White Butterfly by Walter Mosley Read Free Book Online Page A

wrong with the boy’s larynx; the doctors had told me that. He could have talked if he wanted to.
    “Maybe he’ll get around to it one day,” I said, more finishing the thought in my head than talking to her.
    She smiled with perfect little pearls along her pink gums. Mrs. Keaton was small and wiry. She had the same color hair as Gabby Lee. But Mrs. Keaton’s color came out of a bottle, whereas Gabby’s had come from the genetic war white men have waged on black women for centuries.
    “You got the newspapers for the last two months, Stella?”
    “Sure do.
Times
and
Examiner.”
    She took me into a back room that had a long oak reading table. The room smelled of old newspaper. Along all the shelves were stacks of the papers I wanted.
    The papers pretty much said what Naylor told me. The articles were buried in the back pages and there was no connection made between the crimes.
    Willa Scott’s and Juliette LeRoi’s whereabouts on the nights of their deaths were unknown. Their occupations were listed as waitress. Willa though, it seemed, was unemployed.
    Bonita Edwards was in a bar the night she died. She’d had quite a few drinks and had been seen with quite a few men. But, witnesses said, she left alone. Of course, that didn’t mean anything—she could have made a date with some man who was married and didn’t want it to get around what he was doing. She could have made a date with a murderer who had the same reasons for not being seen.
    I put that information together with what I’d already read, and heard, about Robin Garnett.
    Robin Garnett didn’t make any sense at all. She lived with her parents on Hauser, way over in the western part of L.A. Her father was a prosecuting attorney for the city and her mother stayed home. Robin was a coed at UCLA. She was twenty-one and still a sophomore. She’d just recently returned from a trip to Europe, the paper said, and was expecting to major in education.
    She was a pretty girl. (Robin was the only victim to have a photograph printed.) She had sandy hair and a very nice, what old folks call a healthy, smile. Her hair was pulled back, very conservative. Her blouse was of the button-down-the-front variety, and every button was buttoned. The photo was for her parents, for a yearbook; it didn’t give the slightest hint of what she might have really been like.
    It certainly didn’t say why she was the fourth of a series of murders that started out with three black women. Even if a white woman somehow fit into this scheme of murders, why would somebody kill three good-time girls and then go after a bobby-soxer?
    I went out to the main room perplexed.
    “Did you find what you were looking for, Ezekiel?”
    “Naw.” I shook my head. “I mean, yeah… ” She frowned when I said that. I knew she wanted to correct me with “Yes.”
     
     
    JOHN MCKENZIE’S bar had grown over the years. He’d added a kitchen and eight plush booths for dinner. He even hired a short-order cook to burn steaks and boil vegetables. There was a stage for blues and jazz performances. And waitresses, three of them, serving the bar and the round tables that surrounded the stage.
    John still owned Targets but Odell Jones’ name was on the deeds. John had had too much trouble with the law to get a liquor license, so he needed a front man. Odell was ideal. He was a mild-mannered man, semiretired, two years shy of sixty, and twenty-two years older than I.
    Odell was sitting in his regular booth toward the back. He was sipping at a beer and reading the
Sentinel—
L.A.’s largest Negro publication. We hadn’t exchanged words in over three years and it still broke my heart that I had lost such a good friend. But when you’re a poor man struggling in this world you rub up against people pretty hard sometimes. And the people you hurt the most are poor sons just like yourself.
    Once I was deep in trouble and I asked Odell to lend me a hand. How was I to know that his minister would end up dead? How