White Butterfly by Walter Mosley Page A

memories.
     
     
     

— 15 —
     
     
    I CALLED THE POLICE STATION from a phone booth in the street. Quinten agreed to wait for me at his office. He was all starch and good manners.
    When I was going up the stairs to the station door I saw five men coming down. Four of them were policemen surrounding Roger Vaughn. He was manacled, hand and foot. He looked up at me and I remembered all the sirens I’d heard at Hollywood Row.
    When Roger saw me he put both hands out to me. Instinctively I reached out too. But two of the cops clubbed him. He slumped down and they dragged him off to a van in the street.
    The desk sergeant knew who I was and waved me by as I went up to him. But I stopped to ask, “What they got that man out there for?”
    “Double killing. He found some guy on top of his wife.”
     
* * *
     
    BY THAT TIME Quinten had his own office with a clouded glass door that had his name and rank stenciled on it in green paint. I lifted my hand but he must have recognized the shadow against the pane.
    “Come on in, Ezekiel,” he said.
    It had been two days and he was five years older. His cannonball shoulders sagged down a little farther and his head tilted to the side as if he found it too heavy to keep erect. When I came into the room he sighed like a dogface at the end of a thirty-mile forced march.
    “You look half dead, Q-man,” I said, coining the nickname that was to follow him the rest of his life.
    “And you’re drunk,” was his reply.
    “It’s a hard world out there, brother. A little booze keeps ya from sinkin’ to the bottom of the barrel.”
    “What do you want?”
    “I’m feeling generous, officer. I’ve come to share what I know with you-all.” I took a seat in a chair set by the door.
    “What’s that?”
    “Them first three women was killed just about two weeks apart, right?”
    Quinten nodded and his eyes drooped as if he might nod off on me.
    “But then this Robin Garnett is dead just a couple days after you find Bonita Edwards.”
    “Yes, you’re right about that,” Naylor said in his prim Philadelphia accent. “Not only that. She was white, she was a college student, and she didn’t live anywhere near this neighborhood; no one seems to know what she was doing down here. That’s one of the reasons the brass is so upset. They think some crazy Negro is going to go on a rampage killing white women.”
    “Yeah.” I smiled. “But I don’t think you got it all. You see, this li’l darlin’ got kilt wasn’t all so pure as some might wanna think.”
    “What’s that mean?”
    I threw down one of Cyndi’s stripper photographs.
    Naylor studied it for a minute.
    “Why didn’t anybody show me this?”
    “Nobody knew, man. That picture in the
Times
an’
Examiner
didn’t look nuthin’ like this stripper. An’ mosta the people knew her prob’ly don’t buy the mo’nin’ news no way. An’ even if they did, why they wanna come down here when you prob’ly th’ow them in jail fo’bad thoughts?”
    “Where’d you get this?” Maybe he was going to throw
me
in the slam.
    “At her pad, man. You know the Hollywood Row, right?”
    “How’d you know where to go, Easy?”
    “Listen.” I held up my palm for him to admire. “I got my secrets. That’s why you need me.”
    Quinten looked at me hard for a minute.
    Finally he said, “All right. I’ll go look into it. Makes it a little neater for us. I don’t know what the man’s going to think, though. You know they get real upset when these white women cross the line.”
    “Why don’t we drive on down to where that girl’s parents are at? You know, just for some questions. We could bring that picture down there an’ see what they got to say.” I didn’t mention the box of belongings I had out in the car.
    “Why?”
    “It just don’t smell right, Quinten. Why she get killed two days after the other one when they gettin’ murdered ev’ry two weeks or more ’fore that? How come this is a white one an’ all the