“I sure am lookin’ at you,” I said. “And you look good too. But right now I’m doin’ the biggest job that a detective has.”
“What’s that?” she asked, leaning across the counter, peering into my eyes.
“Waiting for all the pieces to fall into place.”
“What pieces?”
“On a chessboard, they call ’em men.”
It was an innocuous enough statement, but Belinda caught the hint of evil that it gave off. She frowned a moment but did not move away. The trouble I represented was just what she was looking for. Her mouth opened ever so slightly, saying without words that she was willing to jump over that counter and run off with me, that even though I was an old man, I had the leisure to sit with her and the goodwill to tell her that she was lovely. It doesn’t take much when you’re nineteen and it doesn’t take long. The trouble is that it doesn’t last long either.
“Why don’t you write down your phone number for me, girl?”
“Why I wanna do that?” she said, not wanting to seem easy.
“You don’t want it,” I said. “I do. You must have every young man in the neighborhood ringin’ your bell. I just like talkin’ to you.”
Her brows knitted as she tried to find some insult or trap in my words. When nothing came to mind, she shrugged and wrote her number on the back of my check and handed it to me.
“You can pay for the coffee some other time,” she said, and the balance of power between us shifted. I had been flirting before, but now she had a hold on me. I wanted to call her, to see her, to show her the valley behind my Bel-Air home.
Our fingers touched as she handed me the check. I took her hand and kissed those fingers twice.
I left with no intention of ever speaking to Belinda again.
49
I drove down to the Sears, Roebuck and Company department store in East LA and bought a high-powered CO2 BB gun with three cartridges and a tube full of 6 mm shot. Then I drove down to Hooper and Sixty-fourth Street. Toward the corner of Sixty-fourth was a house that had gone vacant after the riots. It was a very small house on a huge lot. Maybe that’s why the windows weren’t broken, because you’d have to stand out in plain sight to lob a rock through the panes.
It had once been a bright yellow home, but the paint had worn away to gray mostly. There were only patches of color here and there. The lawn was both overgrown and dead.
There was a padlock on the front door. I pried that off and went inside. The house was empty, stripped bare. There wasn’t a stick of furniture or any carpeting, not one painting or even any lightbulbs. No one had been living there for some time.
The backyard was just as dead and empty as the front. There had been a garage in the far corner of the property, but it had collapsed on itself and was now just a jagged pile of timbers.
It was the perfect domicile for my purposes.
Across the street was another abandoned structure. This was a three-story tenement that had been condemned by the city. The opposite of the house I’d just visited, this building took up the whole lot. Behind it I found a dark concrete lane that led to an alley.
After all that research, I parked my car in the alley, made my way to the back door of the tenement, broke in, and climbed up to the tar-paper roof. It was dirty up there, littered with beer cans and empty condom foils. This was a nighttime recreation area for girls who shared a bedroom in their parents’ houses and young newlyweds off with their spouses’ friends because they realized too late that they had made a mistake.
I went to the front ledge of the building that looked down upon Jewelle’s real-estate investment. There I assembled my air gun and loaded in a CO2 cartridge. I shot a tin vent with a large lead bead. The concussion knocked the metal cylinder out of its moorings.
I put the air gun back in its case, pulled up the tar paper at the ledge, and placed the case underneath, there to wait for things to fall into place.
HALF A BLOCK AWAY, I stopped at a phone booth. I had three dimes in my pocket and I promised myself that before the day was done, I would have dropped them all.
I dialed the first number from a card in my wallet.
“Hello,” a man’s voice answered.
Curses rose to my lips, but I kept them down. Spite and hate and rage bubbled in my gut, but my voice was even. I wanted to use that calm tone to tell him what he was, but instead I said, “Colonel?”
“Who is this?”
“Easy Rawlins.”
“Mr. Rawlins. What can I do for you?”
“Colonel, I wasn’t completely honest with you when we met at my office.”
“No? What else do you know?”
“I, uh, I met with a woman named Laneer. She was married to Craig Laneer.”
“Yes?”
“Faith gave me a copy of the letter you say that Craig sent to you, only this letter here gives the proof that Sammy Sansoam and them were smuggling drugs.”
The silence on Bunting’s side of the line was delicious.
