“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,
“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,
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?”
