Black Betty

by Mosley, Walter

The lane led to a circular drive wide enough that visitors could park there while other cars could drive past and let passengers off at the front door.

  The building, you couldn’t call it a house really, was three tall stories high. The marble pillars flanked a front door that was at the center of a wall of glass. You could see the long staircase that led upward to floors above. The entrance hall was pink stone.

  I wasn’t surprised that a Negro woman opened the front door. Her skin was definitely brown but on the lighter side. Freckles were scattered around her upturned nose. It’s always strange to see a black person’s nose turned up. Instead of me being put off by her arrogant stare I just wanted to get to know her better.

  “Hi,” I said, smiling and hoping that she’d like me.

  “Hello,” the pretty young woman said, devoid of any emotion. The black dress defined her as a maid, but she wore large gaudy earrings and the material of the dress was a fine cotton, maybe even silk. She might have been an employee but she was secure in that position.

  “Can I talk to the lady?”

  “It would be inconvenient at the moment for Miss Cain to receive anyone.” She sounded just like a white woman. There wasn’t a hint of down home in her voice. “So if you’d like to leave a message I’ll make sure that she gets it.”

  I let my head loll forward while I leered. “No,” was all I said.

  “Why not?” She was indignant.

  “You go tell the lady that if she wants to talk to me about Marlon Eady and a certain check that she wrote to him then she could un-inconvenience herself and come on down here to see me. I don’t have to sit on her good chairs or nuthin’. I’ll be standin’ right here, waiting for her t’come on down.”

  “Have you spoken to… to… Mr. Eady?” she asked instead of running my errand.

  “That depends,” I answered.

  “Depends on what?”

  “Do you know him?”

  “His sister worked for us. She left recently.”

  “Us?”

  “I mean here, at the house,” she answered, slightly flustered.

  “We talkin’ ’bout Betty, right?”

  A light went on in the maid’s eyes. “Do you know Elizabeth?”

  “Can I talk to the lady?” I smiled.

  The maid’s nostrils flared and her eyes widened. She was definitely a pretty woman. “Can’t you answer a question?”

  “Can you?”

  She was put off balance by my manner. It was as if nobody had ever refused her anything. I was some strange beast to her; and she was either going to cut my throat—or ride me.

  “Wait here,” she commanded. Then she slammed the door in my face.

  I waited about five minutes or so thinking about all the people who’ve slammed doors on me. I had counted up to twenty-three, with a couple of good chuckles, when the door opened again.

  This time there was a real white woman. She was in her early forties, light-haired—blond going gray—and slight. Her expression gave you the impression that she was thinking about something very far away and very beautiful—if sad. All in all she seemed like one of those other-worldly heroines in the romantic novels of the Brontë sisters.

  “Yes?” she asked as if to someone behind me.

  “Mrs. Cain?” I was noticing the gold band on her finger.

  “The Mrs. I am is Mrs. Hawkes,” she said. The name seemed to cause a bitter taste in her mouth.

  “There must be some kind of mistake, ma’am. I’m here to see Sarah Cain.”

  “Yes?”

  “Is that you?”

  “Hawkes is my married name. I don’t use it, but if you’re going to call me Mrs. that’s the name to use.”

  “So… you’re Sarah Cain?”

  “Her name is Mrs. Hawkes.” A pale young man came up beside the woman. He had a delicate build for a man and his chin looked as though it had never sprouted a hair.

  They were definitely related.

  “Arthur.” The lady patted her thigh and Arthur moved closer to her—a quarter step behind.

  “I’m Miss Cain,” she said. “Ronald Hawkes is Arthur’s father.” Then, almost as an afterthought, “He doesn’t live with us anymore.”

  “But he’s still my father,” Arthur said, more to his mother than to me.

  While we spoke, Sarah Cain’s gaze had slowly come into focus. “And you are, sir?”

  “Rawlins, ma’am. I’m a… an old friend of Marlon Eady.”

  “Yes.” She gave me a watery smile. “He was Elizabeth’s brother, her half brother actually.”

  “Was?”

  “Did I say was? I hardly knew the man. He came to stay with Elizabeth now and then. That was until my father put his foot down.” Distaste twisted her lips again.

  “Is Betty here?” I asked.

  “No,” she said. I got the feeling that she was about to say more, but then changed her mind.

  “Is your father in?”

  “Heavens no. He died two weeks ago Saturday.” There was no sorrow in Sarah Cain’s declaration. She didn’t actually smile, but her posture improved.

  The boy, Arthur, wore white linen pants and a red short-sleeved shirt. His belt was corded cotton and his moccasins were drab green. His mother sported a thickly embroidered Japanese-style orange silk jacket that hung down over loose black pants. Her feet were bare except for the bright red lacquer on the nails.

  The sun was hot on my back but the air coming out of the house felt like church; cool and angelic. I reminded myself that Satan was an angel too.

  I was trying to frame my next question when I heard him.

  “Boy,” a heavy masculine southern drawl declared. I couldn’t have been more shocked if someone had slapped me across the face. “What business you got here?”

  Coming across the entrance hall was a white Texan. A large-framed man with lots of meat to fill out the bones. He wore a cowboy hat, sandpaper jeans, and a blue checkered shirt.

  Behind the Texan came the maid again. It was a regular party.

  “Mr. Rawlins came to speak to me, Calvin,” Miss Cain said.

  I appreciated her words but the cowboy was a commanding force.

  “Rawlins,” I told him. “Ezekiel Rawlins. I came here because I found something that Miss Cain gave to a friend of mine.”

  “And what is that now?”

  Everyone was waiting for me to answer the Texan’s question. I would have preferred to be alone with the lady, but that didn’t seem possible.

  “I was lookin’ for my friend Betty, but I couldn’t find her so I went over to Marlon’s place. But then Marlon wasn’t around neither. I went back a couple’a times and when he wasn’t never there I got scared and went inside to see if he left somethin’ to say where he was. All I found was this here.” I held up the five-thousand-dollar check. “It’s written to Marlon. I couldn’t find him but I found this check at his house. And I couldn’t imagine anybody as poor as he is leavin’ this kinda money around.” I paused for a second. “You’d have to kill Marlon for this kinda money.”

  “He’s daid?” Calvin asked.

  “That’s what the lady seems to think…”

  “I said no such thing,” she piped in.

  “…but I don’t know,” I finished my sentence. “All I found was the check. Marlon wasn’t nowhere to be seen.” I spoke in a dialect that they would expect. If I gave them what they expected then they wouldn’t suspect me of being any kind of real threat.

  “So you really don’t even know that he’s missin’,” Calvin said, and I knew for a fact that he was a lawyer in spite of his rough clothes. “He could be off with some girl.”

  I had better things to do with my breath than to waste it arguing with a lawyer. He was an immense man, resembling a demon out of Hindu mythology that had been sculpted from a big square rock. He looked vital, like he could take it if it came down to that. He was rolling two small black stones in his hand.

  “You better get out of the heat, Mom,” the
pale boy said to Sarah Cain. “We can take care of this.”

  Sarah smiled at her son and nodded. “Thank you, Arthur.”

  “Miss Cain?” I asked before they could leave.

  “Yes?”

  “Why’d you give Marlon five thousand dollars?”

  “It is mine,” she said, peering at the check in my hand. “But I didn’t write it. And it would have bounced if I had. Father never let me have much money, and now that he’s dead the estate is in the hands of lawyers.” She gave Calvin an evil stare. “Until they figure out the will.”

  “Let me take a look at that,” Calvin said.

  “Excuse me.” I snatched the check away. “But who are you?”

  “My name is Calvin Hodge, boy. I’m the family lawyer.”

  Sarah Cain bridled out of her fey stance when Calvin said that. She looked as if she was about to protest. But Calvin gave her an evil grin and her complaint withered.

  I was standing two feet from the Texan. Between his rank pipe smoker’s breath and sweat I felt like withering myself.

  “Are you the one who hired me to find Elizabeth Eady?”

  “What? Calvin, you did that? I thought you said…” Sarah started saying.

  “I haven’t hired you for a damn thing, boy. Now let me have a look at Miss Cain’s property.”

  “This property,” I said, pocketing the check, “belongs to Marlon Eady. I’m trying to find him and his sister. I was hired to find his sister by someone claiming to represent Miss Cain.”

  “You, Calvin?” Sarah Cain said. She even pointed a finger at him as if she were a witness to his crime.

  “Nonsense. I never heard of you before this minute.”

  “Have you found Elizabeth?” Miss Cain wanted to know.

  “No, ma’am. Just your check.”

  I was looking right at the woman, but then Calvin Hodge pressed his reeking bulk in between us.

  “Will you give me that check, son?”

  “Do I look like one of your relatives?” I asked instead of hitting him in the face.

  “We can make it easy,” he said. “You hand me that check now and there won’t be any difficulties down the hill.”

  “This here check belongs to Marlon. I’d think about givin’ it to ya if you said that you were the one hired Saul Lynx.”

  Calvin Hodge shook his head at me. Behind him the maid and boy were holding Sarah Cain’s hands. They all seemed to be afraid, but I couldn’t tell who was the source of their fear, me or Calvin Hodge.

  “I’ll be seein’ ya,” the cowboy lawyer threatened.

  I took a full step backwards before I turned my back on him.

  TWELVE BLOCKS AWAY I began to feel safe. Once I was past danger I started to wonder; Calvin Hodge had to be the man who hired Lynx.

  “It’s her lawyer who hired me,” Lynx had said.

  Didn’t he?

  And if Hodge wasn’t the lawyer then it was Lynx who was lying. Maybe Lynx was lying anyway.

  When I was a younger man I would have had to figure that puzzle out. But at forty-one I knew when to call it quits. I had certainly earned my two hundred dollars.

  WHEN THE SIREN SOUNDED I figured that it was some overzealous cop who didn’t like the idea of a black man cruising around in Beverly Hills. I pulled to the curb at Wilshire and Doheny. A black-and-white car careened to a stop right in front of me. Its two brothers braked behind.

  Six men! Policemen. They were around the car and in the doors before I could even think.

  I was dragged from the front seat and thrown to the asphalt.

  “Spread’em!”

  “Get the keys. Search the vehicle.”

  They went through my clothes and cuffed my hands behind my back.

  “Hey, man! What’d I do?” I shouted.

  That got me a nightstick pressed hard across the back of my neck.

  “You just shut up,” an angry voice whispered in my ear.

  I glanced up to the side and saw a young white woman pull away a small child who was staring at me. The child was trying to ask her mother a question but the woman gave no answer.

  I heard the trunk of the car come open and breathed a sigh of relief that I had the sense to store the shotgun before braving Beverly Hills.

  Sawed-off shotguns were illegal in the state of California.

  They picked me up by the armpits and threw me into one of the cars. Two men got into the back with me. Grim men with flawless white faces.

  I remember thinking that a man who’s never been scarred doesn’t have any mercy. He doesn’t know what pain really feels like.

  — 11 —

  THEY PUT ME IN A SORT of meeting room with bars. There was a long beech table surrounded by beech chairs on a buffed parquet pine floor. Through the bars on the window I could see down onto Santa Monica Boulevard. The cars were going about their business. Not one of those drivers knew that I was bunged up in jail for no reason. And if any of them had found out they wouldn’t have cared. And even if they did care there wasn’t any help for me.

  The meeting room didn’t have a toilet. There was a tall aluminum ashtray, though, it was a freestanding cone that had a shallow dish of sand nestled up top. When I took the dish off I saw that the cone was hollow, so I relieved myself there. I had to move my bowels too but decided to wait for my jailer’s generosity.

  I waited for hours.

  Nobody entered the room until almost night.

  I sat at the window thinking about what a fool I was to get into a mess like that when I had children who expected me home.

  I watched the sun go down and the car lights come on. I banged on the door and yelled a couple of times but nobody came and nobody answered. I knew that all this was designed to frighten me.

  It worked.

  Mouse came into my mind with the sunset. He’d spent almost five years in a cell worse than this one. Here I was running after shadows and dreams when I should have been trying to keep Mouse from killing whatever poor fool turned him in.

  I thought about Jesus talking. About Feather crying over where her daddy had gone to.

  Something had happened to Marlon. Maybe he was dead. Betty was still missing and I didn’t have a clue where she might have been. All I had was some half-truths from Saul Lynx and a check written out to Marlon for five thousand dollars. Actually the cops had the check. They had everything I owned.

  And I still didn’t know a thing.

  The cops came in when I’d given up trying. My gut felt like there was a bowling ball lodged inside. My tongue was dry. My stomach had given up grumbling and died.

  There were three of them. A little man in gray trousers and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up past his bony elbows. He wore gold-rimmed glasses and had thin, milky skin with blue veins just below the surface. There was a uniformed cop dressed in a black uniform. He had ironed his uniform that day. By the way he held his hat under his left arm, military-style, I believed that he ironed it every morning. He was a tall man, well-built and self-assured. His brown hair and brown eyes jarred slightly with the paleness of his skin.

  But it was the third man whom I paid attention to. He was at least six and a half feet tall. Broad-shouldered and redheaded, he had the kind of swagger in his body language that reminded me of Bruno Ingram. His dark blue pants might have been police-issue but his white shirt was spun fine and tailored. His collar was open at the throat.

  His face was busy. His eyes moved over me quickly and then around the floor, then back to me. His lips went between the beginning of a friendly grin and a sneer.

  If I had seen this man walking my way on the street I’d’ve crossed to the other side.

  “Styles,” the jumpy-faced giant said, pointing at his own chest. “Commander Styles.”

  Commander.

  The little man in the gray pants was carrying a small suitcase by the handle. He put this down on the board table and opened it up to reveal a tape recorder. He took a rolled-up electric wire from the box, unraveled i
t, and plugged into a socket underneath the window that looked down onto the street.

  I weighed my chances. No matter how big a man is, a hard toe to the testicles would lay him low. The uniform was only three steps further on. Beyond him? Who knew? Freedom maybe. I could get the kids and be out of the state before midnight. Plane tickets to New York or Hawaii were eighty dollars a head; I could get that from John. We could disappear in an evening.

  But what about the little guy? The commander had to go first, then the cop. I could come back for the little guy. But what if he shouted?

  Commander Styles could see everything I thought by the way my eyes traveled from man to man.

  “Sit down, Rawlins,” he said. The .45 he pulled from his pocket looked like a cap pistol in his big hand.

  “Sit down,” he said again.

  I pulled a beech chair from the table and did as I was told.

  He sat on top of the table to my right, then put the pistol down in front of me.

  I had to go to the toilet so bad that I could have cried.

  “We don’t appreciate our citizenry being hectored,” he said.

  “Yessir,” I answered quickly and contritely, trying my best to keep the hatred out of my voice.

  He smiled, pleased that I was showing him the respect that a commander deserved.

  I’d’ve done almost anything he wanted, because I was his right then. That man had me and I’m not ashamed to admit it. If he wanted to cripple me or incarcerate me indefinitely or even if he wanted to kill me, that was his discretion. I could have been upstanding and proud and spit in that man’s eye. But then who would have raised my kids? Who would have survived to bear witness against his crimes?

  “That’s good,” he said. His hand on my shoulder felt like a bag of wet cement. “Now you just cooperate with us here and things might not get worse than they already are.”

  I held the “yessir” back in my throat. If I seemed too scared he would become brutal; bullies are like that.

  “What were you doing at the Cain residence?”

  “Looking for Elizabeth Eady.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “She’s a woman that a man named Saul Lynx—that’s L-Y-N-X—hired me to find.”