The song was coming to an end, and I was just beginning to understand how powerful my emotions were. The idea that I could hold sunlight in my hands sent a shiver through my bones. I might have come to some deep revelation had it not been for the sudden silence.
I pressed the buzzer and pounded on the door at the same time.
The next song didn’t come. Instead a woman asked in an insulted tone, “Somebody there?”
“Easy Rawlins, ma’am,” I said to the pink door.
The sunlight was behind me now, but the insanity still thrummed at my forehead. Sex and murder felt like possibilities. Given the chance, I would have taken Prometheus’s fire and laid waste to the California coastline from San Diego all the way to Mount Shasta.
But then the door opened.
She wore red. You could have called it a dress, but it was much more like a wrapper. Her figure could not have been more obvious if she were naked and oiled. The medium-brown face and thighs, arms, and neck were ignited by eyes dark enough to be called black. Pretty Smart was short, built to populate the countryside, and lovely in a way that Christians interpreted as sin.
All that I saw she could see in me.
My attention dawdled on her sandals. They were black, with red ribbon straps between the second and third toes of each foot. The ribbons then ascended, twining sinuously around her ankles to hold the shoes in place.
“Yes?” she asked, not nearly so put off by my arrival as she had been before opening the door.
“Those are wonderful sandals,” I said.
Pretty had big lips to begin with, but when she smiled they seemed to swell.
I thought again about the sunlight. It seemed to me that Pretty’s tawdry and ethereal beauty was like that: touchable and untouchable, an artifact wedged in my mind like hunger and fear.
“I got ’em on sale at Gump’s in Frisco,” she said. “What’s your name again?”
“Easy Rawlins.”
“Do I know you, Easy Rawlins?” It was a suggestion as well as a question.
“No. But you know a friend of mine.”
“Your friend send you here?” she speculated.
“No man in his right mind would send another man to you, Miss Smart.”
Her teeth were white and, I noticed, her nails were long, healthy, and clean.
“What man, then?”
“Mouse.”
The woman-child’s terra-cotta face froze as if it were really made of ceramic. She had to think, to wonder what danger I posed. Her power meant nothing next to Mouse’s threat.
“Is that a man’s name?” she asked lamely.
I smiled and shook my head slowly. “There are ten thousand men of every race and age in this city alone,” I said, “who would leave their wives after just seeing your photograph. You know that and I do too.”
The young woman frowned, trying to resist the compliments she craved.
“And,” I continued, “you also know Raymond Alexander just as well.”
“Oh . . . Ray . . . Yes, I know Ray Alexander. I don’t have no nickname for him, though.”
I smiled again.
“What do you want, Mr. Rawlins?”
Her voice had turned cold.
“I’m looking for Ray, and a man I met sent me here to you.”
“What man?”
“It doesn’t matter what man, honey,” I said. “What matters is that he told me that Ray been seen with a man named Pericles Tarr and that Pericles and you were close.”
It’s always a sadness to see a beautiful woman’s eyes turn sour while gazing at you. Even though I wanted to see what she felt, I still lamented the lost opportunity . . . at least a little.
“You’ll have to excuse me, Mr. Rawlins,” she said. “I got to go.”
She backed away from the door, preparing to close it.
“Miss Smart.”
“What?”
“Do you know where Raymond is?”
She closed the door and I allowed myself a chuckle.
I went to the sidewalk and strolled all the way to the corner, where I turned to the left and waited for three minutes. If Pretty had watched me go, she would have returned to the house by then.
“Mister?” a voice asked.
I turned to see an older black man wearing clothes that were once colorful but now had devolved into browns and sad, tinted grays.
“Yeah?”
“Can you help a veteran out?” he asked me.
“What war?”
“The big one back in nineteen sixteen.”
“You kill anybody back then?” I asked him, I don’t know why.
He grinned at me and I noticed he only had three teeth; each one looked as strong and brown as an old oak stump.
A giant cockroach ran a jagged line on the sidewalk between us. The store behind him was closed and boarded up.
I took a twenty-dollar bill from my wallet and gave it to the man. When he saw the denomination, he was shocked.
“Thank you, mister,” he said with emphasis.
“No problem at all, brother,” I said.
He held out a dirty hand, and I shook it. This contact had a cleansing effect upon me.
“I’m’onna take this money and try and do sumpin’ with it, my friend,” the old man said. “I’m’a try and get myself situated, get a job and put down the wine.”
He was looking me in the eye and I knew he meant every word. What difference would it make if he failed? We all failed in the end.
35
I left the veteran and went back to my car down the street from Perry Tarr’s girlfriend’s house. For the first five minutes, I sat there trying to figure out how I could read and watch her driveway at the same time. It was a problem I always thought about when on a stakeout. But the answer was ever the same: I could not read and watch at the same time. Whenever I came to this understanding, it left me feeling a little sour.
I sat there in my resentful contemplation, hoping that someone would come to or leave the pretty girl’s house soon. Unable to distract myself with reading and not wanting to hear any more music, I started thinking about the woman I’d just met.
Pretty Smart was not Bonnie or Faith or EttaMae Harris. She wasn’t the kind of woman that could move me to put my life on the line. But, I thought, wouldn’t life be better with a woman like Pretty? Wouldn’t it be fine to be with a woman who made your blood run like a teenager’s but who didn’t make you feel like you might die when she was gone?
This line of thinking was an appealing distraction. The idea of beauty without consequence and love that was purely physical allowed my heart a brief span of elation. I didn’t imagine making love with her. It was enough just to have a brief conversation and to see her smile.
While I was having these thoughts, a navy blue Volkswagen backed out of Pretty’s driveway. She was an excellent driver. She backed into the street in a tight arc and drove past my car on some mission that my visit no doubt precipitated. I turned my head as she drove past, but it probably wasn’t necessary. Nobody looks at faces in Los Angeles. In LA people are too busy making hay because the sun never seems to go down.
I COULD HAVE TRIED to follow the dark blue automobile, but in my experience a vehicular tail rarely works. Traffic lights turn against you; bad, sloppy, and drunk drivers cut you off; and even though people don’t look at faces in LA, they certainly keep a sharp eye on their rearview mirrors. You need at least two cars for an adequate tail. With one man, you’re much better off trying B and E while the subject is off in her car.
I knocked at her door again. There was no loud music and no answer.
I went around the back. The windows were all shut. The white paint on the back door was cracking and growing a thin veneer of olive-hued lichen. The blades of grass were long and bright. A bushy pine hid the backyard from view. All of this along with the silence boded well for my kind of business. But the best sign was that Pretty Smart’s back door was unlocked and ajar. If I were dealing with Chris
tmas Black, I would have suspected a trap, but I knew that Miss Smart paid too much attention to her own beauty to be distracted by locks and burglars. After all, her wealth was her beauty, and she carried it around with her.
The back porch was fitted with a washer and dryer, but the kitchen that led from there didn’t even have a pot to warm her leftover takeout meals. The tiny living room was furnished with a very large white sofa that had deep cushions and a high back. There were a dozen or more pillows of various pastel hues on the couch. Before the bed-size divan sat a big walnut coffee table that supported a pink portable TV and a brand-new hi-fi system. The carpet was white shag. Three huge abstract paintings hung from as many walls. The furnishings and decorations were made for a much larger room. It felt as if a giant had moved his furnishings into a room made for a pygmy.
Pretty’s bedroom was surprisingly spartan. A single bed with a metal filing cabinet instead of a dresser or chest of drawers. There were shelves in her closet that held her hose and bras, garters and silk panties. There were five dresses hanging from a rod; three of these still had price tags on them.
The filing cabinet had three deep drawers and a Polaroid camera sitting on top. The back door had not been locked, but the filing cabinet was. I found a screwdriver under the sink in the bathroom and twisted the keyhole until the lock snapped off.
There were seven hanging files in the top drawer, the first of which was labeled MEN. Inside this folder was an eight-by-eleven photo album, maybe forty pages long. Each page held six Polaroids of men’s erections. Black men, white men, men who were neither black nor white. Some were young, others old, a few were so fat that they had to hold their bellies up off their hard cocks. More than a couple were slick and wet, and one was in the middle of an ejaculation.
It was no surprise that Pretty had locked her files away. I wondered how she got the men to pose for her. Probably she said that she wanted to remember their manhood, their night of loving.
“If you’re not here, I wanna remembah you inside me,” she might have said.
The other files kept her finances, her modeling résumé, her secretarial résumé, her high school transcripts, her date calendar, and, finally, her phone diary.
Perry Tarr’s home address and phone number had been crossed out and replaced with a new address on Ogden between Eighteenth Street and Airdrome.
I wrote the address on a blank piece of paper that I carried around in my wallet for just that purpose. After that I snapped off the next two locks on the filing cabinet and rummaged around her jewelry, cash cache, checkbook, bankbooks, and savings bonds. I took the cash, about one hundred and eighty dollars, her checkbook, and two rings that looked to be valuable. Then I took the erection album and put it on her bed, gaping open.
I did all that to make it seem as if I were some teenage burglar instead of a man on the trail of Perry Tarr. She might still guess at the identity of her robber, but that was all I could do after breaking the lock on the first drawer.
I was about to leave when I noticed the one girly part of her austere sleeping quarters. It was a pink princess phone on the floor next to the head of her bed.
I should have left, but instead I picked up the receiver and dialed a number.
“Marvel’s Used Cars,” she said.
“Can we have dinner tonight?”
“Easy?”
“Uh-huh.”
“I can’t tonight, Easy,” Tourmaline said. “I have a date. Maybe this weekend?”
“That would be just as good,” I said, thinking my tone was light and airy.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“Nothing. Why? Do I sound like something’s wrong?”
“You sound like it looks when a girl is turning her head away.”
“A girl?”
“Where are you right now, Easy Rawlins?” Tourmaline Goss asked.
It was a crack in the dam, a fissure I felt all the way down to my childhood. Tourmaline was that perpetual Black Woman and I was the forever child. Her tone paralyzed me there on the party girl’s military-style bed. I could see the bushy pine out Pretty’s small window. For all I knew, Pretty had gone to the pharmacy to get aspirin for the headache I had given her. She might have been on the way back at that very moment.
“I just broke into this house,” I said. “Somebody said that a friend’a mine killed somebody, but I knew this woman could prove that the man who’s supposed to be dead is still alive. . . .”
For the next hour and a half I told Tourmaline most of the important moments of my life. I told her about Mouse, whom she’d heard about, and Jackson and Etta and Bonnie. I told her all that I had been through up to the moment I threw Bonnie out of my house. I didn’t mention any killings or murders outside the one Mouse was blamed for. That would have been unfair to an innocent university student.
Tourmaline listened to me patiently even though she was at work. People interrupted her now and then, but she always got back on the line and said, “Go on.”
I had hoped the confession would relieve me, but instead it brought on a sense of emptiness. Laying my life out like that made me see that I had wasted my potential on misguided pride and rage at strangers.
“I should go,” I said at last, “before the young woman comes home.”
“What time are you going to pick me up?” Tourmaline asked.
36
I had planned to leave when I got off the phone with Tourmaline, but after all that confessing I didn’t have the strength to stand up. She had wanted to hear about me, my life. Most of the men she’d met had been either silent or braggarts. It was rare for her to hear a man talk about his life the way he felt about it. But I hadn’t been completely honest. What I had said was true, but what I had done was fool my heart into believing that I was talking to Bonnie, confessing to Bonnie, working my way back into her heart.
The lie didn’t hurt Tourmaline, but it tore me up. Everything I thought I had accomplished in the past days faded, and I was once again at odds with myself.
It was very quiet in the unadorned bedroom. When the phone jangled I leaped from the bed. It rang ten times. At the start of each ring I decided to leave the house, but by the time the interval of silence returned I had lost my resolve.
I was afraid to leave Pretty Smart’s crazy, shallow home. Her life was so simple and straightforward. It was almost as if she were living in a movie set rather than a real home. There was solace in that simplicity.
There was danger outside.
I picked up the hunched pink receiver and dialed another number.
“Proxy Nine,” a woman answered.
“Jackson Blue,” I said.
“And your name is?”
“Ezekiel Porterhouse Rawlins.”
“What company do you represent, Mr. Rawlins?”
“No company. I’m a one-man operation.”
“And what is the purpose of your call?”
“Purpose? I want to speak to my friend.”
“Does he know you?”
The woman wasn’t stupid, I knew that. What I was experiencing was just another example of the world changing while I sat sulking in place.
“Very well,” I said. “We’ve been friends since before the war.”
“Oh.”
I could almost hear her trying to think of some other way to more closely identify me before passing the call on to Jackson. It was her job to protect the uppity-ups at Proxy Nine, the French insurer of international insurance companies and banks, and Jackson was as uppity as you could get. He was the vice president in charge of data processing.
“One moment, please,” the operator said.
There was a series of clicks and then a ring.
“Jackson Blue’s office,” another woman said.
“Easy Rawlins for him.”
“What company do you represent, Mr. Rawlins?”
It was at that moment that Jackson changed in my mind. He had two secretaries protecting him from outside calls. From now
on our relationship would be at the whim of his largesse. Somehow the cowardly genius had managed to circumvent the machinations of racism. He had more power and access, protection and esteem, than most white men.
“Hello,” he said into my ear.
“Hey, Jackson,” I said. “I need to come by.”
“Kinda busy, blood,” he said with barely a stammer.
“Listen, Jackson. I’m sittin’ here on a bed in a woman’s house. I broke in here and now I’m afraid to leave. It’s like if I went outside there’d be an ambush just waiting.”
This was not a continuation of my confessional with Tourmaline. Jackson and I had had one foot on the criminal side of things since we were kids. Admitting to a break-in was no big thing. And fear was Jackson’s native tongue.
“Okay, brah,” he said. “All right. Come on by.”
Jackson’s words were like an incantation that served to break the spell Pretty Smart’s house had cast over me. I walked out the front door, closing it carefully as I left. I walked to my car and headed for the Proxy Nine building downtown.
THE OFFICERS OF THE COMPANY were all on the thirty-first floor. I remembered that because Jackson had called me when he found out where his desk would be situated.
“I asked ’em t’change it, Ease,” he told me at Cox Bar on a Sunday afternoon, “but they said that I gotta be there ’cause Jean-Paul wants me close at hand.”
“Jean-Paul?”
“Jean-Paul Villard. He’s the president’a the company,” Jackson said, as if he were talking about a distant cousin rather than the master of a multibillion-dollar operation. “So I’m thinkin’ I should quit.”
“Quit? Why you gonna quit over somethin’ like that?”
“Thirty-one, man,” he screeched. “Thirty-one. That’s thirteen backwards.”
It took me and Jewelle and Jewelle’s minister to keep Jackson from resigning. It was amazing to me. Jackson was the only man I knew personally who understood Einstein’s theory of relativity, and he was still more superstitious than a room full of four-year-olds.
AFTER THREE PHONE CALLS and four receptionists, I finally got to Jackson’s oaken door. The woman who brought me there had a French accent, brown hair, and a parsley-colored dress that clung tightly to her Jayne Mansfield–like figure. She tapped on the door, listened for something, heard a sound that I did not hear, and then stuck her head in.
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