Blonde Faith er-11 Page 6

  “May I help you?” another woman asked me.

  I had expected a face to go along with the name Goss. So when I saw the lovely young black woman sitting in the dark red chair, I was surprised. I guess it showed on my face.

  “I’m not what you expected?” she asked.

  I tried to speak, but I didn’t want to call her name ugly.

  She smiled and cocked her head to the side.

  Miss Goss was not pretty. Her features were too pronounced and insolent to be pretty. Her high cheekbones and ready-to-be-angry eyes made her beautiful. For the first time in a year, without the aid of sleep or stress, Bonnie completely slipped away from me. But as soon as I realized Bonnie was gone from my mind, she was back again.

  “Do you want something?” Miss Goss asked.

  “No . . . I mean, yes. Brad Knowles said that you could give me some information.”

  Speaking his name, I glanced out at the lot. As if by magic, he looked up at the same time and saw me seeing him.

  The hourglass was set. I smiled, putting love on the back burner for a moment.

  “That’s a lie,” Miss Goss said.

  “What is?”

  “Brad sendin’ you up here. He wouldn’t send anybody up here and certainly not a big black man like you. I’m surprised he didn’t call security.”

  “The man I need to find is named Christmas Black. He bought a red truck from you within the last three weeks.” Pretending to scratch my neck, I got a glimpse of Knowles looking around — for security, no doubt.

  “What’s your name?” she asked.

  “Easy. What’s yours?”

  “Tourmaline.”

  That made me happy. I laughed and decided that the .38 in my pocket would equalize any situation that security might raise.

  “My name is funny?”

  “Quite the contrary,” I said. “It’s a beautiful name. A gem.”

  “I like your name too,” she said.

  I could almost hear the heavy breathing of overweight guards climbing the stairs.

  “Why’s that?” I asked as if I had all the time in the world.

  “It’s got two syllables. I hate one-syllable names. Mel and Brad and all the rest of them: Bill, Max, Tom, Dick — I especially hate Dick — and Harv.”

  “Christmas has two syllables,” I said.

  Tourmaline admired my ability to think for a moment that seemed to last minutes.

  “What’s it worth to you?” she asked.

  “A hundred dollars or dinner at Brentan’s,” I said. “Both.”

  Tourmaline smiled and I saw a light somewhere.

  That’s when my old friend Thunder and a black security guard just as big as he was came out from the entrance to the stairs.

  “Hey, you,” Thunder said.

  I swiveled my head to regard him and his minion.

  Instead of snarling, he gave me a quizzical look.

  But I wasn’t worried about what was on the big man’s mind. I wondered if I could take him down. I decided that it was possible. I’d get hurt in the process, but I was a man trying to impress a woman. I could maybe take him. . . . It didn’t matter, though. With his helper, Thunder would have torn me in two.

  The big white security guard was looking at me, still pondering. I turned my head to see that Tourmaline was frozen, probably holding her breath.

  “Mr. Rawlins,” Thunder said, and I knew that Mouse had had a talk with him too.

  “Hey, Thunder. Listen, I know you gotta kick me out. Just give me one word with the lady here.”

  “Come on, Joe,” Thunder said to his partner.

  Joe showed no emotion, just followed his supervisor down the stairs.

  I turned to Tourmaline, and she said, “I’ll meet you there at eight, Mr. Rawlins.”

  12

  Raymond Alexander had always been a fixture in my life. He was a ladies’ man, a philanderer, a fabulous raconteur, a stone-cold killer, and probably the best friend I ever had; not a friend, really, but a comrade. He was the kind of man who stood there beside you through blood and fire, death and torture. No one would ever choose to live in a world where they’d need a friend like Mouse, but you don’t choose the world you live in or the skin you inhabit.

  There were times that Mouse had stood up for me when I wasn’t in the room or even the neighborhood. That’s why, sometimes, men like Thunder backed away from me, seeing the ghostly image of Ray at my shoulder.

  I lived in a world where many people believed that laws dealt with all citizens equally, but that belief wasn’t held by my people. The law we faced was most often at odds with itself. When the sun went down or the cell door slammed, the law no longer applied to our citizenry.

  In that world a man like Raymond “Mouse” Alexander was Achilles, Beowulf, and Gilgamesh all rolled into one.

  I STOPPED at a phone booth and dialed a number.

  “Library,” a man’s voice answered.

  “Gara, please.” I knew she’d told me to wait for a day, but I also knew my hundred-dollar incentive would get her to move quickly.

  I waited there, smoking a low-tar cigarette. Usually when I smoked I thought about quitting. I knew that my breath had been shortened and that my life would suffer the same fate if I continued. At the end of most smokes I crushed out the ember planning for it to be my last — but not that day. That day Death held no sway over me. She could come and take me; I didn’t care.

  “Hello?” Gara said in a rich tone that I associated only with black women.

  “Any headway?”

  She laughed at my knowledge and said, “Come on by.”

  WHENEVER I SAW Gara she brought to mind deities. She was in that green chair again, fat as Buddha and wise as Ganesh. There was no gender to her divinity, no mortality to her time here on Earth.

  “I got somethin’ for you here, Easy,” she said, indicating a buff-colored folder on the table.

  There were eight sheets of paper inside. The first listed seven names, neatly typed in the top left-hand corner, single-spaced.

  Bruce Richard Morton

  William T. Heatherton

  Glen Albert Thorn

  Xian Lo

  Tomas Hight

  Charles Maxwell Bob

  François Lamieux

  After that, each page gave all the information that Gara had been able to find on the various heroes.

  I scanned the pages. There were lots of abbreviations and acronyms. I didn’t understand most of them, but that didn’t bother me.

  “No photos?” I asked.

  Gara frowned and sucked a tooth.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I didn’t think so.”

  “Don’t show those papers to anybody, Easy. And burn ’em up when you’re through.”

  “Either I’ll burn them or they’ll burn me.”

  ON THE WAY HOME I stopped by the Pugg, Harmon, and Dart Insurance building. It was the newest and tallest glass-and-steel skyscraper to grace the downtown LA skyline. On the top floor was Brentan’s, one of LA’s finest restaurants.

  As I headed for the red elevator whose sole purpose was to bring fine diners to Brentan’s, a guard in a tan short-sleeved shirt and black pants approached me. The pale-faced, slender-armed guard had a holster on his left hip. The leather pouch contained what looked to be a .25-caliber pistol.

  Most white people at that time wouldn’t have given that guard a second thought. I, on the other hand, saw him as potentially life threatening.

  “Sorry,” he said. “No one goes up without a reservation.”

  He was a small white man with eyes of no certain color and bones that would have worked for a hummingbird.

  “This is nineteen sixty-seven,” I reminded him.

  The guard didn’t understand what I meant; his perplexed expression told me that.

  “What I mean,” I said, “is that in this day and age even Negroes can have reservations at nice places. You can’t just look at a man and tell by his suntan whether or not he has a right t
o be somewhere.”

  My tone was light, which made the words even more threatening.

  “Um,” he said in a voice that hovered somewhere between scratchy alto and tentative tenor. “I mean, yes, the restaurant is closed.”

  “You mean to say that the restaurant is not open for business. It isn’t closed. I have an appointment with Hans Green in seven minutes. That’s because the restaurant employees are working.”

  I smiled into the crooked little face that represented every rejection, expulsion, and exclusion I had ever experienced.

  Most of my days went like that. Maybe 15 or 20 percent of the white people I met tried to get a leg up over me. It wasn’t the majority of folks — but it sure felt like it.

  I pressed the button on the elevator while the guard stood there behind me, trying to figure a way around my reasoning. The bell rang and the doors slid open. I got in and the guard joined me.

  I didn’t say a word to him and neither did he speak to me. We rode up those twenty-three floors silently wasting our energies over a feud that should have been done with a hundred years before.

  When the doors came open, the guard scuttled around me, making a beeline for the podium where a young woman was writing in a big reservations log. She was white, with long blond hair and a horsey face. Her high heels made her taller than the guard; her teal gown put her in a completely different class from him.

  The guard talked quickly, and I took my time approaching them. When I finally got there, she was saying, “I’ll go speak to Mr. Green.”

  The guard smirked at me, and again I wondered at all the minutes and hours and days that I’d spent on meaningless encounters like this one.

  I wanted to say to the little white man, “Listen, brother, we’re not enemies. I just want to go up in an elevator like anybody else. You don’t need to worry about me. It’s the men that own this building that are making you poor and uneducated and angry.”

  But I didn’t say anything. He wouldn’t have heard me. I couldn’t free either one of us from our bonds of hatred.

  The young woman returned with another white man behind her. This man was tall, ugly, and impeccably dressed in a dark green suit. He glanced at me and then turned to the guard.

  “Yes?”

  “This man says that he has an appointment with you, Mr. Green.”

  “What is your name?” Green asked the guard.

  “Michaels, sir. But this guy —”

  “Mr. Michaels, how many times a day do I receive people who have made appointments?”

  “I don’t know . . . a few.”

  “And how often do you ride up the elevator humiliating those people?”

  “Um . . .”

  “If a man or woman or child tells you that they have an appointment with me, I’d appreciate it if you would allow them to come here and discharge their business.”

  “I just thought —”

  “No,” Green said, interrupting the excuse, “you did not think. You saw this man, this Negro man, and decided that you would play the hero, protecting a restaurant where you couldn’t afford even a lunch from a person you don’t know a thing about.”

  I felt bad for Michaels, I really did. Green didn’t say another word. Michaels knew enough not to argue. The horsey woman watched her boss with inquisitive eyes. We all stood there for more moments than we should have. I don’t know about them, but I felt that I had somehow lost my way in life, ending up on that high floor embroiled in a conflict that made no sense.

  Michaels finally got the message and went back toward the elevator.

  “Mr. Rawlins,” Hans Green said, “it’s so nice to see you.”

  We shook hands as the young woman watched, trying to understand what was happening.

  “Come back to my office,” Green was saying.

  As I followed him, I smiled and nodded at the hostess.

  How could she know that eighteen months before, Hans Green was being framed for embezzling money from the last restaurant he worked for, Canelli’s. Melvin Suggs, an LAPD detective, was a friend of his and he passed my card along. I took a job as a dishwasher at the restaurant and discovered that the chef and Green’s wife were cooking the books, and each other, at Hans’s expense.

  THE BIG WINDOW of the restaurant manager’s office looked all the way from downtown to the Pacific. I liked sitting there. The only thing I would have liked better was Bonnie back in my arms.

  Green’s ears and nose were way too big for his face. Red and blue veins had risen to the surface of his cheeks. His teeth were too small, and his thin lips were loose and flaccid. He was a caricature of a man.

  “What can I do for you, Easy?” he asked when we were both seated and I had turned down a drink.

  “I’m coming tonight with a very special woman. I’d like a good seat and perfect service.”

  “What time?”

  “Eight.”

  “Done. On the house.”

  “I can pay for it.”

  “If Michaels is any indication, you pay for it every day of your life.”

  13

  By the time I got home, I had plotted and abandoned six different ways to get to Bonnie and convince her to come back to me. I considered everything from just apologizing to buying her a house in Baldwin Hills where we could start life anew. I even flirted with the notion of killing Joguye Cham. . . . That was when I understood that I was truly, madly in love.

  Frenchie was waiting on the other side of the door this time, growling and baring his teeth. He snapped at me when I crossed the threshold into my own home.

  “Hi, Dad,” Feather said, coming out of her room. Easter Dawn came after her, wearing a pink kimono and carrying an ornately crocheted purse that looked something like a briefcase with a red silken shoulder strap.

  “Hey,” I said to the children, the crush of melancholy just below the surface of my greeting.

  Feather stared at me a moment and then turned to the tiny child.

  “E.D., go into my room and set up all the dolls the way you did for me so Dad can see them.”

  The child’s eyes glittered. “Okay,” she said excitedly, and then she ran for the back of the house, the shoulder-strap briefcase flapping at her side.

  It was the first time I’d seen Feather manipulate a situation with a third person in order to get her way. She looked intently at my face and came up to me, putting her hands on either side of my head.

  This gesture made me very uncomfortable. It wasn’t the father-and-daughter relationship I’d had with Feather for close to a dozen years. She was almost a woman and I was nearly a man.

  “We have to talk,” she said.

  I wanted to find the child in her, to tell her a joke or tickle her. I wanted to dismiss her serious stare, but I could not.

  I sat down on the love seat in the small room that divided the living room from the kitchen, and she sat there beside me.

  “Juice and I are going to Bonnie’s wedding,” she said.

  “So I’ve heard.”

  “We have to do it,” Feather continued. “Bonnie is as much our mother as you are our father.”

  Did she find you two in the street like I did? Would she have brought you to live with her with no father to help her? Would she have risked her life to save you? I thought these things, but I did not say them. Bonnie was a wonderful woman and of strong mind. She might have done more than I could have imagined. As far as I knew, her affair with Joguye was to ensure that Feather had the medical treatment that saved her life.

  “I know you love her,” I said. “And I would never stand in the way of that.”

  “And you should come too,” Feather said. “She needs you to tell her it’s all right.”

  I don’t think that the experience of losing my mother at the tender age of seven hurt as much as Feather’s request. I looked up with a blank expression on my face and absolutely nothing in my mind.

  “She has to move on, Daddy. She can’t wait forever for a man who doesn’t ha
ve forgiveness in his heart.”

  I’d been called a nigger many times in my life. It was always a painful, enraging experience. But it was nothing compared to the simple truths that Feather was speaking. I wanted her to be quiet. I wanted to stand up and go into my bedroom, take out my .38, and just start shooting: the mirror, the wall, the floor under my feet.

  “She waited for you to call,” Feather continued. “She told me that she loved you more than any other man. She knew what happened with her and Uncle Joguye was wrong, but she got all confused when she was watching him make those doctors work on me. She wanted to come back home, Daddy, but you wouldn’t let her.”

  Maybe, I thought, there was a God. He wasn’t some gigantic and powerful deity but just the vessel of all knowledge and therefore a judge of truth. Now and then he inhabited some person and made them say the words that had gone unsaid. At this moment Feather was the expression of that God. He was using her to condemn me for my wrongdoing.

  “You can’t expect us to choose between you,” Feather was saying. “We can’t help what happened.”

  I wanted to say that I understood what she was telling me and that it was true. I opened my mouth and a sound came out, but it was not words. It was a small mewling utterance, something that had never before come from me or anyone else I’d heard.

  When Feather heard this muted cry, a look of shock crossed her face. She was my daughter again. I could see in her alarm all the things she was feeling.

  Feather had been mad at me for making Bonnie leave our house. She identified with Bonnie’s broken heart and her need for love in her life. Now she felt guilty about going to the wedding and angrier still that I would feel betrayed about her going.

  I was her father. I never felt pain or weakness. I never got tired or brokenhearted. I was invulnerable and could therefore hear her anger without danger of being hurt.

  But the moment that sound came from me, Feather understood the pain that had been festering inside me, the pain I had never shared with her.

  She put her arms around me and said, “I’m sorry, Daddy. I’m so sorry.”

  “It’s okay, honey,” I said in constricted little words. “I know you love both of us. I know I was wrong. You do whatever you feel is right, and I will love you no matter what.”