“What about my daughter?” he replied.
46
We parked in an unpaved open lot on the outskirts of downtown. I switched the ignition off and pulled up the parking brake, but before opening the door I turned to address my deadly passengers.
“You men need to stay here and wait,” I said.
“What for, Ease?” Mouse asked, while Christmas just stared out the window.
“The cops want you dead, Ray.”
Reading the subtle emotional changes in my best friend’s face was a lifelong study. His eyes could shift from pleasantries to murderous intent with barely a twitch. Right then a steeliness crept into his gray eyes and the corners of his mouth.
“What cops?”
“I don’t know,” I lied, hoping that Mouse couldn’t read me as well as I could him. “Suggs told me about it. They think that because you murdered Perry your career should come to an end.”
“That don’t mean I got to hide in no car.”
“Ray, hear me, man,” I said, softly and clear. “I got it covered. I know what I’m doin’. Just stay in the car and do what I say for a few days and it’ll blow over. You know Etta be mad if I let you get killed . . . again.”
It was the joke that clinched it.
On the day that JFK was assassinated, Raymond Alexander had agreed to accompany me on a minor errand. Things got out of control and Ray wound up shot, almost dead. Mama Jo brought him back to life with her Louisiana magics, and I promised myself that I would never again be the cause of his death.
“Okay, brah,” Mouse said. “I’m tired anyway.”
“I’ll be back in a minute.”
“HELLO, Jewelle speaking.”
“Hey, honey. How’s my family?” I said into the pay phone, thinking, wistfully wishing actually, that some five years before, I had married Jewelle and now I’d just be calling to say hi. That would have been a whole different life, but she’d be mine and we’d love each other and the children we’d no doubt have had. Jackson and Mofass would have been mad, but I’d be happy and Bonnie could do whatever she wanted to.
“What’s wrong, Easy?” she asked.
Maybe the desire showed up in my voice.
“It’s not easy bein’ me,” I said.
She giggled and asked, “Do you have a pen?”
I took out the yellow number two I used for notes and calculating bullet trajectories, and Jewelle rattled off an address on Crest King, a street that began and ended in Bel-Air.
“What’s this?” I asked her.
“Our place is too small for your whole family, so I decided to put them in a house I own up there.”
“You own a house in Bel-Air?”
“Yeah. One’a Jean-Paul’s friends owned it, but he needed some quick money, so I liquidated a few lots and paid him in cash. I figured that you or Mouse or Jackson would need it one day, and in the meantime I’d hold on to it ’cause you know the prices are bound to rise.”
“And what are the neighbors up there gonna think when they see a whole houseful of Mexicans, Vietnamese, and Negroes.”
“That’s no problem, Mr. Rawlins,” she said fetchingly. “You’ll see.”
CHRISTMAS WAS QUIET the rest of the ride. He was a soldier in defeat. There was no revenge or retaliation that would relieve him. He’d been crushed by the enemy after having won every battle. No condemnation could be worse; no tribunal could recommend a stiffer punishment than what he already felt.
“How you find me, Easy?” Mouse asked as we cruised down Sunset Boulevard past the strip.
“I asked Pericles nicely.”
“How you find him?”
“I told his wife that I was hired by Etta to prove you innocent,” I began. Ten minutes later we were at the address Jewelle had given me, and I was just finishing my tale.
Mouse was laughing about Jean-Paul and Pretty Smart, and Christmas languished in hell.
The address was on a big iron door in a great stone wall. You couldn’t see over the barricade except for a few trees that towered on the other side.
I had to get out of the car to press the button on the intercom system.
“ ’Allo?” Feather said with a put-on French accent.
“It’s me, baby.”
“Daddy!” she yelled. “Drive on up to the house.”
She must have activated some mechanism, because slowly the iron gate moved inward, revealing a curving asphalt road that wound through the arboretum used as a yard.
I got back in the car and drove. You couldn’t even see the house until we’d taken three turns along the way. Then we could see the place in the distance.
One man’s house is another man’s mansion, I’m told. We were all the other men in my car driving up to that place. It was four stories, constructed from blond wood and thick glass. There was a stand of bushy pines around the place and a fountain in front. The fountain was a sculpture of naked women and men dancing in a circle around a gushing spout of water that could have been coming out of a great blue whale.
“Where are we?” Christmas asked.
“Hell if I know.”
The front door to the house was red with an alternating black and yellow frame. It was ten feet high at least and twice as wide as a normal door. It flew open as we were getting out of the car, and all my family and Christmas’s family too came running toward us.
“Daddy!” shouted Feather and Easter Dawn.
After them came Jesus in swimming trunks and Benita with Essie in her arms. Between all those legs the little yellow dog came snarling and barking, the hair standing up on his back and his eyes actually glittering with hatred.
As I hugged my daughter, I took in my friends. Mouse shook hands with Jesus and congratulated him on his child. He tried to kiss Benita on the cheek, but she turned away. Christmas picked E.D. up over his head, almost threw her, and she laughed with hilarity that she had not shown in my presence.
“Daddy,” Feather said, leaning away, her fingers laced behind my neck, “I’m so sorry.”
“About what?”
“About hurting you.”
I wanted to deny it. I wanted to say to her that I could not be hurt, that I was her father and beyond the pain and tears that are so important to children. I wanted to, but I could not. Because I knew that if I tried to refute her claim, she would see the pain in my heart.
“Why don’t you show me the house, baby,” I said.
47
And this is the backyard,” Feather said with feigned nonchalance.
We had already seen what E.D. had dubbed the Big Room with its long, long table and rough-hewn, heavy oak chairs. We’d seen the library with its hundreds of books, the kitchen that had four stoves and a freestanding wood-burning oven, the roof garden, eight of the twelve bedrooms, including the master bedroom, and five or six other rooms whose purposes were not immediately apparent.
I was amazed along with my friends, but in my heart there was a war going on. I’d think of Bonnie, of walking with her from the house to the tree garden. The pain of that impossibility brought back to mind my name written thirty times by a woman who was killed as she was falling in love.
“Goddamn,” Mouse exclaimed. “Will you look at that pool? It’s like a goddamned lake.”
To accent Mouse’s claim, Jesus ran forward and jumped in, followed by Feather even though she was wearing shorts and a T-shirt. The pool led to a lawn and the lawn ended at a cliff overlooking a valley. In the distance you could see the Pacific Ocean.
I wondered what kind of deal Jewelle had made to come up with a place like that. She was always looking around, buying up lots of land on the cheap in hopes of future projects. A lot that prevented the construction of a downtown skyscraper might have been worth this hidden mansion.
Easter took Christmas to her room to show him what it looked like. Benita went to the other side of the pool to watch her lover and his sister while at the same time avoiding any contact with Raymond.
“She hates
me, huh, Easy?” Mouse said.
“Sure do.”
“Well . . . I guess she got good reason.”
We were sitting on a pink-and-gray marble bench that was anchored in the concrete. He was wearing a blue-and-purple Hawaiian shirt and white pants.
“You should go stay with Lynne Hua for a while, Ray.”
“Fuck that. Cops want me, they better be ready to lose a few’a they own.”
“Just two days, man,” I said.
“I thought you wanted me to help you kill this Sammy dude.”
“I do and you will.”
Ray grinned his friendliest and deadliest smile.
“You askin’ me this for a favor?” he said.
“Yeah.”
“You been to see Lynne?”
The question threw me, but I didn’t show it.
“Yeah. Lookin’ for you.”
“That all?”
“Ray, how long you known me, man?”
He snorted and took out a cigarette.
I got up and wandered into the California dream house, looking for a phone.
“HELLO,” she said quickly, expectantly on the first ring.
I froze. The paralysis started in my gut but traveled swiftly to my fingertips and tongue. I had every intention of speaking, of saying hello like any ordinary person would do. I wanted to say hey, but I couldn’t even breathe.
“Hello?” Bonnie Shay asked again. “Who’s there?”
One of the reasons I couldn’t speak was that my mind was ahead of my vocal cords. I was in the middle of telling her about Sammy Sansoam and poor Faith Laneer, but I had yet to open my mouth.
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.”
48
Hello,” 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.”
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