Blonde Faith (24 page)

“The next time you come over we’re gonna start up right here,” she said. “Right here where we stop tonight.”

I groaned in disappointment, which made Tourmaline grin and pull harder for a moment before taking her hand from my pants.

“Go home and take a cold shower, Mr. Detective,” she said. “When you come back to me I expect somethin’ good.”

M
y heart was still beating fast half an hour later. I pulled into the parking lot of the Ariba Motel but didn’t get out of the car. I just sat there thinking about all of the motels I’d stayed in while homeless, on the run, or stalking someone. I remembered the chemical-sweet odors and the stains on graying sheets, the holes in the plaster, the moans through the walls, and the continual drone of cars going by. Televisions sounded different in a cheap motel. The voices were tinny and without resonance.

After twenty minutes I turned the ignition and drove off.

For a while I toyed with the idea of going back to Tourmaline’s garage apartment. She might have been expecting me. We were both hot after that exchange at her door. All I had to do was knock and take her in my arms. All I had to do was make love to her until the soldiers were all dead and Mouse was back in Etta’s house and until Bonnie married and became a queen.

In those days or weeks of new love with Tourmaline, Pericles would lose Pretty, and Meredith would buy a new home. Leafa would make dozens of meals for her siblings and stroke her mother’s hair. My granddaughter would grow older, and Jesus and Feather and Easter Dawn would have dreams of a life in which I was no longer a factor.

I drove to Tourmaline’s street and parked at the curb. I turned off the headlights and faded into darkness. I wanted to climb out of my seat, but entropy held me in place once again. There was no rising up for me. I was a paraplegic in a blackout after a bombing.

I would have sat behind the wheel of my car the whole night if not for a couple I saw walk by.

They were older lovers, late thirties or beyond. His gut hung out, and she had a big butt. They went arm in arm, fitting perfectly. Invisible in the darkness, I felt as if I were dreaming them.

They stopped not ten feet from me and started caressing. These two had experience with love. They weren’t delicate or tentative. The woman made sounds of deep-throated ecstasy. Their hands moved and so did their heads and torsos. If I hadn’t known what I was looking at, I’d have thought I was watching the silhouette of a predator subduing and devouring its prey.

After a few minutes they ambled on. I waited for them to get to the end of the block before I turned the ignition.

Tourmaline and I lived in completely different worlds. She was enjoying the dance of bringing a new man into her life, while I was a denizen of the old graveyard, charged with bringing the plague dead to their final rest. She wanted to dance. I was walking on a poorly marked path toward a vat of quicklime.

None of that explained why I aimed my car for Faith Laneer’s apartment. It wasn’t because I was frustrated with the place Tourmaline had brought me. I could have returned to my motel room and fallen asleep on the sheets with no problem. It might have been because Faith was a part of my cracked, melancholic world. She would understand my problems. Maybe I was going there just because I had promised I would.

It was too late to go to Mouse’s house. Whatever he did in the dead of night, he preferred to do it alone.

I wondered, as I neared Faith’s court, if I would be glued to my seat again. I took a deep breath and looked up just in time to see a car driving in the opposite direction, away from the place where Faith lived.

The car might have been some color other than gray, but we were between street lamps. When my headlights flashed on the driver, he was looking to his right, preparing to turn. He wasn’t looking at me. People don’t look at people in LA. They look at cars.

Sammy Sansoam would never know where he’d been fingered.

Sammy turned smoothly and drove east. I wondered for a moment if I should follow him; if I should run him down and shoot him in the head. I could have done it. I wanted to kill him. But I had to play the long shot.

THE LIGHTS WERE OFF, and she didn’t answer my knock. But the door wasn’t locked. I walked into the tiny home in darkness and I wanted it to stay that way. But that bumblebee from Christmas’s house was humming somewhere. I waved my hand and found the chain and pulled.

He’d left her naked and bleeding. She hadn’t been dead, not at first. Maybe she had feigned death. Maybe she’d lost consciousness when he stabbed her… again and again.

She’d crawled across the room, oozing her life into the oak floor. She was too weak to yell and so she tried for the phone. Her pale fingers were still curled in the cord. Her life gave out before she could dial.

Naked and dead, Faith Laneer was looking up at me from another, final world, where I was headed but had not yet reached. My breath was coming in short gasps, and the room was shaking ever so slightly. I knelt down next to the onetime Sister of Salvation and touched her hand. It was still warm, still supple.

That was the moment that Sammy Sansoam died.

I hated myself for not killing him back at the intersection. I knew she was dead. I knew she had no chance. The drug trafficker’s purpose in life was making sure that she couldn’t tell on him.
Tell on him.
We were like children. We hadn’t changed since we were kids hoping that the good ones wouldn’t tattle on the bad.

I went into her bedroom, trying not to think of the brief love we had had there. On her desk was a piece of paper on a green blotter. She had scribbled my name thirty or more times across that solitary sheet. Easy Rawlins, Easy Rawlins, Easy Rawlins, Easy Rawlins…

She’d experimented with different lettering and inks and pencils. I took the blotter and paper, turned off the house lights, and fled.

I
staggered out of the house and headed down toward the ocean. It was the same walk I’d taken with Faith after we’d made love. I ripped up the evidence of her schoolgirl crush and dropped it in a trash can half a mile away, then I trudged through the sand while the waves hissed and shushed.

Faith Laneer had been a heroine in a world that didn’t know it. She stood up for children and weak men and for what was right. And I mourned her.

Part of me sneered at this weakness. What difference did one dead white woman make? I’d seen thousands of dead, murdered, tortured souls. I saw the concentration camps in Europe and fought side by side with boys who died carrying America on their shoulders through Africa and Italy, France and the Fatherland. I’d choked, stabbed, beaten, shot, and drowned men in my day. I’d seen black men castrated, lynched, burned, and stomped to death, and all I could do was watch — or turn away. I’d seen the flu go through little hamlets like plague, killing children by the dozens. I’d seen car crashes that had strewn mothers and their babies across the highway. I had watched while men and women drank themselves to death, laughing and dancing all the way to the grave.

Faith’s death was no worse, not really. She’d died afraid and helpless, but most of us go that way. She was young, but she’d known love. She was beautiful, but that would have faded… probably.

The problem was that this was the last straw for me. It had started when I woke up one morning and my father told me that my mother had died in the night. And it ended here, with Faith Laneer murdered while I was dancing and kissing and sitting in my car.

The air was cold and I welcomed the discomfort. There were no lights near the water and so the night embraced me.

I wasn’t thinking clearly. I knew that but didn’t mind it.

“Life doesn’t make sense, it just make a mess of things,” Lehman Brown used to say. He lived in the room next to mine in a residence hotel in Fifth Ward, Houston, before I went off to war.

There was no right and wrong out there by the water, only my desire for revenge.

I would kill Sammy Sansoam to pay for every death that cut at me. I’d hack that shit-eating grin off his face.

“Hey, buddy,” a man hailed.

I couldn’t see him at first. I looked around, but the source of the voice eluded me. Then I saw him standing off to the right. A small white man wrapped in a blanket formed of dark and light colors.

“You lost?” he asked me.

“Yes, I am.”

“Come on over to my lean-to and we’ll talk about it,” he said.

I’d been staggering and stumbling, moving down the sand, gesturing like a tragic prince delivering his soliloquy near the end of a Shakespearean tragedy. This man was drawn to me like a white moth to a suicide Buddhist aflame on a street in Saigon.

I followed him to a place where he’d set up a huge three-sided cardboard box held in place by two public metal trash cans.

“Sit,” he said.

The box was big enough for two. The inside of his temporary home caught the roar of the ocean and amplified it. The chill sank into my shoulders and I began to shiver.

“Here you go,” the little man said. He was proffering a newly opened quart bottle of red wine.

I stared at my benefactor. His skin was worn by the sun and the wind. His eyes glittered, but in the weak light of the moon I could not tell their coloring. He was older than I or at least looked to be. The wine and weather may have wrinkled him some, added years to his organs and bones. He smiled at me, and I took the bottle and drank deeply.

I did not hesitate. I wasn’t worried about falling off the wagon after years of sober migration. I only smacked my lips and handed it back.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Jones.”

“Just Jones?”

“No. Jones,” he said with a grin.

“Easy.”

“What’s wrong, Easy?” Jones asked me.

I looked at the man again. There was something open and encouraging about his face. That added to the spreading warmth and goodwill of the wine almost tripped me. Faith Laneer’s death wanted to come out of my mouth. It wanted to beg for her life, to represent her to some higher authority. I wanted to confess to my failure to protect her.

I wanted my mother.

“How much of that wine you got, Jones?”

“Four bottles. But I need to save ’em. I’m what they call wine rich but coin poor.”

I lay on my back in the cold sand and dug a twenty-dollar bill from my pocket. I handed the currency to him and he gave me two of his bottles.

We downed my two quarts and then started on his, drinking far into the night. I spent the time avoiding what I wanted to say, what I needed to say. I talked about Raymond without mentioning his name, and Etta and Jackson and Jesus and my mother.

Jones told me that he’d never got living the straight life right.

“Oh, I could get a job all right,” he said. “Go to work a week, maybe two. But then I’d sleep in late one day, get chewed out by the boss, get drunk that night, and miss a whole day or two. Once I met this girl and went up with her to Portland. I was in love until one day I woke up and realized I didn’t know who she was. I guess I lost track of time, ’cause when I got back home there was somebody else livin’ in my apartment. I just couldn’t stay straight no matter what I did. I went to church. They sent me to a psychiatrist. She gave me these drugs.”

“Did that help?” I asked, just to stay on the ride.

“I kept a job for three months, but every day I woke up and looked in the mirror wonderin’ who it was in there.”

Jones just wanted to talk.

When we got near the end of the last bottle of wine, I could really feel it. My fingertips and lips were numb, and the sound of the waves managed, at least partially, to cover the memory of Faith’s death mask.

When a strip of orange appeared over the city, I got down on my side and closed my eyes. I can’t remember if Jones was still talking. Once he started he just kept on going, telling his whole life, skipping backward and forward. He talked about his mother in North Dakota and then his grandmother in Miami. He had a son, I seem to remember… Noah. But like everything else in Jones’s life, the boy got lost on the way to the next tale.

W
hen I woke up, the sun was bright on the box where I slept. I remembered being cold, but now I was sweating under the gaze of Sol. I sat up with the memory becoming real pain in my head.

Jones was gone. There was nothing left of him in the shelter, not even the empty wine bottles. For a moment I thought my only problem was that I’d gotten drunk for the first time in a decade. But then Faith came back to me, and her death clenched my heart. I rolled to my feet on a wave of nausea and started walking.

THERE WERE NO POLICE cars swarming around Faith Laneer’s address, not yet. They wouldn’t find her for days. By that time it would all be over.

I pointed my car for Compton and stepped on the gas.

Ten blocks away, I stopped at a gas station restroom to urinate, throw up, and wash my face. I stayed in that small blue room for a long while, letting the cold water run over my hands and thinking. I wanted out of that room, out of my thoughts. But there was no outside for me.

THE ADDRESS PERICLES TARR had given me for Mouse was on Compton. I parked right out front and tore from my car as if it were a prison and I was making a break. I stormed up to the front door, no longer worried about what Mouse would think. I needed him now. I needed him to help me kill Sammy Sansoam.

I knocked on the door loudly, muttering to myself about murder and revenge. When my knock wasn’t answered, I banged louder.

I was about to knock a third time when the door opened wide.

And there he was: the man I was looking for. Six foot four with the shoulders of a giant. He had medium brown skin, unsettling light brown eyes, and a white scar on the upper portion of his left cheek.