“I understand you, sir,” a voice agreed.
I smiled in my doze, thinking that most people thought I was crazy when I told them that story. A door closed and I was jarred awake. Three men stood in the shadows down the street in front of the curtained church.
Some more words were spoken, but I didn’t understand them. This made me think that I had given meaning to the words I heard in my sleep. Through the darkness I could tell that one of the men was white and the other two were black. One black man was well built, wearing a white suit. He laughed and slapped the white man on the shoulder. That was William Grove. I remembered him going into the church with all of the deacons shaking his hand as he went past. The other black man seemed to be older. He also wore a suit, but it was shapeless, fitting the man like the everyday uniform of a night watchman or usher.
The white man was powerfully built too. That’s really all I could tell about him, except that he seemed to have some kind of foreign accent. They talked briefly, and then a dark-colored sedan drove up. The white man got in, and the sedan drove off.
I crouched down as the sedan went past. When I rose partway up again, the black men were still talking.
They talked for a while more, and then Grove walked away down the street. The older man used a key in the front door to the church and went in.
I had brought myself to the edge of that minefield by asking a couple of good questions and by perseverance. But every step from then on was laid out for a better man than I was. So I sat there trying to will myself up the evolutionary ladder from man to superman. But when I got out of that car, there was no cape dragging behind me, only a tail between my legs.
14
I NEEDED TO RELIEVE my bladder, but I was scared. In a car I was an even match for Leon Douglas; on foot gawky Gella Greenspan had about equal odds to kick my ass.
I knocked on the church door, braced by the cold air and the possibility of finding a toilet. I was standing there for quite a while before a baritone voice asked, “William?”
“It’s Tyrell Lockwood,” I said, loud and clear.
“What you want?”
“I came to speak to Reverend Grove.”
“It’s three in the morning,” the opera voice informed me.
“It’s very important,” I said. “About a woman named Elana Love.”
There was a moment of silence, and then the lock snicked and cracked. The door came open and a frosty-headed older gentleman looked at me with a deeply furrowed brow.
“What about Sister Love?” he asked.
“She hired me to find you, said it was somethin’ important she had to say.”
“What?” His features were African Negro with very little other racial influence. Based on his facial structure you would have expected his skin to be dark, very dark, but instead it was fifty-fifty, coffee and cream.
“I’m sorry, sir,” I said. “But my business is with Reverend Grove. I spent the whole night driving around trying to find this place and I got to go.”
“I’m Vincent,” the man said warily. “Father Vincent la Trieste. At one time I was the minister of this congregation.”
“May I use your facilities, Father Vincent?”
There was a moment when he might have refused me, but then he stepped back, allowing me in.
I had only seen the Messenger of the Divine church once, about a half year before. The landlord brought me around because I was making noises about renting a place and the Messenger was behind on the rent for the second month in a row. Mr. Anderson, the landlord, brought me in on a Tuesday afternoon when there was no one in the place. The room I entered with Father Vincent was exactly the same as I remembered. Plush red drapes on all four walls. Folding walnut chairs set in rows before an oak podium that was edged in gold and jet. There were hymn books with cardboard covers lined with royal blue felt on each seat and a huge, rough-hewn cross propped on its side and leaning against the draperies behind the podium. It was almost an exact replica of the room I had seen on Central. I would have taken the place after Anderson showed it to me, but the church came up with the rent, and I ended up taking the storefront down the street.
In the corner there were three chairs set at a wobbly pine table with three glasses, each one almost empty of red wine, and a tin ashtray full of butts set in the center.
“Through there,” Vincent said, gesturing at the wall.
“What?” I asked.
“Through that door,” he said in an exasperated tone. “The toilet.”
There was a short hallway that led to an old-fashioned toilet that had a pull handle connected to a tank on the wall above. As nervous as I was, urinating afforded me great relief and pleasure. I leaned a hand against the wall while I did my business, exhausted from the past few days of pressure.
I poked my head out of the john, noticing a half-open door a little farther on in the back. In that room I spied a table strewn with watches, jewelry, and 35-millimeter cameras. There were two console televisions with round screens against the far wall and a fur coat of some kind hanging on a nail in the back door.
I snaked my way back to the bathroom, flushed the toilet, and then returned to my host.
“You look familiar,” he said when I returned.
“I used to work part-time for the bookstore near to your church when it was on Central.”
“Where is she?” Vincent asked me.
I pulled out a chair from the rickety table and sat.
“Kidnapped.”
“What?”
“She came to me looking for Grove. Like I said, I worked near to where you used to be. She come in there askin’ ’bout where she could find the reverend.”
“You said she was kidnapped?”
“She told me that if I could find Grove, she’d give me five hundred dollars. So I said I’d help out. Only when I started drivin’ her, a man attacked us and took her away. He chased us. Big motherfucker. You know, I fought him, but he laid me out. Before he did though, she screamed at him, called him Leon.”
“Leon Douglas?” he whispered.
“She didn’t yell his full name.”
Vincent took a chair for himself. He was staring hard at me. I wasn’t scared though. He was an old guy, sixty or more, and I always felt comfortable if given the time to roll out a lie. I’m good at lying. My mother always said that it was because of all those lying books I read.
“You lyin’,” Vincent said.
“Why you say that?”
“Why would she trust you? Why she gonna offer you good money like that to find William?”
“She didn’t trust me completely, that’s why I don’t know why she wanted you guys. You know, I’ve done some findin’-people work for Milo Sweet, the bail bondsman.”
“Why you believe her? Did she pay you anything?”
“Man, the curves on that woman and the way she moved ’em, damn, five hundred dollars was the least she had to offer.”
“You go to the law?”
“No.” I made eye contact with the holy man as I said so.
“Why not?”
I shrugged, looked at him again, and then said, “If she offered me five, there had to be more, and if I went to the cops, there was no chance of being paid a dime. What I figured was that I’d find the reverend and see what was what.”
Vincent held out his hands in a show of helplessness. “I haven’t heard from Sister Love in more than two months, and I don’t know anything about any money. All I do is God’s work. I spread His word.”
Like a boxer getting on his bicycle and putting out the jab, that was Vincent. I had staggered him with my information, and all he could fall back on was his everyday con.
“Well, if you can’t help me…” I stood up.
“But I could ask Brother Grove,” Vincent offered.
“Maybe I should ask him.”
“Maybe,” the canny man of God replied. “If you got here five minutes earlier, you would’a seen him. But he’s gone now, won’
t be back for a few weeks.”
“Where’d he go?”
“Church business, in Tulsa.”
“Oh. Well I guess that’s that.”
“But he’s gonna call me. When he gets there he said he’d call. I could ask him then.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe I should just go to the police.”
“Better no,” he said.
“Why?”
“Let me ask William first. Maybe he could shed some light on it. I’ll tell you what, you go home and get some sleep, and when I talk to William sometime tomorrow night, next mornin’ at the latest, I’ll call you.”
I thought about sleeping in that lilac-scented, apricot-colored room. It sounded pretty good. I mused on that for a few seconds, pretending that I was thinking about Vincent’s selfless offer.
“Call you by ten day after tomorrow,” he added.
“All right,” I said, nodding. “All right. But I’ll have to call the cops if you don’t call me by then. You know it’s a crime not to report a crime.”
Vincent was scanning the tabletop until he located a short pencil and a paper matchbook. He took the nub and said, “Tell me your number.”
I gave him the Tannenbaum phone number.
“What’s the address?”
“Why you need my address?”
“Well, uh, we might have to run over there or somethin’.”
“No, uh-uh. You just call me. Call me by ten day after tomorrow.” I stood up.
“We could use the address too,” he said with no apology or excuse.
“I’ll give you what you need after I talk to Grove.”
I had a question in mind, and it must’ve shown on my face.
“Something else?” he asked.
“Why did you pull up your red skirts and run from the old church so fast?”
Father Vincent blinked twice but said nothing.
“I mean,” I continued, “you ran outta there in the middle’a the night. The landlord came around askin’ everybody if they knew where you’d gone.”
“A misunderstanding about the rent,” the elder Holy Roller said. “Anderson made some promises about work that he was gonna do to the buildin’. After a year we told him that we wouldn’t pay, you know, the rent until, uh, he did what he said he would.”
“Hmm.” I pondered his lie. “Only time I ever seen people pull up stakes that fast they were either runnin’ from the law or from a loaded gun.”
“Nuthin’ like that,” Vincent assured me. “Just a misunderstanding is all.”
“All right,” I said, still leery. “You call me when you’ve talked to Grove.”
I turned and walked out of there, feeling in charge for the first time since Elana Love walked in the door. I didn’t look back at Father Vincent. I was sure that he’d be on the phone to Grove as soon as I was gone. But that was okay. I wanted them upset. I wanted them to feel like I felt.
JOHN-JOHN’S ALL-NIGHT HAMBURGER STAND on Slauson was the right place for me. Their hamburgers came with beefsteak tomatoes, Bermuda onions, sour pickles, mustard, mayonnaise, and homemade chili. You had the choice of cheese. My fries always had chili and cheese on them. A strawberry malted for my milk and I was on cloud nine.
The only two things that I was proud of consistently were that I could eat anything and never gain an ounce and that I’m extremely well endowed in the sexual organ sort of way. My manhood was questionable as far as courage or strength, but once in the bed I could out-joust the best of them.
I once thought that all I had to be was slender and sexually imposing and women would love me for that alone. But I realized as time went on that women, though they were often excited by my size, got used to it pretty quickly and were willing to leave me for what I thought were lesser men.
I guess I was thinking about Fearless. He was with a woman right then, and there I was eating a chili burger at four-thirty in the morning.
Sal Grimaldi, the night manager of John-John’s, liked to play chess. He pulled out his small wooden board and sat across from me in the courtyard space that they covered with canvas on a cold night like that. He said that I looked tired and maybe he could beat me.
He couldn’t. Grimaldi was a white guy from outside of Barre, Vermont. He always loved telling me that he had never even seen a Negro until after his twenty-first birthday.
“I mean,” he said more than once, “I knew you guys existed in theory, but seeing a real black man shocked the shit out of me the first time.”
I believed him. Over the years I had come to realize that people who had no experience with each other rarely hated with the vehemence that I had experienced from some southerners. Sal didn’t have any preconceptions about blacks. Because of that he was critical in ways that other people weren’t. He loved to talk to me about how he didn’t understand why Negroes didn’t make more out of themselves.
“I mean, why don’t you guys just go to school and buy the businesses and take over your own communities like the Catholics and the Jews?” he’d ask.
He didn’t believe that racism existed except in the southern fraternities. He was a nice guy, but just like the libraries of the North and South, he had very little information about me.
I BEAT SAL seven games straight. It took until just after nine. He stayed to play out the last game when the breakfast man came in. He wasn’t perturbed at losing to a Negro, and so I felt friendly toward him. Sometimes it’s just a little something that makes a man feel good.
I was exhausted, but I never liked to sleep in the daytime. And even if I’d wanted to take a nap, the only options for a bed I had were the backseat of Layla’s car or the upstairs bedroom at Fanny Tannenbaum’s house. Both of those choices had serious disadvantages. If the police found me curled up in the backseat of a car I didn’t own, they could take me to jail for vagrancy or worse. Fanny’s was no safer; Leon Douglas or at least one of his friends had already been there once.
I went over to a small shoeshine-and-magazine stand on Florence. I hung around there a couple of hours reading Jet magazine and shooting the breeze with a few other men like me, men who were between here and there. For a couple of hours I loitered, joking with those young men. I was free of bookstores and killers and ladies so beautiful that they could make you bleed. It was another world, where there were good laughs and no immediate danger, where nothing was different from yesterday and tomorrow promised the same.
15
WHEN I PULLED UP in front of the Greenspan house it was almost eleven o’clock. My intention was to take Fanny back home and spend the rest of the afternoon in bed. I was so tired that I wasn’t even afraid of running into Leon Douglas.
Gella came to the door all awkward and timid, ready to run.
“Mr. Minton?” she said.
“I came by for Fanny,” I told the girl. She wore a medium gray dress cut from coarse material with dark gray buttons up the middle. The sagging hem came down to her shins. It was a dowdy dress without style or promise. I couldn’t understand who would make such an ugly piece of clothing, who would sell it, much less walk into some store and decide that this was the rag they wanted to hang on their shoulders.
“She went home early this morning,” Gella said, half grinning, half looking away.
“She walk?”
“Morris drove her when he went to work.” She couldn’t help but smile and puff up a little when saying her lard-bottomed husband’s name. “I’m going over there now myself. We’re going to visit Uncle Sol.”
“I’ll follow you,” I said. “Maybe Fearless is over there too.”
“He wasn’t when I called.”
“When was that?”
“About seven-fifteen. I called to make sure that everything was okay.”
Fanny’s husband was just out of prison and in the hospital with knife wounds inflicted by a criminal who was still on the loose — and her niece calls to ask is everything okay. I could see why that old woman turned to Fearless a
nd me for help.
GELLA PARKED in the driveway, and I pulled up to the curb. By the time I got to the front door, she’d had enough time to ring the bell and knock.
“Nice day,” I said while we waited for Fanny to answer.
“What? Oh yes. Yes it is nice.” She pressed the doorbell again.
I could hear the three short notes, then the long tone — then an even longer silence. Gella looked at me, and I tried to look unconcerned.
“She probably in the bathtub or something,” I said.
“Aunt Hedva never bathes in the daytime,” Gella pronounced with all the weight of a hanging judge.
I took out the key Fanny had given me and used it in the lock. When I pushed the door open the girl ran in.
“Hedva! Fanny!” She ran up the stairs in great galloping bounds.
I wandered into the den. For some reason I expected her to be there.
Her foot, half in a blue canvas shoe, was visible from around the cushioned chair.
“She’s here,” I said loudly enough for Gella to hear.
I didn’t move. Gella’s heavy feet hurried quickly to the stairs and down. When she got to my side she froze.
The wail from Fanny’s niece was enough to break anybody’s heart. She threw the chair aside and fell in a heap next to the corpse. There was no question about Fanny being dead. Her small face was a dark blue, and her tongue protruded. She looked like some demented soul from an old Bosch painting.
I moved backward and lowered myself toward the chair. But the chair wasn’t where I remembered it, so I fell to the floor. It didn’t bother me to sit there, flat on my ass.
As I said before, I’ve been around hard times, but the death of that tiny woman who had taken me in without the slightest hesitation hit me hard. It was like I was groggy or something. I crawled over to Gella and put my hands on her shoulders. She rose and we held each other, her for a shoulder to cry on and me so I didn’t fall again.
“What can we do?” she wailed.
“Cops,” I said. “Call ’em.”
She went to use the phone in the kitchen while I remained, silent witness to an old woman’s death. From various windows sunlight poured into the rooms. Blobs of light and hard-lined shadows were everywhere. Birds were singing. Cars going up and down the street made the sounds of rushing wind. There was a mambo band playing on a radio somewhere down the block. I wouldn’t have heard any of it if it weren’t for the silence imposed by death.
Fearless Jones Page 10
