Walter Mosley - Devil in a Blue Dress

“The police tied him into Coretta; he’s probably lyin’ low.”

“I have to talk to Frank.”

“Alright, but we’ve got to get away from here right now.”

“Wait a second,” she said. She went into the room for a moment. When she reappeared she handed me a piece of paper wrapped around a wad of cash. “Go pay my rent, Easy. That way they won’t bother us when they see us moving my bags.”

Landlords everywhere love their money. When I paid Daphne’s bill the two men left and the little woman even managed to smile at me.

Daphne had three bags but none of them was the beat-up old suitcase that she carried the first night we met.

We drove a long way. I wanted far from Watts and Compton so we went to East L. A.; what they call El Barrio today. Back then it was just another Jewish neighborhood, recently taken over by the Mexicans.

We drove past hundreds of poor houses, sad palm trees, and thousands of children playing and hollering in the streets.

We finally came to a dilapidated old house that used to be a mansion. It had a great cement porch with a high green roof and two big picture windows on each of the three floors. Two of the windows had been broken out; they were papered with cardboard and stuffed with rags. There were three dogs lounging around and eight old cars scattered around the red clay yard under the branches of a sickly and failing oak tree. Six or seven small children were playing among the wrecks. Hammered into the oak was a small wooden sign that read “rooms.”

A grizzled old man in overalls and a T-shirt was sitting in an aluminum chair at the foot of the stairs.

“Howdy, Primo.” I waved.

“Easy,” he said back to me. “You get lost out here?”

“Naw, man. I just wanted a little privacy so I figured to give you a try.”

Primo was a real Mexican, born and bred. That was back in 1948, before Mexicans and black people started hating each other. Back then, before ancestry had been discovered, a Mexican and a Negro considered themselves the same. That is to say, just another couple of unlucky stiffs left holding the short end of the stick.

I met Primo when I became a gardener for a while. We worked together, with a team of men, taking on the large jobs in Beverly Hills and Brentwood. We even took care of a couple of places downtown, off of Sixth.

Primo was a good guy and he liked to run with me and my friends. He told us that he’d bought that big house so that he could turn it into a hotel. He was always begging us to come out and rent a room from him or tell our friends about him.

He stood up when I came up the path. He only came up to my chest. “How’s that?” he asked.

“You got somethin’ with some privacy?”

“I got a little house out back that you and the señorita can have.” He bent down to look at Daphne in the car. She smiled nicely for him.

“How much?”

“Five dollars for a night.”

“What?”

“It’s a whole house, Easy. Made for love.” He winked at me.

I could have argued him down and I would have done it for fun, but I had other things on my mind.

“Alright.”

I gave him a ten-dollar bill and he showed us to the path that led around the big house to the house out back. He started to come with us but I stopped him.

“Primo, my man,” I said. “I’ll come on up tomorrow an’ we do some damage to a fifth of tequila. Alright?”

He smiled and thumped my arm before he turned to leave. I wished that my life was still so simple that all I was after was a wild night with a white girl.

The first thing we saw was a mass of flowering bushes with honeysuckle, snapdragons, and passion fruit weaving through. A jagged, man-sized hole was hacked from the branches. Past that doorway was a small building like a coach house or the gardener’s quarters on a big estate. Three sides of the house were glass doors from ceiling to floor. All the doors could open outward onto the cement patio that surrounded three sides of the house, but they were all shut. The front door was wood, painted green.

Long white curtains were drawn over all the windows.

Inside, the house was just a big room with a fallen-down spring-bed on one side and a two-burner gas range on the other. There was a table with a toaster on it and four spindly chairs. There was a big stuffed sofa upholstered with a dark brown material that had giant yellow flowers stitched into it.

“It’s just beautiful,” Daphne exclaimed.

My face must’ve said that she was crazy because she blushed a little and added, “Well it could use some work but I think we could make something out of it.”

“Maybe if we tore it down…”

Daphne laughed and that was very nice. As I said before, she was like a child and her childish pleasure touched me.

“It is beautiful,” she said. “Maybe not rich but it’s quiet and it’s private. Nobody else could see us here.”

I put her bags down next to the sofa.

“I gotta go out for a little while,” I said. Once I had her in place I saw how to get things moving.

“Stay.”

“I got to, Daphne. I got two bad men and the L.A. police on my trail.”

“What bad men?” She sat at the edge of the bed and crossed her legs. She had put on a yellow sundress at the motel, and it showed off her tan shoulders.

“The man your friend hired and Frank Green, your other friend.”

“What does Frankie have to do with you?”

I went up to her and she stood to meet me. I pulled my collar down and showed her my gashed throat, saying, “That’s what Frankie done to Easy.”

“Oh, honey!” She reached out gently for my neck.

Maybe it was just the touch of a woman that got to me or maybe it was finally realizing all that had happened to me in the previous week; I don’t know.

“Look at that! That’s the cops!” I said, pointing at the bruise on my eye. “I been arrested twice, blamed for four murders, threatened by people I wished I never met, and…” I felt that my liver was going to come out between my teeth.

“Oh my poor man,” she said as she took me by the arm and led me to the bathroom. She didn’t let go of my arm while she turned on the water for the bath. She was right there with me, unbuttoning my shirt, letting down my pants.

I was sitting there, naked on the toilet seat, and watching her go through the mirror-doored medicine cabinet. I felt something deep down in me, something dark like jazz when it reminds you that death is waiting.

“Death,” the saxophone rasps. But, really, I didn’t care.

Daphne Monet, a woman who I didn’t know at all personally, had me laid back in the deep porcelain tub while she carefully washed between my toes and then up my legs. I had an erection lying flat against my stomach and I was breathing slowly, like a small boy poised to catch a butterfly. Every once in a while she’d say, “Shh, honey, it’s all right.” And for some reason that caused me pain.

When she finished with my legs she washed my whole body with a rough hand towel and a bar of soap that had pumice in it.

I never felt drawn to a woman the way I was to Daphne Monet. Most beautiful women make me feel like I want to touch them, own them. But Daphne made me look inside myself. She’d whisper a sweet word and I was brought back to the first time I felt love and loss. I was remembering my mother’s death, back when I was only eight, by the time Daphne got to my belly. I held my breath as she lifted the erection to wash underneath it; she looked into my face, with eyes that had become blue over the water, and stroked my erection up and down, twice. She smiled when she finished and pressed it back down against my flesh.

I couldn’t say a word.