There I sat, stapler in hand, too upset to be humiliated and too scared to put my fake weapon down.
“What’s wrong, Easy?” the white man asked.
“Bonnie’s marrying another man and all I can do is sit here.”
Melvin was of middle height and a little less sure of himself every day. He’d started out with the regular white American’s arrogance and so he was still more certain than I ever would be, but his eyes were opened after the Watts riots and the horror we uncovered together.
It wasn’t fair to call Suggs’s eyes brown. They were taupe colored, like a fawn or a forest mushroom, given to him to make up for the sloth of his life.
He squinted and I sighed, half a mind in my office and the other still in the waiting room for the dying.
I regretted my rash confession to the lawman.
“I’m here about Alexander,” Suggs said, deciding to ignore my words.
That’s why I smiled. “And how are you, Mel?”
He pushed my client’s chair and fell back into it. I could hear the joints strain.
“I’m okay. Met a girl, met her boyfriend, showed him my pistol, and made a small investment in the Johnnie Walker Corporation. You?”
I smiled wider. “I forgot how many blackbirds go in a pie.”
He smiled.
“Alexander,” Suggs said to show me that he could stay on the scent.
“He didn’t kill Pericles Tarr,” I said in a voice not my own. I say not my own because the tone belonged to those men that dropped napalm on Asian men wielding bamboo sticks, whose forefathers preached equality only not for women or niggers or crackers without a pot, who made decisions in their hearts without any consideration for their souls.
Maybe it was my voice.
“Where is he?” Suggs asked.
“I don’t know,” I said, myself again. “I’ve looked everywhere. But listen, Mel. Mouse is not a loan shark, neither is he the kind of man who shoots and runs. We both know what he is and what he isn’t. Mouse did not kill that man.”
“Since when did they make you a judge?”
“The same night they ordained you and yours as executioners,” I said, wondering who spoke through me now.
Suggs paused at that charge. He smiled again.
“I won’t lie to you, Easy,” he said. “They want him this time, his head on a sharpened stick.”
Suggs’s suit was tan and his shirt was either white or light green. Both were soiled, wrinkled, worn to the edge of their threads’ ability to hold on.
“Who?” I asked him.
“Captain Rauchford,” Suggs said, “Seventy-sixth Precinct.”
I turned my face to the wall, taking in this information. Rauchford had rousted me a few times before I was given a PI’s license by the deputy commissioner. He was both an ugly and a prissy man. Every hair in place and the girls still shunned him; every T crossed and he was still passed over for promotion. And like all white men who couldn’t bear the weight of injustice visited upon them, he regurgitated his rage onto others: men like me.
When I turned back, Suggs was rising from his chair, Benedict Arnold to the men in blue. He’d drink a whole bottle that night, hoping maybe he’d find forgiveness on the other side.
34
The drive over to Champion Avenue was pleasant. Suggs’s visit, though not actually restoring my faith in mankind, had at least given human nature a positive wrinkle. He wanted me to know that there was a semi-official plan in motion to murder my friend.
Suggs was a good cop. He solved the crime. That was his downfall. Most Americans (and maybe everybody else around the world, for all I knew) didn’t look directly at the problem. If you heard shots, the first thing you did was duck and then run. After that, most people hid. Suggs’s way of hiding was to think.
He didn’t know if Mouse was guilty, but he did know that killing a man you cannot arrest legally is wrong. He couldn’t go against Rauchford and he had no idea what Mouse or I would do, but he had to tell me.
I spent the rest of the brief drive thinking about Colonel Bunting. In my mind I called him Bumbles. He was like so many young black men who wrapped themselves in the latest styles and thought that made them invulnerable. Bunting believed that his uniform made him superior; my brothers in the street thought it was ruffled shirts and unborn-calf-skin shoes. Manhood and childishness blended together in both Bumbles and my slave-descended kin. The only difference was that the newspapers and television agreed with Bumbles. No one laughed at a puffed-up, preening white fool in uniform.
THE SUPREMES WERE SINGING “Baby Love,” much too loudly, behind the pink door. I pressed the buzzer repeatedly, breaking now and then to work the brass knocker.
It was a nice house, small and set farther back on the lot than the other homes around it. The lawn was cut and well trimmed, and the rosebushes along the sidewalk were clipped and blossoming. Big flowers with red, white, and orange petals hung heavy on the thorny branches, and a profusion of violet dahlias flourished along the side of the house. The light on the lawn was so strong that I felt I might reach down and pick it up in my hands.
