I tried not to think about how Bonnie would have taken care of all that when she was there.
Bonnie had made the house run smoothly, even when she was away on international flights for Air France. She hired people and had friends do chores that made my life easier.
How could I have thrown that concern away?
“Did you find my father?” Easter asked, and I was drawn back into the world.
“Gettin’ close. How long did you live in that house across the street from the big tire?”
“I don’t know . . . a week, maybe.”
“Hm. I found some people who might know where he is,” I said. “They’re supposed to call me tomorrow morning with what they know.”
“Who did you talk to?” she asked.
“A man named Captain Miles. Black guy in the army. Have you ever met him?”
Easter was standing on a chair next to me at the stove. It was her job to drop in the vegetables while I stirred them in the hot butter.
She thought for a moment and then shook her head.
“No. No Captain Miles has ever been to our house. Not when I was awake.”
“Do people come over in the night when you’re asleep?” I asked.
“Sometimes.”
“Have you ever seen any of them? I mean, maybe you woke up and looked downstairs.”
“No,” she said very seriously. “That would be spying and spying is bad. But . . .”
“Yeah?”
“But one time that lady with yellow hair came at night, and she was still there in the morning.”
“What was she like?”
“Very sad.” Easter nodded to assure me of what she was saying.
“About what?”
“Her husband was in trouble. His friends were mad at him and they were mad at her too.”
“Did she say anything else about those men?”
“No. Can we have strawberries on our pound cake?”
“I’ll send Jesus to the store to get some.”
Our conversation went back and forth about cooking and the people her father knew. There wasn’t much useful to me. But when E.D. was making the rice, I remembered the bar of soap wrapped in paper.
“Mr. Fishy,” she cried, unwrapping the bar. “I thought I lost you.”
“I found it at the place across the street from the big tire.”
“Was my daddy there?” Easter Dawn asked.
“No. No, he wasn’t. But I wondered . . . Did you drive down to LA in your father’s Jeep?”
“No. The lady had a green car. Daddy drove that.”
“And did she let him keep it?”
“No. He borrowed a blue car from a friend of his, but then he said he was going to buy a red truck with a camper on it from that funny man.”
“What funny man?”
“The one on the TV who has the animals and the pretty girls around him all the time.”
11
Mel Marvel’s Used Cars was an institution in Compton. Every car on his lot was good as new; at least that’s what his late-night TV ads said. He was a rotund white Texan who kept himself surrounded by pretty white girls in bathing suits, smiling for the cameras. Very often he had caged lions and trained elephants on the lot. Marvel was a con man who knew that most people wanted to be fooled.
A few years before, I’d bought a car from one of Mel’s salesmen, Charles Mung. It was a sky blue Falcon. My Ford was in the shop for a couple of weeks, and I thought I’d drive the Falcon around until mine was fixed. Then I’d give it to Jesus.
The trouble was that a back tire broke off on the way home from Compton. It popped right off the axle and rolled down the street.
I hired a tow truck and brought the car back to the lot.
Charles Mung was a tall white guy with freckles and cornflower blue eyes.
“Tire broke right off,” I told him under a blazing sun on the five-acre lot. It was only three hours into my thirty-day guarantee.
“We don’t cover accidents,” he replied as he turned to walk away.
I grabbed his arm, and three very big men came out of nowhere. They crowded me, freeing the salesman from my grip as they did so.
“You owe me four hundred dollars,” I said over an ugly car thug’s shoulder.
“Show Mr. Rawlins off the lot, will you, Thunder?” Mung replied.
They didn’t hurt me. Just deposited me on the curb.
“Come back here again,” Thunder, a polar bear of a man, told me, “and me and my friends will break all your fingers.”
It’s funny the things that stay with you. I was so humiliated by that treatment that all the way home on the bus I planned my revenge. I was going to get my gun and go back there. If they didn’t return my money, I was going to kill Mung and Thunder.
I was in the bedroom loading my third pistol when Mouse called.
“What’s wrong, man?” he asked after I’d only said hello.
I told him my problem and my intentions.
“Hold tight, Easy,” he said to me. “I got friends down there. Why’on’t you let me call ’em first?”
“They humiliated me, Ray. I ain’t gonna stand for that.”
“Do me a favor, Easy,” he said. “Let me call my friend first. If it don’t work, I’ll go down there with ya.”
I agreed, and later on, after Feather and Jesus got home from school, I came to my senses. I was about to go on a killing spree over four hundred dollars and four fools.
I made dinner and put the kids to bed.
I was sitting in the living room, watching the ten o’clock news, when there was a knock on my door. It was Charles Mung. He wore a thick white bandage that completely covered his left eye, and his right hand was swollen, obviously the source of great pain.
“Here,” he said, handing me a big manila envelope.
Before I could ask him what it was, he rushed away.
The envelope contained automobile registration papers and four hundred and twenty dollars. The car, which was parked in front of my house, was Mung’s own ’62 Cadillac.
I used the money to buy another car and gave the Caddy to my old friend Primo, who made travel money by selling American cars down in Mexico.
I LEFT BEFORE EATING but promised Feather and Easter that I’d be back for dinner.
The huge car lot was twice the size it had been the last time I was there. Mel had bought out the property across the street and built a three-story showroom. The showroom was surrounded by huge columns of red and blue balloons and topped with a forty-foot American flag.
The place was so big now that it seemed like a military installation.
I parked in the customers’ lot and walked toward the glittering steel-and-glass headquarters. When I reached the doorway, a skinny man in a bright green suit approached me.
“May I help you?” the gray-colored black man asked. This was also a new addition, a Negro salesman.
His eyes were fevered. His smile twisted like an earthworm in the sun.
“I need to speak to somebody in records,” I said, showing him my PI’s license.
He held the card between quivering fingers. He was a pill popper, no doubt. I was sure that he couldn’t concentrate on my identification.
He winked, blinked, and grimaced at the card for a few seconds and then handed it back.
“Brad Knowles,” he told me. “Out on the lot somewhere.”
“What does he look like?” I asked.
“Knowles,” the hopped-up salesman said. “Out on the lot.”
I WANDERED AROUND for a while looking for somebody named Knowles. Most of the people walking around were customers pretending that they knew something about cars. But there was security too. After the Watts riots of ’65 everybody had security: convenience and liquor stores, supermarkets, gas stations . . . everyplace but schools; our most precious possession, our children, were left to fend for themselves.
I went up to this one big brawny white guy and asked, “Brad Knowles?”