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.
