White Butterfly

by Mosley, Walter

  He went past me, driving the knife he held into the mattress rather than into me. His body was over mine and I gave him an uppercut to the groin that would have halted a gorilla.

  My attacker fell to the floor, huffing and coughing. It was a white man in a gray jail suit. I kicked him once in the ribs and then I stamped my foot down on his right hand. I was barefoot and so could feel his fingers snapping along with the pain in my heel.

  I broke his hand so I wouldn’t have to kill him. I had to do something. I would have been within my rights, as I see them, to kill a killer. But instead I disabled him.

  I picked him up and dragged him down the aisle of cages and threw him on the floor in front of the door that led to the guards’ kiosk. As I went back toward my cell a commotion began among the waking prisoners. By the time I’d locked myself away there were seven guards stumbling over the would-be killer.

  He was holding his hand over his groin and coughing. The guards looked around suspiciously.

  I noticed a very sour odor. I wondered if it was my own fear that I smelled.

  “He’s got keys!” one of the guards shouted.

  “Pssst!”

  The man yelled in pain as they pulled him from the floor. I felt my toe and realized that I had probably broken his rib too.

  “Pssst!” It was the old white man next to me.

  I looked at him and he smiled. He was missing teeth both upper and lower.

  “Hope I didn’t get your cigarettes with that piss.” His smile broadened and I realized that he was the one who’d warned me, who’d thrown water—urine—in my face.

  He giggled and said, “Lucky there warn’t no turds in there.”

  It struck me as so funny that I had to laugh, but I couldn’t laugh because that would have called attention from the guards, who were looking around for somebody to brutalize.

  I sat there with tears coming from my eyes and my diaphragm beating against my chest. When the guards went past my cell I covered myself with the blanket to keep them from smelling the guilt. The foul odor made me gag harder.

  After a while the guards took that groaning assassin away.

  “You got a good friend somewhere,” the old white man said. He wore jail gray also.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Somebody went to a lotta trouble to kill you.” He gave me a wink. “Unless you know that bozo.”

  I handed my savior five cigarettes.

  “What’s your name?” I asked him.

  “Alamo. Alamo Weir.” He winked at me and I lit his cigarette.

  I lay back in the squalor and began to think. I started with Quinten Naylor coming up to my house and driving me to the scene of a crime.

  THEY FITTED ME with jailhouse grays the next morning. We all went into a big room with a long table and ate thick oatmeal watered down with reconstituted milk. At midday they let us walk around outside of our cells. During that time Alamo stuck with the white prisoners and I moved with the colored brothers.

  After we were back in our cells I was taken to a room where Anthony Violette was waiting for me.

  “Glad to see that you’re still alive, Rawlins.” He smiled at me.

  I couldn’t say a word. A police captain wanted me dead. I was dead.

  “No smart-assed joke? Maybe you could go get me a beer.”

  “I ain’t done nuthin’ this bad to you, man,” I said.

  “That’s right. You haven’t done a damn thing to me. I’m just a police officer, doing my duty.”

  “What am I in here for?”

  “Extortion.” Violette’s smile was plastered to his face. The humiliation he felt from me was immense. One black man talking back to him in front of a superior; maybe that was enough to have me killed.

  “I didn’t extort anybody.”

  “That’s not what Vernor Garnett says.”

  “He killed her.” It jumped right out of my mouth. It was so fast and so natural that the smile was blasted from Violette’s face.

  “What?”

  “He killed his own daughter and now he’s using you and me to cover his track.”

  “Listen here, Rawlins… ”

  “No. You listen to me. Vernor was supposed to meet me yesterday afternoon in front of the main library. A woman who knew about Cyndi’s daughter was going to bring proof that the baby was Cyndi’s.”

  “What kind of proof? What baby?” the cop asked in spite of himself.

  “A bunch’a pictures and a diary that might have identified the killer, the man who was going to bring her three thousand dollars.”

  “Who’re you? Charlie Chan?”

  “What’d he say I did?”

  “What you did do. You threatened to go to the papers about his daughter. You were going to expose her life down in Watts.”

  “I bet that’s what she did. I bet she was going to tell the family about her life and her daughter too. Yeah. He already knew about the baby.”

  “You’re crazy, Rawlins. She didn’t have a kid. And Vernor didn’t know about her before you told him.”

  “She did have a baby. She’d left home and had it at one of Bull Horker’s places.”

  He hadn’t believed a word up until I mentioned Horker.

  “Where were you going to meet this girl?” The cop was fully in charge now.

  I told him my story again. He didn’t tell me a thing. When I was finished he just stood up, in a hurry to leave.

  “What about me?” I asked him.

  “Come up with the bail.”

  “But I didn’t extort nuthin’.”

  “That’s what you say. Maybe you just read the papers. We’ll see.”

  “Listen, captain,” I said in a voice loud enough to stop him for a moment. “There’s somebody trying to kill me in here.”

  Violette’s grin came back for a surprise visit. “He wasn’t going to kill you, Rawlins. He was going to stick you in the shoulder and twist a little. That’s all. You know, you need a little lesson.”

  ALAMO AND I SHARED a few cigarettes that he got and sat up all that night. He was a career criminal. He’d done everything, if you were to believe him, from petty larceny to first-degree murder.

  He’d been born in a small town in Iowa and hit the road after he was let loose from the army after World War I.

  “It just warn’t never right after that. All them dead boys,” Alamo told me. He shook his head in real remorse. “And all them people, never felt it, act like they know life. Damn. I could take their money or their life. They wouldn’t even know it was gone.”

  He was kind of crazy but I was comforted by him. After all, it was sane men who had put me in jail.

  The next morning the guard came and took me from the cell. Alamo had passed me a sharpened spoon in the night, and I had it up the long sleeve of my gray jail shirt. We walked along the big tables and out through large double doors that led to a garage.

  The guard told me to pick up a box that sat in a corner. I looked down in it to see my civilian clothes.

  “Put ’em on,” the porky, crew-cut white man said.

  I stripped right there in front of him, carefully leaving the spoon in the sleeve of the shirt. After I was dressed in my normal clothes I threw the prison garb into a corner and retrieved my weapon.

  Another guard came up and they escorted me to the driveway in front of the factory. There sat a squad car with two cops in it. The cops got out and put manacles on me, hand and foot.

  “Where’m I goin’?” I asked once.

  The police just laughed.

  I sat in the backseat on the way downtown. Every moment was very important. I looked at windows with manikins in them and got weepy. I saw a man make a left turn and I imagined myself turning the steering wheel. I thought of my baby girl and felt my inner organs shift.

  It must have taken an hour to drive all the way downtown but it seemed like fleet moments to me. They hustled me out of the car and then put me in another holding cell. I was sure that someone was going
to kill me. I had the spoon hidden in my pocket. I didn’t think that I could fight past guns with that spoon, but I could take somebody with me; at least I could do that.

  In the afternoon they took me from the holding cell and brought me to a wire-cage kiosk. A young cop pushed a big manila envelope at me. Inside it I found my wallet and keys. Those simple items scared me so much that I began to tremble. I knew that I was being set up for the kill.

  I walked out of the front door of the municipal building next to city hall with my shoulders hunched and my head down.

  “Easy!” he yelled.

  I looked up, ready to go down fighting, only to see Raymond Alexander in all his splendor. He wore a close-fitting bright checkered jacket and flared black slacks. His shoes were ivory and his hat close-brimmed. Mouse smiled for miles.

  “You look terrible,” he said.

  “What you doin’ here, Raymond?”

  “I done made yo’ bail, Easy. I got you out.”

  “What?”

  “Com’on, man, let’s get outta here. Them cops prob’ly take us in fo’loiterin’ fo’long.”

  In the car we went past the squat buildings of fifties L.A. down into Watts.

  “Where you wanna go, Easy?” Mouse asked after a while.

  “You came up with my bail?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Twenty-five hundred dollars?”

  “Uh-uh. Twenty-five thousand. Bail bondsman wouldn’t touch it.”

  “Where you come up wit’ money like that? You go to Mofass?”

  “Tried to but he’s in the hospital.”

  “Hospital?”

  “Yeah. Some white boys tore him up. He told me to tell you that them men you been doin’ business wit’ is mad in the worst way.”

  “Shit. So where’d you get the money?”

  “You sure you wanna know?” He was smiling.

  “Where?”

  “There’s this private poker game out in Gardena. I robbed it.”

  “An’ they had that much money?”

  “An’ some to boot.”

  “You kill anybody?”

  “Shot this one guy but I don’t think he gonna die. Maybe just walk funny fo’awhile.”

  — 38 —

  Bull Horker was found in an alley in San Pedro. He’d been shot seven times in the chest. The police believed that he was killed somewhere else and dumped in that alley. He was found at eight P.M. on the day I was supposed to meet Sylvia and Vernor on the library steps.

  The article said that there were signs of a struggle but there was no explanation of what the signs were.

  PRIMO AND FLOWER were glad to see us. Jesus was so happy I thought he might even talk. He ran up and put his arms around me and he just wouldn’t let go. I had to walk with his embrace and sit with him on my lap.

  MOFASS LOOKED PRETTY GOOD in his hospital bed. The rest gave him a little strength and they wouldn’t let him smoke in the ward. His only problems were a busted hand and three fractures in his left leg.

  “They th’owed me down the steps, Mr. Rawlins. They didn’t care if I was dead. They told me that if I lived I should tell my partners that they ain’t playin’.”

  Mouse grinned.

  “I’ll take care of it, William. You just rest here and try to give up them cigars. You know they gonna kill you faster than DeCampo.”

  “It’s killin’ me not to smoke.”

  I GAVE MOUSE the names of DeCampo and his associates. I told him their Culver City office address and asked him to visit each and every one of them, on the most private terms.

  “I want them to understand that killing Mofass won’t save their lives,” I said. “And, Raymond,” I pointed in his face, “I don’t want nobody dead or even wounded.”

  I’ve read many a novel that extolled the virtues of capitalism. Not one of them ever came within a mile of the truth.

  I WAS SITTING AT MY DESK in the early evening going over the accounts of the killing of Bull Horker. I was looking for something that might lead me to Vernor. But there was nothing I could see.

  I was already used to the silence. The silence we’d lived with before Regina, and then Edna. Jesus was reading a red storybook. And I was still alive.

  Then the screech of the gate brought me to the window. There was Quinten Naylor again. He was wearing the same suit he wore the day he brought me to see Bonita Edwards’s body.

  I blamed him for Regina leaving me. I blamed him but I knew I was wrong.

  He wasn’t surprised to see me open the door before he could knock. I nodded at a chair that stood where the crib had been and he sat down.

  I lit a cigarette. He brushed his hand over the top of his head.

  “The charges against you have been dropped,” Naylor said.

  “Oh? How come?”

  “They got the wife in custody.”

  “What about Milo?” That little boy was the first one I thought of.

  “Juvenile Hall.”

  “Yeah. Take it out on the kid. Put him in jail ’cause’a what his old man did.”

  “His mother was in on it. She confessed.”

  “What? Naw, I don’t believe it. I saw how she acted when I showed her the pictures.”

  “She didn’t know then. But after that she began to put things together. Garnett had told her something about the killings before their daughter was killed. She didn’t think anything until after he told her about their granddaughter. He’d been in touch with Robin even after she’d left school. He had to know that she was pregnant.”

  “So she found out when he was planning to go after Sylvia?”

  “He was scared over the diary. Robin had threatened to come to his office dressed like a whore and with a baby in her arms if he didn’t give her enough money to care for her child.”

  “Killed his own child.” I was saddened by even the possibility.

  “She drove him to it,” Quinten said. “She was a whore and she just wouldn’t straighten out. Then she threatened him.”

  “She drove him to it,” I said. “Well then, what drove her?”

  Quinten didn’t understand the question. There was right and wrong for him. He dealt with morality the way Mofass went after money. There is no such thing as a long-term investment, there’s money right now, there’s sin right now. Mofass didn’t see past the money those crooks blinded him with and Quinten Naylor couldn’t see that maybe Vernor Garnett had sown the seeds of his own destruction.

  “Where is the father?” I asked.

  “He ran after going to meet Sylvia. He killed Bull Horker, we’re pretty sure of that. Then he disappeared with the girl. We found his car in West Hollywood yesterday. Bull’s blood was all over the front seat.”

  “What happened to the girl?”

  “Nothing yet. All we know is what I said. His name and picture are out there. We’ll get him.”

  “I’m sure of that.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You’re good at gettin’ people, Quinten. You got J. T. Saunders good. When Violette thought I mighta done somethin’ he had me set up faster than you could spit.”

  “What are you talking about, Rawlins? When a prosecutor says that someone is extorting him we believe it. Especially when… ”

  “When it’s a nigger. Especially then. Yeah. What are you doing here anyway, man? You gonna send me down to jail again?”

  Naylor studied a few fingernails before he answered. “I wanted to say I’m sorry.” The words seemed to stick in his mouth. “I always thought that… I don’t know. I just always thought that I could work inside the police and keep my hands clean. I put myself above you. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that I think you live right. But maybe I’m not so much better.”

  Maybe Naylor wasn’t so bad either. I didn’t tell him that, though. I didn’t tell him a thing.

  — 39 —

  OVER THE NEXT FEW DAYS things came back into order, after a fashion. Anybody who asked me was told that Regina ha
d gone to visit her sick aunt in Arkansas.

  Jack DeCampo came to Mofass’s hospital room—to apologize. He blamed the attack on silent partners and said that he didn’t know about the mayhem until it was already too late.

  Mofass didn’t want to let him off at first but he remembered the kind of fear that Mouse could throw into a man.

  “You know, Mr. Rawlins,” Mofass told me on the phone, “that man was so pale that he coulda been two white men.”

  It was rare that Mofass and I laughed at the same joke.

  “When I told’im that our friend was on the payroll and that he didn’t have to be scared I thought he mighta kissed me.”

  “Okay, William,” I said. “Maybe next time you’ll fly right.”

  “Uh-huh. But you know there is this one thing.”

  “What?”

  “They still wanna be partners. They say they’ll give a hunnert an’ twenty-five thousand just to be twenty-five percent.” He was making deals from what might have been his deathbed.

  “Man… ”

  “They got good connections, Mr. Rawlins. They could get us deals that no bank ever gonna give a Negro.”

  The thought of DeCampo working for me sounded good. And I could use the cash for development.

  “You tell’im eighteen percent and he’s got a deal.”

  “Okay, man.” I could hear his grin over the phone.

  THE TELEPHONE RANG four days after Quinten Naylor’s visit. I still got butterflies whenever I had to answer a phone. I still thought, What can I say to her?

  “Hello?”

  “Is this a Mr. Rawlins?” a young man’s voice said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Well… I don’t know, sir. This is kinda weird.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Well, you see this couple… have been eating here at the Chicken Pit for about a week now.”

  The butterflies were beating up a storm.