last word, but he covered it up pretty well.
“No. We had a letter from a former soldier, a pharmacist named Craig Laneer. He told us that he’d been part of this smuggling ring and that he wanted to turn over the organization. Laneer was subsequently murdered. His wife, a woman named Faith Laneer, disappeared. We found out from her Vietnamese charity that she had been friends with Black. The LAPD told us that Black and a criminal named Raymond Alexander were friends and that you and this Alexander were very close.
“I’m here to find out if you can help me find Black.”
By the end of this explanation, I was fairly certain that Colonel Bunting was who he said he was and that he was looking for the same people I was.
“I know Christmas,” I said. “He has a house up in Riverside.”
“We’ve been there. He’s gone.”
“Did the police tell you that Raymond has disappeared and is wanted for questioning in the disappearance of a man named Pericles Tarr?”
“No.”
“Maybe the cops want you to do their work for them,” I suggested.
Bunting frowned, remembering something that he did not share.
“They were right about me and Ray bein’ friends, though,” I added. “I’ve been tryin’ to run him down myself. So if you want to leave me a number or something, I’ll be glad to call you if I get a line on Christmas.”
“You would?” He was really surprised.
“I don’t have anything against you, Colonel,” I said. “I just need you to respect me as much as you respect the flag.”
The soldier looked at me in a way that said this encounter would stay with him for the rest of his life. He might forget my name and the circumstances of our meeting, but the changes wrought in him would be indelible on his understanding of power, its distribution, and its use.
He wrote down his numbers on a piece of paper that I provided.
“It’s time,” I said.
“Time for what?”
“For you to get out of here and follow your nose.”
33
Out of habit I put the pistol into the top drawer of the desk. I had places to go, but even after the colonel was gone I did not rise from the chair. I felt tired, not sleepy but dragged down by life.
Many a time I had visited clinics and hospitals, bedrooms in homes and apartments where dying men and women lay. They had watery eyes and wan expressions, tacky skin and nothing to say. They reclined under sweat- soaked sheets as if they’d just run a mile, but the rest never worked. They could barely whisper or lift a hand.
I’d say
“Hey, Easy,” John Van once said to me, as if he were shouting into a pillow, “you remembah that night Marciano knocked Joe Louis out?”
I nodded ruefully.
“I won twenty dollahs off’a you. I told ya: you don’t play a horse a’cause of its color.”
There was a chair next to the bed and a clock somewhere in the room. There were usually children playing on the floor or in the hall. They rolled around because that’s all they knew, the only way they could bring happiness to a waiting room for death.
I often wondered how those dying people felt when there was no one there to distract them from their passage. What did they think about when sleep came on or the sun went down? Was there a sudden fear when they nodded off or just a malaise like I experienced after talking to that fool colonel?
I felt as if I might fall asleep, that if I fell I might not get up again. I wondered what difference it would make. After all, Oswald shot Kennedy, and hours later LBJ was being sworn in as president.
No one was indispensable.
Feather would go to Bonnie or Jesus, and Easter Dawn had a whole army to look after her. Frenchie would piss on my grave, and I had no close relatives except a daughter somewhere who probably didn’t even know my name. I could just close my eyes and never open them again. That would be it.
“Don’t move a muscle!” a loud voice commanded.
I jumped to my feet, or at least I tried to. My left foot got traction, but the right heel slipped out from under me. I dropped back down in the chair, reached for the pistol in my top drawer, grabbed it, and held it up at an awkward angle. It wasn’t until then that I saw the slovenly, overweight white man in the bad suit looking down on me.
“You gonna shoot me with a stapler, Easy?” Sergeant Melvin Suggs of the LAPD asked.
I used to keep a pistol in a wire mesh net underneath my desk, but as time went on I worried that I might kill someone without looking or that somebody might break into the office and steal my piece. That’s when I moved it to the top drawer with my scissors, stapler, Scotch tape, and paper clips.
Dumb luck is better than no luck at all.
