33
I left Benita’s before she woke up. That way she could feel kindly toward me without having to face her drunken failure at seducing her lover’s best friend.
I needed to talk to Detective Suggs but in the light of morning and with a few hours’ sleep from Bill’s Shelter, I knew that I shouldn’t go waltzing into the Seventy-seventh after the argument of the day before. So I went to a phone booth on Hooper and called like any other ordinary citizen.
“Seventy-seventh Precinct Police Station,” the male operator said.
“Detective Suggs.”
“Who is this?”
“Ezekiel Rawlins.”
“And what is the call pertaining to?”
“He called me,” I said to avoid further bad blood with the department. “So I wouldn’t know.”
The operator hesitated but then he connected the pin in the switchboard.
The phone only rang once.
“Suggs.”
“I need to speak with you, Detective.”
“You got something?”
“Enough to talk about.”
“Bring it in,” he said.
“No. Let’s meet. At my office. I’ll be there by nine.” I hung up after that. I couldn’t help it. The letter in my pocket gave me true power for the first time ever in my life. I didn’t have to answer to Suggs but I wanted even more. I wanted him to answer to me.
I STOPPED BY Steinman’s Shoe Repair before going up to my office. The doorway was boarded over and a sign that read CLOSED DUE TO DAMAGES had been nailed from the center plank. I made up my mind to call Theodore soon, to find out what he needed. It came to me then that my side job of trading favors had become more geographic than it was racial. I felt responsible for Theodore because he lived in my adopted neighborhood, not because of the color of his skin.
My office was a comfort to see. The plain table desk and bookshelves were filled with hardbacks I’d purchased from Paris Minton’s Florence Avenue Bookshop. He’d introduced me to the depth as well as the breadth of American Negro literature. I had always known that we had a literature but Paris showed me dozens of novels and nonfiction books that I had never known existed.
I started reading a copy of
The knock on the door was soft, almost feminine, but I knew it was Suggs.
“Come on in.”
He wore a black suit. You know it has to be bad when you can see the wrinkles in black cloth. His white shirt seemed askew even with the red tie, and today he wore a hat. A green one with a yellow feather in the band.
“You didn’t have to get dressed up for me,” I said.
He was carrying a white paper bag in one hand and a briefcase in the other. He walked up to my visitor’s chair and sat down heavily. I could see in his exhausted posture that he had missed as much sleep as I had.
“Coffee and some doughnuts,” he said, placing the bag on the desk.
Another seminal moment in my life that I associated with the riots: a cop, a city official, bringing me coffee and cake. If I had gone down to the neighborhood barbershop and told the men there that tale, they would have laughed me into the street.
I took the coffee and a cherry-filled doughnut. And then I rolled out an edited version of my visit to Bill’s Shelter.
“How can you be sure that our Harold was one of the ones who stayed at this joint?” the cop asked.
“I can’t be,” I said. “But it’s someplace to start. Bill’s is the kinda place let a man like Harold be crazy but not have to answer for it. They don’t try and sell you anything or change you. It’s just a bed and a meal—a perfect place for our man. I figured that you could put some muscle into the Smiths and Joneses and I’ll concentrate on the others.”
Suggs stared at me with those watercolor eyes of his. He had mastered the textbook cop expression—the look that didn’t give away a thing.
“There could be as many as twenty-one,” he said at last.
“Twenty-one what?”
“Women.”
I was back in the frozen slaughterhouse, surrounded by dead women cut down in the prime of their lives; black women who shared their love with a white man and then paid the ultimate price for betraying Harold’s stiff sense of morality.
I clenched my jaw hard enough to crack a tooth.
