“You can go out now,” the eastern bigot said.
I followed the line into the adjoining room. The prisoners were clapped back into chains and led off to their cages. The other men just left.
I made to leave too.
“Rawlins.” It was Fogherty.
He and Sanchez approached me with serious faces.
I realized, with a scared shock, that I had forgotten my lawyer’s phone number.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Fogherty asked. He was no longer friendly or sad.
“Home.”
“Our witness thought that he recognized you, Rawlins.”
I knew when he said it that the lineup had failed; that Fogherty and Sanchez were trying to scare me, or to see how hard it was to shake my tree.
I knew that I shouldn’t show too much fear or they’d think I was guilty. The best thing for an Honest John to do would be to stutter out a “Wha?” That way I could seem the innocent kind of scared.
“The hell you say,” I said instead. “I didn’t do anything for anybody to see.”
“Maybe they saw you afterwards,” Fogherty speculated.
“Bullshit,” I said. “I wasn’t anywhere but work or home. If somebody saw me in one’a those places I’d be glad to confess to workin’ or feedin’ my kids.”
“I don’t have to let you out of here, Rawlins,” Fogherty said. “You could be down in that cellblock that you came through.”
I was still defiant but his threat had numbed my tongue.
Fogherty’s smile was demented. “Yeah. Sanchez told me that you saw Felix Wren down in his cell.” Fogherty watched me and nodded, sagelike. “He’s only in on a drunk driving charge but he resisted the arresting officers — bit one of them. Don’t worry about him though, he’ll be okay. We won’t even charge him. Once he gets his last tooth knocked out we’ll send him back home to his mother.”
That was the first moment I felt murder in my fingers. It’s not that I wanted to kill Fogherty particularly. I could have killed anybody.
I turned and went toward a door with a red-and-white EXIT sign above it.
“We know you’re in it, Rawlins,” Fogherty said to my back.
I kept going, following the EXIT signs.
Nobody stopped me or even noticed as I made my way through the station. Somewhere on the lineup I had become invisible again. I’d taken on the shadows that kept me camouflaged, and dangerous.
21
Sanchez and Fogherty showed me bloody Felix, they told me that I could end up like him, but they stopped short of arresting me and throwing me into the cell with Jones.
They wanted something from me, but what was it? There was only small coverage of the murder of the two brothers in the paper; nothing about the circumstances of their deaths. That lack of coverage in itself might have been surprising if it wasn’t for the fact that Roman and Holland were black men and it was early in the sixties.
You had to kill somebody white to get any kind of news splash in the sixties.
Foreign blacks made the news, however. That very day the Congolese had jailed two Russians for espionage, and five hundred Haitians had been reported dead from flooding. To the white press, and many white Americans, black people were easier to see as exotic foreigners, somebody else’s people. But the lives of black Americans were treated with silence.
I didn’t know when they’d identify Idabell. Los Angeles is a vast complex of unassociated towns and municipalities. The bureaucracies didn’t communicate well and so Idabell’s identity might take a day or two to surface.
The storm dominated the headlines. The Congolese and a political science teacher who claimed that the Russians had framed him for a spy were below that. Idabell’s death was ignored by the radio and TV and newspapers.
Ignored by everyone except me — me and the little yellow dog.
But for a while I put revenge out of my mind. I rolled up my sleeves and started to get ready for dinner with my kids.
I decided to go Mexican because the kids loved it and it was a lot of preparing. I defrosted a large stack of corn tortillas that Flower kept me stocked with. Flower was a Panamanian but she learned Mexican cuisine because that was all that Primo would eat — at home.
I deseeded dried ancho chiles and then pan-roasted them for about fifteen minutes, to get that smoky flavor. After that I softened them with hot water and ran them and the water through the purée cycle of the blender. I filtered out the flecks of skin by passing the liquid through a metal strainer and made a roux, with wheat flour and margarine, to thicken the sauce so that it would stick to the flat tortillas.
I grated my yellow cheddar and Monterey Jack. There was the ground beef and chicken to sauté, separately of course.
When the meat started steaming, Pharaoh slinked into the room. He crouched down and growled while he sniffed. He wanted some food but I’d be damned if I ever fed a mouth that bit me. The food I cook is too good for that.
I love to cook. When I was a boy down in Louisiana, and later on in Texas, I spent many a day with no food and no prospects. So when a piece of meat or some grain passed my way I knew what to do. Preparing a meal for me was like going to church; there was a miracle and a deep satisfaction in my soul.
It wasn’t until I was heating lard in a large iron skillet that I started thinking about my problems again. It hardly seemed real; two dead brothers and a woman too. I couldn’t imagine my simple little working life at Sojourner Truth mixed up with murder and death.
It had to be money. I lit a Camel and watched the steady gas flame under the black pan. It had to be money. That phrase played over about twenty-five times in my mind but it didn’t lead anywhere.
I dipped a stiff tortilla into the hot lard. Instantly it took on the texture of a wet sheet of paper. I immersed the flimsy bread into the sauce and then flattened it out on a plate. I put a line of chicken down the center of that one, rolled it all up, and placed it in its corner of a large ceramic baking dish.
Whoever killed Idabell wanted that croquet set; that child’s toy and revenge.
She and her husband, and his brother, stole it from him. He wanted his property — and the people who stole it. Bonnie had said that she hadn’t seen Idabell in months, but that was a lie. Idabell said that they had gone to Paris together and, to prove it, the killer was waiting for Bonnie to come home. Maybe Bonnie knew more than Idabell thought.
Dear Bonnie,
I just wanted to leave you a note and tell you again that I couldn’t help what I did. If there was any other way I would have come to you first. But I couldn’t have taken that chance.
I know that I can’t make it up to you. All I can say is that I have paid dearly for the wrong they’ve done. I’ve lost my husband, my home, and my job. I’ll probably never see you again and so I’ve also lost the best friend that I ever had.
I hope that you’ll forgive me one day.
Your friend always,
Along with the letter I had three scraps of paper from her purse. A laundry receipt, something that looked like a restaurant tab with the amounts in francs, and, finally, there was a handwritten note. The note read “William, Whitehead’s.” There was an address scrawled at the bottom.
I put the tray of enchiladas in the refrigerator to keep until dinnertime. Then I chopped tomatoes, Bermuda onions, and a little green pepper together with ripe avocado to make a light relish-like salad. I laced it with lime and a touch of cayenne (I couldn’t make it too hot because then Feather wouldn’t be able to eat it).
The rice I baked in a tomato sauce mixed with minced garlic and two hot peppers. I sprinkled in a handful of tiny dried shrimps to give my kids a treat.