“You been having a good time with Feather?” I asked.
Easter nodded vehemently.
“Did she make you lunch?”
“Tuna fish and sweet potato pie.”
Looking up into my eyes, Easter relaxed and leaned against my chest. I hadn’t known her and her father, Christmas Black, for long, but the confidence he had in me had influenced the child’s trust.
“So you and your daddy drove here?” I asked.
“Uh-huh.”
“And was it just you and him in the car?”
“No,” she said. “There was a lady with yellow hair.”
“What was her name?”
“Miss . . . something. I don’t remember.”
“And was this lady up in your house in Riverside?”
“We moved away from there,” Easter said, a little wistfully.
“Moved where?”
“Behind a big blue house across the street from the building with a real big tire on the roof.”
“A tire as big as a house?”
“Uh-huh.”
By then the coffee was beginning to percolate.
“Mr. Black dropped by this morning,” Feather said. “He asked me if Easter Dawn could stay for a while and I said okay. Was that okay, Daddy?”
Feather always called me Daddy when she didn’t want me to get angry.
“Is my daddy okay, Mr. Rawlins?” Easter Dawn asked.
“Your father is the strongest man in the world,” I told her with only the least bit of hyperbole. “Whatever he’s doin’, he’ll be just fine. I’m sure he’s gonna call me and tell me what’s going on before the night is through.”
FEATHER MADE HOT CHOCOLATE for her and E.D. We sat around the dinette table like adults having an afternoon visit. Feather talked about what she’d learned concerning American history, and little Easter Dawn listened as if she were a student in class. When we’d visited enough to make Easter feel at home, I suggested that they go in the backyard to play.
I CALLED SAUL LYNX, the man who had introduced me to Easter’s father, but his answering service told me that my fellow private detective was out of town for a few weeks. I could have called his home, but if he was on a case he wouldn’t have known anything about Christmas.
“ALEXANDER RESIDENCE,” a white man answered on the first ring of my next call.
“Peter?”
“Mr. Rawlins. How are you, sir?”
The transformation of Peter Rhone from salesman to personal manservant to EttaMae Harris would always be astonishing to me. He lost the love of his life in the Watts riots, a lovely young black woman named Nola Payne, and pretty much gave up on the white race. He moved onto the side porch of EttaMae’s house and did chores for her and her husband, Raymond “Mouse” Alexander.
Rhone worked part-time as a mechanic for my old friend Primo in a garage in East LA. He was learning a trade and contributing to the general pot for the upkeep of Etta’s home. Peter was paying penance for the death of Nola Payne because in some way he saw himself as the cause of her demise.
“Okay,” I said. “All right. How’s the garage workin’ out?”
“I’m cleaning spark plugs now. Pretty soon Jorge is going to show me how to work with an automatic transmission.”
“Huh,” I grunted. “Raymond around there?”
“I better get Etta for you,” he said, and I knew there was a problem.
“Easy?” Etta said into the phone a moment later.
“Yeah, babe.”
“I need your help.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said, because I loved Etta as a friend and I had once loved her as I did Bonnie. If she hadn’t been mad for my best friend, we’d’ve had a whole house full of children by that time.
“The police lookin’ for Raymond,” she said.
“For what?” I asked.
“Murder.”
“Murder?”
“Some fool name’a Pericles Tarr went missin’, an’ the cops here ev’ry day askin’ me what I know about it. If it wasn’t for Pete I think they might’a drug me off to jail just for bein’ married to Ray.”
None of this was a surprise to me. Raymond lived a life of crime. The diminutive killer was connected to a whole network of heist men that operated from coast to coast, and maybe beyond that. But for all that, I couldn’t imagine him involved in a petty murder. It wasn’t that Mouse had somehow moved beyond killing; just the opposite was true. But in recent years his blood had cooled, and he rarely lost his temper. If he was to kill somebody nowadays, it would have been in the dead of night, with no witnesses or clues left behind to incriminate him.
“Where is Mouse?” I asked.
“That’s what I need to find out,” Etta said. “He went missin’ the day before this Tarr man did. Now he ain’t around and the law’s all ovah me.”
“So you want me to find him?” I asked, regretting that I had called.
“Yes.”
“What do I do then?”
“I’m worried, Easy,” Etta said. “These cops is serious. They want my baby under the jailhouse.”
I hadn’t heard Etta call Ray my baby in many years.
“All right,” I said. “I’ll find him and I’ll do what I have to to make sure he’s okay.”
“I know this ain’t for free, Easy,” Etta told me. “I’m’a pay you for it.”
“Uh-huh. You know anything about this Tarr?”
“Not too much. He’s married and got a whole house full’a chirren.”
“Where does he live?”
“On Sixty-third Street.” She recited the address, and I wrote it down, thinking that I had found more trouble in one day than most men come across in a decade.
I had called Mouse because he and Christmas Black were friends. I had hoped to find help, not give it. But when you live a life among desperate men and women, any door you open might have Pandora written all over the other side.
3
I hadn’t imbibed any alcohol whatsoever in years. But since Bonnie left I thought about sour mash whiskey every day. I was sitting in the living room in front of a dark TV, thinking about drinking, when the phone rang.
Another symptom of my loneliness was that my heart thrilled with fear every time someone called or knocked on the door. I knew it wasn’t her. I knew it, but still I worried about what I could say.
“Hello?”
“Mr. Rawlins?” a girl asked.
“Yes.”
“Is something wrong? You sound funny.”
“Who is this?”
“Chevette.”
It hadn’t been a full day since I’d almost murdered a man over the woman-child, and already I had to reach for her in my memory.
“Hi. Something wrong? Is pig man botherin’ you?”
“No,” she said. “My daddy told me that I should call and say thank you. I would have anyway, though. He says that we gonna move to Philadelphia to live with my uncle. He says that way we can have a new start back there.”
“That sounds like a great idea,” I said with poorly manufactured enthusiasm.
Chevette sighed.
I got lost in that sigh.
Chevette saw me as her savior. First I took her away from her pimp and then I allowed her to see her father in a way he could never show himself.
I got lost trying to imagine how I could see myself as that child saw me: a hero filled with power and certainty. I would have given anything to be the man she had called.
“If you have any problems, just tell me,” that man said to Chevette.
The front door swung open, and Jesus came in with Benita Flagg and Essie.
“Okay, Mr. Rawlins,” Chevette said. “My daddy wanna say hi.”
I waved at my little broken family.
“Mr. Rawlins?”
“Yeah, Martel. She sounds good.”
“I’m movin’ us all out to Pennsylvania,” he said. “Brother says there’s good work at the train yards out there.”
“That sounds great. Chevette could use a new start; maybe you and your wife could too.”