48 pages • 1 hour read
Walter MosleyDevil In A Blue Dress
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1990A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 13-18Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 13 Summary
Easy arrives at Daphne’s house around 4 AM. She welcomes him inside, and he is struck by her beauty. After Daphne asks him for a ride to her friend Richard McGee’s house, he tries to give her money for a taxi, but she convinces him to take her in his car. Daphne brings an old suitcase, which she claims belongs to Richard.
They drive across town to a canyon above Hollywood. Arriving at Richard’s house, they see that the front door is open. Going in, they find Richard dead in his bed, a knife in his chest. The sight brings back Easy’s memories of other dead people, including those killed during the war. Easy recognizes Richard as the man who offered to pay Easy for help getting into John’s place. Easy picks up a cigarette butt from the floor.
Panicked, Daphne prepares to leave in Richard’s car. Her accent vanishes, and she tells Easy to go before the police arrive. She kisses him twice, then drives away. He does the same.
Chapter 14 Summary
As Easy drives home, a voice in his head tells him to “stand up” and stop “lettin’ these people step on you” but also cautions him to wait for the right moment to act (98). Easy first noticed the voice as a soldier in World War II. At the beginning of the war, Black and white soldiers were separated, but as it dragged on, strained resources made segregation impractical. One day, when Easy found himself trapped in a barn watched by an enemy sniper, the voice told him to wait for sundown, then kill the sniper; he did so. The voice returns when Easy finds himself in difficult situations and tells him to do whatever is necessary to survive.
Chapter 15 Summary
Easy arrives home to find Manny, Shariff, and Albright waiting for him inside. Though he is upset that they broke into his home, he accepts his internal voice’s counsel to “bide [his] time” (105). Albright is angry that Easy’s lead about Frank Green failed to turn up Daphne. He argues with Easy until Easy admits that he met Daphne. Easy describes his outing with Daphne, and Albright shows particular interest in her suitcase.
Pleased at the new lead, Albright tells Easy to get him a drink. Easy tells him to get his own drink. Mildly impressed, Albright offers Easy another $100 to find Frank Green. Easy accepts.
Chapter 16 Summary
Easy sleeps most of the day and into the night. He wakes up after having nightmares about being pursued by Albright, Frank, and the police. After ruling out other people he could turn to for help, Easy calls Mouse’s estranged wife, EttaMae, and asks her to tell Mouse that Sophie was right about LA being “too much” and that the city might be a good fit for Mouse.
Chapter 17 Summary
Wanting to gather his own information about Albright and the case, Easy goes to see Maxim Baxter of Lion Investments, whose business card Albright gave him as part of a promised job offer. There, a secretary tries to turn him away until she sees the card. While she confers with Baxter, Easy notices that the name of the company’s president, Todd Carter, matches a name Daphne mentioned. When the secretary returns, she refuses to let him see Baxter until Easy says that he was hired by Albright to find Carter’s girlfriend. In his office, Baxter scolds Easy for speaking openly about his work for Carter. Easy asks to see Carter, and Baxter refuses until Easy bluffs, implying that there could be legal repercussions for the company. Baxter leads Easy to a locked elevator that leads to Carter’s office.
Over drinks, Easy tells Carter, a small, soft-spoken man, about his experience with Daphne in exchange for information about the circumstances that led to her disappearance. He learns that Carter is in love with Daphne and hopes to marry her. She left him after blackmailers tried to use her to get money from Carter, though Carter fails to say what the blackmailers know about her. When Daphne left, she took $30,000 in a suitcase, but Carter doesn’t care about the money. Instead, he asks what Daphne was wearing when Easy saw her and reminisces about his relationship with her. When Easy tells Carter about Richard’s death, Carter describes Richard as a pimp who trafficked young boys for rich men. Carter gives Easy the cash in his wallet, about $170, to keep looking for Daphne and report to him, rather than Albright.
Reflecting on his interactions with Carter, Easy recognizes a different kind of racism: Carter is so wealthy that he fails to recognize the difference between them and doesn’t even think of Easy “in human terms” (122).
Chapter 18 Summary
Hoping to find Frank, Easy visits Ricardo’s Pool Room, where criminals for hire are known to hang out. Pretending he wants to buy whiskey in bulk, he asks Rosetta, Ricardo’s wife, where he can get some. She refers him to Frank but says Frank hasn’t been around lately. To thank her, Easy loses a few games of pool to her son, Mickey. As he leaves, Easy feels happy to be “doing something on [his] own terms” instead of letting others tell him what to do (127).
Next, Easy visits a brothel run by a woman named Vernie and her daughter, Darcel. Hoping to turn the conversation to Frank, Easy asks Darcel where she buys their drinks; he learns that she buys them from someone unconnected to Frank. Easy also chats with his friend Ronald White, who is depressed at the prospect of providing food for his wife, Mary, who opposes birth control, and their nine children.
The next day, Easy visits a number of bars to which Frank supplies drinks, though he avoids mentioning Frank by name. He finds that he enjoys detective work.
Chapters 13-18 Analysis
In these chapters, Easy struggles to act independently in the midst of conflicting forces and influences. In addition to seeking the money offered him by Albright and Carter, he now develops an attraction to Daphne. His first encounter with her shows him being drawn in almost against his will: “I should have taken Odell’s advice right then and left California for good” (90), he muses as narrator. His rueful narration marks Daphne as a femme fatale, an archetypal female character who lures men into dangerous situations, as she does here, leading him to the scene of Richard’s death. The title Devil in a Blue Dress is an allusion to Shorty Long’s 1964 song, “Devil with a Blue Dress,” which describes a beautiful but dangerous woman. Daphne is presented as the eponymous “Devil,” an alluring but morally complex woman at the center of the novel’s mystery.
These external influences are pitted against Easy’s uncompromising survival instinct, which manifests as a voice in his head that first surfaced during his wartime experience. Easy’s past as a soldier in the midst of violent conflict is juxtaposed with his present life in Los Angeles, and the contrast between past and present is not as sharp as might be expected: He finds himself in desperate, life-or-death situations in LA, just as he did during the war, even as he investigates a trail of murders. Though Easy tries to suppress his feelings, he has a strong visceral reaction to violence and death, as at Richard’s home. This is in contrast to the stereotypically tough or cynical detectives in the hardboiled genre, evincing Mosley’s reshaping of generic conventions to better explore Easy as a complex character. Additionally, tensions between Black and white soldiers during the war mirror Easy’s uneasy alliance with Albright. Overall, Easy’s reliance on the voice lends continuity to these experiences and shows how such a harsh environment can pressure otherwise peaceful people like Easy to act in surprising ways.
One of those surprises comes in Chapter 17, when Easy begins to investigate the case on his own terms, going over Albright’s head to visit Carter. Within the office of Lion Investments, Easy only manages to reach Carter after skillfully managing the fears and racist views of employees at several levels of the organizational hierarchy. The office’s physical spatial arrangements, such as the private, locking elevator, are suggestive of the various levels of bureaucracy and prejudice through which Easy must pass to reach Carter. The space symbolically sets up Easy’s subsequent realization that Carter is so far removed from Easy’s experience of life that Carter effectively dehumanizes Easy.
In terms of setting, these chapters feature Easy’s home as a focal point for conflict. The pride and hope he feels at the thought of owning his home are pitted against Albright’s intrusion. Within his home, Easy stands up against Albright more than he might have elsewhere, as when he tells Albright to pour his own drinks. Only after Albright’s visit does Easy begin to feel unsafe in his own home, leading to nightmares, which in turn lead him to call in Mouse to reinforce his efforts in light of his own vulnerability.
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