White Butterfly An Easy Rawlins Novel [Paperback]

The police don't show up on Easy Rawlins's doorstep until the third girl dies. It's Los Angeles, 1956, and it takes more than one murdered black girl before the cops get interested. Now they need Easy. As he says: I was worth a precinct full of detectives when the cops needed the word in the ghetto. But Easy turns them down. He's married now, a father -- and his detective days are over. Then a white college coed dies the same brutal death, and the cops put the heat on Easy: If he doesn't help, his best friend is headed for jail. So Easy's back, walking the midnight streets of Watts and the darker, twisted avenues of a cunning killer's mind....Chapter One

Easy Rawlins! someone called.

I turned to see Quinten Naylor twist the handle of my front gate.

Eathy, my baby, Edna, cooed as she played peacefully with her feet in her crib next to me on the front porch.

Quinten was normal in height but he was broad and powerful-looking. His hands were the size of potholders, even under the suit jacket his shoulders were round melons. Quinten was a brown man but there was a lot of red under the skin. It was almost as if he were rage-colored.

As Quinten strode across the lawn he crushed a patch of chives that I'd been growing for seven years.

The violent-colored man smiled at me. He held out his beefy paw and said, Glad I caught you in.

Uh-huh. I stepped down to meet him. I shook his hand and looked into his eyes.

When I didn't say anything there was an uncomfortable moment for the Los Angeles police sergeant. He stared up into my face wanting me to ask him why he was there. But all I wanted was for him to leave me to go back into my home with my wife and children.

Is this your baby? he asked. Quinten was from back east, he spoke like an educated white Northerner.

Yeah.

Beautiful child.

Yeah. She sure is.

She sure is, Quinten repeated. Takes after her mother, I betl32