Black Betty by Walter Mosley

other civil unrest.
    But Connor didn’t like Styles and he wasn’t about to let a prisoner die while he was in charge of him.
    “Men have died in here before,” Connor told me. “But never when I was the one on duty.”
    It wasn’t very reassuring to have Connor as my protector, though. He was a clerk with a big heart. Commander Styles would have eaten him for a snack before dropping me into the Pacific Ocean.
     
* * *
     
    WHEN I WAS ALONE in my cell I took off the mattress and loosened one of the twelve-inch metal stays that held the springs in place. It weighed about a quarter of a pound and even though it wasn’t sharp it had a nasty snap to it when I swung it slicing through the air. If the commander wanted another piece of me I’d make sure he got more than he wanted.
    I was willing to play the game, but that man was crazy. Insane. And no matter where I find myself I will not lie down and die without a fight.
     
     
    AT ABOUT MIDNIGHT Connor came down to my cell with the guards.
    “You got visitors, Rawlins.”
    “Who?”
    “Come on,” he said sliding open the cell door.
    I had put the stay back under the mattress and couldn’t get to it without letting the policemen see.
    Connor took me to a small room where Faye Rabinowitz and a well-dressed white man were waiting.
    I knew Faye. She was a white woman, definitely, but her skin ran toward the darker shades. She was slim and hardy-looking, like a weed growing out of a stone. Her eyes meant business and her nose flared slightly as if maybe she’d just smelled something not quite right. Faye wasn’t out of her twenties yet but she’d never been a child.
    Faye Rabinowitz didn’t like anybody. Men were beneath her contempt and women were no good unless they did some kind of important job and talked hard. I’d met her when Mouse was indicted for Bruno’s killing. She brought me into her office to answer her questions so she could be certain that I would stand up under cross-examination in the real trial.
    “Why’d you take Raymond’s case?” I asked after forty-five minutes of practice grilling.
    “Because the law is shit,” she said. She was only twenty-four at the time, one of the youngest people who had ever passed the bar. There wasn’t a hint of makeup on her face and her hair was short and combed straight back.
    “But you’re a lawyer. You’re part of the law.”
    Faye looked down at her watch. She was finished with me and couldn’t have cared less about my questions.
    It made me mad, the way she dismissed my presence as if I were no one and no good. She was trying to help my friend as if she were some kind of liberal but her attitudes were straight out of the plantation.
    “So you’re doin’ this because he’s some poor black man and he won’t get a fair deal in court?” I really wanted to know.
    “I don’t care about your friend,” she said, rising from her chair. “He’s a killer and in a better world he’d hang. But the people who run this world have no right to put anybody to death. They’re the ones who should die.”
    The man was older and dressed in three hundred dollars’ worth of midnight-blue suit. There was a white flower in his lapel, giving me the idea that he’d recently been at some social gathering.
    “Is this the man?” he asked Faye.
    She nodded, somber as a Valkyrie pronouncing my fate.
    The man, who was white-haired, turned his hard stare to Connor. “Why’s he limping? Did he come in limping?”
    “I don’t know, your honor,” Connor said. He might have hated Styles but he wasn’t going to turn him in.
    “Did you?” the judge asked me.
    “Am I gettin’ outta here?” I asked anyone who wanted to answer.
    “There’s not even a record of his arrest, your honor,” Faye Rabinowitz said.
    “Is that true?” The judge had nothing but questions for the Boy Scout.
    “I’m just holding the fort, Judge Mellon. He was in the cell when I got here. Somebody said that he’d been in a