Black Betty

by Mosley, Walter

  “No thanks. I don’t drink.” I smiled and took the .38 from my back pocket. I cracked it open to make sure that it was loaded—it was—then I cocked back the hammer and placed it down on the table. I can learn a lesson, even from a wild man like Styles. I placed the pistol closer to me than to him, but I was standing so he had the closer reach.

  “It’s gonna go off we go after it,” I said.

  Saul split his eyes between the pistol and my hand. A thin line of sweat formed across his upper lip.

  “You see, it’s at times like these that we truly are equals. No bullshit now.” I held up the lecturing finger of my left hand. I needed the right to go after that gun if I had to.

  But I didn’t think that I’d have to. Saul Lynx was a cautious man. He didn’t have a thing incriminating in that office. And that was amazing, because even your most pious, God-fearing man has got something to incriminate him. That’s just the way men are.

  “What’s this about, Rawlins?”

  “Hodge hire you?”

  He looked up at me, hefting that potato he used as a nose between blazing green eyes. “You’re off the case. Keep the retainer.”

  “You don’t want me t’find Betty?”

  “I’d appreciate it if you left me my property.” He nodded toward the pistol.

  “Who hired you, man?” I asked.

  Saul’s shoulders twitched. That was as close as he came to lunging for that gun.

  “I don’t have to answer your questions. I paid you good money and you haven’t produced a thing as far as I can see. You don’t scare me.”

  I believed him. Mr. Lynx was a tough man. That’s why his nose was so misshapen.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll drop it ’cause I don’t have anything in it. But if the cops come to me about Marlon or Betty or anybody else I looked into for you—I’ma give’em your name an’ number.”

  Lynx didn’t even shrug.

  I snatched the pistol from the table so fast that he didn’t even have time to blink.

  “I’ll send this back to ya,” I said. Disarming desperate white men was becoming a habit.

  He didn’t get up to see me out the door.

  OUTSIDE I REALIZED how dark it was in Saul’s office. He didn’t have any windows up front and the brightest lamplight couldn’t have been over sixty watts.

  Out in front of the bodega was a big yellow trash can filled with popsicle sticks, cupcake wrappers, wine and beer bottles in sleek brown bags—and one large paper bag that seemed to be full.

  I thought of Saul’s clean floors and his neat trash can.

  The bag had the rind of a pastrami on rye, an empty bottle of Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray soda, and various papers—some of which had Saul Lynx’s name written on them.

  I carried my find back to the car wondering why I bothered.

  I guess some habits only die with the man.

  — 15 —

  THE KIDS AND I WENT THROUGH the trash bag together. It was a little game we played. We took out our own trash can from under the sink and Feather looked for things I needed to keep so I could read them. Other things were all dirty and needed to be thrown away.

  “How come you wanna be readin’ ’em?” Feather asked.

  “Because it’s a secret and I’m trying to find it out.”

  Jesus helped his sister sift through the papers and food containers.

  There was hardly anything worthwhile to be found. Just a few small sheets of paper with notes scribbled down on them. One had “Calvin Hodge” written on it with an address on Robertson Boulevard. I knew the building. I had already looked up Hodge’s address but it was good to know for a fact that the two of them were linked. Another paper had “Elizabeth Eady” on it. It was also inscribed with the initials FL and Odell’s address.

  There was a third paper that said simply “Ronald Hawkes” with a question mark next to the name.

  “DADDY, I’M HUNGRY,” Feather whined. “What we have for dinner?”

  “Little girls,” I said in as close to a Boris Karloff accent as I could manage. I let my eyes grow big and developed a big hump on my back.

  “Ahhhhhhhh!” Feather screamed with glee. She flew out of the kitchen. I came shambling on behind her chanting, “Girly arms, yummy good. Mmmmm.”

  We went all through the house. Over furniture and under tables. Jesus joined us, making the little girl as happy as a human being can be. We went out the back door and all around the yard until finally a very tired, almost frightened little girl got caught between her two men in a corner of the back fence.

  “Nooooooo!” she screamed but I grabbed her with my one good monster arm and hefted her up so that I could take big old monster bites out of her stomach.

  But then I stopped.

  “Ugh! Raw!” I growled to Jesus. “Gotta cook her. Put her in oven.”

  So we threw the protesting little baby into the backseat and drove off to Mama’s Hacienda, where we had all kinds of tacos and burritos with beans.

  I GOT THREE CALLS THAT NIGHT.

  The first one was from a woman whose voice was unfamiliar to me.

  “Mr. Rawlins?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m Gwendolyn Barnes. We met the other day.”

  “I’m sorry but I don’t remember. Who are you?”

  “I answered the door at Sarah Cain’s.”

  “Oh yeah, the white girl with the tan.” I don’t know why I said that. I guess I was still angry about everything that had happened. “What do you want?”

  “Miss Cain would like to see you.”

  “Where’d you pick up this number?”

  “Mr. Hodge gave it to Miss Cain. He didn’t think that it was a good idea to call you but she insisted. Will you come?”

  “No thanks. They canceled my passport to Beverly Hills. I can’t go back there for five years at least.” I was only half joking.

  “She won’t be at that house,” Gwendolyn told me. “She’s at her farm. You take the Coast Highway almost to Oxnard but then take the exit to Lea. There’s a yellow phone booth at the end of the road. You can call us from there.” She rattled off a phone number and I jotted it down. “I can come lead you to the house from there. It’s hard to find if you don’t know the shortcut.”

  “Thanks for the directions, Miss Barnes, but I don’t think I’ma be usin’em. You see, I don’t have anything to do with your employer anymore. We’re quits.”

  There was a muffled sound over the phone. I heard some voices and then some kind of commotion.

  Finally I said, “Hello? Hello? I’m not just gonna sit here and hold the phone for you, honey.”

  “Just a minute,” she said, exasperated with me. Then, “Miss Cain assures you that only she and I will be here when you come and she’s willing to pay you six hundred and thirty-seven dollars for your trouble.”

  Must have been the loose change at the bottom of her purse.

  “I don’t think so, Miss Barnes. I’m not sure that I can afford any more of your boss’s money.”

  “Please, Mr. Rawlins,” she said as if I knew her, as if I owed her something.

  “I’ll tell you what. I’ll sleep on it. If you hear from me tomorrow, let’s say about two, well then, you will. Okay?”

  “Thank you. Thank you very much.”

  “Don’t thank me unless I call.”

  I held down the phone button and thought about the women. I liked women, at least I liked something about them. I liked how they walked and smelled and how they looked at the world in a really different way than men. Because they were so different they were always full of surprises. But I’d had enough surprises.

  I was still holding the phone when it started to ring again.

  “Yeah?”

  “This is Faye Rabinowitz,” a crisp businesslike voice said. “Is Ezekiel Rawlins there?”

  “That’s me. It’s pretty late, ain’t it?”

  “I just got home from work and I thought you felt some urgency about this matter. If it’
s too late…”

  “Noooo, no. What you got?”

  “I did what you wanted, Mr. Rawlins. I asked the prosecutor’s office how my client was caught.”

  “And?”

  “Why do you want to know?”

  “I already told ya. It’s because I want some kinda way of tellin’ Raymond that it wasn’t one of his friends turned him in. Maybe they got him on clues—I don’t know. I’m tryin’ to keep your client out of trouble.”

  “Well. There really isn’t much to say. He was turned in. It was an anonymous tip. Somebody, probably male, probably Negro, called in even before the shooting was reported and said, I quote, ‘It was Raymond Alexander killed Bruno Ingram in the alley off Hooper. The Lord wouldn’t let me be quiet on a night like this.’ That’s it. That’s all they had. But that, along with the weapon, was enough for a conviction.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “I’ll do what’s right.”

  “Hm,” she answered.

  After that we both hung up our phones.

  “HEY, RAYMOND. How you doin’,” I said when he answered Etta’s phone.

  “Yeah, Easy.”

  “You still lookin’ t’see if somebody at John’s turnt you in?”

  “I been lookin’ but ain’t nobody in town who was there. It’s almost like somebody warnt’em off.” He paused for a full fifteen seconds. Long enough to let me know that he suspected me. Sitting there at my kitchen table my life was in more danger than it had been in jail with Commander Styles. “But I told John that I better find me somebody quick or there will be hell to pay.”

  I couldn’t think of anything more frightening than a face-off between Mouse and John.

  “I want you to lay off doin’ anything till I see what I could see.”

  “What you mean?”

  “I got an idea, that’s all. I heard somethin’ and I wanna chase it down.”

  “Uh-huh. Well, you do that, Easy. But I’ma be doin’ what I’m doin’ too. Maybe we meet in the middle somewhere.”

  Jesus was standing around the kitchen table when I got off the phone with Mouse.

  “How you doin’, boy?”

  He nodded at me.

  “It’s after eleven. Time for you to get to bed.”

  He smiled again. Jesus was always smiling at me. Ever since I took him out of a life of child prostitution he loved me. My first wife, Regina, had told me that there was probably something wrong deep down inside him, that there was a dark anger going to come out someday.

  Maybe so.

  But I wasn’t going to treat him like a monster just because he was supposed to be one.

  “You ever going to talk to me, boy?” I asked his back as he went through the door. He stopped for half a second and then kept on moving.

  I WAS LOOKING THROUGH the want ads at one in the morning when the phone rang again.

  I could have been a plumber, electrician, mechanic, or salesman. Gotten up every morning at six-thirty and dragged myself in to work by eight. I could have said “yessir” and “no sir” and taken home a paycheck. I could have been promoted because I was a good worker; spent every day for the next twenty-five years going into an office or workshop, and then one day they’d put me out and in a year there wouldn’t be a soul to remember that I had ever been.

  “Hello?” I said into the phone.

  Instead of an answer I got an earful of wet rolling coughs.

  “Mofass?”

  “Yeah…” He coughed some more. “Mr. Rawlins.”

  “How you doin’, man?” I asked.

  “Got this cold,” he hacked. “But I’m okay.”

  “It’s kinda late t’be callin’, ain’t it?”

  “I need to talk,” he said. I realized that he was whispering. Mofass’s regular voice, even with the emphysema, was loud and hearty.

  “Talk then.”

  “Not now. Tomorrow. You could come over here after ten.”

  “Okay. I got stuff to talk to you about anyway.”

  I FOLDED THE PAPER and put it in the trash. Maybe in a few weeks I’d get a job, but not that day.

  — 16 —

  MOFASS AND CLOVIS had a big house on Peters Lane up in the Baldwin Hills. I’d had a house down the hill from there once but money troubles forced me to sell it and move down into the rental neighborhood. Grover and Tyrone came out at nine and got into a Ford Galaxy that was wedged in between a Cadillac and a Falcon in the driveway. They drove right across the yard and onto the street, leaving deep furrows in the lawn.

  Clavell, Renee, Antoinette, and Fitts came out, one after the other, over the next half hour. They all got into different cars and went in different ways. Clavelle drove right past my car but I just held up a newspaper with my paper coffee cup in one hand and he didn’t know me from any other laborer waiting for a friend.

  Clovis was out of the door at nine forty-five. She said something into the house, I figured it was to Mofass. She shut the door, checking to make sure that it wouldn’t come open. Then she looked all around the house and up and down the street.

  Maybe she smelled me.

  Finally she got into her Caddy and drove off down the opposite way from where I was parked.

  I waited until ten and then went to pay my respects.

  I had expected Mofass to answer but it wasn’t him. It was Jewelle, a little cousin of Clovis’s who was brought along with the rest of the family up to L.A.

  “Good morning, Mr. Rawlins,” she said as if having rehearsed the line in a grade-school chant. Jewelle was sixteen and already a senior in high school.

  “Mofass here?”

  “Uh-huh. He waitin’ for you.”

  We went through the big messy house together. Men’s and women’s clothes were thrown everywhere. On the banister up the stairs, on the floor in the hall. There were empty plates on the dining-room table and cardboard boxes torn open and left on the chairs.

  Thick drapes were pulled over the windows and all the lights in the house were on. There were newspapers spread out under a chair in the hallway with clumps of cut hair all over them.

  “It’s a mess,” I said.

  “You should see the kitchen,” Jewelle said. “An’ they want me t’clean it. They said I couldn’t go to school until the house gets clean. Do that look like my hair to you?” She had turned and was looking me in the eye.

  “No, ma’am,” I answered obediently.

  That got her to smile.

  “Mr. Rawlins.” Mofass was standing in the doorway to the den. He wore a dark purple robe that hung open to his navel showing his huge gut and his once powerful chest.

  We all went in. The den in that house was also the office, so it was kept neat. All the furniture was mahogany. A desk, two file cabinets, and two chairs upholstered with red velour. One of the chairs was actually large enough for two. Mofass and Jewelle sat in that one.

  That girl, who was looking more like a woman every second, grabbed Mofass’s hand and squeezed it a brief moment before clasping her own hands together between her knees.

  “What’s this all about?” I asked Mofass.

  “What you mean?”

  “All this sneakin’ around.”

  Jewelle wore a one-piece rayon dress. The dress was tan, two shades lighter than her skin. Her hair was hot-comb-straightened and lightened around the edges to a gold color that women were fond of in those days.

  Mofass on the other hand was an ebony man with sad and sagging yellow eyes. He took two breaths for each one of Jewelle’s.

  “I hear you was down at Esquire the other day,” Mofass said.

  I stayed quiet.

  He took twenty little gasps before saying, “I want my business back.”

  “Yeah? What you want me to do about that?”

  “I need to get Jewelle here somewheres safe and then I need me some p’otection ’gainst Clovis’s brood.”

  “What’s wrong with you and Clovis?”

  “She been stealin’ from Uncle Willy,” Jewelle blurted ou
t. “She took everything from outta his bank account and she won’t let him have nuthin’. Treatin’ him like he was some crazy old man.”

  “She won’t even let me out the house, Mr. Rawlins. I’m sick, but that don’t mean I’m feebleminded, do it?”

  “Naw,” I said. I was thinking that maybe this trouble could help me. The first thing a black man and a poor man learns is that trouble is all he’s got so that’s what he has to work with.

  “I still gotta couple’a bank accounts she cain’t get into. She wants me to sign over my power of attorney. But if I do that then she could sell my stuff and…” Mofass paused for a moment. It had a melodramatic effect but I could tell that he was hurting, “…she got a husband that she done drug up from Dallas.”

  “What?” I tried not to laugh. Sometimes you’re hoping that things will be different, that men and women will change over the years and become those good, if hard, folks that the preachers talk about. But it never changes. And if something does get good for a while you could be sure that it will turn sour before you have time to get any real pleasure.

  “It ain’t funny, man,” Mofass wheezed. “Right down the hill.” There were tears in his eyes.

  “She there right now.” Jewelle had snagged Mofass’s hand again.

  “So what is it that you need from me?”

  “Take Jewelle somewhere safe.”

  “What for? Clovis is her family.”

  “Yeah, but she knows how close we is. She’d send her back down Texas or make her life hell up here. She’d think Jewelle helped me if I cut outta here.”

  Mofass was in his late fifties but he seemed older than that. He was from the old days when there was a black community almost completely sealed off from whites. He wore old-fashioned clothes. He belonged to a Negro social club that excluded poor blacks. Clovis got many of her investors from among Mofass’s friends.

  Jewelle was just a child. But give a girl child a hard life and you make a woman out of her faster than she can make babies.