Every morning Mr. Burns came out and collected the rags for the trash. It was all we could do.
I CAME INTO THE MAIN HALL of the administration building. Students were moving around, heading toward their first-period classes.
“Mr. Langdon,” I called down the crowded corridor. “Mr. Langdon.”
Casper Langdon turned around quickly, as if my voice had grabbed his shoulder and yanked. A teenager bounced off of his great paunch and went crashing into a bank of lockers.
Langdon ignored the boy and called, a little too loudly, “Mr. Rawlins?”
He was a man who was used to people running away, not calling out to him.
Small-headed and bald, he had an enormous body that was almost perfectly round. He had no nose to speak of and hardly any lips. He breathed through his open mouth and resembled a great albino turtle in overalls.
“Hi, Mr. Langdon. How are you today?”
“Oh, okay I guess.” He opened his eyes very wide and then squinted. Mr. Langdon was nearsighted but he was too vain to wear his glasses. “You know, with all this stuff about people getting killed, right here on the school grounds. What’s this world coming to?”
“Yeah, well,” I said. “You don’t get any guarantees in this life.”
Langdon gasped twice and worked his eyes at me. “Did the police talk to you yet?”
“Not yet. I expect that Sanchez’ll get to me today.”
“Sanchez? Is that his name? I hope he doesn’t want to talk to me.”
“Why not?” I tried to make the question as pointed as possible without seeming to know anything.
“I’m no good around authority figures. They make me so nervous.”
“Well, do you know anything? I mean, something about what happened?”
“No, I don’t.”
Like hell.
“Then you don’t have a thing to worry about, Mr. Langdon. Not a thing.” I slapped him on his shoulder. He winced and winked and tried to laugh.
“Did you want something, Mr. Rawlins?”
“No. Why?” I asked innocently.
“Why did you call me?”
“No reason.” I smiled. “I just haven’t said good morning to you in a long time.” Lying is mainly achieved by the tone in your voice. If you sound like you mean what you say, most people will believe you.
Mr. Langdon believed me.
I watched him go down the hall, pillow-punching children and adults alike with his girth.
The administration office was a big room of oak and cream. A yard-high wooden wall separated the outside world from the secretaries who ran Sojourner Truth. The seven secretaries had four desks behind which stood a row of shallow offices. Between each office and the next sat two large filing cabinets. The women moved from desk to desk and cabinet to cabinet like bees in a hive. Every now and then one of them would duck into a door and make a call or type a letter. Trudy Van Dial puffed cigarettes behind a closed door now and then because she was addicted to both work and nicotine and couldn’t bear to take the time to go down to the teachers’ lounge.
Gladys Martinez, a fifth-generation Mexican-American Los Angelena, was office head. Gladys was a good-natured woman. She usually had a smile and a story whenever we talked, but that day she didn’t even answer my question.
I asked her if Mrs. Turner was coming in that morning. She just turned her back to me and said, “Joanna, I need some staples up here.” She kept her back to the front desk for a while. When she turned around and saw me still standing there she smiled, raised her shoulders to indicate her helplessness, and then hurried into a back office.
I didn’t run out of the front door. I didn’t get into my car and drive out of the state with my children. I didn’t, but I should have.
THE MAIN OFFICE was clear of custodians when I got there. The painters were sitting around waiting for their tarps and rollers to be delivered. The plumbers were there with a final plea for me to sign off on tearing out the boiler-room floor—I refused them and they left to figure out another way to change the pipes under the school.
“What’s happening with that killing, Rawlins?” Conrad Hopkins, a watery-eyed painter from Detroit, asked me. Some of the craftsmen liked to feel important. A few had annoying habits, like not calling me mister. Hopkins was especially obnoxious because of the high-handed tone he took. He was an older man, more washed out than white.
“I don’t know a thing about it.” I lied to him because keeping in practice keeps you alive.
“They’re all over the garden, and I hear that they took over Teale’s office for questioning people,” Hopkins said.
Mrs. Teale was the girls’ vice principal; she had an office on the second floor of the administration building.
“It was probably drugs,” one of the younger painters said. He put a cigarette to his lips and held his hand out with authority. “Cases like this it usually is.”
“You don’t know shit, Hank,” Hopkins said.
The other men laughed while the painter named Hank looked around trying to hide his humiliation. In the crowds I’d once run in, Hopkins would have had to back up his words with fists; sometimes the street has it over the office.
I sat down at my desk to go over the quarterly vacation requests. That’s when I noticed the pink slip from up the hill informing me that Simona Eng had called in sick.
The workmen hung around talking and drinking coffee. They took longer breaks, but at the end of the day their work had to be done, so I didn’t try to push them. I just filled out my progress reports and made recommendations to the area supervisor, Bertrand Stowe.
Soon after the nine-forty class bell rang, the door to the main office was flung open. Sanchez came in with two uniformed white cops. The plumbers and painters were struck dumb. Maybe they thought that they’d be arrested for slacking off on the job.
“Excuse us, sirs,” Sanchez said to the men. “But Mr. Rawlins and I have some police matters to talk about.”
They cleared the room in seconds.
It took Sanchez half a minute to come sit at my desk. He and his goons knew their script by heart. Policeman number one started looking around the shelves and at the papers on the table while policeman number two positioned himself close to me, just in case I got the notion to run. Sanchez in the meanwhile chose a chair, shook it for no reason that I could tell, and then dragged it over to my desk. Before he sat down he took out a new pack of Kools and tamped it hard against the heel of his palm. He pulled the red strip on the cellophane wrapper and tore the aluminum paper from one side of the pack. He gestured the cigarettes toward me as an offer. I declined and so he put the pack away without taking out a cigarette for himself.
I don’t remember being frightened. I was so concentrated on him and what he did that there was no room for feeling.
He hadn’t shaved that morning and his brown suit was rumpled. His breath was coming quicker than mine and there was dirt under his chipped nails. He had on a violet tie with a knot that even Jesus would have done over. All of that made the sergeant look vulnerable, like he was human. But his eyes were none of that. I’ve been told that there’s no such thing as truly black eyes but Sergeant Sanchez’s small orbs were no other color. They were animal eyes. And I was lost in the woods.
“You know Lieutenant Lewis?” he asked. He straddled the chair backwards, leaning his chest against the backrest.
I didn’t trust my voice not to crack.
“Arno Lewis,” he said. “From the Seventy-seventh Street station.”
“What about’im?”
“I thought I recognized you in the garden yesterday, Rawlins. I’ve been at the Seventy-seventh for eight years. A long time ago I saw you, but I didn’t remember what you were there for. I talked to Lieutenant Lewis this morning.” Sanchez proved that he could smile and scrutinize at the same time. “He likes you.”
It almost sounded like a proposition.
“But,” Sanchez sighed, “with friends like him your enemies wo
uld see you hung up by the balls.”
It was a simple trick. He knew about the times I had been in jail and the kinds of people that I’d been involved with. What he wanted was for me to confess to that history without him actually mentioning anything. That way I would be in the position of confessing to him, telling him things without him having to ask.
“We take our friends where we can,” I said. He was going to have to do better than that if he wanted to hogtie me.
“You were looking for Idabell Turner this morning.”
“I what?”
“Mrs. Turner,” Sanchez said. “You asked about her in the main office this morning. Mrs. Martinez mentioned it.”
“I did?”
“You were asking for the victim’s name yesterday.”
“No,” I said.
“Well, you asked if I’d found out the victim’s name.”
I didn’t have to answer that.
“His name was Roman Gasteau,” Sanchez continued. “Twin brother of Holland Gasteau.”
Sanchez’s eyes were saying, loud and clear, that I knew what he was talking about. They were inviting me to enter into the conversation.
But I refused.
“Why’d you ask about Mrs. Turner this morning, Mr. Rawlins?”
“She’s a friend’a mines. I heard her dog got killed or somethin’.”
“If she’s such a good friend, why didn’t you call her house?”
“I did. She wasn’t home,” I said. “What’s this all about?”
“Where were you last night, Mr. Rawlins?”
“At home mostly. For a while I was out lookin’ at my property.”
“And where’s that?” he asked. He’d been leaning forward but now he sat up straight; it wasn’t going to be as easy to break me down as he’d thought.
“I got a buildin’ on Denker and one on Magnolia Street. I went out to see how they was lookin’.” My language became completely comfortable. I didn’t need to pretend about who I was with Sanchez. “You could ask my manager—Mofass.”
He wanted Mofass’s number, and I obliged him with the answering-service line. Any call Mofass got from the LAPD, he’d talk to me first.
“Now what’s this all about, sergeant?” I asked. “You got some kinda problem with me?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “Has Mrs. Turner been having any problems lately?”
There are moments in your life when you can tell what’s right and wrong about yourself—your nature. I wanted my job and my everyday kind of life. I wanted to see Jesus get his track scholarship at UCLA and Feather to become the artist I knew she could be.
All I had to do was say, “Yeah, she said she’d been fightin’ with her husband. He threatened to kill her dog. I know ’cause she gave the dog to me yesterday morning.” I didn’t have to talk about our good time on the desktop. I didn’t have to confess about breaking into her house.
Instead I said, “Not that I know of. But you know, she’s kinda private about anything at home. I mean, I got her number but last night was the first time I ever called it.”
I was a fool; but I was my own fool.
Sanchez sniffed at the lie and then stood up suddenly.
Before turning to leave he pointed at me. “We’ll be talking again soon, I think, Mr. Rawlins.”
They left and I went back to my vacation charts.
CHAPTER 11
I SPENT A WHILE GOING over other papers and requests that had piled up. I started filling out an order form for central supply, but no matter what I tried to concentrate on I ended up thinking about Simona on that bench and Jorge taking her off.
“HEY, PEÑA!” I found him an hour later on the lower campus. He was hosing down the handball wall out beyond bungalow 1.
“Hey, Mr. Rawlins.” Jorge twisted the nozzle on his hose until the water stopped spouting. “How you doing?”
“Okay. All right. I wanted to ask you something.”
“What’s that?”
“What’s wrong with Simona?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, why is she home sick today?”
“I don’t know. Why don’t you ask her?”
“Listen, the cops came out to the main office to see me a little while ago—”
“Yeah, I heard that. One of the painters said.”
“They wanted to know about Simona.”
“Really? What they want to know?”
“What I knew about her. If she had some reason to lie to them.”
Jorge and I were close enough. He knew that I had his best interests at heart. And I did, too. I was only lying to get the story; not to get him or his girl into trouble.
“We didn’t wanna say nuthin’ to the cops, Mr. Rawlins, you know.”
I waited.
“Simona knew that man. She used to go out with him.”
“Yeah?”
“Uh-huh. His brother was married to Mrs. Turner. They would get together sometimes after school and go out to some place and have reefer parties. You know, Mrs. Turner liked Simona because she was going to college, so she would ask her out with some of the other teachers sometimes.” Peña’s usually cheerful eyes had the dull luster of dread in them. “But they got kinda weird and she stopped goin’ around with them.”
“Did she tell the cops?”
“No. I told her she better not. ’Cause you know if they found out about her and the reefer then she’d get in trouble. Maybe it would be a mark on her record.” Jorge was nervous. He was afraid of trouble himself. He had a good job with his sister and her children covered under his medical insurance.
“Don’t worry, Jorge,” I said. “Just keep it quiet. Everything’s gonna be fine.” I clapped the young man on the shoulder and left him with the illusion of security.
ETTAMAE WAS MOPPING UP some girl’s thrown-up lunch on the top floor of the language arts building. She was looking almost mean enough to dissuade me from approaching her. You learned where we were reared to avoid tough customers with sticks in their hands.
“Hey, Etta.”
She kept pushing her mop. Yesterday she’d been mad at me for acting like a man does. Now she was mad at all men.
“Don’t go droppin’ your jaw on the floor now, honey,” I said. “Mouse stayed with me last night.”
“Says what?”
“Listen, Etta, the cops showed Raymond a picture of the dead man and he went off a little. He started drinkin’ and worryin’ that William was his father. He didn’t wanna bring that kinda sadness home to his own boy.”
It took her a minute to let her anger go. There had been hatred stirring in her heart for Mouse. And, you know, hatred has deep roots in a black woman’s heart.
“Let’s go up on the roof,” I said. “Take a break.”
UP ON TOP of the language arts building you could see for miles. L.A. down around Watts was mostly flat to the sea. The blacktop roads were wide and green sprouted up everywhere. Little houses ran in rows between the avenues. They seemed frail in comparison with the streets. It was almost as if the houses were just resting points on a forever roadway to somewhere else.
I lit up a Camel. Etta took one too. She leaned over the brick wall to look down on the new yard.
“He still crazy, Easy.” She exhaled deeply.
“He loves you and LaMarque.”
“Yeah. I know. But he so strange now. Two nights ago he was sittin’ on the sofa, not sayin’ a thing, an’ then all of a sudden he sit up straight an’ call out, ‘LaMarque! LaMarque!’ I tole’im to be quiet, that the boy’s sleepin’, but he just kept on shoutin’ till finally LaMarque come outta his bedroom rubbin’ his tears ’cause he’s asleep an’ afraid at the same time.”
I heard what she was saying but my gaze lay on a giant cloud that was passing. Etta’s words were painful for her but she had to say them. And while she talked I was comforted by her voice and the familiarity of our lives.
“You know what he said?” Etta asked.
“
What?”
“‘LaMarque, don’t you never kill a man don’t deserve to die.’ Then he sat there an’ look for a long time and then he say, ‘An’ don’t you never kill your father or your mother either.’
“Can you beat that?”
Instead of saying anything I took her in my arms. It wasn’t sex. I just needed to be held and she did too. She smelled of cleaning wax and bread, of the sweat from hard work.
Our embrace would have hurt most people. It was strong and straining.
Two double bells sounded in the yard.
Etta’s arm moved up to caress my head in its padded vice. I felt that explosion go off in my chest again. The wind kicked up, fanning the tiny ember left years before.
Again, two double bells.
“That’s for you, Easy,” Etta said in a voice that had no sympathy with the words.
“I know.”
We kissed and then kissed again. But the ember didn’t have anything to catch on. My right hand laced itself together with her left.
Our smiles were sorry grins.
By the time the bells sounded again I was off down the stairs.
CHAPTER 12
MR. RAWLINS,” Gladys Martinez, the snitch, said shyly, “Mr. Preston wants you to meet him in the aud.”
“Okay.” I turned to go. I wasn’t really mad at Gladys. The way I figured it, Sergeant Sanchez had told her to report on anyone who asked about Mrs. Turner. People in the working world went by the rules. That’s how they knew to survive.
“Mr. Rawlins,” Gladys called when I was half the way out of the door.
“Yes?”
“Mr. Stowe called from the central office. He said that he’d like you to come down there.”
Any other time I would have gone to meet Mr. Preston with no qualms. He was the boys’ vice principal at Sojourner Truth, and he was okay, in an aloof way. He was a squat, muscular man, in his late forties. Bill had come up the hard way, working as a gym teacher for twenty years before they promoted him.
I was a workingman just like him. But as I made my way to the eastern side of the administration building, I remembered the last time Preston wanted to see me in Truth Auditorium …
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