“Did he have a Southern accent?”
“Maybe. But not real deep like country or somethin’ like that.”
“Listen, Etheline,” I said. “I’m tryin’ to find out if this man you knew was my friend. Can you describe him?”
“Hell,” she said. “I could show you a picture if that would get you to leave me alone.”
“A photograph?” I asked.
“Uh-huh. I got it in my trunk, with all the rest’a my letters and stuff.”
“Honey, I sure would like to see that.”
“You said somethin’ in that note you gave to Miss Bristol about money?”
“I’ll give you a hundred dollars just to have a look at that photograph.”
I could have offered twenty; that was a lot of money. But I wanted to pay what the picture was worth to me. I guess it was a little superstition on my part. I felt that if I tried to skimp on the value of her gift, somehow things would turn out bad.
She gave me an address on Hedly, a small street between downtown and south L.A.
Feather and Jesus were both asleep by then. Feather was only eight and needed her rest. Jesus was an early riser, intent on finishing his boat.
I WAS NERVOUS on the ride over. In my mind I knew that Mouse was dead, but in my heart I had never accepted it. The attending nurse said that he had no pulse minutes before EttaMae came and carried him out of the emergency room bed. But I could never find EttaMae after that, and some deep part of me still held out hope.
I pulled up in front of the house near ten. There was a light on on the front porch and another behind a drawn shade inside the house. The house looked nice enough, but nighttime is kind on the eyes. I walked up on the front porch feeling all right. Going to Piney’s had made me feel that I was slipping back into the street life, that I had lost my grip on being a citizen. But going to see Etheline, a reformed, churchgoing prostitute, was almost a normal thing.
I knocked.
I knocked again. Maybe she was in the bathroom.
I found a button and pushed it. I could hear the buzzer through the door. That jangling noise got under my scalp and I felt a moment of fear.
I tried the knob. It was locked but the door wasn’t fully closed. The dead bolt was keeping it open. That couldn’t have been good. I went inside, hoping for a reasonable explanation. I didn’t have to go far. She was there in the entranceway, wearing her cream colored church suit, a crimson stain over her heart. The knife was on the floor next to her body. She’d been a beauty in life, I could see that. But now her pretty face was hardening into clay.
I went around the house, looking for the trunk she’d mentioned. I found it at the foot of her bed. Someone else had already been there. The trunk was open, and all of its contents were strewn across the bed. There were no photographs, not a one.
I went back into the door where Etheline lay dead. I pulled up a chair from the living room and sat there next to her. I didn’t sit there long, maybe five minutes.
The problem was simple. I had asked the church lady, Miss Bristol, to give Etheline a note with my name and number on it. She’d given the note to the girl at church that day, and now Etheline was dead. There was a good chance that the police would come to see me, trying to place me at the scene of the crime. If I called them right then, they’d come over and I’d become the prime suspect. No matter how innocent or law-abiding I was, they’d take me to jail and beat me until I confessed. That was a foregone conclusion—at least in my mind.
My other choice was to drive home and go to bed. If the police called me, I’d tell them that I didn’t know a thing. If someone saw my license plate parked out in front of her house, I could say I dropped by but no one answered the door.
The first way was the honest, law-abiding way, the kind of life I craved. But the second way was smarter. Leaving that poor dead girl was the wise choice for a black man down at the bottom of the food chain. I walked out of that front door, wiped the doorknob clean, and, though I didn’t realize it at the time, drove off into a new period in my life.
THE POLICE DIDN’T CALL me the next day or the day after that. I read about the murder in the Sentinel, L.A.’s black newspaper. They reported that Etheline AnnaMaria Teaman was found dead in her foyer by a neighbor who came by to drive her to work at her new job at Douglas Aircraft. The murder weapon was found at the scene. Theft seemed to be the motive. As of yet, there were no suspects in the crime.
It seemed a strange coincidence that she was murdered between the time she called me and the time I arrived. If Raymond was alive, maybe he had something to do with her, more than she let on. After all, why would she have had a photograph of a man that she’d only seen a couple of times in a bar?
I didn’t think that Mouse would have killed that girl. It isn’t that he was above killing women. But in the times I knew him, he would more likely seduce a girl or threaten her. He got no pleasure out of killing people who couldn’t fight back.
But maybe he’d changed. Or maybe he was in trouble.
I pulled out the phone book and began looking for Cedric or C. Boughman. I was lucky that day. The only Cedric Boughman lived on 101st Street.
The address took me to a small house at the far end of a deep lot in the heart of Watts. Instead of a lawn, Boughman’s yard had corn and tomatoes, huge fans of collard greens, and rows of carrots. Near the house there was a wire enclosure where eight hens clucked and pecked. They set up a loud din of protest as I reached the front door.
A small woman, somewhere near fifty, appeared in the shadowy screen. Caramel-colored and delicate, she wore glasses with very thick lenses. She stared at me for a moment before saying anything.
“Yes?” she asked.
“Hi. My name is Rawlins. I’m lookin’ for Cedric.”
“He ain’t doin’ too well today, Mr. Rawlins,” the woman said sadly. “Been sittin’ back there for almost a week just shakin’ his head and sobbin’.”
“What’s wrong?”
“He won’t say,” she replied. “But it must be some girl. Young men pour their whole heart and soul out for just one kiss. It takes a while to get back on your feet after somethin’ like that.”
“He’s been like that a whole week?” I asked.
“Just about. He ain’t eat hardly a thing, and you know, he won’t even put on his pants.”
“He don’t even go to work?”
The woman smiled when I mentioned work. “You know he work for the church,” she said happily. “Stay home with his mother and make her proud down at Winter Baptist. He’s the youngest deacon they ever had.”
“And the church don’t mind him stayin’ home?” I asked.
“God bless Minister Winters,” she said, closing her eyes in reverence. “He sent a man down here to tell us that Cedric could take off all the time he needed to.”
“He’s a good man,” I said. “Almost a saint.”
The woman took in a deep breath and smiled as if she had just inhaled God. “He was me and Mr. Boughman’s savior when we come out here from Arkansas. Every Sunday we’d go to that little chapel and hear about how the Lord was testin’ us, makin’ us stronger and better for our kids.” The feeling in her face, the curl of her lip, was ecstatic. “There was always apple pies and pork sandwiches after the sermon so even if you hadn’t eaten all week, at least that one day your body would be satisfied along with your spirit. Mr. Boughman used to say to me, ‘Celia, the Lord put that man on earth to save the poor black man.’”
“Do you think I could see Cedric a minute, Mrs. Boughman?”
“Oh, I don’t know.”
“He might be able to help me find out what happened to my cousin,” I said. “You see, my cousin, Ray, died in a logging accident. Cedric might know somebody who talked to him before he died.”
Mrs. Boughman peered at me as if trying to puzzle out what I was saying.