“Fine,” I said. “But when I give the police your address they’ll have you in jail and up on charges before you can explain to your wife what you were doing down there in a black woman’s arms.”
Peter Rhone was staring deeply into my eyes. His face was quivering and his fingers were more jittery than those of a two-year-old who’s just eaten a chocolate bar.
“The news hasn’t said anything about Nola . . . There were no reports.”
“She was strangled and then she was shot. Beaten too,” I said.
It was no proof but it broke the man down emotionally. His head lowered nearly to his knees.
“I wondered why she wasn’t home,” he said. “I’ve been calling every chance I get. She didn’t come in to work either.”
“She’s dead,” I said again.
“What did you want to know?” he asked.
“Did you kill Nola?”
“No. No.”
“Did you have sex with her on Tuesday night?”
His forehead touched his left knee.
“Yes,” he said.
“She was willing?”
“Very much. Very much. She was so happy that I was there and, and . . . she kissed me. That’s what started it. She kissed me.”
“Why did you go to her house in the first place?”
“I had driven down to Grape Street looking for her.”
“You already knew her?”
“Yes. Didn’t you know? She works in the office where I do on Wilshire. Nola’s the daytime switchboard operator at Trevor Enterprises.”
“What do you do there?”
“I broker advertising deals. You see, people come to us to find out where they should advertise. We have contacts throughout the southland, so people, especially companies with out-of-town staffs, rely on us for intelligence.”
“And how well did you know Nola?” I asked.
“The operator’s room is next to my office,” he said. “And somehow we started bringing in coffee for each other every other day. Usually it was just a drop-off but sometimes we’d gab a little bit before getting to work. At first, you know, I was just nice to her because the operator is the most important job at Trevor Ent.”
“How’s that?”
“A lot of times people call in wanting help but they have to rely on Nola to route the call to the right person. She was a smart girl so she knew a good prospect when it came in. And if it was good she’d give it to me if it seemed up my alley. Not a bad dividend for two cups of coffee a week.
“But after a while I started liking her. She was smart. Read all the magazines and papers that came through the office and she knew more about baseball than I did. We were friends.”
“So how does that turn into you making love to her with the city burning down around your heads?” I asked.
“When the riots started, Theda went down to La Jolla to visit her uncle and aunt. They’re her closest family and they were afraid that a race war was coming. Crazy. I went to work in the morning and Nola didn’t come in. I worried about her all day and then finally I called in the afternoon. She was so frightened. I could hear it in her voice. She hadn’t come to work because she had to take the bus and she was afraid of snipers. So I told her that I’d come and get her and drop her off with some friends that lived down around Venice.”
“So you worked until the end of the day and then drove down into the riot?”
I had always been amazed by the ignorance that white people showed about blacks. Most of the times I was angry at their lack of awareness—this time I was enthralled. Peter Rhone might have been the only white man in L.A. who wanted to drive down into Watts in order to save a colored woman from the riots.
“And they got you,” I said.
“Yeah.” Peter nodded his battered head. “Beat me pretty bad. All I could do was run toward Nola’s address. And there she was. She threw a blanket over me and took me into her building. They knocked out a tooth and I was bleeding from the head. There I was, trying to save her and she saved me instead.
“We talked for three days. She told me all about her family and her Aunt Geneva. I told her about my wife. She had a boyfriend but she wasn’t in love with him.”
His mentioning Geneva Landry reminded me of something.
“Why didn’t Geneva know your last name?” I asked.
“What?”
“Didn’t she talk to her aunt every day?”
“Yeah. Little Scarlet would call her aunt at sunset each day. Geneva would call at other times too—whenever she was scared.”
