Blonde Faith

34

The drive over to Champion Avenue was pleasant. Suggs’s visit, though not actually restoring my faith in mankind, had at least given human nature a positive wrinkle. He wanted me to know that there was a semi-official plan in motion to murder my friend.

Suggs was a good cop. He solved the crime. That was his downfall. Most Americans (and maybe everybody else around the world, for all I knew) didn’t look directly at the problem. If you heard shots, the first thing you did was duck and then run. After that, most people hid. Suggs’s way of hiding was to think.

He didn’t know if Mouse was guilty, but he did know that killing a man you cannot arrest legally is wrong. He couldn’t go against Rauchford and he had no idea what Mouse or I would do, but he had to tell me.

I spent the rest of the brief drive thinking about Colonel Bunting. In my mind I called him Bumbles. He was like so many young black men who wrapped themselves in the latest styles and thought that made them invulnerable. Bunting believed that his uniform made him superior; my brothers in the street thought it was ruffled shirts and unborn-calf-skin shoes. Manhood and childishness blended together in both Bumbles and my slave-descended kin. The only difference was that the newspapers and television agreed with Bumbles. No one laughed at a puffed-up, preening white fool in uniform.

THE SUPREMES WERE SINGING “Baby Love,” much too loudly, behind the pink door. I pressed the buzzer repeatedly, breaking now and then to work the brass knocker.

It was a nice house, small and set farther back on the lot than the other homes around it. The lawn was cut and well trimmed, and the rosebushes along the sidewalk were clipped and blossoming. Big flowers with red, white, and orange petals hung heavy on the thorny branches, and a profusion of violet dahlias flourished along the side of the house. The light on the lawn was so strong that I felt I might reach down and pick it up in my hands.

The song was coming to an end, and I was just beginning to understand how powerful my emotions were. The idea that I could hold sunlight in my hands sent a shiver through my bones. I might have come to some deep revelation had it not been for the sudden silence.

I pressed the buzzer and pounded on the door at the same time.

The next song didn’t come. Instead a woman asked in an insulted tone, “Somebody there?”

“Easy Rawlins, ma’am,” I said to the pink door.

The sunlight was behind me now, but the insanity still thrummed at my forehead. Sex and murder felt like possibilities. Given the chance, I would have taken Prometheus’s fire and laid waste to the California coastline from San Diego all the way to Mount Shasta.

But then the door opened.

She wore red. You could have called it a dress, but it was much more like a wrapper. Her figure could not have been more obvious if she were naked and oiled. The medium-brown face and thighs, arms, and neck were ignited by eyes dark enough to be called black. Pretty Smart was short, built to populate the countryside, and lovely in a way that Christians interpreted as sin.

All that I saw she could see in me.

My attention dawdled on her sandals. They were black, with red ribbon straps between the second and third toes of each foot. The ribbons then ascended, twining sinuously around her ankles to hold the shoes in place.

“Yes?” she asked, not nearly so put off by my arrival as she had been before opening the door.

“Those are wonderful sandals,” I said.

Pretty had big lips to begin with, but when she smiled they seemed to swell.

I thought again about the sunlight. It seemed to me that Pretty’s tawdry and ethereal beauty was like that: touchable and untouchable, an artifact wedged in my mind like hunger and fear.

“I got ’em on sale at Gump’s in Frisco,” she said. “What’s your name again?”

“Easy Rawlins.”

“Do I know you, Easy Rawlins?” It was a suggestion as well as a question.

“No. But you know a friend of mine.”

“Your friend send you here?” she speculated.

“No man in his right mind would send another man to you, Miss Smart.”

Her teeth were white and, I noticed, her nails were long, healthy, and clean.

“What man, then?”

“Mouse.”

The woman-child’s terra-cotta face froze as if it were really made of ceramic. She had to think, to wonder what danger I posed. Her power meant nothing next to Mouse’s threat.

“Is that a man’s name?” she asked lamely.

I smiled and shook my head slowly. “There are ten thousand men of every race and age in this city alone,” I said, “who would leave their wives after just seeing your photograph. You know that and I do too.”

The young woman frowned, trying to resist the compliments she craved.

“And,” I continued, “you also know Raymond Alexander just as well.”

“Oh . . . Ray . . . Yes, I know Ray Alexander. I don’t have no nickname for him, though.”

I smiled again.

“What do you want, Mr. Rawlins?”

Her voice had turned cold.

“I’m looking for Ray, and a man I met sent me here to you.”

“What man?”

“It doesn’t matter what man, honey,” I said. “What matters is that he told me that Ray been seen with a man named Pericles Tarr and that Pericles and you were close.”

It’s always a sadness to see a beautiful woman’s eyes turn sour while gazing at you. Even though I wanted to see what she felt, I still lamented the lost opportunity . . . at least a little.

“You’ll have to excuse me, Mr. Rawlins,” she said. “I got to go.”

She backed away from the door, preparing to close it.

“Miss Smart.”

“What?”

“Do you know where Raymond is?”

She closed the door and I allowed myself a chuckle.

I went to the sidewalk and strolled all the way to the corner, where I turned to the left and waited for three minutes. If Pretty had watched me go, she would have returned to the house by then.

“Mister?” a voice asked.

I turned to see an older black man wearing clothes that were once colorful but now had devolved into browns and sad, tinted grays.

“Yeah?”

“Can you help a veteran out?” he asked me.

“What war?”

“The big one back in nineteen sixteen.”

“You kill anybody back then?” I asked him, I don’t know why.

He grinned at me and I noticed he only had three teeth; each one looked as strong and brown as an old oak stump.

A giant cockroach ran a jagged line on the sidewalk between us. The store behind him was closed and boarded up.

I took a twenty-dollar bill from my wallet and gave it to the man. When he saw the denomination, he was shocked.

“Thank you, mister,” he said with emphasis.

“No problem at all, brother,” I said.

He held out a dirty hand, and I shook it. This contact had a cleansing effect upon me.

“I’m’onna take this money and try and do sumpin’ with it, my friend,” the old man said. “I’m’a try and get myself situated, get a job and put down the wine.”

He was looking me in the eye and I knew he meant every word. What difference would it make if he failed? We all failed in the end.