“I’m going to undress you,” she told me. “Just let me do it.
Don’t help or touch me.”
I didn’t.
The water was hot and the liquor did exactly what it was supposed to. I was very excited sexually, but I would have been happy going to sleep while Mum cleaned me with a sea sponge scrubber.
I closed my eyes and let my mind wander. Somewhere between here and there a thought came to me in the form of a question: Why would Hector LaTiara want a French dictionary?
But even that didn’t disturb me.
When I opened my eyes Mum had disrobed and was stepping into the tub with me.
•
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“ Yo u ’ r e a n i c e m a n , Pa r i s , ” Mum said. She had one arm behind my head and the other across my chest. We were in her big bed, enveloped in silk and soft, soft cotton. I was clean and completely satisfied.
“What a man wants to hear is that he’s big and strong and almost scary,” I replied, though I was thinking about a door that had opened in my mind.
Mum giggled.
“I’m stronger than you are,” she said.
“We’ll never find out now, will we?”
“Why were you at Jerry’s with Fearless Jones?” she asked then, and I wondered again why she had lured me over.
“Lookin’ for my cousin Useless.”
“Useless Grant is your cousin?”
“Everybody says that in the same way,” I said. “And I know why. Useless is a motherfucker. Have you seen him?”
“Every once in a while he talks to Ha Tsu. They like to laugh together.”
“They do business together?”
“I don’t know Ha’s business. I’m just a waitress.” She was getting nervous.
“And I’m just a bookseller,” I said. “What can you do?”
“You sell books?” Mum seemed shocked.
“Yeah. Why?”
She jumped up and pulled back the red fabric at the head of the bed. There were eight bookshelves filled with hardbound Chinese texts. I perused them. Most were complete ciphers to me. But on the bottom shelf I saw the names Aristotle, Plato, Marx, Spinoza, and Hegel printed over Chinese cuneiforms.
“I like some’a these guys,” I said. “But I prefer the older generation. Herodotus, Homer, and Sophocles.”
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“You have read them?”
“Sure.”
“I used to study ancient thinkers. My father sent me to New York to study. But then the Japs came and killed my family.
They destroyed everything and made my country crazy. I came here and Ha Tsu took me in.”
I put my arms around her, and after a while she fell into a deep sleep. I was soon to follow, but before I nodded off I thought about the man looking for the French dictionary, the man who was after Useless.
My dreams were darker than Jerry Twist’s office.
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I f H e c t o r L a Ti a r a h a d b e e n to my store, he was probably there looking for Useless —
22 that was the thought going through my mind when I was almost awake, lying there between floral-scented sheets. And if Hector had been to my place once, he might have been there twice, even three times. He might have been armed and he might have run into Tiny Bobchek.
But what did any of that have to do with smoked bacon?
I hated Useless, hated him in that way you can only despise a family member. All of a sudden I was worried that the Bobchek murder could be tied to me in some way. If the police could somehow identify the corpse, they might tie him to Useless and then Useless to me. The next thing I knew, somebody who knew more than I did would be confessing to the crime, incriminating me, and getting a reduced sentence as he did so.
I would have liked to pour orange juice and hot butter all over him.
“Paris,” the breeze whispered.
I should have agreed with Fearless the night before. We should have gone to Hector’s house. It was too late to go to the police. They wouldn’t understand us taking Tiny to the straw-140
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berry field. Killer Cleave wouldn’t understand me telling them about it.
“Breakfast,” the gentle wind sighed.
I opened my eyes to see Mum kneeling before me, naked and proffering a silver tray holding bacon and eggs, orange juice, and coffee.
My waking dream had put a pall on the day, but I smiled for Mum and kissed her gently.
“This what you call a Chinese breakfast?” I asked the young woman.
“No. But you’re not what I call a Chinese girl’s boyfriend either,” she replied.
We ate and talked about her family. I asked where they had come from in China and why were so many people killed.
Mum told me that her clan hailed from central China originally. She blamed the Japanese for their demise. She hated that people with a virulence that rivaled the worst white racists I had met in the South. While she spoke I thought of Loretta. I wondered if Mum would have hated my Japanese friend.
Then I wondered about the people I hated because of their skin color or whatever. It seemed rather arbitrary to me —
unnecessary, or maybe not that, maybe it was necessary to hate someone, just capricious who it was that you hated.
After breakfast I put on my clothes. At the door Mum hugged me and we kissed. She peered deeply into my eyes then.
“You cannot be my boyfriend,” she said very seriously.
“You’re very beautiful,” I replied with a smile.
“But —”
“So I’m happy for what I got here,” I said. “It’s like a dream 141
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in here. And now when I come to Good News I know I can talk to you about philosophy over hot and sour.”
Mum’s eyes widened, and maybe there was a gleam of disappointment there. She might have been thinking that I took it so well maybe I could have been a good secret lover. Or maybe she wanted me to be a little brokenhearted after that night of perfect love.
Either way, she kissed me again and, unknowingly, sent me off to war.
S e x w i t h a w o m a n i s a l way s a two-edged sword for me. The last woman I had been with, Jessa, was the source of all kinds of trouble. I was still deep in that morass, my clothes newly perfumed with Mum’s exotic scents, when I decided that it would be okay for me to go to the address on Saturn where Hector LaTiara lived.
There were many forces that brought me to his block.
There was the manhood I felt from the act of love with Mum.
There was the urgency I felt about the murder that had happened in my home. And there was the feeling of invisibility I had at times.
I didn’t expect to confront Hector. I just wanted to get the lay of the land before Fearless and I went up against the French-assed nigger.
I got in my car and sat there for a while. I thought about the assumptions I had made and the mistakes that attended those assumptions.
Very often I blamed Fearless for my problems. He’d get into trouble trying to do right in a world where everything was wrong. When he felt that he needed to think his way out of a 142
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problem, he always came to me. And if I got involved, trouble came down in a deluge.
Sometimes I wouldn’t answer Fearless’s calls. Sometimes I would refuse him bail money.
But now here I was, in trouble deep, and I didn’t question whether or not Fearless would be there the moment I needed him. I can’t say that I felt guilty about my infidelity, but I did see the truth of it. If Fearless wasn’t in my life, I’d already be in jail over Tiny Bobchek’s murder. And if not for my friend, knowing anything about Hector LaTiara wouldn’t have done me one lick of good.
I t wa s a b o u t e l e v e n when I drove down the 1600
block of Hauser, then left onto Saturn. It was a narrow street th
ere below Pico. The dwellings were single-family houses and two- and three-unit apartment buildings. Most everybody was at work. The yards were empty. The birds were cheeping.
There was no car at the address given for Mr. LaTiara. The apartment building was red and cream stucco, tall for L.A., three floors. I sat there patiently, remembering Mum’s kisses, fearing the iron bars of California justice.
At twelve fifteen Jessa stumbled out of the arched entrance to Hector’s building. She was wearing a pale green dress that didn’t seem done up right. She looked confused standing there on the concrete path to the first-floor entrance of the building.
Another problem I have is that I don’t have enough respect for women. I’m not saying that I don’t try to be civil by opening doors and keeping my eyes in check. The problem is that I don’t fear women enough.
Seeing Jessa, I jumped out of my car and made it across the 143
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street before considering what her presence there might have meant. She was turning in a slow circle, looking up as if the sun had robbed her of her senses.
“Jessa, what are you doing here?” I asked, coming up to her.
At first she didn’t respond. Then she looked me in the eye.
After a moment, I think she recognized me. I thought she was going to tell me something, but then she screamed and socked me in the jaw.
Then next thing I knew I was flat on my back on the lawn.
I sat up, befuddled. Jessa was screaming again but she was also running. I watched her go down the street at a good clip and wondered what I should do.
I decided that going back to my car would be a mistake. If anyone saw me, they might get the license plate, and then the police would have my name and Jessa’s face at least. I couldn’t walk down the street — I just couldn’t. And so I decided that going into the red building was my best choice.
It might not have been a good decision, but I was a little shaken by Jessa’s sucker punch.
Once inside the entrance of the building, I was presented with two choices. To the left was a circular stairway that led to the apartments above, and straight ahead was the doorway to the first-floor abode.
Another easy choice. The door to the first-floor apartment was open.
I walked in gingerly. If there was someone there, I didn’t want to scare them.
The foyer was a small room in its own right. Salmon pink walls and a dark wood chair with an ivory white cushion in the seat. The carpet was a yellow background supporting dozens of woven red roses. There was a telephone on the floor, mark-144
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ing a place where a stand should have been, I imagined. And there was a portrait of a white woman on a horse. The woman and horse were on a path in front of a white fence. In the distance was an apple orchard, beyond that a mountain range.
I remember much more about that foyer. I remember the baseboard around the floor and the yellow-and-red light fix-ture on the ceiling. I could spend a great deal of time on the dimensions of the room and the odd shape of it . . . but that’s because of what happened in the next room, the room I should never have entered.
It was a den of some sort: half office, half study. It was dark.
There was a desk behind which were closed drapes. There was a high-backed office chair, and sitting on it was Hector LaTiara, the man who had come to me looking for a French dictionary, the man Useless was so frightened of.
He was wearing a vanilla-colored jacket and a white shirt, both of which were bad choices because of his throat being slashed open. Thick, gelatinous blood had flowed, lavalike, down the fair material. An arc of blood had sprayed across the papers on his desk.
One of his eyes was wide with fright, the other half closed.
His lips, even in his last moments, curled into a superior sneer, as if he were trying to convey to his murderer that he had been through worse than this.
I was mesmerized by the brutality and the blood. My gorge rose, but I wouldn’t turn away. My body shook, but I wouldn’t take a step. A voice in the back of my mind was screaming,
“Run! Run! Run!” But I stayed in place, gawking at the para-digm of murder.
My breathing had become very shallow. I was almost panting, with very little oxygen getting to my brain. So I put my 145
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hands on my knees and squatted down like a sprinter after a hard-run race. It worked. I took in deeper breaths, and the paralysis began to lift.
But bending over, I put myself closer to the corpse.
His left hand held a broken pencil. He’d probably snapped it when he first felt the razor on his throat. There was blood on the pencil and all over both hands. You could see that he’d grabbed for the wound without releasing what he held. Then, as he died, the hands came back down to the note he’d been writing:
Martin Friar, UEC, 2750.00
“Mr. LaTiara?” a frail voice called.
How I moved so swiftly behind the maroon drapes I cannot say. All I know is that one moment I was frozen in awe, reading the upside-down note, and the next I was behind the thick fabric. There was a tiny tear through which I could see the room beyond the dead man’s chair.
“Mr. LaTiara?”
And then, long moments later, a small and ancient white woman doddered in. She had the blue hair of an old woman and a face that would have fit on the smallest of animals.
“Oh, no,” she whispered, and I was convinced, absolutely, that she would fall down dead from fright.
But I was wrong. She moved closer to the desk than I had dared and stared deeply at the man. Her tiny face became steely and she turned away, walking from the room with more fortitude than she had coming in.
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stopped there to call the police, I was done for. Either she’d see me or they would come and find me.
I could sneak up on her, knock her senseless, and run —
but no. She was too old and I was too close to my mother.
A minute passed and I heard nothing.
Another minute.
I moved out from behind the curtain and into the foyer.
The woman was gone.
I went back into the foyer and through another door. This led to a kitchen, which had a back door that led to a yard. Then there was a fence, another yard, an alley, a street. I ran as fast as I could until I was in the driver’s seat of my jalopy again. As I turned the ignition, I heard the far-off whine of sirens.
My heart was beating like bongo drums; my soul was deep in the ecstasy of escape.
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I d r o v e d i r e c t l y f r o m the scene of the murder to Santa Monica Beach.
23 Whenever I am frightened I head for water.
Don’t ask me why. I’m not a good swimmer and I don’t know the first thing about boats. My uncle always used to say that the fish must have known it was me at the other end of that line because they never took my bait.
But despite all that, the water makes me feel secure. The Mis-sissippi and the Gulf of Mexico were my solace in Louisiana; now that I was a Californian, the great Pacific was my pro-tector.
I went to a bench in a park that stood maybe a hundred feet above the ocean at the end of Olympic Boulevard. There I sat and tried to make sense out of a life that, if I were a white man, should have been as boring as a cardboard box.
The last time I had anything to do with Jessa I found her lover murdered on my floor. And now I had found her again and another man had been murdered, a man who was after my cousin Useless.
It almost made sense. Almost.
I couldn’t hear the waves but I could see them, cresting white and breaking rank at the sand.
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Useless was being followed by Hector. Hector, for some unknown reason, had killed Tiny. Then Jessa, who knows why, had gone away with Hector. Now Hector was dead.
There wer
e people I had never met who were involved with Useless. There was the white man Stringly and the men who were being blackmailed or extorted or whatever. There was Mad Anthony, whom I did know.
What I didn’t know was if any of this mattered to me.
At almost any other time I would have gone home and left the killing of Hector LaTiara to the LAPD. They wouldn’t care too much about a black man getting his throat cut. And if they decided to investigate, it would be about the criminal life he lived and not about some Negro bookseller from South L.A. But I had already tried to ignore a crime that had come to me via my cousin. Tiny’s corpse was stalking me still. Hector might do so too.
After this last thought my mind went blank. I couldn’t get any further into the problem. I was not the kind of man who made bold decisions about events that could harm or kill me. I moved behind drapes, sought out shadows. But there I was in the light of day between the rock (Three Hearts) and the hard place (her son).
“ B a i l b o n d s , ” Loretta Kuroko answered on the first ring.
“Loretta.”
“Hi, Paris,” she said happily. “Hold on.”
“Hello?” Fearless said.
“Hey, man.”
“You sound like the house burnt down and the dog died,”
he said. “What’s wrong?”
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“I got to see you, Fearless, and this really ain’t the kinda talk you can have on the phone.”
“Okay, man. Fine. Milo off wit’ Whisper, so I could take some time. I don’t have a car, though.”
“I’m out at the beach,” I said. “Santa Monica.”
First-time lovers and real friends don’t need much language. Fearless knew my predilection for the sea when I was frightened. He knew I would find it hard to come to him.
“You at the place you usually go?” he asked.
“No. But I can get there.”
“See ya in forty-five minutes, Paris. Hold on, brother.”
M y u s u a l p l a c e wa s a p a t c h of sand about a hundred feet south of the Santa Monica Pier, midway between the ocean and the boardwalk. I climbed down the long stairway from the park to the beach and then trudged along the shore-line to that place.
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