“So what do you intend to do now?”
“I don’t know.” She made a gesture of hopelessness with her hands, but I had learned by now not to trust when she was acting weak.
“What about that place on Hazzard you wanted to go before? You wanna go there?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Are you going to help me?” she asked.
“I don’t know. I can’t go back to the store because of Leon. That’s where he’d go for sure.”
“We could go to your place,” she suggested.
“I live at my store,” I said.
“Oh.”
“But there’s a motel down at Venice Beach take us. It’s cheap and there’s the ocean outside. The waves help me think.”
“Let’s go there.” She reached across the table and laid her hand over mine. And damn if my fingers didn’t curl around hers.
4
THE MUSSEL BEACH INN was half a block up from the water, perched on a small hill. You couldn’t see the ocean in the darkness, but you heard and smelled it just fine. I left the sliding doors open because of a false sense of security I had. I mean, Leon wouldn’t find us at the beach if he searched for seven years.
The lights were down and the linen curtains were waving in and out from our little cement patio. Every now and then the moon appeared in a curve of the flowing fabric.
Elana told me that she was from Georgia, that her mother had brought her to live in L.A. when she was only twelve. But then, just three years later, her mother moved to Jackson, Mississippi, with a merchant marine who later abandoned her.
“She left you on your own when you was just fifteen?” I said, sounding more concerned than I actually felt.
“We didn’t see eye to eye, my mama and me,” Elana said rather callously. “And anyway, I had a boyfriend I was livin’ wit’ when she left.”
I said that that was sad and tried for a kiss, but she turned away before I got there.
Leon, she said, was a strong arm and a robber. She worried that Sol Tannenbaum had to give up part of his life savings for his thuggish protection. That’s why she left him. She wasn’t going to be a moll or an accomplice. She needed a man who was going to be sweet and gentle.
I didn’t believe a word she said, but that didn’t matter. I told her that my mother raised me as a gentleman. “A gentle man,” I said before launching another kiss. That one missed too.
It was late, and there was no immediate danger. She was a young woman, and I was the young man who had just saved her life. I couldn’t see where a kiss was out of line.
“I’m too upset to do that, baby,” she said after my third awkward attempt. “Why don’t we try an’ get some sleep. I’ll feel better tomorrow.”
The only vacancy the motel had was furnished with two single beds. I could see that I was destined to sleep alone and so crawled under the covers of the one nearest the window.
“Aren’t you gonna take off your clothes?” she asked.
“No.”
“I won’t look.”
“I wish you would. You might see somethin’ you like. But I’m not taking off my pants until I know that I won’t have to run any minute with some killer on my ass.” I wasn’t really afraid, but I had my car key, money, and Fearless Jones’s pistol in my pockets. I wanted all of that close at hand.
She made a little humming sound and then got under her bedclothes. She did take off her dress, but I couldn’t see anything because of the blankets.
“G’night,” she said softly.
I switched off the lamp on the night table next to my bed, closed my eyes, and concentrated on the sound of the waves. After a while my mind began to drift.
In the reverie my thoughts kept returning to Fearless Jones.
Fearless Jones. Tall and slender, darker than most Negroes in the American melting pot, he was stronger than tempered steel and an army-trained killing machine.
I learned just how deadly he was one night after a big rainstorm in San Francisco. I was coming down a dark street dancing to the jazz I knew I’d be hearing soon. When the cops stopped me, I guess I must have been a little too cocky. They didn’t like my attitude and were correcting it with their nightsticks when Fearless showed up to meet me. He jumped in the middle of the fracas as if he were still under Bradley fighting the Germans hand to hand. He disarmed both men and beat them to their knees.
He would have let it go at that if one of the cops hadn’t put a knife in his thigh. After that there was no hope. One cop fell unconscious, facedown in a pool of water. The other, the one who stabbed Fearless, well, his windpipe busted.
Fearless still had a small limp from that knife wound. There’s never a day that goes by I don’t wish that I’d taken the beating and Fearless had missed the whole thing.
But for all that he was a killer, Fearless was a good man too. Too good. He was generous beyond his means. This generosity often led to trouble that I got pulled into. Loan sharks and wife-beating husbands, con men and shady landlords. Fearless brought me into conflict with every kind of lowlife and thug. And I am not a courageous man.
Maybe that’s why I had Fearless on my mind instead of the sensuous curves of Elana Love. I was scared, and Fearless was the only person I really trusted. I considered going to the police about Leon, but the cops were an iffy bet at best. Maybe somebody had reported the shoot-out. Maybe, if they couldn’t find Leon, the cops would decide that I shot at myself. There was no way that I could rely on Elana telling them the same story she told me. And if they got me into an interrogation room, I’d confess to anything they said.
No, I couldn’t go to the police. And I wouldn’t go to Fearless either. In the morning I’d take Elana anywhere she wanted to go and then I’d go on vacation for a few weeks, maybe down in San Diego. I had enough money for a holiday. And by the time I returned, Leon would either be back in jail or on easy street. Either way he wouldn’t be worried about me.
With that decision made I dozed off, but I didn’t relax. In my dreams someone was chasing me through the main library downtown. I ran from room to room with my unknown pursuer close behind. I knew that in one of the books there was written the secret of my success and salvation, but I couldn’t stop to search for it for fear I’d get caught and drown in the waters outside the Mussel Beach Inn.
“Paris.” Her lips were touching my ear.
I tried to jump, but her arms were around me. Her breasts were heavy against my back.
“I thought you said —” I started to say.
“Shhhh,” she whispered. “What you got down here?”
I heard the zipper from under the blanket and then I felt the silken warmth of her hand.
“Dang,” she said in what I knew was real surprise. “I could use three hands on you.”
There are no two lovers alike. Every man and woman has different needs and pleasures in bed. I’ve always known this. It’s part of the reason that I have so much anticipation the first time with a new woman. But that night I realized that everybody is different with every new love they meet. Coming together with Elana made me into a new man. I was jumping through hoops I hadn’t known were there. Elana gave me pleasure in places I never associated with sex.
Together we were like an overripe peach, just dripping with sweetness and sticky with love. My orgasms were so strong that I didn’t even feel the ejaculations. But they were in no way superior to the feel of her teeth at the back of my neck.
From a worried sleep to passionate love to a deep slumber she took me. The ocean was crashing, and the cool air drove me deeper into the blankets. At the first moment of consciousness I was smiling and placated. But then I began to sense that I was alone.
Morning light was coming through the wavy curtains. Elana was not in my bed and neither was she in hers. The bathroom was empty. My pants were strewn in the middle of the floor. My wallet was laid open, emptied of cash. The .38 was gone too.
She hadn’t taken the five-dollar bill
that I keep in my shoe. I always thought it would come in handy if I was mugged late one night and had to pay for a taxi ride home. I never imagined that a mugging would come in the form of sex. And, as much as I wanted to be mad, as much as I was mad, I still appreciated the way she had robbed me. At least I did until I realized that she had also stolen my car.
The blacktop lot to the motel was completely empty. It was ten A.M. and I was marooned in Venice for no reason other than I was a fool.
I took a bus directly to the Bank of America branch on Normandie. I made a withdrawal, which took a while because I was closing out my account, and carried my money back home.
THERE WAS no crowd, and so I figured the fire must have happened either the night before or early in the morning. Whenever it happened it must have raged, because there weren’t ten books out of over three thousand that survived the blaze. My storefront rental was razed to the ground. Only the metal fixtures and the extra thick wood of my desk and filing cabinet left any vestige of the life I had been trying to build.
I wept like a child. The tears ran down my cheeks, and my hands hung down. I stood there in the middle of the blackened lot that had been my future, quivering from the diaphragm.
“Mr. Minton.” It was Theodore Wally from the Superette. He was standing at my side ready to catch me in case I were to fall again.
“What happened?” I asked.
“It was a fire last night,” the old-faced youth told me. He seemed almost as upset as I was. He might have even shared a tear or two with me. “The fire inspector came and asked me questions about you. I told him what happent yesterday. I hope that wasn’t bad.”
“What am I gonna do now?” I moaned. “That was everything I ever owned.”
“Your insurance’ll pay for it, won’t it?” Theodore asked hopefully.
“Insurance? Man, I didn’t have no insurance.” I laughed a little too loudly.
“Can I do something for you?” Wally asked. “Anything you want.”
“Did the inspector say anything about the fire?”
“He said suspicious. Suspicious.”
I didn’t need to ask him any more questions. Wally went back to the store and brought me a Royal Crown cola and a ham sandwich. I sucked on the bottle and inhaled the odor of my life gone up in smoke.
5
MILO SWEET’S bail bonds,Tax Filing, and Financial Advising office was on the fourth floor of a warehouse building on Avalon. At that time an illegal poultry distributor occupied the ground floor, so there was the general odor of chicken shit and grain feed throughout the upper rooms.
Milo’s office had a frosted glass door with black letters stenciled at the top:
OTTO RICKMAN
LIFE INSURANCE AGT.
&
NOTARY PUBLIC
I was never sure if that was the old sign or if Milo purposely had it printed to mislead creditors and others who might have held a grudge or a marker.
The room was maybe twenty feet wide and ten deep. There were three windows across the back wall and a desk on either side of the room. Wooden filing cabinets filled in the spaces between the windows.
“Hello, Mr. Minton,” Milo’s secretary, Loretta Kuroko, said from the desk on the right. She’d been Milo’s secretary since his lawyer days. She stayed with him after he’d been disbarred, imprisoned for three years, and then when he went through a series of professions. She was a hostess when he had been a restaurant owner, a bookkeeper when he’d tried car insurance sales. Even in Milo’s brief stint as a fence Loretta answered his phone and ran interference with the fiercest of clients.
They had never been lovers as far as I knew, and that was odd because Loretta loved Milo and she had a kind of perpetual beauty, thin and elegant with no wrinkles or lines. She was Japanese-American, a victim of America’s little-publicized Japanese internment camps during World War Two.
“Loretta,” I replied.
“Hey hey, Paris,” Milo growled from his desk to the left. He sat in a haze of mentholated cigarette smoke, smiling like a king bug in a child’s nightmare.
Milo was always the darkest man in the room, except when he was in the room with Fearless. He was taller than I but not six feet. He had big hands and long arms, bright white eyes and teeth and the complexion of polished charcoal. His short hair was always loaded with pomade and combed to the right. He knew the definition of every word in the dictionary and every once in a while managed to beat me at a game of chess.
“Milo,” I hailed. “How’s it goin’?”
“Must be good for somebody, somewhere. Must be. But don’t ask me where.”
I sat down and submitted to the scrutiny of those bright eyes.
“What’s wrong, Paris?”
“Who said anything was wrong?”
“Your eyes is red. Your head is hangin’. You don’t have a chessboard or a book under your arm, so you must be here on bidness.” Milo paused and looked a little harder. “And if it’s bidness you here for, it can’t be for you because if it was, you’d be in jail and callin’ me on the phone. It ain’t tax time, and you sure don’t make enough money to need financial advice. So if it ain’t you, then it must be Fearless.” Milo enjoyed reading between the lines. He was good at it, I had to admit that. “But you refused to come up with his fine before, so now something must have changed. That means I was right in the first place and you are in trouble. So, what’s wrong, Paris?”
“Believe me, Mr. Sweet, you don’t wanna know. I got to get Fearless outta jail and I got to do it fast. Will you help me?”
“I ain’t no bank.”
“You’re not a German insurance salesman either.”
Milo didn’t bother to answer that swipe. I put a stack of five one-hundred-dollar bills on the table and then placed a twenty crosswise on that.
“It’s all I got,” I apologized.
“You expect me to spring him for just twenty?”
“I’ll pay the rest in four weeks’ time.”
I had done work for Milo in the past. Asked a few questions, come up with an address or two on bail jumpers, but it still burned him when he felt that he was being had.
“I can’t do it, Paris,” he whined. “It would set a bad example.”
“I’m not tellin’ anybody, Miles.”
“Can you at least make it thirty?”
“They burned down my store, man,” I said. “They took my money and my car and burned down my goddamn store.” My voice cracked and I had to blink hard to shut down my tear ducts.
Milo began rapping his knuckles on the desktop. His look changed. It was no friendlier, but the animosity was now aimed at some unknown perpetrator.
“Your bookstore?”
“Yeah.”
“Why?” There was pain in Milo’s voice.
“I don’t know, but if I don’t do somethin’ soon, they might burn me down too.”
“Shit, Paris. What did you do?”
I pondered his question. I had asked it a hundred times of Fearless Jones. I couldn’t believe the trouble he’d get into and all he would say is, I didn’t do nuthin’, Paris. I was just mindin’ my own business. But what had I done? How could I have avoided Elana Love and Leon Douglas?
“I’on’t know, man. Maybe God looked down and saw all the shit I done got away wit’ an’ decided to mete out my punishment just when things started to get good.”
“Amen,” Milo said. “Amen to that.” He shook his head and smiled, then he looked at his watch. “It’s too late to get him out today. I’ll drop by the courthouse on my way home and make the arrangements, but we have to go get him tomorrow mornin’. Where you gonna sleep tonight?”
“I don’t know.”
“Loretta,” Milo called across the room.
“Yes, Mr. Sweet?” she replied.
“Pull out the cot. Paris is gonna be our watchdog tonight.”
“Yes sir.”
AT FIVE-THIRTY, when Milo and Loretta went home, I started going through the phone
books of L.A., looking for Love. I found four listings. I called the numbers, asking for Elana, but of the two that were still connected there was no clue. The two that had been disconnected were an Alvin Love in Santa Monica, which I doubted would be fruitful, and an E. E. Love on Twenty-eighth Street.
I lay back and read the newspaper after exhausting the phone book. Then I had a notion. In the phone book there was only one Tannenbaum. The first name was David, not Sol, but his address in East Los Angeles was the same one Elana had given to me the day before, on Hazzard. We’d been headed to his house when Leon and his friend tried to run us down. I considered dialing the number, but then I held back. One thing I was sure of: surviving Leon Douglas was going to take more subtlety than a call announcing how smart I was.
I turned out the lights at about nine. Milo’s canvas cot was no more than a stretcher held aloft by crossed sticks of oak at either end. I lay there, the wounded soldier, the man who never asked for war and wouldn’t benefit from its outcome.
Up until that moment I had been going on reflex: running and hiding. But on that stretcher, in that coffin-shaped room, with only the occasional squawk of a dreaming hen to break the silence, I decided what I needed and what I had to do. It didn’t matter that I was small and weak or even that I begged for my life when that man was slapping me. None of that mattered because that bookstore was what made me somebody rather than just anybody. Burning down my store was just the same as shooting me, and somebody would have to make restitution for that crime.
LORETTA WAS in at eight o’clock exactly. I made coffee for her in the little kitchenette that they had built in the closet.
“Nine years with Mr. Sweet and he never even bought me a coffee,” she said, smiling at me.
I had put away the folding cot under the kitchenette counter and returned all of the phone books. Loretta went to her desk and started working immediately. I sat at Milo’s desk, thinking how lucky I was to have friends.
Fearless Jones Page 3
