Blonde Faith (2 page)

When I came into the house the seven-pound dog began screaming and snapping at my shoes. I squatted down to say hello. This gesture of truce always made Frenchie run away.

When I looked up to watch him scamper down the hall toward Feather’s room, I saw the little Vietnamese child Easter Dawn.

“Hello, Mr. Rawlins,” the petite eight-year-old said.

“E.D. Where’d you come from, girl?” I looked around the room for her village-killing father.

“Vietnam, originally,” the cogent child replied.

“Hi, Daddy,” Feather said, coming from around the corner.

She was only eleven but seemed much older. She’d grown a foot and a half in little more than a year and she had a lean, intelligent face. Feather and Jesus spoke to each other in fluent English, French, and Spanish, which somehow made her conversation seem more sophisticated.

“Where’s Juice?” I asked, using Jesus’s nickname.

“He and Benny went to get Essie from Benny’s mom.” She hesitated a moment and then added, “I stayed home with E.D. today because I didn’t know what else to do.”

I was trying to figure it all out while standing there.

My son had agreed to stay with Feather while I was out looking for Chevette. He and Benita didn’t make much money and had only a one-room studio apartment in Venice. When they babysat they could sleep in my big bed, watch TV, and cook on a real stove.

But Jesus had a life, and Feather was supposed to be in school. Easter Dawn Black had no business in my house at all.

The child wore black cotton pants and an unadorned red silk jacket cut in an Asian style. Her long black hair was tied with an orange bow and hung down the front, over her right shoulder.

“Daddy brought me,” Easter said, answering the question in my eyes.

“Why?”

“He told me to tell you that I had to stay here for a while visiting with Feather.…”

My daughter knelt down then and hugged the smaller child from behind.

“…He said that you would know how long I had to stay. Do you?”

“You want some coffee, Daddy?” Feather asked.

My adopted daughter had a creamy brown complexion that reflected her complicated racial heritage. Staring into her generous face, I realized for the twentieth time that I could no longer predict the caprice or depth of her heart.

It was with the sadness of this growing separation that I said, “Sure, baby. Sure.”

I picked up Easter and followed Feather into the kitchen. There I sat in a dinette chair with the doll-size child on my lap.

“You been having a good time with Feather?” I asked.

Easter nodded vehemently.

“Did she make you lunch?”

“Tuna fish and sweet potato pie.”

Looking up into my eyes, Easter relaxed and leaned against my chest. I hadn’t known her and her father, Christmas Black, for long, but the confidence he had in me had influenced the child’s trust.

“So you and your daddy drove here?” I asked.

“Uh-huh.”

“And was it just you and him in the car?”

“No,” she said. “There was a lady with yellow hair.”

“What was her name?”

“Miss… something. I don’t remember.”

“And was this lady up in your house in Riverside?”

“We moved away from there,” Easter said, a little wistfully.

“Moved where?”

“Behind a big blue house across the street from the building with a real big tire on the roof.”

“A tire as big as a house?”

“Uh-huh.”

By then the coffee was beginning to percolate.

“Mr. Black dropped by this morning,” Feather said. “He asked me if Easter Dawn could stay for a while and I said okay. Was that okay, Daddy?”

Feather always called me Daddy when she didn’t want me to get angry.

“Is my daddy okay, Mr. Rawlins?” Easter Dawn asked.

“Your father is the strongest man in the world,” I told her with only the least bit of hyperbole. “Whatever he’s doin’, he’ll be just fine. I’m sure he’s gonna call me and tell me what’s going on before the night is through.”

FEATHER MADE HOT CHOCOLATE for her and E.D. We sat around the dinette table like adults having an afternoon visit. Feather talked about what she’d learned concerning American history, and little Easter Dawn listened as if she were a student in class. When we’d visited enough to make Easter feel at home, I suggested that they go in the backyard to play.

I CALLED SAUL LYNX, the man who had introduced me to Easter’s father, but his answering service told me that my fellow private detective was out of town for a few weeks. I could have called his home, but if he was on a case he wouldn’t have known anything about Christmas.

“ALEXANDER RESIDENCE,” a white man answered on the first ring of my next call.

“Peter?”

“Mr. Rawlins. How are you, sir?”

The transformation of Peter Rhone from salesman to personal manservant to EttaMae Harris would always be astonishing to me. He lost the love of his life in the Watts riots, a lovely young black woman named Nola Payne, and pretty much gave up on the white race. He moved onto the side porch of EttaMae’s house and did chores for her and her husband, Raymond “Mouse” Alexander.

Rhone worked part-time as a mechanic for my old friend Primo in a garage in East LA. He was learning a trade and contributing to the general pot for the upkeep of Etta’s home. Peter was paying penance for the death of Nola Payne because in some way he saw himself as the cause of her demise.

“Okay,” I said. “All right. How’s the garage workin’ out?”

“I’m cleaning spark plugs now. Pretty soon Jorge is going to show me how to work with an automatic transmission.”

“Huh,” I grunted. “Raymond around there?”

“I better get Etta for you,” he said, and I knew there was a problem.

“Easy?” Etta said into the phone a moment later.

“Yeah, babe.”

“I need your help.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, because I loved Etta as a friend and I had once loved her as I did Bonnie. If she hadn’t been mad for my best friend, we’d’ve had a whole house full of children by that time.

“The police lookin’ for Raymond,” she said.

“For what?” I asked.

“Murder.”

“Murder?”

“Some fool name’a Pericles Tarr went missin’, an’ the cops here ev’ry day askin’ me what I know about it. If it wasn’t for Pete I think they might’a drug me off to jail just for bein’ married to Ray.”

None of this was a surprise to me. Raymond lived a life of crime. The diminutive killer was connected to a whole network of heist men that operated from coast to coast, and maybe beyond that. But for all that, I couldn’t imagine him involved in a petty murder. It wasn’t that Mouse had somehow moved beyond killing; just the opposite was true. But in recent years his blood had cooled, and he rarely lost his temper. If he was to kill somebody nowadays, it would have been in the dead of night, with no witnesses or clues left behind to incriminate him.

“Where is Mouse?” I asked.

“That’s what I need to find out,” Etta said. “He went missin’ the day before this Tarr man did. Now he ain’t around and the law’s all ovah me.”

“So you want me to find him?” I asked, regretting that I had called.

“Yes.”

“What do I do then?”

“I’m worried, Easy,” Etta said. “These cops is serious. They want my baby under the jailhouse.”

I hadn’t heard Etta call Ray
my baby
in many years.

“All right,” I said. “I’ll find him and I’ll do what I have to to make sure he’s okay.”

“I know this ain’t for free, Easy,” Etta told me. “I’m’a pay you for it.”

“Uh-huh. You know anything about this Tarr?”

“Not too much. He’s married and got a whole house full’a chirren.”

“Where does he live?”

“On Sixty-third Street.” She recited the address, and I wrote it down, thinking that I had found more trouble in one day than most men come across in a decade.

I had called Mouse because he and Christmas Black were friends. I had hoped to find help, not give it. But when you live a life among desperate men and women, any door you open might have
Pandora
written all over the other side.

I
hadn’t imbibed any alcohol whatsoever in years. But since Bonnie left I thought about sour mash whiskey every day. I was sitting in the living room in front of a dark TV, thinking about drinking, when the phone rang.

Another symptom of my loneliness was that my heart thrilled with fear every time someone called or knocked on the door. I knew it wasn’t her. I knew it, but still I worried about what I could say.

“Hello?”

“Mr. Rawlins?” a girl asked.

“Yes.”

“Is something wrong? You sound funny.”

“Who is this?”

“Chevette.”

It hadn’t been a full day since I’d almost murdered a man over the woman-child, and already I had to reach for her in my memory.

“Hi. Something wrong? Is pig man botherin’ you?”

“No,” she said. “My daddy told me that I should call and say thank you. I would have anyway, though. He says that we gonna move to Philadelphia to live with my uncle. He says that way we can have a new start back there.”

“That sounds like a great idea,” I said with poorly manufactured enthusiasm.

Chevette sighed.

I got lost in that sigh.

Chevette saw me as her savior. First I took her away from her pimp and then I allowed her to see her father in a way he could never show himself.

I got lost trying to imagine how I could see myself as that child saw me: a hero filled with power and certainty. I would have given anything to be the man she had called.

“If you have any problems, just tell me,” that man said to Chevette.

The front door swung open, and Jesus came in with Benita Flagg and Essie.

“Okay, Mr. Rawlins,” Chevette said. “My daddy wanna say hi.”

I waved at my little broken family.

“Mr. Rawlins?”

“Yeah, Martel. She sounds good.”

“I’m movin’ us all out to Pennsylvania,” he said. “Brother says there’s good work at the train yards out there.”

“That sounds great. Chevette could use a new start; maybe you and your wife could too.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Martel said, treading water.

“Is there something else?” I asked.

Essie started crying then.

“You, um, you said that, uh, that the three hundred dollars was for the week you was gonna spend lookin’ for Chevy.”

“Yeah?” I said with the question in my voice, but I knew what was coming next.

“Well, it only took a day, not even that.”

“So?”

“I figure that’s about fifty dollars a day, excludin’ Sunday,” Martel argued. “You could get another job to make up the difference.”

“Is Chevette still there?” I asked.

“Yeh. Why?”

“I tell you what, Martel. I’ll give you two hundred and fifty dollars if Chevy could come spend the next five days with me.”

“Say what?”

I hung up then. Martel couldn’t help it. He was a workingman and had the logic of the paycheck wedged in his soul. I’d saved his daughter from a life of prostitution, but that didn’t mean I’d earned his three hundred dollars. He’d go to his grave feeling that he’d been cheated by me.

“Hey, boy,” I said, rising to meet my son.

“Dad.”

He hugged me and I kissed his forehead. Benita got in on it, kissing my cheek while Essie wailed in her arms.

I took the baby in my hands and heaved her around in a circle. She looked at my face in wonder, reached up to my scratchy cheek, and then smiled.

For a moment I felt nothing but love for that infant. She had Benita’s medium-brown skin and Juice’s straight black hair. There wasn’t one drop of my blood in her veins, but she was my granddaughter. It was because of my love for her that I had been ready to kill Porky.

Looking at her trusting face, I thought of the child that my first wife took away with her to Texas. That shadow of loss brought on the memory of Bonnie, and I handed Essie back to her mother.

“Are you okay, Mr. Rawlins?” Benny asked me.

Hadn’t she just asked me that? No.

“Fine, baby.”

“You need us tonight, Dad?” Jesus asked. He knew that I was hurting and so tried to save me from Benita’s concern. He was always saving me — ever since I first brought him home from the streets.

“No. I found who I was looking for. But you guys could stay anyway. I’ll sleep in your room, Juice.”

Jesus knew that I wanted him to stay, to keep my house filled with movement and sound. He nodded ever so slightly and looked into my eyes.

I couldn’t tell what he was thinking. Maybe it was that he could watch TV or sleep in a big bed. But the way I felt then, I was sure that he could see right through me. That he knew I was way off course, lost in my own home, my own skin.

“Juice!” Feather and Easter Dawn shouted.

They ran in to hug the boy who took them on boat rides and taught them how to catch crabs in a net. All the commotion caused Essie to cry again, and Benita brought out her bottle.

I drifted into the kitchen and started dinner. Before long I had three pots and the oven going. Fried chicken with leftover macaroni and cheese, and cauliflower with a white sauce spiced by Tabasco. Easter and Feather joined me after a while and made a Bisquick peach crisp under my supervision.

The whole dinner took forty-seven minutes from start to the table. While the pastry cooled on the sink, Feather and Easter Dawn helped me serve the meal.

Dinner was boisterous. Every now and then Easter got a little sad, but Jesus sat next to her and told her little jokes that made her grin.

EVERYONE BUT ME was in bed by nine.

I sat in front of the dark TV, thinking about whiskey and how good it once tasted.

After a while I forced myself to consider the Vietnamese child who had been taken from her war-torn homeland, whose parents (and all their relatives and everyone they knew) had been murdered by the man who had adopted her — Christmas Black.

The professional soldier’s patriotism had soured when he realized what America’s war had cost him. He was a killer on a par with Mouse. But Christmas was also a man of honor. This made him more dangerous and unpredictable than the homicidal friend of my youth.