“Get up, baby,” I said to Jewelle.
“What is it?” she asked.
“I don’t know but you should be awake.”
The ambulance wailed up to the front of the Ostenberg home. Two attendants rushed out carrying the gurney. The man from the Cadillac ran out to meet them. Even at the distance I could tell that he was all broken up. His hands kept moving. The ambulance men had to push him aside.
“What is it, Easy?” Jewelle asked.
“I don’t know. But you better get out of here. I’ll get out and you go home.”
“I’m not leavin’ you here. You come on with me.”
Four police cars came up all at once. Cops rolled out of the cars and into the house. People were coming out of their houses on the next block. The sun was coming up as if even the sky was awakened by the racket.
As the minutes went by, the ambulance attendants didn’t reappear. That meant there was either a false alarm or a death.
“It’s him!” someone shouted in a maniacal tone. “It’s him! It’s him!”
I looked out and saw, not fifteen feet from Jewelle’s Citroën, the flabby man with the green eyes who had called the police on me the last time I was on Jocelyn’s block. He was shouting and jumping in his housecoat and slippers. When our eyes met he shrieked and ran straight for the cops.
“You got a key for the glove compartment?” I asked Jewelle.
“What’s wrong with him?” she said, referring to the screaming man.
“Take it off of the key chain and gimme it,” I said.
I took the forty-five out of the bag and Jewelle handed me the key. I threw the gun into the glove compartment, locked it, and then swallowed the little brass key just as if I were in some spy movie about to be arrested for attempting to go over the Berlin Wall.
“What’s wrong with that man, Easy? Was he talking about us?”
“The cops are going to grab us, JJ. Let’s get out of the car and cross our hands in front of us.”
Jewelle was a fast study. She got out with me and we waited for the cops that were hurrying out of the Ostenberg house.
Even though we were waiting peacefully we were both grabbed and thrown to the ground. The officers used rough language, calling us niggers and asking questions without waiting for or expecting replies. We were cuffed and yanked to our feet, dragged down the street and thrown through the Ostenberg front doorway.
As we were pulled into the house more policemen arrived. All that pushing and shoving opened the wounds on my leg and arm.
“This one’s bleeding,” one cop said.
But I wasn’t paying attention to their overreactions or the stinging pain I felt. I was looking around the Ostenberg living room.
It was all white.
The carpets and walls, the sofa and even the coffee table were stark white. Even a painting on the wall was a big white house in snow with white children laughing in the window. I wondered if the rest of the house was the same. A policeman grabbed my bandaged arm and a drop of my blood fell onto the thick white rug.
A white man in a brown suit was ushered into the room by two cops. He was an old man and miserable beyond his years. One cop whispered something into his ear and he looked up at me and Jewelle. Then he shook his head and collapsed into their arms. They led him to a white stuffed chair.
He rolled out from the seat and onto the carpet, crying.
I watched him as if he were a distant constellation. I didn’t care about Jocelyn’s husband any more than some far-off celestial event that occurred before humanity had blighted the earth. He was just a bystander who didn’t see the car coming at him. He wasn’t important.
48
What were you doing in front of the house?” a police sergeant asked me.
We were in the kitchen of the Ostenberg house. I was sitting in a white chair, at a white table, across from a white enamel stove, dripping blood on the white linoleum floor.
Somewhere else in the house the white man was crying.
“I was down the block,” I said. “Sitting in the car with my girl.”
“How did you get shot?” The sergeant was in his mid-thirties. When he was a teenager he had a bad bout with acne. The scars covered both of his fat cheeks.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I was going to my office when somebody opened fire.”
They had Jewelle in another room but I wasn’t worried about her. Jewelle would just say that we were parking, that there was no law against that.
I had given them Jordan’s letter but with a black suspect in a crime in a white neighborhood less than a week after the riots, they had to have more than a tardy note from the deputy commissioner.
“What are you doing in this neighborhood?” the scarred sergeant asked.
“Nuthin’ special, Officer. Just hangin’ around.”
“Tell me about this note from Jordan’s office.”
“That’s nothing,” I said. “Why don’t you tell me what’s wrong here. I didn’t do anything and haven’t seen any crime.”
“You open your smart mouth again, nigger,” a uniformed officer said, “and I’ll break your face for you good.”
“Yeah?” I said.
It was as if Mama Jo’s elixir was waiting for some insult. The blood in my veins turned hot and I was suddenly ready to fight.
The sergeant didn’t know what to do. And I was of no help. I couldn’t seem to control my mouth or my actions and I had no proof of what crime had been committed—though I did have my suspicions.
There were four cops with me in the white kitchen. The angry one was meaty and tall. The sides of his neck were red and his eyes were blue. He’d cut himself shaving recently. The scab was near the right corner of his mouth.
I was ready to fight even sitting there with my hands cuffed behind me. It was as if Mama Jo’s medicine had opened a door of foolish bravery in my heart and now it came on me whenever I was in jeopardy.
Just then the phone rang. In between the ringing I could hear the white man’s cries.
“This is Dietrich,” the sergeant said into the phone.
He looked up at me. “Yes.”
He gestured at another policeman to undo my handcuffs. “Certainly. Yes sir. I understand.”
The manacles were tight on my wrists and they held me in such a way that the ache in my arm worsened. With release I felt a moment of surcease.
“Are you sure?” Sergeant Dietrich said into the phone. “Yes sir. I will. Completely.”
He hung up the line and said, “Come with me . . . Mr. Rawlins.”
The meaty cop who had threatened me scowled. He wanted to strike out at me but was restrained by the respect that his superior was forced to show. He got close to me though. I’m sure he was hoping that someone would give him permission to drop the hammer on my skull.
Sergeant Dietrich walked me up the stairs to an open door that led into a bedroom with the corpse of Jocelyn Ostenberg lying across it. Her tongue was protruding and her eyes were wide with fright.
He finally got the one he was after, I thought.
There was a small pistol on the floor next to the bed. About half a soda bottle of blood had been spilled down the bedspread and onto the floor.
“Do you know her?” the sergeant asked.
“Jocelyn Ostenberg,” I said. “She’s a black woman.”
“What?” the meaty cop said.
“Her son is a man named Harold. He killed a woman down in Watts a few days ago.”
The police all around me peered closer at the dead face on the bed.
“And what do you have to do with it?” Dietrich asked.
I was staring at the corpse, looking for Harold somewhere in the folds underneath. After he shot me he came back to her, I thought. Was it her plan to kill him? Did she want to get rid of him for good once he took care of me?