By that time there were three plainclothes detectives on the scene. They seemed to know Suggs. They all talked for forty-five minutes or so.
“Jordan had Peter Rhone arrested as a material witness in the Payne murder,” Suggs told me on the way to his car. “I had to give up his name.”
“He didn’t do it,” I said.
“I know.”
“Where we goin’?” I asked my new friend.
“That’s up to you, Ezekiel,” he said.
49
They found Miss Ostenberg’s car on Fifty-fourth Place in an alley,” Suggs told me as we headed back for South L.A.
“They find him?”
Suggs shook his head while saying, “Hide nor hair.”
We drove a little further.
I was tired by then. The wounds and drugs and company of death had weakened me. There would have been little I could do to subdue Harold even if he were standing in front of me. I doubted that I could have climbed out of my seat without help.
“You got any leads on the man, Rawlins?”
“No.”
“Why would he kill his mother?”
“Same reason he killed all those other women. Because she preferred the company of a white man to him.”
Suggs grimaced.
“Geneva Landry died this morning,” he said.
“What? Who did it?”
“Nobody. The doctors think that she might have been allergic to an antibiotic that they gave her. They won’t be sure until they do an autopsy.”
“She just died in her bed?”
“I’m sorry, Ezekiel.”
“Just died?” I said. “If you motherfuckers didn’t put her in there she would have been fine. But you were so worried about yourselves you didn’t even stop to find out about her.”
Suggs drove the car, his big hands tight on the wheel.
“You killed her just as well as you killed all those other women,” I continued.
“I didn’t kill anybody,” he said softly.
“No? Then who did? Who did? I told the people at the Seventy-seventh what I knew months ago. I told you just the other day.”
“Nobody saw the pattern,” he said, his voice getting fainter still.
“No,” I said. “They didn’t. But they heard Geneva yellin’ about it. They sure enough threw her in a hospital and started shootin’ her with drugs. They let her slip away right under their noses. Another woman dead and Gerald Jordan gets a party at the mayor’s house.”
Suggs said something else but it was too soft to hear over the car engine.
“What you say?” I asked him.
“Where are we going?”
“Take me to my office. Take me there and I will call you if I find out anything.”
“We can’t just let this go, Easy,” Suggs said. “The man is a killer and Payne is innocent.”
“I know that,” I said. “So you go to the papers and tell them. Tell the
Melvin was already looking at the road but still it felt as if he were turning away from me.
“Mayor’s office doesn’t want any publicity,” he whispered.
“Say what?”
Those two words were the last of our conversation. Suggs had a job. He saved banks from being robbed and protected innocent victims from predators in the night. He hid the truth about a killer for the betterment of people that had never been that murderer’s victims. I was on the other side of the board. My queen and rooks and bishops were all gone. My pawns were exhausted, while he had a full complement of men. All I had left was a king behind a lazy pawn, flanked by a drunken man on a horse. He could have beaten me at any time he wanted to. And all I did was keep pushing ahead with no plan or hope.
If I were driving that car I might have run it into a wall.
SUGGS LET ME out in front of my building. I limped up the stairs and to my office. The door was open, I could see that and the
