She was looking into my face but seeing the images of her husband and her choice.
“I went to stay with a friend in Culver City. I told Craig where I’d be. The next morning I was reading the newspaper and saw a picture of him on page three. It said that he had been tortured and murdered and that I couldn’t be found. I stood up from the table, and the dining-room window shattered. Someone had tried to shoot me.
“I ran out of there and kept on going for two days. I was out of my mind. . . .”
“Did you call the police?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“The article made it seem as if I was to blame. Our neighbors talked about us arguing and, and I was worried because the men who killed him were in the army. I thought I’d be arrested and killed. You know that happened all the time in Saigon.”
I took her hand then. It just seemed like the right thing to do.
“I stayed in a motel for three days,” she continued, “until I thought of Christmas. I had his number in my mind because I called him every other week to say hello and find out how Easter was coming along. She’s such a special child. He came and got me. After that he set me up in an apartment in Venice.”
“I want to believe this,” I said, “but I don’t get the thing about Easter. She saw you in the car with Chris, but she didn’t recognize you.”
“She was a baby when he took her. She doesn’t remember me, and because of the circumstances of her parents’ death we decided not to tell her too much. She wouldn’t have remembered me before I went out to their house in Riverside.”
“Do you know who it was that tried to kill you?” I asked.
“Not exactly. I knew some of the men that Craig was involved with, though. There was a marine lieutenant named Drake Bishop and a guy they called Lodai. And then there was that grinning idiot, Sammy Sansoam.”
“Black guy?” I asked. “About five ten?”
“Yes. Craig told me that they made hundreds of thousands of dollars. I guess they tried to shoot me because I’m the only one who knows anything about them. They killed Craig because I tried to make him quit.”
The guilt in her was so powerful that I felt it. For a while there, her feeling superseded my broken heart.
“It’s them that’s the killers, not you,” I said, taking both of her hands now.
“I know,” she said.
She was gripping my fingers hard enough to cause pain. I was happy to give her the outlet.
“You guys want anything else?” Rilla asked. Neither one of us had seen her coming.
“No,” I said, realizing that my voice was heavy with emotion. “That’s all, Rilla. Thank you.”
Rilla, my long-lost pup sister, looked at me with real empathy. She put the flimsy yellow check on the red tabletop, saying, “You can just leave it here.”
When the waitress had gone, I asked Faith, “Do you know how I can get in touch with Christmas?”
“No.”
“Can I do anything for you?”
“You could give me a ride to my apartment.”
“Aren’t you going back to work?”
“I told the manager that I was going to meet you, and he told me that I had to stay at my desk. So I quit. I would have done it soon anyway. It’s just too hard trying to pretend that everything’s fine.”
FAITH HAD a beachside courtyard apartment down in Venice. I walked her to the secluded entrance. She turned to me. It seemed that the easiest thing in the world at that moment would have been to throw that door open wide, carry her across the threshold, and make love until the sun set and then rose again. These thoughts seemed to be in both our minds as we stood there.
“Christmas didn’t tell you anything to do in case of emergency?” I asked.
“He gave me a number to call,” she said, and then she recited it.
“That’s my phone,” I said.
“Easy,” she said in mild surprise. “Short for Ezekiel.”
Damn.
“Will you call me?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Will you come visit?”
“Definitely.”
24
I drove a long way with nothing but the notion of the Blonde Faith in my mind. She’d been blindsided by the power of her own commitment to life. Not only did she know what was right, she did something about it. And now her charity had betrayed her; her own husband had given her up to assassins.
I understood at last why Christmas had brought Easter to me. He also believed that the military men could get at Faith despite police protection. He was going after the men on his own, and judging by the body count, he was doing a good job.
I had solved the mystery. I knew the players, their reasons, and the danger they posed. The right choice now was to go home and be with my family. But the idea of home was like a coffin to me. Jesus and Benita would take care of the children, and I’d continue my investigations for no good reason except that it kept up my momentum.
But even at that fevered point in my life, I wasn’t so foolish as to believe that I could continue on my way without backup.
So I found myself driving to Watts and through Watts on the way to Compton, an ever-growing Negro enclave.
I kept going until I hit a street named Tucker and took that until a dead-end stand of overgrown avocados stopped me.
I parked half on asphalt and half on hard soil, got out, and pressed my way through dense leaves and thorny bushes until I came to a door that seemed more like a portal to another world than an entrance to a house. You couldn’t even see the home behind it, just trees and leaves, the dirt beneath your feet, and the hint of sky above.
Mama Jo, Lynne Hua had said.
It was like the house that Mama Jo had lived in in the swamplands outside of Pariah, Texas. I never knew how she found such a place in Southern California. It seemed as if she had conjured it out of her own knotty desires.
I was about to knock when the door came open. Tall and black-skinned, ageless, handsome, and bristling with power, Mama Jo smiled upon me. I suspected that she had some kind of alarm system like Christmas Black employed, but it could have been that she really was a witch who could sense when those she loved or danger approached.
“I been waitin’ for ya, Easy,” she said.
I wondered as to her meaning. Waiting for what of me?
We had made love once, more than two decades before, when I was nineteen and she was around forty. She was maybe an inch shorter; that and a few gray hairs were all that marked the passage of years.
“Jo.”
She put an arm around my shoulders and pulled me into her witch’s den. The floor was swept earth. The walls were shelves lined with glass and crockery containing herbs and dried animal parts. The fireplace was actually a hearth where a small pig was roasting on a spit. Above the fireplace was a shelf that held the skulls of twelve armadillos, six on either side of a human skull, the keepsake that Jo kept of her son’s father — both named Domaque.
“How’s Dom?” I asked as I sat on the wooden bench at her big ebony wood table.
“On a commune up north.”
“A commune?”
“Uh-huh. City of the Sun, they calls it,” Jo said as she poured me some of the tea that was always abrew at the side of the fire. “He met this little girl at a picnic in Griffith Park, and she asked him to go live with her there up near Big Sur. Nice place. The kids there tryin’ to get all the craziness outta their bones.” Jo shook her head and smiled at the thought of such an impossible task.
“How long did he know this girl?” I tasted the dark brew. Mama Jo’s teas were medicinal and strong. Almost immediately I could feel my muscles releasing.
“No more than a day, but I believe that she asked him to come with her even before she bedded him.”
“That’s kinda quick, ain’t it, Jo?” I said, relishing the flush of the herbs raging through my system.
“Love don’t work on the clock, baby,” she said, looking into my eyes.