We were at the corner.
“So tell me what happened when you were at Nola’s,” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean—what happened?”
“Are you her husband?” he asked then. That was the first moment I had an inkling that the situation was much more complex than I had even suspected.
“Nola’s dead,” I said.
Peter stopped walking. He grabbed me by the forearm.
“What? What happened?” There were already tears in his eyes. “What happened?”
“That’s what I wanted to ask you.”
Peter glanced back toward his house. I did too.
Theda Rhone was standing on the sidewalk, looking at us.
“Come on,” Rhone said. “Let’s keep walking.”
He turned and started moving at a fast pace.
I kept up with him. Walking is what I did all day long at Sojourner Truth. There was both an upper and a lower campus and space enough for over thirty-five hundred students. Some days I didn’t sit at all.
As we walked he kept asking what happened. Finally I told him about Nola and Geneva and her claims.
At the end of the third block we came to a small park. It had four or five trees and two benches. Peter sat and started rocking.
“Who could have done such a thing?” he said. “Who?”
“Everybody I’ve talked to has got their money on you.”
“Me? Why would I? She saved my life.”
“Maybe she wanted something you couldn’t give,” I suggested.
“Like what?”
“Maybe she was going to call your wife.”
“Why would she? I was going to leave Theda. I told Nola that.”
“Come again?”
“I loved your cousin. Didn’t she tell you that?”
“Well,” I said. “I have to admit that I misled you, Mr. Rhone. My name is Easy Rawlins and the first time I saw Nola was on a coroner’s slab.”
“I, I don’t understand. What do you have to do with her . . .” His words trailed off because he didn’t want to call her dead.
“The police are stepping lightly around this murder —”
“Murder,” he repeated the word.
“Yeah. Anyway, the cops called on me because I know people around the neighborhood and I can ask questions without arousing too much attention. You know public attention to her murder could set off the riots all over again.”
“I don’t understand, Mr. Rawlins. Who would want to kill Nola?”
There we were again. By now I was more than half convinced that he hadn’t killed her. Rhone wasn’t trying to hide anything from me. He was frightened but not for himself. Nola was still alive in this man’s heart.
“Do you own a gun, Peter?”
“A twenty-five-caliber pistol.”
“Where is it?”
“In my house. In the dresser.”
It was a beautiful day. Low eighties and fairly clear. There was a robin singing somewhere and the traffic was sparse.
“Why don’t you tell me what happened, Peter? Then maybe I can help make some sense out of it all.”
21
I don’t understand, Mr. Rawlins,” Peter Rhone said. “Are you with the police department?”
“No. Not with them. If I was, I would have turned you in the minute I got your name. But they asked me to help them solve Nola’s murder before the newspapers got hold of it because they want to keep a lid on Watts.”
“So you’re a detective?”
“Think of me as a concerned citizen who has the ear of the police and you have a good idea of what I’m doing here.”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe I shouldn’t be talking to you.”
