“Oh, yes, very well. We have conducted business with him over the years. Investments and some insurance.”
“What’s he like?”
“He comes from a long line of headmen of his people. He was educated at Oxford and was active in revolutionary movements. He’s a . . . what you say . . . a good guy.”
A good guy. He was more than that. He saved my daughter’s life and then took my lover in payment.
39
I rented a room at a motel called Ariba on Centinela. I didn’t know if the military men had enough grunts left to stake out my house, but safe was definitely better than sorry. Not that sorry had left me unscathed. I lamented almost everything, even those things that I hadn’t and couldn’t have done.
I lay down on the bed with the pillowcase containing thirty thousand dollars at my side. I never once thought of keeping the money. It wasn’t mine, and I would have paid for that theft. One day I’d meet Leafa after she’d lived in the street for ten years. I’d see the pain in her eyes, and whatever money I’d stolen would be gone.
After thirty minutes of trying to sleep, I reached into the bag and pulled out Pericles’ letter. The envelope was made from cheap gray paper. It had been sealed and also taped. I used my razor-sharp pocketknife to sever the seam. The Dear Meredith letter was written on white paper of a higher quality than the envelope.
Dear Meredith:
I’m so sorry honey to tell you like this but I just couldn’t face you now. I’m going away. I can’t take it any more. I sit up in the house every night listening to them kids making sounds like wild animals and you in the bed next to me like Sonny Liston done knocked you dead.
It was the last straw when Hanley threw up on my newspaper and then Lola cried because she couldn’t read the funnies. Ten minutes later they were both laughing and I wanted to kill them. Then you says that I needed to get a new job to pay for all that. It came into my head right then like God talking to Moses. I needed something new all right. And I’m doing that.
Don’t get me wrong baby — this hurts. I came by the house just two days ago. I watched you guys from the alley across the street. I saw Leafa out there in a nice new green raincoat. She helping Lana learn how to ride a two-wheeler, and you were sitting there watching them. I almost went to you but then the whole brood came out of that house like pestilence and I ran away.
I am giving you this money. This $30,000.00. You can pay rent and feed the kids for a few years with that, maybe more. I will send more money when I can get it.
I am sorry baby.
Pericles Tarr
I read the letter three times, wondering what Meredith would think when she read it. It was the truth, but how could she know that? Pericles’ leaving her had nothing to do with Pretty Smart. He just couldn’t take it anymore. It was a house filled with noise and ugliness that only a mother could love. It’s a wonder that she didn’t understand what her man was going through. But then I thought, what would understanding have done for her? He would still have left. She would still have been set adrift with a dozen kids in a paper boat.
But none of that was my concern. I’d bring Meredith her money, and she would make it into their life preserver.
We all just make up life as we go along. At some point Pericles must have loved Meredith. He wanted a big family, or at least he wanted what she wanted and believed that she understood the consequences. And when the life he’d made turned out not to be the life he was making, Perry made up Pretty, robbed a payroll in Washington state, and bought two tickets for New York.
It was all make-believe, their lives and mine.
I PULLED UP in front of the Tarr home a little after four-thirty. The front door was open, and there were children ripping and running in and out of the house. There were more than twenty kids crying out loud and going crazy. The Tarr children had friends whose parents would never let them run wild like that.
I stepped over two wrestling eight-year-old boys to get past the threshold. In the kitchen I found Leafa making peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches for smaller kids who needed fuel for their disasters.
When the perfect child saw me, she smiled. She had her father’s nose.
“She’s in the back room, Mr. Rawlins,” Leafa shouted, pointing with the jelly knife.
I went past the line of preschoolers to a closed door that I opened without knocking.
Meredith was there in a straight-back chair, sitting at an odd, distinctly unfeminine angle and staring at the wall.
“Mrs. Tarr.”
No response.
“Mrs. Tarr,” I said again, moving closer to her corner.
She turned her frozen gaze to me and frowned slightly.
“Have you fount his body?” she asked.
I handed her the pillowcase and the page Pericles had penned. She put the bag on her lap and unfolded the note.
Either she was a slow reader or Meredith Tarr read Perry’s last words to her many times over. I stood there because there was no other chair in that malleable room. After a long time, Meredith took up the pillowcase and looked inside. After that she turned her attention to me.
“What does this mean?”
“I found Perry in a house in Compton,” I said. “He was leaving for New York and said that he was going to send
