Blonde Faith

2

It only took me ten minutes or so to climb out of the car.

Walking across the lawn, I heard the little yellow dog barking. Frenchie hated me and loved Feather. We had something in common there. I was happy to hear his canine curses through the front door. It was the only welcome I deserved.

When I came into the house the seven-pound dog began screaming and snapping at my shoes. I squatted down to say hello. This gesture of truce always made Frenchie run away.

When I looked up to watch him scamper down the hall toward Feather’s room, I saw the little Vietnamese child Easter Dawn.

“Hello, Mr. Rawlins,” the petite eight-year-old said.

“E.D. Where’d you come from, girl?” I looked around the room for her village-killing father.

“Vietnam, originally,” the cogent child replied.

“Hi, Daddy,” Feather said, coming from around the corner.

She was only eleven but seemed much older. She’d grown a foot and a half in little more than a year and she had a lean, intelligent face. Feather and Jesus spoke to each other in fluent English, French, and Spanish, which somehow made her conversation seem more sophisticated.

“Where’s Juice?” I asked, using Jesus’s nickname.

“He and Benny went to get Essie from Benny’s mom.” She hesitated a moment and then added, “I stayed home with E.D. today because I didn’t know what else to do.”

I was trying to figure it all out while standing there.

My son had agreed to stay with Feather while I was out looking for Chevette. He and Benita didn’t make much money and had only a one-room studio apartment in Venice. When they babysat they could sleep in my big bed, watch TV, and cook on a real stove.

But Jesus had a life, and Feather was supposed to be in school. Easter Dawn Black had no business in my house at all.

The child wore black cotton pants and an unadorned red silk jacket cut in an Asian style. Her long black hair was tied with an orange bow and hung down the front, over her right shoulder.

“Daddy brought me,” Easter said, answering the question in my eyes.

“Why?”

“He told me to tell you that I had to stay here for a while visiting with Feather. . . .”

My daughter knelt down then and hugged the smaller child from behind.

“. . . He said that you would know how long I had to stay. Do you?”

“You want some coffee, Daddy?” Feather asked.

My adopted daughter had a creamy brown complexion that reflected her complicated racial heritage. Staring into her generous face, I realized for the twentieth time that I could no longer predict the caprice or depth of her heart.

It was with the sadness of this growing separation that I said, “Sure, baby. Sure.”

I picked up Easter and followed Feather into the kitchen. There I sat in a dinette chair with the doll-size child on my lap.

“You been having a good time with Feather?” I asked.

Easter nodded vehemently.

“Did she make you lunch?”

“Tuna fish and sweet potato pie.”

Looking up into my eyes, Easter relaxed and leaned against my chest. I hadn’t known her and her father, Christmas Black, for long, but the confidence he had in me had influenced the child’s trust.

“So you and your daddy drove here?” I asked.

“Uh-huh.”

“And was it just you and him in the car?”

“No,” she said. “There was a lady with yellow hair.”

“What was her name?”

“Miss . . . something. I don’t remember.”

“And was this lady up in your house in Riverside?”

“We moved away from there,” Easter said, a little wistfully.

“Moved where?”

“Behind a big blue house across the street from the building with a real big tire on the roof.”

“A tire as big as a house?”

“Uh-huh.”

By then the coffee was beginning to percolate.

“Mr. Black dropped by this morning,” Feather said. “He asked me if Easter Dawn could stay for a while and I said okay. Was that okay, Daddy?”

Feather always called me Daddy when she didn’t want me to get angry.

“Is my daddy okay, Mr. Rawlins?” Easter Dawn asked.

“Your father is the strongest man in the world,” I told her with only the least bit of hyperbole. “Whatever he’s doin’, he’ll be just fine. I’m sure he’s gonna call me and tell me what’s going on before the night is through.”

FEATHER MADE HOT CHOCOLATE for her and E.D. We sat around the dinette table like adults having an afternoon visit. Feather talked about what she’d learned concerning American history, and little Easter Dawn listened as if she were a student in class. When we’d visited enough to make Easter feel at home, I suggested that they go in the backyard to play.

I CALLED SAUL LYNX, the man who had introduced me to Easter’s father, but his answering service told me that my fellow private detective was out of town for a few weeks. I could have called his home, but if he was on a case he wouldn’t have known anything about Christmas.

“ALEXANDER RESIDENCE,” a white man answered on the first ring of my next call.

“Peter?”

“Mr. Rawlins. How are you, sir?”

The transformation of Peter Rhone from salesman to personal manservant to EttaMae Harris would always be astonishing to me. He lost the love of his life in the Watts riots, a lovely young black woman named Nola Payne, and pretty much gave up on the white race. He moved onto the side porch of EttaMae’s house and did chores for her and her husband, Raymond “Mouse” Alexander.

Rhone worked part-time as a mechanic for my old friend Primo in a garage in East LA. He was learning a trade and contributing to the general pot for the upkeep of Etta’s home. Peter was paying penance for the death of Nola Payne because in some way he saw himself as the cause of her demise.

“Okay,” I said. “All right. How’s the garage workin’ out?”

“I’m cleaning spark plugs now. Pretty soon Jorge is going to show me how to work with an automatic transmission.”

“Huh,” I grunted. “Raymond around there?”

“I better get Etta for you,” he said, and I knew there was a problem.

“Easy?” Etta said into the phone a moment later.

“Yeah, babe.”

“I need your help.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, because I loved Etta as a friend and I had once loved her as I did Bonnie. If she hadn’t been mad for my best friend, we’d’ve had a whole house full of children by that time.

“The police lookin’ for Raymond,” she said.

“For what?” I asked.

“Murder.”

“Murder?”

“Some fool name’a Pericles Tarr went missin’, an’ the cops here ev’ry day askin’ me what I know about it. If it wasn’t for Pete I think they might’a drug me off to jail just for bein’ married to Ray.”

None of this was a surprise to me. Raymond lived a life of crime. The diminutive killer was connected to a whole network of heist men that operated from coast to coast, and maybe beyond that. But for all that, I couldn’t imagine him involved in a petty murder. It wasn’t that Mouse had somehow moved beyond killing; just the opposite was true. But in recent years his blood had cooled, and he rarely lost his temper. If he was to kill somebody nowadays, it would have been in the dead of night, with no witnesses or clues left behind to incriminate him.

“Where is Mouse?” I asked.

“That’s what I need to find out,” Etta said. “He went missin’ the day before this Tarr man did. Now he ain’t around and the law’s all ovah me.”

“So you want me to find him?” I asked, regretting that I had called.

“Yes.”

“What do I do then?”

“I’m worried, Easy,” Etta said. “These cops is serious. They want my baby under the jailhouse.”

I hadn’t heard Etta call Ray my baby in many years.

“All right,” I said. “I’ll find him and I’ll do what I have to to make sure he’s okay.”

“I know this ain’t for free, Easy,” Etta told me. “I’m’a pay you for it.”

“Uh-huh. You know anything about this Tarr?”

“Not too much. He’s married and got a whole house full’a chirren.”

“Where does he live?”

“On Sixty-third Street.” She recited the address, and I wrote it down, thinking that I had found more trouble in one day than most men come across in a decade.

I had called Mouse because he and Christmas Black were friends. I had hoped to find help, not give it. But when you live a life among desperate men and women, any door you open might have Pandora written all over the other side.