Blonde Faith (12 page)

“I’ve been believin’ nuthin’ but that for four hundred years,” I said.

“What?”

I stood up on steady legs. I knew something more about my
employers,
and I, even though he didn’t understand me, had shared a common confusion with Tomas Hight.

The boy in the picture looked just like Hight, only smaller. His son? His brother? Him? Why not a girlfriend or parent?

“Where are you going?” he asked me.

“Down to my car.”

“I was just getting ready to go to work. I’ll walk down with you.”

I realized then that I couldn’t escape the kindness of Tomas Hight. He was going down the stairs alongside me with a hard hat under his arm because he knew that Roger and his friends might be waiting down there. He gave me his protection without a thought to race or even if I deserved it. He would have protected a malingerer on the same principle.

At my car, we shook hands.

“Be careful around Thorn,” he advised. “A couple of his friends in the MPs were killed right after he left. And it wasn’t Charlie that did it either.”

T
omas Hight stayed on my mind all the way back to the city. He’d saved a life in that hall, but not necessarily my life; it was just as likely that one or more of his acquaintances would have been shot.

I thought about his one-room apartment. I owned two houses and three apartment buildings but still felt that he had more than I did. I thought he was more heroic too, but hadn’t I been the one to stand up first against those men?

It’s strange how you can know something and still not feel it, how you can covet the assets of others though you would never think of trading places with them.

THE ADDRESS TOURMALINE had given me for Christmas Black was on a street named Gray. It was a single block in the area between the black neighborhood and downtown. There were warehouses and small wholesale businesses all over that unzoned neighborhood. The building across the street from Christmas’s house was Cairo Cane Distributors.

There wasn’t a soul anywhere to be seen.

I had waited till midmorning to go to Christmas’s door because he was not the kind of man you wanted to take unawares. Black was at least as proficient a killer as Mouse. Added to that, he was crazy and paranoid; added to that, there really were people after him.

I parked in front of Cairo Cane but didn’t get out immediately. Black’s address was another cottage. The small yard was laid with green concrete. There was an attempt at a porch, though I doubted that there was enough room for a stool on that thin band of wood.

Flowerless flowerpots hung on either side of the front door.

I watched the house for five minutes and no one passed by.

The debacle at Tomas Hight’s house had made me temporarily cautious. I didn’t want to run out into another dangerous situation, and I needed to put the words together that I would say to Christmas when and if I found him.

The minutes went by, and my confidence returned.

For a while there I had forgotten the answer to the unasked question framed by fearful caution.
Will I die?
the mortal asks from the fear shared by all his kin.
Yes, you will die,
the answer comes from the infinite experience of our race. I might get hurt, be hungry, get old, contract some fatal disease. When my children uttered these fears, I told them not to worry, that nothing was going to happen. But in my life I knew better. The only way to end fear was to stop breathing, to stop moving forward… and there I was on a street named Gray under a bright sun with no one else in sight.

THE FRONT DOOR had been broken down and put back in place hastily. This was not a good omen. I clasped my hands and prepared to back away. I swayed, but my feet stayed planted on that faux porch.

There was nowhere else to go. If I didn’t want to be a detective, I should have gone back to the LAUSD and asked them to reinstate me as a school custodian. Medical insurance, retirement program, two weeks vacation…

Gripping the doorknob with a gloved hand, I levered the half-unhinged door open. This brought me to an entry chamber. The uncharacteristic foyer was probably why Christmas had taken the place. Anyone trying to come in on him would have been stymied by the second door, and at the same time the occupant would have been warned of his attacker.

I wrenched the front door back in place and strode through a short passageway into the living room, as the second door was also broken in.

The room had no windows and so was shrouded in darkness.

That’s where I found the first body.

Actually, I stumbled on his leg as I looked for a light switch on the wall. I almost fell. Then I waved my hand above my head and found the chain for an overhead lamp. When the light snapped on, I was looking into one of Glen Thorn’s bright gray eyes. His other eye had been destroyed by the ice pick that was lodged in his brain.

I looked quickly around the small room. It had pine floors with no carpet and a pair of small brown stuffed chairs. Between the chairs stood a round table with a whiskey glass set upon it. Below the table, taking up most of the floor space, was the body that had once housed Glen Thorn. He wasn’t wearing a uniform now, just black trousers, a red-and-black checkered shirt, and tennis shoes like the kids wore.

There was a pistol in his left hand.

The only neat thing about him, I now knew, was his appearance. I’d seen his filthy house and the literature he devoured. I saluted him because he had fooled me with his appearance. Glen Thorn had taught me something, and that was worth a last good-bye.

IT WAS A SHOTGUN HOUSE with a cottage facade. I went through the next door and found another body. This was the second MP who had accompanied the man who called himself Captain Clarence Miles. This corpse had been strangled, by hand. I could make out the finger marks along his throat and neck. Whereas Glen had no real expression on his face, this man’s eyes and mouth were strained with fear. I would have been scared too if I had been looking into the murderous visage of Christmas Black while he was throttling the life from me.

This room was a kitchen, the body it contained a conundrum. How could Christmas Black, no matter how proficient he was, kill two trained soldiers in two different rooms? There was nowhere to hide in the room where Glen Thorn had died. There wasn’t enough time for Christmas to jump out of some window and come back around. And even if he had used that trick, why leave a perfectly good weapon in the eye of his first victim when there might have been another assassin in the house?

I entered the next room with mounting trepidation. I expected to see Captain Miles, or whoever he was, on the floor with an arrow in his chest.

But the small bedroom was empty. There was just a mattress on the floor and a lamp. The bed was made in flawless military style. There was a window, but it was locked and barred. I looked around for the clues but found none.

Back in the living room, I noticed that one of the legs of the round table had a folded piece of paper underneath it. The table had been rocking, no doubt, something Christmas wouldn’t have stood for.

I expected the wedge to be a take-out menu or a matchbook, but it was a brochure from Beachland Savings in Santa Monica. It promised a free electric fan to anyone who opened a checking account with one hundred dollars or more.

I pocketed the pamphlet and reimagined the murder scene. I tried my best to imagine the second MP coming into the kitchen and being overwhelmed by Black. Even a Green Beret would make some noise killing a man with his bare hands. Where was Thorn when this was happening? Why not kill the first MP with the ice pick and then take the other one out with his hands? Why not use a gun?

The only answer was that there were two men in the first room when the MPs broke in. One of those men, probably Christmas, feigned running into the kitchen while his cohort stood pressed into a corner, as I had done in Tomas Hight’s hallway. Christmas grabbed his pursuer in the kitchen, or maybe he turned and then dragged the unsuspecting MP after him. The other man, Christmas’s cohort, then blindsided Glen Thorn, who must have been concentrating on the fleeing Black. Glen got an ice pick in the eye while his friend was being strangled in the kitchen.

None of that helped me. The only lesson to be learned was to stay out of the way of this juggernaut of death. But I wasn’t a willing student that day.

ON MY WAY OUT, I looked both ways down the street and sighed, relieved that I was in Los Angeles, where there was never anyone on the street to witness anything, not even a black man coming out of a broken door behind which was more mayhem than most honest Angelenos would see in a lifetime.

S
aul Lynx often said that he thought of me as the unwilling detective. When I asked him what he meant, he said, “It’s not a profession for you. You’re out there to help people because you hate what’s happened. But really you’d rather be reading a book.”

“Wouldn’t everybody rather be rich than workin’?” I asked.

“They tell you that, but most people in a job like ours are driven to be here, peeking through keyholes and mixing with scum.”

Well, I was no longer an unwilling detective. I was voluntarily moving toward a destination even though I had no idea where or what that was.

FOR SOME TIME, Mouse had had a sidetrack girlfriend named Lynne Hua, a Chinese beauty who had appeared in various films and TV shows. She never had more than a line or two, sometimes not even that, but she was gorgeous and worked pretty steadily. She didn’t want to get married or live with anyone, so she was the perfect girlfriend for Mouse, who had the perennial problem of his temporary lovers’ wanting to displace EttaMae to become Mrs. Mouse.

Jesus’s common-law wife, Benita, had been one of these. When she wanted more of Mouse’s attention, he dropped her and she swallowed forty-seven sleeping pills. After taking her to the hospital to pump out the chemicals and restart her heart, I brought her home, where Jesus took care of her like he did all the strays I took in.

I was on my way from downtown LA to Santa Monica when I thought of Lynne. I got off the freeway at La Brea and rode north to Olympic, where Lynne lived on the third floor of a mission-style apartment building.

I had been to Lynne’s before with Ray. I’d drink a glass of club soda with them before they left for some fancy Hollywood party. Lynne couldn’t be a star, but neither did she have to worry about people in the movie business being nonplussed by her being with a black man. No one but her Chinese aunts would be concerned about her dating Ray.

The stairway was rust colored and external, leading upward in a tight spiral. When I got to her door, I stopped and wondered what I’d say if Mouse was there. He wouldn’t like it that I was trying to find him for Etta. No, that wouldn’t be the approach. I needed help because of Christmas, that’s what I would say.

Lynne answered wearing a short red silk kimono with nothing underneath. Her face was made up, and there was a martini glass in her hand. For a moment I thought I had found my wayward friend.

Her lips said, “Hi, Easy,” but the tone in her voice and the way she smiled said, “I wondered when you’d come by alone.”

“Hey, Lynne,” I said, addressing her words, and then added, “Lookin’ for Mouse” to reply to her insinuation.

“He’s not here. But why don’t you come in? I hate drinking alone.”

The centerpiece of Lynne’s apartment was her living room, a large octagonal space with a big, almost wall-size window looking toward the Hollywood Hills. There were bookcases on every wall and a perfectly round yellow sofa, eight feet in diameter, set deliciously off center.

“Watermelon juice and vodka?” she offered.

“Not drinking these days,” I said, but I sure wanted to.

“Come sit.”

She lay on the sofa enticingly, and I sat next to her, a schoolboy with an obvious itch.

“I haven’t seen Raymond in a week,” Lynne said, pouting a little.

“You know where he’s been?”

“No. He said it was serious business. That meant he didn’t want me to ask where he was going or when he was coming back.”

“Was he worried?”

“Ray never worries. He’s never scared of anything. But I know better than to fall in love with a man like that.” She was on her back, looking up into my eyes. I could see her left breast clearly, and she could see me looking.

“Has your girlfriend come back?” she asked, sitting up. Her black hair fell down around the sides of her face.

“She’s getting married.”

A combination of mischief and sadness formed itself on Lynne’s perfect face.

“I’m so sorry,” she said. “Can I do anything for you?”

She touched my left forearm with her fingertips.

“Yeah. Yeah, you could.”

“What?” she asked through a knowing smile.

“Go put on something so I don’t lose my mind and get us both killed.”

This brought about a series of changes in the actress. First her face straightened out, then she stood and nodded. As she walked from the room, I wondered if I understood anything about women… or men.

I went over to the bookshelf and pondered the titles, which were eclectic. There was a physics textbook and
Moby Dick,
books in French, Chinese, and Spanish, a guide to knitting. After seeing all the different titles and languages, I thought that the books were just a designer’s decoration, a counterbalance for the erotic charge of the room, but then I realized that they were placed in alphabetical order, by title.

While I was pondering Lynne Hua’s library, she returned. Now she was wearing a schoolgirl’s green-and-white plaid skirt and a white blouse buttoned up to her throat. She even wore black shoes and white ankle socks.

Her smile seemed to be suppressing a sneer.

She sat and I did too.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I haven’t been working, and Raymond is gone for I don’t know how long. And… and sometimes I drink too much.”