Bonnie Shay, in a sleek little uniform, got out and put down two small bags. Somebody said something from one of the windows. Bonnie laughed and waved. When the bus drove off she bent down to pick up her bags.
“Miss Shay!” I yelled out of my window. I got out and stood across the street waiting for her reply.
“Yes?” She didn’t recognize me at first.
“I was given a letter by Idabell to give to you. I wanted to ask you what this was all about, so I waited here.” I held the letter up over my head.
If I was out to hurt her I could have slipped from my car and hit her over the head, she knew that. But maybe, maybe I was slick and wanted to get her into the car with me. She looked at the bags she had hanging from either hand, then put them down and waved for me to come over.
“Thank you,” I said as I came up to her.
I handed her the letter and she read it. Then she read it again.
“Where is she?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “She said that she had to get out of town but she didn’t say why. She just left her dog with me and went.”
“She left Pharaoh with you?”
It was a mistake to mention the dog, I knew that as soon as it was out of my mouth. But I had to go with it once it was out.
“Yeah. Yeah, she said that she didn’t know where she was going first and that she was going to go by bus. I told her that the dog wasn’t gonna like his cage for weeks on end. I said that I could take him, or give him to you, until she sent for him.”
“They don’t allow pets in my building, Mr. Rawlins.”
“Oh. Tell me, Miss Shay, what’s goin’ on?”
Her eyes narrowed just a bit and she said, “Do you want a cup of coffee?”
“Sure thing.”
Her apartment was designed for what they call architectural efficiency. That is to say, the most rentable space with the least waste — or comfort. One big square room was the living space. Tucked off in the corner, behind half walls, was the small open kitchen. Her bedroom, I suspected, was exactly half the size of the living room so another bedroom for the apartment next door could neatly fill in the gap.
There was an Air France poster on the wall. It was a cartoonish drawing of Paris with a bright blue gendarme twirling his whiskers while ogling a pretty brunette. The Eiffel Tower was falling on them, or so it seemed to me. Along the floor were dark African carvings; all of them of women with pointed breasts and “outie” belly buttons.
She put her bags down, went into the kitchen, and flipped the on switch of her electric coffee percolator. She’d probably set it up with grounds when she left so that there would be coffee waiting almost when she came in the door. Her life seemed simple and elegant to me.
“Excuse me,” she said. “But I have to wash up a little before I can sit down.”
She went through the door to the other room, closing it behind her. She could have been making a call to somebody dangerous. But there was nothing I could do about that.
The coffee smelled strong. French roast.
I heard a toilet flush and then water running. The building was constructed from the kind of cheap materials that allowed you to hear mice sneezing through the walls and ants tramping across the floor above.
When she came out she had changed into a one-piece lime dress. It revealed her womanly figure without a lot of fanfare or too much sex.
“You work for the airlines?”
“Air France. I’m a stewardess.”
“You just comin’ back from there now?”
“Uh-huh.” She was concentrating on the coffeemaker. “Sugar and cream?”
“Black,” I said.
She gave me a smile with the cup.
“What do you want to know, Mr. Rawlins?”
“I’m a simple man, Miss Shay. I’m a head custodian for the Board of Education and I own a few apartment buildin’s here and there…” I stopped myself. That was the first time in my life that I told somebody about what I had just in conversation. Where I came from you kept everything a secret — survival depended on keeping the people around you in the dark. The tenants in my buildings didn’t know that I owned them. The government didn’t know where I got my money from. Nobody I worked with knew, with the exception of Etta and Mouse. The cops knew but I’d been on intimate, if dicey, terms with them for over a decade.
I blamed my slip on the whiskey and I swore silently never to take another drink.
“Mr. Rawlins?”
“Yeah?”
“You were saying?”
“Oh, yeah. Yeah. I go in to work one day and Idabell comes crying to me that her husband wants to kill her dog. The next thing I know her brother-in-law is dead — right there on the school grounds — and her husband gets shot at their house. She disappears, and then when she calls me she says that she’s runnin’ away.”
“I read about Roman in the paper. And the police came here to question me about Idabell and Holland. They should probably have this letter?” She looked to see how I’d take that question.
It wouldn’t have looked good for me if she went to the police and told them that I’d seen Idabell in the last couple of days. A cold chill ran up under my scalp. It hurt where I’d been sapped.
“What’s it say?” I asked innocently.
She handed it over to me and I pretended to read.
“What’s all’a this mean?”
“Why do you want to know, Mr. Rawlins? This doesn’t have anything to do with you. All you have to do is go home.” She was harsh but it didn’t bother me. I was a fool.
“I got a history with the cops, Miss Shay,” Whiskey said. “They don’t like me and they know that I was talkin’ to Idabell the day she left. I didn’t tell’em ’bout her dog ’cause she’d lied about the dog at school, she said that he was in an accident and that’s why she left that day. Now if I do say they’ll lean pretty hard.”
“If you didn’t do anything there’s nothing to worry about.”
I knew right then that she wasn’t a fully American Negro. A black man or woman in America, with American parents, knew that innocence was a term for white people. We were born in sin.
“I like my job, Miss Shay. I got a pension and a ladder to climb. They will fire me if the cops do something like cart me off to jail.”
Bonnie Shay gave me a long look. I liked it. I hadn’t lied to her, except about Idabell and that damned dog. But that was just a lie of necessity. I was sure that she wouldn’t hold that against me.
“Roman,” she said. “Her brother-in-law. He stole something from me. I told Ida about it. I guess she just felt bad about it.”
“What did he take?”
“What?”
“What did he take from you?”
“Oh. Well, yes. A ring.”
“It sure don’t sound like that,” I said.
“It doesn’t?” she dared me. “What does it sound like then?”
I decided to go out on a limb. “It sounds like Roman was smuggling heroin from France into L.A. and using you to do it. It sounds like Holland was in on it with him. It sounds like Idabell took the heroin from Holland and killed him for playing her like a fool. It sounds like you’re into it up to your neck and you’d be lucky not only to keep your job but to stay outta jail.”
The hardness in her face was something to behold. I had delivered a devastating stroke and she weathered it.
“What do you want, Mr. Rawlins?”
“All I want is enough to give to the cops if they decide they want me. I wanna know who killed the twins and why they did. I wanna know why Idabell ran.”
“I don’t know any of it. Nothing.”
It had to be the whiskey. Had to be. There I was talking about murder with someone who was obviously involved, and all I could think about was how much I liked it that I could tell when she was lying. I was feeling an intimacy with her. I would have liked to get to know her as well as I understood her.