The song was coming to an end, and I was just beginning to understand how powerful my emotions were. The idea that I could hold sunlight in my hands sent a shiver through my bones. I might have come to some deep revelation had it not been for the sudden silence.
I pressed the buzzer and pounded on the door at the same time.
The next song didn’t come. Instead a woman asked in an insulted tone, “Somebody there?”
“Easy Rawlins, ma’am,” I said to the pink door.
The sunlight was behind me now, but the insanity still thrummed at my forehead. Sex and murder felt like possibilities. Given the chance, I would have taken Prometheus’s fire and laid waste to the California coastline from San Diego all the way to Mount Shasta.
But then the door opened.
She wore red. You could have called it a dress, but it was much more like a wrapper. Her figure could not have been more obvious if she were naked and oiled. The medium-brown face and thighs, arms, and neck were ignited by eyes dark enough to be called black. Pretty Smart was short, built to populate the countryside, and lovely in a way that Christians interpreted as sin.
All that I saw she could see in me.
My attention dawdled on her sandals. They were black, with red ribbon straps between the second and third toes of each foot. The ribbons then ascended, twining sinuously around her ankles to hold the shoes in place.
“Yes?” she asked, not nearly so put off by my arrival as she had been before opening the door.
“Those are wonderful sandals,” I said.
Pretty had big lips to begin with, but when she smiled they seemed to swell.
I thought again about the sunlight. It seemed to me that Pretty’s tawdry and ethereal beauty was like that: touchable and untouchable, an artifact wedged in my mind like hunger and fear.
“I got ’em on sale at Gump’s in Frisco,” she said. “What’s your name again?”
“Easy Rawlins.”
“Do I know you, Easy Rawlins?” It was a suggestion as well as a question.
“No. But you know a friend of mine.”
“Your friend send you here?” she speculated.
“No man in his right mind would send another man to you, Miss Smart.”
Her teeth were white and, I noticed, her nails were long, healthy, and clean.
“What man, then?”
“Mouse.”
The woman-child’s terra-cotta face froze as if it were really made of ceramic. She had to think, to wonder what danger I posed. Her power meant nothing next to Mouse’s threat.
“Is that a man’s name?” she asked lamely.
I smiled and shook my head slowly. “There are ten thousand men of every race and age in this city alone,” I said, “who would leave their wives after just seeing your photograph. You know that and I do too.”
The young woman frowned, trying to resist the compliments she craved.
“And,” I continued, “you also know Raymond Alexander just as well.”
“Oh . . . Ray . . . Yes, I know Ray Alexander. I don’t have no nickname for him, though.”
I smiled again.
“What do you want, Mr. Rawlins?”
Her voice had turned cold.
“I’m looking for Ray, and a man I met sent me here to you.”
“What man?”
“It doesn’t matter what man, honey,” I said. “What matters is that he told me that Ray been seen with a man named Pericles Tarr and that Pericles and you were close.”
It’s always a sadness to see a beautiful woman’s eyes turn sour while gazing at you. Even though I wanted to see what she felt, I still lamented the lost opportunity . . . at least a little.
“You’ll have to excuse me, Mr. Rawlins,” she said. “I got to go.”
She backed away from the door, preparing to close it.
“Miss Smart.”
“What?”
“Do you know where Raymond is?”
She closed the door and I allowed myself a chuckle.
I went to the sidewalk and strolled all the way to the corner, where I turned to the left and waited for three minutes. If Pretty had watched me go, she would have returned to the house by then.
“Mister?” a voice asked.
