White Butterfly by Walter Mosley Read Free Book Online Page B

could I blame him for hating me either?
    “Easy,” John greeted me. His dark face was stony and expressionless.
    “John. Gimme a fist of little Johnnie Walker.” That meant four fingers.
    While he poured I asked him, “You hear anything about them girls gettin’ killed?”
    “I knowed all them girls, Easy. Every one.”
    I thought again of Bonita Edwards. I slugged back half of my drink.
    “All of ’em?”
    John looked me in the eye and nodded.
    “Even Robin Garnett?”
    “I don’t know nuthin’ ’bout no Robin what-have-ya but I know that white girl got her picture in the paper. That was Cyndi Starr an’ they ain’t no lyin’ ’bout that.” He looked at a stool next to me. Maybe a stool she’d once sat in. “Yeah, Cyndi—the White Butterfly.”
    “The what?”
    “That was her stage name. She was a damned stripper, man.”
    “And you say her name was Cyndi Starr?”
    “That was her name, least that’s what they called her. You know, she was just like all these other girls. It’s only these white people makin’ all that fuss. They coulda been sayin’ somethin’ ’fore she got killed.”
    “You sure, John? Paper says she went to college in West L.A. They said she lived with her parents out there.”
    “I read it. But just ’cause you read it in the paper don’t make it true. If she went t’ college she studied takin’ off her clothes fo’men to watch’er, an’ if she lived wit’er parents they lived right down here on Hollywood Row.”
    “You mean she lived down here?”
    “Uh-huh, right down on the Hollywood Row. An’ that ain’t all I know either.”
    “Yeah?”
    “That other one, that Juliette LeRoi, she was down at Aretha’s right around the night she got killed.”
    “How do you know?”
    “I know ’cause she got into a fight wit’ some boy or sumpin’. Coy Baxter told me that the boy was so messed up that he had to go to the emergency room at Temple.”
    “Aretha’s, you say?”
    John nodded again.
    I asked him a few other questions and he answered them as well as he could.
     
     
    MY CAR STARTED up with a roar. I hit the gas and felt the tug of gravity as she pulled toward the corner. I turned the steering wheel and felt the swing of the back end as I straightened out for the main drag.
    That’s when I saw the woman. She was jaywalking and pushing a baby carriage.
    I hit the brakes and felt the back end fishtail. I got a panorama of the shops and stores on the east side of the street. The car turned completely around. By the time I was facing the young mother again, she was yelling, “Motherfucker! Motherfucker! Who in hell! Fuck you!” and things like that.
    Another car behind me hit his brakes. The squeal seemed to go on forever, but it didn’t hit anything. The woman stopped screaming and gathered her baby up in her arms. She ran for the sidewalk, leaving the carriage in the middle of the street.
    My heart was beating fast. The woman was trying to calm down the hollering baby.
    I started my engine back up and drove off thinking about how my life had gone out of control.
     
     
     

— 9 —
     
     
    BONE STREET WAS LOCAL HISTORY. A crooked spine down the center of Watts’s jazz heyday, it was four long and jagged blocks. West of Central Avenue and north of 103rd Street, Bone Street was broken and desolate to look at by day, with its two-story tenementlike apartment buildings and its mangy hotels. But by night Bones, as it was called, was a center for late-night blues, and whiskey so strong that it could grow hairs on the glass it was served in. When a man said he was going to get down to the bare Bones he meant he was going to lose himself in the music and the booze and the women down there.
    The women, in the late forties and even into the early fifties, were all beautiful; young and old, in satins, silks, and furs. They came in the back-room clubs fine and sassy, and daring any man to wipe the snarl from their lips. They’d come in and listen to