I shook my head without speaking.
“No, thank you,” Tourmaline said graciously.
After Melinda walked away, Tourmaline observed, “She looks sad.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “I wonder why.”
THE EVENING was the best I’d had in a year. Tourmaline was only working at the used-car lot for a few months. She was a student at UCLA full-time, getting her master’s in economics.
“Marxist economics or the kind that makes money?” I asked.
“The science,” she said with a smirk. “I’m political but not a revolutionary; interested in a good living, but I have no need to be rich.”
“Yeah,” I said, “but you got to admit that the science meets man on the front page of the paper. I just glanced at the headlines today and I saw articles on Vietnam, the USSR, and the Chinese Cultural Revolution.”
“But what about that boy and his brother?” Tourmaline asked.
“I didn’t see that one.”
“It was on the lower left,” she said. “A sixteen-year-old boy carried his dying brother through the snow for ten hours in the San Gabriel Mountains. When the rescuers found them, the younger boy was dead.”
“Yeah,” I said. “There’s a lotta good strong hearts out there. Problem is they get lost when they wander too far from home.”
I had made up my mind not to mention the red truck until she did. There was a dance to our date. It was something we both needed. I didn’t know a thing about her as a person, and I was a mystery myself at that table.
Melinda served us duck with cherry sauce, ramps, and potatoes roasted with garlic and parsley. For dessert Hans brought us fresh strawberries in whipped cream with champagne for Tourmaline and Squirt grapefruit soda in a glass for me.
“You don’t drink?” Tourmaline asked.
“No.”
“You sound sad about it.” The way she let her head tilt to the side told me she cared. For the first time in a long time, I felt physically drawn to a woman.
“Whiskey for me is like having an allergy to aspirin along with the worst headache you could imagine.”
Tourmaline didn’t respond to that, not with words. She sipped from her flute and looked at me.
“I have the information you wanted,” she said. “And I’ll give it to you if you promise not to try and pay me.”
“I can’t even try?”
“No.”
15
I was further impressed by Tourmaline because she had taken the bus to make our date. I drove her home with hardly a thought about Christmas Black and the hard men after him, or about Mouse and his war with the LAPD.
It was after eleven when I walked the beautiful young black woman to her door. She lived in an apartment that had been added on to the side of a garage at the back of a home on Hooper.
While she fumbled in her purse for the key, I said, “This has been a really wonderful evening, Miss Goss.”
Almost as an afterthought she took an envelope out of her bag and handed it to me.
“This is what you asked me for,” she said.
“Thank you.”
She looked up at me, waited for more words, and when those words didn’t come, she said, “Is that it?”
“What?”
“I expect a man to at least try and kiss me. You know it took me two and a half hours to look like this.”
Time didn’t exactly stop for me right then. It was more like it slowed down to an excruciatingly sluggish ooze. I could feel my lips wondering what to say — or do.
“Hello,” Tourmaline prodded when I didn’t answer.
And then suddenly everything became normal again. I knew exactly who I was and what I needed to say.
“If I were to kiss you right now, with everything that I’m feelin’, neither one of us would make it through the door. We’d be right out here on the concrete, under the palm trees, making babies.”
Tourmaline gazed at me, deciding how to react to my declaration.
“That’s better,” she said at last.
She opened the door and went in. Before the door closed, she put her head out and kissed the air.
I GOT TO COX BAR a few minutes shy of midnight. Most places in LA were already closed, but Ginny Wright’s bar was just getting started. It was a tin-and-tar-paper structure that would have been condemned on the day it was erected, but Cox was hidden in an alley and no health inspector, no building inspector even knew it was there.
