“Each of the ten was strangled, a few of them were beaten, and one was stabbed after she was dead. None were raped. I don’t believe that Nola Payne was raped either. Two of the women were married to white men.”
He looked up at me and I felt that a door opened somewhere. It was as if I had been held prisoner for so long that I’d forgotten there ever was a door to freedom. And now that it was open I didn’t know exactly what to do.
“You found that just by lookin’ through the files?” I asked.
Suggs nodded.
“You mean somebody around here could have sat down in this messy room and read the files and come up with this list?”
“Yeah.” Suggs’s admission carried a heavy weight with it. “I mean, I’m pretty good at this kind of work. That’s why they have me on the case but somebody should have picked it up before this.”
“And what about women killed that you found killers for?” I asked. “What about some innocent men up in jail for women that Harold killed?”
Melvin hadn’t thought of that. He turned his eyes toward a tan filing cabinet in the corner.
“One thing at a time,” he said. “Tell me what you know about this Harold right now.”
I told him all I knew. It wasn’t much. He was on the short side and medium brown. I remembered that his hairline was beginning to recede and his beard hairs were at least half gray. When I’d met him he looked about fifty to me, but on thinking about it later, I thought that street life had aged him prematurely. He had big hands that seemed a little bloated. He had spent at least a few nights in the drunk tank and he drove a shopping cart. His mother was still alive and lived in L.A., a fact he let drop in the one three-minute conversation I had with him. He had never looked me directly in the eye.
Suggs took notes while I talked and when I was finished he snapped his little notepad shut.
“Not much,” he said.
“I know. I’ve spent months driving around South L.A. looking for him. But it’s a big city. I thought maybe he migrated away. But if his mother is here, I hoped that he either came back to see her or that he never left.”
“I’ll put out the word on this Harold,” Suggs said. “But you should be out there lookin’ for him too. Did you find out anything about the white man that stayed with Nola?”
“No.”
“Well,” he said, “that’s probably for the best anyway. Jordan’s office won’t care about our theories on some black Jack the Ripper out around here. No sir they sure wouldn’t. Find the white man and truss him up like a Thanksgiving turkey—that’s Jordan’s speed.”
26
Suggs accompanied me out of the precinct. Half the policemen in the station came out to watch our passage. If I’d gone alone I would have been drawn into a fight I could have never won. Suggs knew that and walked me all the way to my car. There he extended his hand to me again. I shook it. It had been a long time since I felt that a white policeman saw eye to eye with me. The least I could do was take his hand in friendship.
I had the urge to get out in the streets and search for Harold but I knew better. Los Angeles is a big place. Anyone can hide there. There are docks and train yards and so many back alleys that it would take you two months to search them all once.
No, I wouldn’t get far by driving around, so I went home to see my beautiful patchwork family.
The little yellow dog, Frenchie, met me at the door. He snarled and barked his disapproval at my presence.
“I’m home,” I called, thinking that Bonnie and Feather would be in the kitchen sharing girl talk and making dinner.
“Hey, Easy,” a somewhat masculine voice said.
Jackson Blue rose up out of the love seat.
Jackson was very dark, slender, and short. I’d known him since my early years in Houston. We were what you would call friends but he certainly was not someone I could trust.
Jackson’s own mother couldn’t trust him. He was a liar by nature and a thief from the first day he could close his hands around some other baby’s rattle. But on the plus side he smiled easily, knew all of the important gossip within a twenty-mile radius, and had an IQ probably on a par with some of the greatest geniuses of history.
One of Jackson’s most endearing qualities was his cowardice combined with a willingness to get involved with some of the worst criminals you could imagine. He was always looking over his shoulder or cowering in some dark corner. He laughed easily and I was sure that he stayed so slim so that he’d have the edge when he might have to outrun some irate partner in crime.
“Jackson,” I said.
Now that he was standing I could see that he was wearing a tailored two-piece gray flannel suit with a white shirt, a dark maroon tie, and glasses with thick black rims. I tried to think of why he would be wearing such a getup. But no matter what came to mind there was no justification for it.
“You like?” he asked with a grin, holding up his cuffs and giving a wink.
“Halloween?” I asked, gesturing at the suit.
“You a regular Redd Foxx. No. This is a business suit. I’m a businessman.”
“Hi, honey,” Bonnie said, coming out of the kitchen.
“Daddy!” Feather yelled, careening between Bonnie and Jackson and slamming into my legs.
Feather hugged my right thigh, Bonnie kissed my cheek, and Jackson got into it by giving me a handshake. It was one of the few moments at that time that stands out for me as peaceful and whole. There I was, a man surrounded by friendship and love.
“Uncle Jackson says that there’s people in the South Pacific got two heads,” Feather said.
“Maybe if they buy a head of lettuce at the store,” I told her.
Feather giggled and then laughed until she fell to the floor.
Bonnie picked her up and I kissed her.
“What you doin’ here, Jackson?” I asked.
“Anybody ever need help, they come to Easy Rawlins,” he said.
Maybe I should have turned him away. I already had two or three full-time jobs to accomplish in the next week or so. Jackson wasn’t deserving of special consideration because he was so undependable. But no one I ever knew had a mind like his. And I was going to need some special thinking if I was going to go out after Harold the woman killer.
“What’s up, Jackson?”
Bonnie whirled Feather around and whisked her back into the kitchen.
Jackson sat in the love seat and I pulled up a two-rung step stool that Bonnie had bought so that she could get up on the high shelves.
“It’s Jewelle,” he said. He adjusted his glasses as he spoke.
“Since when you been wearin’ glasses, Blue?”
“You like ’em? I just got ’em last week. Bought ’em up in Beverly Hills—on Rodeo Drive.”
“Near-sighted?” I asked.
Jackson grinned. “No, brother. My eyesight’s twenty-ten. You a small man like me, need an edge with all these violent peoples runnin’ up and down the street.”
He handed me the glasses and I tried them on. It was like looking through the windshield of my car—no change at all. I handed them back.
“I don’t get it. Glasses make you look like an egghead. What’s the angle?”
Jackson smiled again.
“You know I been studyin’ the binary language of machines,” he said.
Computers had been Jackson’s passion for some time. He had been holed up in a small apartment managed by his lover, Jewelle MacDonald, for well over a year reading about how those thinking machines worked.
I said all of this by nodding.
“Well,” he said, “a while ago I decided to see if I could get me a job at a bank or some insurance company workin’ on their computers. I know the IBM languages called BAL and COBOL and FORTRAN. I know all the loops and peripheries and the JCL too.”
I had no idea what he was talking about but it still gave me an inner glee to know that a ghetto-bred black man like Jackson could know all the rich white businessmen’s secrets.