Blonde Faith (27 page)

My heart throbbed rather than beat. It seemed to make a sound, a high-pitched chatter that reminded me of a winter’s day in southern Louisiana five weeks after my mother had died.

It was after one of those rare Louisiana snowstorms in the early morning. A quarter inch of the fine powder covered the ground. A daddy longlegs spider was hobbling back and forth on a broad plain of white. As a child, I figured that he was probably looking for the summer again, that he thought he was lost and that there was solid ground and warm earth somewhere… if he could only find it.

My heart was that spider way back then.

“Easy?” Bonnie said softly.

I hung up.

JESUS WAS WAITING for me outside the library. He had a keen sense about my feelings and a belief that he was the only one who could save me from myself.

“Jewelle told me to tell you that we could stay here as long as we wanted, Dad.”

“That’s good,” I said. “I need you up here for a while.”

“Did you talk to Bonnie?”

I looked at my son, proud of his talents and his gentle ways.

“No,” I said. “Uh-uh. I was about to make a call to the police about somethin’, but then I thought that maybe it wasn’t such a good idea.”

WHEN CHRISTMAS told Easter Dawn that it was time to go, she broke down crying. She didn’t want to leave her new room or her sister, Feather. I told the disgraced soldier that we had the house for as long as we wanted and that I’d like him to stay around to make sure that my family and his were safe.

“You don’t have a house now anyway, do ya?” I asked him.

“No,” he said, his head bowed down.

“Then stay, man. I got E.D. enrolled in a school. She needs other kids. She needs a life.”

The sour twist of Black’s lips was the taste of bile and blood, I’m sure. He was thinking about breaking my neck. I knew this from my own impression and also because Mouse raised his head to regard us.

Easter Dawn was all that Christmas had left. He wanted to take her and crawl into a hole somewhere to heal. And there I was, the first-ever impediment between him and his daughter. My life, my home, my children called to her. Christmas wanted to silence that song.

But he was a good man beneath all the insanity. He loved his daughter and wanted what was right for her. In the car he had dismissed me as a subordinate, but that was over now. I was an equal in an unfair world.

AFTER A FEW long good-byes I drove Ray to Lynne Hua’s apartment. He slapped my shoulder and winked at me before getting out.

“You got to take it easy, Easy,” he told me. “You gettin’ all worked up, man. I mean, I got people out there plannin’ to kill me an’ I ain’t as upset as you.”

“I got it covered, Ray. Just a few more steps and I’m home free.”

I STOPPED ON LA BREA in the early evening, went into a phone booth, and dropped two nickels. I dialed a number I knew by heart and wrapped a handkerchief around the mouthpiece.

“Seventy-sixth Street Precinct,” a woman told me.

“Captain Rauchford,” I said in a deep voice with a growl inside it.

Without reply, she plugged me into the switchboard. A phone rang one time before a man answered, “Rauchford.”

“I hear you lookin’ for Ray Alexander.”

“Who is this?”

“Don’t you worry about who this is, just listen up,” I said in a voice I heard in my mind sometimes. “Mouse outta town right now, but he be back with his boys in a day or two.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know yet, but I will know because that mothahfuckah fuckin’ my woman,” I said with real feeling, too much feeling. “She gonna run to him the minute he’s in town.”

“Tell me your name,” the white man commanded.

“My name ain’t got nuthin’ to do with it.”

“This call has been traced. I know where you live.”

Just about then an ambulance raced by, its siren crying.

“I’ll call you tomorrow, late morning or noon, and give you the knowledge.”

H
ello,” Jewelle said, answering her home phone.

“Hey, honey.”

“Oh, hi, Easy. How’d you like the house?”

“House? Oh, you mean Buckingham Palace?”

Jewelle giggled. “It’s nice, huh?”

“Yeah, it’s nice. I won’t even ask you how you got it.”

“You and your family can stay there as long as you want, Easy.”

“You don’t have to do all that, baby. A month or so do us fine.”

“A month, a year, five years,” she said. “As long as you want it.”

I realized then why Jewelle and I could never have been lovers. The majority of our relationship was a dialogue that occurred between the lines. She was thanking me for helping her when she was in trouble and in love, for not judging her when she fell for Jackson but stayed with Mofass. Jewelle and I were like the symbiotic creatures I sometimes read about in nature magazines, like the hippopotamus and the birds that picked its teeth, or the ants that herded aphids in the South American rain forest. We were not the same species, but our fates were entwined all the way down to the instinct.

“That house over on Hooper and Sixty-fourth still vacant?” I asked.

“Uh-huh. Why?”

“You gonna build there, right?”

“Lot’s so big they tell me we could put in sixteen units. Why?”

“I’ll talk to you later, baby. Shout at Jackson for me, will ya?”

Jewelle didn’t question me any more than a heron questions the wind.

I hung up the phone and turned on the motel TV. The Million-Dollar Movie was playing on channel nine. That night they were featuring
The Seventh Seal.
At first I just had it on, but after a few minutes the stark black-and-white film entranced me. Death walked as a man among men, and we fell like leaves, like dust, around him. The Knight struggled against the Specter, each one winning even as he lost. I was deeply moved by the severe performances and the truths they told. When the film was over, I realized that I had a sour taste in my mouth. This reminded me that I had fallen off the wagon not twenty-four hours before. But I didn’t want a drink; I didn’t need one. I laughed to myself: all those years I’d avoided alcohol when I could have used moderation.

I was a fool.

IN THE MORNING I shaved, showered, and ironed my clothes before dressing. Across the street on Centinela there was a coffee shop that served freshly made doughnuts. I drank and smoked, read the paper, and flirted with the young waitress from seven to nine.

Her name was Belinda and she was nineteen years old.

“So what you do for a livin’, Mr. Rawlins?” she asked after half an hour of my asking questions about her life.

“Just about what you see me doin’ right now,” I said.

Belinda had a big butt and a plain face, but when she smiled I couldn’t help but join her.

“You mean you drink coffee for a livin’? Sign me up for that job.”

“I’m a detective,” I said, handing her my business card. “Most of my investigations have me sitting in restaurants, cars, and motel rooms, watchin’ people and tryin’ to hear through walls.”

“You the only one in here, Mr. Rawlins,” Belinda said to me. “Everybody else jes’ buy they coffee and go on. Are you investigatin’ me?”

“I sure am lookin’ at you,” I said. “And you look good too. But right now I’m doin’ the biggest job that a detective has.”

“What’s that?” she asked, leaning across the counter, peering into my eyes.

“Waiting for all the pieces to fall into place.”

“What pieces?”

“On a chessboard, they call ’em men.”

It was an innocuous enough statement, but Belinda caught the hint of evil that it gave off. She frowned a moment but did not move away. The trouble I represented was just what she was looking for. Her mouth opened ever so slightly, saying without words that she was willing to jump over that counter and run off with me, that even though I was an old man, I had the leisure to sit with her and the goodwill to tell her that she was lovely. It doesn’t take much when you’re nineteen and it doesn’t take long. The trouble is that it doesn’t last long either.

“Why don’t you write down your phone number for me, girl?”

“Why I wanna do that?” she said, not wanting to seem easy.

“You don’t want it,” I said. “I do. You must have every young man in the neighborhood ringin’ your bell. I just like talkin’ to you.”

Her brows knitted as she tried to find some insult or trap in my words. When nothing came to mind, she shrugged and wrote her number on the back of my check and handed it to me.

“You can pay for the coffee some other time,” she said, and the balance of power between us shifted. I had been flirting before, but now she had a hold on me. I wanted to call her, to see her, to show her the valley behind my Bel-Air home.

Our fingers touched as she handed me the check. I took her hand and kissed those fingers twice.

I left with no intention of ever speaking to Belinda again.

I
drove down to the Sears, Roebuck and Company department store in East LA and bought a high-powered CO2 BB gun with three cartridges and a tube full of 6 mm shot. Then I drove down to Hooper and Sixty-fourth Street. Toward the corner of Sixty-fourth was a house that had gone vacant after the riots. It was a very small house on a huge lot. Maybe that’s why the windows weren’t broken, because you’d have to stand out in plain sight to lob a rock through the panes.

It had once been a bright yellow home, but the paint had worn away to gray mostly. There were only patches of color here and there. The lawn was both overgrown and dead.

There was a padlock on the front door. I pried that off and went inside. The house was empty, stripped bare. There wasn’t a stick of furniture or any carpeting, not one painting or even any lightbulbs. No one had been living there for some time.

The backyard was just as dead and empty as the front. There had been a garage in the far corner of the property, but it had collapsed on itself and was now just a jagged pile of timbers.

It was the perfect domicile for my purposes.

Across the street was another abandoned structure. This was a three-story tenement that had been condemned by the city. The opposite of the house I’d just visited, this building took up the whole lot. Behind it I found a dark concrete lane that led to an alley.

After all that research, I parked my car in the alley, made my way to the back door of the tenement, broke in, and climbed up to the tar-paper roof. It was dirty up there, littered with beer cans and empty condom foils. This was a nighttime recreation area for girls who shared a bedroom in their parents’ houses and young newlyweds off with their spouses’ friends because they realized too late that they had made a mistake.

I went to the front ledge of the building that looked down upon Jewelle’s real-estate investment. There I assembled my air gun and loaded in a CO2 cartridge. I shot a tin vent with a large lead bead. The concussion knocked the metal cylinder out of its moorings.

I put the air gun back in its case, pulled up the tar paper at the ledge, and placed the case underneath, there to wait for things to fall into place.

HALF A BLOCK AWAY, I stopped at a phone booth. I had three dimes in my pocket and I promised myself that before the day was done, I would have dropped them all.

I dialed the first number from a card in my wallet.

“Hello,” a man’s voice answered.

Curses rose to my lips, but I kept them down. Spite and hate and rage bubbled in my gut, but my voice was even. I wanted to use that calm tone to tell him what he was, but instead I said, “Colonel?”

“Who is this?”

“Easy Rawlins.”

“Mr. Rawlins. What can I do for you?”

“Colonel, I wasn’t completely honest with you when we met at my office.”

“No? What else do you know?”

“I, uh, I met with a woman named Laneer. She was married to Craig Laneer.”

“Yes?”

“Faith gave me a copy of the letter you say that Craig sent to you, only this letter here gives the proof that Sammy Sansoam and them were smuggling drugs.”

The silence on Bunting’s side of the line was delicious.

“I need to see that letter, Mr. Rawlins.”

“Oh, yeah,” I said. “I know you do.”

“Can you bring it to me?”

“No. No, sir. I’m scared. I’ve been tryin’ to call Faith, but she doesn’t answer. You know I think somethin’ might’a happened to her.”

“I need that information, Mr. Rawlins.”

“I could send it to you,” I said.

“No. Bring it to me today. We have to move on this quickly. There’s no time to wait for the post office.”

It was my turn to be silent.

“Mr. Rawlins,” Bunting said.

“Is there some kinda reward for this if I give it to you?”

“If the letter leads to an indictment, we can pay maybe five hundred,” he said.

“Dollars?”

“Yeah.”

“I know this house over near Sixty-fourth and Hooper.” I gave him the address while checking my watch for the time. It was 11:17 in the morning. “Meet me there at four. I can get there by then.”

He made sure of the address and then told me to be there or he’d have the police put out a warrant for my arrest.

“I’ll be there,” I said. “I sure will.”

I went back to my roof perch after that. While waiting, I thought about Bonnie in a distant, almost nostalgic way. So much had happened that I could hardly feel the broken heart. Bonnie would have understood what I was doing. She didn’t believe in sitting still when a crime had been committed. In some ways she was like Christmas.

At 12:11, Sammy Sansoam and Timothy Bunting pulled up in front of the abandoned house. Sammy slipped through the gate and went around the back while Tim loitered on the sidewalk for a minute or two. Then the colonel, or ex-colonel or whatever he was, wandered toward the front door. By the time he’d gotten there, Sammy appeared. They looked around and then disappeared into the house.