“Mr. Minton?” Green Suit asked.
“Yes, sir.”
“Have a seat.”
I sat on a wooden stool placed on the other side of the table from the detectives. The men who had brought me there left without being asked.
The game began in earnest then. The goals of this particular sport were different on the opposite sides of the table. For the detectives to win they’d have to get me to admit to certain suppositions that they would posit. For me not to lose I’d have to avoid admission while keeping from being damaged beyond repair in the process.
“Tony Jarman,” Spotty said. It was like a low ante in a high-stakes poker game.
I knew what he wanted me to say, but I squinted and cocked my head to the side. What?
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“Don’t fuck with us, Minton,” Green Suit said.
“I don’t know no Jarman, man. What could I tell you?”
“Mad Anthony,” Spotty amended.
“Oh,” I said, but my expression said, Uh-oh, so you know about that?
“Yeah,” Green Suit said. “Oh.”
I put up my hands, trying to halt the train coming at me. I went right into my explanation because in the game we were playing it was in my best interest to get it over quickly. The longer they played, the better chance they had to win.
“Let me explain,” I said.
I told them about Three Hearts but not about Useless’s visit. I told them that I was looking for Useless but not about his business or his confederates. I told them that Man from Man’s Barn had told me that Useless knew Mad Anthony and that Anthony had kicked my butt for talking to him. I added that Fearless broke Anthony’s jaw because that was just the kind of friend he was.
After all that, I smiled, thinking that my points added up to an even number.
“Why are you looking for Mr. Grant again?” Spotty asked.
“His mother thinks that the woman he’s with is not right for him. She came up to see him and tell him so, but he had moved and she didn’t know where he was.”
“What’s the girlfriend’s name?” Green Suit asked.
“Debbie, I think. Don’t know the last name.”
“What she look like?”
I shook my head. In that game there was a point deducted for every word someone on my side spoke.
Green Suit walked around the table so that he could hit me if I tried that shit again. I let my eyes get big, very big.
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“Hey, hey, man,” I said. “I don’t know nuthin’ about her. I never met her.”
Green Suit was uncertain. He believed that me and my kind were stupid but wily. That was trouble for him because he never knew when to slap my face or shake his head in disgust.
He hit me hard enough to knock me off the stool, then he shook his head. Doing both was against the rules even in our freewheeling game.
“Get back on the chair,” Spotty said. He had a red face and Saint Bernard–like jowls.
“That’s not what I wanna hear,” Green Suit told me.
“Man, I was just lookin’ for Useless. That’s all.”
“Where is Grant?” Green Suit asked.
“He moved to Man’s Barn and then he disappeared.”
“What did Useless have to do with Mad Anthony?” Spotty asked.
“He gambled a lot. Played snooker for up to a dollar a ball,”
I said. “I thought that Anthony might be bankrollin’ him.”
“And you say this Fearless broke his jaw?”
“Yeah. But that was just a fight in a café. Anthony left after that an’ everything was peaceful.”
Green Suit laughed at my choice of words, and I knew that Anthony was dead.
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H a v i n g r e c e i v e d j u s t o n e slap made me a nonloser. Someday I’d tell my grandchil-30 dren about that evening in jail. By that time there’d be racism on Mars and jails for black men up there.
They took Fearless in for questioning after me. He wouldn’t tell them anything either. And Fearless was the kind of man that policemen didn’t batter around needlessly. They could tell right off that he’d die before saying something he didn’t want to say, and despite popular belief, the police needed good reason to beat a man to death under interrogation.
Finally I got to sleep. By then I was used to the sour smell of the cell. Chapman Grey asked for a doctor. They took him away and he never returned. I didn’t miss him.
I don’t know what time it was when I woke up, but it felt like early morning. There was no window, so I couldn’t tell for sure.
I bummed a cigarette off an old guy named Joshua who was in there for stabbing his wife. He didn’t understand why they had arrested him.
“Me an’ Gladys be fightin’ all the time,” he told me. “Damn, she shot me one time in ’forty-eight. The police asked me if I was okay an’ that was that.”
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Soon after he said this, I found myself thinking about Jamaica again.
An hour or so later a policeman called out, “Minton and Jones.”
We were brought to a processing room where all of our property, including Fearless’s .45, was returned.
When we walked out into the waiting room, I expected to see Milo or at least Loretta, and maybe Whisper. But instead, Jerry Twist, the African frog, was squatting on the bench.
“Fearless,” he said, breaking convention with familiarity,
“Paris.”
“What are you doin’ here, Jerry?” I asked.
“That all the thanks I get for goin’ yo’ bail?”
“What are you doing here?” I asked again.
“Let’s go outside,” the master stickman suggested.
It was the best idea. He might have had something to say that one wouldn’t want the police to overhear. But I was loath to go out of that jailhouse.
On the street it was maybe 6:00 or 7:00 a.m. Cars were cruising past. Twist led us to a big blue Chrysler parked across the street.
“Where you want me to drive ya?” he asked.
Fearless gave him an address three blocks down from Nadine and we drove away.
“What’s it like on the inside’a that jail?” Twist asked me as we went down Central. “You know I have never been arrested in my life.”
Only the best and worst of men could make that claim.
“How did you come to bail us out of jail, Mr. Twist?” I asked again.
“Answer up this time, Jerry,” Fearless added.
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He gave a slight shrug and said, “Ulysses called me and asked me to do it.”
“Ulysses?” That was both of us.
“Yeah. He called and said that he saw his mama an’ them an’ they told him that you was arrested. I called cop houses till I fount you.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because Ulysses axed me to, that’s why. I done told you all that I’m doin’ business wit’ him.”
“Where is he?”
“I don’t know. He called from a phone booth, said that he was with his mama an’ that girl, that Angel.” Jerry smiled at the thought of her. There was something obscene about a man that ugly lusting after a goddess.
He made a turn on a block three numbers lower than Nadine’s.
“You could stop anywhere around here,” Fearless said.
“I’ll take you to the do’, man,” our driver offered.
“Here’s fine.”
“Whatevah you say.” Jerry pulled to the curb, and I jumped out, followed by Fearless.
I put my head in the window before he could drive away.
“You know about that cabin Useless stay in around Angeles National Forest?” I asked.
“Sure do.”
“You know where it’s at?”
“Red house on Bear Pond Lane,” he said without straining his memory. “Got a airplane wind vane on to
p. It’s off Route Seventeen. The exit have a sign for fresh honeycomb underneath it. You take that exit, make a right, and go till you see Bear Pond Lane. Turn there an’ go a mile or two. You’ll see it.”
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When he drove off I actually had a chill.
“What was that all about?” I asked Fearless.
“I don’t know,” Fearless replied. “It was like a wild hyena had run ya down and then he lick yo’ hand instead’a rippin’ a steak outta yo’ thigh.”
“Uh-huh.”
Th e r e wa s a l i q u o r s t o r e at the corner. Fearless and I went in to buy orange soda, potato chips, and devil’s food cupcakes. We were starving. After eating our junk food meal at the bus stop bench we strolled on down to Nadine’s.
She hadn’t left for work yet. As a matter of fact, she was still dressed in her housecoat. The robe was mostly white with some pink and green sewn in. It looked more like an over-grown pot holder than anything else.
“Hi,” she said to us at the door. “I wondered when you were going to bring her home.”
“Who?” I asked.
“Hearts, of course.”
“She ain’t here?”
“She was with you.”
We came in and sat around a small dining table.
Nadine was the kind of woman who overdid everything.
Where there should have been one chair she’d put three; where a three-foot table would fit nicely she’d place a table five feet in diameter. There were seven prints of paintings hung from the wall and little doodads all over the place.
“So you got taken off to jail an’ that devil girl took off with Hearts?” Nadine asked us.
“We couldn’t help gettin’ arrested,” I said.
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“Hm.”
“Does my aunt have your phone number?” I asked then.
“Of course.”
“And she haven’t called?”
“Wouldn’t I tell you if she did?”
“Nadine,” I asked. “Could you stay home from work today?”
“What?” she gasped. You would have thought I’d asked her to take off her clothes and lie out on the bed.
“My aunt may call you,” I said calmly. “She might be in trouble. If you aren’t here when she calls, we might miss the only chance we have to help her.”
“I use my job to pay the rent,” Nadine explained.
“You have sick days.”
“But I’m not sick.”
I’m so used to people who steal and cheat and lie that when I’m faced with someone like Nadine I’m thrown off balance.
Nadine would have walked a city mile to return an extra nickel she got in change from a fifty-dollar transaction. Her idea of life was to look back over all the decades of work and play and be able to say that she never did a wrong thing or took advantage of a single soul. She’d turn on Jesus if he broke a commandment, wouldn’t have a choice.
“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.”
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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.
Th e r i d e o u t t o t h e c o u n t r y 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.
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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.
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I f o l l o w e d F e a r l e s s on the ride back to Los Angeles. We dropped Nadine’s car off at her 31 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 recre-ation area. The mystery of the sculpture allowed casual viewers to come up with their own reasons for such powerful emotions.
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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.
Th e t i t l e o f t h e p a p e r b a c k b o o k 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.
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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-con-doned 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.
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