’t what you think. I mean, she did come up to Soledad to see ya, right?”

  Roger just stared.

  “Woman wanna leave a man don’t come up t’see him but the first few months,” I continued. “But yo’ wife come up the whole time, right?”

  He wouldn’t nod. We weren’t friends anymore.

  “Think about it, Roger. Talk to her.”

  I got up and backed away from the table. Roger followed me with his eyes. I decided to let him keep the handkerchief. Maybe when he looked at the bloody rag he’d remember what I said and refrain from killing Charles Warren.

  THE HOWARDS’ HOUSE was a big yellow thing. It had been a plain, single-story house at one time but they kept adding to it. First they made the garage into their living quarters so that the rest of the house could be used for business. Then they added a room on the other side. A second floor was put on in 1952 with a flat roof supporting a flower garden that Estelle tended. At some point they bought the house next door and annexed it by building a long hall-like structure across the yard. The original house was wood but the new addition was brick. The city started giving them zoning problems in ’55 so they farmed out the girls for a while and had the whole thing painted yellow so that it would at least look of a piece.

  I guess the city agent backed off or, more likely, was paid off. The girls came back, and along with them their regular customers. Nobody complained. Max, Estelle, and twelve women lived there—raising families, working hard, and going to church on Sundays.

  I was drunk. The only reason I didn’t have an accident driving the eight blocks to Bethune was that I didn’t think about driving and somehow steered from instinct. I pushed the button in the center of the lion’s mouth at the front door but I didn’t feel my finger. I didn’t hear the bell either, but, as I said, it was a big house.

  A mule-faced woman answered the door. She was more than forty and less than sixty-five but that was all I could say about her age. Her platinum-blond hair cascaded to her shoulders like Marlene Dietrich’s. Her skin was black. Her face had many folds in it. And her eyes were the color and sheen of wet mud. Her small hands, which she held before her pink bathrobe, looked as if they could crush stones.

  “Estelle,” I said. I had a stupid grin on my face. I could see it in the bronze-framed mirror that dominated the wall at Estelle’s back. She peered at me as if I might have been a dream that would disappear.

  I grinned on.

  “What you want?” she asked, not in a friendly way at all.

  “Thought I might have a drink an’ some company.” I shuddered. “It’s cold out tonight.”

  “You already had enough t’drink, an’ you got a wife t’keep you warm.”

  “Business so good you turnin’ it away?”

  Estelle pushed at a loose lock of her wig and the whole thing turned askew on her head. She didn’t seem to notice, though.

  “Ain’t nuthin’ that good. I just don’t trust you, Easy. I hear all kindsa things ’bout you. What you want? I ain’t axin’ no mo’.”

  I tried to make the grin a little more sincere by looking into my own eyes in the mirror.

  “Like I said. I want a drink an’ some soft friendship. That’s all.”

  “Why come here?”

  “I been told that that girl… ” I snapped my fingers again, looking for something I didn’t know again. “You know, that li’l one, Bonita Edwards’s friend.”

  The mud in Estelle’s eye hardened to stone. “Nita Edwards is dead.”

  “I ain’t lookin’ fo’her, it’s just that I cain’t remember her li’l friend’s name.”

  “You mean Marla?” The look on Estelle Howard’s mug would have deterred a rhinoceros.

  “I don’t know.” I held up my hands. The smile muscles in my cheeks ached. “Jackson Blue told me ’bout her, but all he remembered was that she was Bonita’s friend.”

  I smiled and she scowled for another thirty seconds or so, then she said, “You better com’on in fo’ you let all the heat out.”

  — 11 —

  WE WENT DOWN A LONG HALL that was papered with yellow and orange velvet. There were small dark-stained tables every few feet with clean ashtrays and dishes of hard candy on them. This led to a largish room that had blue sofas along each cream wall. There were lamps here and there, all of them turned on. A woman and a boychild sat on a sofa before wall-length maroon drapes. She was Mexican with a lot of cleavage and makeup, backed by a mane of luxurious black hair. He was black and scrawny but had the largest brown eyes I’d ever seen—his mother’s eyes.

  “Wait here,” Estelle said, batting at her wig.

  She exited out a door on the opposite side of the room.

  “Hey, mister?”

  She was looking at me, smiling. The boy had something that came close to hatred in his beautiful eyes.

  “Yeah?”

  “Is it ‘Peter and me went’ or ‘Peter and I went’?” She curled her lip and flared her nostril on the last sentence. I noticed tha
t the boy had a straight-backed pad of paper on his lap.

  “ ‘Peter and I,’ like, ‘Peter and I went to the store.’ You see, you know because if you cut it down and said ‘I went to the store’ it would be better than ‘Me went to the store.’”

  The mother looked leery. The boy wanted to tear my heart out.

  “You live here?” I asked.

  “Yes.” Her smile dazzled. She wasn’t beautiful but she projected warmth.

  “Hey, Pedro!”

  The boy stopped scowling at me long enough to peer at the old white man coming through the door.

  “Come here, boy!”

  I was surprised that such an old and feeble-looking man could produce such volume.

  He was tall and stooped over like Westley, but even more. He could almost look little Pedro in the eye. Max Howard fished a coin out of his pocket and flipped it at the boy. Pedro caught it and checked to see what it was—he didn’t look disappointed.

  Max had a full head of long white hair. During that time only old men could get away with that kind of hairstyle. He kept his head up, reminding me of a vulture scanning the horizon for the spectacle of death. He wore an old-fashioned three-button black suit with a starched white shirt and a silken blue-and-black tie. His shoes were older than I was but they were in perfect repair.

  “Mr. Howard,” I said.

  “Rawlins, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, sir. Easy Rawlins.” I didn’t hold out my hand and he kept his claws in his pockets.

  Max pressed his lips out and swiveled his head toward the mother and child. He might have nodded, maybe he silently mouthed something, but Pedro’s mother gathered the boy up and hurried out of the room.

  “Have a seat, Easy,” Max Howard said.

  I sat and he stood before me. His skin was like bleached onion parchment, crinkled and ghastly white.

  He blinked. I crossed my legs. Somewhere far away a motor cruised down the street.

  “What do you want here, Easy?” The question was straightforward.

  “A woman,” I said in kind.

  His smiling lips quivered like a pair of light blue earthworms. “I don’t think so,” he said.

  He blinked again. I uncrossed my legs.

  After what seemed like a long time he said, “Twenty dollars.”

  I took out the bill and handed it over. He brought it right up to his face and squinted. Then he nodded and went back the way he’d come.

  A few minutes later a short woman wearing a checkered muumuu that barely came down to her legs walked in. She had big red lips and round thighs. Her hair was permed into big floppy curls. Her eyes were big and round and ready to look into mine.

  “Com’on,” she said. Then she turned and walked away.

  I followed her up the stairs. Her dress didn’t hide a thing.

  We went down a hallway that looked like it belonged in a hotel. There were doors on each side with numbers on them. She opened door seven and ushered me in.

  “How you wan’it?” she asked my back.

  When I turned around she’d taken off the dress.

  “Just a little talk.” I don’t think I stuttered, but the girl smiled as if I had.

  “What you wanna talk about?” One of her upper front teeth was solid gold. There was a nipple-sized mole just above her left nipple.

  “You Marla?”

  “Com’on.” She pointed at the bed. “Sit’own.”

  We sat side by side with her thigh against my pant leg.

  “You Marla?” I asked again.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I wanna know about Bonita Edwards.”

  “She dead.”

  Marla took my hand in hers and rubbed the knuckles against her nipple. It hardened and became very long.

  Marla smiled. “She like you.”

  “I wanna know about Bonita Edwards.”

  “What you wanna know?”

  “Did somebody want her dead? Anybody you know?”

  Marla sat back with her hands propping her body from behind. “You workin’ for the cops? ’Cause the cops already came here an’ we told’em that we didn’t know nuthin’. Bonita had the day off an’ she just never came back.”

  “I just wanna find out what happened to her. That’s all.”

  “Max an’ Estelle say I better watch out about you. They say you bad news an’ I jus’ better fuck you an’ keep my mouf shut.”

  “S’pose I want you to use yo’ mouf on me?”

  Marla laughed and grabbed my arm. It was a very good laugh, lots of feeling behind it.

  “That was a good one.” She smiled at me and I realized that I was sitting on the bed with a naked young woman.

  Then came three raps at the door. “Five minutes!” a man’s voice said. It wasn’t Max Howard.

  “You got forty mo’ dollars, mister?” Marla asked.

  “How come?”

  “They only give ya ten minutes for’ twenty an’ they knock after five, you know, to hurry up. But if you pay again they let you go forty-five minutes fo’ just sixty bucks.”

  I gave her the money.

  She ran out in the hall without putting on a stitch.

  In the room alone I considered going out of the window. Maybe she’d tell them what I asked her and they’d come back with a gun. I hadn’t come armed. The whiskey was wearing off and I wasn’t so brave anymore. I wasn’t so sure.

  The door opened and Marla came back with a bottle of scotch, two glasses, and her natural charm.

  She was grinning. “We got almost a hour an’ this bottle. You wan’it?”

  She poured the two glasses full and settled on the bed beside me, her legs open wide enough to expose a thick mat of pubic hair. “So what you wanna know?”

  “Same thing. A guy wants me t’find out about Bonita. He’s upset about what happened and maybe he’d like t’say sumpin’ to the guy that did it.”

  “What guy?”

  “That ain’t none’a yo’ business, honey.” I took a long drink and poured another glass full. Marla did the same and laughed.

  “Bonita didn’t have no boyfriend,” she said speculatively. “She didn’t even like men, not like me. An’ I cain’t think’a nobody wanna do that.”

  I sloshed back another drink. “Had to be somebody. Nobody kills you fo’nuthin’.”

  “Baby, you ain’t never been in this business if you think that.” Marla leaned forward to shake her head, and I realized that her curls were a wig.

  “How old are you?” I demanded.

  “Nineteen. An’ I seen girls killed before. I seen men come at’em with a baseball bat and a razor blade. I seen men come up these here steps with a dog they want the girl t’get friendly wit’ Uh-huh. I might just be a girl but I’m a woman too. I been a woman since I was eleven.”

  We both drank some more. Marla put her hand way up on my thigh.

  “Who wanna know ’bout Bonita?” she asked.

  “I can’t say. They payin’ me an’ I ain’t s’posed t’tell.”

  “You wanna fuck me?”

  “Did Bonita know them other girls got killed?” I took another drink.

  “Uh-uh.”

  “How do you know?”

  “She told me. I know’d Julie LeRoi myself an’ when I told Nita ’bout her she said, ‘Who?’ ” Marla laughed. “ ‘Who?’ Just like a owl.”

  I don’t know how we started kissing, but there I was on my back and Marla was on top of me. I was so drunk I could barely feel our lips or tongues but something stronger than feeling was driving me.

  When she was pulling down my pants I said, “How ’bout the other ones, Willa Scott or a stripper named Cyndi Starr?”

  “You want me t’suck this thing or talk?”

  I didn’t say anything and she didn’t either.

  A long time later the knocks came on the door again.

  “You gotta get dressed,” Marla said.

  I put on my pants and she slipped on her shift.

  I got my money
’s worth. Bonita Edwards was from Dallas and had only been in L.A. three months. She came right to Max and Estelle’s. She had an apartment but hardly ever went there. She didn’t know Willa Scott, but Marla wasn’t sure about Cyndi Starr.

  “Marla?”

  “What?”

  “You ever do any work outside of here? I mean, does anybody ever hire you to meet’em on you’ day off or sumpin’?”

  “Sometimes.”

  I knew from her smile that she’d hate me.

  “Did Bonita?”

  “That what you wanna know?” she snapped. “Why’ont you go on down to the mortuary an’ jump on her?”

  “Com’on, Marla. This is how I get paid.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know what?”

  “I don’t know nuthin’!” she yelled, putting her fists up to her ears. Then she jumped up and ran out of the door.

  I took a moment to grab my shirt before going after her.

  When I made it to the hallway a snakish white man was standing where Marla was supposed to be. He wore a tapered green suit that was large in the shoulders and thin at the hips. The suit matched his eyes. He smiled the way a snake would smile if serpents had lips.

  “Hold on there, son,” he hissed. “Playtime is over.”

  I was drunk, but not so drunk I didn’t know that my reflexes were shot. I became as quiet as I could be, gathering all of my strength for one move.

  “Why you after Marla?” Snake-lips was almost polite.

  He raised his eyes a little, glancing over my right shoulder.

  I heard the man behind me grunt. That was enough warning for me to avoid the blackjack aimed at my head. I moved to the right long enough to see a squat Negro stumble behind the force of his thrust. I let him fall and I threw a punch that landed on the side of Snake-lips’s jaw. He fell back against the wall.

  Little men are, on the whole, more agile than larger ones. The little Negro was already on his feet and swinging his sap. I moved enough not to take the full brunt of the blow but it did graze my head above the left ear.

  The impact felt much like when a large vehicle, a bus for example, hits its brakes and sends you reeling. Then came the colors: red amoebae cut by yellow shards and peppered with black holes.