Walter Mosley - Devil in a Blue Dress

Mason grinned wide enough to show me his flaring red gums.

“I don’t know what you guys are talking about. Maybe I know this dude Howard Green. I mean if he goes to John’s I prob’ly know what he looks like, but I don’t know nuthin’ else.”

“I think you do, Ezekiel. And if you do but you don’t tell us then things are going to get bad. Real bad for you.”

“Man, I don’t know a thing. People gettin’ killed ain’t gotta thing to do with me. You took me in. You know I ain’t got no record. I had me a drink with Dupree and Coretta and that’s all. You cain’t hang me for that.”

“I can if I prove that you were in McGee’s house.”

I noticed that Miller had a small crescent scar under his right eye. It seemed to me that I always knew he had that scar. Like I knew it and I didn’t know it at the same time.

“I ain’t been there,” I said.

“Where?” Miller asked eagerly.

“I ain’t been to no dead man’s house.”

“There’s a big fat fingerprint on the knife, Ezekiel. If it’s yours, then you’re fried.”

Mason took my jacket from a chair and held it out to me, like a butler might. He thought he had me so he could afford being polite.

They took me back down to the station for fingerprinting, then they sent the prints downtown to be compared against the one found on the knife.

Miller and Mason took me to the little room again for another round of questions.

They kept asking the same things. Did I know Howard Green? Did I know Richard McGee? Miller kept threatening to go down to John’s and find somebody who could tie me to Green, but we both knew that he was throwing a bluff. Back in those days there wasn’t one Negro in a hundred who’d talk to the police. And those that did were just as likely to lie as anything else. And John’s crowd was an especially close one so I was safe, at least from the testimony of friends.

But I was worried about that fingerprint.

I knew that I hadn’t touched the knife but I didn’t know what the police were up to. If they really wanted to catch who did the killing then they’d be fair and check my prints against the knife’s and let me go. But maybe they needed a culprit. Maybe they just wanted to close the books because their record hadn’t been so good over the year. You never could tell when it came to the cops and a colored neighborhood. The police didn’t care about crime among Negroes. I mean, some softhearted cops got upset if a man killed his wife or did any such harm to a child. But the kind of violence that Frank Green dished out, the business kind of violence, didn’t get anybody worried. The papers hardly ever even reported a colored murder. And when they did it was way in the back pages.

So if they wanted to get me for Howard Green’s death, or Coretta’s, then they might just frame me to cut down the paperwork. At least that’s what I thought at the time.

The difference was that two white men had died also. To kill a white man was a real crime. My only hope was that these cops were interested in finding the real criminal.

I was still being questioned that afternoon when a young man in a loose brown suit entered the small room. He had a large brown envelope that he handed to Miller. He whispered something into Miller’s ear and Miller nodded seriously as if he had heard something that was very important. The young man left and Miller turned to me; it was the only time I ever saw him smile.

“I got the answer on the fingerprints right here in this package, Ezekiel,” he grinned.

“Then I guess I can go now.”

“Uh-uh.”

“What’s it say?” Mason was frisking from side to side like a dog whose master had just come home.

“Looks like we got our killer.”

My heart was beating so fast that I could hear the pulse in my ear. “Naw, man. I wasn’t there.”

I looked into Miller’s face, not giving away an ounce of fear. I looked at him and I was thinking of every German I had ever killed. He couldn’t scare me and he couldn’t bring me down either.

Miller pulled out a white sheet from the envelope and looked at it. Then he looked at me. Then to the paper again.

“You can go, Mr. Rawlins,” he said after a full minute. “But we’re going to get you again. We’re going to bring you down for something, Ezekiel, you can bank on that.”

“Easy! easy, over here!” Mouse hissed to me from my car across the street.

“Where’d you get my keys?” I asked him as I climbed in the passenger’s side.

“Keys? Shit, man, all you gotta do is rub a couple’a sticks together an’ you could start this thing.”

The ignition had a bunch of taped wires hanging from it. Some other time I might have been mad but all I could do then was laugh.

“I was startin’ t’think that I’d have t’come in after you, Ease,” Mouse said. He patted the pistol that sat between us on the front seat.

“They don’t have enough to hold me, yet. But if something don’t happen fo’ them real soon they might just take it in their heads to fo’get ev’rybody else an’ drag me down.”

“Well,” Mouse said, “I found out where Dupree is holed up. We could go stay with him and figger what’s next.”

I wanted to talk to Dupree but there was something that was more important.

“We go over there a little later, but first I want you to drive somewhere.”

“Where’s that?”

“Go up here to the corner and take a left,” I said.

Portland court was a horseshoe of tiny apartments not far from Joppy’s place, near 107th and Central. There were sixteen little porches and doorways staggered in a semicircle around a small yard that had seven stunted magnolia trees growing in brick pots. It was early evening and the tenants, mostly old people, were sitting inside the screened doorways, eating their dinners off of portable aluminum stands. Radios played from every house. Mouse and I waved to folks and said hello as we made it back to number eight.

That door was closed.

I knocked on it and then I knocked again. After a few minutes we heard something crash and then heavy footsteps toward the door.

“Who’s that?” an angry voice that might have had some fear in it called out.

“It’s Easy!” I shouted.

The door opened and Junior Fornay stood there, in the gray haze of the screen door, wearing blue boxer shorts and a white T-shirt.

“What you want?”

“I wanna talk about your call the other night, Junior. I gotta couple’a things I wanna ask.”

I reached to pull the door open but Junior threw the latch from the inside.

“If you wanted t’talk you should’a done it then. Right now I gotta get some sleep.”

“Why’ont you open the do’, Junior, fo’ I have t’shoot it down,” Mouse said. He had been standing to the side of the door, where Junior couldn’t see, but then he stood out in plain sight.

“Mouse,” Junior said.

I wondered if he was still anxious to see my friend again.

“Open up, Junior, Easy an’ me ain’t got all night.”

We went in and Junior smiled as if he wanted to make us feel at home.

“Wanna beer, boys? I gotta couple’a quarts in the box.”

We got drinks and lit up cigarettes that Junior offered. He seated us on folding chairs he had placed around a card table.

“What you need?” he asked after a while.

I took a handkerchief from my pocket. It was the same handkerchief that I used to pick up something from the floor at Richard McGee’s.

“Recognize this?” I asked Junior as I opened it on his table.

“What’s a cigarette butt gotta do with me?”

“It’s yours, Junior, Zapatas. You the only one I know cheap enough to smoke this shit. And you see how somebody just let it drop to the floor and burn so that the paper on the bottom is just charred but not ash?”