“Didn’t seem to,” Norbert shrugged.
I handed him another twenty-dollar bill.
“Where’s Art now?”
“At Havelock’s Motel on Santa Barbara. That’s where we go when we got a woman, you know, to let the other man get some sleep. I mean, we ain’t got but two rooms up in here.”
I handed over another leaf of Sheila Merchant’s money and went away.
Once in my car I had a small dilemma. Should I go after the girl or Willis? It seemed to me that no one really cared about her, except maybe her father. Willis was the one that Etta was worried about. I knew that if I asked her, she would have told me to make Willis my priority.
But I was raised better than that. No matter what she had done, I couldn’t leave Sinestra Merchant at the mercy of a kidnapper and possible rapist. I couldn’t take Norbert’s word that she maybe wanted some rough action from some big black man in Watts.
Havelock’s was a long bungalow in the shape of a horseshoe. When I got there it was closing on midnight. A night clerk was in the office, sitting at the front desk with his back to the switchboard. I parked across the street and considered.
The motel sign said that there was a TV and a phone in each room.
I went to a phone booth and dialed a number that hadn’t changed in sixteen years.
“Hola,” a sleepy Spanish voice said.
“Primo.”
“Oh, hello, Easy. Man, what you doin’ callin’ me at this time’a night?”
“You got a pencil and a clock?”
I gave Primo a number and asked him to call in seven minutes exactly. I told him who to ask for and what to say if he got through. He didn’t ask me any questions, just said “Okay” and hung up the phone.
“Hi,” I said to the night clerk five minutes later. “Can you help me with a reservation?”
It was a carefully constructed sentence designed to keep him from getting too nervous about a six-foot black man coming into his office in the middle of the night. Thieves don’t ask for reservations. They rarely say hello.
“Um,” the white clerk said. He first looked at my hands and then over my shoulder to see if somebody else was coming in behind. “I can’t make reservations. I just rent out rooms for people when they come.”
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s what I thought. But you know, I work at a nightclub down the street here, and the only time I can really make it in is after work. Do the daytime people take reservations?”
“I don’t know,” the clerk said, relaxing a bit. “People usually just look at the sign. If there’s a vacancy they drive in, and if not they drive on.”
He smiled at me and the phone rang. He turned his back and lifted the receiver.
“Havelock’s Motel,” he said in a stronger tone than he’d used with me. “Who? Oh yes. Let me put you through.”
He pushed the plug into a slot labeled “Number Six.” I was smiling honestly when he turned back to me.
“That’s really all I can say,” he said. “Just look for the sign.”
“All right.”
I counted the doors on the north side of the building and then I went around the back, counting windows as I went. Number six’s curtains were open wide. The only light on in the room was coming from a partially closed door, the bathroom, I was sure. There were two double beds. One was neat, either stripped or made. The other one had something on it, a pair of shoes tilted at an uncomfortable angle.
The window was unlocked.
Big Art — his driver’s license said Arthur — Farman had been dead for some hours. The cause of death probably being a bullet through the eye. Before he’d been killed he was bound, gagged, and beaten. A pillow on the floor next to him had been used to stifle the shot.
There was no trace of the girl named Sinestra. But that didn’t mean she hadn’t been there at the time of Art’s death.
I climbed out of the window and made it back to my car. The dead man, who I’d never met in life, was the strongest presence in my mind.
It’s hard looking for a blue house at three in the morning. There’s white, black, and gray, and that’s it. But I saw the big apartment building. It was on a corner with only one house nearby. It helped that the lights were on.
I knocked on the door. Why not? They were just crazy kids. There was no answer so I turned the knob. The house was a mess. Pizza cartons and dirty dishes all over the living room and the kitchen. Half-gone sodas, a nearly full bottle of whiskey; it was the kind of filth that many youths lived in while waiting to grow up.
I couldn’t tell if the rooms had been searched. But there wasn’t any blood around.
I got home a few minutes before four.
Etta picked up the receiver after the first ring.
“Hello.”
I told her about Big Art and Sinestra’s games.
“Old Willis don’t have to worry about Abel Snow with that girl in his bed,” I said.
“She called her daddy,” Etta said. “She told him where she was and asked him to come and get her.”
“Then she lit out?”
“I don’t know. All I know is what Mrs. Merchant said. She told me that Mr. Merchant sent Abel down to get her.”
“Did he bring her back?”
“No.”
“Damn.”
“Do you think he’s found ’em, Easy?”
“I’m not sure, but I don’t think so. Mr. Snow don’t mind leavin’ blood and guts behind him.”
“Maybe you better leave it alone, Easy.”
“Can’t do that, Etta. I got to see it through now.”
“I don’t want you to get killed, baby,” she said.
“That’s the nicest thing I been told all day.”
I slept on the couch for the few hours left of the night.
When I opened my eyes, she was sitting right in front of me.
“We have to talk,” Bonnie said.
“I got to go.”
“No.”
“Bonnie.”
“His name is Jogaye Cham,” she said. “We, we talked on the plane when everybody else was asleep. He talked about Africa, our home, Easy. Where we came from.”
“I was born in southern Louisiana, and I still call myself a Texan ’cause Texas is where I grew into a man.”
“Africa,” she said again. “He was working for democracy. He worked all day and all night. He wanted a country where everyone would be free. A land our people here would be glad to migrate to. A land with black presidents and black professionals of all kinds.”
“Yeah.”
“He worked all the time. Day and night. But one time there was a break in the schedule. We took a flight to a beach town he knew in Madagascar.”
“You could’a come home,” I said, even though I didn’t want to say anything.
“No,” she said, and the pain in my chest grew worse. “I needed to be with him, with his dreams.”
“Would you be tellin’ me this if them flowers didn’t come?”
“No. No.” She was crying. I held back from slapping her face. “There was nothing to tell.”
“Five days on a beach with another man and there wasn’t somethin’ to say?”
“We, we had separate rooms.”
“But did you fuck him?”
“Don’t use that kind of language with me.”
“Okay,” I said. “All right. Excuse me for upsetting you with my street-nigger talk. Let me put it another way. Did you make love to him?”
The words cut much deeper than any profanity I could have used. I saw in her face the pain that I felt. Deep, grinding pain that only gets worse with time. And though it didn’t make me feel good, it at least seemed to create some kind of balance. At least she wouldn’t leave unscathed.
“No,” she whispered. “No. We didn’t make love. I couldn’t with you back here waiting for me.”