Blonde Faith er-11

by Walter Mosley

  Her brows knitted as she tried to find some insult or trap in my words. When nothing came to mind, she shrugged and wrote her number on the back of my check and handed it to me.

  “You can pay for the coffee some other time,” she said, and the balance of power between us shifted. I had been flirting before, but now she had a hold on me. I wanted to call her, to see her, to show her the valley behind my Bel-Air home.

  Our fingers touched as she handed me the check. I took her hand and kissed those fingers twice.

  I left with no intention of ever speaking to Belinda again.

  49

  I drove down to the Sears, Roebuck and Company department store in East LA and bought a high-powered CO2 BB gun with three cartridges and a tube full of 6 mm shot. Then I drove down to Hooper and Sixty-fourth Street. Toward the corner of Sixty-fourth was a house that had gone vacant after the riots. It was a very small house on a huge lot. Maybe that’s why the windows weren’t broken, because you’d have to stand out in plain sight to lob a rock through the panes.

  It had once been a bright yellow home, but the paint had worn away to gray mostly. There were only patches of color here and there. The lawn was both overgrown and dead.

  There was a padlock on the front door. I pried that off and went inside. The house was empty, stripped bare. There wasn’t a stick of furniture or any carpeting, not one painting or even any lightbulbs. No one had been living there for some time.

  The backyard was just as dead and empty as the front. There had been a garage in the far corner of the property, but it had collapsed on itself and was now just a jagged pile of timbers.

  It was the perfect domicile for my purposes.

  Across the street was another abandoned structure. This was a three-story tenement that had been condemned by the city. The opposite of the house I’d just visited, this building took up the whole lot. Behind it I found a dark concrete lane that led to an alley.

  After all that research, I parked my car in the alley, made my way to the back door of the tenement, broke in, and climbed up to the tar-paper roof. It was dirty up there, littered with beer cans and empty condom foils. This was a nighttime recreation area for girls who shared a bedroom in their parents’ houses and young newlyweds off with their spouses’ friends because they realized too late that they had made a mistake.

  I went to the front ledge of the building that looked down upon Jewelle’s real-estate investment. There I assembled my air gun and loaded in a CO2 cartridge. I shot a tin vent with a large lead bead. The concussion knocked the metal cylinder out of its moorings.

  I put the air gun back in its case, pulled up the tar paper at the ledge, and placed the case underneath, there to wait for things to fall into place.

  HALF A BLOCK AWAY, I stopped at a phone booth. I had three dimes in my pocket and I promised myself that before the day was done, I would have dropped them all.

  I dialed the first number from a card in my wallet.

  “Hello,” a man’s voice answered.

  Curses rose to my lips, but I kept them down. Spite and hate and rage bubbled in my gut, but my voice was even. I wanted to use that calm tone to tell him what he was, but instead I said, “Colonel?”

  “Who is this?”

  “Easy Rawlins.”

  “Mr. Rawlins. What can I do for you?”

  “Colonel, I wasn’t completely honest with you when we met at my office.”

  “No? What else do you know?”

  “I, uh, I met with a woman named Laneer. She was married to Craig Laneer.”

  “Yes?”

  “Faith gave me a copy of the letter you say that Craig sent to you, only this letter here gives the proof that Sammy Sansoam and them were smuggling drugs.”

  The silence on Bunting’s side of the line was delicious.

  “I need to see that letter, Mr. Rawlins.”

  “Oh, yeah,” I said. “I know you do.”

  “Can you bring it to me?”

  “No. No, sir. I’m scared. I’ve been tryin’ to call Faith, but she doesn’t answer. You know I think somethin’ might’a happened to her.”

  “I need that information, Mr. Rawlins.”

  “I could send it to you,” I said.

  “No. Bring it to me today. We have to move on this quickly. There’s no time to wait for the post office.”

  It was my turn to be silent.

  “Mr. Rawlins,” Bunting said.

  “Is there some kinda reward for this if I give it to you?”

  “If the letter leads to an indictment, we can pay maybe five hundred,” he said.

  “Dollars?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I know this house over near Sixty-fourth and Hooper.” I gave him the address while checking my watch for the time. It was 11:17 in the morning. “Meet me there at four. I can get there by then.”

  He made sure of the address and then told me to be there or he’d have the police put out a warrant for my arrest.

  “I’ll be there,” I said. “I sure will.”

  I went back to my roof perch after that. While waiting, I thought about Bonnie in a distant, almost nostalgic way. So much had happened that I could hardly feel the broken heart. Bonnie would have understood what I was doing. She didn’t believe in sitting still when a crime had been committed. In some ways she was like Christmas.

  At 12:11, Sammy Sansoam and Timothy Bunting pulled up in front of the abandoned house. Sammy slipped through the gate and went around the back while Tim loitered on the sidewalk for a minute or two. Then the colonel, or ex-colonel or whatever he was, wandered toward the front door. By the time he’d gotten there, Sammy appeared. They looked around and then disappeared into the house.

  “MELVIN SUGGS.” He answered on the first ring.

  “Hey.”

  “Easy? What you got for me?”

  “I got it on very good sources that somebody saw Pericles Tarr in the flesh. He’s holed up with a girl named Pretty Smart.”

  “Where?”

  “CAPTAIN RAUCHFORD.”

  “He here. Right ovah there on Hooper an’ Sixty-four,” a deep voice from somewhere inside me rumbled. “It’s the little house on the big empty lot. They’s six of ’em in there. I heard my girlfriend talkin’ to ’em on the line.”

  “Who is this?” Rauchford asked, and I hung up the phone in his ear.

  THE BIGGEST MISTAKES run smooth and sure. The German army cut through Russia like a hot bayonet into a vat of butter. But they drowned in their own oily excrement.

  I was having these thoughts when the first of the police cars arrived out there in front of Jewelle’s investment. Twenty cops deployed themselves while I aimed my gun. A crowd of bystanders was forming, but none of them were in the line of fire.

  I pulled the trigger. The silent shot fired over the heads of the police. I had been a marksman during the war. I was sure that I’d hit the windowpane. I shot again and again, but nothing happened.

  Captain Rauchford was preparing to use a megaphone to warn Mouse and his cohorts. The policemen had their rifles at the ready.

  I fired again, and the front window of the small house shattered.

  That was all Rauchford’s men needed. They opened fire. The bystanders reacted quickly, men ducking low and women screaming. Smoke began to rise from the phalanx of executioners. Children froze, watching while the policemen fired their weapons. They kept on shooting until the walls looked like a colander, until those same walls caved in and the roof collapsed, until the gas main was struck and flames leaped up from the ruins.

  For five minutes, the policemen fired and reloaded, fired and reloaded again.

  After Rauchford gave the cease-fire, I walked on my belly to the trapdoor and carried my air gun down the stairs and through the dark pathway to my car. I drove away without looking back. I wasn’t happy for the deaths I’d conjured, but I wasn’t feeling sad either.

  When I got to my motel room, I called Lynne Hua’s apartment.

  “Hello.
”

  “It’s Easy, Lynne.”

  “What happened?”

  “Nothing, why?”

  “Your voice,” she said. “You sound like a dead man.”

  “Let me talk to Mouse.”

  “Hey, Ease,” Mouse said a moment later. “You wanna go take care’a that business now?”

  “You already did,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Somebody told the cops you were at a house on Sixty-fourth. They findin’ out right now that it was those soldiers instead. Turn on the news. You’ll see.”

  50

  After murdering two men I went up to the farmers’ market on Third and Fairfax and bought a basket of extrafancy strawberries and got three bottles of champagne and a pint of cognac from Stallion Liquors on Pico. I wasn’t feeling a thing, nor was I worried, anxious, or guilt ridden. I knew what I had done, but the reality was like a dream to me.

  I went to my house on Genesee after shopping and made a phone call.

  “Hello,” Tourmaline Goss answered.

  “Can I take you to dinner tonight?”

  WE ATE AT A LITTLE French place on Pico near Robertson, where they called chicken poulet and bread pain. Tourmaline had my full attention.

  “Were you really burgling a woman’s house when you were on the phone with me?” she asked.

  This reminded me of Belinda, of how some women were drawn to danger.

  “Yeah,” I said. “But I don’t think she’ll mind.”

  “Why not?”

  I told her about Jean-Paul Villard and how I had come upon Pericles Tarr looking for Mouse, and how the police were searching for Mouse when they attacked the house down in South Central.

  “That was the man they were looking for in that shoot-out today?” she asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “You mean the police shot up that place lookin’ for somebody who wasn’t even there? They killed two innocent men, veterans, when they just heard that he was in a house down in South Central?”

  “Yeah,” I said, the surprise in my voice half real.

  “Yes,” Tourmaline said angrily. “Cops shoot up a house, kill two innocent men, but it’s all okay because it’s a colored neighborhood, and one of the men was black, so the other one shouldn’t have been there anyway.”

  “CAN I COME in awhile?” I asked as I pulled up the handle on the parking brake.

  Her smile was demure, the assent implied.

  I took the iced champagne and box of fruit from under a blanket in the backseat and followed her. When we arrived at her door, she put out a hand behind her and I reached out to take that hand.

  I popped a cork and poured our champagne into jelly-jar glasses.

  “I thought you didn’t drink?” she asked after our fourth or fifth toast and kiss.

  “I didn’t back then.”

  “Back then? It was just a couple’a days ago.”

  “For you, maybe.”

  My hands felt as if they were made for her breasts, my lips and tongue for her sex.

  “I want you to do everything to me,” she said when she was naked on my lap and I was still fully dressed.

  I did everything I knew how, and when I was unsure, she showed me and guided me and called out to gods who were murdered on slave ships long before our parents’ parents’ parents were born.

  I couldn’t stop myself. Sex came from me like blood from a wound. The champagne stoked the fires while Tourmaline stroked my heart. I was on top of her on the couch, listening to Otis Redding and making love like a movie star. I could feel a halo around my head while looking deeply into her eyes.

  “Don’t stop, baby,” she whispered. “Don’t ever stop.”

  That was the moment that decided everything for the rest of my life.

  I had been with Tourmaline completely. I was only with her, only wanted her, was ready to marry her and make a new family. There was nothing outside of that room.

  But when she looked up at me, asking me to keep on going, I knew in my heart that I could not. It was as if I had inside me a glass ampoule that held the soul apart and separate from my body. Her words made me clench, and the glass shattered like the window in Jewelle’s house. I made that same sound I had with Feather, and I rose up both erect and flaccid.

  “Easy?” Toumaline said.

  I wanted to answer her, but I could not.

  I had gone out that evening dressed to the nines. I had worn my dark green suit, spit-polished black leather shoes, a yellow shirt, and a burgundy, blue, and green tie made from an antique kimono.

  I left out of her front door in only pants and a T-shirt. I wasn’t even wearing socks or shoes.

  Tourmaline called after me, but I stalked off like Frankenstein’s monster.

  “Easy. Easy Rawlins,” she cried.

  But I didn’t even recognize my name.

  AT ROYAL CREST AND OLYMPIC, I stopped at a phone booth and dialed. The phone rang a dozen times, and finally she answered.

  “Hello?”

  “Can I come over for a minute?”

  No was hovering in the air as she considered.

  “Where are you?”

  “Around the corner.”

  HER HOUSE was only half a block from the phone booth, but I drove there, right up into her driveway. She was at the door, as beautiful as ever, her dark blue nightgown more like royal robes.

  “Where are your shoes, Easy?”

  “Lost them on my way here.”

  “Have you been drinking,” she asked after pecking my lips with hers.

  “Joguye here?”

  “No. He’s in Paris. There was a coup. His parents were killed. He’s in exile working to overthrow the junta.”

  “Oh.”

  “Come in, Easy. Come in.”

  The living room was filled with African art of all kinds: paintings, sculptures, textiles, and even furniture. The colors were dark or bright, not synthetic pastel America at all. We sat on a wooden couch that had two long feather-filled pillows for cushions.

  “It’s been a long time,” Bonnie said.

  “It feels like forever.”

  “Why are you here, Easy?” she asked.

  I began talking.

  I started with Chevette Johnson and how I had almost murdered her porcine pimp. I told her about Mouse and Jackson and Jean-Paul. I told her about making love to Faith and then finding her dead, about the murders I’d committed using the police as my weapon. I told her about Tourmaline.

  I didn’t leave anything out. Somewhere along the way she took my hands in hers. She was there with me, feeling me.

  “I know I was wrong,” I said. “I know what happened happened and that you didn’t mean to hurt me like I did you. I been a child and a fool and I ask you to forgive me.”

  Tears welled in Bonnie’s eyes as she nodded, granting me clemency.

  “I love you, Bonnie.”

  “I love you too, Easy.”

  “When I tell you all this stuff been happening, that’s just the husk, the skin a snake shucks off. But inside, you have been on my mind every minute. When I went up to the house in Bel-Air, I thought about you. When I found that dead man bunged up in a box, I turned away and thought about you. I’m not jealous anymore and I’m not proud. But please, baby, please . . . come back to me.”

  Bonnie stared into me, seeing more than anyone, after my mother, ever had. She smiled and looked down and then up again with resolve.

  “It’s too late,” she whispered.

  It didn’t surprise me. I knew what she would say before I got there. I knew Bonnie. Even if I was the love of her life, she had made a promise to a man who never wavered in his feelings for her. She had pledged to him her love and a family, a future.

  When she let my hands go, I rose like a half-filled helium balloon.

  “I just needed to hear it,” I said.

  “Sit down, Easy.”

  “No, baby. We finished here. You know it and now I do too.”

  “You s
houldn’t drive in your condition.”

  “I fought a war in this condition.”

  She stood up to me.

  “Stay.”

  “To some men that might sound like a proposition,” I said.

  “You’re not some men,” she said. “You’re Easy Rawlins.”

  I smiled and cupped her chin with my left hand.

  “You were the woman of my life,” I said. “And I threw you away like a fool.”

  It was easy after that to walk out barefoot and half dressed. The night air was invigorating, and I had faced my worst demon and lost with dignity.

  51

  I followed Pico down to the ocean, made a series of turns, and wound up traveling north on the Pacific Coast Highway. I was cruising in my car with the windows all open and a cigarette between my fingers. I didn’t know what time it was exactly, but midnight was behind me and morning was far, far away. I’d cracked the pint of cognac and placed it between my legs. Now and then I’d take a hit, toasting dead men and women whom I’d known and lost over the decades.

  There wasn’t much traffic, so I was feeling free. At first I was going the prescribed limit, 50 MPH, but the speedometer kept advancing as I began more and more to leave the pain behind.

  I had thirty-seven dollars and a hundred-dollar bill in my pocket, no shoes or proper shirt, and the radio played songs that sounded happy even when they were about a broken heart.

  I didn’t know where I was going. I needed shoes and a jacket of some sort. I’d need more cigarettes and another bottle before long. But right then, three-quarters down the pint and with eight cigarettes left, I was in a state of grace, making my way up the coast, rolling toward tomorrow.

  It tickled me that the only reason I knew the ocean was out there to my left was because of the darkness, the primordial dark that had caused my kind to stop and reflect for millions of years. I laughed at the huge void.

  Twenty miles or so past Malibu, a station wagon was taking its time on a steep rise. I swung around that automobile with pinpoint control. This made me laugh, made me feel strong.