by Mary Monroe
“You don’t need to be turning off your phones, girl,” she yelled, shaking a finger with a two-inch nail in my face.
“What are you talking about? Where’s Floyd? Did something happen to him?” I yelled, looking over her shoulder. I looked toward her house and saw that her porch light and every light in the house was on, except the one in the front upstairs room that Floyd occupied. I also saw two police cars parked in front of her house. “Glodine, what’s going on? What are the cops . . . doing in front of your house?”
“I knew Floyd was going to end up in jail sooner or later. He’s too sneaky! He was sneaky when they brought him to me, he was—”
“Will you shut the fuck up and just tell me why you are here and why the cops are at your house?” I shouted, looking from her to the police cars parked in front of her house like demons guarding the gates of hell.
“This is it! It’s over for your boy! Floyd raped and killed some girl tonight! All this time I been raising a rapist in my house!” Glodine told me, her arms wrapped around her lumpy chest. “It could have been me!” she shrieked.
I almost knocked her to the ground as I ran out the door and across the yard. My housecoat flew open and was flapping behind me like a pair of limp wings. Just as I made it to Glodine’s front yard, both of the police cars pulled away from the curb. One had Floyd in the backseat. Even in the darkness, I could see the desperation in his eyes. It was a look that would haunt me for the rest of my life.
I had so many questions running through my head. Like who got raped? When? Where? But the biggest question I had was, “What did this have to do with Floyd?” Floyd was the man I was going to marry soon. Him raping somebody was about as unthinkable as me raping somebody!
I stood there in the middle of Baylor Street in my housecoat and bare feet. I watched until the police car that had my man in it turned the corner. Glodine’s husband and their foster daughters stood on the front porch, shaking their heads and mumbling among themselves. The nosy Scotts were peeping out of their upstairs bedroom window. Glodine was standing right next to me now. I could hear her rambling on and on, but she was making no sense to me. The word rape and Floyd’s name didn’t even belong in the same sentence. It was as farfetched as Valerie and murder. But . . . Valerie was guilty of murder, and I had seen her do it. Could Floyd have . . . I couldn’t even finish the thought.
CHAPTER 24
It had been less than a year since Valerie killed Mr. Zeke. I was still trying to deal with that mess. I knew that I would never be able to put it completely out of my mind, but I had learned to live with it. As long as Mr. Zeke’s corpse remained in the makeshift grave in the backyard of Valerie’s house and nobody else ever found out, I could go on about my business. But now I had to deal with another unspeakable horror that involved another person close to me.
If the whole world had come crashing down on my shoulders that night the cops hauled Floyd away for rape and murder, I could not have felt more helpless and confused.
What happened in the next few days happened so fast I couldn’t stay focused on any one thing for too long. And none of it made sense to me. From what I’d been able to piece together, based on information dumped in my lap by Glodine and newspaper accounts, some college girl had been snatched off the street, dragged into an alley, beaten, raped, and strangled. This horrific crime had occurred behind the theater where Floyd worked.
The girl had worked part-time in the ice creamery next door to the theater. Two witnesses had identified Floyd as the assailant. He’d been seen talking to the victim earlier that night in front of the theater. From what the witnesses said, he had behaved in an “aggressive and threatening manner.” One of the witnesses was a jacked-up hoochie who used to flirt with Floyd at school. She still had a grudge against him because he’d never shown any interest in her. She swore on the Bible that she’d seen Floyd in the ice creamery on his break making lewd comments to this girl. And for the record, this murdered girl had fucked almost everybody I knew. If Floyd had wanted her, he would not have had to rape her. However, I knew enough about rape to know that even if a prostitute decided at the last minute not to fuck a trick and he forced her, that was rape. Even though I did not witness Floyd’s alleged crime, I refused to believe what I’d been told. He had no reason to rape anybody as long as he had me.
There were other ifs running through my mind. One was the fact that if Floyd had pursued other job opportunities as hard as I did, he would not have still been working at that Mickey Mouse movie usher job in the vicinity of the crime scene in the first place. But it was too late to worry about that now. What was important was dealing with the present situation. And it was not going to be easy.
“Baby, you know I didn’t do this,” Floyd assured me, gripping the bars at the county jail where they’d taken him for further questioning. “I got off work at eight and I was with you from then until after midnight. You know that. They said this girl was raped and killed between ten and eleven.”
“Well, did you tell them that? I’m going to tell them myself,” I wailed. “You couldn’t be in two places at the same time. And if they are right about the time that this happened, there is no way it could have been you.”
Floyd gave me a guarded look. “But what if they got the time wrong? What if I was over there when that shit happened? Do you think I could do something like that? You know I don’t fool around with nobody but you.”
I didn’t like the thoughts that quickly moved from the back of my mind to the front. I couldn’t remember all the times I’d caught Floyd ogling other females. If he’d been that bold, right in front of me, what was he like when I was not around? And I couldn’t stop myself from recalling all the times I’d practically had to fight him off when he was so horny he didn’t want to take no for an answer. There had been several times that he didn’t take no for an answer. Technically, he had raped me, and more than once. . . .
I blinked hard and sniffed as I looked in his eyes. I hated myself for thinking what I was thinking. I looked at him with these thoughts dancing around in my head, taunting me. My mind said one thing, my lips said another. “Floyd, you couldn’t rape anybody,” I managed. “I believe you.” I had to believe him. He was my future.
“Hell no! My sister got raped, my mama got raped. And almost every foster sister I ever had either got raped or came close to it. I know how much pain and suffering rape causes. I could never rape nobody! This is some crazy bullshit!” The longer I stood there talking to Floyd the more desperate he sounded, and looked. From the dark circles around his eyes, and the heavy bags beneath them, I could see that he had not slept. And from his foul body odor, he had not bathed, either. The half-moon-shaped sweat stains in the underarm of his shirt were dripping wet, and so was his hair.
“Look, we got a few dollars in the bank and if that’s not enough to bail you out, I’ll get the rest from somewhere. I know Viola would lend me some money if I asked her to. What I can’t get from her, I’ll get from Dr. Oglethorpe.”
“No, baby, don’t do that,” Floyd insisted. “I . . . I don’t want you to touch our money. Matter of fact, I don’t want you to do nothing right now. I don’t want you to get involved in this, if you don’t have to. The system works . . . usually.” Floyd paused and gave me an uncertain look. That look said a lot. As far as I was concerned, he didn’t believe what he was saying any more than I did. His right eye started twitching, and he started breathing through his mouth. Just knowing how scared and nervous he was made me feel even worse.
“Usually? That’s just it. This system usually works, but it usually works for white folks—or folks with money! It usually doesn’t work for men like you! You know that!”
“Yeah, unfortunately I do know that,” he said with a profound sigh. “Baby, I’m innocent. I know the truth will come out,” Floyd insisted, his voice cracking. “All we got to do is sit back and wait.”
“Well, I’m not going to sit back and do nothing. The least I can do is tell them you
were with me in Dr. Oglethorpe’s office at the time of the crime,” I insisted, stomping my foot so hard on the concrete floor my ankle ached.
Floyd gave me a hard look. Then he shifted his weight from one foot to the other, and exhaled. His sour breath made me flinch. “And then you’ll be out of a job,” he said, shaking his head. “You know how straight-laced the good doctor is.”
“I care a lot more about you than I do that job. I can always get another job. You—I can’t replace you,” I protested.
“Dolores, I’m not on trial yet—”
“If they’ve brought you this far, you might as well be! Floyd, we can hope for the best, but we need to prepare ourselves for the worst. Number one, they’ve got witnesses.” I paused and held up my finger, level with his face. He focused his eyes on it, like he was expecting me to hypnotize him. “They’ve arrested you for suspicion of rape and murder. You are a black man.” I paused and held up two more fingers. “A poor-ass black man living in a city that’s known for racism! They’ll put you up under the jailhouse if they find you guilty! You don’t have a leg to stand on.” I held up five fingers, and then I made a fist and shook it in Floyd’s horrified face. He looked at me like I’d suddenly lost my mind, and I felt like he wasn’t that far from the truth.
“Well, when you put it like that, I guess I don’t have a chance,” he said in a weary voice. “If my own woman thinks that my goose is about to be cooked, what’s the point? Why don’t you just take that money out of the bank and buy me a one-way ticket to San Quentin. I’m a dead man walking. Shit!” Floyd gave me a disgusted look and a dismissive wave. He started to walk away, but he returned his attention to me as soon as I started talking again.
“Baby, you are missing my point. I am just telling you what might happen if things backfire. We are in this together,” I insisted.
“I am not guilty,” Floyd said in an unusually calm and quiet voice. He gave me a hopeful look, but his eyes were twitching and both his hands were shaking. “I . . . am . . . not . . . guilty!” he repeated, his voice like thunder this time. He wrapped his fingers around the bars to his cell, gripping them hard. After only a few seconds, he let go of the bars and slapped them so hard I was surprised he didn’t break the bones in his hand. He moaned and started shaking his head, but from the look on his face I could tell that he was in some serious pain. Pain of any kind was the one thing he didn’t need any more of. And neither did I. I reached through the bars and touched his injured hand. Then I held it up and kissed the tips of his fingers. This seemed to do a little good. A faint smiled formed on his lips.
“All I care about is you, and getting you out of this mess!” I snorted and looked around. Behind Floyd in the same funky-smelling cell on the bottom bunk was a Latino man that looked like a big, brown grizzly bear, and he was snoring like one, too.
I knew that most of Floyd’s friends were involved in all kinds of criminal enterprises. Most of them had no visible means of support, and even though they dressed like thugs, they all drove big cars, lived in nice apartments, and spent money like kings. Why Floyd chose the friends he did was beyond me. Every time he’d had a brush with the cops it was because of the people he associated with. And now that I thought about it, a lot of the black homeboys that he ran with looked like him. Same shade, same height and weight, and same style of dress. I couldn’t count the number of times I’d run up to a brother thinking it was Floyd, because from a distance he’d looked like Floyd. A lot of his clonelike friends hung out around that mall where he worked. One of them had probably raped and killed that college girl, and now he was letting Floyd take the heat for it! I didn’t want to point that out to Floyd, yet. Mainly because I assumed it would come out in the long run, anyway. “What about some of your homeboys? We can borrow money from some of them! What about that one whose apartment we stayed in while he was in Mexico on vacation.”
“Miguel Avalos? Aw shit. My boy got busted while he was in Mexico. They dragged him out of his grandmother’s house kicking and screaming. I doubt if he’s even still alive. And I don’t want to borrow money that would take me the rest of my life to pay back,” Floyd told me.
The longer I stood in that spot facing Floyd, the worse I felt about being there. I was ready to start clawing at the walls, and I wasn’t the one trapped behind those damn bars. I couldn’t imagine what it was like for a free spirit like Floyd. The look in his eyes had become even more desperate. He looked like a caged animal. If just being confined to a cell in County was making him like this, I knew that there was no way he could survive in a more hostile and severe prison environment, like hellholes such as San Quentin or Folsom.
As it turned out, I didn’t have to worry about trying to borrow money to bail Floyd out of jail. Things were worse than either of us realized. With all the evidence piling up against him, his goose wasn’t just about to be cooked, it was about to be cremated. There was no bail. The district attorney filed formal charges against Floyd for rape and first-degree murder.
There were even stories floating around that claimed Floyd had stalked that girl and had “lain in wait,” which was very serious in a case like this. That meant he had planned the crime. As soon as I heard that account, ominous words like special circumstances and premeditated lodged in my brain like cancers. According to a report in the newspaper, if they found Floyd guilty of this “premeditated rape and murder,” he could spend the rest of his life in prison. That would have been punishment enough, but the grand jury didn’t think so. The next day the newspaper reported that the DA was going for the death penalty.
CHAPTER 25
Richard Ramirez, better known to the world as the Night Stalker, was on death row, and that was where he belonged. He had raped, tortured, and killed many people in the L.A. area and then he took a “vacation” to San Francisco and killed a man with the unlikely name of Peter Pan and almost killed Mr. Pan’s wife. Charles Manson should have been on death row, too, but he was doing life instead. The list of names of people on death row or doing life in the state of California was long. Floyd Watson’s name did not belong on that list.
I didn’t care what anybody else said, thought, or did. I was going to stand by my man. Even though Floyd wanted me to stay out of it, I told everybody who would listen that he’d been with me at the time of the murder. A woman from church gave me a pitiful look and a hug, telling me how much she admired me for sticking by a rapist/murderer. This same woman had spent a few months in jail for lying on the witness stand for her two sons, who were both doing time in San Quentin for robbing and killing a paraplegic. Other people just told me to “hang in there and pray” because Floyd’s fate was in God’s hands, not mine. Even though I had stopped attending church on a regular basis, I took their advice. I prayed for Floyd several times a day.
I didn’t lose my job, but I immediately started looking for another one anyway, despite Dr. Oglethorpe’s protests. “Dolores, you are a good employee, and I want you to stay on,” he said, looking at me over the top of his glasses, his eyes looking like the eyes of a blind man. “You should not have allowed Floyd to be with you while you were on my time, but because of your exceptional record, I’ll overlook that this one time. As far as I’m concerned, your only crime was you charging me for overtime for the extra hours you were supposed to be working that night, when I know damn well you spent some of that time with your fiancé. If he really was with you when you say he was. . . .” Even though Dr. Oglethorpe was a dentist and he took real good care of his patients, his long crooked teeth looked like they were about ready to fly out of his mouth. He suddenly reminded me of a vampire, and that made me want to get away from him even more.
The fact that my employer had some doubts about Floyd’s innocence bothered me. But he wasn’t the only one. Some of the same people who had watched Floyd grow up and spend every Sunday in church would have thrown him to the lions had it been up to them.
Viola was one of the few people I knew who believed me when I told her that Floyd
had been with me during the time of the crime. But her ever-present, mean-spirited, meddlesome nephew was beside himself. “You don’t know what he did before he got over to you that night! He always did look like a rapist to me, with them sneaky eyes and them tight jeans. Only men with sex on the brain wear their pants tight enough for the world to see how big their dick is. That ain’t normal! You ought to be glad you found out what he was before you finished ruining your life by marrying him.”
“You hush your mouth, Noble Coleman! You ought to be ashamed of yourself!” Viola said. It was obvious that she was physically weak, but you couldn’t tell that from her voice. She sounded strong and determined, and that made me feel somewhat better. She had just come home from the hospital where she’d almost died during an operation on her obstructed bowels. She laid on the very couch that Floyd and I had all but fucked into the ground. There was a loud orange blanket draped across her body. “I been knowing Floyd since he was a itty bitty boy and I know he didn’t rape or kill nobody.” Viola had to stop talking for a few seconds to catch her breath. Then she patted and rubbed her chest a few times, like she was trying to gather up more steam. And she did. This time when she attacked her nephew, she did it with both guns blasting. “Now you look-a-here, Noble Coleman; I don’t believe Floyd done nothing! He ain’t raped and killed nobody! And even if I seen him do it with my own eyes, the only thing I’d believe was that my eyes was playing tricks on me! That boy ain’t no more of a rapist and killer than I am!!”
Even though Viola repeatedly defended Floyd, Noble talked trash about him every time he came to the house. And he seemed to enjoy it because every time he brought up the subject, he did it with a smirk on his face.
“Oh, them white folks is going to bury Floyd’s ghetto ass,” he spat, strutting around in Viola’s living room with the flip-flops on his ashy, reptilian feet flapping. There was a bottle of beer in one hand and a plate of stale tea cakes in the other. Despite his own health problems, which included high blood pressure, excessive gas, and various heart problems like Viola, this man ate like a hog, and had the flab hanging from his waist like an apron to prove it. His shirt was so tight, two of the middle buttons had popped loose. And the zipper on his dingy gray corduroy pants was threatening to do the same thing. Crumbs decorated his chin like measles. He stopped talking and chewing long enough to take a large, loud swallow from his beer bottle. Then he let out a great belch, which forced him to expel a mild fart. Without excusing himself he started spewing more of his verbal trash. “That nigger is going to get fried like shrimp tempura!”
