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.
21
Saul 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.”
I had all the information I needed from her, but I couldn’t just walk out after making
her get dressed.
“You haven’t been working?” I asked.
“I’ve been waiting for a job to start.”
“What’s that?”
The hidden sneer receded.
“There’s a new TV show called My Dad the Bachelor that’s supposed to air in the fall. I have a recurring role.”
“What is it?”
“You’re a funny man, Mr. Rawlins. I a Chinee girl speakee funny, lookee like ugly duck next to beautiful white swan.” She mimed the last part for me, and I smiled in condolence.
“Oh.”
“They pay okay,” she said. “The bachelor dad has a Chinese houseboy who takes care of the kids. The houseboy, Ralph, has a girlfriend who’s always yelling at him and cursing in Chinese. That’s all she does. He tells her something and then she screams. Once every three weeks I’ll go in to do that and they’ll pay my rent.”
“But why would they make a woman as beautiful as you into an ugly woman?” I asked.
“You think I’m ugly,” she said.
“You know that’s not true, girl. You look so good to me I have to cross my legs to keep decent. It’s just that Ray’s my friend and, as you said, he’s serious.”
The smile she showed at the hint of death was everything I needed to know about Lynne Hua.
“Blow jobs,” she said.
“Say what?”
“I give great blow jobs. There’s one guy casts for commercials, acts like he’s my agent because he knows that if I get a job he does too.”
She was trying to shock me and succeeding. It’s not that I was surprised what a man would do to get a woman down on her knees in front of him, but I was amazed that she would admit it so blithely.
“Have I scandalized you, Mr. Rawlins?”
“No . . . I mean, yes.”
“You don’t think a woman has to do these things to get by?”
“Oh, no, yes, yes, of course they do. It’s not that,” I said. “It’s you telling me about it.”
“You think I should tell Raymond what I do to get work?”
“No. I’m just wondering why tell me?”
“I have to tell somebody.” Her face was completely straight and honest looking. The words she spoke, I was sure, were the absolute truth.
“But why me?”
“Because,” Lynne said, “Raymond says that you are the most trustworthy man he has ever known. He says that you can tell Easy anything. He says that it’s like dropping a killing gun in the deepest part of the ocean.”
Watermelon juice and vodka were the prescription for her moments alone. I had just happened along when she was under the sway of her medicine.
“That’s why I wanted to make love to you,” she said.
“Because why?”
“I thought afterward I could tell you what I did and you would forgive me and I would keep our secret. But I didn’t even have to do that, did I?”
I held out a hand to her, and she wrapped her arms around me. We stood there a moment in that embrace. I kissed the top of her head and squeezed her shoulder.
When we let go, I asked, “How would you go about finding Mouse if you had to, Lynne?”
“Mama Jo.”
Of course.
22
Leaving Lynne’s neighborhood, I took Olympic down to Santa Monica. On the way I tried to resolve the differences between people like the Chinese actress and Tomas Hight. Lynne lived an exciting life that was split between black gangsters and glittering Hollywood parties. She was well educated, I believed, and bright as a cloudless day in the Palm Springs desert. Tomas, on the other hand, didn’t have much — maybe didn’t understand very much. All he had was a job working construction and one room to live in. The difference was that Tomas could be president of the United States one day, and all Lynne could hope for would be to give the president a blow job.
This reality had nothing to do with my being black, Negro, or colored, bearing the inheritance of slavery. Lynne came from a culture that remembered itself all the way back before America’s colonizers could even speculate.
While having these idle thoughts, I was driving past palm trees, coral trees, eucalyptus trees . . . a whole arboretum of trees of every species. That was Los Angeles too. We were a desert with all the water we needed, a breeding ground for the contradiction of nature. Any seed or insect or lizard or mammal that found itself in LA had to believe that there was a chance to thrive. Living in Southern California was like waking up in a children’s book titled Would Be If I Could Be.
But the desert was waiting for all of us. One day the water would stop flowing, and then the masters of that land would reclaim their domain.
I PARKED ON Lincoln Boulevard a block north of Olympic. Strolling a block east brought me to Beachland Savings. The building was shaped like a slice of pie, crust side out, placed on the corner. The front was a wide arc of glass revealing the comings and goings of everyday people tending their checking accounts and Christmas clubs.
I walked in happy about the fact that I would not be likely to find a dead military man in that building, happy just to be moving forward.
I was still in my gray suit, still looking presentable, but this was Santa Monica, and all the business in that bank was being conducted by white people. In 1964, I would have been an anomaly walking in there, obviously far from home, looking around at the faces of employees and customers alike. But in 1967, two years after the Watts riots, I was no longer a mere abnormality but a threat.
“Excuse me, sir,” a uniformed guard said as he walked up to me.
“Yes?”
“Can I help you?”
He was shorter than I, red faced and pale eyed. There was a stolid certainty in his stare. His body was telling me that I couldn’t move forward before answering his question, so I considered the different routes to my goal.
After a moment went by, I asked: “You still got them new fans in here? It’s hotter than a oven down at my place. My girlfriend wants me to get a air conditioner, but you know it’s not just what the unit cost but all that electricity it suck down.”
“You have to start a checking account with a hundred-dollar minimum in order to get a fan.”
I took out one of my two remaining hundred-dollar bills and held it out to him as if he were an usher who needed to read my ticket in order to guide me to my seat.
He almost reached for the bill, but then he remembered who he was and where we were. Resentment replaced the indifference in his gaze. His nostrils flared a bit. He waited as long as he could and then gestured to the left, where an old lady and a man in a checkered suit were sitting on a long marble bench.
“You’re third in line,” the guard said, as if reminding me of my place in the grand design of things.
I thanked him with a smile and an exaggerated nod, then went to sit, where the lady and the man ignored me.
Across from us was a paper-thin, waist-high, red-stained pine wall. Beyond this wall two bank officers manned twin oaken desks; a bird-boned man who wore thick-lensed, green-rimmed glasses side by side with a vivacious Hollywood blonde who might have been playing a loan officer on a movie screen.
Both bankers were in earnest conversation with the men sitting before them. I watched the dramas unfold. The bank officer with the green glasses was processing a new account, but he acted as if it were all very official. He checked identification and studied the information his client, a long-haired man in cutoffs and a T-shirt, had written on his form.
The other officer had a sorry look on her face. The businessman she was speaking to had asked for a loan and was in the process of being denied. He was aggressive, kept pointing at her and at other parts of the bank. She made a gesture of helplessness and managed to frown and smile at the same time.
I was taken by her empathy for this rude customer. I could hear his angry voice though not the words. He was arguing with her authority, but she didn’t take offense.
I guess I was staring at her when she began to notic
e me.
At first it was just a glance, but after a while she was completely distracted. No one else would have noticed. She was still patient with the businessman, she still sat posed and perfect for the camera. But I caught her trying to see me.
This wasn’t an unusual situation for me to be in. I often made white women upset by noticing them. Sometimes I could see them concocting responses to the raw pickup lines they knew I would utter if I got the chance. I thought I had her figured out, but then the woman looked up and right at me, deeply into my eyes. There was frank interest in me, my being there, and I understood what was going on.
She turned her head to the businessman and said something blunt. She was no longer smiling, no longer understanding. The man moved his head as if he had been slapped. He sat up straight while deciding how to respond. There was a momentary face-off, but then the man stood and walked through the red-stained pine gate and left the bank, consciously avoiding eye contact with anyone else.
I watched him leave, noticing that the blue suit he wore was threadbare and that his shoes were so old they had almost completely molded to the shape of his feet.
“Sir?”
The blond officer was standing over me. She had one of those figures that made you look away in modesty. Just her close proximity made my hands hot.
“We were first,” the man in the checkered suit said. He had a mustache and a tic in his right eyelid. I hadn’t looked at his face before, so I didn’t know if the tic was due to the bank officer’s coming up to me or not.
“We’ll be with you as soon as we can,” the curvaceous officer said. And then to me, “Come with me, sir.”
I took the place of the down-at-heel businessman, noticing the officer’s nameplate — FAITH MOREL.
“Thank you, Miss Morel,” I said, “but that gentleman was before me.”
“Mr. Treeman comes in every other day to argue about the rounding of the decimal on his interest,” she said in a pleasant, unhurried voice. “We tell him that it is bank policy to round point five and below down a penny, but he wants to argue. If his time is that worthless to him, he might as well wait till last.
Blonde Faith er-11 Page 10
