“If you’re not here, I wanna remembah you inside me,” she might have said.
The other files kept her finances, her modeling resume, her secretarial resume, her high school transcripts, her date calendar, and, finally, her phone diary.
Perry Tarr’s home address and phone number had been crossed out and replaced with a new address on Ogden between Eighteenth Street and Airdrome.
I wrote the address on a blank piece of paper that I carried around in my wallet for just that purpose. After that I snapped off the next two locks on the filing cabinet and rummaged around her jewelry, cash cache, checkbook, bankbooks, and savings bonds. I took the cash, about one hundred and eighty dollars, her checkbook, and two rings that looked to be valuable. Then I took the erection album and put it on her bed, gaping open.
I did all that to make it seem as if I were some teenage burglar instead of a man on the trail of Perry Tarr. She might still guess at the identity of her robber, but that was all I could do after breaking the lock on the first drawer.
I was about to leave when I noticed the one girly part of her austere sleeping quarters. It was a pink princess phone on the floor next to the head of her bed.
I should have left, but instead I picked up the receiver and dialed a number.
“Marvel’s Used Cars,” she said.
“Can we have dinner tonight?”
“Easy?”
“Uh-huh.”
“I can’t tonight, Easy,” Tourmaline said. “I have a date. Maybe this weekend?”
“That would be just as good,” I said, thinking my tone was light and airy.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“Nothing. Why? Do I sound like something’s wrong?”
“You sound like it looks when a girl is turning her head away.”
“A girl?”
“Where are you right now, Easy Rawlins?” Tourmaline Goss asked.
It was a crack in the dam, a fissure I felt all the way down to my childhood. Tourmaline was that perpetual Black Woman and I was the forever child. Her tone paralyzed me there on the party girl’s military-style bed. I could see the bushy pine out Pretty’s small window. For all I knew, Pretty had gone to the pharmacy to get aspirin for the headache I had given her. She might have been on the way back at that very moment.
“I just broke into this house,” I said. “Somebody said that a friend’a mine killed somebody, but I knew this woman could prove that the man who’s supposed to be dead is still alive. . . .”
For the next hour and a half I told Tourmaline most of the important moments of my life. I told her about Mouse, whom she’d heard about, and Jackson and Etta and Bonnie. I told her all that I had been through up to the moment I threw Bonnie out of my house. I didn’t mention any killings or murders outside the one Mouse was blamed for. That would have been unfair to an innocent university student.
Tourmaline listened to me patiently even though she was at work. People interrupted her now and then, but she always got back on the line and said, “Go on.”
I had hoped the confession would relieve me, but instead it brought on a sense of emptiness. Laying my life out like that made me see that I had wasted my potential on misguided pride and rage at strangers.
“I should go,” I said at last, “before the young woman comes home.”
“What time are you going to pick me up?” Tourmaline asked.
36
I had planned to leave when I got off the phone with Tourmaline, but after all that confessing I didn’t have the strength to stand up. She had wanted to hear about me, my life. Most of the men she’d met had been either silent or braggarts. It was rare for her to hear a man talk about his life the way he felt about it. But I hadn’t been completely honest. What I had said was true, but what I had done was fool my heart into believing that I was talking to Bonnie, confessing to Bonnie, working my way back into her heart.
The lie didn’t hurt Tourmaline, but it tore me up. Everything I thought I had accomplished in the past days faded, and I was once again at odds with myself.
It was very quiet in the unadorned bedroom. When the phone jangled I leaped from the bed. It rang ten times. At the start of each ring I decided to leave the house, but by the time the interval of silence returned I had lost my resolve.
I was afraid to leave Pretty Smart’s crazy, shallow home. Her life was so simple and straightforward. It was almost as if she were living in a movie set rather than a real home. There was solace in that simplicity.
There was danger outside.
I picked up the hunched pink receiver and dialed another number.
“Proxy Nine,” a woman answered.
“Jackson Blue,” I said.
“And your name is?”
“Ezekiel Porterhouse Rawlins.”
