Blonde Faith (25 page)

“Easy?” he said.

“Christmas?” I was completely thrown off by the appearance of my other quarry. “What are you doin’ here?”

“Come on in,” he said, while looking around to make sure there were no other surprises.

I did as he bade me, entering a room that seemed to be a perfect, almost nude, cube. There were two metal folding chairs and a cardboard box for a table on the far corner of the bare pine floor. No paintings on the walls or shelves or even a TV. There was a radio. Aretha Franklin was wailing away at a low volume.

“How’d you find me, Easy?” Christmas asked.

“I didn’t.”

“No? Then what are you doing here?”

“Mouse,” I said.

And like magic, my friend came out of a doorway to the right. In his left hand he was holding his famous .41-caliber pistol.

“Easy,” he said.

“Raymond?”

“I thought you said you was lookin’ for me,” he said, responding to the surprise in my tone.

“I’m, I’m lookin’ for both’a ya’ll,” I said, my language devolving all the way back to my childhood, “but not in the same place.”

Mouse’s smile broadened, while Christmas’s eyes got tight. At least they were reacting according to their natures.

“You been drinkin’, Easy?” Mouse asked.

“How’s Easter Dawn?” Christmas wanted to know.

“She’s fine,” I said. “Down at Jackson Blue’s house with Feather and Jesus and them.”

“I left her with you,” the ex-Green Beret said. In any other state of mind I would have been worried about the threat in his voice.

“Yeah. Yes, you did. You left her with me with not even a note. Not even one word to tell her why you brought her there. Here I am with a child worried about her father, and he don’t have the decency to let on what he’s up to or when he’ll be back.”

The muscle in Black’s shoulders and back was so dense that it looked like a pack he toted. This mass increased with his anger, but I didn’t care.

“I told you he was gonna do sumpin’, Chris,” Mouse said. “Easy ain’t no pussy-ass soldier gonna wait for your orders.”

“Are you here for Mouse or for me?” Christmas asked.

“Faith Laneer is dead,” I said, answering all questions he might have had.

“Dead how?”

“Slaughtered like a hog in her own living room by a man named Sammy Sansoam.”

I hadn’t known Christmas for long, but our relationship had been consecrated in blood, my blood. So I knew him on a very intimate level. He had never shown a moment of weakness or uncertainty in the time I had known him, and I was pretty sure that he rarely radiated anything but strength.

But when he heard how Faith had died, he went to one of the chairs and sat down. It was an eloquent, soldierly sign of surrender.

“But you here for me, not him,” Mouse said.

“I was lookin’ for you ’cause of Pericles Tarr,” I said. “Etta wanted me to find you because the cops think you killed Tarr.”

“Killed him? I freed him and then made him rich. I’m his goddamned Abraham Lincoln. Forty thousand acres and a whole herd’a mules.”

“Yeah. I found that out and told Etta, but then this thing with Sansoam happened and I wanted you to come help me take care of it.”

The gleam in Raymond’s eye almost made me smile. He recognized the murder in my soul like a long-lost brother.

“You wanna kill the mothahfuckah,” he stated.

“Yes.”

“Okay.”

And that was it. As far as Mouse was concerned, we were ready to roll. For a man to die somewhere, all I had to do was ask.

“How you get messed up with Sansoam?” Christmas asked. His voice was low and empty.

I told him about my meeting with the soldiers at his house and about the break-in at mine. Then I related my last sighting of Sammy, driving away from Faith’s home.

“How could a man do somethin’ like that to that beautiful young woman?” Raymond asked.

I hadn’t wondered about Raymond getting together with Christmas to take care of the soldiers on his trail. They were friends and they were remorseless killers; the combination spoke for itself. What bothered me was that question, though. Killing had taken an odd turn in Raymond’s mind. Would he understand killing an ugly woman or an old one? And then I wondered…

“How would Sammy know where Faith was?”

Christmas looked up.

“I mean,” I continued, “Mouse wouldn’t let out a secret if you cut off his arm. He wouldn’t tell anybody and neither would you, Chris. And I know you put her somewhere where nobody could have trailed her. So it had to be somethin’ Sammy came upon.”

“I left a brochure under one of the table legs.…”

“No. I found that,” I said. “That’s how I got to Faith in the first place. No one else saw it, and you killed those men came in on you.”

A crease appeared in Black’s forehead. His light brown eyes shone like those of any man or animal surprised in leisure.

“She had a child,” he said. “A boy.”

It bothered me that Faith hadn’t told me about her child. I didn’t know why.

“Where?” I asked.

“Child didn’t tell this man Sammy where she was,” Raymond said reasonably. He wanted to get on the road to killing.

“Hope,” Christmas said. “Hope Neverman. She lives in Pasadena.”

W
e took my car for the ride out to Pasadena. My heart was erratic; sometimes it was pounding and then it would skip a beat or two. My hands were sweating, and if you had asked me at any moment what I was thinking, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you. Or I might just have given a list of names and relationships that had foundered at my feet. My mother, and Bonnie, Faith, and my first wife, who had run off with my friend Dupree.

“Easy, you know where this dude Sammy is at?” Mouse asked from the backseat.

I heard the question clearly. I had no idea where Sansoam was, but I couldn’t speak.

I looked over at Christmas. He was staring out the window. I noticed then that there were rain clouds forming. They were far off, over the desert, but they’d be where we were in a few days.

“Easy?”

“Yeah, Ray?”

“You all right, man?”

“I want to drive all the way to the East Coast,” I said. “And then when I get there, I could drive my car into the Atlantic.”

Christmas nodded solemnly, and I felt something squirm in my chest.

“I knew a dude got himself buried in his Caddy,” Mouse said jauntily. “He weighed six hunnert pounds. There was five women cryin’ at his grave too. Some men just lucky, is all.”

That’s when I started to laugh. It was a good laugh, happy. Mouse lived in the world while everyone else tried to pretend that they were somewhere else. He smelled the shit that fertilized the rosebush. He accepted whatever it was that came his way and either put a good face on it or pulled out his gun.

“What color was that Caddy, Ray?” I asked.

“Pink.”

“Pink?” Christmas roared. “Pink? That’s not right. If you have to have a car for a coffin, it should be black.”

“What fo’?” Mouse asked.

“Pink is not a funerary color.”

“What color you need to be to drive into the sea?” Mouse asked.

“Dead,” I said, and we were quiet for most of the rest of the drive to Hope Neverman’s home.

IT WAS A BIG HOUSE the color of thin-sliced smoked Scottish salmon. It felt a little overpowering for three armed black men to converge on her front door. Christmas pressed the button, and church bells sounded in the distance.

The woman who answered was white, definitely Faith’s sister. She was smaller, finer boned, a pretty version of Faith’s beauty.

“Mr. Black,” she said with hardly a tremor.

“I’m sorry to bother you, Hope, but my friends and I need to ask you some questions.”

“Come in. Come in.”

The house had to have been in a magazine somewhere. It was southwestern in style but very modern. To the left was a large library around an oval dining table. To the right there lay a sunken living room with a horseshoe-shaped sofa and dark highly polished wood floors. These rooms were divided by a stairway with no banisters that led up to floors two and three. The stairs rose until they stopped just under the roof.

The back wall was made of sliding glass doors. These led to the backyard and the Olympic-size pool where four children rollicked under the patient gaze of a young, dark-skinned Mexican nanny.

I couldn’t help thinking about Leafa and all her brothers and sisters bunged up in that small house in South Central. It made no sense that both those homes existed in the same world.

Hope was wearing a powder blue one-piece dress made from rough cotton. Her flat shoes were the color of bone, and there was no makeup on her perfectly formed face. She wasn’t yet thirty. She would never be her sister.

She led us to the library, and we all sat at one end of the dining table: an impromptu meeting of the board of some charity or corporation.

“Is something wrong, Mr. Black?” the lesser sister asked.

“Faith told me that she would call me now and then to say that she was all right,” he said. “She called me every other day until yesterday, when she should have called but didn’t. I’m worried about it.”

There was sympathy in Christmas Black’s mien, kindness to back up his lies.

“I don’t understand,” Hope said. “Where could she be?”

“Have you spoken to her?”

“Not since the day before yesterday.”

Black laced his powerful hands and placed them on the light ash tabletop.

“Has anybody been here asking about her?”

“Only Major Bryant.”

“Major?” Christmas said.

My heart sank like some far-off balloon dipping below the horizon line.

“Yes. He came here the day before yesterday. He said that they had received her letter and needed to speak to her about what to do about this terrible thing with Craig.”

“What did this Major Bryant look like?” I asked.

“This is Tyrell Samuels,” Christmas said by way of a belated introduction. “He’s been helping me lately.”

“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Samuels.”

I nodded.

For a moment Hope was quiet, waiting for something else pleasant. When she realized that something wasn’t coming, she said, “He was young and tall, on the thin side.”

“Dark complexion?” I asked. “Like he was from Sicily or Greece?”

“Yes. Do you know him?”

“We’ve met.”

“Did you tell him where Faith lived?” Christmas asked, trying his best not to lose his temper.

“She didn’t tell me where she was exactly,” Hope replied. “I only had a PO box.”

“Did you give the major her PO box?” Christmas asked.

“Of course not. I knew that Faith was in trouble. I wouldn’t tell anyone.”

“Aunt Hope,” a boy shouted, “Carmen won’t let me have some ice cream.”

Even from a distance I could see that Andrew had his mother’s beauty. When he grew up to be a sad man, he would be deadly handsome.

“You can’t eat until after swimming,” Hope said. “You know that.”

He came through the open door, drawn to the strangers in his aunt’s home.

“Oh, yeah,” he said, staring at Christmas.

“Do you know my mama?” the three-year-old asked the ex-government killer.

“Yes,” he said. “Very well.”

“Do you know where she is?”

“She’s very sad, Andy. But pretty soon she’ll be better and back with you again.”

I wondered if Christmas believed in God.

Andy didn’t know how to respond to the words, the man, or his tone, and so he hunched his shoulders, ran out to the pool.

When the boy was gone, I asked, “Do you keep a little phone diary?”

“Of course.” She was a woman of certainty.

“Is Faith’s PO box in that book?”

“Yes.”

“Would you mind looking to make sure it’s where you left it?” I asked.

“What are you saying?”

“Please,” Christmas said. “Do as he asks.”

Hope didn’t go far. There was a desk in the corner of the library. She opened it and took out a tiny red diary.

“See,” she said, “it’s here.”

“Look up your sister’s PO box,” Christmas directed.

Hope turned the pages deftly, frowned a little, turned them again.

“I don’t understand,” she said. “The page is missing, torn out.”

She looked up at us.

“Is my sister all right?” she asked.

“I hope so,” Christmas said.

It came to me then that all great soldiers had to believe in a higher power.

H
ow we gonna hit Sammy?” Mouse asked from the back. He was sitting forward, both hands on the long seat, more like an excited child than a cold-blooded killer.

I didn’t know what to say. Bunting had fooled me, his youthful bravado covering up the lies. He had pumped me for information while I dismissed him for a fool. I needed a superior officer at that moment.

“Let it go,” Christmas said.

I heard the words, understood their meaning, but I found myself trying to decipher exactly how they spelled death for Sammy Sansoam and his friends. Was Christmas planning to go it alone? Was he so enraged that he wanted to kill the whole squad the way he’d murdered everyone in Easter Dawn’s little village?

“What you mean, Chris?” Mouse asked.

“I mean what I said. Let it go.”

“You mean you don’t wanna kill him?” Mouse pressed.

Christmas didn’t answer. Just looked ahead. He was wearing a cream-colored cowboy shirt with pocket flaps that snapped down. The flaps bore complex dark brown embroidery. His pants were brown, with sharp creases that he’d probably ironed that morning. He was a forever soldier — in uniform and under orders for life.

I glanced up into the rearview mirror to see Mouse with rare confusion on his face. He respected Christmas just as much as I did and was mystified by his refusal to seek revenge. They had killed two men together only days before. This was a war and now was the time for battle.

I wanted to understand too, but it wasn’t going to be a simple equation. The tone in Black’s voice, the set of his jaw, said that he wasn’t going to give. This was his operation and now it was over. Mouse and I, as far as he was concerned, were short-term conscripts who had no say whatsoever.