Black Betty by Walter Mosley Page B

part of the state I had ever visited—and came to L.A. after the violent death of a man named “Jammer” Jerry Redd. Seems Jerry was trying to force his affections on Clovis’s youngest sister—Antoinette. But he gave up that enterprise when Clovis dissuaded him with a twelve-inch pipe that she carried around in a sack. Jerry died three days later, and even though the judge called it self-defense the Redd clan wanted Clo’s scalp.
    Clovis was on a bus to Los Angeles twenty-five minutes after the verdict.
    Clovis didn’t have but sixty-five dollars to her name when she came to L.A. in 1955. She took a room on 103rd Street and got a job serving ham hocks and collard greens at a nameless diner that Mofass, my money-hungry real estate agent, and I used to frequent. Clovis was civil to us whenever we ate there but she was especially deferential to Mofass, because he was the boss—at least that was what she thought. I liked to pretend that I worked for Mofass and that he was the landlord. That way I got most of the money and none of the complaints. And people were only nice to me because they liked me. Nobody ever greased me up the way Clovis used to butter Mofass’s cornbread.
    Mofass was already sick by then. He had wasted away to a mere two hundred and thirty pounds and his breath came faster than a small dog’s. He’d finally given up cigars but the emphysema still moved through his lungs like thick glue. Even then his breath was high and musical, like the chatter from domesticated dolphins at Pacific Ocean Park.
    One day Mofass was complaining that the only home-cooked meals he got came from Clo’s table. At that time he lived in a rented room on Spruce, the opposite direction from Clo’s. But she told him that she’d be happy to drop by with a hot meal now and then.
    “Important man like you shouldn’t have to be eatin’ out no cans,” she said, bending so far down across the counter that we could see her stomach down between her breasts. “I could bring you somethin’ hot if you want it.”
    Mofass’s fast breathing picked up its pace. I thought he was going to keel over dead right then.
    They had a house together in less than three months. Before the year was out, Esquire Realty was formed and Clovis had started drumming up business all over south L.A.
    Clovis had a real flair for the real estate business. She put together a group of middle-class workingmen and started them investing in apartment buildings. She and Mofass managed the properties and then Clovis started making deals with wealthier white landowners. She told the white men that she could represent their investments better in the black neighborhoods because she had her ear close to the ground out there and because she had the trust of the tenants.
    In three years, Freedom’s Trust, which was the Negro investment group’s name, owned twelve buildings and Esquire Realty represented them all, along with another twenty buildings owned by outside whites.
    Esquire still represented me, in a limited way, but Clovis wasn’t happy about it. Even once she’d found that I owned all the property that Mofass had represented she still couldn’t shake the notion of me as a handyman.
     
     
    “WE CAIN’T MOVE on Freedom’s Plaza,” she said.
    “’Scuse me?”
    “They done put a freeze on our permit. Cain’t even put a shovel in the ground out there.”
    “What about the lawyer?” I asked.
    Clovis twisted her lips to the side in a sour kiss. “Ain’t nuthin’ he could do. They got a injunction on the whole place. City says that they wanna build a sewage treatment plant out there.” Clovis’s gaze kept going back to the papers on her desk. She was trying to give me the hint that she was too busy to spend much time discussing a foregone conclusion.
    “But they granted us a permit. If they granted us a permit then they got to honor it—right?”
    Freedom’s Trust looked like a good idea to me when Clovis started it. Everything she touched