Suggs opened his briefcase and handed me a sheaf of single-page reports.
Each page contained two photographs of a young black woman—one in life and the other in death.
“The bodies were almost all left on their backs,” Suggs was saying. “A couple weren’t quite dead when he left them. That accounts for the few odd positions.”
“You think it was all him?” I asked.
“Maybe not every one,” Suggs said. “But there are also probably some that I missed. It’s a shame. The homicide detectives should have picked it up. I’m really very sorry about this, Mr. Rawlins.”
An apology. A week before, it would have meant something to me. But right then I couldn’t even meet his eye. I was afraid that if I saw his sorrow, it might dredge up the rage and impotence I felt. So instead, I kept my eyes down and my mouth shut.
After a few minutes I heard the chair scrape the floor and his footsteps trailed away. Finally my door closed and I was alone with the dead women.
Suggs had done a good job. He’d read the files and typed up an abbreviated report, which he stapled to the back of each one.
Phyllis Hart was thirty-three when she died, choked to death in her auntie’s backyard on the fourteenth of July.
Many of them had known white men. Maybe all of them had. Suggs had called family members to get some of the details. He even asked about a man living in the street named Harold. There were three people who had seen a hobo hanging around.
Solve Jackson was killed in her own bed. Her boyfriend, Terry McGee, was arrested for the crime. He had an alibi and witnesses to his whereabouts but still the jury found him guilty.
I sat there reading about dead women until I knew everything Sugg’s report had to say.
After a while I noticed that the tape on Jackson’s recording device had moved. I flipped the switch to “rewind” and then to “play.”
“Hello,” a man’s voice said. “This is Conrad Hale of the Cross County Fidelity Bank. Your company’s name was given as a reference for a Mr. Jackson Blue. Could you please return this call as soon as possible? We are considering hiring Mr. Blue in a responsible position and were wondering about his work history with your firm. I’m calling on Saturday, so you may not get this until Monday morning. But if you get this message earlier I’ll give you my home phone too. We are anxious to get going with Mr. Blue. We’d like to put him to work as soon as possible.”
There was a similar call from Leighton Car Insurance but they didn’t leave a home phone.
I realized that I had been of two minds about giving Blue a fake recommendation. It hadn’t felt right. I needed his help, so I said I would do it, but I still didn’t like it. With that stack of dead black women on my desk now, I felt differently. Nobody cared about them. I had told the police about what I suspected about Jackie Jay’s death. I’m sure there had been other complaints with so many women dead. But the denizens of Watts were under the law with no say. We were no different than pieces on a game board.
I dialed the banker’s number. He answered on the first ring.
“Conrad Hale.”
“Mr. Hale,” I said, “this is Eugene Nelson, manager of Tyler Office Machines. I hope it isn’t a problem calling you on a Sunday.”
“Not at all, Mr. Nelson. I have to hire ten men in the assembler lab here at the bank and your Mr. Blue is only the third person we’ve interviewed who passed the IBM exam.”
My voice was devoid of any accent. My words were a plain wrapper over a five-pound lie. Jackson was a mechanical whiz kid, I told Hale. He understood any machine and its inner workings. He worked overtime. He handled sensitive information. He was the most trustworthy employee I’d ever had.
On Monday, if necessary, I would extend my lies to Leighton Car Insurance.
I was happy to have Jackson on the inside of the world that ignored the women on my desk. I would have put Mouse in the White House if I could have.
34
There came another knock on the door.
I wondered if Suggs had found another twenty-one dead women. Maybe there were children too and old people and ministers. Maybe there was a whole factory of death working twenty-four hours a day under the city. Black people being thrown down onto rolling spikes that chopped them into pieces and then dropped the pieces into vats of acid. Maybe they were selling our blood and using our teeth and bones for ivory.
“Mr. Rawlins,” Juanda said, peeking into the office from the half-open door. “Can I come in?”
I stood up as she entered, closing the door behind her.
She was wearing a pink dress that only came down to the middle of her thigh.
I walked toward her and she to me. I put my arms around her and held her as tight as I did my mother when I was six and she was still alive. We may have kissed—I really don’t remember.
“You’re crying,” she said.
I didn’t even know that.
Somehow I was sitting on my desk. Juanda was standing next to me, holding me like the young mother she dreamt of becoming. My tears stopped. But the rage was still singing inside me.
“How did you know where I was?” I asked her.
