“Jackson said that he’s getting’ that job to help you out, JJ. That sounds like he’s tryin’ to do right.”
“Yeah. He loves me. I know he does. But you know straight as he tryin’ t’be, he still a pretzel in his heart. It tickles me to see him in that suit with those cute glasses don’t do nuthin’.”
“You love him?”
“Yeah. I love ’im but he ain’t you, Mr. Rawlins. No sir. You are the real thing. That’s why I got up outta my bed, because it ain’t too often that Easy Rawlins calls on somebody for help.”
I drifted in my seat for a while then. I was angry at myself for inviting Jocelyn Ostenberg to my office, for giving her a way to come at me. But in that car, with the rising sun making silhouettes of the eastern mountains, beside a woman I’d seen grow up from a child, I felt at ease. I was at home in my own life in spite of everything. Maybe that was the drugs or maybe even shock but I remember feeling safe and comfortable on the drive toward the Ostenberg home.
“Jackson said that you lost everything in the riots,” I said after a long time.
“Naw,” Jewelle said easily. “It’s just tied up my resources. The property’s still there and there’s sure enough rent to pay the taxes. I got to be creative but the money’ll flow back in.”
WE PARKED A block away from the Ostenberg house. I didn’t want Jocelyn seeing me out there waiting and I didn’t need a close-up view to know if Harold came in or if she went out.
It was still very early when we got there, not yet six. Jewelle put her head down on my lap and fell asleep. She’d always felt comfortable with me, as if I had some kind of secret power to keep away danger. There she was with her brilliant business mind thinking that I was the one who could protect her.
I wasn’t tired but all the drugs and trauma to my system made me drift in and out of various states of mind. I thought about Juanda and Howard and Jackson and Mouse. I thought about the riots and Gerald Jordan and Melvin Suggs all at the same time. Between all the chemicals and thoughts and wounds I seemed to be able to break up my thoughts and let them blend together.
For most of my life I’d only been able to think about one thing at a time unless I was in danger and had to have eyes in the back of my head. But that morning, when I should have been concentrating on Harold and only Harold, I was putting all the pieces into place all at once.
Jewelle took my hand in her sleep and rolled her head. I looked down on her lovely profile. She was smiling, thinking about Jackson most probably while holding my hand and feeling my warmth.
I realized then that I had almost died in my hallway. I had come within inches and moments of my own death and hadn’t stopped even to acknowledge my luck.
I could see Juanda in Jewelle’s profile and I knew that we would never be lovers. That made me smile. I could see that Suggs hated Jordan as much as I did and that Harold felt the same pain that drove his mother. Mouse and Harold were in the same place in my mind. And Benita and Nola, and Honey and Geneva were right behind them. Black women at the mercy of black men who couldn’t help what they’d become.
My heart was racing trying to keep up with all the overlays in my head. I wanted a cigarette but Jewelle was holding my hand.
A light-colored ’sixty Cadillac drove up to Jocelyn’s driveway and pulled in. A man got out and walked up to the door. He fiddled around and then went in. It wasn’t Harold. I stayed where I was, wondering what I should do.
A few minutes later the sirens began to howl. At first there was only one and it was pretty far off. It wasn’t a fire engine siren; either police or ambulance then. And then there was another, and another. They were coming closer with every moment.
“Get up, baby,” I said to Jewelle.
“What is it?” she asked.
“I don’t know but you should be awake.”
The ambulance wailed up to the front of the Ostenberg home. Two attendants rushed out carrying the gurney. The man from the Cadillac ran out to meet them. Even at the distance I could tell that he was all broken up. His hands kept moving. The ambulance men had to push him aside.
“What is it, Easy?” Jewelle asked.
“I don’t know. But you better get out of here. I’ll get out and you go home.”
“I’m not leavin’ you here. You come on with me.”
Four police cars came up all at once. Cops rolled out of the cars and into the house. People were coming out of their houses on the next block. The sun was coming up as if even the sky was awakened by the racket.
As the minutes went by, the ambulance attendants didn’t reappear. That meant there was either a false alarm or a death.
“It’s him!” someone shouted in a maniacal tone. “It’s him! It’s him!”
I looked out and saw, not fifteen feet from Jewelle’s Citroën, the flabby man with the green eyes who had called the police on me the last time I was on Jocelyn’s block. He was shouting and jumping in his housecoat and slippers. When our eyes met he shrieked and ran straight for the cops.
“You got a key for the glove compartment?” I asked Jewelle.
“What’s wrong with him?” she said, referring to the screaming man.
“Take it off of the key chain and gimme it,” I said.
I took the forty-five out of the bag and Jewelle handed me the key. I threw the gun into the glove compartment, locked it, and then swallowed the little brass key just as if I were in some spy movie about to be arrested for attempting to go over the Berlin Wall.
“What’s wrong with that man, Easy? Was he talking about us?”
“The cops are going to grab us, JJ. Let’s get out of the car and cross our hands in front of us.”
Jewelle was a fast study. She got out with me and we waited for the cops that were hurrying out of the Ostenberg house.
Even though we were waiting peacefully we were both grabbed and thrown to the ground. The officers used rough language, calling us niggers and asking questions without waiting for or expecting replies. We were cuffed and yanked to our feet, dragged down the street and thrown through the Ostenberg front doorway.
As we were pulled into the house more policemen arrived. All that pushing and shoving opened the wounds on my leg and arm.
“This one’s bleeding,” one cop said.
But I wasn’t paying attention to their overreactions or the stinging pain I felt. I was looking around the Ostenberg living room.
It was all white.
The carpets and walls, the sofa and even the coffee table were stark white. Even a painting on the wall was a big white house in snow with white children laughing in the window. I wondered if the rest of the house was the same. A policeman grabbed my bandaged arm and a drop of my blood fell onto the thick white rug.
A white man in a brown suit was ushered into the room by two cops. He was an old man and miserable beyond his years. One cop whispered something into his ear and he looked up at me and Jewelle. Then he shook his head and collapsed into their arms. They led him to a white stuffed chair.
He rolled out from the seat and onto the carpet, crying.
I watched him as if he were a distant constellation. I didn’t care about Jocelyn’s husband any more than some far-off celestial event that occurred before humanity had blighted the earth. He was just a bystander who didn’t see the car coming at him. He wasn’t important.
48
What were you doing in front of the house?” a police sergeant asked me.
We were in the kitchen of the Ostenberg house. I was sitting in a white chair, at a white table, across from a white enamel stove, dripping blood on the white linoleum floor.
Somewhere else in the house the white man was crying.
“I was down the block,” I said. “Sitting in the car with my girl.”
“How did you get shot?” The sergeant was in his mid-thirties. When he was a teenager he had a bad bout with acne. The scars covered both of his fat cheeks.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I was going to my office when somebod
y opened fire.”
They had Jewelle in another room but I wasn’t worried about her. Jewelle would just say that we were parking, that there was no law against that.
I had given them Jordan’s letter but with a black suspect in a crime in a white neighborhood less than a week after the riots, they had to have more than a tardy note from the deputy commissioner.
“What are you doing in this neighborhood?” the scarred sergeant asked.
“Nuthin’ special, Officer. Just hangin’ around.”
“Tell me about this note from Jordan’s office.”
“That’s nothing,” I said. “Why don’t you tell me what’s wrong here. I didn’t do anything and haven’t seen any crime.”
“You open your smart mouth again, nigger,” a uniformed officer said, “and I’ll break your face for you good.”
“Yeah?” I said.
It was as if Mama Jo’s elixir was waiting for some insult. The blood in my veins turned hot and I was suddenly ready to fight.
The sergeant didn’t know what to do. And I was of no help. I couldn’t seem to control my mouth or my actions and I had no proof of what crime had been committed—though I did have my suspicions.
There were four cops with me in the white kitchen. The angry one was meaty and tall. The sides of his neck were red and his eyes were blue. He’d cut himself shaving recently. The scab was near the right corner of his mouth.
I was ready to fight even sitting there with my hands cuffed behind me. It was as if Mama Jo’s medicine had opened a door of foolish bravery in my heart and now it came on me whenever I was in jeopardy.
Just then the phone rang. In between the ringing I could hear the white man’s cries.
“This is Dietrich,” the sergeant said into the phone.
He looked up at me. “Yes.”
He gestured at another policeman to undo my handcuffs. “Certainly. Yes sir. I understand.”
The manacles were tight on my wrists and they held me in such a way that the ache in my arm worsened. With release I felt a moment of surcease.
“Are you sure?” Sergeant Dietrich said into the phone. “Yes sir. I will. Completely.”
He hung up the line and said, “Come with me . . . Mr. Rawlins.”
The meaty cop who had threatened me scowled. He wanted to strike out at me but was restrained by the respect that his superior was forced to show. He got close to me though. I’m sure he was hoping that someone would give him permission to drop the hammer on my skull.
Sergeant Dietrich walked me up the stairs to an open door that led into a bedroom with the corpse of Jocelyn Ostenberg lying across it. Her tongue was protruding and her eyes were wide with fright.
He finally got the one he was after, I thought.
There was a small pistol on the floor next to the bed. About half a soda bottle of blood had been spilled down the bedspread and onto the floor.
“Do you know her?” the sergeant asked.
“Jocelyn Ostenberg,” I said. “She’s a black woman.”
“What?” the meaty cop said.
“Her son is a man named Harold. He killed a woman down in Watts a few days ago.”
The police all around me peered closer at the dead face on the bed.
“And what do you have to do with it?” Dietrich asked.
I was staring at the corpse, looking for Harold somewhere in the folds underneath. After he shot me he came back to her, I thought. Was it her plan to kill him? Did she want to get rid of him for good once he took care of me?
“Was there a trail of blood?” I asked.
“What?”
“Leading from the house? I mean, she shot her attacker, right?”
“You look like you’ve been shot,” the meaty cop who had called me a nigger said.
I ignored him.
“Can you help me out here, Sergeant Dietrich?” I asked.
“Go look around the backyard, Samuels,” the sergeant said to my self-proclaimed enemy.
“But, Sergeant —”
“The backyard,” Dietrich repeated.
After Samuels was gone Dietrich said, “There was a little blood. Not much. We figured that he used a pillow or something to stanch the bleeding and then made his way out. Mr. Poundstone said that his wife’s car was missing. The man who killed her —”
“Harold Ostenberg,” I said.
“— he probably took the car.”
“Can I go, Sergeant?” I asked.
“Detective Suggs is coming to pick you up,” Dietrich said. “They wanted you to wait for him.”
“Well, let me talk to Jewelle,” I said. “She can go, right?”
“I guess.”
JEWELLE DIDN’T WANT to leave me there but I told her that I had everything under control. I walked her to her car and apologized for swallowing her key.
“Don’t worry, Easy,” she replied. “You ain’t never taken nuthin’ from me that you ain’t given back tenfold. Helpin’ Jackson get his job means that he can finally lift up outta the street and make an honest woman outta me.”
I was wondering if Jackson could make an honest man of himself but I didn’t say it out loud. JJ drove off and white neighbors up and down the block stared at me as I made my way back to the crime scene. The man who had told the police about me ran to his door when I came near. He stood there at the entrance, shaking all over and slamming his right fist into his left palm. His deep consternation made me laugh. Here this guy didn’t know me from the man in the moon but still he was beside himself with hatred for me just walking down the street.
SUGGS ARRIVED AT about eight-thirty. He wore a stained beige suit and brown brogans. He shook my hand in front of a dozen cop witnesses and then toured the crime scene with a hard eye.
By that time there were three plainclothes detectives on the scene. They seemed to know Suggs. They all talked for forty-five minutes or so.
“Jordan had Peter Rhone arrested as a material witness in the Payne murder,” Suggs told me on the way to his car. “I had to give up his name.”
“He didn’t do it,” I said.
“I know.”
“Where we goin’?” I asked my new friend.
“That’s up to you, Ezekiel,” he said.
49
They found Miss Ostenberg’s car on Fifty-fourth Place in an alley,” Suggs told me as we headed back for South L.A.
“They find him?”
Suggs shook his head while saying, “Hide nor hair.”
We drove a little further.
I was tired by then. The wounds and drugs and company of death had weakened me. There would have been little I could do to subdue Harold even if he were standing in front of me. I doubted that I could have climbed out of my seat without help.
“You got any leads on the man, Rawlins?”
“No.”
“Why would he kill his mother?”
“Same reason he killed all those other women. Because she preferred the company of a white man to him.”
Suggs grimaced.
“Geneva Landry died this morning,” he said.
“What? Who did it?”
“Nobody. The doctors think that she might have been allergic to an antibiotic that they gave her. They won’t be sure until they do an autopsy.”
“She just died in her bed?”
“I’m sorry, Ezekiel.”
“Just died?” I said. “If you motherfuckers didn’t put her in there she would have been fine. But you were so worried about yourselves you didn’t even stop to find out about her.”
Suggs drove the car, his big hands tight on the wheel.
“You killed her just as well as you killed all those other women,” I continued.
“I didn’t kill anybody,” he said softly.
“No? Then who did? Who did? I told the people at the Seventy-seventh what I knew months ago. I told you just the other day.”
“Nobody saw the pattern,” he said, his voice getting fainter still.
“No,�
�� I said. “They didn’t. But they heard Geneva yellin’ about it. They sure enough threw her in a hospital and started shootin’ her with drugs. They let her slip away right under their noses. Another woman dead and Gerald Jordan gets a party at the mayor’s house.”
Suggs said something else but it was too soft to hear over the car engine.
“What you say?” I asked him.
“Where are we going?”
“Take me to my office. Take me there and I will call you if I find out anything.”
“We can’t just let this go, Easy,” Suggs said. “The man is a killer and Payne is innocent.”
“I know that,” I said. “So you go to the papers and tell them. Tell the Examiner and the Times and the Los Angeles Sentinel. Tell ’em that there’s a Jack the Ripper goin’ up and down the streets killin’ black women. Give them Harold’s full name. Put that picture I gave you on the news.”
Melvin was already looking at the road but still it felt as if he were turning away from me.
“Mayor’s office doesn’t want any publicity,” he whispered.
“Say what?”
Those two words were the last of our conversation. Suggs had a job. He saved banks from being robbed and protected innocent victims from predators in the night. He hid the truth about a killer for the betterment of people that had never been that murderer’s victims. I was on the other side of the board. My queen and rooks and bishops were all gone. My pawns were exhausted, while he had a full complement of men. All I had left was a king behind a lazy pawn, flanked by a drunken man on a horse. He could have beaten me at any time he wanted to. And all I did was keep pushing ahead with no plan or hope.
If I were driving that car I might have run it into a wall.
SUGGS LET ME out in front of my building. I limped up the stairs and to my office. The door was open, I could see that and the damage that Harold’s gun had done from ten feet away. The key to Jewelle’s glove compartment was in my stomach and even if it weren’t, she and her .45 were many miles away. I was unarmed and my door was open. I couldn’t remember if I had left it that way or if Harold had shot me before I’d unlocked it.
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