“Call them,” I said. “Tell them you need a personal day—that there’s a family emergency and you need to stay home to man the phone.”
No lie there.
But still Nadine hesitated.
“You know I don’t live no fast an’ loose life like you, Paris Minton. I have responsibilities.”
I could have told her that running a bookstore was a responsible position. I could have told her that trying to save Three Hearts’s life was something important. But instead I said, “Please. For my auntie.”
Nadine never did say yes, but we left with the tacit understanding that she would stay home. She even let us borrow her red Rambler.
THE RIDE OUT TO THE COUNTRY would have been nice if it wasn’t for our mission. The old pines seemed sage and peaceful. The grasses waving in the breeze were lovely. We climbed out of the Los Angeles basin, leaving the dirty yellow miasma of smog beneath. There was fresh air and wild birds and blue sky behind billowy white clouds.
“There’s the honey sign,” Fearless said, pointing at the rude painting of a beehive leaning up against an exit sign.
We took the exit and the turn, drove seven miles to the Bear Pond Lane turnoff, and went two more miles to the red house with a weather vane in the shape of an airplane.
There was no driveway or lawn, just a large square of dirt in front of the house. Behind stood tall, dirty green pines.
My car was parked in front of the house. When I looked in the window I saw that the key was in the ignition.
The thing I remember most about that country cabin was the quiet. It wasn’t that there was no noise but that each sound was particular, as if it were waiting its turn: Fearless’s door slamming, a robin’s cry, the wind through a welter of leaves and pine needles. Even though I was tense and worried, I recognized the beauty of the moment.
“Nice, huh?” Fearless said. Then he took the pistol out of his belt and made sure the safety was off.
I followed him to the front door.
He knocked.
No answer.
He knocked again. I tried the door, but it was locked.
Fearless motioned for me to follow him around the back.
There was a well-swept dirt path leading around the side of the house, marked off from the wild by a white lattice fence. Big white flowers bloomed here and there.
The back door was unlocked.
The cabin was just one big room with a thirteen-foot ceiling and rustic furniture. There was a cast iron woodstove against one wall—that was the kitchen. Other than that the left side was a living area with couches and chairs. The right side had a big bed with a thick mattress and animal furs for blankets.
Everything was neat and tidy, which told me that Useless had probably not been around very much. The only things out of place were one turned-over chair and a good deal of half-dry blood in the center of the pine floor.
Without a word we searched the house. Actually, I searched while Fearless moved around. He didn’t have the kind of concentration to look for clues.
It was all a waste of time. There wasn’t a personal item in the cabin. Not a name or bus ticket, not a photograph or letter. All there was was a drying pool of blood and a fallen chair.
31
I FOLLOWED FEARLESS on the ride back to Los Angeles. We dropped Nadine’s car off at her house and went in to see if Three Hearts had called.
She hadn’t.
Things had gotten a little more serious, and I was forced to take a chance.
Mad Anthony was probably dead, probably murdered. I wanted to stay away from Katz and Drummund, the men the murdered man had beaten. I wanted no connection with a murder, and so Mr. Friar, at United Episcopal Charities, became the object of our labors.
The office was in a three-story brick building on Olympic, about a mile west of downtown proper. There was a small park across the street that had on permanent display a cast iron statue of a woman wearing a Spanish veil. She was crying, and her hands were held out about a foot from either side of her face. There was no plaque for explanation, no reason for or account of her pain. The statue made me like the small recreation area. The mystery of the sculpture allowed casual viewers to come up with their own reasons for such powerful emotions.
At the edge of the small patch of green was a bench that gave us a good view of United Episcopal Charities.
“What’s the plan, Paris?” Fearless asked me.
“You still got that chauffeur’s uniform you used to wear?” I replied.
“Uh-huh.”
“You wanna go and get it and put it on?”
“Sure.” He stood up.
“While you at it, you could stop by that Western Union office on Manchester and pick me up a blank form there, maybe three or four.”
“Sure thing, man. What you gonna do?”
“I just wanna sit for a while, Fearless. This next step gonna be a big one, an’ I wanna clear my head. You know?”
My car was parked two blocks down. I walked there with Fearless and got a book out of the trunk before he drove off. Then I went back to my park bench and pretended that I was just an everyday Joe hanging out in the park.
THE TITLE OF THE PAPERBACK BOOK was Aelita, written by Alexei Tolstoy and published by Raduga Publishers, Moscow. I had gotten the newly printed copy from a socialist librarian who worked in Santa Monica. He’d told me that this was a translation of a Russian novel by a guy who had been through the early days of the revolution. Most of the books he had written were naturalist novels, but this was science fiction. He thought I’d find it interesting.
I did.
At that time I, and most other Americans, believed that Russia didn’t allow for any kind of independent thinking, that all Russians lived in similar barrack-like rooms and were brainwashed so that they couldn’t really have an imagination. But the first few pages of this book brought this belief into question. There was nothing overtly political about the story. It was more about adventure and love and men seeking their destiny among the stars.
I was amazed that any Russian could have such thoughts.
“You there,” someone said in a loud, unfriendly voice.
It was a policeman hailing me from the passenger’s side of his patrol car.
“Yes, Officer?” I was determined not to stand and walk toward him.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Reading a book,” I replied. I held up the Communist-condoned fiction in case he didn’t believe it.
For a moment the young white patrolman didn’t know what to say. So he leaned over to conspire with his partner. They parked, disembarked, and walked over to flank me and block the sun.
“Stand up,” the officer who had spoken to me before said. His only distinguishing characteristic was a red pus-filled pimple on the left side of his forehead. Other than that his brown-eyed, thin-lipped, brown-haired, frowning visage was something I had seen again and again throughout my life.
His partner was taller and deadly handsome but with nearly the same features. The contrast of like images intrigued me, but this wasn’t my show.
I stood up, holding my book like a talisman.
“What are you doing here?” the handsome man asked me.
“Reading my book,” I said.
“What are you doing reading here?”
“I like the literary quality of the statuary.”
That bought me three seconds of silence.
“Let me see your book,” the handsome speaker said.
I handed it over. He flipped through the pages, looking for contraband, no doubt. If he had read the frontispiece, he might have decided that I was a Communist; he might have arrested me for espionage. But his imagination wasn’t at all intellectual. He was looking for swag, for small packets of heroin. He was looking for the kind of contraband he thought someone like me would be carrying.
“Let’s see your wallet,” he asked when the book search turned up nothing.
I obliged.
&
nbsp; After fumbling through my well-ordered documents, he said, “Tell me something, Mr. Minton. Why aren’t you at work?”
“I am,” I said. “My book.”
“Your job is reading?”
“In a way. I own a bookstore on Florence. I’m considering ordering a dozen copies of this book. But since it’s a translation, I’m trying to see if it’s of a quality to justify such an investment.”
Three seconds more.
“Why don’t you go to a park near your store?”
“I like this park,” I replied.
“Turn around and lean against the bench,” was his answer to my flippancy.
He searched me down to the cuffs in my pants.
When I turned around again, he was still looking for a way to invade me.
“How much longer do you plan to be here?” he asked.
“I don’t know, Officer. I’m readin’ a book. Haven’t you ever read a book? It takes time.”
If he were a soldier and I were the enemy, the look in his eyes would have told me that he intended to kill me the next chance he got.
“We’ll be driving by in an hour,” he told me.
“Good,” I said. “I’ll see you then.”
I TRIED TO GET BACK into my book but I couldn’t stop thinking about all the words the police and I had spilled. It was a complex meeting, what with the Communist publication, the racist miscomprehension, and my barely conscious desire to be put back in a cell.
This last detail was very important in light of the other two. I was a black man seeking incarceration because I felt comfortable in that state. If I were a braver individual, I would have become a revolutionary at that very moment. But as it is, I only remember it because of Useless and his determination to share his bad luck with family and friends.
FEARLESS RETURNED IN forty-five minutes or so. He looked very dapper in his charcoal-colored chauffeur’s uniform. I took a blank Western Union form, scribbled down a note, folded it so that it appeared to be sealed, and addressed it. Fearless carried the dispatch to do its work.
HE CAME BACK OUT and sat there with me. I was a little worried that the cops might return, but I suppose they had found some real police work to keep them busy.
I tried to explain to Fearless about Communism and the American police state, and about me playing my part in the farce, but he didn’t understand.
“That’s just the way it is, man,” Fearless said. “Cops wanna mess wit’ you, you got to put ’em in their place.”
I looked at my friend, not for the first time thinking that even though we were as close as two men could be, we didn’t live in the same world—not at all.
32
NOT LONG AFTER FEARLESS returned from his mission at United Episcopal Charities, a man came out the double glass doors. The white man had once been young, and hale, and handsome. He had probably been over six feet tall twenty-five years ago. Now he was five ten with silver hair and a gray blue suit that almost made up for the ravages of time.
The man carried a yellow slip of paper in his left hand. He transported this paper across the street, jaywalking toward me and my friend from another world.
I wasn’t worried because I was buoyed with the kind of synthetic confidence that Fearless inspired.
As Martin Friar approached, Fearless stood up to make room for him on the bench. Realizing, whether right or wrong, who was in charge, Friar waved the Western Union note page at me and asked, “What is the meaning of this?”
His once-handsome features were still rugged and, in certain circles, no doubt, awe inspiring. But there was a glaze of uncertainty over his pale blue eyes.
“Sit down, Mr. Friar,” I said.
He obeyed, and Fearless took a perch on the other side.
“Well?” the vice president in charge of investments asked.
“You know a young black woman named Angel?” I asked.
“Do you mean Monique? Monique Dubois?”
I took out the 3 ¥ 5 I had got from Man. When the steely-faced white man saw it, his colorless lips trembled for a moment.
“Yes,” he said. “That’s Monique.”
“She was your lover?” It was meant to be a question but came out as an accusation.
“We love each other,” he said.
This present-tense reply threw me off a bit.
“You say you love the woman who set you up and then made you the victim of blackmailers?”
“It wasn’t her fault. She was coerced into fooling me. But we, we . . .”
I don’t know for sure, but I believe that in part of his mind Friar felt that he was being a fool and so was ashamed to divulge further intimacies of his heart.
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s true. Hector and Sterling were using her. I was just wondering what you thought.”
“Where is she?” Friar asked, leaning toward me.
“That’s what I’m trying to find out,” I told the heartbroken executive. “She’s with a friend’a mine, a guy named Maurice.”
“What’s he to her?” Friar asked, without waiting for even a second to pass.
This worried me. I had hoped to find someone who was feeling hate for Angel. Hate is a good source of energy. It makes your allies blind and eager. Love is a much stickier form of fuel. It burns unevenly and often causes internal damage.
“He used to be her lover too,” I said. “But no more. Now they’re just friends.”
The tension easing a little, Friar asked, “What can I do to help?”
He was moving too fast. I needed time to dicker with him, to figure out where he was coming from. Here he wanted to jump right in with both feet, and I still didn’t have a good understanding of his part in the puzzle.
“I, I need some information before I could tell ya that,” I said.
“What kind of information?”
“How did Sterling get to you?”
“I don’t know any Sterling or that other name—Hector, you said?”
I told him about Hector and the little I knew about Sterling, the man in charge.
“I know the Negro is Paul Dempsey. He was the one who ran the game,” Friar told us on that overexposed park bench. “But I don’t know anything about a man named Sterling. I’ve only met black people since Monique and I have been together.”
“When’s the last time you saw Monique?” I asked.
“Two weeks ago,” he said, choking a bit. “She called me and said that she was going away. She said that she was free of Paul Dempsey and that I didn’t have to worry about her anymore.”
“Was she gonna call you again?”
“No. She said that it would be better if I never saw her again.” Friar looked down at his expensive Italian shoes with bitter regret.
There was a very thin gold band on the ring finger of his left hand. The ring had probably always been that slender, but the way I read this man, I imagined that it had once been a big thick gold ring that had worn away over time like a Lifesaver confection under a dripping tap.
“How did you meet her?” I asked him.
“It was a church function. I got a note from a man I know telling me that there was a young Negro woman who had come into a modest sum and wanted some advice on how to make that work for her church.”
“Really? What’s this man’s name?”
“Brian. Brian Motley.”
“A white man?”
“Why . . . Yes, he is.”
“And how did Mr. Motley come into contact with a young Negro woman?” I asked, trying hard to keep the sarcasm out of my voice.
“He said that he had a friend who had done work with the church, that they didn’t really have a good system set up for their investments, but that this girl really wanted to help out.”
“And then?” I asked.
“I . . . Well, I met her. She called and suggested a restaurant on Olvera Street. We, we met.”
“I’ve only met her once myself,” I said, feeling every word. “Her eyes are somethin’ else.”
Fearless grunted in agreement.
“I fell in love,” Friar admitted. “Completely.”
“Was that your first time?” I asked.
“I’m married, after all,” he replied. “We have two children. I love my family.”
“I’m sure you do, Mr. Friar. But I’m not asking you if Monique or Angel, or whatever her name really is, was your first lover. What I wanted to know was, was she your first black girl?”
That stopped him for a second. His outpouring of feeling coagulated there, just behind his eyes.
“I don’t see what race has to do with love,” he stated.
“But most people do,” I said. “Most people feel that love is a question of race. I mean, how many interracial couples you see walkin’ down Olympic, goin’ hand in hand?”
“I’m not like that,” he said. “I care for people for what’s on the inside, not the outside.”
“So Monique wasn’t your first?”
“The question is crass, but the answer is no.”
It took me a moment to disentangle that sentence. Once I had it, I asked him if his friend Brian Motley knew about his racial liberalism.
This question brought suspicion to Friar’s gaze; suspicion but no immediate answer. Fearless turned to regard Friar—intrigued, I suppose, by the man’s silence. White Men Loving Black Women, that’s the title of a book someone should write one day.
A pale blue vein appeared on Friar’s milk white forehead.
“This has nothing to do with Brian,” Friar said. “He didn’t even know anything about Monique.”
“Angel,” I said, correcting him. “Just like she didn’t know that this Paul guy was going to blackmail you.”
“I was a fool,” Friar said dramatically. “But that doesn’t change how I felt, how I feel. It has nothing to do with race. Monique is a beautiful woman. She’s sophisticated and well-spoken. She understands how a man thinks.”
“She sure do,” I said, appraising her effect on this man. “Tell me about your boy Motley. How does he fit in this?”
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