White Butterfly (24 page)

“Okay. I’ll call you tonight. But if he says yeah, then how long before you get the money?”

“I don’t know if he will agree.”

“But if he does?”

She hesitated but then said, “Day after tomorrow, maybe.”

I spent the day cleaning up. I threw Regina’s things away. She’d left clothing and costume jewelry and knickknacks all over the house. I threw all of that out. Edna’s toys and blankets, those that were left, I piled in her crib. I covered all of that with a big blanket and left it in the living room.

I spent the afternoon reading
The Souls of Black Folk
by W.E.B. Du Bois. It was a book Jackson Blue told me about years before.

Jesus came home at about three-thirty and we played catch until six. We had pork chops, mashed potatoes with sautéed onions, and canned asparagus for dinner. After that Jesus split a candy bar with me and I asked him to wash the dishes.

The phone rang at eight o’clock.

“Hello.”

“Mr. Rawlins. My wife tells me that you’ve found our baby.”

“Maybe, sir. I don’t know. Woman had a picture of your daughter and a little baby. She says that she’s got an album full of enough pictures to prove to anybody that it’s your granddaughter.”

“What’s this woman’s name and what does she have to do with Robin?”

“She was Robin’s friend. Her name is Sylvia.”

“Sylvia what?”

“You not gonna find her in any phone book, Mr. Garnett.”

“But maybe I know her. If she was my daughter’s friend I might know her.”

“Bride,” I said. “Sylvia Bride.”

“No. I never heard that name before. You say she wants two thousand dollars?”

“She said that.”

“It’s a lot of money for something we don’t even know for sure.”

“Listen,” I said. “I’ll call her and make a meeting where she will show you the book. If you think the baby in the pictures is the daughter, then you can make a deal. You don’t have to bring the money with you. Leave it with your lawyer. I’ll call her after this an’ say that we all gonna meet tomorrow at four on the front stairs of the main library downtown. Okay?”

“My wife said something about a diary.”

“Yeah. It seems like she did a lot of writing about Feather. Sylvia seems to think that it will help to identify the baby.” I paused for a moment.

“Listen, Mr. Garnett. I don’t think that that crazy man killed your girl.”

“What?”

“I can’t go into all of it right now but I think that somebody killed her and made it seem like she was the crazy man’s victim.”

“But nobody knew about the crazy man until after she was dead.”

“People all over my neighborhood did. Some of them might even have found out about those burns.”

“It doesn’t sound likely, Mr. Rawlins. That’s all pretty elaborate.”

“She was seen with some man the day she was killed. And Sylvia told me that somebody was going to give Cyndi some money. Maybe this diary will tell us who that is.”

“My God,” Garnett said. He sounded so broken up that I felt sorry I had confided in him. There was enough pain in his life.

After a long minute he said, “I hope you’re wrong. I hope… Well, nothing to do but meet this woman and see what she’s got.”

“You sure now?”

“Yes. Yes, I’m certain.”

“All right. Then I’ll call her an’ make the date. If sumpin’ happens I’ll call you back, all right?”

He took a deep breath and then said, “Okay.”

SYLVIA WAS UNHAPPY AT FIRST. But I told her that she didn’t have to have the baby there. All she had to have was the photographs and the diary. The library was as public and safe as she was about to get.

Jesus went to sleep early and was off to school before I was out of bed.

I was working in the garden around noon when Quinten Naylor and Roland Hobbes drove up in front of my house. They walked abreast and each of them gave me a noncommittal stare.

“Ezekiel Rawlins… ” Roland Hobbes started the speech.

“Hold it, man,” I said. “Lemme get a call on the phone before you take me down. My wife is gone and my little boy is mute. Lemme call somebody down here ’fore you take me in.”

Hobbes and Naylor exchanged glances. Neither one of them said a thing. Finally Naylor nodded and Hobbes accompanied me to the telephone.

“Hola,” said Flower. Her voice was deep and dark as a South American rain forest. Even listening to her brought images of large white lilies on a black bough. I could hear children in the background. The children Jesus called brother and sister before he came to live with me.

I told her to send Primo, her husband, up for the boy. I told her that I was going to jail. She gave me a friendly sigh of sorrow and said okay. The thought that I still had a friend in the world lightened my heart a little.

I hung up the phone and Roland Hobbes said, “Ezekiel Rawlins, you are under arrest.”

THEY DIDN’T TELL ME a thing. Just cuffed me and drove me down to the station house.

They put me in a holding cell, where I sat until seven-thirty the next morning. It wasn’t much of a cell. It was more like a high-ceilinged hopper room with a chair and a light fixture. There were no windows, nor even bars. Just a gray room with a chair. They took my cigarettes, so I was edgy.

There was an eye hole in the gray metal door. Every once in a while it seemed to darken a little, as if someone were looking in at me.

Two uniformed cops came to escort me to court. I met my court-appointed lawyer before the bench. I didn’t catch his name. He didn’t shake my hand.

Then my lawyer and the prosecution went to the bench and talked with the judge. They discussed my fate for thirty seconds and my lawyer came back to where I stood.

He was a sandy-haired, short man with ears that stood straight away from his head. He was middle-aged and skinny but he still had bad posture and shirttails that brimmed out of his pants.

“What’s this all about?” I asked him.

He shuffled his papers together and walked away from the desk. The judge said, “Next case,” just like on television, and the court officers started to hustle me off.

I grabbed at my lawyer’s jacket.

“Lemme talk to my man a minute,” I begged.

“What do you want, Mr. Rawlins?” the little lawyer, whose name I never knew, asked.

“What am I in here for an’ what happens now?”

“You’re in here for extortion, Mr. Rawlins, and you go to jail until somebody posts twenty-five thousand dollars or your trial comes up.”

The lawyer turned away and I was dragged to a room where four other men slept. A half hour later the sleeping men were roused by three court officers.

We were hustled into a bus that had wire mesh over all the windows and a cell door separating us from the driver. He didn’t need that protection, though, because each of the prisoners was manacled by his handcuffs to a bolt under his seat.

We were driven to a flat building near the southern outskirts of town.

The building we were taken to wasn’t originally a jail. Maybe they made ball bearings there, or apricot jam. The walls were made of concrete, probably reinforced with steel.

The prisoners were led to a large room, half a football field in size. In the middle of the big room the state had erected steel cages. Like the cages in the older zoos. There looked to be forty-five or fifty of the cells. About half of them were occupied.

One cage to a man. Each one was eight by eight by eight and furnished with a small cot. There were two pails on the floor. One had a cup to drink from, the other was there when you needed to relieve yourself.

One of the other prisoners sold me a pack of cigarettes for a five-dollar bill that I had palmed before leaving the house. When the guards were gone and I was safely locked away, I lit up.

I still remember how good that cigarette tasted. As bad as my life had turned in those few days I still remember that moment as being one of the most satisfying in my life.

For a while the new inmates talked to the old ones. I asked the guy in the cell next to mine, “What kinda jail is this?”

“Temporary,” the gray old white man said. “They’re buildin’ a new one and this is just the overflow.”

I handed him a cigarette and lit it.

“Obliged,” he said.

Then the guards told us to be quiet.

Somebody might not believe what happened to me. They might say that a prisoner in America always knows the specific crime of which he is accused. They might say that a man has a right to good counsel and at least a phone call.

At one time I would have said that white people had those rights but colored ones didn’t. But as time went by I came to understand that we’re all just one step away from an anonymous grave. You don’t have to live in a communist country to be assassinated; just ask J. T. Saunders about that.

The police could come to your house today and drag you from your bed. They could beat you until you swallow teeth and they can lock you in a hole for months.

I knew all that but I put it far out of my mind. I just lay back on my cot and savored the cigarette.

I WAS IN THE CELL but I wasn’t alone. Naylor, Voss, Violette, and Hobbes were in there with me.

Naylor said, “You didn’t want to help a black woman but you go out for some white whore.”

“I saw you with her,” Hobbes said.

Voss just shook his head and spit.

Then Violette unholstered his pistol. When he cocked back the hammer it made a squeaking sound instead of a crack.

Then I hear, outside of the dream, “Look out, boy!” And then I felt a cold spray against my face. Another voice curses but by that time I’m doubling up from the cot.

He went past me, driving the knife he held into the mattress rather than into me. His body was over mine and I gave him an uppercut to the groin that would have halted a gorilla.

My attacker fell to the floor, huffing and coughing. It was a white man in a gray jail suit. I kicked him once in the ribs and then I stamped my foot down on his right hand. I was barefoot and so could feel his fingers snapping along with the pain in my heel.

I broke his hand so I wouldn’t have to kill him. I had to do something. I would have been within my rights, as I see them, to kill a killer. But instead I disabled him.

I picked him up and dragged him down the aisle of cages and threw him on the floor in front of the door that led to the guards’ kiosk. As I went back toward my cell a commotion began among the waking prisoners. By the time I’d locked myself away there were seven guards stumbling over the would-be killer.

He was holding his hand over his groin and coughing. The guards looked around suspiciously.

I noticed a very sour odor. I wondered if it was my own fear that I smelled.

“He’s got keys!” one of the guards shouted.

“Pssst!”

The man yelled in pain as they pulled him from the floor. I felt my toe and realized that I had probably broken his rib too.

“Pssst!” It was the old white man next to me.

I looked at him and he smiled. He was missing teeth both upper and lower.

“Hope I didn’t get your cigarettes with that piss.” His smile broadened and I realized that he was the one who’d warned me, who’d thrown water—urine—in my face.

He giggled and said, “Lucky there warn’t no turds in there.”

It struck me as so funny that I had to laugh, but I couldn’t laugh because that would have called attention from the guards, who were looking around for somebody to brutalize.

I sat there with tears coming from my eyes and my diaphragm beating against my chest. When the guards went past my cell I covered myself with the blanket to keep them from smelling the guilt. The foul odor made me gag harder.

After a while the guards took that groaning assassin away.

“You got a good friend somewhere,” the old white man said. He wore jail gray also.

“What do you mean?”

“Somebody went to a lotta trouble to kill you.” He gave me a wink. “Unless you know that bozo.”

I handed my savior five cigarettes.

“What’s your name?” I asked him.

“Alamo. Alamo Weir.” He winked at me and I lit his cigarette.

I lay back in the squalor and began to think. I started with Quinten Naylor coming up to my house and driving me to the scene of a crime.

THEY FITTED ME with jailhouse grays the next morning. We all went into a big room with a long table and ate thick oatmeal watered down with reconstituted milk. At midday they let us walk around outside of our cells. During that time Alamo stuck with the white prisoners and I moved with the colored brothers.

After we were back in our cells I was taken to a room where Anthony Violette was waiting for me.

“Glad to see that you’re still alive, Rawlins.” He smiled at me.

I couldn’t say a word. A police captain wanted me dead. I was dead.

“No smart-assed joke? Maybe you could go get me a beer.”

“I ain’t done nuthin’ this bad to you, man,” I said.

“That’s right. You haven’t done a damn thing to me. I’m just a police officer, doing my duty.”

“What am I in here for?”

“Extortion.” Violette’s smile was plastered to his face. The humiliation he felt from me was immense. One black man talking back to him in front of a superior; maybe that was enough to have me killed.

“I didn’t extort anybody.”

“That’s not what Vernor Garnett says.”

“He killed her.” It jumped right out of my mouth. It was so fast and so natural that the smile was blasted from Violette’s face.

“What?”

“He killed his own daughter and now he’s using you and me to cover his track.”

“Listen here, Rawlins… ”

“No. You listen to me. Vernor was supposed to meet me yesterday afternoon in front of the main library. A woman who knew about Cyndi’s daughter was going to bring proof that the baby was Cyndi’s.”

“What kind of proof? What baby?” the cop asked in spite of himself.

“A bunch’a pictures and a diary that might have identified the killer, the man who was going to bring her three thousand dollars.”