Blonde Faith (28 page)

“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.”

A
fter 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 shouldn’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.

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.

Bunting and Sansoam were dead, but I didn’t feel bad about their passing. I didn’t feel guilt. The cops were in the wrong, but I wasn’t. Those men had run a murdering streak from Vietnam to California and they wouldn’t have stopped with Faith Laneer. They’d have come after me soon enough, not knowing what I might have against them.

I had a lot of living to make up for after a year of moping around because of Bonnie.

The scatter of stars over the lightless ocean called to me on the high rise up the side of the coastal mountain.

Bonnie had to turn me away. She had to marry Joguye. Africa and the Caribbean were closer to each other than America could ever be to either. He was a king and I was a bum. And tonight I would drive so far away that no one could find me to tell me if anything had changed.

My children were safe and living in a mansion. I wasn’t there to watch over them, but they had Jesus. Jesus — the boy who had always been the better man.

I lit a cigarette, took a hit off my cognac bottle, and made up my mind to call my little tribe at daybreak. They deserved to know where I was.

I wouldn’t give them a number to call me because if they knew the number, every time the phone rang I’d wonder if they’d given it to Bonnie.

A big sixteen-wheeler was having trouble with the rise. I moved out a little to make sure there was no one coming and then hit the gas. I had just about cleared the cab when I saw the headlights of an oncoming car.

That was no problem. There was a shoulder to the left. I widened the arc of my turn and tapped the brake to slow down. I had no idea that the shoulder would thin out and then fade away. I jammed down on the brakes, but by that time the wheels were no longer on solid ground. The engine stalled out, and the wind through the windows was a woman howling for help that would never come.

“No,” I said, remembering all the times I had almost died at the hands of others: German soldiers, American soldiers, drunkards, crooks, and women who wanted me in the grave.