It was as if I was caked with the filth and detritus of a lifetime, and now this woman came with a rough-bristled scrubber and hand rake to scour me clean and raw.
That night was spent throbbing with pleasure and pain too. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had a sleepless night that didn’t involve a case, or one of my kids getting sick.
“I want to devour you, Easy Rawlins,” she said maybe five minutes after sunrise. We were in my bed by then, taking a breather. “I been thinkin’ about this here every day, every day.”
She rose above me on her left elbow and looked down.
“I been dreamin’ about it, but whatever I imagined, I never thought it would be like this.”
“Like what?”
“Like dogs at their meat after they’d been starvin’ a week.”
I had to kiss her, didn’t I?
Later that morning, we had breakfast in bed. I made lemon waffles with maple-cured bacon and a simple salad of butter lettuce dressed with vinaigrette. Somewhere in the middle of the meal I remembered Ida Lorris. I’d had a wonderful evening with that woman. She was friendly and intelligent, just bent enough that she wouldn’t run away screaming from the life I inhabited. I remembered her the way I thought of parts of my life that had happened long ago, far away.
“So, what’s your day like, Ezekiel?”
“I’m on a job.”
“What kinda job?
“Lookin’ for people probably don’t wanna be found, runnin’ into those don’t want me lookin’.”
“Wouldn’t you rather stay up here with me?”
“What I want and what I have to do are two different things.”
“Can’t you hire some young man to run the streets with a target on his back instead of yours?”
“That’s next year on the life plan. What about you?”
“What about me?” When she turned over on her stomach, the sheet rolled under her, showing off her fine flanks and two marks that told of healed violence. One scar was small and round, not unlike Vu Von Lihn’s eye. The other was long and centipede-like due to the many stitches that had to be used to hold it together.
The long gash I remembered from the few weeks we knew each other. The bullet wound, though, that was new.
“What you been doin’ since I seen you last?” I asked her. “Still workin’ for Jewelle?”
“No. It didn’t feel right working for your friend’s wife. I left there and started working for a man named Charles Clinic.”
“Now, that’s a name. What’s Mr. Clinic have you doin’?”
“Dr. Clinic,” she corrected. “He’s a physics professor at USC, pretty arrogant, really. I hired on to keep his house clean because his wife left him. He told me that he was doing very important work and that when he was in his study he didn’t want to be disturbed, even with cleaning noise. So, one day when he wasn’t behind a closed door, I asked him what he does in that study of his. He got all snide and said, ‘Particle physics.’ To which I said, ‘Oh, you mean quantum mechanics.’ His lips got all twisted. He said I coulda learnt that from some note he threw in the trash or sumpin’. I told him, no, I could read real books just as well as anybody else.”
I knew what she was saying was true. Amethystine could debate someone on the level of Jackson Blue about the meanings and values of mathematical theory.
“So, what did the good professor have to say to that?” I asked.
“He thought for a minute and then asked me what the maximum number of electrons in a quantum shell was. When I said two-N-squared, he almost shit himself.” Her grin was hard and self-assured. “He asked me more and more questions over the next few days. Sometimes we talked for hours. By the end of that week, he hired me to transcribe notes for a major paper he was slated to deliver at the end of last year.”
“So, your job is to clean out his toilets and write his physics papers?”
She smiled and said, “Not anymore. When I made up my mind to come see you, I quit.”
“Why?”
“I realized that I was just marking time, waiting for this.”
I was listening to what she said but I was thinking too, and when her story was over, my mind kept on going.
“What?” she called into my silence.
“You killed that man,” I said with deep conviction, referring to Harrison Fields, aka Sturdyman, who had murdered her ex-husband. She’d shot the old guy in his eye, leaving no clue but a whiff of perfume. I was the only one who knew the identity of the murderer, and so, because I didn’t turn her in, I felt complicit.
“You woulda done the same to somebody murdered one’a your loved ones,” she countered.
She’d said the same thing two years before, but for some reason, back then, I didn’t hear it as truth. But time had changed me. I remembered talking to my adopted son, Jesus, pronounced in the Spanish articulation, Hey Zeus. He told me that I needed a woman in my life.
Somewhere between assigning Ida a place in memory and accepting Amethystine’s hard truth, I stalled. In hindsight, I suppose it was good for me to be conflicted about love instead of the deadly danger that Mouse said awaited me with Lutisha James.
“Ezekiel?”
“Yeah.”
“What you thinkin’?”
“How’s Garnett and Pearl doin’?” I asked, coming up with a topic that had no weight. Garnett and Pearl were fraternal twins, her much younger siblings. She’d taken care of them since they were infants.
“They’re fine. I sent them up north to a co-ed academy. He’s gotten into painting, and she says that she wants to go into law.”
“That sounds expensive.”
“They’re both very smart. Most of the cost they get in financial aid.”
“They don’t mind being away from you?”
“I go up to see them on the weekend every two or three weeks. And they come home for the holidays and part of summer vacation.”
“That’s good. Those private schools can be hell on a sensitive child.” I knew this from my daughter’s prep school experience.
“You told me about Feather. What’s goin’ on with Jesus?”
“Him and Benita raisin’ my beautiful granddaughter and they’re makin’ pretty good money at deep-sea fishin’.”
“Really? I read somewhere that the mackerel were running less around Southern California.”
“Yeah, it’s been kinda dry. Jesus is a real fisherman, though. He goes down into open sea outside of Mexican waters.”
“I wanna see you,” she said out of nowhere.
“Me too.”
The smile those two words earned brought me all the way out of the funk I’d been in for the last two years. You could say that she saved my life right then and there.
I left Amethystine in my mountain home with her scars and my killer dog. I hadn’t broken it off with her due to any lack of trust. I did it because being with her was like being back in the Fifth Ward ghetto, back when the only laws were heaven and hell, black and white, good or evil.
The gates to the curved driveway of the Bel-Air address were open wide. I traveled up the long and curving cobblestone coachway and then parked at the curb before the heavy oaken double doors of the three-story manor. I disembarked the work Lincoln, walked up to the entrance, and was about to press the doorbell button when I noticed the right-side door was just a bit ajar.
I stood there for a full sixty seconds wondering what to do next. It was probably nothing. People up in that fancy neighborhood weren’t worried about a neighbor coming to see if their door was unlocked and what kind of money they kept in the underwear drawer. Nobody wanted to steal your cracked china or some pair of three-year-old size-eleven shoes.
It was probably okay to ring the bell but, then again, I was unarmed and by myself. I had kissed one woman and made love to another. My life was going well, quite well. Why should I put that good life on the line for a man who looked like a demon that had been misnamed Saint?