White Butterfly by Walter Mosley Page B

in the air. “It’s just that people been talkin’ ’bout how she was here the night she was killed an’ how the man that killed her was probably here, an’ then he killed all them other girls.”
    “Caintnobodyprovethat,” she said in machine-gun talk.
    “Hey, like I said, it’s just what I heard.”
    “Listen.” She held a fat finger up to my face. “That Julie LeRoi was a tramp. She come here tryin’ t’get her rent money. Now you know she be in five places in any night an’ out on the corner if that don’t work.”
    “But I heard she was here with a boyfriend.” I snapped my fingers trying to remember something I didn’t know.
    “That boy Gregory?” she exploded. “He was her john. It’s just that another one wanted her too an’ he had more muscles, that’s all.”
    I nodded, sipped.
    “I see,” I said, very seriously. “Anyway, it’s cool now, right? Nobody’s scared.”
    “Don’t let ’em fool ya,” Charlene said and pointed down the long room. “They all scared. Scared t’death. But what could they do? Poor woman all alone needs men fo’sumpin’. Maybe it’s that night’s rent an’ maybe more, but she need sumpin’. An’ these men is hungry too. Hungry fo’drink an’ hungry fo’love.”
    I let her wisdom settle for a moment, then I said, “Well, I better be goin’.”
    When I stood up I felt the room bob a little as if I were on a ship.
    “See ya,” I said.
    “Bye, Easy.” Charlene smiled. “You take care now, baby.”
    I paid Westley on the way out. At the bar I tapped Elaine’s shoulder and gave her a rolled-up dollar bill. When she smiled in the stronger light of the bar I noticed that she was missing one of her lower front teeth. That one simple, human fact excited me more than all of Charlene’s bold talk.
    When I staggered out of the door it wasn’t only the whiskey that had me drunk.
     
     
     

— 10 —
     
     
    THE BARS AND CLUBS on and around Bone Street were many. I wouldn’t have been able to hit all of them in one night, but I didn’t have to, because I was looking for a special kind of joint. A place like Charlene’s that catered to love-starved and sex-starved men, and sometimes women. A place that offered a little more than whiskey and blues. There were just a handful of clubs that fit those needs.
    There was the Can-Can, run by Caleb Varley. At one time Caleb had a regular revue. But he had to cut back to a piano player and two sisters, Wanda and Sheila Rollet, who danced around artistically in golden glitter and glue. Then there was Pussy’s Den, a pickup bar where B-girls had a couple of drinks before heading for an apartment, an alley, or an hourly motel.
    DeCatur’s still had Dixieland musicians.
    The Yellow Dog and Mike’s were one step down on the evolutionary scale. These were bars where the criminal element hung out. Gangsters and gamblers. Men who had done hard time for every crime you could think of. But there was a place for them, there were women for them too. Mostly your larger women. The kind who could take the punishment; either physical or grief. Both of these bars had back rooms where doctors sometimes came to patch a gunshot or knife wound. Where lawyers met clients that couldn’t be seen going into an office in the daylight. And where women got on their knees for five minutes and five dollars, for a man who might not have seen a woman in five years.
    I had been out of the bar scene since I got married, so most people were happy to see me. They were happy to talk. But nobody knew a thing.
    I saw a fight in DeCatur’s. A young boy named Jasper Filagret decided to take his woman, Dorthea, off the streets. He came in blustering and he went out bleeding. Dorthea left ten minutes later with another man. She had her fingers in his pocket while he rubbed the knuckles of his right hand.
    I ran into an old acquaintance at the Yellow Dog. Roger Vaughn was his name. Roger was only five-six, but he had the shoulders of a