White Butterfly

by Mosley, Walter

  “What about the man an’ Juliette?” I didn’t want to hear about his problems. There was nothing I could do.

  “She saved me, man. She yelled at’im an’ pulled him back. I mean, he let her pull him. He was big an’ real strong. He hit me in the head a couple of times with a trash can. The last I seen they was goin’ off together.”

  “She call’im anything?”

  “She did but I don’t remember.” Gregory shook his head but that hurt him so he winced.

  “Did he pull her away?”

  “Uh-uh. She said she’d go with’im if he let up.”

  “That’s all?”

  “He sounded funny.”

  “Like what?”

  “He’d say ‘mon’ instead’a ‘man.’ He almost sounded like he was a English nigger.”

  That was enough for me. I stood up to go and Gregory said, “What’s this all about?”

  “You don’t know?”

  “Know what? What should I know?”

  “Juliette is dead. She got killed sometime after she went off with this dude who busted you up.”

  “Naw, uh-uh, Julie ain’t dead.” Gregory gave a little laugh to prove it.

  “Don’t you talk to nobody, man?” I asked.

  “Ella’s all since this.” He raised his broken arm about three inches.

  I left him there to lie in his coffin-size bedroom and consider how close he had come to death.

  Ella was on the matchbook sofa crying when I left. I didn’t say anything to her. There’s no cure for living a life of poverty. There’s nothing to say either.

  WILLA SCOTT had lived with her parents on Eighty-third Street. They were two small people who owned a modest house. They’d had Willa late in life and were now of retirement age. All they could do was ask me why. “Why would somebody do that to our girl?”

  “Did she ever have friends come to the house?” I asked. “Men friends.”

  Her mother, a hen-shaped woman, shook her head. The father, who never got out of his chair as long as I was there, said, “She was kinda private. She told us that most a these men she meets out there wasn’t good enough t’bring on home. But you know she was gonna get a job for the schools. She said she was.”

  “Did she know a man, a Negro man with a beard?”

  “No sir,” Mrs. Scott answered. “Did you want to see the pictures of her?”

  Mrs. Scott brought out a handmade photograph album. She and her husband beamed at the photos while I stood behind them. She kneeled at his side and they both cooed and clucked.

  I thanked them about halfway through.

  When I went through the front door they were still admiring Willa’s memory.

  — 14 —

  BETWEEN EIGHTY-SIXTH STREET and Eighty-seventh Place on Central Avenue, not far from the Scotts’ house, was a long stucco building that we called Hollywood Row. It was nowhere near Hollywood but we called it that because of its showy residents. It was only two stories high but it took up the whole length of the block. The bottom floor was made up of a mom-and-pop store called Market, two liquor stores, three bars, and a Chinese laundry called Lin Chow. The upper floor was a long hall of studio apartments populated by transient gangsters, whores, and musicians who’d seen their day come and go. The musicians were the only long-term residents. Lips McGee, a man I’d known since I was a youngster in Houston, had lived there for thirteen years.

  First I went to Lin Chow, where a small woman wearing a blue quilted jacket and red cotton pants was ironing. She looked at me and gave me a toothless grin. I handed her the denim bag and she emptied it on the counter. She jotted something down on a white pad and tore the slip off for me.

  I couldn’t read it.

  “How long?” I shouted.

  She held up two fingers and shouted back, “Two day.”

  “Today?” I pointed at the floor indicating now.

  She shook her head and held up two fingers again.

  I used her sign language as a kind of omen and went to one of the liquor stores, where I purchased two pints of Johnnie Walker Red Label scotch.

  The only entrance to the dwellings of Hollywood Row was a rickety door that opened into an alley behind the building. To the left of the door there was a corral of trash cans breeding ants, roaches, and flies. The cans were all overflowing with aluminum TV dinner plates and liquor bottles. The wooden stairs were spongy. The long hall was covered with a carpet that once was green. Now it was simply edged with color like a dry brown riverbed with dying grasses along its banks.

  Hollywood Row wasn’t a private place. People treated it like one big house. Most of the studio apartment doors were open. One door I passed revealed a man fully dressed in an antique zoot suit and a white ten-gallon hat. As I passed by we regarded each other as two wary lizards might stare as they slithered across some barren stone.

  There were smells of cooking and incense and various human odors. And then there was a long and clear note made by a silver trumpet. The note broke into a ripple of sounds that somehow ended up at the same clear cry. And then came an earthy “wah-wah” that drowned out all the mortality in that hall.

  I followed the sound to a door toward the end of the hall. On my way I passed shabby scenes of men and women in various states of undress. Some were lovers oblivious of my passage. Others were looking for someone to come down that hall and deliver them from their lives.

  Lips McGee’s door was ajar. I knocked gently and his trumpet answered, “Wah?”

  “It’s me, Lips, Easy Rawlins,” I said.

  “Com’on in, Easy.”

  The room wasn’t big but it was larger than Gregory Jewel’s whole house. There was a couch, a maple table with two oak chairs, and a sink over which a window peeked out onto Central Avenue. The walls were all covered with photographs of Lips’s life. The larger ones were of him and the jazz greats. But there were older, brownish pictures of him playing in the one-room clubs and jazz parades down in Houston. He was old by then but in his heyday Lips was what every black man wanted to be. He was dapper and self-assured, articulate, and had money in his pocket. He was always surrounded by beautiful women, but what really made me jealous was the way he looked when he played his horn.

  He’d stand straight and tall and play that horn as if every bit of his soul could be concentrated through a silver pipe. Sweat shone across his wide forehead and his eyes became shiny slits. When Lips hit the high notes he made that horn sound like a woman who was where she wanted to be when she was in love with you.

  The smell of marijuana permeated the room. Lips was standing next to the sink; he’d probably been serenading the street. He wore blue jeans and a yellow T-shirt that hung loose on his bony frame. His hair was longish and combed backward. His orangy-brown chin was whiskered with black and white stubs.

  “Wah-wah,” he blew. And then, “What you doin’ here, Easy Rawlins?”

  I sat down in one of the chairs.

  “Makin’ a social call,” I said.

  Lips laughed. He took a plate of something that looked like chili-out-of-a-can from the stove and placed it across from me on the table. Far away I heard sirens, lots of sirens. They were police sirens, not fire trucks.

  “That’s what the snake say t’the hare when he comin’ down his hole,” Lips said.

  “What’s that?”

  “ ‘Makin’ a social call.” Lips chuckled. “An’ the first thing he do is eat his host.”

  “That might be,” I said. “But I ain’t hungry t’night.” I took a pint bottle from my jacket pocket. Lips grinned a little wider.

  “I see,” the old man said.

  He brought out two jelly jars and filled them with my scotch. He blew a kiss to his glass before sipping. Then he smiled up at the ceiling.

  Lips told me stories that I’d heard a hundred times before but I still laughed heartily. When we got quiet Lips would take a sip of whiskey, then a bite of chili. Then he’d blow a few notes, maybe even the beginning of a song—a nursery r
hyme or jazz hit. He asked me about Mouse and Dupree Bouchard and Jackson Blue.

  After we cracked the seal on the second bottle, Lips asked, “What you want here wit’ me, man?”

  “You hear ’bout these women gettin’ killed?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m lookin’ around with Quinten Naylor to find out who did it.”

  “Uh-huh?”

  “One’a them girls, the last one, was called Robin Garnett in the newspaper, but the name she used down here was Cyndi Starr.”

  For a moment the old man looked even older. Then he licked his lips.

  “Yeah,” he said. “That white girl lived down here sometimes. I wondered where she went. Cyndi Starr, I wonder where you are, baby. I wonder wonder where.” He smiled a different, softer smile for her memory.

  “You knew her?” I asked.

  When Lips looked me in the eye I knew he was going to go off on what we used to call his “wild talk.” But that was the only way he knew how to say what he meant, so I took another drink and wished that I had been seated on the more comfortable couch.

  “I been here thirteen years and there ain’t never been no change. I mean, somebody moves out but then someone just like him, or her or what-have-you, moves in and it’s the same. It’s like you get so high like in a dream where you flyin’, an’ sometimes you think, ‘What am I doin’ up here?’ And you go crashin’ down on the ground, an’ sometimes you don’t even care. ’Cause nuthin’ matters when a wave pulls out. The sand smooths over any footprint that was there.

  “You ast me if I know Cyndi Starr but you ain’t askin’ ’bout Hilda Wildheart. You ain’t askin’ ’bout Curtis Mayhew. You know what happened t’them?”

  I shook my head.

  “Same fuckin’ thing. Same fuckin’ thing. They gone. Gone. That’s all she wrote fo’them. Beautiful girl all sad inside want some man t’make her feel good. Put on some silky clothes an’ some makeup. All the wolves up an’ down the street make some noise an’ she fo’get how bad she feel. Whas wrong with that? Huh? Whas wrong?”

  There wasn’t an answer.

  “Hilda Wildheart, Sonia Juarez, Yakeesha Lewis… ” He counted them off on his fingers as he went. “Tiffany Marlowe, even yo’ Lois Chan been up here. Broken hearts, broken jaws, broken necks. All the pussy you could ever wanna be ’round. You know, mo’ than one’a them girls kept me company when I was so low I couldn’t even go outside. They brew some tea an’ love me. Yeah,” he shrugged, “they mighta lifted five bucks after I was asleep but they didn’t take it all. Uh-uh. Them girls was all beautiful, an’ here you go askin’ ’bout Cyndi Starr like this is the first thing you know ’bout them po’ girls. Young boys like you come up here t’get some pussy an’ that’s it. You gone.”

  Lips shrugged again. I poured him another glass of whiskey.

  “She come up here laughin’ an’ singin’ with her girlfriends an’ her boyfriends,” Lips said. I knew that he was talking about Cyndi because now he seemed to be talking to me rather than at me. “She used to come in here an’ tell me things till even my old dick would get hard. She liked to say how she could handle two men till they was like jelly. She had a foul mouth but she was so sweet sometimes.”

  “When was the last time she was here?”

  “Maybe I seen’er about three weeks ago. She was gone for a while before that.”

  “Gone where?”

  “She was just gone there fo’while. She had this other white girl stayin’ there. Sylvia.”

  “How long was she gone?”

  “I dunno. Three, four months. ’Bout that. Maybe more.”

  “What was this Sylvia girl like?”

  “Raven. Long raven hair and black eyes and white skin so pale that it was always a shock t’look at her.”

  “Where’s she now?”

  Lips shook his head. “Don’t know that either. She stayed a couple’a days when Cyndi got back but then she went. That was ’bout two months ago. Yeah, them girls was thick.”

  “Cyndi have a job?”

  “She’d take off her clothes down at Melodyland.”

  “What room was hers?”

  “The purple. Three doors down on the other side.”

  I thanked him for his help and toasted his virility.

  Before I left he said, “You drinkin’ pretty heavy there, boy. Better slow it down some.”

  “I got a lot on my mind, old man. Too much.”

  “You ain’t gonna have much of a mind left if you keep on like that.”

  I laughed. “I’m still young, Lips. I can take it.”

  “I seen men turn old in six months under that bottle, man. I seen’em die in a year.”

  I USED MY POCKETKNIFE, pried open the lock with no trouble.

  Cyndi Starr’s room had no history. Everything was right then. The single mattress on the floor in the corner. The signed photographs of Little Richard and Elvis Presley tacked to the wall. There were three partially eaten cans of pork and beans in the sink, each one with a spoon handle sticking out. A cardboard box made her night table. The Formica-top dining table was covered with movie magazines and one hardcover book. That was a thick brown tome entitled Industrial Psychology.

  “Can I help you?” The voice behind me was musical and delicate.

  When I turned I was met by a small, fair man. His skin was almost white. He had a sparse goatee, long eyelashes, and brown suede pants and shirt. His shoes were made from blue fake alligator skin.

  “No,” I told him.

  He cocked his head to the side and looked me up and down with a hint of a smile on his lips. He met my eye and blinked slowly. “Then what you doin’ in here?”

  “Lookin’ fo’ Cyndi.”

  He looked around the room. “She ain’t here. An’ even if she was, why you be openin’ her do’ if she don’t answer?”

  I was nervous in front of this brazen little man. His frank stares and insinuating smiles, coupled with the alcohol, made me uncomfortable.

  “Ain’t you heard, man?” I asked.

  “Heard what?” His eyes hardened into the question.

  “She’s dead. Murdered by the man been killin’ them girls.”

  “No.” His lower lip trembled. He clasped his hands and took a step toward me.

  “Raped her and brutalized her and then mutilated her body.” I nodded. I felt better now that my inquisitor was disturbed.

  He took another step and grabbed my sleeve.

  “No,” he said again. His eyes were begging me.

  “An’ I’m here fo’ the police… ”

  He didn’t give me enough time to finish. The little man stepped away from me, putting his hands on his thighs. His face was hard and unyielding. He backed straight to the door and then turned. He was gone in less than three heartbeats.

  I looked around a little bit more. I found a yearbook from Los Angeles High School, the class of ’55, and a folder full of professional photos of Cyndi. In one shot she posed naked, except for a G-string and her fingertips, feigning surprise on an empty stage. The spotlight on her was in the shape of a butterfly against the black backdrop. The White Butterfly. In a corner there was a box of clothes. She had everything in there, from a UCLA letter sweater to a pair of glitter-encrusted high heels.

  I studied another of the photos for a while. It was her looking over her bare shoulder at the camera. The face was hard and beautiful. She wasn’t healthy in that photograph. None of the force or sensuality in that snarl appeared in her college photo. I understood why no one but John had recognized her. Cyndi Starr was a different woman on Hollywood Row.

  I felt like a child’s pallbearer going down the stairs with her box of memories.

  — 15 —

  I CALLED THE POLICE STATION from a phone booth in the street. Quinten agreed to wait for me at his office. He was all starch and good manners.

  When I was going up the stairs to the station door I saw five men coming down. Four of them were policemen surrounding Roger Vaughn.
He was manacled, hand and foot. He looked up at me and I remembered all the sirens I’d heard at Hollywood Row.

  When Roger saw me he put both hands out to me. Instinctively I reached out too. But two of the cops clubbed him. He slumped down and they dragged him off to a van in the street.

  The desk sergeant knew who I was and waved me by as I went up to him. But I stopped to ask, “What they got that man out there for?”

  “Double killing. He found some guy on top of his wife.”

  * * *

  BY THAT TIME Quinten had his own office with a clouded glass door that had his name and rank stenciled on it in green paint. I lifted my hand but he must have recognized the shadow against the pane.

  “Come on in, Ezekiel,” he said.

  It had been two days and he was five years older. His cannonball shoulders sagged down a little farther and his head tilted to the side as if he found it too heavy to keep erect. When I came into the room he sighed like a dogface at the end of a thirty-mile forced march.

  “You look half dead, Q-man,” I said, coining the nickname that was to follow him the rest of his life.

  “And you’re drunk,” was his reply.

  “It’s a hard world out there, brother. A little booze keeps ya from sinkin’ to the bottom of the barrel.”

  “What do you want?”

  “I’m feeling generous, officer. I’ve come to share what I know with you-all.” I took a seat in a chair set by the door.

  “What’s that?”

  “Them first three women was killed just about two weeks apart, right?”

  Quinten nodded and his eyes drooped as if he might nod off on me.