Blonde Faith

7

I had been distracted from my inspection of the neat little household but not derailed. Those soldiers hadn’t come for the kind of search I was mounting. They had come to either find Black or not. There was no subtlety to their intrusion.

It would have taken a dead body or a spilled bucket of blood to satisfy their curiosity. Also, they obviously didn’t know Christmas all that well; otherwise they would have come at him from three different directions, with their guns drawn and cocked. Christmas Black was a government-trained killer, one of the best of his kind in the world.

I went back to my seat on the little tan couch and looked around. After a while I spied that bumblebee again. It hadn’t moved in quite some time.

There was a wall that meant to be a kitchen toward the back of the studio apartment. The stovetop was empty and the sink too. There was nothing in the little refrigerator, and all the two-person dining table had to offer was a pair of sturdy maple chairs.

I carried one of these to the corner where the decorated soldier had stood. I climbed up and looked into the depths of a smallish black hole that had masqueraded as a bee. Only a bullet could have created that perfect little cavity.

Along with the PI’s license, I carried a yellow number two pencil in my shirt pocket. This I poked into the hole. The pink eraser pointed me back to the the little sofa.

I got down on my hands and knees next to the foam rubber settee. I was about to inspect the wall and the floor when a wave of fear went through me.

What if Clarence Miles was smarter than I gave him credit for? Maybe he had gone out to wait for me to look around a bit more. His plan might have been to come back in on me, take whatever I’d found, and then have one of his soldiers execute me for good measure.

Grunting, I got to my feet, walked to the door, and locked it. Then I returned to the sofa, placing my pistol on the floor nearby for easy access.

Moving the sofa away from the white wall, I spied a faint red smudge. Not a droplet or a spatter but something that had been washed away as well as possible in the time allowed.

If Christmas had had ninety minutes, he would have gone to the hardware store and then painted over the blood he’d spilled.

The couch was now facing the front door. I sat on it again and tried to imagine what had happened.

Whoever it was that got shot was in the middle of the room when he was surprised by his assailant. The victim was armed and probably had his gun out. He turned quickly but was shot while pulling the trigger of his own piece. He was falling backward, so the shot hit the ceiling.

There were other possibilities. The victim could have been unfamiliar with the use of firearms so the shot went wild. Christmas might still have shot this novice; he (or she) was obviously armed. But I doubted it was a chance burglar or a devious neighbor who broke in; not with Clarence Miles and his boys in the landscape. The assailant, I believed, was someone who intended to do harm to Christmas. That someone was armed and trained in the use of his weapon.

Whoever it was, he was now dead. His killer was Christmas Black; there wasn’t a doubt in my mind about that. Only Christmas would have cleaned up so scrupulously after a killing of that sort.

Christmas had been expecting an attack, or maybe he had a warning system that told him when his enemy was approaching. He went out through the side door and then back around to the front. He came in fast and shot the invader, then cleaned up everything, somehow disposed of the body, and decamped to another hideout.

I was pretty confident about my hypothesis. Christmas had killed for a living most of his life. He was raised by a whole family of government killers. He would have heard the outer door to the building open. In the time it took the assassin to make it into the apartment, Christmas could have been away.

But what happened to the body?

OUTSIDE AGAIN, I walked around both shabby buildings. This was 1967, and LA hadn’t filled out. The area behind the church had been a big empty lot before the prefabricated bungalows were dropped in.

The back of the property was accessible by an unpaved alley that led to a small street that had no name that I knew of. The lot was strewn with beer cans, condom wrappers, and empty packs of cigarettes. By the side of Christmas’s apartment there was a wheelbarrow. It had been scrupulously cleaned.

There was no trail through the grasses and weeds from the side of the house to the alley, but Christmas had learned to hide his comings and goings from eyes as sharp as those of the Vietcong. He would’ve been able to go back and forth leaving no evidence of his passage.

I walked out under the dawning sky into the alleyway. There were willows on either side of the packed-dirt lane but no houses. Halfway to the nameless street, I came upon a decrepit shed made from cheap pine, tar paper, and tin.

No wheelbarrow track there either, but Christmas was that good too.

Inside the shed was an accumulation of items left by construction workmen, drunks, lovers, prostitutes and their johns, and inquisitive children. There were animal droppings, piles of useless tools, tarps, and metal and plastic containers of all sorts.

In one corner there was a big crate that had been piled high with all kinds of rags, metal casings, and broken furniture. This crate had been calling to me ever since I’d realized that the bumblebee was not moving.

After I’d received my investigator’s license, Saul Lynx, the Jewish PI, had given me lessons in what tools a shamus needed.

“You need things that can’t be seen as criminal,” he’d told me one day as his half-black children played around us in their View Park home. “No lock-picking tools but a long slender metal ruler with a nick on one side that happened from an accident. That will get you into most doors and cars. You should also always have a pair of cotton gloves in your back pocket. . . .”

I donned my gloves and inspected the crate.

Along an unobstructed side there were the heads of eight brand-new nails that had been recently driven home. I found an old screwdriver and pried that side of the crate away.

The corpse didn’t surprise me in the least. Neither did it bother me — much. I had seen a whole mountain of dead people in my life, most of them murdered because of their race or nationality. All the way from New Iberia, Louisiana, to Dachau I had seen them shot and hanged, blown up and lynched, gassed, burned, tortured, and starved. One more dead man couldn’t rattle me.

He was young and wore dark clothes. There was a neat little bullet hole over his left eye and a blank stare on his ant-covered face. The colony of the queen had claimed him. Thousands of the little black socialists swarmed over his pale skin and dark clothes. I was sure that he’d been relieved of anything that could identify him. But I didn’t need a name. His blond hair was cut in the military style and his shoes were black combat boots of military issue. This was a scout for the good captain and his brave men.

I reattached the side of the crate and left the funerary shed. I walked down into the nameless street and around the neighborhood.

It was still quite early.

As I wended my way back toward Centinela and my car, my mind drifted to Bonnie again. She was the love of my life, then and now. She loved another man, maybe not as much as she loved me but enough to be swayed by him.

I tried to think of some way that I could have stayed in a life with her. It was a dialogue I’d had in my head almost every day since I showed her the door. And every day I came to the same conclusion: I couldn’t bear lying there next to her with him in her mind.

Mountains of dead bodies and criminal soldiers meant nothing compared to the loss of Bonnie Shay.