Black Betty (32 page)

“Was the cop you called Styles?” I asked.

Arthur nodded. “That’s the one.”

“Who told you about him?”

“Dad did.”

“He knew Styles?”

“Yes. Grandpa sent Styles to tell Dad to stay away from us, but then they got to be friends. They were working together.”

“Who told you about the will?”

“Calvin Hodge did,” Sarah said. “He found out somehow and told us that we’d better make a deal with Betty.”

“Some deal,” I said. “And did Calvin call the cops on me when I left your house the first time?”

“I’m sorry about that, Mr. Rawlins,” Arthur said.

“You called him?”

“I didn’t know what you were doing there. You said that you were looking for Marlon, so I got scared. I didn’t think that he’d hurt you.”

“You knew he wanted to kill your grandfather. You knew he wanted to kill Betty.”

Arthur shook his head. “I didn’t mean to hurt Betty. I only wanted to get at Grandpa for hurting Mom.” He turned to his mother. “For keeping you from Dad.”

“I hate him,” Sarah said. I was pretty sure that her father and husband were one man for her.

“So it was your father who killed Marlon and Terry and Gwen?”

“Dad was outside the house this morning. He told me that he wanted to talk to Gwen. He said that he wanted to ask her something about Betty. He wanted me to bring her out to the gate so Mother wouldn’t get mad. But then you guys came.” Arthur peered over at the operating-room door.

“Did he kill Gwen?”

Arthur stared directly into my eyes, not saying a word.

“He wanted my money,” Sarah said in her son’s place. “The fool thought that Betty was going to take everything. The only reason he wanted to be married to me was that he wanted to get bought off. But he couldn’t get anything until Father was dead.”

“And that’s why he got Arthur to tell Marlon and Terry about the rapes.” I was just talking out loud. “Marlon loved Betty more’n anything.”

“Yes,” Arthur and his mother said at the same time.

“What about Styles, though? Why’d he start sayin’ that it was murder?”

“I don’t know. He knew the coroner and got him to say that they were overworked so that a private contractor could do the autopsy. The report originally said that foul play wasn’t suspected, so then the contractor doctor was free to say that it was a heart attack.”

“Styles knew this doctor?” I asked.

Arthur nodded.

“Excuse me, but are you Mr. Rawlins?” The young black woman, with the baby cradled in her arms, had come up next to me.

“Yeah?”

“I’m Mrs. Lynx,” she said. “They told me that if Saul lives it will be because of you. They said that he saved your life and that you kept him breathing for more than half an hour before the ambulance came.”

“I wasn’t watchin’ the clock.” My hand went down to hers. She held it next to her infant son’s face. His lips pushed in and out. There was very little of Saul in his dark features but you could tell by the hair, a little.

“Thank you.”

I WENT TO THE PHONE and dialed the Beverly Hills precinct.

After a little bit of work I got Officer Connor on the line. At first he didn’t want to talk to me but after I told him I thought I could get Styles he wanted to listen. I told him everything I knew about the murders, including Styles’s part in them. The only thing I left out was Marlon’s burial.

“Styles has been sitting on the murder investigation and he’s been working with the man he killed today. I’m gonna send you a copy of an arrest report that he buried over twelve years ago.” I left him with the puzzle, hoping that he would work it all out.

AFTER THAT CAME THE WAIT. Miss Cain and Arthur went home at midnight, but Rita, that’s Mrs. Lynx, and I waited until the doctor came out at three A.M. to announce that Saul had passed the first hurdle. If his body could fight off any secondary infections he’d probably live.

I drove her and the baby to their home in Redondo Beach and then I made the long way back to my house.

IT WAS EARLY MORNING AGAIN. The children were safe with Primo and I’d have them home with me again soon. My money problems weren’t solved yet but I had some hope. And I was definitely sure that I’d never enter work that didn’t have a paycheck and benefits involved. I was through with the streets. That was a younger man’s game.

“Mornin’, Ease.” He was seated in my reclining chair, a gaudy Colt .45 resting on his knees.

“Mouse.”

“I’m’onna kill me somebody today, man. Now either it’s gonna be you and John or it’s gonna be them boys turned me in.”

“None’a them men turnt you in, Raymond.”

Mouse laid his hand across the pistol. He couldn’t help himself, I knew that. He needed to kill somebody, and even though it would hurt him he’d kill me if there was nobody else to blame.

“The man turned you in was a religious man. I found out from Faye Rabinowitz that he said God wouldn’t let him keep quiet on a night like that when he called in. Them men in John’s wouldn’ta said that. You could call Faye Rabinowitz. She got that from the prosecutor.”

His fingers wrapped around the butt of the pistol and he lifted the silver barrel a quarter of an inch.

Three seconds before my death I said, “I know who did it.”

“Well all right then.” Mouse’s grin was his relief at my survival.

I TOLD HIM everything that he needed. “Just call this number and tell her that her husband’s sick. That’ll get the house open for ya and you could just walk in.”

With every word I swore to myself that I’d never get involved with another man’s problems again.

JESUS AND FEATHER had to spend another week at Primo’s house because I collapsed in the front yard the morning after the shooting. Lucky took me to the hospital where they diagnosed the infection from my stab wound. Antibiotics saved my life from the bacteria, and seven days on my back were enough for me to decide how to go out and find a job that would keep me out of the streets forever.

Saul Lynx lived. His wife nursed him back to health and he took a job doing security for WestBank in Santa Monica. I get together with him and Rita now and again. They’re good people.

Officer Connor was able to get an indictment against Arthur Hawkes and Commander Styles, and Marlon Eady too—though he was never found to stand trial. Styles, the workingman, went to jail for his crimes. The fool had used his own pistol to kill Terry Tyler. I was sure that he was the one who helped Hawkes beat Marlon.

Arthur went free. His lawyers made Marlon Eady and Ron Hawkes the bad guys. “These hardened criminals misled the boy and blackmailed him. He loved his family, and if he had been aware of the evil of the men who used him he would have definitely turned away from them,” the defense claimed.

The prosecution didn’t fuss much.

The trial destroyed Betty. They hauled her up on the stand and asked again and again if she was aware of her brother’s plotting. They made her seem like a whore who had beguiled Albert Cain.

These last accusations were used to break the will. Calvin Hodge did that. He was never implicated in the crimes. Maybe he didn’t know anything about them. He was just a lawyer trying to make it through the muck. When the prosecution asked him about his relationship with Styles, Hodge said that he’d introduced Albert Cain to Styles but that he had “no entrée into their intercourse.”

Hodge helped Mofass break Clovis’s hold on his business. Actually Mofass got away like a bandit, because really it was Clovis who had built the business. Mofass just took it away from her and then became a kind of a recluse because of the threats her family put down. We tried for two years to keep Jewelle and Mofass apart. But finally, on the day she turned eighteen, they went off together.

They condemned Freedom’s Plaza and bought up the property for the city. Then they found that the soil was unsuitable for a waste-processing plant. They sold the property to Save-Co with Mason LaMone as the managing agent.

I hired on to the construction crew that laid the foundation for the shopping center. No one ever suspected that it was me who put the extra sand in the cement that made it crumble only one year after the opening ceremonies. Nobody except maybe Mason LaMone.

SHE TOLD THE POLICE that a call had come saying that her husband was sick at work. She hurried out to him. After all, what could happen in the house in just twenty minutes?

I don’t know how it happened exactly. They found him behind the sofa. The shot from the Colt .45 had knocked him back and flipped him over.

Mouse had come in and asked him who had turned him in and Martin said that he’d done it. He said that the Lord wouldn’t let him keep quiet on that. And Mouse shot him. A sixty-year-old man dressed in a small boy’s clothes, but all Mouse saw was the man who’d turned him over. So he shot him and walked out of the empty house.