Blonde Faith er-11

by Walter Mosley

  “Perry’s my friend, man. You know that’s not how you talk about your friends.”

  “Every man and woman I talked to so far has said Perry is dead. How’s tellin’ me how I might find out why gonna hurt?”

  The walrus scratched his mustachios and pondered. Finally he shrugged and said, “Pretty Smart.”

  “What is?”

  “That’s her name. Her mama named her that.”

  “You know where she lives?”

  “I don’t even know what she looks like. All I know is that Perry would call her from my house sometimes. Maybe she come by there and took a nap with him if I wasn’t home.”

  32

  Driving away from the fish market, I had the feeling that I’d done something right. More than that, I felt good about my life . . . for a passing moment. I liked Lineman and the men and women who worked the fish trade, but I didn’t want my life to be like that: to go every day to the same place, do the same things, and say the same words to the same people.

  My dalliance with Faith Laneer had put Bonnie in a box in a corner of my mind. She wasn’t gone, but she wasn’t in plain sight either. This was, I believed, the first step out of the sadness that had enveloped me.

  I got to my office and went straight to the phone book. There was only one Pretty Smart listed in the Negro neighborhood; actually in any neighborhood.

  I leaned back in my swivel chair and took the time to breathe deeply and enjoy the leisure that the moment provided. I even considered picking up a book I’d gotten at the Aquarian Bookshop, The System of Dante’s Hell by a young writer named LeRoi Jones. It was a difficult tome, but something about the certainty of the author’s tone made me think about freedom.

  I didn’t pick up the book, but at least I thought about it. This was another milestone in my recovery. I lit a cigarette and gazed at my white ceiling. There were no faux bumblebees or even a water mark to betoken the poverty of my neighborhood. I was all right, on the road to a better tomorrow, free, or almost so, the best the scion of slaves could hope for.

  Someone knocked at my door.

  All that comfort and hope drained out at my feet. The cold reality of murder and grim retribution filled me more quickly than I could gauge the change. It was as if there had been no change at all; I had always been desperate and frightened, vengeful and ready to run.

  I patted my right pocket to make sure my gun was there.

  I went over to the far right corner away from the door and shouted, “Who is it?”

  “Colonel Timothy Bunting,” a young man said in a practiced commanding tone.

  I took a step to my left just in case the man decided to fire in the direction of my voice. All the regular questions went through my mind. Was he alone? Had he come to kill me? How many drug smugglers were there? It did not occur to me immediately to question whether he really was a military man come to see me for some valid purpose. Why would I think that? All I had met so far were victims and killers, and the killers were all in uniform — or at least once were.

  “Mr. Rawlins?” the man called.

  For a moment I considered shooting him through the door. After all, wasn’t he there to kill me? That’s when I knew that my bout with insanity was not yet over. I was prepared to murder a man I had never even seen. I had become those white men chasing me up the stairs in Bellflower — that was just not acceptable, not at all.

  I went to the door and pulled it open, the gun in my pocket and my hands not in fists.

  A natty young man in a colonel’s uniform stood there in front of me. He wore no medals and had his officer’s cap under his left arm. His face would not grow into manhood for at least another decade. He was tall, slender of shoulder in spite of exercise, and his skin was olive colored, not from the sun.

  “Mr. Rawlins?” the thirty-something officer asked.

  “Show me some ID.”

  “Excuse me, sir, don’t you see the uniform?”

  “Show me some ID now,” I said.

  “I represent the United States government, Mr. Rawlins. . . .”

  He stopped talking because I pulled out my .38 and pointed it at his left eyeball. The young officer knew enough to see when he was in a no-win situation, so he carefully took his wallet from his back pocket and opened it to show his military identification card.

  This displayed his name, rank, and photograph.

  I put the gun in my pocket and a smile on my lips.

  “Come on in, Colonel,” I said. “It’s been quite a while since a man in uniform has told me the truth.”

  I took the seat behind my desk and the young officer sat before me. We experienced a few seconds that dragged on into a minute of uncomfortable silence. I had pulled a gun on a man who was used to treating the smallest exhibition of insubordination with harsh retaliation. But here he had to swallow my defiance and continue as if nothing had happened.

  “What did you mean?” the colonel asked.

  “Come again.”

  “What did you mean when you said that men in uniform were, uh, lying to you?”

  I considered being cagey, putting out a few feelers to see how much Bunting knew. But I wasn’t in the frame of mind to tiptoe around. Bunting was either with Sansoam or against him; either way we were going to have to put our cards on the table. So I told him what I knew about Clarence Miles.

  “I’ll have this Miles looked into,” he said officiously.

  “Don’t bother, Tim,” I said. “There is no black Clarence Miles in your army, at least not no captain.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I know things that would amaze you, Tim. Just take my word on it. Clarence Miles’s real name is Sammy Sansoam.”

  Bunting knew the name. He might have been an officer, but he’d never be a cardsharp.

  “You should refer to me as Colonel, Mr. Rawlins.”

  “If you don’t like what I say, then get your ass outta here . . . Tim. I been jerked all around this city by everyone from security guards to colonels. I refuse to respect you because you don’t give a shit about me. So if you need somebody to kiss your ass, you can just move on down the hall.”

  Again the young man needed a moment to collect himself. He was a soldier, and our country was at war. I should have been falling over myself to help him — that’s what he thought.

  “Samuel Sansoam was an officer,” Bunting said at last. “We suspect him of having been involved with criminal activities in the army and even now after his discharge.”

  “What crimes?” I asked.

  “I’m not at liberty to say.”

  “Drug smuggling for a warlord in Cambodia, maybe?” I said, trying to look like an innocent.

  Bunting was injudicious in his silence. He should never have been made colonel, but he’d probably end up with five stars.

  “What other information do you have, Rawlins?” he asked in a hard-as-nails voice that he must have practiced at night.

  “Mr. Rawlins,” I said.

  This time a look of hurt went across Bunting’s face. If I could call him Tim, then why couldn’t he use my last name?

  Life is not fair. These were some of the few words of advice I had left to remind me of my father. What he meant was that a black man had to swallow his pride, his pain, and his humiliation on a daily basis when it came to dealing with white folks. It felt good to turn the tables on that adage. And I felt no remorse for doing so with the self-important boy-officer.

  “Do you have any other information . . . Mr. Rawlins?”

  “First you tell me how you got to my door.”

  “I’m not here to answer your questions, sir.”

  “You’re not here at all, son. You are a soldier and I am a civilian. I’m not answerable to you, and you hold no jurisdiction over me. So if you want to play nice, I will consider answering your questions. Otherwise we can go on playing this silly game.”

  “I’m looking for Major Christmas Black,” Bunting said. “He was once a member of our special
forces, but he left the army.”

  “And you think that he is a part of your drug smugglers’ cabal?” I could tell that Bunting didn’t understand the last word, but he covered it up pretty well.

  “No. We had a letter from a former soldier, a pharmacist named Craig Laneer. He told us that he’d been part of this smuggling ring and that he wanted to turn over the organization. Laneer was subsequently murdered. His wife, a woman named Faith Laneer, disappeared. We found out from her Vietnamese charity that she had been friends with Black. The LAPD told us that Black and a criminal named Raymond Alexander were friends and that you and this Alexander were very close.

  “I’m here to find out if you can help me find Black.”

  By the end of this explanation, I was fairly certain that Colonel Bunting was who he said he was and that he was looking for the same people I was.

  “I know Christmas,” I said. “He has a house up in Riverside.”

  “We’ve been there. He’s gone.”

  “Did the police tell you that Raymond has disappeared and is wanted for questioning in the disappearance of a man named Pericles Tarr?”

  “No.”

  “Maybe the cops want you to do their work for them,” I suggested.

  Bunting frowned, remembering something that he did not share.

  “They were right about me and Ray bein’ friends, though,” I added. “I’ve been tryin’ to run him down myself. So if you want to leave me a number or something, I’ll be glad to call you if I get a line on Christmas.”

  “You would?” He was really surprised.

  “I don’t have anything against you, Colonel,” I said. “I just need you to respect me as much as you respect the flag.”

  The soldier looked at me in a way that said this encounter would stay with him for the rest of his life. He might forget my name and the circumstances of our meeting, but the changes wrought in him would be indelible on his understanding of power, its distribution, and its use.

  He wrote down his numbers on a piece of paper that I provided.

  “It’s time,” I said.

  “Time for what?”

  “For you to get out of here and follow your nose.”

  33

  Out of habit I put the pistol into the top drawer of the desk. I had places to go, but even after the colonel was gone I did not rise from the chair. I felt tired, not sleepy but dragged down by life.

  Many a time I had visited clinics and hospitals, bedrooms in homes and apartments where dying men and women lay. They had watery eyes and wan expressions, tacky skin and nothing to say. They reclined under sweat-soaked sheets as if they’d just run a mile, but the rest never worked. They could barely whisper or lift a hand.

  I’d say Hey, Ricky or Mary or Jeness, repressing the question How you doin’? And they’d smile and mouth my name, try to remember something that we both knew well.

  “Hey, Easy,” John Van once said to me, as if he were shouting into a pillow, “you remembah that night Marciano knocked Joe Louis out?”

  I nodded ruefully.

  “I won twenty dollahs off’a you. I told ya: you don’t play a horse a’cause of its color.”

  There was a chair next to the bed and a clock somewhere in the room. There were usually children playing on the floor or in the hall. They rolled around because that’s all they knew, the only way they could bring happiness to a waiting room for death.

  I often wondered how those dying people felt when there was no one there to distract them from their passage. What did they think about when sleep came on or the sun went down? Was there a sudden fear when they nodded off or just a malaise like I experienced after talking to that fool colonel?

  I felt as if I might fall asleep, that if I fell I might not get up again. I wondered what difference it would make. After all, Oswald shot Kennedy, and hours later LBJ was being sworn in as president.

  No one was indispensable.

  Feather would go to Bonnie or Jesus, and Easter Dawn had a whole army to look after her. Frenchie would piss on my grave, and I had no close relatives except a daughter somewhere who probably didn’t even know my name. I could just close my eyes and never open them again. That would be it.

  “Don’t move a muscle!” a loud voice commanded.

  I jumped to my feet, or at least I tried to. My left foot got traction, but the right heel slipped out from under me. I dropped back down in the chair, reached for the pistol in my top drawer, grabbed it, and held it up at an awkward angle. It wasn’t until then that I saw the slovenly, overweight white man in the bad suit looking down on me.

  “You gonna shoot me with a stapler, Easy?” Sergeant Melvin Suggs of the LAPD asked.

  I used to keep a pistol in a wire mesh net underneath my desk, but as time went on I worried that I might kill someone without looking or that somebody might break into the office and steal my piece. That’s when I moved it to the top drawer with my scissors, stapler, Scotch tape, and paper clips.

  Dumb luck is better than no luck at all.

  There I sat, stapler in hand, too upset to be humiliated and too scared to put my fake weapon down.

  “What’s wrong, Easy?” the white man asked.

  “Bonnie’s marrying another man and all I can do is sit here.”

  Melvin was of middle height and a little less sure of himself every day. He’d started out with the regular white American’s arrogance and so he was still more certain than I ever would be, but his eyes were opened after the Watts riots and the horror we uncovered together.

  It wasn’t fair to call Suggs’s eyes brown. They were taupe colored, like a fawn or a forest mushroom, given to him to make up for the sloth of his life.

  He squinted and I sighed, half a mind in my office and the other still in the waiting room for the dying.

  I regretted my rash confession to the lawman.

  “I’m here about Alexander,” Suggs said, deciding to ignore my words.

  That’s why I smiled. “And how are you, Mel?”

  He pushed my client’s chair and fell back into it. I could hear the joints strain.

  “I’m okay. Met a girl, met her boyfriend, showed him my pistol, and made a small investment in the Johnnie Walker Corporation. You?”

  I smiled wider. “I forgot how many blackbirds go in a pie.”

  He smiled.

  “Alexander,” Suggs said to show me that he could stay on the scent.

  “He didn’t kill Pericles Tarr,” I said in a voice not my own. I say not my own because the tone belonged to those men that dropped napalm on Asian men wielding bamboo sticks, whose forefathers preached equality only not for women or niggers or crackers without a pot, who made decisions in their hearts without any consideration for their souls.

  Maybe it was my voice.

  “Where is he?” Suggs asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said, myself again. “I’ve looked everywhere. But listen, Mel. Mouse is not a loan shark, neither is he the kind of man who shoots and runs. We both know what he is and what he isn’t. Mouse did not kill that man.”

  “Since when did they make you a judge?”

  “The same night they ordained you and yours as executioners,” I said, wondering who spoke through me now.

  Suggs paused at that charge. He smiled again.

  “I won’t lie to you, Easy,” he said. “They want him this time, his head on a sharpened stick.”

  Suggs’s suit was tan and his shirt was either white or light green. Both were soiled, wrinkled, worn to the edge of their threads’ ability to hold on.

  “Who?” I asked him.

  “Captain Rauchford,” Suggs said, “Seventy-sixth Precinct.”

  I turned my face to the wall, taking in this information. Rauchford had rousted me a few times before I was given a PI’s license by the deputy commissioner. He was both an ugly and a prissy man. Every hair in place and the girls still shunned him; every T crossed and he was still passed over for promotion. And like all white men who couldn’t bear th
e weight of injustice visited upon them, he regurgitated his rage onto others: men like me.

  When I turned back, Suggs was rising from his chair, Benedict Arnold to the men in blue. He’d drink a whole bottle that night, hoping maybe he’d find forgiveness on the other side.

  34

  The drive over to Champion Avenue was pleasant. Suggs’s visit, though not actually restoring my faith in mankind, had at least given human nature a positive wrinkle. He wanted me to know that there was a semi-official plan in motion to murder my friend.

  Suggs was a good cop. He solved the crime. That was his downfall. Most Americans (and maybe everybody else around the world, for all I knew) didn’t look directly at the problem. If you heard shots, the first thing you did was duck and then run. After that, most people hid. Suggs’s way of hiding was to think.

  He didn’t know if Mouse was guilty, but he did know that killing a man you cannot arrest legally is wrong. He couldn’t go against Rauchford and he had no idea what Mouse or I would do, but he had to tell me.

  I spent the rest of the brief drive thinking about Colonel Bunting. In my mind I called him Bumbles. He was like so many young black men who wrapped themselves in the latest styles and thought that made them invulnerable. Bunting believed that his uniform made him superior; my brothers in the street thought it was ruffled shirts and unborn-calf-skin shoes. Manhood and childishness blended together in both Bumbles and my slave-descended kin. The only difference was that the newspapers and television agreed with Bumbles. No one laughed at a puffed-up, preening white fool in uniform.

  THE SUPREMES WERE SINGING “Baby Love,” much too loudly, behind the pink door. I pressed the buzzer repeatedly, breaking now and then to work the brass knocker.

  It was a nice house, small and set farther back on the lot than the other homes around it. The lawn was cut and well trimmed, and the rosebushes along the sidewalk were clipped and blossoming. Big flowers with red, white, and orange petals hung heavy on the thorny branches, and a profusion of violet dahlias flourished along the side of the house. The light on the lawn was so strong that I felt I might reach down and pick it up in my hands.