The police didn’t believe me and I never saw Harold again. But I was convinced that he killed Jackie because he thought that Musa was a white man and he wanted revenge on the black woman who dared to become a white man’s lover.
“Hey you, Easy Rawlins!” someone shouted.
I didn’t respond. I didn’t know who it was calling me but I couldn’t take my mind off of Harold and Jackie and now Nola on a silver bed in a white room hidden by the same police department that refused to believe my story.
“Hey!” the voice shouted again.
Hearing the threat in his tone my body rose without my willing it to do so. I turned to see that I was faced with four men, the foremost of whom was Newell.
“You sucker punched me yesterday,” the broad-shouldered man said.
I lifted my iron in reply.
Two of the men who were with him took involuntary steps backward.
“Whu-oh,” the third one said.
“You think I’m ascared’a that crowbar?” he asked me.
I kicked him in the groin and then swung the iron at his cohorts, hitting one of them in the shoulder.
“Get the fuck outta here or I’ma kill you motherfuckahs!” I shouted at the men.
They ran and I didn’t blame them. Easy Rawlins was a crazy man right then. Insane.
Newell was in the dirt moaning when I knelt down next to him.
“Do you want me to start hittin’ you with this thing?” I asked him.
He shook his head.
“Are you scared of this crowbar now?” I asked.
He nodded so I knew he could distinguish between the words I said.
“What was the name of the bum lived in here?”
“Harold,” he said in a pained whisper.
I left him there for someone else to save. Saving wasn’t my business right then. I was ready to go out and kill a man named Harold.
25
I entered the Seventy-seventh Street police station not fifteen minutes after leaving Newell. I’d gotten out of the car with the tire iron in my hand but when a woman passing by jerked her head and skipped away from me I realized that I should put my weapon down.
Walking back to the car, I felt every step like I was walking through water. I was wasting time. What I needed to do was find Harold and kill him. I opened the trunk and threw the tire iron in and then I sprinted for the police station.
I ran up to the front door breathing hard and sweating. Anyone looking at me would have thought that I was a man in trouble. I’m sure that’s what the desk sergeant thought.
“Yes?” he asked, scrutinizing me from head to toe.
“Detective Suggs, please,” I said.
“And who are you?”
The only feature I remember about that white man was that he had red hair. Red hair like Nola Payne had. Little Scarlet murdered by Harold the tramp. If thoughts could kill, people would have fallen dead for a mile all around me.
“Easy Rawlins,” I said. “Easy Rawlins.”
“And what’s your problem, Mr. Rawlins?”
“Murder,” I said. “He asked me about a murder and I found out something he wants to know.”
I could see the cop trying to block me with some unspoken logic in his mind. The man looks crazy, he seemed to be thinking, but then again Suggs was only visiting the Seventy-seventh. I probably did know him.
There were quite a few policemen in the station. I suppose they were on overtime, making sure the people in the neighborhood didn’t burn them down.
“Have a seat,” Red said.
I went over near the bench across from his desk but stayed on my feet.
“I said sit down,” the desk sergeant commanded.
“Don’t wanna sit,” I said.
“You heard the man,” a voice to my right said.
It was from a tall uniformed cop standing nearby. He had gray hair, a young face, and a hand on his baton. I didn’t say anything to him, just stood there and stared.
“Do you want me to sit you down?” the gray-haired, boy-faced man asked.
“Fuck you.”
“Corless,” a voice I recognized said. “Stand down.”
“But, Lieutenant —”
“Stand down,” Detective Suggs said again.
He came in between me and the angry uniform.
“Fuck you,” I said again.
The gray head lunged at me but he was met by a surprisingly quick left hook thrown by the sloppy detective. Corless went down quickly and though he tried to jump back up he couldn’t find his legs.
Suggs took me by the arm and led me down a hall behind the sergeant’s desk and to an office that was a storage room not three days before. A dozen reams of paper were piled on the table he used for a desk and a three-foot pile of first-aid kits was stacked against the wall. There was a rack of shotguns on the floor and a gaping file cabinet filled with parking tickets and other traffic citations that kept the door from fully opening.
Suggs slammed the door shut.
“What’s wrong with you, Rawlins?” he said. “You off your rocker?”
“I know who killed Nola Payne.”
“Who?”
“A guy named Harold.”
“Harold what?”
“Don’t know his last name. But he killed her. I’m sure of that.”
“How do you know?”
I told Suggs about Musa Tanous and Jackie Jay, about how I met Harold once and then saw his lean-to filled with her belongings. I told him about the crazy notes he left near both crime scenes.
“Nola and the white man she was with either became lovers or Harold thought that they had. Either way, he killed her for having that white man in her place.”
I decided to leave Peter Rhone, Harley Piedmont, and Juanda out of my story. I knew who the killer was but if I threw any more names at the cops, they’d go off on some other track. And I wasn’t about to let that happen.
“How do you know that Harold was in the neighborhood?” Suggs asked. He was a good cop.
“I walked around,” I said. “Just lookin’ to get the lay of the land and I saw his teepee. It was made the same way as the last one I saw.”
“Have a seat, Mr. Rawlins,” Suggs offered.
He lifted a box full of files from a folding metal chair and slapped the seat a couple of times to move the dust around. Then he climbed over some other boxes to get to the chair behind the ancient maple desk.
I sat too.
Suggs’s fawn-colored eyes seemed to be asking me for something. He took a deep breath and let out a sigh.
“I’m not leavin’ here until you do somethin’ about Harold,” I said. “Last time I told the cops—right here in this station—they said I was crazy to think that a bum could be that good at killin’.”
“I believe you,” Suggs said.
I didn’t know what he meant by that. I mean, he could have been saying that he believed that the cops in the station would say such a thing. But that didn’t mean he bought my story about Harold.
Suggs laid his hand on a green folder filled with maybe two hundred sheets of paper.
“While I’ve been here waiting for you to come up with something,” he said, “I’ve been taking up my time looking at the files of the open homicide cases of women in the neighborhood. At first I only went back one year but now I’m up to seven . . .”
It had only been a couple of days. That kind of work would have meant he was on the job almost around the clock.
“. . . and I found something disturbing,” he continued, opening the file. On the front page he had typed a long list of names down the left side with a shorter list to the right. “Thirty-seven unsolved homicides of women under forty. Most of them were in relationships with violent men. But six were not and four more were involved with men who had no history of violence. Your Jackie Jay was one of those.”
He turned the page to a handwritten sheet.