A Red Death

by Mosley, Walter

  Dupree wore drab green overalls with CHAMPION sewn into the back in dull red thread. We both worked at the airplane manufacturer for some years, before the untimely death of his girlfriend, Coretta James, and my entrée into the world of real estate and favors.

  But for all their showy qualities, Dupree and Jackson were dim lights compared with Mouse.

  He wore a cream double-breasted suit with a felt brown derby and brown, round-toed shoes. His white shirt looked to be satin. His teeth were all aglitter with gold edgings, silver caps, and one lustrous blue jewel. He didn’t wear rings or bracelets, because they got in the way of weapons handling. Mouse’s color was a dusky pecan and his eyes were light gray. He was smiling and talking. People from other tables leaned away from their drinks to hear what he had to say.

  “Yeah, man,” Mouse drawled. “He waits till the bitch an’ me was in the bed, not gettin’ ready mind ya, but in the fuckin’ bed. Then he jump out an’ say, ‘Ah-hah.’”

  Mouse opened his eyes wide just the way the jealous lover must’ve done it. Everybody was laughing.

  Jackson asked, “What you do then?” in a way that let you know he felt he might need that trick one day.

  “Shit!” Mouse spat. “I kicked off the blankets an’ jumped up t’ face the mothahfuckah. I say, ‘What the fuck is this shit?’ That boy was rowdy, but you know he took out a moment t’ look down at my big hard dick. ’Cause you know I got sumpin’ give any man pause.”

  Mouse was a master storyteller. He had every man there wondering about his thing just like that jealous lover was supposed to have done.

  “Then I go upside the dude’s head wit’ a lamp from the night table. Heavy clay job, man, it was so thick that it didn’t even break. Shit. That boy hit the flo’ hard.”

  “I bet you got yo’ ass outta there in a hurry,” Jackson laughed. You could tell that Jackson had his hand on his own business under the table; that’s how some men maintain their security.

  “Run? Hell no! Man, I was really ready t’ fuck then. I pulled that bitch down in the bed an’ got me some pussy like most men on’y dream of. Run? Shit.”

  Mouse sat back and drank his beer. The men around were all laughing. Most people there were from Texas originally, but many of them didn’t know Mouse. They laughed because they loved a well-told lie. And Raymond didn’t mind, because he liked to make people laugh. But I wasn’t laughing. Neither was John behind his bar, or Odell over on his side.

  Mouse never lied. That wasn’t his way. I mean, he’d lie to you if it was business of some sort, but sitting around a bar Mouse told true stories.

  What I wondered was how hard he hit that man.

  “Easy.” Mouse smiled at me out past the edge of his audience.

  My heart thrilled and quailed at the same time. Mouse was the truest friend I ever had. And if there is such a thing as true evil, he was that too.

  “Raymond,” I said. I moved past the others to sit at the small table. “How ya doin’, Jackson, Dupree?”

  They both said my name and touched my hand.

  “You heard I was here?” Mouse asked me.

  “Yeah,” I answered. “I wondered why you didn’t come by t’see me.”

  Mouse and I were talking to each other. It was like no one else was in the room. Dupree was calling John to get more drinks and Jackson turned away, telling a story to somebody at another table.

  “I been out at Dupree’s house. I’m out there stayin’ wit’ him.”

  “You coulda come t’ my house, Ray. I got room, you know that.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Coulda done, but …” He paused and smiled at me. “But I don’t like t’ be surprised, Easy. It’s like that dude come bustin’ in the bedroom. You see, if I had seen my old lady fuckin’ somebody in my own bed, well, they both need the undertaker by then.”

  I felt the weight of that .38 through my jacket and on my right thigh. But my arms felt weak and I remembered how awful it was for my great-uncle Halley when he got so old that he couldn’t even feed himself.

  “Ain’t none of us gotta worry ’bout gettin’ old, Mouse,” I said.

  He laughed and slapped my thigh. It was a good laugh. Happy.

  “But,” I went on, “that ain’t no reason fo’ you to go to Dupree when I got room right in my own house.”

  “You seen Etta?”

  I wanted to, but I couldn’t lie in his face.

  “She come yesterday, stayed the night, and moved to a place t’day. Her an’ LaMarque.”

  When I said LaMarque’s name Mouse jerked his head up. He looked me in the eye for a moment, and what I saw there scared me.

  Most violent and desperate men have a kind of haunted look in their eyes. But never Mouse. He could smile in your face and shoot you dead. He didn’t feel guilt or remorse. He was different from most men. What he did, he did because of a set of rules that only applied to him. He loved some people; his mother, dead by then, Etta and LaMarque, and me too. He loved us in the strange way that he felt everything.

  So I was unsettled when I saw the remorse and bitterness in Mouse’s gaze. A man who is already insane was frightening enough, but when he goes crazy …

  “Where she go?”

  “She asked me not to tell ya, Raymond. She said t’tell her how she could call you an’ she’d do it—when she was ready.”

  Mouse just stared at me. His eyes were clear again. He might have killed me then. Who knows? Maybe if it all happened at a different time I would have acted differently. But I didn’t know how to give in to my fear. In two days I had prepared to lose all my property and my freedom, I had settled on becoming a murderer, and I had become a flunky for the FBI. I decided to let fate hold my cards.

  “You ain’t gonna tell me where she is?”

  “She upset, Raymond. If you don’t let her do it her way she gonna blow up at you, an’ me too.”

  Mouse watched me like a little boy might watch a butterfly. John hovered behind him while he put down short glasses filled with various amber liquors and ice.

  “Easy got yo’ number, Dupree?” Mouse asked at last.

  “Ain’t ya, Ease?” Dupree asked me.

  “Yeah, yeah. I got it.”

  Mouse laughed. “Well then, that’s business. Let’s have some drinks.”

  DUPREE GOT DRUNK and told stories after a while. Wholesome stories about foolish men at Champion Aircraft. The kind of stories that workmen tell. How somebody lost count when assembling a jet engine and how that engine blew the roof off of the construction bungalow. And when the boss asked what happened the perpetrator just opened his eyes and said something like “Somebody musta lit a match.”

  At one point I asked Dupree, “You seen Andre Lavender ’round there lately?”

  “Uh-uh, man. He got the politics bug pretty bad there for a while. Union. But then he just disappeared one day.”

  “Disappeared?”

  “Yeah, man. Gone. I think he stole sumpin’, ’cause they had all kindsa cops there. But no one know what happened.”

  “Didn’t his li’l girlfriend …” I snapped my fingers trying to remember.

  “Juanita,” Dupree said, frowning.

  “Yeah. Juanita. Didn’t she know where he was?”

  “Nope. She come around the plant lookin’ fo’im the next day, but nobody could help. But you know I did hear that Andre blew town with Winthrop Hughes’s ole lady.”

  “You mean Shaker’s girl?”

  “Uh-huh. They say Andre took her, his bank book, an’ his car.”

  “No shit?” I let it drop there. Andre could wait for a while.

  When Dupree passed out (which is what he did whenever he drank) we carried him out to the car. We piled him in the back and Jackson jumped into the passenger’s seat. Before Mouse pulled in behind the wheel he leaned very close to my face and said, “If you see’er, you tell’er that I give it a couple’a days. You tell’er that I won’t be denied. I will not be denied.” Then he grabbed my shirt with thin fingers that were
hard as nails. “An’ if you get in my way, Easy, or if you take her side, I kill you too.”

  As I watched them drive away I breathed a quiet sigh of relief that Etta had moved out of my house. I figured that EttaMae could handle Mouse, especially if she wasn’t with me.

  — 10 —

  THE NEXT MORNING I CALLED ETTA to tell her about my talk with Mouse. She snorted once and had nothing else to say. I offered to escort her to church on Sunday. She accepted and excused herself, polite and cold.

  As a kind of treat for my new freedom from the IRS and Raymond Alexander, I decided to let myself loll in the sunny halls of the Magnolia Street apartments.

  Mrs. Trajillo was at her window rolling out corn tortillas on a breadboard balanced on the windowsill. Her skin was a deep olive color dappled with various-size freckles and one large mole at the center of her chin. Her long hair was salt and pepper and hung in one thick braid down to about the middle of her thigh. She was short but sturdily built, and though she had never had a job, her hands were strong from years of doing housework, raising children, and making food from scratch.

  “Good morning, Mr. Rawlins,” she greeted me.

  “Hello, ma’am. How’re you today?”

  “Oh, pretty good I guess. My granddaughter had her confirmation last Sunday.”

  “That a fact?”

  “You look good,” she said. “I was worried about you and poor Mr. Mofass the other day. You weren’t smiling at all, and that terrible girl …” She brought her fingers to her chest and made an O-shape with her lips. “The things she yelled at him. You know I was glad the children were still in school.”

  “I guess Poinsettia was upset. You know how she’s sick and all.”

  “God gives you what you earn, Mr. Rawlins.”

  That seemed like a terrible curse coming from such a kind woman.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “The way she was with men before. No girl of mine would be like that. I’m not telling you anything, Mr. Rawlins, but God knows.”

  It didn’t bother me much. I know that older women often forget how it is to be loved by young men. Or maybe they do remember and hate it all the more.

  I went upstairs and stood on the second floor for an hour or more just feeling the sun and looking at nothing. But after a while I picked up the trace of a foul scent.

  The sun was shining in on the third floor too. It was beautiful but the smell was bad. The door to Apartment J was ajar; that’s where the smell came from.

  Really what I should call it is smells. There was the sweet smell of three or four kinds of incense that she used in her prayer altar and the odor of sickness that had been bottled up in her small rooms for the most part of six months. There were all kinds of rotting odors beyond that smell.

  But now, I figured, she was gone, moved out after Mofass had threatened her with eviction. The door was open and I knew she had probably left me a major cleaning job.

  Poinsettia had gone off for a vacation weekend six months before and come back two weeks later in a private ambulance. The attendants had told Mrs. Trajillo that Poinsettia had been in a bad car accident and that her boyfriend had paid to have her moved from the hospital back home. Her bones and bruises healed, but something happened to her nerves. She couldn’t work anymore or even walk right. Somewhere in her late twenties, she had been a beautiful woman until that accident. It was a shame to see her come down so far. But what could I do about it? Mofass was hard but he was right when he said that I couldn’t pay her rent.

  The living room was a mess. The shades were drawn and the curtains pulled, so it was twilight in the musty rooms. Ghostly white cartons of Chinese food were open and moldering on the table, trash everywhere. I flicked the light switch, but the bulb had burned out. Against a far wall there sat an altar she had made from a small alcove. Inside she had glued a picture of Jesus. It was painted like a mosaic. He had a halo and held two fingers and a thumb above three saints who were bowing to receive his blessing. All around the painting there were old flowers wired to the walls. They were unidentifiable brown things that she’d probably brought home from mass or after a funeral.

  At the foot of the painting was the bronze dish that she also used to burn the incense. The sweet smell was much stronger there. Little ashes, like white maggots, were littered around the brimming dish. And there was a black, gummy substance on the ledge and down the wall to the floor.

  The bathroom was disgusting. All kinds of cosmetic bottles open and dried until the liquids had caked and cracked. Mildewed towels on the floor. A spider spun its web over the bathtub faucet.

  The worst smells came from the bedroom, and I hesitated to go in there. It’s a funny thing how smell is such an animal instinct. The first thing a dog will do is sniff. And if it doesn’t smell right there’s a natural reluctance to get any closer.

  Maybe I should have been a dog.

  Poinsettia was hanging from the light fixture in the middle of the ceiling. She was naked and her skin sagged so that it seemed as if it would come right off the bone any second. Directly under her was the cause of the worst smells. Even as I watched a thick drop of blood and excrement fell from her toe.

  I don’t remember going down to Mrs. Trajillo’s apartment. I have a feeling that I tried to use Poinsettia’s phone, but it had been disconnected.

  “SURE,” SAID OFFICER ANDREW REEDY, a rangy and towheaded policeman. “She kicks over the chair after tying the knot.” He was looking at the overturned chair that lay halfway across the room, then continued, “And bingo! She’s hung. You said she was despondent, right, Mr. Rawlins?”

  “Yeah,” I answered him. “She was being evicted by Mofass.”

  “Who’s that?” asked Quinten Naylor. He was Reedy’s partner and the only Negro policeman I’d ever seen, up to that time, in plainclothes. He was also looking at that chair.

  “He manages the place, collects the rent and the like.”

  “Who does he manage for?” Naylor asked me.

  While I was considering how to answer, Reedy said, “Who cares? This is a suicide. We just tell ’em that she killed herself and that’s that.”

  Naylor was of medium height but he was wide and so gave the feeling of largeness and strength. He was the opposite of his partner in every way, but they seemed to have a kind of rapport.

  Naylor walked up to, almost under, the hanging corpse. It seemed as if he were sniffing for something wrong.

  “Aw, com’on, Quint,” Reedy whined. “Who wants to murder this girl? I mean all sneaky-like, pretending she killed herself? Did she have any enemies, Mr. Rawlins?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Look at her face, though, Andy. Those could be fresh bruises,” Naylor said.

  “Sometimes strangulation from hanging does that, Quint,” Reedy pleaded.

  “Hey listen,” the fat ambulance attendant shouted from the hall. I’d called the hospital too, even though I knew she was dead. “When can we cut ’er down an’ get outta here?”

  He was not my favorite kind of white man.

  “Hold up on that,” Naylor said. “We got an investigation going here and we can’t have the evidence disturbed. I want someone to photograph the room first.”

  “Aw, geez,” Reedy sighed.

  “Shit,” the fat man said. Then, “Okay, we go, but who signs for the call?”

  “We didn’t call so you can’t charge us,” Naylor said.

  “What about you, son?” the ambulance attendant asked me. He looked to be in his mid-twenties, almost ten years younger than I.

  “Can’t say that I know. I just called the police.” I lied. It was a kind of warm-up lie. I was getting ready for the real lies I’d have to tell later.

  The fat man glared at me but that’s all he could do.

  When the ambulance men left I turned away and saw Poinsettia hanging there. She seemed to be swaying slightly and my stomach started to move with her, so I turned to leave.

  Naylor touc
hed my arm and asked, “Who did you say that Mr. Mofass represented?”

  “It’s just Mofass. He don’t go by no other name.”

  “Who does he represent?” Naylor insisted.

  “Can’t say I know. I just clean fo’ him.”

  “Geez, Quint,” Reedy said. He’d taken out a handkerchief and covered his mouth and nose. That seemed like a good idea, so I pulled out my own rag.

  Reedy was an older man, past fifty. Naylor was young, the ambulance attendant’s age. He had probably been a noncommissioned officer in Korea. We got all kinds of things out of that war. Integration, advancement of some colored soldiers, and lots of dead boys.

  “Don’t look right, Andy,” Naylor said. “Let’s give it a little bit more.”

  “Who’s gonna care about this one girl, Quint?”

  “I care,” was all the young policeman answered. And it made me proud. It was the first time I had ever seen civilian blacks and whites dealing with each other in an official capacity. I mean, the first time I’d seen them acting as equals. They were really working together.

  “You need me for that?” I asked.

  “No, Mr. Rawlins,” Reedy sighed. “Just give me your address and phone number and we’ll call you for a statement if we need to.”

  I gave him my address and phone. He wrote them down in a leather-bound notepad that he took from his pocket.

  Downstairs, I told Mrs. Trajillo what was happening with the police. She was not only the burglar alarm but she was also a kind of newsletter for the neighborhood.

  — 11 —

  I LAMENTED POINSETTIA’S DEATH. She’d come down in the world, but that was no reason to wish her ill. It was a senseless and brutal death whether she killed herself or somebody else did it. But if it was suicide I dreaded the thought that she did herself in over the threat of eviction; an eviction I knew was wrong. I tried to put that thought out of my mind but it burrowed there, in the back of my thoughts, like a gopher tunneling under the ground.