Blonde Faith (7 page)

“Here,” he said, handing me a big manila envelope.

Before I could ask him what it was, he rushed away.

The envelope contained automobile registration papers and four hundred and twenty dollars. The car, which was parked in front of my house, was Mung’s own ’62 Cadillac.

I used the money to buy another car and gave the Caddy to my old friend Primo, who made travel money by selling American cars down in Mexico.

I LEFT BEFORE EATING but promised Feather and Easter that I’d be back for dinner.

The huge car lot was twice the size it had been the last time I was there. Mel had bought out the property across the street and built a three-story showroom. The showroom was surrounded by huge columns of red and blue balloons and topped with a forty-foot American flag.

The place was so big now that it seemed like a military installation.

I parked in the customers’ lot and walked toward the glittering steel-and-glass headquarters. When I reached the doorway, a skinny man in a bright green suit approached me.

“May I help you?” the gray-colored black man asked. This was also a new addition, a Negro salesman.

His eyes were fevered. His smile twisted like an earthworm in the sun.

“I need to speak to somebody in records,” I said, showing him my PI’s license.

He held the card between quivering fingers. He was a pill popper, no doubt. I was sure that he couldn’t concentrate on my identification.

He winked, blinked, and grimaced at the card for a few seconds and then handed it back.

“Brad Knowles,” he told me. “Out on the lot somewhere.”

“What does he look like?” I asked.

“Knowles,” the hopped-up salesman said. “Out on the lot.”

I WANDERED AROUND for a while looking for somebody named Knowles. Most of the people walking around were customers pretending that they knew something about cars. But there was security too. After the Watts riots of ’65 everybody had security: convenience and liquor stores, supermarkets, gas stations… everyplace but schools; our most precious possession, our children, were left to fend for themselves.

I went up to this one big brawny white guy and asked, “Brad Knowles?”

He pointed over my left shoulder. When I gazed in that direction I spied a white guy wearing a cherry red blazer. He was gabbing with a young white woman. If somebody looked at me the way he was gawking at her, I would have run or pulled out a gun. But the woman seemed to be enjoying the attention.

“Thanks,” I said to the white muscleman, and made my way across baking asphalt, past a hundred dying automobiles, toward the wolf and his willing prey.

“Mr. Knowles?” I said in my friendliest voice.

Even in that awful coat, Knowles was a handsome devil. The woman, who was plain faced and well built, frowned at me.

“Excuse me a moment, ma’am,” I said through the rising heat. “I just need to ask Mr. Knowles a quick question.”

“What is it?” he asked.

I wondered if I was a white man would he have put a
sir
on the end of that sentence.

“I bought a car from a man named Black,” I said as affably as I could. “He left his power tools behind the front seat. The only things I know for sure about him are that his first name is Christmas and he bought the car, truck actually, on this lot.”

Power tools, honest citizen — I had all the bases covered. Not only would I get the information, I might also receive a medal.

“Get the fuck off my lot,” Brad Knowles said to me.

I was actually speechless, so surprised that for a moment I forgot my deep sorrow. My mouth hung open.

“Do I have to call security and have you removed?” Brad added.

Despite my shock I could still shake my head and did so.

The plain white woman smiled at me, at my humiliation.

I turned and walked away, wondering what had happened.

Was it my interruption of his line on that woman? Was it racism? Or maybe they’d cheated Christmas on his truck. His complaint might have raised some hackles.

I OPENED MY CAR DOOR and waited a minute for the interior to cool down a little before I climbed in. I drove out of the lot and around the back of the big glass showroom, where a sign said there was overflow parking. I parked again and made my way into the building.

A young Asian woman, Korean I thought at the time, came up to me with a big smile on her face.

“May I help you, sir?”

“Yeah, yeah,” I said as I looked through the glass walls, hoping I hadn’t been seen by the indelicate lot boss. “Brad Knowles told me that I could find out something I need to know from somebody in records.”

“Miss Goss?” the woman asked.

“Yes. That’s who it is.”

“Third floor. The stairs are behind you.”

THE STAIRWAY was next to the glass wall. As I made my way up, I felt like a hornet in a clear plastic bag. Just a glance at the building would have shown Knowles that I was there. All he had to do was put down his foot to get rid of me.

I’d hoped that the records office had solid walls to hide behind, but it didn’t. All that separated me from the outside world was a wall of colorless glass. I was the best man trying to take the groom’s place at the top of a three-tiered wedding cake.

“May I help you?” another woman asked me.

I had expected a face to go along with the name Goss. So when I saw the lovely young black woman sitting in the dark red chair, I was surprised. I guess it showed on my face.

“I’m not what you expected?” she asked.

I tried to speak, but I didn’t want to call her name ugly.

She smiled and cocked her head to the side.

Miss Goss was not pretty. Her features were too pronounced and insolent to be pretty. Her high cheekbones and ready-to-be-angry eyes made her beautiful. For the first time in a year, without the aid of sleep or stress, Bonnie completely slipped away from me. But as soon as I realized Bonnie was gone from my mind, she was back again.

“Do you want something?” Miss Goss asked.

“No… I mean, yes. Brad Knowles said that you could give me some information.”

Speaking his name, I glanced out at the lot. As if by magic, he looked up at the same time and saw me seeing him.

The hourglass was set. I smiled, putting love on the back burner for a moment.

“That’s a lie,” Miss Goss said.

“What is?”

“Brad sendin’ you up here. He wouldn’t send anybody up here and certainly not a big black man like you. I’m surprised he didn’t call security.”

“The man I need to find is named Christmas Black. He bought a red truck from you within the last three weeks.” Pretending to scratch my neck, I got a glimpse of Knowles looking around — for security, no doubt.

“What’s your name?” she asked.

“Easy. What’s yours?”

“Tourmaline.”

That made me happy. I laughed and decided that the .38 in my pocket would equalize any situation that security might raise.

“My name is funny?”

“Quite the contrary,” I said. “It’s a beautiful name. A gem.”

“I like your name too,” she said.

I could almost hear the heavy breathing of overweight guards climbing the stairs.

“Why’s that?” I asked as if I had all the time in the world.

“It’s got two syllables. I hate one-syllable names. Mel and Brad and all the rest of them: Bill, Max, Tom, Dick — I especially hate Dick — and Harv.”

“Christmas has two syllables,” I said.

Tourmaline admired my ability to think for a moment that seemed to last minutes.

“What’s it worth to you?” she asked.

“A hundred dollars or dinner at Brentan’s,” I said. “Both.”

Tourmaline smiled and I saw a light somewhere.

That’s when my old friend Thunder and a black security guard just as big as he was came out from the entrance to the stairs.

“Hey, you,” Thunder said.

I swiveled my head to regard him and his minion.

Instead of snarling, he gave me a quizzical look.

But I wasn’t worried about what was on the big man’s mind. I wondered if I could take him down. I decided that it was possible. I’d get hurt in the process, but I was a man trying to impress a woman. I could maybe take him.… It didn’t matter, though. With his helper, Thunder would have torn me in two.

The big white security guard was looking at me, still pondering. I turned my head to see that Tourmaline was frozen, probably holding her breath.

“Mr. Rawlins,” Thunder said, and I knew that Mouse had had a talk with him too.

“Hey, Thunder. Listen, I know you gotta kick me out. Just give me one word with the lady here.”

“Come on, Joe,” Thunder said to his partner.

Joe showed no emotion, just followed his supervisor down the stairs.

I turned to Tourmaline, and she said, “I’ll meet you there at eight, Mr. Rawlins.”

R
aymond Alexander had always been a fixture in my life. He was a ladies’ man, a philanderer, a fabulous raconteur, a stone-cold killer, and probably the best friend I ever had; not a friend, really, but a comrade. He was the kind of man who stood there beside you through blood and fire, death and torture. No one would ever choose to live in a world where they’d need a friend like Mouse, but you don’t choose the world you live in or the skin you inhabit.

There were times that Mouse had stood up for me when I wasn’t in the room or even the neighborhood. That’s why, sometimes, men like Thunder backed away from me, seeing the ghostly image of Ray at my shoulder.

I lived in a world where many people believed that laws dealt with all citizens equally, but that belief wasn’t held by my people. The law we faced was most often at odds with itself. When the sun went down or the cell door slammed, the law no longer applied to our citizenry.

In that world a man like Raymond “Mouse” Alexander was Achilles, Beowulf, and Gilgamesh all rolled into one.

I STOPPED at a phone booth and dialed a number.

“Library,” a man’s voice answered.

“Gara, please.” I knew she’d told me to wait for a day, but I also knew my hundred-dollar incentive would get her to move quickly.

I waited there, smoking a low-tar cigarette. Usually when I smoked I thought about quitting. I knew that my breath had been shortened and that my life would suffer the same fate if I continued. At the end of most smokes I crushed out the ember planning for it to be my last — but not that day. That day Death held no sway over me. She could come and take me; I didn’t care.

“Hello?” Gara said in a rich tone that I associated only with black women.

“Any headway?”

She laughed at my knowledge and said, “Come on by.”

WHENEVER I SAW Gara she brought to mind deities. She was in that green chair again, fat as Buddha and wise as Ganesh. There was no gender to her divinity, no mortality to her time here on Earth.

“I got somethin’ for you here, Easy,” she said, indicating a buff-colored folder on the table.

There were eight sheets of paper inside. The first listed seven names, neatly typed in the top left-hand corner, single-spaced.

Bruce Richard Morton
William T. Heatherton
Glen Albert Thorn
Xian Lo
Tomas Hight
Charles Maxwell Bob
François Lamieux

After that, each page gave all the information that Gara had been able to find on the various heroes.

I scanned the pages. There were lots of abbreviations and acronyms. I didn’t understand most of them, but that didn’t bother me.

“No photos?” I asked.

Gara frowned and sucked a tooth.

“Yeah,” I said. “I didn’t think so.”

“Don’t show those papers to anybody, Easy. And burn ’em up when you’re through.”

“Either I’ll burn them or they’ll burn me.”

ON THE WAY HOME I stopped by the Pugg, Harmon, and Dart Insurance building. It was the newest and tallest glass-and-steel skyscraper to grace the downtown LA skyline. On the top floor was Brentan’s, one of LA’s finest restaurants.

As I headed for the red elevator whose sole purpose was to bring fine diners to Brentan’s, a guard in a tan short-sleeved shirt and black pants approached me. The pale-faced, slender-armed guard had a holster on his left hip. The leather pouch contained what looked to be a .25-caliber pistol.

Most white people at that time wouldn’t have given that guard a second thought. I, on the other hand, saw him as potentially life threatening.

“Sorry,” he said. “No one goes up without a reservation.”

He was a small white man with eyes of no certain color and bones that would have worked for a hummingbird.

“This is nineteen sixty-seven,” I reminded him.

The guard didn’t understand what I meant; his perplexed expression told me that.

“What I mean,” I said, “is that in this day and age even Negroes can have reservations at nice places. You can’t just look at a man and tell by his suntan whether or not he has a right to be somewhere.”

My tone was light, which made the words even more threatening.

“Um,” he said in a voice that hovered somewhere between scratchy alto and tentative tenor. “I mean, yes, the restaurant is closed.”

“You mean to say that the restaurant is not open for business. It isn’t closed. I have an appointment with Hans Green in seven minutes. That’s because the restaurant employees are working.”

I smiled into the crooked little face that represented every rejection, expulsion, and exclusion I had ever experienced.

Most of my days went like that. Maybe 15 or 20 percent of the white people I met tried to get a leg up over me. It wasn’t the majority of folks — but it sure felt like it.

I pressed the button on the elevator while the guard stood there behind me, trying to figure a way around my reasoning. The bell rang and the doors slid open. I got in and the guard joined me.

I didn’t say a word to him and neither did he speak to me. We rode up those twenty-three floors silently wasting our energies over a feud that should have been done with a hundred years before.