“Oh sure, darlin’,” Nadine said with a big forced grin. “I could use the company.”
We left them there standing on the porch: old Evil Eye and Typhoid Mary among the flowers, counting up the dead.
BACK IN THE CAR I informed Fearless of what I knew.
“Seventy-two thousand dollars?” he said. “Ulysses? Where that poor son gonna come up wit’ money like that?”
“Blackmail, extortion, intimidation, and threats,” I said.
Fearless laughed.
“What’s funny?” I asked.
“That cousin’a yours is sumpin’ else, man. I mean, I never seen any boy get in as much trouble as him. Damn, he’d be runnin’ numbahs in heaven an’ sellin’ holy water in hell.”
“Whole gotdamned family,” I said. “There you got Nadine cuttin’ down men like wheat and people fallin’ dead all ovah Three Hearts. I don’t know how I lived through a Christmas dinner back in the old days when they’d come by.”
“Yeah,” Fearless said with a nod. “But you ain’t much bettah, Paris.”
“What you mean?” I said. “I ain’t cursed.”
“No?”
“Naw.”
“Paris, I know men who run in the streets every night don’t have half the trouble you got. I know people live more peaceable lives in prison.”
“Fuck you, man. All I do is run my bookstore. Ain’t nuthin’ more peaceful than readin’ a book.”
“That’s what that white boy thought when somebody put that bullet in his head.”
This was no simple banter. Fearless wouldn’t have brought up Tiny Bobchek unless he was thinking that my current problems had something to do with him.
“Uh-uh, Fearless. No,” I said. “Tiny was just a, a coincidence.”
“Ulysses comes to your door one minute and then just a few hours later there’s a dead white man on your flo’ and that’s just a coincidence? You know I ain’t that fast when it comes to figurin’, Paris, but this one looks clear as a bell.”
“It was Jessa,” I said. “Jessa did it.”
“Li’l white girl killed that Goliath?”
“He was shot,” I said. “Shot in the head. Women carry guns. Look at Three Hearts.”
“You said Jessa didn’t even have a bag or drawers,” Fearless argued. He had a good memory when he wanted to.
“Tiny could have been armed. She could have pulled out his pistol and opened fire.”
Fearless threw up a hand and let it fall. “Yeah,” he admitted.
“It couldn’t have been Useless,” I continued. “He ain’t a natural killer in the first place. He never carries a gun and he would run from a big fool like Bobchek.”
“Yeah, but that just proves my point.”
“What are you talkin’ about?”
“First you got Ulysses comin’ to your door, sayin’ how he got to run,” Fearless said. “Then the white girl and her boyfriend aftah yo’ ass. Now Ulysses is gone an’ Three Hearts comes, gettin’ you into trouble up to your ears. If that ain’t some kinda bad luck, I don’t know what is.”
It was my turn to laugh. Fearless wasn’t making fun of me. He was reading my life like I’d read a dime novel.
“So what we gonna do about Ulysses?” Fearless asked.
“What can we do?” I replied. “You heard Anthony. Useless is either gone or dead. And with seventy-two thousand dollars in his pocket, he’s way beyond where we gonna find him.”
“The girl could have took the money,” Fearless said.
“Then he’s runnin’ on empty.”
“Come on, Paris. You know we cain’t turn our backs on Hearts. You know you don’t want that evil eye’a hers on yo’ ass.”
I knew it. I knew it.
15
I KNEW IT TOO WELL.
Fearless dropped me off at my place at about six.
There was a cardboard box on the front porch. The flaps were folded together and there was an envelope taped to its side. I unlocked the door and kicked the box inside. I sat on the first chair near the entrance and flipped the box open.
Books. Books in which there were many dog-eared pages. I opened the sealed envelope. It was from my literary girlfriend, Ashe Knowles.
Dear Mr. Minton,
Lately I’ve been taking to underlining those places in books where Negroes are denigrated by white authors, and colored ones too. It seems to me that one day our children or their children might want to know how many lies have been propagated against our people over the years and decades and centuries. You will find in these pages references to our low intelligence, our aberrant sexuality, our criminal nature, and our primitive instincts. In some places these comments are meant as compliments and in others as scientific fact. For a long time I believed that everyone was aware of this terrible state of affairs, but just last Tuesday I asked Miss Harrison, the librarian at the 53rd Street branch, if she knew where such outrageous statements would be catalogued. She told me that she wasn’t even aware of any great preponderance of racist statements in American literature. I gave her fifteen examples in the B’s of authors’ last names and she was amazed. But when I asked her if she would set up a catalogue of these gaffes in her branch she told me that that wouldn’t be any help for anyone.
Mr. Minton, you are a well-read and therefore a well-educated man. I know that you will see the value of these notes. My apartment is just one room and very small, but you have lots of room in your bookstore. I was wondering if you might keep these books for me over the next little while until I can find some institution that might want to store and catalogue my research.
Yours truly,
Ashe Knowles
There were eighteen hardback books in the box. Each one had anywhere from five to fifteen dog-eared pages proving Ashe’s claims. She had a relentless, steel-trap kind of intelligence. And I had to admit there was something to her assertion. There must have been thousands of times that I had come across statements in books that insulted and lied about Negroes in America and abroad. Hegel had done it and Karl Marx too. But without a definitive list of these misdemeanors, how could we complain? Even the librarian had denied the allegation until Ashe showed her proof.
I decided to put the books down in the onetime crypt of Tiny Bobchek.
I was happy to have received that box of books, first because of the fact that no one had stolen them from off my porch. Nobody stole books. These bound and printed stacks of paper were the most precious things in the world, and yet no one would have picked them up. That box could have sat on my porch for a week and those books would have gone unmolested and unread.
The second thing that made me happy was that Ashe had distracted me for an hour or so from the worries that had settled all through my mind.
I thought about Ashe and her bumbling brilliance. She would have done much better for herself if she had gone to college and committed all of the plays of Shakespeare to memory. That way the white professors, deans, and provosts would have seen her as some kind of anomaly who would have fit well in the lower echelons of the university hierarchy. There she could have waited until such time that a catalogue of racist quotes in American and English literature might have been presented on a grand stage.
But Ashe could only see truth—not strategy. She worked as a teacher’s assistant at a private Baptist elementary school down on Eighty-third Street. They paid her twenty-two dollars a week, and she lived somehow, sometimes unable to buy even a pencil.
Again I thought of how I could have loved a woman like that. But loving her, I knew that I should leave her alone.
I WASN’T HUNGRY and so I went up to bed at eight. My jaw was aching and my right arm felt weak. I had pains up and down my right side and a thick copy of Titus Groan on my night table. I wanted to read it, but I was experiencing too many aches to grapple with that hefty tome.
So instead I started thinking.
I knew that I shouldn’t have cut off Fearless’s question about Tiny Bobchek’s death. Tiny’s dying
like that was just the kind of trouble that Useless would bring down on you. But Useless wasn’t a killer and he’d gone. I hadn’t even let him through the door, so why would he have come back? And I was sure there wasn’t any connection between Useless and Jessa.
When I’d met her, she talked all the time about how she’d never seen a black man up close. She’d play with my hair and place her white hand against my skin to marvel at the contrast.
And Jessa was a brass tacks kind of girl. I paid her rent and made an exotic entry in her life. If she was working with somebody who was counting money in the thousands, she wouldn’t have had a moment for me.
No. Jessa had nothing to do with Useless and Useless had nothing to do with the murder of Tiny Bobchek.
But where had Jessa gone?
I closed my eyes, but I could tell by the thrumming at the back of my head that sleep would not be coming any time soon.
I had an inspiration then. So I got dressed, went down to my car, and drove over to the blue house in front of Man’s Barn.
It was almost nine, well beyond the time when decent people dropped in on one another. Man might have turned me away, but I had a plan to get by him.
I rang the bell and stood there in my brown jacket and black trousers. I was sporting alligator shoes and a blue pullover shirt that had a one-button collar.
Man wore a white T-shirt and navy blue pants that had a drawstring at the waist.
“What the hell do you want?” he asked me. “Do you know what time it is? My little girl was asleep before you started pushin’ on that bell.”
I twisted my face into a wordless apology. “I didn’t wanna disturb ya, but I thought you’d appreciate me coming here over the alternative.”
“What the fuck are you talkin’ about, Negro?” he said. He grabbed the door as if he were about to slam it in my face.
“Fearless Jones,” I said.
For a moment time ceased to pass on Man Dorn’s face. Then he looked at me, wondering how to avoid the two words he’d just heard.
“What’s Mr. Jones got to do wit’ me?”
“You know that woman I was here wit’ today?” I asked. “The one that paid Useless’s rent?”
“Yeah?”
“She took me ovah to Mad Anthony’s, and he got kinda riled. . . .”
“That don’t have nuthin’ to do wit’ me,” Man claimed.
“Yeah. I know.” I was feeling sorry for Man. “But then Three Hearts went to Fearless and Fearless broke Tony’s jaw. Then she said that she was here and she thought that you knew more about Angel than you was sayin’ and that maybe he could come on by. I told Fearless that we didn’t need to go through all’a that. I said that I was sure you’d give Three Hearts what she needed.”
“Hold on,” he said, retreating into the blue home.
He left the door open. There was a television on in a room next to the one the door opened onto. Through the second doorway I could see two black women sitting on a couch, illuminated by the light of the TV. They were peering out at me. They looked like dark sisters, maybe a year or two apart. I tried to think of what their relationship to Man might have been but failed.
I did know that neither one of them was his wife.
Man returned with an eight-by-six glossy photograph. It was of a stunningly beautiful woman. She had medium brown skin, straight or straightened hair, eyes filled with knowing surprise, and parted lips that could teach you how to kiss a Greek goddess.
“This Angel?” I asked.
“When she told me that she was a actress,” Man said, “I asked her if she had a publicity picture. You know, a lotta these girls got bikini pictures for their Hollywood agents. It wasn’t that, but she’s pretty, though. Nice girl. She just had bad taste in men.”
“Anything else?”
“Naw, man. That’s it. I told you everything else.”
“How about the car the guy drove her off in?”
“I don’t even know, brother. I didn’t really care.”
“Man?” a woman said. She was standing at the inner door.
She was a shortish woman with big kissy lips and startled eyes.
“Go on back in the TV room, Doretha,” Man said. “We almost through here.”
She backed away fearfully.
“Couple’a my tenants come up to watch TV,” he told me. “So Fearless don’t have to come by now, right?”
“No, sir, Mr. Dorn.”
16
THERE WEREN’T TOO MANY joints where a woman like Angel would belong. Of course there were all kinds of men who would have wanted to go there with her: garage attendants and gangsters on the Negro side; directors, producers, and other high rollers on the white. But black men couldn’t get into the places she would have wanted to be, and white men couldn’t take her there—at least not for very long.
In 1956 a sophisticated and beautiful black woman had very few choices unless she wanted to be a good girl and wear midcalf skirts and milky rimmed glasses. I didn’t expect that Angel was that type of woman. If she was, I wouldn’t find her and I wouldn’t need to.
The only black club that would fit her bill was Apollo’s at the Knickerbocker Hotel off Central down in the forties. Apollo’s had jazz and fine food for black and white patrons. That was before the black part of town became off-limits to the casual white devotee.
I pulled up to a liquor store called Kenny’s Keg on Figueroa. I got a pack of Lucky Strikes and a pint of Greeley’s whiskey with a short stack of paper cups and a quart bottle of seltzer. I put the booze and water in the trunk, lit a cigarette, and then walked across the street to a glass-encased phone booth. I looked up a number by the yellow electric light and dialed.
“Hello?” a frightened elderly voice inquired.
“Kiko, please.”
“What?”
“Kiko.”
“Kiko?”
“Yes.”
A few hard knocks sounded in my ear and then, “Hello,” came a sultry voice.
“Loretta?”
“Paris?” she managed to evince both surprise and joy in her tone.
“You said call you, right?”
“I’m surprised you did,” she said.
“Why’s that?”
“I don’t know. You seem to think about some things until all the color is washed out, I guess. What do you want?”
“I got fifty dollars and a yen to hear some jazz.”
“The High Hat?” she suggested.
“I was thinkin’ more in the line with Apollo’s.”
“You know you need a reservation to get in there,” she said.
“I do, but Milo don’t.”
“And you just came up with this idea on a whim?” she asked. She was playing with me, but even when playing, cats use their claws a little.
“No,” I admitted. “I got to find out some things there, but I promise you a good dinner and fine companionship.”
“I’m not a cheap date, Mr. Minton.”
“I know how to act.”
I PICKED HER UP at her parents’ house twenty-five minutes later. They lived just south of Venice Boulevard on the west side of town.
That night Kiko “Loretta” Kuroko was a sight to behold. She wore a tight-fitting green gown that had sequins here and there, with a black velvet-and-silk shawl draped on her shoulders. Her black high heels made her taller than I by two inches, and her makeup was just enough to make any man from six to sixty-six skip a step in his gait.
I opened the door for her as her frightened parents gawped from a window of their small house.
Loretta’s whole family had been imprisoned in an American-run concentration camp during World War II. This caused her parents to be afraid of anything outside their small circle and it made Loretta hate all white people.
“Damn,” I once said to her. “My people been under a white man’s thumb for three hundred years an’ I don’t hate all of ’em.”
“That’s because they never lied to you,” she sai
d on that weekday afternoon at Milo’s office. “But I always believed that I was accepted as a person and a citizen. After what I saw, I don’t care what happens to them.”
It was lucky for Milo and the black population of Watts in general. Loretta was a force to be reckoned with.
THE BOUNCER AT THE CLUB entrance at the Knickerbocker was a reptilian-looking fellow named Razor. He was taller than Fearless and broader of shoulder than Mad Anthony. But he smiled, showing more teeth than seemed possible.
“Loretta,” he said, not even deigning to recognize my presence.
“Mr. Hanley.” If Loretta knew you, she knew your last name and often used it as a mark of respect.
Loretta took a step across the threshold and I moved to follow. A big brown hand covered my chest.
“Where you think you goin’, boy?” Razor asked, no longer smiling but still showing his teeth.
I wish I’d said something smart or sassy, but I was flabbergasted and intimidated. All I could do was stutter.
“Paris is with me,” Loretta said.
“Really?”
“Yes.” Her smile really was something.
“You know you could do a lot bettah than a little man like this here,” Razor said, giving her an up and down look.
“I can see that you don’t know him as well as I do, Mr. Hanley,” she replied. “Paris here can’t fight to save his life, but you know when women get a man alone, fighting is the last thing on their minds.”
The club was crowded, and the bar was right next to the door. A few of the people standing around heard Loretta’s lecture and started laughing.
Razor smiled and bowed his head to me.
“Excuse me, Mr. Paris, sir. I didn’t know.” He waved his hand and we were taken by a young brown girl in a tight pink dress to a table near the stage.
Milo had a running tab at Apollo’s, but I started my own. I lit Loretta’s cigarette and ordered good champagne. She was hungry and so we had them bring out a basket of battered and fried shrimp with two salads.
The Winston Marks Trio was playing that night. They were one of the most important components in those early days of the new jazz. Winston could be anything from a lonely whale to a hummingbird’s wing with his trumpet. He would have probably been world renowned if he hadn’t had an eye for every lady he met. One of those ladies was his bass player’s wife. Three weeks after that performance, Billy Stiles shot Winston in the brain, ending the trio’s career.
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