Blonde Faith

37

So what did you do during the war, J.P.?” I asked on the way over to Ogden.

“My family is very rich,” he said. “They went to Switzerland and South America. A few went to our plantations in Mali and Congo.”

“And you?”

“I wanted to fight the Nazis. I was young and I wanted to kill the people who were raping my homeland.”

“Is that what you did?”

Jean-Paul was sitting shotgun, and Jackson was in the backseat. The Frenchman’s dark eyes flashed at me and he wondered. I was wondering too. Here I was speaking to a man whose family was old and rich. They owned plantations in Africa, so they had probably been slavers at one time; they might still be today. . . .

“I worked in a small apartment, making radio codes for the Resistance,” he said. “Our little station was across the street from the Gestapo. I never left my post. For three years I went outside only two times. Once when there was a fire in our building and we feared that the transmitter would be found, and once . . . once down in an alley where a German officer would go to have sex with little girls of twelve and thirteen.”

“What you do down there?” I asked, because I didn’t want the son of slavers to think I couldn’t handle his experience.

“I cut his throat and then I cut off his prick and put it in his mouth.”

I glanced up at Jackson in the rearview mirror. I don’t know what he was thinking, but I remembered a conversation we’d had many years before. I had asked him if he thought that a black man and a white man could ever be friends.

“Hell, yeah,” he’d answered. “Sure can. But you know a white man got to go through sumpin’ ’fore he could call a black man friend. White man got to see the shit an’ smell it too before he could really know a black friend.”

Jean-Paul had smelled the shit.

THE OGDEN HOUSE was a small stucco hutlike structure the color of mottled blood orange. It was perched on a raised lawn at the center of the block.

After a few minutes of deliberation, I decided to walk up the driveway as Jackson and Jean-Paul went toward the front.

They were to ring the bell while I made my way toward the back door on light and fast feet.

There might have been barriers to impede me, a locked gate or a guard dog, for instance, but I took the chance.

The backyard was small and barren. It was a paved patio under the dubious shade of a dying pomegranate tree. There were two rusting poles standing across from each other supporting a clothesline that held two shirts and about half a dozen socks.

I stood to the right of the door with my .38 in my hand. It might seem to the layman that a pistol out and at the ready would have been overkill for a situation like that. But when you enter into the occupation of ambush, you have got to go all the way or you will, sooner or later, regret it.

I didn’t have to wait long. Within sixty seconds the back door opened, allowing a short and stealthy man to step outside.

He was the color of a well-used two-year-old Lincoln penny, stubby in his build, with small, strong hands and a green cap. His pants were black and his short-sleeved shirt was brown.

“Hold it, Perry,” I said, “or I’ll shoot you dead.”

I expected to scare him, to keep him still. He went me one better by falling on his knees and putting his hands up above his head. I went around my prisoner with the gun in evidence. His head was bowed.

“Look up at me, man,” I commanded.

His face and body were a hodgepodge of the true Afro-American experience. There were northern European features to his bulbous nose and cheeks, Slavic influence in his Asiatic eyes, serflike economy to his compact bone structure and wide hands. His hair was kinky and his lips full. He was the jambalaya of the New World, a dozen or more European and African races competing for a piece of his body’s geography.

“Who you?” the frightened man whispered.

“Easy Rawlins.”

“What trouble you got wit’ me, man?”

“They say that Raymond Alexander killed you.”

“No, brother. No. I ain’t dead.”

“But the cops think you are,” I argued. “They after Ray.”

“Mouse know where I am, man. He got me this place.”

“You a lyin’ mothahfuckah,” I said, digging deep into the language of the street.

“I could prove it.”

I waited maybe thirty seconds before speaking. I wanted Pericles Tarr as frightened as possible so that I could get down to the truth quickly and switch back onto the track of Christmas Black.

“Get up.”

INSIDE, JACKSON BLUE, Pretty Smart, and Jean-Paul Villard were sitting in the sunken living room, gabbing like old friends. Pretty was leaning forward in her chair, asking J.P. a question.

She was wearing a blue wrapper now, with sandals that had yellow ribbons to hold them in place. When she saw me, she stood up and said, “You,” with a kind of emphasis that implied I was in trouble. But then she saw the pistol in my hand and decided it was time to sit down.

“Hey, Easy,” Jackson said, “come on in. Pretty was just tellin’ us how she live in this cute li’l house all by herself.”

I was wondering how my accomplices had insinuated themselves into the mercenary young woman’s good graces, but I didn’t have time to consider that for long.

“Yeah,” I said. “She’s been known to stretch the truth in my brief experience with her. She also said she don’t know Mouse.”

“I said I didn’t know that nickname for him,” Pretty said.

“Uh-huh. Listen up. You people stay out here and continue on with your chat. Me and Perry gonna go in the bedroom and figure a few things out.”

Perry glanced at Pretty, looking for some kind of support or help, but she turned her head away.

“Come on,” I said to the dead man.

DOWN THE HALL on the right side was a bedroom with two single beds. The one on the right was tousled. I sat on the made bed and gestured with the pistol to the one that Pretty and Perry had used for sex.

Perry sat down, clasping his hands. He slapped the palms together and rubbed them like an anxious fly.

“So?” I said.

“What you worried ’bout, man?” he whined. “I ain’t dead, so they cain’t hang Ray.”

“They can if they don’t find you,” I said.

“I wouldn’t let ’em take Ray down.”

“Don’t look like that to me.” I was speaking a street dialect that was filled with unspoken threats. This was a language that black people all over the nation knew.

“I give you my word,” Pericles pleaded.

“An’ what you give to Leafa?”

“Leafa?”

“I’m a detective, Pericles. Your wife borrowed three hunnert dollars for me to hunt you down. She told me about when you got ambushed in the war, about how you smeared the blood of your dead friends on your own face to keep from gettin’ killed. She said that she knew you weren’t dead.”

My claim was so shocking that it knocked the fear right off Perry’s face. He was trying to understand how his ploy had failed.

“Who gonna lend Meredith three hunnert dollahs?”

“EttaMae Harris, that’s who. Meredith went to EttaMae and told her that she didn’t believe Ray killed you. She said that she would hire me if Etta lent her the money.”

“What? She borrowed three hunnert dollahs just in case I was alive? She some kinda fool?”

“She’s desperate, man,” I said as if I were an enemy pretending he was a friend. “She ain’t got nuthin’. You gone. They wanna kick her outta that rented house.”

“I got money for her,” Pericles said, squaring his shoulders at the insult to his manhood.

“You do?”

“Thirty thousand dollars.”

My mind went blank for a moment. There wasn’t one Negro out of a thousand that I ever knew who could say that they had held thirty thousand dollars in their hands. As for the ones who could make such a claim, they were all gamblers or criminals.

Mouse.

“Armored car or payroll?” I asked Pericles.

“Say what?”

“You heard me, niggah,” I said, lifting the .38 three inches.

“Payroll.”

“What state?”

“Washington.”

“Are you a fool, Mr. Tarr?”

“What you mean? What you tryin’ to do, man?”

“Lemme tell you,” I said. “You went up there in a blue Pontiac you and Ray bought from Primo. You had regular plates up to Washington, but then you put on stolen ones when you got near the job. Early in the mornin’ you walked into the shop where guards were movin’ the money, two hunnert fifty thousand or more. The guards let you hit ’em in the head, and you and Ray moved all that money into the trunk, went to a motel, put it in boxes, and shipped it down here to this house.”

“Who the fuck are you, man?”

“Have you told Pretty where you got the money?”

He shook his head.

“Because if you do,” I continued, “Ray will kill both’a ya’ll.”

“I ain’t said a word.”

“You told me.”

“You got a gun and you already knew most of it.”

“If you tell anybody, you’ll be dead.”

“I just told Pretty that I won twelve thousand on the trifecta. That’s all I said. I bought her some dresses an’ said I’d take her to New York in style.”

“Gimme the money for Meredith and the kids,” I said.

Perry didn’t even stall. He went to the closet, turned an iron plate in the floor, and pulled out a pillowcase filled with stacks of twenty-dollar bills held together by rubber bands.

“Thirty thousand,” he said. “There’s a letter in there already sealed and addressed to her. I was gonna drop it off when they were asleep tonight.”

“When you leavin’ for New York?” I asked him.

“Monday. We flyin’ first class. We gonna live in Brooklyn. After I get a divorce, we be married.”

I doubted that the nuptials would ever take place, but that was okay. Perry would be better off without Pretty Smart.

“One more question,” I said.

“What?”

“Where’s Raymond?”

He blinked four times.

“No, man,” he said. “I cain’t tell ya that. Ray kill me wherever I was if I told you about that.”

I put the pistol in my pocket and sighed.

“Okay,” I said. “All right. I can see that you really mean it.”

“I cain’t tell ya,” Perry said again.

“I know. So you won’t mind when me and my friends hog-tie you and drag you back to Meredith and all them kids.”

Pericles Tarr was a man of decision despite his weaknesses. He was more afraid of his family’s love than he was of the deadliest man in Los Angeles. He gave me the address in Compton without another word of hesitation.