No wheelbarrow track there either, but Christmas was that good too.
Inside the shed was an accumulation of items left by construction workmen, drunks, lovers, prostitutes and their johns, and inquisitive children. There were animal droppings, piles of useless tools, tarps, and metal and plastic containers of all sorts.
In one corner there was a big crate that had been piled high with all kinds of rags, metal casings, and broken furniture. This crate had been calling to me ever since I’d realized that the bumblebee was not moving.
After I’d received my investigator’s license, Saul Lynx, the Jewish PI, had given me lessons in what tools a shamus needed.
“You need things that can’t be seen as criminal,” he’d told me one day as his half-black children played around us in their View Park home. “No lock-picking tools but a long slender metal ruler with a nick on one side that happened from an accident. That will get you into most doors and cars. You should also always have a pair of cotton gloves in your back pocket. . . .”
I donned my gloves and inspected the crate.
Along an unobstructed side there were the heads of eight brand-new nails that had been recently driven home. I found an old screwdriver and pried that side of the crate away.
The corpse didn’t surprise me in the least. Neither did it bother me — much. I had seen a whole mountain of dead people in my life, most of them murdered because of their race or nationality. All the way from New Iberia, Louisiana, to Dachau I had seen them shot and hanged, blown up and lynched, gassed, burned, tortured, and starved. One more dead man couldn’t rattle me.
He was young and wore dark clothes. There was a neat little bullet hole over his left eye and a blank stare on his ant-covered face. The colony of the queen had claimed him. Thousands of the little black socialists swarmed over his pale skin and dark clothes. I was sure that he’d been relieved of anything that could identify him. But I didn’t need a name. His blond hair was cut in the military style and his shoes were black combat boots of military issue. This was a scout for the good captain and his brave men.
I reattached the side of the crate and left the funerary shed. I walked down into the nameless street and around the neighborhood.
It was still quite early.
As I wended my way back toward Centinela and my car, my mind drifted to Bonnie again. She was the love of my life, then and now. She loved another man, maybe not as much as she loved me but enough to be swayed by him.
I tried to think of some way that I could have stayed in a life with her. It was a dialogue I’d had in my head almost every day since I showed her the door. And every day I came to the same conclusion: I couldn’t bear lying there next to her with him in her mind.
Mountains of dead bodies and criminal soldiers meant nothing compared to the loss of Bonnie Shay.
8
On the drive away from Christmas Black’s pied-à-terre, his killing ground, I wondered about my new friend. He wasn’t like most black people I knew. His family had been members of the American military since before there was a United States. Many of his ancestors had lived through slavery without being slaves. For all I knew, some of them might have owned slaves. They had all studied the arts of war and violence, had passed down that knowledge in a great hand-bound book that Christmas had relinquished to his first cousin Hannibal Orr after he, Christmas, decided that the America his forebears fought for had lost its way.
Christmas and Hannibal’s family was more American than most white people’s. They had been at every important moment in America’s tumultuous attempt at creating democracy. They had been at every victory and every massacre, their heads wreathed in glory and their hands drenched with blood.
I would have gone home and looked for Hannibal to take Easter Dawn off my hands if I believed that Christmas had gone completely crazy and was on a killing spree. But Clarence Miles, and that buzzless bumblebee, told a different story. Christmas was in trouble, and I owed him.
When I was wounded by a sadistic assassin named after a Roman statesman, Christmas and Easter had nursed me back to health. They had saved my life, and even though my life wasn’t worth very much to me at that moment, a debt was still a debt.
All I had to do was wait until the next morning at nine and I could string Clarence a little further along. But the long span of hours between this morning and the next was too much for me.
Thinking about Bonnie’s departure was like staring into the sun. I needed to get my mind off her, to distract myself. Bonnie was in the seat next to me, on the street walking to some store. She was smiling at me when I got mad over some small mistake I’d made.
“Life goes on,” she’d told me at least once a week.
Not anymore.
Life had stopped for me just as surely as it had for that foolish soldier who had dared to invade Christmas Black’s personal, portable sovereignty.
THE DIN COMING from behind the pink, dented, and smudged front door was reminiscent of a riot. No, not a riot, a war. And it wasn’t just the broken wagons, splintered wood, and scorched-earth lawn, but a full-pitched battle being waged inside the home. I could have sworn that there was machine gun fire, airplanes dive-bombing, a whole army on the march behind that portal.
I pressed the doorbell and knocked loudly, but I could not imagine that anyone would hear me over the racket that emanated from that small domicile. For some reason my intelligence failed in the presence of such tumult. I didn’t know how I could make them hear me. Anyway, who would want such a ruckus to turn its attention to him?
I was ready to walk away when the front door opened. The sentry was a slack-shouldered, bone-thin brown woman with half-straightened hair. She wore a dress that had faded to such a degree that the pattern on its bluish fabric had become indistinct. The repeated images might have been fleeing birds, dying flowers, or once solid and specific forms driven to madness by the dozen leaping, screaming, fighting, and very, very ugly children that inhabited the Tarr household.
“Yes?” the poor woman whined. Her shoulders sagged so far down that she most resembled a building that was in the process of collapse.
“Mrs. Tarr?”
For some reason the sound of my voice brought complete silence to the war-torn household.
The beady-eyed brood of unsightly children peered at me as if I was to be their next target, one war over and another about to begin.
I felt the beginnings of panic in my diaphragm. There were at least two sets of unattractive twins in the litter. Not one was under two or over the age of eleven.
“Yes,” the careworn medium-brown woman said. “I’m Meredith Tarr.”
I felt sorry for her. A dozen children and a husband murdered. As low as I was, I couldn’t imagine being in Meredith’s place. Just the thought of that many hearts beating under my roof at night, looking to me for health and succor, love, was beyond my comprehension.
The silence extended into a long moment, thirteen pairs of hungry eyes boring into me.
“My name is Easy Rawlins,” I said. “I’m a private detective hired to find out what has become of your husband.”
Too many syllables for her mottled brown brood. One child screamed and the rest followed her into chaos.
“Who hired you?” she asked. Her voice was strained and tired, but still she had to yell if she wanted to be heard.
“A woman named Ginny Tooms,” I said to keep my fabrications simple. “She’s one of Raymond Alexander’s cousins and is absolutely sure that he didn’t kill Pericles.”
“No, Mr. Rawlins,” Meredith Tarr assured me. “Ray Alexander done killed Perry. I know that for a fact.”
It was hard for me to plumb the depths of this haggard woman’s heart. Maybe she was exhibiting hatred for my friend. But she was so exhausted that there was little meat left on her bone of contention.
From the chaos of children a small eight- or nine-year-old emerged. This girl, though as ugly as her brothers and sisters, had a different look about her. Her y
ellow dress was unsoiled and her hair was combed. She wore red shoes of cheap but shiny leather.
The child moved close to her mother, watching her.
There’s a bright spot in every shadow, my aunt Rinn used to say.
“What’s your name?” I yelled at the girl.
She took her mother’s hand and said, “Leafa.”
Leafa was Meredith Tarr’s little islet of light.
“I don’t know who did what,” I said to Meredith. “I don’t owe Alexander a thing. All I know is I got paid three hundred dollars to spend a week lookin’ to find your husband. If he’s dead like you say, I intend to prove it. If he’s alive —”
“He ain’t,” Meredith said, interrupting my lie.
“If he is, I will prove that too. All I need is to ask you some questions, if you don’t mind.”
My certainty set up against Meredith’s conviction that her husband was dead brought the sagging woman to tears. At first no one but Leafa and I noticed. The child hugged her mother’s thigh and I put a hand on her shoulder.
“It’s my fault,” she sobbed. “It’s my fault. I kept on complainin’ that there wasn’t enough money to feed and clothe all these kids we got. He had two jobs and got another one on weekends. He was hardly evah home, he worked so hard. And then he borrowed money from that man they named aftah a rodent.”
“Did Pericles tell you that?” I asked.
“He didn’t have to. Raymond Alexander came here to this house to give it to him,” Meredith said as if she were a preacher quoting from the Bible. “He sat in this very livin’ room.”
I looked at the couch, which six children had set up as the Alamo or Custer’s last stand. They were shooting and jumping and cutting one another’s throats.
“Ray Alexander sat there?”
“In the presence of his own chirren, Perry took the blood money from that evil man. He said he was gonna start a doughnut cart out in front of the Goodyear gate, but the man he gave his money to cheated him and he didn’t have nuthin’ to pay back his debt.”
“Raymond Alexander came to your house and handed over a loan to Pericles Tarr?” I asked, just to be sure that I heard her right.
“I swear by God,” she said, raising her left hand because her right was held by Leafa.
“What happened when Perry couldn’t pay?”
“He told me that Mouse told him that he had three weeks to come up with the money or he would have to work off the debt. For about two months he spent every night doin’ bad things for the loan shark. And then he come home one night and say that if somethin’ happened to him, he had paid for our security with his life.”
By this time all of the children had gathered around their mother, blubbering along with her. Everyone but Leafa was crying. The good child kept her calm for the whole family. In my eyes, her ugliness was transforming into beauty.
“Perry loved us, Mr. Rawlins!” Meredith wailed. “He loved his kids and this house. He haven’t called or written in eight days. I know he’s dead. And I know who killed him too.”
On cue the little Tarr tribe stopped crying, their eyes now holding a glare of hatred for their father’s killer.
“Where did he work?” I asked, straining a little from a dry throat.
“Down at Portman’s Department Store on Central. He was a salesman there.”
I nodded and tried to smile but failed. Then I thanked Meredith and turned away. The door closed behind me and I took a few steps toward the street. I was surprised when a small hand grabbed my baby finger.
It was Leafa. She pulled on my hand and I crouched down to hear what she had to say.
“My daddy’s too smart to be dead, mister. One time he was in a war and the Koreans ambushed him an’ his friends. An’ aftah that they came down to make sure that they was all dead. But my daddy took his friend’s blood and put it on his head, and when the endemy soldiers come to look at him they didn’t shoot him ’cause they thought he was already dead.”
“So you don’t think that this man Ray killed him?” I asked.
She shook her head solemnly, and I found it hard to imagine that such intelligence could be wrong.
9
I also found it hard to believe that Mouse would have sat on that ratty sofa amid the screams of all those ugly kids. Raymond didn’t have patience for more than one child at a time, and then he would be the center of attention, not the child. And Ray wasn’t a loan shark either. He might decide that he wanted his money back at any time, even before it was due, and the borrower had better beware.
Mouse was not a businessman in the conventional sense. He was a special agent, an enforcer, a boss man. Ray Alexander was a force of nature, not a bank.
But neither could I believe that Leafa’s mother was lying. She had gone to the police to accuse Mouse of a crime. There was not one in a thousand people in Watts brave or stupid enough to do something like that.
And Mouse had disappeared at the same time Pericles had gone missing. It was a real mystery; almost enough to divert me from Bonnie.
Almost.
I was all alone in a car full of phantoms. Bonnie was there next to me with Easter Dawn on her lap. Mouse and Pericles Tarr sat in the backseat, muttering about money and blood. Next to them were Christmas and a white woman swathed in a polka-dotted scarf; maybe they were making love.
Behind us was a jeep filled with armed military men, rogues.
I had to choose between Bonnie and the suicide soldiers, the ones who thought they could come up on a man like Christmas and win.
THE MAIN BRANCH of the LA library had a librarian named Gara Lemmon. She was a black woman from Illinois named for her father and educated by her mom. She was a heavy woman with big, well-defined features. Her hands were larger than mine, and her broad nose seemed to go all the way up to her forehead.
Gara liked me and my friend Jackson Blue because we were well-read and willing to talk about ideas. Sometimes the three of us would go back to her little office to argue the finer points of philosophy and politics. Jackson and Gara were better read and smarter than I was, but they also took a few nips from Jackson’s flask, so we were on pretty much even footing when the talks got heavy.
“Easy Rawlins,” Gara said when I entered the librarians’ lounge.
She was sitting in a big green chair in the cavernous sitting room.
“How’d you get in here?” Gara asked.
“Mr. Bill knows me by now,” I said. “He told me I could just come on back.”
“Jackson with you?”
“Since he got that computer job, Jackson don’t do a thing but work,” I said.
“Oh, well. I know you didn’t come here all by yourself to talk.” She put down the book she was reading and arranged her mass in the huge chair.
“What you reading?” I asked.
“The Catcher in the Rye,” she said, a little frown at the corner of her pillow lips.
“You don’t like it?”
“It’s okay. I mean, it’s good. But I just think about a little black child or Mexican kid readin’ this in school. They look at Caulfield’s life an’ think, Damn, this kid got it good. What’s he so upset about?”
I laughed. “Yeah,” I said. “So much we know that they never even think about, and so much they think about without a thought about us.”
I didn’t have to tell Gara who they and us were. We lived in a they-and-us world while they lived, to all appearances, alone.
“You got any books in here tell me who’s who in the army?” I asked, sitting down on a three-legged stool across from her.
“You know we do. I told you about the grant the government gave us to house their special publications. We got a whole locked room filled with that stuff.”
“I’m lookin’ for a General Thaddeus King and a Captain Clarence Miles.”
Gara pursed those big lips. I had met her husband. He was a small man who looked like a rooster. I couldn’t imagine him kissing that woman, but I supposed he coul
dn’t think of anything else.
“It’s a special-access stack,” she said.
“Yeah, I figured. But there’s a little girl missing her father, and this is the only way home for her.”
“Write down the names,” Gara said.
I scribbled the names on the top leaf of a pad of paper sitting on the table between her grand inquisitor’s chair and my supplicant’s stool.
“You wait here,” she said. “I’ll look ’em up.”
AT ANY OTHER TIME I would have picked a book off one of the shelving carts and started reading. I’m a reader. As a rule I love books, but not that day. The only things I was interested in then breathed and bled or cried.
I sat there trying to come up with a plan for approaching General Thaddeus King. I couldn’t get to him on a military base, and even Gara’s precise records wouldn’t have a home address. That meant I had to use the phone. I’d have to find his number somewhere and call him.
But what would I say? That I knew about the scam he and Miles were up to? An approach like that might work on a street punk but not a soldier, certainly not a general. No. A general in this army had seen combat. He’d faced death and done things that would sicken any normal man.
And who was I to say that King knew anything about Miles’s criminal activities? Maybe I should tell King about Miles and see what he’d have to say about that.
But for subtle investigation, I’d have to meet him eye to eye. He wouldn’t give up his heart over the phone like some teenage girl.
Love over the phone was the wrong avenue of conjecture. It brought Bonnie to mind, curled up in the living-room chair, talking on the phone and laughing. Her voice got very deep when she laughed. Her head tilted back, and that long brown throat offered itself to me.
That image shattered any ability I had to resist the hurt. All I could do was stare at the buff-colored wall of the librarians’ lounge. I imagined my mind as that inarticulate, meaningless flat plane. It was a kind of temporary intellectual suicide.
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