Black Betty by Walter Mosley Page A

to the date on the check she had written it two and a half weeks before.
    I didn’t have to do a thing. I didn’t have any contracts with anyone. I hadn’t been convicted of any crime.
    That’s when Martin Smith came back to me. His peanut head and his big hands that seemed to have too much flesh around the fingers. If it hadn’t been for Martin and Odell I would have died when I was a boy. They had taken me into their homes and fed me when there was nothing but cold and hunger outside.
    I knew that I had to go visit Martin before he died. I
did
have to do that.
    So I decided to go see Martin—right after I took care of the things on my table.
     
     
     

— 8 —
     
     
    I AWOKE IN A COLD SWEAT. Bruno had been laid up against the butcher’s door with his eyes open. He wanted me to help him but I couldn’t; I couldn’t leave the shelter of the doorway. He was muttering my name under his ragged breath. His dying was more important than any other death I’d known. But I couldn’t go out there and face Mouse though. I couldn’t.
     
     
    I DROPPED FEATHER OFF at her school on Burnside and then headed south. I was upset about my dream and the job I had to perform in the late morning, so I decided to take care of some business first. I thought that if I could get some money I wouldn’t have to find the owner of that tooth.
    Down near Crenshaw and Santa Barbara I came to a little prefabricated building that had a large sign set up on the roof. The sign was twelve feet high and forty feet across, as if designed for a much larger building. It had a big yellow background covered with giant red letters that spelled out ESQUIRE REALTY INC.
    The inner office was no more than a room with four tan metal desks on a concrete floor. The desks were arranged in a diamond—one at the center of each wall. Renee Stewart sat at the desk that faced the front door. Her sister, Clovis MacDonald, was seated at the back of the office.
    “Can I help you?” Renee asked as if she had never met me before in her life.
    Her hair was arranged in bright gold curls and her skin was black as skin could get, but her lips and nose were strangely Caucasian. Renee was skinny and unhappy. Her red nails needed a touch-up and her dark blue dress might have given you the impression that she was naked if you saw her from afar.
    “I wanna talk to Clovis.”
    Clovis was within earshot, but Renee jumped up and said, “I’ll see if she’s available.”
    Renee had no butt to speak of, though she moved like she did. She switched-walked to Clovis’s desk and rested both hands there, indicating that if she had to do one more thing she might just pass out from exhaustion.
    “Somebody to see you,” I heard her say. She pointed behind to indicate what she meant.
    Then she came back to her own desk, sat down, and looked up at me. “You can go on in,” she said as she picked up the telephone and started to dial.
    Clovis didn’t stand to greet me. She didn’t even reach out a hand across the desk in common courtesy.
    “Mr. Rawlins,” she said.
    “Clo,” I replied. “You plannin’ t’put some walls in here?”
    “Huh?”
    “Well, you got Renee actin’ like she cain’t even see you. I figure you practicin’ for some walls.”
    Clovis didn’t have much of a sense of humor. Her life had been too hard for laughs. She was a short, stout woman whose skin was the color of burnished bronze. Her blunt face jutted out from her head, making her appear like a boxer after he’s delivered a chopping blow, expecting his foe to crumple any moment. Her eyebrows were dense and mannish. The thick shelf over her eyes was furrowed as if she were angry down into her bones.
    “What can I do for you, Mr. Rawlins?”
    “I came to see about when we can start movin’ on Freedom’s Plaza. You know my money’s gettin’ kinda low.”
    Clovis stared at me like I was a hobo instead of being a member of her investment consortium.
    She hailed from Dallas, Texas—not a