Blonde Faith (4 page)

He made a face that replied,
But it’s true.

“Mr. Rawlins.”

“Captain.”

“Tell me about this Ginny Tooms.” The smile was gone and the MPs were in position. He might as well have said,
Either you talk now or after we kick the shit out of you.

I could take the punishment, but I saw no reason that I should.

“White woman,” I said. “Twenties, maybe thirty. Pretty, I think.”

“You think?”

“She wore sunglasses and had a blue bandanna wrapped around her head. Might’a been scarred up under all that for all I know.”

“Blond?”

“I couldn’t tell. Maybe she was bald. Nice figure, though. She couldn’t hide that.”

The smile returned. Clarence was beginning to enjoy our conversation.

“Her address?”

I shook my head. “She paid with fifteen twenty-dollar bills and promised to call me every other day. The perfect woman as far as I’m concerned.”

That was the standoff. I’d told my lies and he had told his. His men were in position, but there was no real reason to punish me. Everything I’d said was plausible.

I looked around the room and saw what looked like a bumblebee hanging upside down on the ceiling over the decorated soldier’s head.

“Can I see some identification, Mr. Rawlins?” Captain Miles asked.

I kept my PI’s license in my shirt pocket for easy access. I took this out and handed it over like a good soldier. The officer studied it. The black-and-white photo of my smiling face and the signature of the deputy police commissioner, my nemesis, Gerald Jordan, were enough to prove everything I’d said.

“Not too many Negro detectives in Los Angeles,” he said to the card. Then he looked at me and grinned.

“Is that all, Captain?”

“No. No, it’s not.”

“What else do you want? You know I got a job too.”

The bumblebee was in the same position. I found myself hoping that the creature would come to life and startle the soldiers. I only needed a moment to get to my gun, which was nestled at the belt line at the back of my pants. I was feeling the need for an equalizer.

“General King is in charge of some very sensitive operations, both in this country and abroad. He reports to the White House. More than once I’ve answered his phone and the president was on the other end of the line.”

“What that got to do with a niggah like me or Christmas Black for that matter?”

“We need to find Black,” Miles said with a reluctantly straight face. “We must find him.”

“I’m not standin’ in your way, brother.”

“How did you locate this apartment?”

“Tooms had been here,” I said.

“Then why didn’t she come here herself?”

“She told me she had only been to his place once, at night. The only thing she remembered was that there was a building across the street with a giant tire on the roof. The minute she said that, I knew the address.”

“So why not just tell her that?” Miles asked.

“You see, man,” I replied airily, “you a niggah like me, but you been in the army too long. They buy your clothes, your food, give you a bed, a car, and a gun. You think you all bad ’cause you in the biggest gang in the world, so you don’t understand when a man be runnin’ aftah a dollar.

“If I had just said to Ginny that I knew where the address was, she’d’a parted with twenty dollars, not three hundred. You got to milk a client just like you would a cow. Ain’t no PX with bottles’a cream out here, just us workin’ niggahs is all.”

If I tied it any tighter someone might have strangled on that lie. My only problem was keeping the smug satisfaction off my face so that Clarence wouldn’t know how good I thought I was.

“Stand down,” Miles said to his men.

The MPs relaxed and took a step back.

“What have you found here, Mr. Rawlins?”

“A cleaner house than I could imagine and one busted picture frame.”

“What was in that?”

“Nuthin’.”

I couldn’t have looked into a woman’s eyes as deeply as Miles stared into mine — not without passion growing out of it.

“We need to find Christmas Black,” he said with a smirk.

“You said that.”

For a minute there the four men in that room might have been manikins we were so still.

“Are you committed to this woman?”

“I ain’t give her no ring or nuthin’.”

“Will you take on the job of finding Christmas Black for the United States government?” he asked.

Life doesn’t travel in a straight line like we think it does. I was positive that these men were the reason Christmas had left his adopted daughter with me. My intention was to lead them on in hopes of finding out what had happened to my friend. But my mind took that information and imagined me coming home over a year ago and telling Bonnie about my adventure. She had been the first person I could share my thoughts with.

The pain that came with the reverie almost sank me. I couldn’t speak because I knew the sob in my chest would come out with whatever words I spoke.

“Mr. Rawlins,” Miles prodded.

I held on to my silence ten seconds more and then said, “You got anything against Miss Tooms gettin’ a line on him?”

“Do you care?”

“I like it when people tell their friends that I did the job they paid me for, yeah.”

“No problem,” the black captain said. “Matter of fact, I’d like to meet this Ginny Tooms.”

“How come?”

“Maybe she knows something about what Black’s been doing.”

“Stickin’ his black dick in her white underage sister is what,” I said, and Miles actually laughed.

“I’ll give you seventy-five dollars,” he said, “as a retainer.”

“You’ll give me three hundred dollars for a week’s worth of lookin’,” I said. “That’s my fee. That’s what everybody else pays. Uncle Sam ain’t no exception.”

“You already been paid for this.”

“Three hunnert dollars or you an’ General King could go jump in a lake.”

I was absolutely sure that Clarence Miles had murdered men with that mirthless grin on his face. He reached into his back pocket and came out with a large secretary-type wallet. He counted out three crisp new one-hundred-dollar bills and handed them to me. It was then I knew that whatever he was into, it was illegal.

Honest government men on official business wouldn’t hand out hundred-dollar bills. Since the day it was founded, the army hadn’t given out that high a denomination without a raft of accompanying paperwork.

I took the money, though, and put it in the pocket with the picture of the woman I had christened Ginny Tooms.

“How do I get in touch?” I asked my bent employer.

“What’s your phone number?”

I told him. He wrote it down on a slip of paper in his big wallet.

“We’ll call you tomorrow morning at nine hundred hours,” he said. Then he did an about-face and walked between his sentries. They executed somewhat less precise turns and followed him out.

It took them less than ten seconds to vacate the premises completely.

They might have been criminals, but they had been soldiers at some point along the way.

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.