The Color of Fear

by Thomas Laird

  “Change your phone number. Get an unlisted number.”

  “I did that already, but someone got the new number. You know how easy it is to find out about a telephone if someone really want to find out.”

  “They can put a trap on the line. I’ll have them do it in the morning.”

  “Thank you.”

  “What’ve they been saying?”

  “They say that I better shut my mouth and let this thing about Andres die out. They say they better not read any more quotes about it in the paper. Nothing coming from me, at least.”

  “Maybe you better tell Martinson to lay off until we find out who’s making the calls.”

  “All right. I’ll tell him... I’m so sorry to wake you up and drag you down here—”

  “I’d come any time.”

  She looks at me, and then the tears come.

  “I missed you, Jimmy P. I missed you so bad that I thought I’d die, I mean really truly die.”

  She reaches out for me and I get up and come around to her side of the kitchen table.

  I get down on my knees and I put my arms about her, my head against her breast.

  “I’ve been walking around like a dead man for all these weeks. I thought I’d stop breathing when you told me to get out.”

  “I can’t stay away from you, Jimmy. I know I should but I can’t do it. Jesus forgive me, but I can’t. Ain’t nothing changed, baby. We can’t ever have what you want us to have, but I got to see you. I got to have you. I got to be near you. I can’t sleep at night unless you’re there. I really can’t. I tried sleeping pills and I—”

  “I’m not giving up on you, Celia. I don’t give a damn what you say anymore. I’m not quitting.”

  “Jimmy. Jimmy, why do you make my life so hard?”

  She smiles when she asks the question, this time. Then she kisses me again.

  “Don’t you dare start up on that brand new table. You know how many hours I gotta change bedpans to pay for that table?”

  She laughs and she takes me by the hand and she walks me back into her bedroom.

  A phone call wakes us up at 5:23. This time I answer it.

  “Yeah??”

  There’s no response.

  “Who the fuck is this?”

  Then the line goes dead.

  I’m back with her, now, in the bedroom. Her eyes are sleepy, her face slack with drowsiness. I want to cling to her as if she were a floatation device in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, the sharks prowling all about us.

  “Who was it?” she wants to know.

  “I presume it was the needle dick who’s been calling you. Look, if I call over here, I’ll ring twice and hang up and then I’ll ring you again right after. Otherwise, don’t answer the phone until I tell you the trap is on. Then pick up once you know we’ve got a tracer on him.”

  “All right. Whatever you say, Jimmy P.”

  *

  I drop Celia off at the hospital at 7:45 A.M. She’s working days’ this month. She works all three shifts, one after the other in rotation. She says she hates midnights’ the worst. I agree with her, having done my share of the dead man’s watch with Doc, out in the streets.

  I kiss her long and slow as she’s ready to get out and do her job...

  “Behave yourself, Jimmy P. Don’t go ruinin’ a good thing.”

  She walks away from the Ford, and I feel my heart slumping toward the floorboards.

  I love her. Completely, madly, thoroughly, and any other way there is to love her with everything I’ve got. And here I thought I was dead again, the moment I walked away from her when she kicked me out, all those weeks ago.

  I’m like some toy on a string. I get yanked up for a while, and then I get tossed toward the stage floor next.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  I head toward Celia’s. She’s right about it not being the time to have our usual ‘relations’ at the northside house. I’d feel as awkward as she would. The only way it could happen is if we were really married.

  I want to ask her if she’d marry me in the Church, if she’d become a Catholic, and then it dawns on me that I don’t even know what her religious affiliation is.

  “You never told me if you’ve been baptized,” I blurt as we’re halfway to her apartment.

  “I was baptized a Catholic, Jimmy P. Just like you were.”

  “You never told me you were of the faith.”

  “Sure. I can even trace my family back to New Orleans. My great grandmama was a Creole and her husband was half Cajun half black. New Orleans is one crazy, mixed up city. My mother married a one hundred percent African who got off the boat at Ellis Island in the early thirties. He came here from Liberia. His family had been in the United States until after the Civil War, and then they went back to the old country. But my daddy wanted to see could he make a fortune over here, and he wound up working the assembly line in Detroit before he got hurt and then moved to Chicago. He worked in an airplane factory during the Second War, and then he retired in the Sixties. He died just when I was in the ninth grade. Then Momma worked full time as a dental hygienist and supported three of us on the southside.”

  “You have siblings?”

  “A brother and a sister. Sister lives on the southside. Brother... God knows where he’s at.”

  “How come you wound up in the projects? I mean, why didn’t you stay with the mother once your husband took off?”

  She looks at me, and then the smile gathers slowly.

  “My mother and I don’t get along so good. Never did. She didn’t like my hot temper, she says.”

  “What hot temper?”

  “You ain’t never seen me really angry, Jimmy P.”

  “Am I in for a treat?”

  The smile fades rapidly.

  *

  “No. It ain’t no treat. I’m not proud of it... My lord, I been tellin’ you more of the story of my life in these five minutes than I have in all the time we’ve been together.”

  “I’m glad you laid it on me.”

  “What about you?”

  So I tell her about Eleanor and Jake and the Bad Dream and about the years I’ve been a copper, and I’m wondering why it all took so long to come out. Perhaps it was that we didn’t think there was ever time enough to do anything but love each other in a hurry before time ran out on us. Everything about us seems to have been rushed. It took just minutes for me to lose it over her. It took just minutes more for me to find myself kissing her at the Art Institute. It was just moments later that we were for real lovers at my buddy’s cutrate motel.

  Then there was that brief interlude where she threw me out, and just a little later she got phone calls, and the next thing I knew she was sitting down to eat with me and my family.

  As I say, everything seems to be extremely accelerated when I’m around her.

  “There’s nothing else to know about me. All the important business I’ve told you over and over. As in I love you. As in I still want to marry you.”

  “You promised.”

  “I know. I’ll lay off. I’m sorry.”

  “Picture yourself in some Catholic Church with a black bride. Picture me in one of those frilly assed white bridal gowns. I never wore one at my first marriage. It was a civil number with the JP dowtown in the Loop. Whooee. In and out in fifteen minutes.”

  “I can picture you in the dress, Celia.”

  She reaches over and touches my arm, but there is no look of sadness, the way I’m expecting her to show me.

  “I bet you can, Jimmy P. Like I said. You’re the hopeless romantic in this pair. You’re the dreamer, not me.”

  We arrive at her apartment building. We walk up to her floor, she unlocks the door, and then we go directly into her bedroom.

  I take off my clothes slowly, and I watch her undress. The room is lit by a small bulb from the bedside lamp. There is no other glow inside here.

  She extends herself languorously on top of the sheets. I bend down to her and touch her face. She pull
s me down to her.

  “You know how to pretend, Jimmy P? You know how to imagine? Then just imagine that we’re married, like you say. Make it up in your head when you’re here because this is as close as it’s ever going to come to being for real. You got to understand that, baby. You got to learn to live with it. Those two babies of yours are beautiful, but they’re not ours, and they’re sure not ever going to be mine. It’s a pretty thought, Jimmy, but that’s all it is. You see that, don’t you? You know it’s true.”

  I kiss her, but I don’t answer her. I’m going to outlast her, I keep telling myself.

  She told me the story of her life, didn’t she? What was it that she was leaving out? There has to be an omission. Color doesn’t control the whole goddamned world, does it?

  She takes me in. She warms me and soothes me. Celia sways my mind from arguing any further with her. She wins the way she always comes out on top — figuratively, I mean.

  “Make it up in your head. Imagine it just the way you want it, Jimmy P. I’ll help you. I’ll get you there. It’s the best that I can do, honey. I’m sorry, but it’s all that I can do.”

  *

  Aaron Mitchell gets hauled into jail on a weapons beef. They catch him trying to pass through the scanners with a piece under his sport coat.

  “This is a pretty dumbass move on your part, isn’t it, Aaron?” Doc questions.

  “What are a couple of homicide po-lice doin’, talking to me? I ain’t killed no one.”

  “Why you bring the gun into the projects? You know you can’t have firearms at Cabrini,” I tell him.

  “I just plain forgot.”

  “You always use a gun?” Doc goes on. “I was in Korea, too. They gave us a whole lot of combat training with knives. You know, with bayonets.”

  “Yeah. I remember.”

  “You wouldn’t have one of those pig stickers stashed in your crib on the Green, would you?” Doc smiles.

  “We done already had this conversation. I told you you’d need a piece of paper to find out what the fuck I’ve got.”

  “That can be easily arranged now, Mr. Mitchell. You just handed us cause. It was a very dumb move on your part,” I say.

  We thank the uniform who informed us about the arrest, and then we head toward a judge who’ll give us permission to toss his living quarters.

  *

  The bayonet is in the ceiling tile. Doc finds it after a ten minute inspection of his apartment. Mitchell winces as Gibron brings the blade down.

  “Looks like you’re under arrest again,” my partner explains to him.

  “Sheeet.”

  That’s all that Mitchell can muster in response. The two uniforms with us for the search burst out in the giggles. I stare at them until they’re back under control.

  *

  “There is no blood on this blade, Jimmy,” Dr. Gray explains. “Either he cleaned it under extreme heat or he never has used this thing on Antoine or Ronnie because I can find no trace.

  “It’s pretty difficult to get all the blood off a blade, isn’t it.”

  “He’d have to do a professional job, but it’s possible.”

  “Could this weapon have done the deed on those two?” I ask.

  “Absolutely. Proving it is another thing. Like I said. He cleaned up real well or he’s just not your guy.”

  Dr. Gray walks back toward his autopsy, here at the morgue. This is my least favorite place in the world. I should be used to the overly chilly air conditioning, but I get the goose bumps whenever I come inside here. It has nothing to do with the cooling system, I’m sure.

  Doc and I walk out into the early fall coolness.

  We have to bag those two bangers, Chaka and Creel. We have to dig out the perpetrator in the other two homicides. Maybe I can live with Celia’s fantasy world, but this is business, motherfucker. There’s no such creature as an imaginary and successful prosecution. You have to have the warm body in tow before you can hear the clang of the steel door snapping closed.

  Chaka and Creel have nothing to do with fairyland or Disneyworld. They’re not imaginary figures or creations of my fantasy. They lurk. They shuffle about in the dark and they pop up from time to time.

  And when they appear, somebody really gets dead.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  I receive a telephone call from Wendell, down at Cabrini. He says it isn’t an official call; no one’s been killed this time, but he asks me to hurry down and see him at work.

  I don’t call Doc because it’s his day off, too. I go down to the projects solo, which is no copper’s idea of time away from work. Eleanor is again with the children because it’s early afternoon and because I have to return to the midnights shift tonight.

  It’s officially fall, but it’s unseasonably hot for the end of September. It’s been in the nineties for the last week, so I’m tired of the heat. Everybody on the street is a little crankier than usual, and there are old people dying from the temperatures all over the city. We find them curled up on their floors, obviously gasping for a little dose of cooler air. Like fire victims. The only things missing are the flames and the smoke. I don’t recall a hotter summer in my nearly five decades.

  When I arrive at the Green, Wendell is standing in front of his reception desk.

  “Come on into my office over here,” he points off to the side.

  He’s got a little cubicle he uses for paperwork when things are quiet in the public housing site. Inside his small, squared office is Celia Dacy. She’s sitting in a leather chair opposite Wendell’s desk and she’s visibly shivering. It’s air conditioned in his office, but it isn’t that frigid in here.

  *

  She tells me the story slowly after the security guard leaves us alone. Celia came down to the Green to get some of her things she’d left behind in the storage lockers that the projects supply for their tenants. When she tried to retrieve those items, she ran into Chaka.

  “Chaka?” I say as I stand up before her.

  “Sit down, Jimmy. It’s all right, now. Mr. Wendell saved my life, I think.”

  “He saved your—”

  “Yes. I was alone down in that storage basement, just gathering a few old things of Andres’. You know. Some toys and books and clothes I’d put aside when he got too old for them. I was just going to leave them here, but I couldn’t. They were his.”

  Then it all flows out of her. Celia tells me she turned around when she heard a noise, and there he was. In his usual garb, the black leather jacket. She says he wasn’t brandishing any kind of weapon — At least he never had time to show her one until Wendell interrupted the two of them.

  Chaka walks right up behind her and gets within a foot of her, she says. He’s almost literally in her face.

  “You got a big fuckin’ mouth, bitch. It’s gone get you hurt, too.”

  She asks him who the fuck he thinks he’s talking to because she doesn’t know Chaka by sight. She’s never seen the motherfucker up close and personal like this.

  Celia thinks the banger’s certainly going to kill her, but he doesn’t make any moves. She does her best to remain calm, but she thinks her legs are giving out on her. There’s a set of old carving knives in the locker behind her, she remembers, here in this dimly lit basement-storage area. It’s so dim she can barely make out his features.

  “But he appeared to be a good looking boy. Not the ugly gangster you’d think he’d look like,” she says.

  Then he thumps her on the left breast with a hard forefinger.

  “You talk to that newspaper or to that po-lice boyfriend of yours again, I’ll cut you, bitch. I’ll cut you like those two motherfuckers who died around here with their throats all cut to fucking hell. I won’t shoot you because that would be too good for you. You fuck with me and with my people, I’ll make you one sad fuckin’ ho. You all hear me?”

  Then he took hold of her shoulder, but Celia shook him off. Her gesture made him furious. He then took her by both shoulders and got close enough that she
could finally see his eyes.

  “I killed your son and there ain’t shit you can do about it. The po-lice tried and they couldn’t neither... Maybe y’all need a little lesson in what they call humility.”

  He tore at Celia’s blouse, and she retaliated with a missed kick aimed at his groin. Chaka came back at her even more enraged, and this time, as they struggled, her blouse was ripped all the way open to the waist. He grabbed her from behind and he grabbed both her breasts.

  At this point Celia stopped her story. Her voice cracked and she couldn’t seem to go on.

  “You tell me. You tell me everything,” I demand.

  Celia tore away from him again, but this time she landed a toe in his balls and Chaka sunk to his knees. But the young man recovered very quickly and then stood before her again.

  “Maybe I just kill you now and then you won’t have to worry about when I be comin’ for you. Maybe I do the kind thing for you, Miz Celia Dacy.”

  Just as he was about to jump Celia, in pops Wendell the security guard. Apparently the basement is one of his routine checks throughout the day.

  Before Wendell can pull his baton on Chaka — Wendell doesn’t carry a gun to work, he informed me a while back — the boy’s got a nine milimeter in the security man’s face.

  “You back the fuck off,” he tells Wendell. “I’ll be seeing you again,” he barks toward Celia Dacy.

  Then he’s gone, and Celia’s trying to hold her blouse together. She feels the heat of embarrassment in her face, but Wendell escorts her to his office. She asks him to call me. I feel a sort of warmth in my own face when I realize I’m the one she called when she needed help. I was the first person she thought of.

  Now I remind myself why I’m here, and all the good feeling flees.

  “He didn’t do anything you didn’t tell me about?” I ask her.

  “No. He tore my blouse. That was all. And he scared the living hell out of me, Jimmy.”

  I bend down to her and I take her in my arms. She stands up, and we’re clinging to each other.

  “How did he get in here?” she wants to know.

  “I don’t know. But it ain’t too difficult to get in here if you’re a guy like him. He’s the type who owns this place, remember?”