“In the hospital,” I said.
“Am I sick? Am I dyin’?” she asked in a distraught tone.
“No ma’am. I think you had a shock and the policemen brought you here to the doctor.”
“Yes,” she said in a very knowing way. “I have seen terrible things. Things you wouldn’t ever want to see, Roger.”
I thought about what it must have been like for her to come upon the corpse of Nola Payne, a woman she had probably known since Nola was a child.
“Why am I tied up?”
“Because the doctors thought you might hurt yourself.”
“It wasn’t that white man, was it?” she asked over my reply.
“What white man?”
“The one with Nola. The one that choked her and shot her and ran.”
“What white man?” I asked again.
I had learned over the years that when someone is in shock you can ask them the same question again and again, getting a different answer each time—every answer bringing you closer to the truth.
“The one in her house. The one she tried to save. All them white men wanna do is beat you and stick their things in your behind like you was a whore.”
“Who did she try and save?”
The woman closed her eyes and moaned.
“They were tryin’ to kill him, the people. And he runned and Nola took him in. He was bleedin’ and bloody. She didn’t know about white men. I never told her and now she’s dead.”
“What was his name?” I whispered.
She sighed and then passed back into the stupor the doctors had induced. I sat with her a bit just to be some company. I wondered where Nola’s story ended and her aunt’s began.
After a while I left the sleeping, tortured prisoner and made my way back toward Dr. Turner’s office.
THEY WERE WANDERING the halls, looking for me. Both Fleck and Jordan had removed their borrowed doctor’s smocks. Fleck wore a dark blue uniform and Jordan had on a cream- colored suit.
“Where are you coming from?” Fleck asked me.
If he had been a brother or a young beatnik I would have thought he was talking in slang. But I knew it was just that the language he spoke and hipster talk sometimes overlapped.
“Out lookin’ for a place to smoke,” I said. “I got lost in these damn white halls.”
I was trying to sound down-home, half ignorant—but it was too late for that now. I had already talked to the white man in his own tongue and he would know from that day forth that his bastion had been breached.
“Here you go,” Jordan said, handing me a folded sheet of paper.
I unfolded the white sheet and read it silently.
It was a letter composed on the typewriter.
August 18, 1965
To Whom It May Concern:
The bearer of this letter, Mr. Ezekiel Rawlins, is hereby empowered by the writer, Deputy Commissioner of Police Gerald Jordan, to be given free access by the police and any other security employee as he is conducting private consultations for the Los Angeles Police Department. If there are any questions as to his authority you should contact the central office of the police department and inquire at the desk concerning the police commissioner’s business.
Gerald Jordan
Deputy Commissioner Gerald Jordan
“This is enough?” I asked.
“It should be,” Jordan said.
“And when does it go into effect?”
Past the deputy commissioner’s shoulder I could see Suggs and the third white-man-in-white coming down the hall.
“Right now, Mr. Rawlins. I called it in before coming to find you.”
I refolded the letter and put it in my shirt pocket.
“I have to leave, Mr. Rawlins,” Jordan said. “Is there anything else you need?”
“No sir.”
“What about remuneration?”
“I don’t usually take on white clients, Mr. Jordan.”
