That old white lady hadn’t gotten a clear look at me leaving Idabell’s. I’d hidden my face upon leaving the house, distracted her with my keys, changed my height.
I was innocent.
“Face forward, number three.”
A panel of six large floodlights flared from the ceiling; they were hot on my skin.
“What’re you lookin’ up for, boy?” The cop was young; his accent at home in the northeast somewhere. The derogatory words sounded odd on his tongue but the meaning was clear.
I was back, suddenly, in the Deep South. All feeling drained out of my body and my face went lax. My eyes felt nothing, my mouth had no words or expression. I was empty of all past doings. I had no future. I stood up straight and presented my face toward the wall, but still, it wasn’t me standing there. Easy had gone undercover and there was no bringing him out.
There were peepholes drilled into the wall opposite us. I noticed them without seeming to see. My mind was back on a hot swampland road, back in the days when I could have disappeared, in half a moment’s notice, from any job or town or girlfriend. Back to a time when the rear door was the only door—and it was never locked.
A number was asked to step forward and then another. When my turn came I stood out under the hot lights and stared right into them.
In the beginning … The words came into my mind and I was my own master.
The floodlights cut off, leaving just the overheads. Suddenly it was darker and cool.
“You can go out now,” the eastern bigot said.
I followed the line into the adjoining room. The prisoners were clapped back into chains and led off to their cages. The other men just left.
I made to leave too.
“Rawlins.” It was Fogherty.
He and Sanchez approached me with serious faces.
I realized, with a scared shock, that I had forgotten my lawyer’s phone number.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Fogherty asked. He was no longer friendly or sad.
“Home.”
“Our witness thought that he recognized you, Rawlins.”
I knew when he said it that the lineup had failed; that Fogherty and Sanchez were trying to scare me, or to see how hard it was to shake my tree.
I knew that I shouldn’t show too much fear or they’d think I was guilty. The best thing for an Honest John to do would be to stutter out a “Wha?” That way I could seem the innocent kind of scared.
“The hell you say,” I said instead. “I didn’t do anything for anybody to see.”
“Maybe they saw you afterwards,” Fogherty speculated.
“Bullshit,” I said. “I wasn’t anywhere but work or home. If somebody saw me in one’a those places I’d be glad to confess to workin’ or feedin’ my kids.”
“I don’t have to let you out of here, Rawlins,” Fogherty said. “You could be down in that cellblock that you came through.”
I was still defiant but his threat had numbed my tongue.
Fogherty’s smile was demented. “Yeah. Sanchez told me that you saw Felix Wren down in his cell.” Fogherty watched me and nodded, sagelike. “He’s only in on a drunk driving charge but he resisted the arresting officers—bit one of them. Don’t worry about him though, he’ll be okay. We won’t even charge him. Once he gets his last tooth knocked out we’ll send him back home to his mother.”
That was the first moment I felt murder in my fingers. It’s not that I wanted to kill Fogherty particularly. I could have killed anybody.
I turned and went toward a door with a red-and-white EXIT sign above it.
“We know you’re in it, Rawlins,” Fogherty said to my back.
I kept going, following the EXIT signs.
Nobody stopped me or even noticed as I made my way through the station. Somewhere on the lineup I had become invisible again. I’d taken on the shadows that kept me camouflaged, and dangerous.
CHAPTER 21
SANCHEZ AND FOGHERTY showed me bloody Felix, they told me that I could end up like him, but they stopped short of arresting me and throwing me into the cell with Jones.
They wanted something from me, but what was it? There was only small coverage of the murder of the two brothers in the paper; nothing about the circumstances of their deaths. That lack of coverage in itself might have been surprising if it wasn’t for the fact that Roman and Holland were black men and it was early in the sixties.
You had to kill somebody white to get any kind of news splash in the sixties.
Foreign blacks made the news, however. That very day the Congolese had jailed two Russians for espionage, and five hundred Haitians had been reported dead from flooding. To the white press, and many white Americans, black people were easier to see as exotic foreigners, somebody else’s people. But the lives of black Americans were
