Little Scarlet

a derelict. Only thirty-seven and he’s just a bum.”

“Tell me about him,” I said.

“I told you. He’s worthless.” Her lips curled into a feral snarl. “He’s nothing.”

“Is that why he’s killing black women who get together with white men?”

For me it was her eyes. They opened wide at the accusation I leveled, wide and brown and down-home. She had the colored curse in her veins. I was sure that she saw it in the mirror every morning before dousing herself with powders and lightening creams, before she put on her wig and gloves and hat.

It wasn’t the first time I had met someone like her. And I didn’t hate her for hating herself. If everybody in the world despises and hates you, sees your features as ugly and simian, makes jokes about your ways of talking, calls you stupid and beneath contempt; if you have no history, no heroes, and no future where a hero might lead, then you might begin to hate yourself, your face and features, your parents, and even your child. It could all happen and you would never even know it. And then one hot summer’s night you just erupt and go burning and shooting and nobody seems to know why.

“What women?” Jocelyn said.

You. The word came into my mind but I didn’t say it. Maybe it wasn’t even true but I believed it. I believed that Harold Ostenberg had roamed around the streets looking for a place to put his rage. He found women who had betrayed him as his mother had. He killed them and stole their memories.

“The woman across the street said that you made Harold walk to school alone even when he was little,” I said.

“Lots of children go to school alone. I was busy keeping the house in order,” she said.

“She also told me that Harold ran away when he was just twelve.”

“He was a bad seed even then. You know, Mr. Rawlins, that some children are just born bad.”

“Who was his father?” I asked.

“I don’t see what that has to do with anything,” she said. “His father left when Harold was just a baby.”

“Was he passing like you?”

“I don’t have to put up with this.”

“Yes, you do,” I said. “Either that or you want me to go to your new white husband with this story.”

For a moment I believed that Jocelyn was going to walk out on me. She certainly wanted to. She certainly hated me.

“Carl came from St. Louis,” she said, defeated. “We met when we were both working for Third Avenue Bank. He was a loan officer and I was a teller. They thought we were white and we didn’t set them straight. But we could tell about each other. It wasn’t so wrong. We just wanted to get ahead. We wanted to work together. We bought a house.”

“Just a nice white couple from back East.”

“You have no right to judge me.”

“But black-skinned Harold did,” I said. “Somehow you and your light-skinned hubby made a mess in the nursery. Harold would be like a shit stain on your sheets.”

“You don’t have to be crude,” she said.

“I have never once murdered a black woman, Miss Ostenberg. I never once drove a child from my door.”

“You don’t understand,” she said. “Carl left me. He just went to work one day and never came back. I had no friends or family. All I had was Harold and he just couldn’t act right.”

“You mean he didn’t know why he had to pretend to be your maid’s child? He didn’t know why Honey May was pretending to be his mother?”

“You know her name?” Jocelyn asked.

“I’m looking for Harold,” I said. “I intend to find him with or without your help.”

“I don’t know where he is, Mr. Rawlins. He left me when he was twelve. I haven’t seen him since.”

“You sure you don’t wanna change that story? Once it gets out you won’t have a hole to hide in.”

She stood up on nearly steady feet and turned her back on me. She walked to the door and out without another word. I’d never felt such hatred in my life but I wasn’t quite sure right then of who or what I hated. I wasn’t even certain why.

43

There was only one Honey May in the Los Angeles directory. She lived on Crocker between Eighty-seventh Street and Eighty-seventh Place. I could have walked there from my office but I drove because that was the way you got around in L.A. Down the street or across town, you had your car there at the curb waiting to take you where you needed to be.

Honey lived in a blue apartment building, on the second floor.

“Yes?” she said sweetly from behind the closed door.

“It’s Easy Rawlins, ma’am,” I said. “You don’t know me but I’ve come here to ask you about Harold Ostenberg.”

“Oh my,” she said. “Oh my.”

She opened the door and peered out through the screen.