I noticed that this MP had three medals over his left breast. They were red, red, and bronze. He was a younger white man with shocking gray eyes.
“They say that about niggers too,” I said, to see if I could get a rise.
But Captain Miles had only smiles for me.
“What’s your name, Detective?”
“Easy Rawlins. I work out of an office down on Central. A woman hired me to find Mr. Black. Paid me three hundred dollars for a week’s worth of walking.”
“What woman?”
I hesitated then, but not from uncertainty. I knew what I wanted from the captain and I also had a notion of how I could get it.
“Ginny Tooms,” I said. “She told me that Black was the father of her seventeen-year-old sister’s child. They want him to come back and do the right thing.”
“Sounds like they want to put him in prison,” Miles speculated.
I shrugged, saying without words that it wasn’t my business what a man with a foolish dick got himself into. I just needed the three hundred dollars, that’s why I was there.
“What’s this Miss Tooms look like?” he asked.
“Why you wanna know? I mean, you said you was lookin’ for Black.” My dialect deepened as I talked. I knew from experience that Negro career soldiers looked down on their uneducated brothers. And in underestimating me, Miles might slip up and tell me something he didn’t think I would understand.
“I am,” Miles said. “But anybody that knows anything about him might help us.”
“What do you want with him, Captain?” I asked.
The MPs were moving closer. Bonnie entered my mind for a second. I thought that no beating could hurt me more than the announcement of her upcoming marriage.
Miles pretended to waver then. We were made for each other, him and me, like the Tyrannosaurus rex and triceratops dinosaur figurines that Jesus loved to play with when he was a boy.
“Have you come across the name of General Thaddeus King in your investigation, Mr. Private Detective?”
I pretended to ponder this question and then shook my head.
“He’s our boss,” Miles confided. “Black’s too. Lately he’d sent Christmas out on a delicate assignment. That was three weeks ago, and nobody’s heard from him since.”
“What kind of assignment?”
“I don’t know.”
I made a face that said I didn’t believe him.
He made a face that replied, But it’s true.
“Mr. Rawlins.”
“Captain.”
“Tell me about this Ginny Tooms.” The smile was gone and the MPs were in position. He might as well have said, Either you talk now or after we kick the shit out of you.
I could take the punishment, but I saw no reason that I should.
“White woman,” I said. “Twenties, maybe thirty. Pretty, I think.”
“You think?”
“She wore sunglasses and had a blue bandanna wrapped around her head. Might’a been scarred up under all that for all I know.”
“Blond?”
“I couldn’t tell. Maybe she was bald. Nice figure, though. She couldn’t hide that.”
The smile returned. Clarence was beginning to enjoy our conversation.
“Her address?”
I shook my head. “She paid with fifteen twenty-dollar bills and promised to call me every other day. The perfect woman as far as I’m concerned.”
That was the standoff. I’d told my lies and he had told his. His men were in position, but there was no real reason to punish me. Everything I’d said was plausible.
I looked around the room and saw what looked like a bumblebee hanging upside down on the ceiling over the decorated soldier’s head.
“Can I see some identification, Mr. Rawlins?” Captain Miles asked.
I kept my PI’s license in my shirt pocket for easy access. I took this out and handed it over like a good soldier. The officer studied it. The black-and-white photo of my smiling face and the signature of the deputy police commissioner, my nemesis, Gerald Jordan, were enough to prove everything I’d said.
“Not too many Negro detectives in Los Angeles,” he said to the card. Then he looked at me and grinned.
“Is that all, Captain?”
“No. No, it’s not.”
“What else do you want? You know I got a job too.”
The bumblebee was in the same position. I found myself hoping that the creature would come to life and startle the soldiers. I only needed a moment to get to my gun, which was nestled at the belt line at the back of my pants. I was feeling the need for an equalizer.
“General King is in charge of some very sensitive operations, both in this country and abroad. He reports to the White House. More than once I’ve answered his phone and the president was on the other end of the line.”
“What that got to do with a niggah like me or Christmas Black for that matter?”
“We need to find Black,” Miles said with a reluctantly straight face. “We must find him.”
“I’m not standin’ in your way, brother.”
“How did you locate this apartment?”
“Tooms had been here,” I said.
“Then why didn’t she come here herself?”
“She told me she had only been to his place once, at night. The only thing she remembered was that there was a building across the street with a giant tire on the roof. The minute she said that, I knew the address.”
“So why not just tell her that?” Miles asked.
“You see, man,” I replied airily, “you a niggah like me, but you been in the army too long. They buy your clothes, your food, give you a bed, a car, and a gun. You think you all bad ’cause you in the biggest gang in the world, so you don’t understand when a man be runnin’ aftah a dollar.
“If I had just said to Ginny that I knew where the address was, she’d’a parted with twenty dollars, not three hundred. You got to milk a client just like you would a cow. Ain’t no PX with bottles’a cream out here, just us workin’ niggahs is all.”
If I tied it any tighter someone might have strangled on that lie. My only problem was keeping the smug satisfaction off my face so that Clarence wouldn’t know how good I thought I was.
“Stand down,” Miles said to his men.
The MPs relaxed and took a step back.
“What have you found here, Mr. Rawlins?”
“A cleaner house than I could imagine and one busted picture frame.”
“What was in that?”
“Nuthin’.”
I couldn’t have looked into a woman’s eyes as deeply as Miles stared into mine — not without passion growing out of it.
“We need to find Christmas Black,” he said with a smirk.
“You said that.”
For a minute there the four men in that room might have been manikins we were so still.
“Are you committed to this woman?”
“I ain’t give her no ring or nuthin’.”
“Will you take on the job of finding Christmas Black for the United States government?” he asked.
Life doesn’t travel in a straight line like we think it does. I was positive that these men were the reason Christmas had left his adopted daughter with me. My intention was to lead them on in hopes of finding out what had happened to my friend. But my mind took that information and imagined me coming home over a year ago and telling Bonnie about my adventure. She had been the first person I could share my thoughts with.
The pain that came with the reverie almost sank me. I couldn’t speak because I knew the sob in my chest would come out with whatever words I spoke.
“Mr. Rawlins,” Miles prodded.
I held on to my silence ten seconds more and then said, “You got anything against Miss Tooms gettin’ a line on him?”
“Do you care?”
“I like it when people tell their friends that I did the job they paid me for, yeah.”
“No problem,” the black captain said. “Matter of fact, I’d like to meet this Ginny Tooms.”
“How come?”
“Maybe she knows something about what Black’s been doing.”