Walter Mosley - Devil in a Blue Dress

“I can’t, Easy. I can’t stay with you.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“I just can’t.”

I put my hand out but she moved away saying, “Don’t touch me.”

“I’ve done more than touch you, honey.”

“That wasn’t me.”

“What you mean? Who was it if it wasn’t you?” I moved toward her and she got behind her bag.

“I’ll talk to you, Easy. I’ll talk to you till the car comes but just don’t touch me. Don’t touch me or I’ll yell.”

“What’s wrong?”

“You know what’s wrong. You know who I am; what I am.”

“You ain’t no different than me. We both just people, Daphne. That’s all we are.”

“I’m not Daphne. My given name is Ruby Hanks and I was born in Lake Charles, Louisiana. I’m different than you because I’m two people. I’m her and I’m me. I never went to that zoo, she did. She was there and that’s where she lost her father. I had a different father. He came home and fell in my bed about as many times as he fell in my mother’s. He did that until one night Frank killed him.”

When she looked up at me I had the feeling that she wanted to reach out to me, not out of love or passion but to implore me.

“Bury Frank,” she said.

“Okay. But you could stay here with me and we could bury him together.”

“I can’t. Do me one other favor?”

“What’s that?”

“Do something about the boy.”

I didn’t really want her to stay. Daphne Monet was death herself. I was glad that she was leaving.

But I would have taken her in a second if she’d asked me to.

The cabdriver could tell something was wrong. He kept looking around as if he expected to be mugged any second. She asked him to carry her bag. She put her hand on his arm to thank him but she wouldn’t even shake my hand good-bye.

“Why’d you kill him, Mouse?”

“Who?”

“Joppy!”

Mouse was whistling and wrapping his money in a package fashioned from brown paper bags.

“He the cause of all yo’ pain, Easy. And anyway, I needed to show that girl how serious I was.”

“But she already hated him fo’ Frank; maybe you could’a worked on that.”

“It was me killed Frank,” he said. This time it was Mouse reminding me of DeWitt Albright.

“You killed him?”

“So what? What you think he gonna do fo’ you? You think he wasn’t gonna kill you?”

“That don’t mean I had t’kill’im.”

“Hell it don’t!” Mouse flashed his eyes angrily at me.

It was murder and I had to swallow it.

“You just like Ruby,” Mouse said.

“What you say?”

“She wanna be white. All them years people be tellin’ her how she light-skinned and beautiful but all the time she knows that she can’t have what white people have. So she pretend and then she lose it all. She can love a white man but all he can love is the white girl he think she is.”

“What’s that got to do with me?”

“That’s just like you, Easy. You learn stuff and you be thinkin’ like white men be thinkin’. You be thinkin’ that what’s right fo’ them is right fo’ you. She look like she white and you think like you white. But brother you don’t know that you both poor niggers. And a nigger ain’t never gonna be happy ’less he accept what he is.”

They found Dewitt Albright slumped over his steering wheel just north of Santa Barbara; it took him that long to bleed to death. I could hardly believe it. A man like DeWitt Albright didn’t die, couldn’t die. It frightened me even to think of a world that could kill a man like that; what could a world like that do to me?

Mouse and I heard it on the radio when I was driving him to the bus station the next morning. I was happy to see him off.

“I’m’a give all that money to Etta, Easy. Maybe she take me back now that I done saved yo’ ass and come up rich.” Mouse smiled at me and climbed on the bus. I knew I’d see him again and I didn’t know how I felt about that.

That same morning I went to Daphne’s apartment, where I found the little boy. He was filthy. His underwear hadn’t been changed in weeks and mucus was caked in his nose and on his face. He didn’t say anything. I found him eating from a bag of flour in the kitchen. When I walked up to him and held out my hand he just took it and followed me to the bathroom. After he was clean I brought him out to Primo’s place.

“I don’t think he understands English,” I said to Primo. “Maybe you could get something out of him.”

Primo was a father at heart. He had as many children as Ronald White and he loved them all.

“I could give some mamacita a few hundred bucks over the next year or two while she looked after him,” I said.

“I’ll see,” Primo said. He already had the boy in his lap. “Maybe I know someone.”

The next person I went to see was Mr. Carter. He gave me a cool eye when I told him that Daphne was gone. I told him that I’d heard from Albright about the killings Joppy and Frank had done. I told him about Frank’s death and that Joppy had disappeared.

But what really got to him was when I told him that I knew Daphne was colored. I told him that she wanted me to tell him that she loved him and wanted to be with him but that she would never know any kind of peace as long as she was with him. I laid it on kind of thick but he liked it that way.

I told him about her sundress, and while I talked I thought about making love to her when she was still a white woman. He had a look of ecstasy on his face; I had darker feeling, but just as strong, inside.

“But I’ve got a problem, Mr. Carter, and you do too.”

“Oh?” He was still savoring the last glimpse of her. “What is that?”

“I’m the only suspect that the police have,” I told him. “And unless sumpin’ happens I’m’a have to tell ’em ’bout Daphne. And you know she gonna hate you if you drag her through the papers. She might even kill herself,” I said. I didn’t think it was a lie.

“What can I do about that?”

“You the one braggin’ ’bout all your City Hall connections.”

“Yes?”

“Then get’em on the phone. I got a story t’tell’em but you gotta back me up in it. ’Cause if I go in there on my own you know they gonna sweat me till I tell about Daphne.”

“Why should I help you, Mr. Rawlins? I lost my money and my fiancée. You haven’t done a thing for me.”

“I saved her life, man. I let her get away with your money and her skin. Any one of the men involved with this would have seen her dead.”

That very afternoon we went to City Hall and met with the assistant to the chief of police and the deputy mayor, Lawrence Wrightsmith. The policeman was short and fat. He looked to the deputy mayor before saying anything, even hello. The deputy mayor was a distinguished man in a gray suit. He waved his arm through the air while he talked and he smoked Pall Malls. He had silver-gray hair and I thought for a moment that he looked the way I imagined the president to be when I was a child.

Officers Mason and Miller were called when I mentioned them.

We were all sitting in Mr. Wrightsmith’s office. He was behind his desk and the deputy police chief stood behind him. Carter and I sat before the desk and Carter’s lawyer was behind us. Mason and Miller sat off to the side, on a couch.

“Well, Mr. Rawlins,” Mr. Wrightsmith said. “You have something to tell us about all these murders going on?”

“Yessir.”

“Mr. Carter here says that you were working for him.”

“In a way, sir.”

“What way is that?”

“I was hired by DeWitt Albright, through a friend of ours, Joppy Shag. Mr. Albright hired Joppy to locate Frank and Howard Green. And later on Joppy got him to hire me.”