“You a member of this church?”
“Yes sir.”
Naylor turned his head to the uniforms.
“Cover them up,” he said. “Don’t you guys know procedure?”
The fat cop made like he was going to go at Naylor but Reedy grabbed him by the arm and whispered to him. Then the uniforms left with the fat cop swaggering through the door.
On the way out the fat one said to Naylor, “Don’t worry, son, lotsa killin’s on nigger patrol. Wait till you see how the nigger bitches cut up on each other.” Then he was gone.
“I’ll kill that son of a bitch,” Naylor said.
Reedy didn’t say anything. He’d gone up to the bedroom and gotten sheets to cover the dead.
“What about you?” Naylor asked Chaim.
“I am Wenzler, officer. Easy and I are working in the basement and we hear the screams. He runs up, I come in, and poor Dr. Towne was here, and the girl. It’s terrible.”
“Mr. Rawlins work for you?”
“Together,” Chaim said. “We do charity for the church.”
“And you were down there when you heard the screams?”
“Yes.”
“What about shots?”
“No shots, just screams. Weak little screams like she was far away, in a hole.”
“Let’s take ’em all down and get statements, Quint,” Reedy said. “I’ll call for more uniforms and we’ll take ’em. I’ll call the ambulance and the coroner, too.”
23
I hadn’t been to the Seventy-seventh Street station for questioning in many years. It looked older in the fifties but it smelled the same. A sour odor that wasn’t anything exactly.
It wasn’t living and it wasn’t dead, it wasn’t food and it wasn’t excrement. It wasn’t anything I knew, but it was wrong, as wrong as the smells in Poinsettia’s apartment.
The last time I was taken there I had been under arrest and the police put me in a raw-walled room that was made for questioning prisoners. The kind of questioning that was punctuated by fists and shoes. This time, though, they sat me at a desk with Quinten Naylor. He had a blue-and-white form in front of him and he asked me questions.
“Name?”
“Ezekiel Porterhouse Rawlins,” I answered.
“Date of birth.”
“Let’s see now,” I said. “That would be November third, nineteen hundred and twenty.”
“Height.”
“Close to six feet, almost six-one.”
“Weight.”
“One eighty-five, except at Christmas. Then I’m about one ninety.”
He asked more questions like that and I answered freely. I trusted a Negro, I don’t know why. I’d been beaten, robbed, shot at, and generally mistreated by more colored brothers than I’d ever been by whites, but I trusted a black man before I’d even think about a white one. That’s just the way things were for me.
“Okay, Ezekiel, tell me about Poinsettia, Reverend Towne, and that woman.”
“They all dead, man. Dead as mackerel.”
“Who killed them?”
He had an educated way of talking. I could have talked like him if I’d wanted to, but I never did like it when a man stopped using the language of his upbringing. If you were to talk like a white man you might forget who you were.
“I’ont know, man. Poinsettia kilt herself, right?”
“Autopsy report on her will be in this evening. You got something to say about it now?”
“They ain’t got to that yet?” I was really surprised.
“The coroner’s working a little hard these days, Mr. Rawlins. There was that bus accident on San Remo Street and the fire in Santa Monica. Up until now we were only half sure that this was even a case,” Quinten said. “He’s been butt-high in corpses, but your turn is coming up.”
“I don’t know nuthin’, man. I know the minister and the girl was murdered ’cause I seen the blood. I’ont know who killed ’em an’ if I get my way I ain’t gonna know. Murder ain’t got nuthin’ t’do wit’ me.”
“That’s not how I hear it.”
“How’s that?”
“I hear that there were quite a few murders that you were intimate with a few years ago. Your testimony put away one of the killers.”
“That’s right! Not me.” I pointed at my chest. “Somebody else did a killin’ an’ I told the law. If I knew today I’d tell you now. But I was dumb-assed in the basement, movin’ some clothes, when I heard Winona yell. I went up to help but I could see that they was beyond what I could do.”
“You think Winona did it?”
“Beats me.”
“You see anybody else around?”
“No,” I said. Chaim had mentioned Robert Williams, but I hadn’t seen him.
“Nobody?”
“I seen Chaim, an’ Chaim seen me. That’s it.”
“Where were you before you got to work?”
“I was at breakfast, with a friend’a mines.”
“Who was that?”
“Her name was Shirley.”
“Shirley what?”
“I don’t know the girl’s last name but I know where she lives.”
“How long were you at the church before you went down to the basement?”
“I went right down.”
So we started from the top again. And again.
One time he asked me if I heard the shots.
“Shots?”
“Yeah,” he answered gruffly. “Shots.”
“They were shot?”
“What did you think?”
“I’ont know, man, they coulda been stabbed fo’all I know.”
That was it for Officer Naylor. He got up and left in disgust. A few minutes later he returned and told me I could go. Chaim and Winona had been gone for hours. The police didn’t suspect them. Winona was too hysterical to be faking it, and nobody knew that Chaim was part of the Red Terror.
I went out on the street and caught a bus down Central to the church, then I drove home. Nothing seemed quite right. Everything was off. It was strange enough that so much had happened. But now people were dying and still it didn’t make sense.
As if to prove my fears, Mouse was on my swinging sofa on the front porch, drinking whiskey. I could smell him from ten feet away.
He was usually a natty dresser. He wore silk and cashmere as another man might wear cotton. Women dressed him and then took him out to show the world what they had.
He told me once that a woman had the pockets in his pants taken out and replaced them with satin so that
