By then we were in front of my office. I couldn’t turn down the lucre. Mouse was giving me the money partly because he was my friend and partly because he wanted me to be implicated in his criminal activity. Telling him no would have put us at odds.
I told him to call me if he hadn’t found Benita by morning. Then I went up to the only place where I could be the man I wanted to be.
I PUT THE money and the ring into the bottom drawer of my desk.
At home in the garage I had a little box where I kept all the extra monies I had taken in. That was for Feather’s college and Jesus’ future, whatever that might turn out to be. But Mouse’s money was something else. I had to do something with it that would redeem his crimes. I thought about how to achieve that goal but without much success.
After that I went to the window and looked out on the street. There were no National Guards to be seen, but six police cars cruised down my block in the time I stood there.
On my street, the effects of the riots were still in evidence. Small knots of people moved around listlessly from corner to corner. The police would break them up whenever they began to congregate. I saw one man getting arrested for refusing to move on. The riots were kind of like my fight with the wrong Harold. There was no real winner. Fear on one side, defeat on the other.
42
I was reading
But it was Jocelyn Ostenberg. She was still wearing that gray dress and she’d added a brunette wig. There was enough powder on her face to bake bread and her lips looked like they were painted with red nail polish. Rather than trying to be a white woman, she seemed like she was attempting to pass as a member of a lost race of clowns.
“Come in,” I said to the garish woman. “Come have a seat.”
I returned to my chair after the older woman was seated. She was carrying a big tan bag. I wondered if she had a gun in that purse. It bothered me that the idea wasn’t very far-fetched at all.
“What do you want from me, Mr. Rawlins?”
“Your son owes me six hundred dollars,” I said. “He stopped me on the street, asking for a handout. I hired him to work on a wall I was building and he ran away with my power tools.”
The pinched expression returned to the tiny woman’s face.
“You brought the police to my house for a bunch of tools?”
“Good tools,” I said. “Power tools. And anyway, it’s the principle, not the money.”
“How did you find me?”
“On the day he was workin’ he talked about his life some. He talked about his mother, Jocelyn, so when he stole my property I looked you up in the book.”
It was a weak lie, very weak. But it was all I could manage.
“What do you do here?” she asked me.
“I do research,” I said. It was close enough to the truth that I would have probably passed a lie detector test.
“So then why were you building a wall?”
“Tell me where your son is or I will tell your husband that he’s married to a Negro woman who has a Negro son running around Watts committing crimes.”
“That’s extortion,” she said. “I could take you to court over that.”
“Where’s Harold?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t seen him in years.”
“He said that he comes to your house now and then.”
“Not for years,” she said. There were tears somewhere near.
“When was the last time you saw him?”
“You’re not doing this over some old tools.”
“I have your number right here, Miss Ostenberg. And I will call your house before you can get there.”
“It’s not right for you to do this.”
“I’m not going to argue with you, lady. Either you give up Harold or you give up your white life.”
“Do I look like a black woman to you?” she pleaded.
“You look like Bozo’s grandmother,” I said. “But I don’t care. I would go out in the streets and stage a one-man riot to get to Harold. So either you tell me what I want to know or I’ll tell everybody else about you.”
I could hardly believe how brutal I was toward that fragile, elderly woman. But I knew that Harold had given rise to all kinds of sorrow and the woman before me had given birth to him. She was responsible and I wouldn’t let up.
“Why do you want him so bad?” Jocelyn asked.
“Where is he?” I replied.
“I don’t know. You’ve seen him. He lives in the streets and alleys. He doesn’t have a phone or an address. He’s
