“Was there a trail of blood?” I asked.
“What?”
“Leading from the house? I mean, she shot her attacker, right?”
“You look like you’ve been shot,” the meaty cop who had called me a nigger said.
I ignored him.
“Can you help me out here, Sergeant Dietrich?” I asked.
“Go look around the backyard, Samuels,” the sergeant said to my self-proclaimed enemy.
“But, Sergeant —”
“The backyard,” Dietrich repeated.
After Samuels was gone Dietrich said, “There was a little blood. Not much. We figured that he used a pillow or something to stanch the bleeding and then made his way out. Mr. Poundstone said that his wife’s car was missing. The man who killed her —”
“Harold Ostenberg,” I said.
“— he probably took the car.”
“Can I go, Sergeant?” I asked.
“Detective Suggs is coming to pick you up,” Dietrich said. “They wanted you to wait for him.”
“Well, let me talk to Jewelle,” I said. “She can go, right?”
“I guess.”
JEWELLE DIDN’T WANT to leave me there but I told her that I had everything under control. I walked her to her car and apologized for swallowing her key.
“Don’t worry, Easy,” she replied. “You ain’t never taken nuthin’ from me that you ain’t given back tenfold. Helpin’ Jackson get his job means that he can finally lift up outta the street and make an honest woman outta me.”
I was wondering if Jackson could make an honest man of himself but I didn’t say it out loud. JJ drove off and white neighbors up and down the block stared at me as I made my way back to the crime scene. The man who had told the police about me ran to his door when I came near. He stood there at the entrance, shaking all over and slamming his right fist into his left palm. His deep consternation made me laugh. Here this guy didn’t know me from the man in the moon but still he was beside himself with hatred for me just walking down the street.
SUGGS ARRIVED AT about eight-thirty. He wore a stained beige suit and brown brogans. He shook my hand in front of a dozen cop witnesses and then toured the crime scene with a hard eye.
By that time there were three plainclothes detectives on the scene. They seemed to know Suggs. They all talked for forty-five minutes or so.
“Jordan had Peter Rhone arrested as a material witness in the Payne murder,” Suggs told me on the way to his car. “I had to give up his name.”
“He didn’t do it,” I said.
“I know.”
“Where we goin’?” I asked my new friend.
“That’s up to you, Ezekiel,” he said.
49
They found Miss Ostenberg’s car on Fifty-fourth Place in an alley,” Suggs told me as we headed back for South L.A.
“They find him?”
Suggs shook his head while saying, “Hide nor hair.”
We drove a little further.
I was tired by then. The wounds and drugs and company of death had weakened me. There would have been little I could do to subdue Harold even if he were standing in front of me. I doubted that I could have climbed out of my seat without help.
“You got any leads on the man, Rawlins?”
“No.”
“Why would he kill his mother?”
“Same reason he killed all those other women. Because she preferred the company of a white man to him.”
Suggs grimaced.
“Geneva Landry died this morning,” he said.
“What? Who did it?”
“Nobody. The doctors think that she might have been allergic to an antibiotic that they gave her. They won’t be sure until they do an autopsy.”
“She just died in her bed?”
“I’m sorry, Ezekiel.”
“Just died?” I said. “If you motherfuckers didn’t put her in there she would have been fine. But you were so worried about yourselves you didn’t even stop to find out about her.”
Suggs drove the car, his big hands tight on the wheel.
“You killed her just as well as you killed all those other women,” I continued.
“I didn’t kill anybody,” he said softly.
“No? Then who did? Who did? I told the people at the Seventy-seventh what I knew months ago. I told you just the other day.”
“Nobody saw the pattern,” he said, his voice getting fainter still.
“No,” I said. “They didn’t. But they heard Geneva yellin’ about it. They sure enough threw her in a hospital and started shootin’ her with drugs. They let her slip away right under their noses. Another woman dead and Gerald Jordan gets a party at the mayor’s house.”
Suggs said something else but it was too soft to hear over the car engine.
“What you say?” I asked him.
“Where are we going?”
“Take me to my office. Take me there and I will call you if I find out anything.”
“We can’t just let this go, Easy,” Suggs said. “The man is a killer and Payne is innocent.”
“I know that,” I said. “So you go to the papers and tell them. Tell the Examiner and the Times and the Los Angeles Sentinel. Tell ’em that there’s a Jack the Ripper goin’ up and down the streets killin’ black women. Give them Harold’s full name. Put that picture I gave you on the news.”
Melvin was already looking at the road but still it felt as if he were turning away from me.
“Mayor’s office doesn’t want any publicity,” he whispered.
“Say what?”
Those two words were the last of our conversation. Suggs had a job. He saved banks from being robbed and protected innocent victims from predators in the night. He hid the truth about a killer for the betterment of people that had never been that murderer’s victims. I was on the other side of the board. My queen and rooks and bishops were all gone. My pawns were exhausted, while he had a full complement of men. All I had left was a king behind a lazy pawn, flanked by a drunken man on a horse. He could have beaten me at any time he wanted to. And all I did was keep pushing ahead with no plan or hope.
If I were driving that car I might have run it into a wall.
SUGGS LET ME out in front of my building. I limped up the stairs and to my office. The door was open, I could see that and the damage that Harold’s gun had done from ten feet away. The key to Jewelle’s glove compartment was in my stomach and even if it weren’t, she and her .45 were many miles away. I was unarmed and my door was open. I couldn’t remember if I had left it that way or if Harold had shot me before I’d unlocked it.
I couldn’t run because of my wounds. I should have shuffled off but I didn’t. Instead I jumped through the doorway and yelled.
Mouse looked up from my chair. He had his feet on the tabledesk, leaning back against the windowsill. He smiled when he saw me.
“Hey, Ease,” he said. “How you doin’?”
I sighed but said nothing. I just walked to the visitor’s chair and sat down with my wounded leg out straight in front of me.
“I saw Benita,” Mouse said. “She was at the hospital with Bonnie and them.”
I nodded and wondered where I could find Harold.
“She told me that she almost did herself in, that you busted down her door and took her to the hospital.”
“Was my door open when you got here, Ray?”
“Naw. I jimmied it. I figured it didn’t matter ’cause it was already fucked up from that gunfire.”
“How long you been here?”
Raymond shook his head and pointed his gray eyes at the ceiling. “Couple’a hours. More.”
“What you want?” I asked.
“You saved her life, Easy. Here I fucked around and almost got the girl killed but you showed up. There you were and now Benita got a new chance. That ain’t half bad. I just wanted to tell you.”
I noticed that Jackson’s tape had moved. Between the desk and the back of my chair I was able to press myself into a standing position. I turned the arrow switch to “rewind” and then I switched it to “play.”