Blonde Faith

35

I left the veteran and went back to my car down the street from Perry Tarr’s girlfriend’s house. For the first five minutes, I sat there trying to figure out how I could read and watch her driveway at the same time. It was a problem I always thought about when on a stakeout. But the answer was ever the same: I could not read and watch at the same time. Whenever I came to this understanding, it left me feeling a little sour.

I sat there in my resentful contemplation, hoping that someone would come to or leave the pretty girl’s house soon. Unable to distract myself with reading and not wanting to hear any more music, I started thinking about the woman I’d just met.

Pretty Smart was not Bonnie or Faith or EttaMae Harris. She wasn’t the kind of woman that could move me to put my life on the line. But, I thought, wouldn’t life be better with a woman like Pretty? Wouldn’t it be fine to be with a woman who made your blood run like a teenager’s but who didn’t make you feel like you might die when she was gone?

This line of thinking was an appealing distraction. The idea of beauty without consequence and love that was purely physical allowed my heart a brief span of elation. I didn’t imagine making love with her. It was enough just to have a brief conversation and to see her smile.

While I was having these thoughts, a navy blue Volkswagen backed out of Pretty’s driveway. She was an excellent driver. She backed into the street in a tight arc and drove past my car on some mission that my visit no doubt precipitated. I turned my head as she drove past, but it probably wasn’t necessary. Nobody looks at faces in Los Angeles. In LA people are too busy making hay because the sun never seems to go down.

I COULD HAVE TRIED to follow the dark blue automobile, but in my experience a vehicular tail rarely works. Traffic lights turn against you; bad, sloppy, and drunk drivers cut you off; and even though people don’t look at faces in LA, they certainly keep a sharp eye on their rearview mirrors. You need at least two cars for an adequate tail. With one man, you’re much better off trying B and E while the subject is off in her car.

I knocked at her door again. There was no loud music and no answer.

I went around the back. The windows were all shut. The white paint on the back door was cracking and growing a thin veneer of olive-hued lichen. The blades of grass were long and bright. A bushy pine hid the backyard from view. All of this along with the silence boded well for my kind of business. But the best sign was that Pretty Smart’s back door was unlocked and ajar. If I were dealing with Christmas Black, I would have suspected a trap, but I knew that Miss Smart paid too much attention to her own beauty to be distracted by locks and burglars. After all, her wealth was her beauty, and she carried it around with her.

The back porch was fitted with a washer and dryer, but the kitchen that led from there didn’t even have a pot to warm her leftover takeout meals. The tiny living room was furnished with a very large white sofa that had deep cushions and a high back. There were a dozen or more pillows of various pastel hues on the couch. Before the bed-size divan sat a big walnut coffee table that supported a pink portable TV and a brand-new hi-fi system. The carpet was white shag. Three huge abstract paintings hung from as many walls. The furnishings and decorations were made for a much larger room. It felt as if a giant had moved his furnishings into a room made for a pygmy.

Pretty’s bedroom was surprisingly spartan. A single bed with a metal filing cabinet instead of a dresser or chest of drawers. There were shelves in her closet that held her hose and bras, garters and silk panties. There were five dresses hanging from a rod; three of these still had price tags on them.

The filing cabinet had three deep drawers and a Polaroid camera sitting on top. The back door had not been locked, but the filing cabinet was. I found a screwdriver under the sink in the bathroom and twisted the keyhole until the lock snapped off.

There were seven hanging files in the top drawer, the first of which was labeled MEN. Inside this folder was an eight-by-eleven photo album, maybe forty pages long. Each page held six Polaroids of men’s erections. Black men, white men, men who were neither black nor white. Some were young, others old, a few were so fat that they had to hold their bellies up off their hard cocks. More than a couple were slick and wet, and one was in the middle of an ejaculation.

It was no surprise that Pretty had locked her files away. I wondered how she got the men to pose for her. Probably she said that she wanted to remember their manhood, their night of loving.

“If you’re not here, I wanna remembah you inside me,” she might have said.

The other files kept her finances, her modeling résumé, her secretarial résumé, her high school transcripts, her date calendar, and, finally, her phone diary.

Perry Tarr’s home address and phone number had been crossed out and replaced with a new address on Ogden between Eighteenth Street and Airdrome.

I wrote the address on a blank piece of paper that I carried around in my wallet for just that purpose. After that I snapped off the next two locks on the filing cabinet and rummaged around her jewelry, cash cache, checkbook, bankbooks, and savings bonds. I took the cash, about one hundred and eighty dollars, her checkbook, and two rings that looked to be valuable. Then I took the erection album and put it on her bed, gaping open.

I did all that to make it seem as if I were some teenage burglar instead of a man on the trail of Perry Tarr. She might still guess at the identity of her robber, but that was all I could do after breaking the lock on the first drawer.

I was about to leave when I noticed the one girly part of her austere sleeping quarters. It was a pink princess phone on the floor next to the head of her bed.

I should have left, but instead I picked up the receiver and dialed a number.

“Marvel’s Used Cars,” she said.

“Can we have dinner tonight?”

“Easy?”

“Uh-huh.”

“I can’t tonight, Easy,” Tourmaline said. “I have a date. Maybe this weekend?”

“That would be just as good,” I said, thinking my tone was light and airy.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“Nothing. Why? Do I sound like something’s wrong?”

“You sound like it looks when a girl is turning her head away.”

“A girl?”

“Where are you right now, Easy Rawlins?” Tourmaline Goss asked.

It was a crack in the dam, a fissure I felt all the way down to my childhood. Tourmaline was that perpetual Black Woman and I was the forever child. Her tone paralyzed me there on the party girl’s military-style bed. I could see the bushy pine out Pretty’s small window. For all I knew, Pretty had gone to the pharmacy to get aspirin for the headache I had given her. She might have been on the way back at that very moment.

“I just broke into this house,” I said. “Somebody said that a friend’a mine killed somebody, but I knew this woman could prove that the man who’s supposed to be dead is still alive. . . .”

For the next hour and a half I told Tourmaline most of the important moments of my life. I told her about Mouse, whom she’d heard about, and Jackson and Etta and Bonnie. I told her all that I had been through up to the moment I threw Bonnie out of my house. I didn’t mention any killings or murders outside the one Mouse was blamed for. That would have been unfair to an innocent university student.

Tourmaline listened to me patiently even though she was at work. People interrupted her now and then, but she always got back on the line and said, “Go on.”

I had hoped the confession would relieve me, but instead it brought on a sense of emptiness. Laying my life out like that made me see that I had wasted my potential on misguided pride and rage at strangers.

“I should go,” I said at last, “before the young woman comes home.”

“What time are you going to pick me up?” Tourmaline asked.