That was the end of our discussion.
When we got to the gas station I put a nickel into the slot. C.T., whoever that was, was a long shot. But it was the only shot we had.
He answered on the first ring. “Leon, is that you, man?” His voice sounded like a metal file rasping against stone.
“C.T.?” I asked, disguising my voice just in case this rough man ever heard me speak again.
“Who is?” he asked.
“It’s me — Dingo,” I said. I regretted the name as soon as I said it. I was scared stupid.
“Who?”
“Leon told me to call you up. He wanted me to come and get you but —”
“Get me? Man, I could hardly sit up straight.”
“Leon said to come help —”
“You a doctor?”
“I can take care’a you,” I said, trying to make my fake voice sound certain. “I got a brother used to be a medic in the army with me.”
There was silence on the line.
“C.T.?”
“Why you callin’ me that?”
“That’s what Leon wrote on the paper, man. Ain’t that you? I mean if —”
“When you gonna get here?” he asked, interrupting me for the third time.
“That’s why I called. He wrote down your initials and phone, but I can’t read the address. Clinton sumpin’.”
“Clinton?” C.T. moaned. “Denker, man. Twenty-nine sixty-nine Denker. Super’s apartment.”
“Be right there,” I said in a husky voice that would have fooled even my mother.
“YOU GOT my pistol, Paris?” Fearless asked over the loud barking in the backseat.
“I told you already, the girl stole it.”
“That was my gun she took from you?”
“Yes.” I took the left onto Denker.
“An’ now you want me to walk unarmed into the house of a friend of a ex-con nearly killed you yesterday?”
“He don’t know me, Fearless. I’ll just walk in there an’ tell him I’m Leon’s friend.” Finding that phone number and fooling C.T. had given me a sense of control.
“What if he was the one sittin’ next to Leon when he was chasin’ yo’ ass down the street?”
“Shit.” My fingers went suddenly cold.
“That’s okay, man. I’ll go in first. But you owe me a pistol.”
THE ADDRESS C.T. had given us was a court of apartments at the corner of Horn. We left the dog in the car. The super’s apartment was listed under the name of Conrad Benjamin Till. Whoever designed the court must have been a fan of Minos’s maze. After every two doorways there was another turn. I lost my sense of direction almost immediately.
Most of the apartments were dark, as the next day was a workday. We went past a pair of teenagers having some kinda sex behind a skimpy rosebush. I don’t know if they saw us, but they sure didn’t stop.
NO ONE ANSWERED when we rang Conrad’s bell. No one called out when we knocked. Fearless had brought Layla’s tire iron in lieu of a pistol and used it on the door. The sound of that doorjamb being wrenched open by that twelve-pound tire iron was frightening; loud and whining with reports like small-caliber gunshots now and then. I looked around to see if anyone had turned on their lights; no one had, but that didn’t mean we hadn’t been heard or seen.
Fearless went in first, but I was right on his heels, running my hands along the wall. I didn’t find a light switch, but Fearless snagged the overhead cord and said, “I got it.”
Yellow light flooded the small sitting room as I was closing the front door.
Fearless said, “Dog.”
There on a low, modern couch sat a fresh corpse.
He probably had been darker before all the blood drained out, but he’d always be a light-skinned Negro with brown freckles across his wide nose. His face seemed to belong on a fat man, but he was of normal build. He wore a light-colored jacket, blood-soaked T-shirt, and threadbare jeans. Till must’ve died right after we got off the phone.
I was looking at the dead man, but my mind was working overtime trying to believe that he wasn’t there. I’d happened upon dead bodies before in my life: three children in a car wreck outside of Turner, Texas, the body of a sailor I saw on the shore at the Gulf of Mexico, and there’s been a murdered body or two on the street. I once saw the victims of a double lynching hung from an ancient live oak not two miles from my mother’s home. I’ve seen a good many deaths, but none of them, with the exception of those cops that Fearless killed, had anything to do with me.
I had sought out Conrad Till. And if I wasn’t careful I’d end up just like him.
“The first one’s always hard,” Fearless said.
“Say what?”
“When me and my squad’d go out in Germany it was always the first man get killed get to us,” he said in an impossibly calm voice. “Didn’t matter if it was one’a us or one’a them. It’s just that first dead man that reminds you that this is serious business.”
With that Fearless moved to inspect the room. I moved too, his nonchalant bravery having turned my terror into mere heart-pounding fear.
Till’s tan jacket had as much wet blood on it as dry. There was a lot of blood, down on his blue jeans and coagulated in the spaces between the fingers of his left hand. There was also a burned-out cigarette between those fingers. It was as if he’d been sitting there listening to music but then all of a sudden broke out in an attack of bleeding. The blood had come from a wound in the left side of his chest.
We didn’t split up in the super’s pad. I went with Fearless into the kitchen. I forced my eyes to look everywhere, but they didn’t see much. I had forgotten that I was looking for Elana Love.
A doorway from the kitchen led to the bedroom. There was nothing there except a bloody towel in the middle of an unmade bed.
“Let’s get outta here, man,” I whispered to Fearless.
He nodded sagely, and we went back the way we came.
I expected to see the corpse, but not standing up in front of me.
He still looked dead, and that scared me more than his size. I don’t think he expected someone to come out of the kitchen. Maybe he was going for some water to replace all the blood he’d lost.
“Hold it, man,” Fearless said.
The corpse swung his heavy fist, but Fearless leaned back and then pushed the man with the flat of his hand. A variation on that dance step happened again and again. The dead man kept swinging, and Fearless kept pushing off of him as gently as possible.
“You gonna hurt yourself, man,” Fearless kept saying. “Stop it.”
And he was right too. The man could only swing with his right. He was holding his left hand at a high point on the left side of his chest to keep the blood in. That tactic was not working. The blood cascaded through his fingers, and as the life fluid went, the one-handed fighter started flagging. He wound down like a child’s toy until he was on his knees. Finally he lunged with a roundhouse right that would have clocked Fearless on his left hip if he hadn’t stepped out of the way. The man fell on his face and went back to mimicking the dead.
Fearless quickly turned him over and applied pressure to the wound.
Twice in one day. I should have been at the racetrack. Luck that consistent needed a horse to bet on.
Fearless removed Till’s jacket, T-shirt, and a blood-soaked bandage. He then fashioned a new dressing from the sheet I got off the unkempt bed.
“Let’s get outta here,” I said when he was done.
“We got to call an ambulance,” he said.
The man was on his back on the floor, bare-chested with one arm straight out to the right and the other down at his side. I knew Fearless was right. But if I had been alone, my moral responsibilities wouldn’t have become apparent until I was far away and safe.
We made the call from the phone in a corner of the living room, then hurried out toward the car.
There was a siren blaring somewhere off in the night. The young lovers were gone
, and we weren’t far behind them.
9
THE DAPPLED SUNLIGHT on apricot-colored walls was the most delicate thing I had seen in a very long time. The lilac-scented sheets were soft and light. Even the mosquitoes silently batting against the outside of the window were a feathery tickle in my mind. But mosquitoes led unerringly to the notion of blood, and blood would always remind me of Conrad Benjamin Till.
Someone dragged a chair across a floor downstairs, and a dog barked. The aroma of coffee blended with lilac. I sat up and looked out of the window. There I saw East L.A. with its carob and magnolia trees, its unpaved sidewalks, and tiny homes flocked with children. Pontiacs and Fords and Studebakers drove slowly toward their goals. Brown- and white-skinned people made their way.
“Hey, Paris,” Fearless hailed when I came to the doorway of the kitchen. He was sitting just outside the back door in boxer shorts and a T-shirt on a chrome-and-vinyl chair, drinking coffee from a porcelain cup.
“Good morning,” Fanny Tannenbaum said. She was standing at an ironing board, working the wrinkles out of my pants.
I was in my underwear like Fearless, but I wasn’t embarrassed.
“What time is it?” I asked.
“Almost nine,” Fearless and Fanny said together. It was like they were old friends, even family.
I walked into the room and then jumped across the floor because of the low growl to my right. It was the mongrel from the night before, chewing on a big beef bone and warning me to keep my distance.
Fearless got up from his perch and came in to join us. “Shut up, Blood,” he intoned. The dog whimpered and ducked his head.
“I named him after last night,” Fearless continued.
“Mr. Jones told me that I should ask questions to you, that he didn’t explain things so good,” Fanny said.
“He did, huh?”
“Have you found out anything?”
“You know a guy named Conrad Till?” I asked her.
“No. Who is he?”
“He’s a black man, maybe one of the ones who came after you and Solly. Somebody shot him —”
“Oh my!” Fanny cried.
“But he wasn’t dead. We called the ambulance. He’s probably fine.”
Fanny sighed with relief. It had been a while since I’d been around someone who would care about a stranger, even when that stranger might have done her wrong.
“Did you find out why they hurt my husband?” she asked.
“No,” I said.
“It’s all so crazy,” Fanny said. She took my pants and folded them. I reached over to take them from her. It was funny, I didn’t mind standing there in my drawers, but I was embarrassed to put pants on in front of her. I turned sideways, and she, sensing my embarrassment, turned to look out of the window.
It felt like there was a sock in the right front pocket, but when I put my hand in there, I discovered a large wad of what I knew was money. Small bills, I figured, that she kept in a can used for household expenses.
“When did you come in?” I asked Fanny.
“Morris brought me over at seven on his way to the bank.”
“Who?”
“Gella’s husband. All the way he’s telling me what I should be doing. I should be careful. I should leave well enough alone. I shouldn’t let whatever Solly’s done get me in trouble. I should tell someone if I know something is wrong. I think he’d give Gella over to the police if he saw her walking on a red light.”
“You don’t like the police, Fanny?” Fearless asked.
“I have seen the soldiers. I have seen them kill. I saw what they did to you. The police are swine.” The vehemence in her voice left no room for argument.
Not that I wanted to argue with her. The best cop I ever saw was the cop who wasn’t there.
The doorbell was three quick high notes, a pause, and then a long tone.
Blood jumped up and started barking. Worry knitted itself in Fanny’s face. I shared her emotion, but Fearless just walked to the front door in his blue boxers and opened it. I went to the kitchen door, Fanny came up behind me.
I couldn’t see who it was, but Fearless knew him.
“Hello,” he said, then he paused and called out, “Fanny, do you want to talk to Sergeant Latham?”
“Uh… um… oh… uh—what does he want?” Fanny asked.
Fearless turned and said something and then turned again. “He just wants to talk, ma’am. I think he wants to know more about what happened yesterday.”
“I guess,” Fanny said.
She and I came into the living room.
Big, blocky, and blond Bernard Latham walked in. He wore a light tan suit that was a bit large even on his frame, designed for quick movement. When I saw him I took a half step backward. That was the fear I’d inherited from his interrogation.
“Did you find out who attacked my husband?” Fanny asked.
“Yeah,” the sergeant replied. “You and your two darkies here.”
Fearless’s greatest strength is also his greatest weakness; his fists had a mind of their own. Given the right circumstances Fearless could hit a man so fast that later on, when the man recovered, he couldn’t remember what had happened.
Reluctantly I moved to stand between Fearless and Latham.
“If you have come to my house to insult my friends, you can leave now,” Fanny said.
I liked her more every minute.
“I thought you said that you just met these boys yesterday?” Latham asked.
“They have no place to stay, they saved my husband’s life, and for that you beat them. What else could I do but offer them a bed?”
Latham grinned and chortled. “Maybe they’re in that bed with you.”
“In what?” I asked, me, a man without a paddle or rudder.
“Her husband’s a convicted embezzler,” Latham told me. “He’s all mixed up with the underworld. A real Jew. Good enough that he took the money and covered the trail so well that they could only get him for the tip of the iceberg. But there’s millions missing. They just have to find out how he made it disappear.”
Millions. My brain became a fine screen, filtering out everything but the notion of money.
“That’s a lie, and you’re a liar,” Fanny said in that tone of hers. “Solly told me that he never stole anything, and he wouldn’t lie to me.”
I’d’ve lied to Saint Peter for just a hundred thousand dollars.
“Is that all you have to say?” the cop replied.
Fanny was too angry to speak.
“Maybe you think you can get away with it. But I’m watching you.” He expanded his hands to include me and Fearless. “All of you.”
“Every cop I ever seen been watchin’ me, officer,” Fearless offered. “I once spent three months on a Texas chain gang for spittin’ on the sidewalk instead’a the street.”
“If you could do that, I guess you’d kill for some good money, eh, son?” Latham asked.
“I wouldn’t rob ya,” Fearless replied. “But I would spit on you after you was dead.”
That was the line right there, the line that should never be crossed with a cop. Once you stood straight up and looked him in the eye he had to knock you down, or the whole system would stop working.
The problem was that Latham couldn’t knock Fearless down. He didn’t have backup, and they were in close quarters there in the doorway. I knew from his war stories, and from that dark San Francisco night, that Fearless was trained to kill professional killers hand to hand. If Latham tried to do something, Fearless would do something back, and there was nowhere for a man to run after he’d killed an active member of the LAPD.
I was trying to think of a way to head off the inevitable when Fanny started screaming, “Get out of my house, you Cossack! Get out of here! Out of here!” She ran at Latham, and I leaned back against Fearless.
“Get off ’a me, Paris!”
“You can’t help Fanny if they got you.”
Fanny was pressing to get
Latham out of her house, but he didn’t budge.
“I could take you all down now,” Latham assured us. “But I’ve got time. We know the crime, we know the criminals. You won’t be free for long.”
“And where is it you’d take us to?” I asked. The question I hoped would be a buffer between the cop’s stupidity and Fearless’s rage.
“What?” Latham asked.
“You gonna take us to the Hollywood jail?”
Latham’s right eye twitched. That was the whole story right there, that twitch. All I had to do was figure out what it meant.
“If we are not under arrest, then go,” little Fanny said.
Latham took his time staring at her and then Fearless and me in turns. The glare was intended to frighten, and I guess it worked if you consider that I was scared for his life. Finally he left. Fearless stood at the open door, watching him go.
“What do you know about this millions stuff?” I asked our host.
“He made it up,” Fanny said. “He had to. We don’t have that kind of money. And why steal it if not to spend? We don’t have children to leave it to. Why live here?”
“Hmm. Yeah. I don’t know,” I said. “There was once a woman lived down the road from us when I was a kid. She was poor as corn husks, barely kept the flesh on her bones. We all thought that she couldn’t have made more than a dollar a week the way she lived. But she must’a made two, because when she died at eighty-eight they found three thousand silver dollars hid up under her bed.”
“You’re welcome to look under my bed, Mr. Minton.”
10
FANNY HAD CALLED the hospital before I woke up. They told her that Sol was being given a series of blood tests and X rays and wouldn’t be able to have visitors until the afternoon.
After breakfast I spent a couple of hours on the phone trying to get a line on the Messenger of the Divine church. I called every religious group listed in twelve different counties and every soul that I knew. I wanted to ask Reverend Grove a question or two; like when had he last seen Elana Love and was she driving my red Rambler.
Fearless Jones Page 7
