“He’d gone crazy.”
“Crazy from what?”
“I don’t know, Easy,” she whined. “I don’t know.”
“And did he call you at school?”
“Yes.”
“And you went to meet him?”
There was an explosion of laughter somewhere in the restaurant.
“No,” she said. “He said that he was going to come down to the school to get me and Pharaoh. He said that he would pull me right out of the classroom if I didn’t come. You know he would have done it. So I ran. I’m sorry that I left Pharaoh with you but I was scared that if Holly found me with him he would have done what he said.”
“And so then you went to go’n tell Mr. Preston about this?”
“How did… I mean, yes. I went to tell Bill, because I was scared. You had already helped me with Pharaoh. I couldn’t ask for any more than that.”
“Uh-huh.” I was thinking that Holland wasn’t the only one to ever hate that dog. “So why are you callin’ me if you got so much trouble? We don’t even know each other.”
“Don’t be like that, Easy. I meant yesterday. You’re the first person in a long time that I feel safe with.”
“What about Mr. Preston?” I asked.
She paused for a moment and then said, very softly, “I called you, not him.”
“Because you feel safe with me?”
“Yes.”
“But what about me?” I asked.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, am I safe? The cops are on me already. I asked where you were gone to and now the cops wanna talk to me.”
“You didn’t tell them about Pharaoh, did you?”
“No, I didn’t. But I woulda told’em if I didn’t think that they’d throw me together with you. For all I know you’d tell ’em that I killed your husband ’cause we had a roll on the desktop.”
She had no answer to that.
“Don’t you have anything to say?” I asked her.
“I don’t know what to say, except that if you don’t help me I don’t know what I’ll do.”
“Hold up, Mrs. Turner. I don’t even know you. I don’t give a damn about you or your husband an’ I surely don’t care ’bout that damn dog—”
Pharaoh jumped to his feet and yelped once. I swatted him off the couch and he went running, probably to look for my other slipper.
“Was that him?” Idabell asked. “Was that Pharaoh?”
“Yeah, but I can’t put him on right now. He had to go to the bathroom.”
Feather shifted peacefully, putting her arm up on my lap.
“I know you’re angry, Easy,” she said. I was sorry that I’d told her my name. “It’s not your problem, you’re right. But I still need you to do one thing for me.”
“What’s that?”
“Could you bring me my dog? I’m going to leave L.A. I’m going to leave the country. All I need is Pharaoh.”
“That dog’ll mark you,” I said. “You’d be better off leavin’ him somewhere and having him sent on later.”
And I didn’t feel guilty either. If Ida was running that meant she thought the police could get her on something. If she ran their attention would concentrate on her. But if they got frustrated and wanted to give me heat, and if I knew where she was — well then…
“I couldn’t live without my little man, Easy. He’s all I have. Bring him to me. Please.”
“If I was going to give’im to you when would you want him?”
“Tonight. Late though. I can’t get to the place I’m staying until late.”
“How late?”
“Not before eleven.”
“Where?”
She gave me an address on Hoagland Street, off of Adams Boulevard. It was a house and not an apartment. She promised that she’d be there by twelve.
So did I.
“Daddy, where’s Frenchie?” Feather had been sleeping with the top of her head nuzzled up against my thigh for nearly half an hour. I didn’t have anywhere to go and no place that I’d rather be.
“He ran off in the back somewhere,” I said. “But the woman who owns him called. She wants him back. You know she really loves him.”
I wanted to be able to say the next day that I’d told her about returning Pharaoh to Idabell. She might get upset but at least she wouldn’t think that I was doing things behind her back.
She sat up pushing her little hands against my chest and asked, “What was my momma like, Daddy?”
“Oh,” I crooned in a low voice. I lifted her and held her in my lap. “She was light-skinned and a very beautiful dancer. I only ever met her once,” I lied. “That’s when she asked me to take care of you. She was flying away to Europe somewhere to dance for somebody really important but the plane crashed and she was lost out there in the ocean.”
It was a story that we’d made up together over the years.
Most of it was true. Her mother was actually white. And she was a dancer, of the exotic variety. I never knew who Feather’s father was; her mother might not have known either. As a matter of fact I had never even met her mother. I found Feather after the police had forced me to help them catch her mother’s killer.
“Was my real daddy on that plane too?”
“Uh-huh.”
Feather nestled her head against my chest.
“Did they love me a whole lot?”
“More than anything, honey. More than anybody. That’s why they asked me to take care of you forever if anything happened, because they loved you so much.”
Feather went to sleep with the declaration of love burrowing down into her dreams. I took her to her room and undressed her. I placed her in the high bed that she wanted so much and hung all of her clothes in the stand-up closet that I’d built for her.
A girl’s voice answered my call to Mofass. “Hello?”
“Jewelle?”
She hesitated for a second and then said, “Hi, Mr. Rawlins. How are you?”
“Fine, JJ. Just fine. Mofass there?”
“Uncle Willy up in the bed. He’s sick.”
My real estate agent, Mofass, had emphysema and surprised the doctors with every breath he drew.
“I got to talk to him, honey.”
“Sorry, Mr. Rawlins, but I can’t get him outta the bed at this time of night.”
Jewelle was a distant cousin of Mofass’s ex-girlfriend, Clovis MacDonald. She was only sixteen two years before when she helped Mofass contact me to get away from her auntie. Clovis was trying to bleed away everything that Mofass had, but we put a stop to that.
After that Jewelle worked for Mofass and lived with EttaMae. But as soon as she turned eighteen she moved in with Mofass.
Jewelle had one of the toughest minds I had ever encountered in man or woman. She was a straight-A student all through Crenshaw High School but she decided against college because Uncle Willy, her pet name for Mofass, needed her. Clovis and her brothers had it in for them, so Jewelle moved them to an isolated little home in Laurel Canyon. She got a place there through a man who owned property down in Watts that Mofass represented. Then she hired Buford D. Howell, a UAW man from Detroit, to collect the rent and maintain the properties.
On the night of her eighteenth birthday she moved in with Mofass. She said that he was sick, she still called him Uncle Willy, but we all knew that there was more to that relationship than good friends.
If you wanted to get a letter to Mofass you had to send it to his PO box. If you wanted to call him you had to use his answering service — unless you were one of the three people who had his private number. He and Jewelle stayed in their posh little house perched up over Sunset Boulevard living like two young lovers; him hacking from emphysema and her holding camphor and menthol under his nose.
“I got to talk to him, Jewelle,” I said.
“What about?”
“Did the cops call your service?”