White Butterfly (23 page)

It was a question, not an address, but that was all I needed. Much more, actually. Maybe too much.

BULL HORKER OWNED a ribs-and-chicken joint on the southern outskirts of downtown. It was just an old bungalow that he and his brother owned. They set it on a vacant lot that they leased from a friend who was in jail for manslaughter.

Bull was a massive man. He resembled the sculptures of Balzac done by Rodin. His corpulence was indicative of strength of limb and of spirit. His large gut was a clenched fist. His beefy jowls looked as if they could gnash through pipe.

His skin was mottled like some fine Asian woodwork. It was pulled back tight across his wide, hippopotamus-like face.

“Sylvia who?” he said, cocking his head at such a severe angle that his left ear was almost parallel to the floor.

We were sitting at the back of the dive. The cook, an old ex-convict called Bailey, was frying short ribs and flour behind the counter.

Bull had migrated to Chicago from Mississippi but wound up in L.A. because of his intense dislike of the cold. He did favors for people; so did I. But Mr. Horker’s favors always had a price attached up front. Sometimes it was cash; sometimes it was something more dear.

He had plenty of business because he’d do
anything,
from finding a cut-rate engagement ring to killing your worst enemy.

“Sylvia Bride,” I said. “That’s probably her working name. She does exotic dancing.”

“Nope,” he smiled. He looked around the room cautiously and then pulled a fifth of some kind of pink liquor from under his chair. “Drink?”

I shook my head no.

“Mind if I try?”

“You sure you don’t know her?” I asked again.

“Sure as this here booze.” He slugged back a healthy shot. Suddenly there was a powerful odor of apricots.

“The police been lookin’ for her in the worst way.”

The lizard-skinned clown transformed into a bronze warrior before my eyes. His fists clenched and his jaw set. His eyes became so dull that it was hard to distinguish them from the rest of his face.

“Says which?” he breathed.

“Cops lookin’ for this girl, this Sylvia.”

“So?”

“They gonna go out t’look in my trail if I cain’t locate ’er. We kinda workin’ together on this one.”

Bull was a big man. I didn’t think I would stand a chance against him without a high-caliber gun. As he looked at me I considered my demise. One eye, his left one, nearly shut while the other one opened wide.

I girded myself for the stampede.

Then the right half of his upper lip curled back, revealing an especially feral-looking canine. The rest of his teeth slowly came into view until I saw, with little relief, that Bull was smiling.

“You comin’ inta my place an’ threatenin’ me, Easy Rawlins?”

“I ain’t threatenin’ nobody. I ain’t scared’a you neither. I’m lookin’ for this girl and I heard your name. That’s all. The police want her. That ain’t no threat—it’s the truth.”

Bull poured another shot of schnapps and drank it.

We had never been at odds before. I wasn’t afraid of him any more than I was afraid of any man. The problem wasn’t men, it was death.

Death seemed to hound me. He was in Bull Horker’s placid visage; he was on a slab in Oakland. She leaned up against a tree a few blocks from my house.

“If I tell you I don’t know the girl, then that’s all I gotta say,” Bull said.

“And if I tell you that somebody got a thousand dollars for something they lost and Sylvia found, then you wouldn’t be able to help me, huh?”

Bull just stared.

I wrote my number on the corner of his racing form. Then I walked out of there into the smog and sun of Los Angeles.

JESUS WAS STILL AT SCHOOL when I got home. He had emptied out all of my liquor bottles. Poured every one down the drain and set them neatly across the windowsill. Even my hundred-dollar bottle of Armagnac.

I took off my clothes and got into the bed.

There was a child crying in my dreams.

IN THE MORNING I WOKE to find Jesus asleep at the foot of my bed. He was curled up into a little ball, fully dressed, with his mouth wide open. He was just a little boy and the world around him was whirling like a storm.

I never knew where Jesus was from. For a long time he lived with my friend Primo down in the barrio. But then Primo left for a while and Jesus came to live with me.

I was the closest thing to a father he had, and now that Regina was gone I didn’t even come home regularly.

I got up and threw out the bottles that my son had emptied and made breakfast. We had pancakes and bacon. Jesus ate with silent glee.

“Don’t worry, boy,” I told him. “We’re gonna get through this one just like we made it all them other times.”

Jesus nodded solemnly. I tickled his ribs and he fell off the chair to the floor.

After he was gone to school I called Quinten Naylor.

“Yes?” he said in my ear.

“Yeah, man. Are you a cop or what?”

“Rawlins?”

“Robin Garnett, Cyndi Starr, or whatever you wanna call’er, had a baby just three months ago. She never went to Europe and she dropped out of UCLA.”

He was silent for a moment and then he said, “Go on.”

“Viola Saunders said that J.T. was up there when Robin was killed.”

“She’s just trying to protect him, that’s all.”

I told him about Prancer and Sylvia.

“We got the killer, Easy.”

“You ain’t got shit. You just wanna shove yo’ head in the dirt and make like it’s gonna go away.”

Quinten hung up on me and I sat back in my chair.

I wanted a drink. I thought of Regina and slapped myself hard against the head.

Then I called up the memory of the day we buried my mother. It was in St. Ives’s graveyard four miles outside of New Iberia, Louisiana. My father wore a black suit and a black tie. He held a spray of honeysuckle in one hand and my hand in the other. My mother’s sister and her children were there. The sky was clear and the air was heavy and hot. The minister said a lot of words and my father held my hand. He never let go.

Then, just a week later, he left for logging up in Mississippi. He never came back down. Nobody knew what had happened. Nobody knew a thing. Maybe he died. Maybe he found a new wife and moved away. Maybe he got in a fight one night and killed somebody and he was arrested and sent to jail for the rest of my boyhood.

I sat at the kitchen table and watched the sun edge across it. I watched the floor until I could see the trails of dried mop markings from the last time that Regina had cleaned.

Then I cried. I cried the same misery I had when I was a child. My eyes and nose ran. And I felt my father’s hand and an old woman hovering behind me and cried for my loss.

I howled and banged the table. Whenever I let myself feel the pain of that loss I have no fear of Death. I hate him a little. I’d like for him to come meet me outside where I could poke out his eyes.

When it was over my feelings for Regina were gone. At least they weren’t yelling in my ears. I still missed Edna like I missed my own childhood, such as it was.

The phone rang just as my breathing returned to normal. It was like a signal.

“Yeah?” I said. I knew that it wasn’t Regina. I knew that I’d never hear from her again.

“Mr. Rawlins?”

“Yeah.”

“This is Sylvia Bride.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Can you come up wit’ somethin’ if I give you the girl?”

“Whose girl is it?”

“Fuck you!”

“That don’t tell me nuthin’. I ain’t gonna scam nobody. If you could prove it then I might do somethin’. They might too.”

She was quiet for a moment. I heard a baby stammer in the silence.

“You know the Beldin Arms?”

“Sure.” It was an apartment building on Sixty-third Street.

“Meet me there in an hour.”

“What apartment?”

“Just go there,” she said and then she hung up.

I dressed casually for the meeting. Tan cotton slacks with a green-and-blue square-cut shirt. I wore sandals without socks. There was a .38 pistol hooked to the back of my belt and a .25 in my pocket.

The phone was ringing when I left but I let it ring. There was nothing so important that it couldn’t wait.

I got to the front of the Beldin Arms in exactly one hour. I looked at the mailboxes in the entrance hall, but there was no Sylvia Bride.

While I stood there a small boy ran up the steps. He was short and stocky. He swaggered from side to side as boys are likely to do when they feel important. He seemed to be looking around for accolades on the beautiful job he was doing at playing the child.

He stopped in front of me. “You lookin’ fo’a lady?”

“What?” I asked.

“She said you gimme a dollar if I show you.”

I handed him a dollar and he started to run out the door, saying over his shoulder, “She in the park.”

“What park?”

He waved his right hand indicating the direction and said, “Down there,” as if he were talking to a very stupid little brother.

At the end of the block was Beldin Park. Mostly concrete. Four scraggly pines amid a small, balding patch of grass. Sylvia Bride sat on the bench.

She wore red silk pants tapered at the ankle and a red Chinese blouse. Her shoes were powder-blue and her hair could have used some work. It was unwashed and brushed back in bold strokes. She smoked Luckies. There was a half-empty pack in her lap.

“Where’s the baby?” I asked, standing above her.

“Sit down.” She was quiet and almost demure.

I sat down and asked her, “Where’s the baby?”

She took a photograph from inside the cellophane wrapper of the Lucky pack and handed it to me. It was a picture of Cyndi Starr and a small, brown baby.

“I’ve got a whole album of pictures with them. Any blind fool could see that they’re mother and child. I have her diary too. She wrote pages and pages about Feather.”

“Is it a daily thing?”

“Huh?”

“Is it a daily journal or is it just about the baby?”

“Oh, no. Cyndi was real smart. She went to college, you know. Every day she’d write down poems and how she felt… ”

“Is it up to the day she was killed?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t read it. I mean it was hers.”

“But… ” I began to say and then I held back. No reason to let her realize the book was worth anything.

“I want two thousand dollars. I want it in my hands, and then you can have the baby, the diary, and the album.”

I reached for my pocket. “Now lemme see, you want that in tens or twenties?”

She smiled at me. I might have liked Sylvia Bride in another world.

“We could switch. But it has to be someplace safe. And I need two thousand.”

“I’ll get you the money if I can. We could do it in the zoo or at the beach. I don’t care where. But before you see the money my people will have to look at what you got. If that convinces them, then we make the trade.”

Sylvia bit her red lips with small, sharp teeth. “Okay,” she said. “My number’s on the back of that picture. Call me when you find out something.”

“Tell me something before you go.”

“What?”

“Who killed Cyndi?”

She fumbled for a cigarette. I lit it for her.

“I don’t know. It was some crazy man, right?”

“I don’t think so. It just doesn’t make sense.”

“Everybody loved her. She was great.”

“Was Bull Horker a friend of hers too?”

“He let her stay at his place down near Redondo while she was pregnant. But that’s all.”

“He the father?”

“God knows who the father is, Mr. Rawlins.”

“How was she living when she couldn’t work?”

“She borrowed from Bull. But he didn’t do it. She was going to pay him three thousand dollars.”

“From where?”

“I don’t know, honey. She said that she was going to get it from some man.”

“A white man?”

“She never said. I mean… ” Sylvia stopped talking and turned her head at an angle.

“She said,” Sylvia continued, “that she didn’t like somebody but that they had to pay up.”

We both let that one sit until she got up to go.

“Why you come to me, Sylvia?” I said.

“You came to me. You’re the one.”

“But you could have called that girl’s parents yourself. You could do it now.”

“I’m not talking to white people about this,” she said.

I’d heard that all the time. Half the black people I knew would walk an extra mile to avoid straightforward contact with white people. It didn’t surprise me that white people might not trust each other. I couldn’t trust them, so why should they trust each other?

Sylvia crossed the street and walked down the block. At the end of the street she got into the passenger’s seat of a new Ford. I thought I knew who the driver was.

JESUS AND I WENT to Pecos Bob’s Barbecue Heaven for dinner. He had two servings of ribs. Then we went to the penny arcade at the Santa Monica pier. He played the little coin games and rode the merry-go-round. It was great fun.

I bought a beer but didn’t drink it. Jesus had cotton candy and caramel corn, but that was okay, he needed to feel good. We went home feeling dizzy from the red flashing lights and bells.

He was kind of slow in the morning but at least he slept in his own bed. I watched him trail off toward school. He met up with two little girls from across the street. I never even knew that Jesus had friends he walked to school with.

Mrs. Garnett was home.

“Two thousand dollars?” she gasped.

“That’s what she said. But first you get to see the diary, the photo album with all the pictures of Cyn—of Robin and her baby.”

I didn’t mention that the baby was black. Many times little black babies look white when they’re born. The color sets in later on. I figured I’d let the shock of race set in on them without my trying to soften it. After all, a black baby didn’t bother me.

“I don’t know. I’ll have to talk to my husband.”