She’d been crying but that’s not what was different. I realized that she was wearing false eyelashes before.
“Rita, I need to talk to you about Jackie.”
“I don’t know her.”
“Yes you do, and if you don’t want me to say that to the cops you’ll let me in and answer my questions.”
As a rule I don’t threaten black folk with the law. That’s because most of the time I’m trying to help someone black. The police are hardly ever in the position to make a Negro’s life easier. They’re there to keep us from making trouble. But I needed to know what Rita’s connection with the dead girl was and the law opened almost any door in the ghetto.
She let me in and showed me to a chair.
The chair was blue and the couch gray; there were lavender walls and a red-and-brown carpet. It was a poor working girl’s apartment, clean and ill-fitted.
She was wearing cranberry slacks and a white T-shirt.
She looked good. Even the sorrow made her attractive.
“What you wanna know?”
“You got a picture of Jackie?”
From a table behind the couch she took a small frame that had an oval aperture. The photograph was of a lovely, smiling young woman, a little heavy but worth every pound.
“She was beautiful,” Rita said.
“You knew her pretty well?” I asked.
“Uh-huh. We were friends.”
“Did you know her before she got to know Mr. Munson?”
“No. She met Matt at a hamburger stand down Hoover. At first he’d bring her over to the office after I went home but after a while they got sloppy and I’d catch ’em. After that she’d call sometimes when he was out with a client and we talked. She was a really good person.” Sorrow constricted the last few words.
“Did she love your boss?” I asked.
Rita smiled through the tears.
“Jackie just liked men,” she said. “I mean they had to be older and they couldn’t be black but after that she wasn’t too picky. She didn’t mind if they was fat or bald or plain.”
“How about rich?” I asked.
“No. I mean she had her investment plan but you didn’t have to be rich to belong to that.”
“That was to buy her house?”
“Uh-huh. She fount this house for only twelve thousand dollars in Compton. Then she would ask her boyfriends to put up the money, like an interest-free loan. She had started payin’ it back. She called it her rent.”
“And where’d she get that?”
“She was a good girl,” Rita said. “She was only seventeen you know. And her mama could hardly make enough to pay the rent. And Jackie really liked the men she was with. So what if a couple’a them gave her money?”
It was a discussion held between women that I had been overhearing since I was a child. Poor young women with no money, and no hope for a job, taking a handout now and then from a “friend.” Maybe he was called “uncle” or a family friend. He was older and lonely and willing to let her go out dancing when she wanted to. The money was always in an envelope and never in the bedroom. Sometimes there wasn’t even sex at all, just a series of well-dressed dates and maybe a kiss or two at the end of the evening.
“Why not black men?” I asked.
“She hated her father,” Rita said. “He used to beat her mother and brother. She said that most’a the white men she was with were gentle.”
“What about Musa Tanous?”
“She loved him for real. She’d call me after they were together and tell me about his stories about castles in Jordan and Lebanon. His family used to own a castle that was a thousand years old.”
“When’s the last time she called you?”
“The morning she was killed.” Her throat tightened again.
“What time?”
“About eight. We planned to meet at Brenda’s Sunshine Diner on Eighty-second at eight-thirty but she never got there.”
“Where’d she call from?”
“The motel.”
“You sure?”
Rita nodded.
“Can I use your phone?”
“Is it long distance?”
