It was the station attendant who suggested they use my car.
It took three of them, one driving and the other two holding me in the backseat, to drive me to city hall.
And when we got there it took five men to heft my dead weight into a large, well-appointed room.
They dropped me on the floor but I didn’t feel it. I had become the soul of resistance. I could stay like that for years, I believed. No one would ever defeat me again. They’d have to kill me.
“Get up, Mr. Rawlins,” Gerald Jordan said.
I took what felt like my first breath since my arrest and stood up. At the door behind me were the five cops that had carried me. Detective Suggs was there. So were two high-ranking policemen in fancy dress.
Somebody took the handcuffs from my wrists.
Suggs looked a little subdued. But that was okay by me. I had the fortitude of ten men inside of me.
“What the fuck you grab me off the street like that for, man?” I said to the deputy chief.
A hand grabbed me from behind but I flung it off.
Jordan raised his hand to tell the rank and file to stand back.
“I’ve been talking to Detective Suggs,” Jordan said.
He looked every bit as slick and evil as he had the first time we met. The only thing different about him was that the red mark under his eye seemed larger. I decided that this meant I had done something to upset him.
I liked that.
“Yeah,” I said. “So what?”
“He tells me that you’re looking for a mendicant named Harold. He said that you don’t even know his last name but that you believe this Harold killed Nola Payne.”
I didn’t say anything. Why should I?
“Is this true?” Jordan asked.
“What the fuck do you want, man?” I replied.
“Don’t push your luck, son,” one of the fancy black uniforms said.
That had an effect on me. I was born understanding those very words, delivered in that very tone. I and everybody I’d known had survived by gleaning the white man’s final threat.
His words shook me but Jo’s potion poured over them like salt on a garden slug.
“Listen, man,” I said to the uniform, “I’m here because you called on me. I got a job to do and I will do it. But I’m not gonna smile at you or kiss your mothahfuckin’ hand. I’m not gonna let you tell me what it is I should be doin’ neither. So if that’s why I’m here, either throw me in a cell or let me be.”
Suggs, who had been looking at his feet, glanced upward at his bosses. I could tell that he was awed by my outburst and that they were stymied by my resolve.
“This is not going to help your case, Rawlins,” Jordan said.
“There’s only one thing I want, Jerry. I want to find the man who killed Nola Payne. I want him either on death row or dead. If you’re with me on that, then we don’t have a problem. If you not—that’s okay too.”
“There is no Harold,” Jordan said. “I’ve spoken to every captain in the south L.A. precincts. These killings that you and Detective Suggs are talking about have other, better explanations.”
“Sir,” Suggs said.
“You be quiet,” the other fancy uniform said.
“No sir,” Suggs replied, “I can’t do that. The people you’ve been talking to are just trying to cover their own oversights. The cases I brought to you were all done by the same man. I’m sure of that. Mr. Rawlins has a credible suspect . . .”
“You don’t know that,” Jordan said.
“Yes I do, sir. There’s a murderer running loose and if we find him we will be doing what you asked us to do.”
“If,” Jordan said.
“We ain’t gonna find shit stinkin’ in here with you,” I added.
“You don’t want me as an enemy, Mr. Rawlins,” Jordan said.
“I don’t have any choice about that, Jerry. You know it and I do too. Right here at this minute you and me on the same side even if you don’t know it. I’m gonna do what you want me to do but we still gonna be enemies. There ain’t no question about that. Never was. Never will be.”
Jordan turned to Suggs then.
“You have forty-eight hours,” he said. “Either you have a killer in a cell by then or I will have your ass. Both of you.”
39
It was close to midnight and I was on the street downtown standing side by side with the white man named Melvin Suggs. He was a cop by trade and I was a criminal by color. But there we were.
“You are one crazy bastard,” Suggs said to me.
