A Red Death

by Mosley, Walter

  Once I was dressed I went out into the yard to appreciate the garden. I sat, hidden from the street, in the cast-iron chair for half an hour watching a jay dance in the grass. He was proud and happy in moist grass that had gotten too tall in past weeks. He didn’t have a natural enemy in sight, and that was all he needed to be happy.

  I thought about the Mexican badlands. They sounded pretty good.

  ROBERTA JEFFERSON, Mofass’s sister, didn’t live far from my house. She and her husband, George, had a small place. They both worked for the Los Angeles Board of Education. He was with the board’s internal delivery service and she was a breakfast cook at Lincoln High School.

  She was home when I got there, wearing a big yellow handkerchief around her round brown face. I took my time walking up to the door. She was inside ironing shirts; there was the smell of collard greens in the air. Dozens of iridescent green flies hovered around the screen door. Flies love the smell of cooked greens.

  There was no need to knock.

  “Hi, Easy,” Roberta said. “How you doin’?”

  “Fine, Ro, just fine.”

  I stood there in the doorway, taking my time, waiting.

  “Come on in, baby, what brings you here?”

  “Lookin’ fo’ Mofass is all.”

  “I ain’t seen’im in two or three days. But you know sometimes a month go by an’ he don’t come ’round.”

  “Yeah,” I said. I pulled up a high stool next to where she was ironing. “He left me a note to pull a refrigerator out of one’a his places, but he didn’t say what apartment. You know I don’t wanna be pullin’ out no po’ son’s icebox. I might be takin’ his last po’k chop.”

  We laughed nicely and then Roberta said, “Well, I ain’t seen’im, Easy. He show up though. You know Billy-boy don’t trust nobody an’ he will make sure you did it right.”

  “That’s what you call’im?”

  Roberta laughed. “Yeah. Billy-boy Wharton. That’s why he don’t like seein’ us, ’cause I ain’t about t’let him fo’get his Christian name.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Yeah.”

  I asked her about her husband and children. They were fine. George Jr. had just gotten over a case of the chicken pox and little Mozelle had grown titties and said she wanted a baby to go with them. Normal things. Roberta said that the board was hiring and maybe it was time for me to get a regular job. I said I’d look into it.

  “Your momma down Louisiana, ain’t she, Ro?” I asked to finish off the questions about her family.

  “She’ll live there till she dies.”

  “How old is she now?”

  “Close enough to seventy so she could kiss it, but she always say sixty-two. Not that she don’t look young enough to lie ’bout it. My sister Regina tole me jus’ yestiday that Momma got a new boyfriend down there.”

  “At seventy!” I was scandalized.

  “I guess it ain’t worn out yet.”

  “She must be in good health.”

  “Strong as a hog,” Roberta answered.

  We traded some more pleasantries and then I excused myself.

  I rode down to the Magnolia Street apartments next. It was like walking into the past. Nothing had changed. I saw an aluminum gum wrapper that had been in the gutter across the street the last time I had been there. I was amazed to think that the apartments were still my property. Who had maintained my rights on them while I was gone these long days?

  “Good morning, Mr. Rawlins,” Mrs. Trajillo said.

  “Morn’in, ma’am. How are you today?”

  She smiled in answer and I walked up to her window. There was a portrait of Christ on the wall behind her. His chest was cut open, revealing a Valentine’s heart crowned in thorns. He was staring at me, holding up two fingers as if to say, “Go slow, child, find your nemesis.”

  “Have the police been back?” I asked.

  “Sealed off the apartment and asked us all questions about who did it.”

  “Did they know? Did they find the killer?”

  “I don’t think so, Mr. Rawlins, but they asked a lot about you and Mr. Mofass.”

  “Mofass was here that day?”

  “I didn’t see him, and I told that nice colored man that Mr. Mofass wouldn’t crawl through a window.”

  Only just on his belly, like a snake, I thought.

  “I told them everything I saw, Mr. Rawlins. There was only the people that live here and the postman with a special delivery and a white insurance salesman.”

  “What salesman was that?” I asked.

  “Just some white man in an old suit. He said that it was life insurance he was selling.” Mrs. Trajillo snorted. “Just trying to steal poor people’s money.” She didn’t like white people too well.

  “Did he try to sell any to you?”

  “I wasn’t interested, but he went up and down in here looking for somebody to rob.”

  I wasn’t interested in an insurance man, though. “So that was it, huh?”

  “I think so, Mr. Rawlins. That white policeman was checking the door around back. He said that it looked like it had been forced open not too long ago.”

  I thanked her and bid her good-bye. But I must have looked grim, because she said after me, “You take care now, Mr. Rawlins. You know it is nobody’s fault when someone dies.”

  “No?”

  “It is only God who takes life.”

  I kept the laughter inside of me, like a caged wolf.

  I STILL FELT DIRTY when I got home, so I took a long bath. I wanted to be clean, perfect. I put a chair beside the tub and laid my .38 on it. I left the door open and all the lights on. Shadows would be my alarm.

  I called Dupree but Mouse was out, playing with LaMarque.

  There was one chance that I had of staying in Los Angeles. That chance depended on some creative handling of the top-secret papers.

  So I dressed in dark worker clothes, loaded a squirt gun with ammonia, wrapped a canvas tarp I used for painting, and bought three steaks from the corner store. Then I went to the car graveyard on Vernon and went around the back, because it was nighttime and the place was closed. I made it over the barbed-wire fence by laying the canvas tarp over it. I didn’t have time for the regular business hours.

  The yard was made up of wide alleys formed by stacks of automobiles. I had worked my way down three lanes before the dogs got my scent. I saw two of them, a boxerlike monster and a shepherd, ’round the aisle of cars. The first one was growling and running at me fast, his brother hot on his tail. I squirted them both directly on their snouts with my ammonia gun. A dog would rather gnaw off his tail than have a snout full of that poison.

  The papers were right where Andre had said they’d be. They were bound in a leather notebook, the kind that zips up the side, behind the seat of an ancient Dodge pickup truck. I tucked them under my arm, thinking about how Chaim put those papers there. I hadn’t really said good-bye to my friend.

  By the time I reached the tarp-covered fence the dogs were on me again. The boxer/greyhound showed his teeth and snarled, but he was tentative for all that and hung back behind the three or four other dogs. I took out the squirt gun and splashed the first snapping dog—no breed would describe him—on the snout.

  He couldn’t get away from me fast enough. The other dogs were on their way soon after, and I got out of the whole thing with no more than a small cut I suffered opening the truck’s door. I left the steaks on the ground near the fence. Those dogs couldn’t bark after me, causing unwanted attention, if they had their mouths full of T-bone.

  BEFORE I KNOCKED ON THE DOOR I heard screaming. High-pitched yelling mixed with words like “no” and “no mo’.”

  I knocked. When Etta opened the door the yelling was still going on behind her. Mouse and LaMarque were wrestling on the couch. They were both yelling, but LaMarque was on top, playfully pounding the sides of Mouse’s head. Mouse was bowing low, pretending to be in pain and screeching like his namesake.

  Etta put her han
d to my chest, which I felt all the way down to my knees, and said, “Thank you, baby, Raymond done come back t’life fo’ him.”

  “Etta, do you love me?” I whispered.

  “Yes, Easy, I do,” she whispered back.

  I wanted to ask her to run with me, to go down to Mexico, but I’d wait until Mouse was somewhere else.

  “Easy!” Mouse shouted from inside.

  “Hi, Unca Easy,” LaMarque said.

  I wondered if LaMarque would come with Etta and me down to Mexico or would she leave him with her sister. He was still young enough to pick up a language if he had to.

  “Hi, boys,” I said. Then, “Raymond.”

  “Yeah, Ease?”

  “I need yo’ help on sumpin’.”

  LaMarque had looked away from us to a round table that they used for meals. Across it lay Mouse’s long .41-caliber pistol. It looked obscene there, but I supposed it was safer than if Mouse wore it while they tussled.

  “I’ll make tea,” Etta said. Raymond’s artillery didn’t seem to bother her. She just pushed it to one side and another as she wiped off the table.

  “No, honey,” I said. “Raymond an’ me got business. We gots to go.”

  And so we left.

  In the hall I said, “I need some help, Mouse.”

  “Who you want me to kill?” he asked, pulling out his pistol to prove his readiness.

  “I just need you to come with me, Raymond. I gotta look into a couple’a things and I could use somebody at my back.”

  Raymond was smiling as he holstered his long gun.

  WE DROVE OUT TO MOFASS’S OFFICE. I had the key, so it wouldn’t be a case of burglary.

  “What we lookin’ fo’, Ease?” Mouse asked me. He was working at his golden teeth with an ivory toothpick that he carried. “Just sit’own, Raymond. I gotta search Mofass’s files.”

  “You don’t need me fo’ that.”

  “Somebody tried t’shoot me out in front’a my house yester-day,” I told him. “I was standin’ out there with a friend and I just happened t’bend over or the lights woulda been out on my show.”

  “Oh,” Mouse said simply. He felt for his pistol under his coat and sat back in Mofass’s swivel chair. He put his feet up on the desk and smiled at me as I went through the filing cabinet.

  In his files Mofass kept a book of all the properties he managed. There were twelve columns to the right of each address or unit, where he indicated, on a monthly basis, if the place was occupied or not. If the property was vacant for that month there was an x marked in pencil.

  There were about twenty unoccupied apartments, the longest vacancy being on Clinton Street. I listed them, but I really didn’t think Mofass would try to hide in an apartment. People didn’t like Mofass, and they were likely to blab his whereabouts if given the opportunity.

  Mofass also managed a group of business properties and seven warehouses. All of them were rented. One warehouse was rented to Alameda Fruits and Vegetables Incorporated. Mofass had told me when they had gone out of business. The president, Anton Vitali, also owned the building. He’d cleared out the building but kept paying the rent, to himself, because he needed people to believe he was solvent as a real estate owner. Mofass was happy with that, because he still got his percentage and didn’t have to lift a finger.

  I gave Mouse all the addresses, telling him to check the warehouse first.

  “You want me to kill’im, Ease?” Mouse asked as simply as if he were offering me a beer.

  “Just hold him, Ray. I’ll do what killin’s gotta be done.”

  — 35 —

  HE ANSWERED THE PHONE HIMSELF on the first ring. “Craxton!”

  “Hello, Mr. Craxton.”

  “Well, well, Mr. Rawlins, I thought you might’ve run out on me.”

  “No, sir. Where’m I gonna go?”

  “No further than I can reach, that’s for sure.”

  “I been kinda busy, gettin’ news.”

  “What kind of news?”

  “Chaim Wenzler is dead.”

  “What?”

  “They shot him through his front door. Shot him dead.”

  “How do you know about it?”

  “Shirley Wenzler, Chaim’s daughter, brought me there. Seems like I’m the only one she trusts.”

  “Does she know who did it?”

  “She thinks it was you.”

  “Horseshit!”

  “Don’t get me wrong, I ain’t saying’ no government man gonna do somethin’ like that. All I’m sayin’ is that she really thinks that the government did it.”

  “You got anything I can use?”

  “I think he was in it with somebody down here. Like you said, he was working with somebody colored. But I don’t know who it is. Whoever it is, though, they pegged me early on.”

  “How’d they do that, Easy?” Craxton asked.

  “I don’t know, but I think I know how to find out.”

  “Did you find anything in his house?”

  “Like what?”

  “Anything,” he said evasively. “Anything I might be interested in.”

  “No sir. But then again I didn’t spend any too long checkin’ it out either. I don’t like keepin’ company with the dead.”

  “But you’re working for me, Rawlins. If you can’t get your hands dirty, then why should I help you?”

  “Maybe if I knew what it was you were lookin’ for I could nose around. But you ain’t told me shit, man, Agent Craxton.”

  That cut our conversation for a moment. When he finally spoke again it was in forced calm and measured tones.

  “What about the girl, Easy? Does she know why he was killed?”

  “She don’t know nuthin’. But I heard a thing or two down at First African.”

  “What things?”

  “You got your secrets, Mr. Craxton, and I got mines. I’ma look this thing down until I find out who killed Wenzler. When I find out I’m’a tell you, all right?”

  “No.” I could almost hear him shaking his head. “That’s not all right at all. You’re working for me …”

  I cut him off. “Uh-uh. You ain’t payin’ me an’ you ain’t done a damn thing fo’me neither. I will find your killer and I figure he will be the key to whatever it is you lookin’ for. At that time you an’ me will come to a deal.”

  “I’m the law, Mr. Rawlins. You can’t bargain with the law.”

  “The fuck I cain’t! Somebody put a bullet two inches from my head yesterday afternoon. This is my life we speakin’ on, so either you take my deal or we call it quits.”

  For the most part I was blowing smoke. But I knew things that Craxton didn’t know. I had the papers and I knew who Chaim and Poinsettia’s killer was. One thing had nothing to do with the other, but when I was finished everything would be as neat as a buck private’s bunk bed.

  I had Craxton over a barrel. He finally said, “When will you have something for me?”

  “Six o’clock tomorrow. I got some irons in the fire right now. By six tomorrow I should know everything. If not then, then the day after.”

  “Six tomorrow?”

  “That’s the time.”

  “All right. I’ll expect a call then.” He was trying to sound like he was still in charge.

  “One more thing,” I blurted out before he could hang up.

  “What?”

  “You gotta make sure the police don’t mess wit’ me before then.”

  “You got it.”

  “Thanks.”

  In the darkness of my house I spun plans. None of them seemed real. Mofass was all I had. He was the only one who connected everything. He had been up to something with Poinsettia, and I was the one who told him about the taxes and First African. He was the only one I could suspect. If I was guessing right he told Jackie and Melvin about me nosing around First African. So he was really to blame for Reverend Towne and Tania Lee, or maybe he killed them too. And Mofass was the only one with a reason. He wanted my money. He knew that th
e government would take my property and that he could buy it before it ever went to auction. He knew how to make payoffs. That’s why he didn’t want to sign, because he wanted it all.

  I was going to kill Mofass, mainly because he had killed my tenant and I felt that I owed her something. But also because he had killed Chaim and I had come to like that man. He had destroyed my life, and I felt I owed him something for that.

  All the things I’d told Craxton were half-truths and lies for him to follow down while I was on my way to Mexico.

  Mexico. EttaMae and I and maybe even LaMarque. It was like a dream. It was better than what I had, at least that’s what I told myself.

  I SAT WAITING FOR A CALL. No radio and no television. I turned a single light on in the bedroom and then went to the living room to sit in shadows. I had been reading a book on the history of Rome, but I didn’t have any heart for it that night. The history of Rome didn’t move me the way it usually did. I didn’t care about the Visigoths and the Ostrogoths sacking the Empire; I didn’t even care about the Vandals, how they were so terrible that the Romans made a word out of their name.

  I didn’t even believe in history, really. Real was what was happening to me right then. Real was a toothache and a man you trusted who did you dirt. Real was an empty stomach or a woman saying yes, or a woman saying no. Real was what you could feel. History was like TV for me, it wasn’t the great wave of mankind moving through an ocean of minutes and hours. It wasn’t mankind getting better either; I had seen enough murder in Europe to know that the Nazis were even worse than the barbarians at Rome’s gate. And even if I was in Rome they would have called me a barbarian; it was no different that day in Watts.

  Chaim wanted to make it better for me and my people.

  Chaim was a good man; better than a lot of people in Washington, and a lot of black people I knew. But he was dead. He was history, as they say, and I was holding my gun in the dark, being real.

  — 36 —