For a moment or so I forgot about my problems and started to read the words of the long-dead Russian.
I suppose that the lock on the front door had been wedged open by the cops, because he just walked on in without rousing me from my reverie. When I sensed a shadow passing somewhere at the edge of my peripheral vision I jumped, screamed, and threw my book all at the same time. Luckily my aim was bad and Fearless had stayed back, knowing how jumpy I could be sometimes.
“Hey, Paris,” he said, holding his hands up in mock surrender. “I give.”
He wore black jeans and a denim jacket of the same color over a gray shirt. There was a watch with a gold band on his wrist and a pair of sunglasses stuffed in the breast pocket of his new jacket.
I wanted to crack wise about his new wardrobe, but the fear that made me jump was deeper than just edginess.
“What’s wrong, Paris?”
“They killed Fanny.”
Fearless and I hadn’t met until we were both full-grown men, but I felt that I knew him as a child, because every once in a while the boy would come out in his face. Loss and disbelief erased any swagger from the sex he had had with Dorthea the night before.
“No.”
Blood padded in from the doorway and regarded his newfound master.
“Somebody came in and choked her.”
“Where were you, Paris?”
“I was out lookin’ for them Messenger people. Didn’t come in till about eleven. I went over her niece’s house to get her, but Fanny’d already come here.”
Fearless hunkered down on the floor, elbows on his knees, hands propped on either side of his face. Blood licked a hand, but Fearless pushed him away.
“Who did it, man?”
He wasn’t looking at me, but still I only shook my head.
Fearless stood up all at once.
“Muthahfuckah,” he said, and then he grabbed me by the front of my shirt and lifted me from the floor.
He raised his fist, but I didn’t resist. Fearless was one of the kindest men I ever met, but the devil lived in him too. In a rage he was capable of murder. But he had never killed any friend that I knew of.
His eyes could have belonged to a dead man, they were so fixed. He didn’t seem to be breathing. I hovered there an inch or so over the floor.
Even though I’m often frightened, I have never been afraid of Fearless. I felt such a deep kinship with him that he never scared me.
When he let me go I stumbled but remained on my feet.
“Where is she?” he asked.
“Ambulance took her,” I said. “Gella went with them.”
“What you got?”
I considered my words carefully then. I knew he was close to killing, and I was taught never to point a loaded weapon at somebody unless I intended to shoot.
“Grove called me. He’s gonna meet us at the Charles Diner at nine.”
“He do this?”
“Naw. Naw, I don’t think so.”
“He know who did it?”
Before I could answer, Blood started barking and Morris Greenspan rushed in.
“Blood!” Fearless commanded, and the dog, still growling, stood down.
“Where?” Morris Greenspan asked. He was looking around the room. His eyes stopped on the floor of the den. “Gella said it was in there.”
The big, sloppy man was nearly in shock. His eyes were wide and his voice was strained to cracking. He lurched into the den and looked around, twisting from side to side.
“What happened?” he shouted, and then he fell to the floor just like a two-year-old throwing a tantrum. “What happened?”
He jerked and flailed around on the carpet for a while, but I didn’t mind. At least the spectacle distracted Fearless. After a minute or so we helped Morris back to his feet and sat him down in a chair.
“Why would anyone… how could they?” he said, and then he cried in earnest.
It was a deep, mournful wailing with no modesty or shame. He cried from his eyes and nose and mouth. He bent forward in the chair and called out for his Fanny, his Hedva. It was more like a pagan priest who had witnessed the death of his patron deity than a man who’d lost an in-law.
It was a full ten minutes before the lament subsided.
“How did you hear about it?” I asked.
“Gella called me at work from the hospital. She said that they were taking her to the police station to talk.”
“What did she tell you?”
“That Hedva was dead!” he declared.
“Did she want you to pick her up or meet her?”
“She, she… I guess.”
“Then why did you come here?”
“I thought I could do something. I hoped I could do something. I wanted to help.”
“But she’s dead, man,” I said. The anger probably came from my own frustration. “She’s dead, and your wife needs help down at the cops.”
“Leave him alone, Paris,” Fearless said.
Blood growled to back up his new master’s command, but he wasn’t sure if he was growling at me or Morris.
“No,” Morris said. “He’s right. I should go.”
“You better not drive,” Fearless said. “We’ll take you.”
GELLA WASN’T too much better off than her husband. She was sitting at the far end of the long bench in the entrance room of the Boyleston Heights precinct. There were a few others seated here and there. Mostly Mexicans. Mostly women. Waiting for their men, I guess. Nobody seemed happy.
One young woman, she couldn’t have been twenty-five, had four small children running around, a toddler holding on to her skirts, and a baby in her arms. The children laughed and played on the hard floor, explored the area in front of the sergeant’s desk, and watched as three brown men were brought in in chains.
Them chirren is where they gonna be, I could hear my mother say. Ain’t nobody even care ’cept her. An’ look at her. What could she do?
When Gella saw us she went straight to her husband and put her arms around him. He brought his arms around her, but it was more a hopeless gesture than it was a hug. Fearless and I waited for the pitiful embrace to be over, and then I suggested we make tracks.
But before we could get out of there a ranking officer in uniform came up to us.
“Mrs. Greenspan,” the tallish, portly man said. His smile was an amenity, like a blindfold offered before the firing squad. “Is this your husband?”
“Yes. This is Lieutenant Binder,” she said to our assembly.
Binder shook Morris’s hand and looked into his eyes. “Sorry for your loss.”
Morris mumbled something.
“Which one of you boys is Paris Minton?” the policeman asked.
I hesitated and then lifted a finger to indicate myself.
His eyes were peacock blue, his skin tended toward gray.
I was trying to keep my mind on freedom.
“Would you spare me a few minutes?” Lieutenant Binder asked.
He didn’t wait for an answer. Instead he touched my arm and steered me to a small room behind the admitting sergeant’s desk.
It wasn’t a room really, but just a space behind a frosted glass door. Inside were a wooden table and chair. It was a place where the desk sergeant could eat his meal or take a cigarette break.
“Mrs. Greenspan tells me that you happened on her great-aunt and -uncle after they were attacked two days ago,” the lieutenant said.
“Yeah, yeah. We were lookin’ for a gardenin’ job, and then there the old man was, stabbed.”
“Then the old woman invited you to stay at their home?” He had the satisfied grin of a crocodile.
“We needed a place to stay,” I said.
“Because of a fire, I believe the young lady said.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Sit down, Mr. Minton,” Binder said.
“No, thank you.”
“Sit, please.”
“No,” I replied.
That was the test. If
I were close to arrest he would have made me bend. That’s how it worked: a cop pushed you to the limit but never more unless he could turn a key on you.
“Okay,” Binder said. “Have it your way. I just wanted to ask you a few more questions.”
“Shoot.”
He didn’t jump right off. First he gauged me with those shiny blue eyes of his. His orbs were so bright that it was hard for me to imagine that there was intelligence behind them.
“What do you think of these Jews?” he asked. He twisted his lips on the last word as if it was a lemon peel in his mouth.
“Like you say, I’ve only been there two days. That whole time the old man’s been unconscious in the hospital. Fanny’s okay, though.”
“Did she get along with her niece and her nephew-in-law?”
“Yeh. Sure. I mean, she thought Morris was kind of a fool. But I guess he kinda is.”
“Do you think that either one of them might have wanted the old Jews harmed?”
Jew turned to nigger in my ears, and I started disliking the cop.
“No,” I said. “No. The girl and Fanny really loved each other. And Morris is more broke up than Gella over Fanny bein’ dead.”
Binder wasn’t really listening. He didn’t really care about the people in this case. But he seemed to want something. He regarded me again with those beautiful but stupid eyes.
“What about Bernard Latham?” he asked.
At first I thought we were experiencing an earthquake. The ground seemed to swell under my feet. I regretted my decision to stand.
“What about ’im?”
“What did he ask you?”
“He wrote it down, man.” I got dodgy, hoping to figure out where these questions came from — and where they were going.
“Don’t get wise, son,” the uniform said.
“He wanted to know why we were at Fanny’s house. He thought maybe we were the ones who stabbed Sol.” I decided to skim the truth off a little at a time.
“Who’s we?”
“Me an’ Fearless.”
“Fearless the other boy outside?”
“Latham brought us here,” I said.
“Who was he riding with?” Binder asked.
I tried to remember. I was handcuffed and in the backseat next to Fearless.
“He was in uniform,” I ventured. “White guy. Pink really.”
“Billings?” Binder asked. “Pullman? Nazareth?”
It’s a mess, Naz, I remembered Latham saying to the cop next to him in the front seat. At the time it meant nothing to me.
“I think I heard him call somebody Naz,” I said.
Binder considered me then. He could have delved deeper into my story, or he could let me go.
“And…,” I said.
“And what?”
“I seen where Sergeant Latham been all over town. I mean I saw in the newspapers that he was interrogatin’ that guy who got shot down in Watts and died over in Mercy Hospital. I just figured that he was on some kinda citywide police unit to be showin’ up all over.” I was hoping that Binder didn’t read all the papers. He probably didn’t. He probably didn’t know any more about that crime than any other citizen.
“What paper did you read that in?”
“I forget. Either the Times or the Examiner. It was just on the counter in a coffee shop I was at. You know I was surprised to see Latham’s name over south when I knew he was a Hollywood cop and I had just seen ’im in East L.A.”
Again those eyes considered me. They probed so deep that I began to wonder what he could have on me. I hadn’t done anything wrong except maybe to take that money from Sol’s drawer. That’s when I remembered the pistol I had hitched up in my belt. They wouldn’t frisk me unless I was going to be arrested, but if they found an illegal, and stolen, concealed weapon on me, prison was right around the corner.
I cursed Elana Love in silence.
“Anything else?” he asked.
“Like what?”
He stuck out his lower lip and raised his right shoulder an inch or two. “I don’t know. Maybe something Latham asked you. Something the Jews might have said.”
I counted three breaths and considered my situation. I wanted the policeman to trust me, to think that I was too scared to be anywhere but on his side.
“Latham said that the old man stole some money,” I said. “A lot of it. And they never recovered it even though they caught him and had him in jail.”
“Did the sergeant say that he was investigating the case?”
“He didn’t say, but I guessed he was.”
“Did you find out anything?”
“I asked Fanny about it, but she said that her husband would never steal a thing.”
Binder snorted his contempt and then asked, “What about the niece and her husband?”
I shook my head. “I ain’t really talked to them at all. Morris didn’t like us much, and Gella’s kinda scared.”
Binder frowned, and then he smiled. He offered me his hand, but when I took it he pressed down hard with his thumb.
“If you’re in this, it’s gonna hurt,” Binder said.
“The way you mashin’ on my hand it hurts right now.”
“It could get worse,” he said and then let me go.
“I don’t know nuthin’ more, man,” I said.
The lieutenant smiled and then gestured, telling me that I could go.
I left the police station, thinking again about the Greyhound Bus Company. This time I thought maybe I’d return to Louisiana. A white man would have to look pretty hard down around the colored parishes of southern swamps to find a little black man like me.
18
THE FIRST THING I did when I got back to the car was to slip Sol’s pistol from under my shirt and shove it beneath the driver’s seat. The Greenspans sat in the backseat on the ride to their home. Morris laid his meaty head against the window, and Gella was wound so tight that she shook slightly, like a palsied old woman. Half the way there Fearless turned around and took her two slender hands into his one big one.
“You gonna make it through this, girl,” he said. “You gonna make it.”
I don’t know how she responded because I was looking in the rearview mirror at Morris to make sure he wasn’t going to start swinging because another man, a black man, was holding his wife by the hand. But Morris didn’t even budge. He was more shattered than my grandfather had been when his wife of sixty-three years had passed.
When we stopped in front of their house Morris stumbled out of his side and fell on the lawn. He got to his feet and strode up to the door like a toddler whose gait changes every three steps. Fearless walked Gella slowly to the door, still holding her by one hand. Morris had worked his key on the lock and blundered in by the time they reached the single stair. Fearless lifted Gella’s chin and kissed her on the lips. When he whispered something, she leaned into him for another osculation and an embrace. He ushered her through the door and closed it behind her.
Back next to me he took the posture of someone waiting for the car to begin moving. I didn’t engage the gears.
“Somethin’ wrong with the car, Paris?”
I didn’t answer.
Fearless turned to me.
“Something wrong?”
“What was that?” I asked.
“What?”
“With that white girl. Jail so hard on you that you got to take a woman right out from under her husband?”
“What?” Fearless complained. “Naw, man. I ain’t interested in that crooked-nosed girl.”
“You could’a fooled me and about half the neighborhood too.”
“She needed a kiss, Paris. That’s all. A kiss and a kind word. She just lost her family, man. That big bum of a husband don’t care. I just kissed her and told her that I was there. That’s all.”
“And if she still felt bad,” I taunted, “you’d take her up in the bed but still that wouldn’t be nuthin’?”
“Maybe. Sometimes you got
to give, Paris. Sometimes a man or a woman needs the opposite sex to say, hey it’s okay. But she don’t mean nuthin’ t’me. Neither do that dumb husband. If he was holdin’ her, then she wouldn’t’a needed me to do it.”
I shifted into first and drove off.
Fearless had a smart heart. He had a brave heart too. When he talked to me like he did about Gella, I never understood, not really, a word.
WE MADE IT to the Charles Diner by nine-fifteen. The place was alive. The girls couldn’t help but move their butts, even if it was just in their chairs, when Big Joe Turner was playing on the jukebox, and the men couldn’t help but watch. At the Charles men dressed as differently as the women did. From T-shirts to tuxedos the fashions ranged. The women sat in groups at the small tables in the great round room while solitary men smelling anywhere from Classic Gent to hard-earned sweat came up and made their offers for a little wiggle on the dance floor in back.
“At the table over next to the plastic palm tree,” the bartender told Fearless when he asked if anyone was looking for Tyrell Lockwood.
A woman was sitting next to him, leaning toward him like a sailboat under a squall.
“Reverend Grove?” I said in greeting. There was only a faint light of recognition in his eyes for me, but I knew him. The minister was the cock of the walk down around Central and 101 when the Messenger had its doors open.
“Get yourself another fizz and park it at the bar, babe. I’ll be there in a minute,” the reverend told the girl.
He handed her a two-dollar bill. She kissed his fingers before taking the money with her teeth. I think she was a pretty girl. She might have been a knockout. But I couldn’t tell. My mind was going over and over the lies and questions I had for the holy man.
His suit was three-button, maroon, and silk. He was a hair shorter than Fearless and more substantial but not portly or fat. He had a full face that was medium brown and diabolical in a mild way. Everything turned up: the almond eyes, the slightly receding hairline, the corners of his smile; all like small horns on a masquerade devil or, more likely, a minister who had studied sin for too long and who was finally overwhelmed by its beauty. The left side of his jaw was a little larger than the right, and that eye was bloodshot, and not from lack of sleep.
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