White Butterfly Read Online Free PDF Page B

was right.
    “All I wanna know,” I said, “is if you want that six hundred dollars. I’m willin’ t’get it but you gotta ask me.”
    Regina raised her beautiful black face and stared at me. She nodded after a while; it was a small, ungrateful gesture.
    And an empty victory for me. I wanted her to be happy that I could help when she needed. But what she needed was something I couldn’t give.
     
     
     

— 7 —
     
     
    I MADE MYSELF SCARCE for the next few evenings. I’d go out to different bars and drink until almost eleven and then come home. Everybody was in bed by then. I could breathe a little easier with no one to ask me questions.
    Never, in my whole life, had anyone ever been able to demand to know about my private life. There was many a time that I’d give up teeth rather than answer a police interrogator. And here I was with Regina’s silence and her distrust.
    At night I dreamed of sinking ships and falling elevators.
    It got so bad that on the third night I couldn’t sleep at all.
    I could hear every sound in the house and the early traffic down Central Avenue. At six-thirty Regina got out of bed. A moment later Edna cried in the distance, then she laughed.
    At seven the baby-sitter, Regina’s cousin Gabby Lee, came over. She made loud noises that Edna liked and that always woke me up.
    “Ooooo-ga wah!” the big woman cried. “Oooogy, ooogy, oogy, wah, wah, wah!”
    Edna went wild with pleasured squeals.
    At seven-fifteen the front door slammed. That was Regina going to her little Studebaker. I heard the tinny engine turn over and the sputter her car made as she drove off.
    Gabby Lee was in the bathroom with Edna. For some reason she thought that babies had to be changed in the bathroom. I guess it was her idea of early toilet training.
    When she came out I said, “Good morning.”
    Gabby Lee was a big woman. Not very fat really but barrel-shaped and a lighter shade than about half of the white people you’re ever likely to meet. She had wiry strawberry hair and definite Negro features. She reserved her smile for other women and babies.
    “You here today?” she asked me—the man who paid her salary.
    “It’s my house, ain’t it?”
    “Honeybell”—that was one of the nicknames she had for Regina—“wanted me to do some cleanin’ today. You bein’ here just be in my way.”
    “It is my house, ain’t it?”
    Gabby Lee harrumphed and snarled.
    I went around her to relieve myself in the bathroom. There was a dirty diaper steaming in the sink.
    The newspaper on the front porch was folded into a tube shape held by a tiny blue rubber band. I got it and started a pot of coffee in the old percolator that I bought three days after my discharge in 1945.
    Jesus kissed me good morning. He had his book bag and wore tennis shoes, jeans, and a tan short-sleeved shirt.
    “You be good today and study hard,” I said.
    He nodded ferociously and grinned like a candidate for office. Then he ran out of the door and tore down out to the street.
    He was never a great student. But since the fifth grade they put him in a special class. A class for kids with learning problems. His classmates ran a range from juvenile delinquent to mildly retarded. But his teacher, Keesha Jones, had taken a special interest in Jesus’s reading. He sat up nearly every night with a book in his bed.
    I poured myself a cup of coffee and settled down to the breakfast table intent on making some decision on what to do about Regina. Who knows, I might have gotten somewhere if it wasn’t for the headline of the
Los Angeles Examiner.
     
WOMAN MURDERED
4TH VICTIM
KILLER
STALKS SOUTHLAND
     
    Robin Garnett was last seen near a Thrifty’s drugstore near Avalon. She was talking to a man who wore a trench coat with the collar turned up and a broad-rimmed Stetson hat. The article explained how she was later found in a small shack that sat on an abandoned lot four blocks away. She was beaten and possibly raped. She had been