Blonde Faith

9

I also found it hard to believe that Mouse would have sat on that ratty sofa amid the screams of all those ugly kids. Raymond didn’t have patience for more than one child at a time, and then he would be the center of attention, not the child. And Ray wasn’t a loan shark either. He might decide that he wanted his money back at any time, even before it was due, and the borrower had better beware.

Mouse was not a businessman in the conventional sense. He was a special agent, an enforcer, a boss man. Ray Alexander was a force of nature, not a bank.

But neither could I believe that Leafa’s mother was lying. She had gone to the police to accuse Mouse of a crime. There was not one in a thousand people in Watts brave or stupid enough to do something like that.

And Mouse had disappeared at the same time Pericles had gone missing. It was a real mystery; almost enough to divert me from Bonnie.

Almost.

I was all alone in a car full of phantoms. Bonnie was there next to me with Easter Dawn on her lap. Mouse and Pericles Tarr sat in the backseat, muttering about money and blood. Next to them were Christmas and a white woman swathed in a polka-dotted scarf; maybe they were making love.

Behind us was a jeep filled with armed military men, rogues.

I had to choose between Bonnie and the suicide soldiers, the ones who thought they could come up on a man like Christmas and win.

THE MAIN BRANCH of the LA library had a librarian named Gara Lemmon. She was a black woman from Illinois named for her father and educated by her mom. She was a heavy woman with big, well-defined features. Her hands were larger than mine, and her broad nose seemed to go all the way up to her forehead.

Gara liked me and my friend Jackson Blue because we were well-read and willing to talk about ideas. Sometimes the three of us would go back to her little office to argue the finer points of philosophy and politics. Jackson and Gara were better read and smarter than I was, but they also took a few nips from Jackson’s flask, so we were on pretty much even footing when the talks got heavy.

“Easy Rawlins,” Gara said when I entered the librarians’ lounge.

She was sitting in a big green chair in the cavernous sitting room.

“How’d you get in here?” Gara asked.

“Mr. Bill knows me by now,” I said. “He told me I could just come on back.”

“Jackson with you?”

“Since he got that computer job, Jackson don’t do a thing but work,” I said.

“Oh, well. I know you didn’t come here all by yourself to talk.” She put down the book she was reading and arranged her mass in the huge chair.

“What you reading?” I asked.

“The Catcher in the Rye,” she said, a little frown at the corner of her pillow lips.

“You don’t like it?”

“It’s okay. I mean, it’s good. But I just think about a little black child or Mexican kid readin’ this in school. They look at Caulfield’s life an’ think, Damn, this kid got it good. What’s he so upset about?”

I laughed. “Yeah,” I said. “So much we know that they never even think about, and so much they think about without a thought about us.”

I didn’t have to tell Gara who they and us were. We lived in a they-and-us world while they lived, to all appearances, alone.

“You got any books in here tell me who’s who in the army?” I asked, sitting down on a three-legged stool across from her.

“You know we do. I told you about the grant the government gave us to house their special publications. We got a whole locked room filled with that stuff.”

“I’m lookin’ for a General Thaddeus King and a Captain Clarence Miles.”

Gara pursed those big lips. I had met her husband. He was a small man who looked like a rooster. I couldn’t imagine him kissing that woman, but I supposed he couldn’t think of anything else.

“It’s a special-access stack,” she said.

“Yeah, I figured. But there’s a little girl missing her father, and this is the only way home for her.”

“Write down the names,” Gara said.

I scribbled the names on the top leaf of a pad of paper sitting on the table between her grand inquisitor’s chair and my supplicant’s stool.

“You wait here,” she said. “I’ll look ’em up.”

AT ANY OTHER TIME I would have picked a book off one of the shelving carts and started reading. I’m a reader. As a rule I love books, but not that day. The only things I was interested in then breathed and bled or cried.

I sat there trying to come up with a plan for approaching General Thaddeus King. I couldn’t get to him on a military base, and even Gara’s precise records wouldn’t have a home address. That meant I had to use the phone. I’d have to find his number somewhere and call him.

But what would I say? That I knew about the scam he and Miles were up to? An approach like that might work on a street punk but not a soldier, certainly not a general. No. A general in this army had seen combat. He’d faced death and done things that would sicken any normal man.

And who was I to say that King knew anything about Miles’s criminal activities? Maybe I should tell King about Miles and see what he’d have to say about that.

But for subtle investigation, I’d have to meet him eye to eye. He wouldn’t give up his heart over the phone like some teenage girl.

Love over the phone was the wrong avenue of conjecture. It brought Bonnie to mind, curled up in the living-room chair, talking on the phone and laughing. Her voice got very deep when she laughed. Her head tilted back, and that long brown throat offered itself to me.

That image shattered any ability I had to resist the hurt. All I could do was stare at the buff-colored wall of the librarians’ lounge. I imagined my mind as that inarticulate, meaningless flat plane. It was a kind of temporary intellectual suicide.

“Was that a trick question?” Gara asked as she entered the room.

I looked up, and the mirth in her eyes died.

“What’s wrong with you, baby?”

“I . . .”

Gara pulled a chair up next to me and took my hands in hers. Gara had never touched me in all the time we’d been acquainted. She was a proper woman who didn’t want to give the wrong impression.

“It’s okay,” I said. “Just a problem at home. It’s all right. Nobody’s sick. Nobody’s dying.”

I took a deep breath and pulled away. “What you talkin’ about a trick?”

“There ain’t no General, Colonel, or Major Thaddeus King anywhere in the army, and the only Clarence Miles is a master sergeant in Berlin.”

“Can I smoke in here?” I asked.

“No, but I’ll allow it anyway. You look like you need somethin’.”

The inhalation of cancer-causing smoke felt like the first breath I’d taken in a long time. It reminded me of what a man, I’d forgotten his name, that was friends with my maternal grandfather used to say: “We born dyin’, boy,” he’d opine. “If it wasn’t for death, we’d nevah draw a breath.”

Everything Miles had said was a lie. What he’d said but not what I’d seen. They’d come armed and in force. They all had at least been in the military. They were killers and soldiers inasmuch as they were willing to put their lives, and others’ lives, on the line.