In one corner there was a big crate that had been piled high with all kinds of rags, metal casings, and broken furniture. This crate had been calling to me ever since I’d realized that the bumblebee was not moving.
After I’d received my investigator’s license, Saul Lynx, the Jewish PI, had given me lessons in what tools a shamus needed.
“You need things that can’t be seen as criminal,” he’d told me one day as his half-black children played around us in their View Park home. “No lock-picking tools but a long slender metal ruler with a nick on one side that happened from an accident. That will get you into most doors and cars. You should also always have a pair of cotton gloves in your back pocket. . . .”
I donned my gloves and inspected the crate.
Along an unobstructed side there were the heads of eight brand-new nails that had been recently driven home. I found an old screwdriver and pried that side of the crate away.
The corpse didn’t surprise me in the least. Neither did it bother me — much. I had seen a whole mountain of dead people in my life, most of them murdered because of their race or nationality. All the way from New Iberia, Louisiana, to Dachau I had seen them shot and hanged, blown up and lynched, gassed, burned, tortured, and starved. One more dead man couldn’t rattle me.
He was young and wore dark clothes. There was a neat little bullet hole over his left eye and a blank stare on his ant-covered face. The colony of the queen had claimed him. Thousands of the little black socialists swarmed over his pale skin and dark clothes. I was sure that he’d been relieved of anything that could identify him. But I didn’t need a name. His blond hair was cut in the military style and his shoes were black combat boots of military issue. This was a scout for the good captain and his brave men.
I reattached the side of the crate and left the funerary shed. I walked down into the nameless street and around the neighborhood.
It was still quite early.
As I wended my way back toward Centinela and my car, my mind drifted to Bonnie again. She was the love of my life, then and now. She loved another man, maybe not as much as she loved me but enough to be swayed by him.
I tried to think of some way that I could have stayed in a life with her. It was a dialogue I’d had in my head almost every day since I showed her the door. And every day I came to the same conclusion: I couldn’t bear lying there next to her with him in her mind.
Mountains of dead bodies and criminal soldiers meant nothing compared to the loss of Bonnie Shay.
8
On the drive away from Christmas Black’s pied-a-terre, his killing ground, I wondered about my new friend. He wasn’t like most black people I knew. His family had been members of the American military since before there was a United States. Many of his ancestors had lived through slavery without being slaves. For all I knew, some of them might have owned slaves. They had all studied the arts of war and violence, had passed down that knowledge in a great hand-bound book that Christmas had relinquished to his first cousin Hannibal Orr after he, Christmas, decided that the America his forebears fought for had lost its way.
Christmas and Hannibal’s family was more American than most white people’s. They had been at every important moment in America’s tumultuous attempt at creating democracy. They had been at every victory and every massacre, their heads wreathed in glory and their hands drenched with blood.
I would have gone home and looked for Hannibal to take Easter Dawn off my hands if I believed that Christmas had gone completely crazy and was on a killing spree. But Clarence Miles, and that buzzless bumblebee, told a different story. Christmas was in trouble, and I owed him.
When I was wounded by a sadistic assassin named after a Roman statesman, Christmas and Easter had nursed me back to health. They had saved my life, and even though my life wasn’t worth very much to me at that moment, a debt was still a debt.
All I had to do was wait until the next morning at nine and I could string Clarence a little further along. But the long span of hours between this morning and the next was too much for me.
Thinking about Bonnie’s departure was like staring into the sun. I needed to get my mind off her, to distract myself. Bonnie was in the seat next to me, on the street walking to some store. She was smiling at me when I got mad over some small mistake I’d made.
“Life goes on,” she’d told me at least once a week.
Not anymore.
Life had stopped for me just as surely as it had for that foolish soldier who had dared to invade Christmas Black’s personal, portable sovereignty.
THE DIN COMING from behind the pink, dented, and smudged front door was reminiscent of a riot. No, not a riot, a war. And it wasn’t just the broken wagons, splintered wood, and scorched-earth lawn, but a full-pitched battle being waged inside the home. I could have sworn that there was machine gun fire, airplanes dive-bombing, a whole army on the march behind that portal.
I pressed the doorbell and knocked loudly, but I could not imagine that anyone would hear me over the racket that emanated from that small domicile. For some reason my intelligence failed in the presence of such tumult. I didn’t know how I could make them hear me. Anyway, who would want such a ruckus to turn its attention to him?
I was ready to walk away when the front door opened. The sentry was a slack-shouldered, bone-thin brown woman with half-straightened hair. She wore a dress that had faded to such a degree that the pattern on its bluish fabric had become indistinct. The repeated images might have been fleeing birds, dying flowers, or once solid and specific forms driven to madness by the dozen leaping, screaming, fighting, and very, very ugly children that inhabited the Tarr household.
“Yes?” the poor woman whined. Her shoulders sagged so far down that she most resembled a building that was in the process of collapse.
“Mrs. Tarr?”
