Blonde Faith er-11 Read online

  Blonde Faith

  ( Easy Rawlins - 11 )

  Walter Mosley

  Copyright © 2007 by Walter Mosley

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Little, Brown and Company

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017

  Visit our Web site at www.HachetteBookGroup.com

  The Little, Brown and Company name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  First eBook Edition: October 2007

  ISBN: 978-0-316-02290-3

  Contents

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  About the Author

  Also by Walter Mosley

  EASY RAWLINS BOOKS

  Devil in a Blue Dress

  A Red Death

  White Butterfly

  Black Betty

  A Little Yellow Dog

  Gone Fishin’

  Bad Boy Brawly Brown

  Six Easy Pieces: Easy Rawlins Stories

  Little Scarlet

  Cinnamon Kiss

  OTHER FICTION

  RL’s Dream

  Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned

  Blue Light

  Walkin’ the Dog

  Fearless Jones

  Futureland

  Fear Itself

  The Man in My Basement

  47

  The Wave

  Fortunate Son

  Fear of the Dark

  Killing Johnny Fry

  NONFICTION

  Workin’ on the Chain Gang

  What Next: A Memoir Toward World Peace

  Life Out of Context

  This Year You Write Your Novel

  In memory of August Wilson

  a cognizant original v5 release november 04 2010

  1

  It’s hard to get lost when you’re coming home from work. When you have a job, and a paycheck, the road is set right out in front of you: a paved highway with no exits except yours. There’s the parking lot, the grocery store, the kids’ school, the cleaner’s, the gas station, and then your front door.

  But I hadn’t had a regular job in a year and here it was two in the afternoon and I was pulling into my driveway wondering what I was doing there. I cut off the engine and then shuddered, trying to fit inside the sudden stillness.

  All morning I had been thinking about Bonnie and what I’d lost when I sent her away. She’d saved my adopted daughter’s life, and I had repaid her by making her leave our home.

  In order to get little Feather into a Swiss clinic, Bonnie had reacquainted herself with Joguye Cham, a West African prince she had met in her work as a flight attendant for Air France. He made a temporary home for Feather, and Bonnie stayed there with her — and him.

  I threw open the car door but didn’t get out. Part of my lethargy was exhaustion from being up for the past twenty-four hours.

  I didn’t have a regular job, but I worked like a dog.

  Martel Johnson had hired me to find his runaway sixteen-year-old daughter, Chevette. He’d gone to the police and they had taken down her information, but two weeks had gone by and they hadn’t turned up a thing. I told Martel that I’d do the footwork for three hundred dollars. On any other transaction he would have tried to dicker with me, giving me a down payment and promising the balance when and if I did the job. But when a man loves his child he will do anything to have her safely home.

  I pocketed the money, spoke to a dozen of Chevette’s high school friends, and then made the rounds of various alleys in the general vicinity of Watts.

  MOST OF THAT TIME I was thinking about Bonnie, about calling her and asking her to come home to me. I missed her milky breath and the spiced teas she brewed. I missed her mild Guyanese accent and our long talks about freedom. I missed everything about her and me, but I couldn’t make myself stop at a pay phone.

  Where I came from — Fifth Ward, Houston, Texas — another man sleeping with your woman was more than reason enough for justifiable double homicide. Every time I thought of her in his arms my vision sputtered and I had to close my eyes.

  My adoptive daughter still saw Bonnie at least once a week. The boy I raised as my son, Jesus, and his common-law wife, Benita Flagg, treated Bonnie as the grandmother of their newborn daughter, Essie.

  I loved them all and in turning my back on Bonnie I had lost them.

  And so, at 1:30 in the morning, at the mouth of an alley off Avalon, when a buxom young thing in a miniskirt and halter top had come up to my window, I rolled down the glass and asked, “How much to suck my dick?”

  “Fifteen dollars, daddy,” she said in a voice both sweet and high.

  “Um,” I stalled. “Up front or after?”

  She sucked a tooth and stuck out a hand. I put three new five-dollar bills across her palm, and she hurried around to the passenger side of my late-model Ford. She had dark skin and full cheeks ready to smile for the man with the money.

  When I turned toward her I detected a momentary shyness in her eyes, but then she put on a brazen look and said, “Let’s see what you got.”

  “Can I ask you somethin’ first?”

  “You paid for ten minutes; you can do whatever you want with it.”

  “Are you happy doing this, Chevette?”

  Her years went from thirty to sixteen in one second flat. She reached for the door, but I grabbed her wrist.

  “I’m not tryin’ to stop you, girl,” I said.

  “Then let me go.”

  “You got my money. All I’m askin’ is my ten minutes,” I said, letting her wrist go.

  Chevette settled down after looking at my other hand and around the front seat for signs of danger.

  “Okay,” she said, staring into the darkness of the floor. “But we stay right here.”

  I lifted her chin with one finger and gazed into her big eyes until she turned away.

  “Martel hired me to find you,” I said. “He’s all broken up. I told him I’d ask you to come home but I wouldn’t drag you there.”

  The woman-child glanced at me then.

  “But I have to tell him where you are . . . and about Porky.”

  “You cain’t tell Daddy ’bout
him,” she pleaded. “One’a them get killed sure.”

  Porky the Pimp had recruited Chevette three blocks away from Jordan High. He was a pock-faced fat man with a penchant for razors, diamond rings, and women.

  “Martel’s your father,” I reasoned. “He deserves to know what happened with you.”

  “Porky’ll cut him. He’ll kill him.”

  “Or the other way around,” I said. “Martel hired me to find you and tell him where you are. That’s how I pay my mortgage, girl.”

  “I could pay you,” she suggested, placing a hand on my thigh. “I got seventy-fi’e dollars in my purse. And, and you said you wanted some company.”

  “No,” I said. “I mean . . . you are a fine young thing, but I’m honest and a father too.”

  The teenager’s face went blank, but I could see that her mind was racing. My appearance had been a possibility that she’d already considered. Not me exactly but some man who either knew her or wanted to save her. After twenty blow jobs a night for two weeks, she’d have to be thinking about rescue — and about the perils that came along with such an act of desperation. Porky could find her anywhere in Southern California.

  “Porky ain’t gonna let me go,” she said. “He cut up one girl that tried to leave him. Cassandra. He cut up her face.”

  She put a hand to her cheek. It wasn’t a pretty face.

  “Oh,” I said, “I’m almost sure the pig man will listen to reason.”

  It was my smile that gave Chevette Johnson hope.

  “Where is he?” I asked.

  “At the back of the barbershop.”

  I took the dull gray .38 from the glove compartment and the keys from the ignition.

  Cupping my hand around the girl’s chin, I said, “You wait right here. I don’t wanna have to look for you again.”

  She nodded into my palm and I went off down the alley.

  TALL AND LANKY LaTerry Klegg stood in the doorway of the back porch of Masters and Broad Barber Shop. He looked like a deep brown praying mantis standing in a pool of yellow cream. Klegg had a reputation for being fast and deadly, so I came up on him quickly, slamming the side of my pistol against his jaw.

  He went down and I thought of Bonnie for a moment. I wondered, as I looked into the startled face of Porky the Pimp, why she had not called me.

  Porky was seated in an old barber’s chair that had been moved out on the porch to make room for a newer model, no doubt.

  “Who the fuck are you?” the pimp said in a frightened alto voice. He was the color of a pig too, a sickly pinkish brown.

  I answered by pressing the barrel of my pistol against his left cheekbone.

  “What?” he squeaked.

  “Chevette Johnson,” I said. “Either you let up or I lay you down right here and now.”

  I meant it. I was ready to kill him. I wanted to kill him. But even while I stood there on the verge of murder, it came to me that Bonnie would never call. She was too proud and hurt.

  “Take her,” Porky said.

  My finger was constricting on the trigger.

  “Take her!”

  I moved my hand three inches to the right and fired. The bullet only nicked the outer earlobe, but his hearing on that side would never be the same. Porky went down to the floor, holding his head and crying out. I kicked him in his gut and walked back down the way I’d come.

  On the way to my car, I passed three women in short skirts and high heels that had come running. They gave me a wide berth, seeing the pistol in my hand.

  “SO WHY’D YOU LEAVE HOME LIKE THAT?” I asked Chevette at the all-night hamburger stand on Beverly.

  She’d ordered a chili burger and fries. I nursed a cream soda.

  “They wouldn’t let me do nuthin’,” she whined. “Daddy want me to wear long skirts and ponytails. He wouldn’t even let me talk to a boy on the phone.”

  Even in a potato sack you could have seen that Chevette was a woman. It had been a long time since she had been a member of the Mickey Mouse Clubhouse.

  I drove her to my office and let her sleep on my new blue sofa while I napped, dreaming of Bonnie, in my office chair.

  In the morning I called Martel and told him everything — except that Chevette was listening in.

  “What you mean, walkin’ the streets?” he asked.

  “You know what I mean.”

  “A prostitute?”

  “You still want her back?” I asked.

  “Of course I want my baby back.”

  “No, Marty. I can bring her back, but what you gonna get is a full-grown woman, not no child, not no baby. She gonna need you to let her grow up. She gonna need you to see what she is. ’Cause it won’t make a difference her bein’ back home if you don’t change.”

  “She my child, Easy,” he said with deadly certainty.

  “The child is gone, Marty. Woman’s all that’s left.”

  He broke down then and so did Chevette. She buried her face in a blue cushion and cried.

  I told Martel I’d call him back. We talked three more times before I got all the way through to him. I told him that it wasn’t worth it for me to bring her back if he couldn’t see her for what she was, if he couldn’t love her for what she was.

  And all the time, I was thinking about Bonnie. I was thinking that I should call her and beg her to come home.

  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.