?Uh-uh. He never said a thing about that. I mean he said that he was married before, that he killed his wife's boyfriend. Her name was Geraldine too.?
?Same.? Biggers smiled. ?She got sick after he went to prison. I guess she was pretty bad off when he got out. Some kind of nerve disorder. She's the one that found him. They slept separately. Cut his own throat in his own bed. I don't think Geraldine liked him much but he did pay the rent. Cut his own throat. You know that takes guts.?
Killer, the two-legged dog, jumped up buoyed by the harness attached to the line strung across Socrates' small yard. The dog padded his way to the door and pressed his snout against the ex-con's hand.
?What you want, Albert??
?Was Samuels distressed? Was he depressed??
The laugh that issued from Socrates' deep chest was hard earned. ?You the one said he was livin' with a woman hated him. What do you think??
?But you said you didn't know about his wife,? Biggers argued uselessly.
?You ever hate anybody, officer??
?I asked you a question, Mr. Fortlow.?
? 'Cause you see Lydell hated somebody. He hated a man and he killed him. He couldn't help himself. And if you put that man in front'a him today he'd kill him again. All he wanted was to wipe that man from his mind. That's what he talked about.?
?So he killed himself because he couldn't kill his wife's boyfriend again?? Biggers asked.
?I don't have no idea, man. I wasn't in his head. We just got drunk together.?
?So he didn't give you any indication that he intended suicide??
?There weren't no play in Lydell, officer. No play at all.?
?What is that supposed to mean?? the policeman wanted to know.
?It means what it means, man.?
Socrates turned on his radio that night. There was jazz playing on the university station. Fats Waller. The image of a smiling fat black man came up in Socrates' mind. He was laughing and playing those ivories. He was cooing and wooing. Socrates knew that there must have been tears behind all of those funny lines. And then the announcer said,
Socrates wondered who he could blame for Lydell's death. He wondered that until he drifted off to sleep.
a day in the park
S
ocrates got to the front stairs of the house on Marvane Street at six fifteen that Sunday morning. The block was lined with a few large homes left over from the more prosperous days of South Central L.A. Most had been subdivided into rooms for let or knocked down and replaced by large stucco apartment buildings. There was the big brick house a few lots down, the one that the radical college students called the New Africans once occupied. It was vacant. The young college radicals had splintered into two smaller organizations, Socrates had heard, neither of which could afford the rent.
The police surveillance house across the street was empty now too. Without potential revolutionaries to spy on the police saw no reason to maintain their presence on the block.
The only industries left were Luvia's private retirement home and the crack house down toward the end of the block. Even at that hour there was a fat man in a cheap suit who had driven by for a quick blow job in the deep lawn. Socrates couldn't tell if it was a man or a woman down on one knee before the fat man.
Socrates was remembering the days when he and Right Burke sat out on the front porch of Luvia's and watched the cops sneak in and out of their nest. Right Burke had been Socrates' best friend but now he was dead.
It had been almost a year. Socrates wasn't invited to the service. Right's sister had come down from Richmond in the Bay Area and organized the funeral with Luvia Prine. The women had blamed Socrates for Right's death. They were angry because Right had gone out with Socrates one night and the next morning he was found at a bus stop, dead from an overdose of morphine complicated by a large quantity of alcohol.
He didn't blame them but still he'd gotten himself up and out of bed at five in the morning to come down to Luvia's retirement home.
