The glass had been cracked as if from a fall. Maybe, I thought, Easter had set it up on top of the cushions to study the woman who was a friend of her father’s, a woman who looked like a movie star and had also earned the right to be framed and set up in their home. After a while, Easter began horsing around and the couch came away from the wall, allowing the picture to fall and the glass to break.
All of this was very important to me. Christmas Black was an immaculate and obsessive man. All other things being equal, he would have checked behind the sofa before decamping. This meant that he was in a hurry when he left. That hidden picture told me that the placid and clean apartment had been the scene of fear and maybe even violence.
I removed the picture from its broken frame and put it in my pocket. I put the frame back where I found it and pressed the sofa against the wall in keeping with the order of the Black home.
I looked around again, hoping that there was something else that might help me discover more about Christmas and his sudden disappearance. It was hard to concentrate because there was a sense of delight that kept interfering. I was almost unconsciously overjoyed at being distracted from Bonnie and her upcoming marriage.
Thinking about Christmas demanded that I keep focused, because if he got spooked there was definitely death somewhere in the vicinity.
6
I was sitting on that tan couch, wavering between giddiness and the heavy sense of impending violence, when the door came open. Three uniformed men entered. Soldiers. A captain followed by two MPs. The military policemen wore holsters that carried .45-caliber pistols. They were white and massive. The captain was smaller, black, and, after a moment of surprise, smiling. It wasn’t a friendly smile, but it seemed to be a natural expression for this man.
I thought about grabbing my gun, but I couldn’t find an excuse for such an action. In my heart I was desperate and confused, but it was my mind that I chose to follow.
“Hello,” the black captain said. “Who are you?”
“Is this your house, man?” I asked as I stood up.
The captain’s empty grin grew larger.
“Is it yours?” he asked.
“I’m a private detective,” I said. It always gave me a little thrill to say that; made me feel like I was on a movie set and Humphrey Bogart was about to make an entrance. “I’ve been hired to find a man named Christmas Black.”
I wondered if there were women who were fooled by that officer’s smile. He was dark skinned like me and deadly handsome. But his bright eyes, I was sure, had never seen into another human being’s heart. He hoarded the coldness of a natural predator behind those deep brown eyes.
“And have you found him?”
“Who’s askin’?”
The MPs fanned out on either side of their commanding officer. I wasn’t going to get out of there by force of arms.
“Excuse my rudeness,” the smiling predator said. “Clarence Miles. Captain Clarence Miles.”
“And what are you doing here, Captain?” I asked, wondering what Mouse or Christmas might have done if they were in my situation.
“I asked you a question first,” he said.
“I’m on the job, Captain, and my military years are far behind me. I don’t have to answer to you and I sure don’t have to tell you my client’s business.”
“Once a soldier, always a soldier,” he said, glancing at the man to his right.
I noticed that this MP had three medals over his left breast. They were red, red, and bronze. He was a younger white man with shocking gray eyes.
“They say that about niggers too,” I said, to see if I could get a rise.
But Captain Miles had only smiles for me.
“What’s your name, Detective?”
“Easy Rawlins. I work out of an office down on Central. A woman hired me to find Mr. Black. Paid me three hundred dollars for a week’s worth of walking.”
“What woman?”
I hesitated then, but not from uncertainty. I knew what I wanted from the captain and I also had a notion of how I could get it.
“Ginny Tooms,” I said. “She told me that Black was the father of her seventeen-year-old sister’s child. They want him to come back and do the right thing.”
“Sounds like they want to put him in prison,” Miles speculated.
I shrugged, saying without words that it wasn’t my business what a man with a foolish dick got himself into. I just needed the three hundred dollars, that’s why I was there.
“What’s this Miss Tooms look like?” he asked.
“Why you wanna know? I mean, you said you was lookin’ for Black.” My dialect deepened as I talked. I knew from experience that Negro career soldiers looked down on their uneducated brothers. And in underestimating me, Miles might slip up and tell me something he didn’t think I would understand.
“I am,” Miles said. “But anybody that knows anything about him might help us.”
“What do you want with him, Captain?” I asked.
The MPs were moving closer. Bonnie entered my mind for a second. I thought that no beating could hurt me more than the announcement of her upcoming marriage.
Miles pretended to waver then. We were made for each other, him and me, like the Tyrannosaurus rex and triceratops dinosaur figurines that Jesus loved to play with when he was a boy.
“Have you come across the name of General Thaddeus King in your investigation, Mr. Private Detective?”
I pretended to ponder this question and then shook my head.
“He’s our boss,” Miles confided. “Black’s too. Lately he’d sent Christmas out on a delicate assignment. That was three weeks ago, and nobody’s heard from him since.”
“What kind of assignment?”
“I don’t know.”
I made a face that said I didn’t believe him.
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 fe
eling 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.
7
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.
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