Fearless Jones (11 page)

She showed a lot of teeth when she saw Fearless.

“That was too bad about your store, Paris,” Shirley said. “What happened?”

“I don’t know, babe. I came home and it was gone.”

“Where were you?”

“Out bein’ a fool.”

Shirley shook her head and sucked her tooth. She and her mother had lost all the men in their lives. The father ran off with
the number three chair girl. Her brothers were both institutionalized, one by the prison system and the other by the armed
forces.

“Shirley, can I borrow Dorthea for a moment?” Fearless asked.

We decided while approaching the beauty shop that Fearless would ask for Dorthea. Women were much more likely to say yes to
him.

“Can’t you see that she’s workin’?” Obviously Shirley didn’t see it our way.

“Oh, that’s okay,” Dorthea spoke up. “Mrs. Calhoun don’t mind waitin’. Do ya, honey?”

Up until then I hadn’t looked closely at the woman in Dorthea’s chair. She was older and with a stern, strawberry-brown face.
She had white-rimmed glasses and hard eyes. Her stern countenance was cause for surprise because it broke out into a big smile
for Dorthea and the prospect of her talking with a good-looking man.

“Go on, honey,” Mrs. Calhoun said. “Me an’ Shirley can talk mess without you for a while.”

Before Shirley could object, Dorthea took off her white apron and scooted toward the door. We were right after her.

Outside, the three of us convened at the curb, but I might just as well have been the fireplug as far as Dorthea was concerned.

“What you wanted, Fearless?”

“Did you know them Messenger of the Divine peoples?” he asked.

The light of love faltered in her eyes.

“Did you?” I chimed.

“What’s this all about, Paris?” Now that she was angry she talked to me.

“Dorthea, honey, I don’t wanna fight with you…”

“I ain’t fightin’ I just —”

“I don’t wanna fight, so I’ll cut this short. I need information on them Messenger people because I think it was somebody
after them came and burnt down my store. You know I lost everything and somebody got to pay.”

“Them’s religious people, Paris,” Dorthea said. “They wouldn’t do nothin’ like that.”

“I don’t think they did it,” I assured her. “But somebody didn’t like ’em did.”

“Who?”

“Did you know Reverend Grove?” I asked.

“Why should I tell you?”

“Five dollars,” I said.

Dorthea looked left and right, then she said, “You gotta car?”

“Right across the street.”

“Take me around the block then.”

We got into Layla’s Packard. Fearless drove and I sat in the back.

“What you wanna know?” Dorthea asked.

“Do you know Grove?”

“Yeah. William. He from Arkansas. He came in as Father Vincent’s head deacon, but after just a year he was so popular that
he forced Vincent into semiretirement and took over the whole ministry even though they say he ain’t really ordained. That
man can preach. He make you feel like he’s God and you the only one he care about.”

“But he took the church away from the pastor was there?” Fearless asked.

Dorthea nodded. “Brought in his own deacons and everything.”

“Did you know a woman around there called Elana Love?” I asked.

“What about her?” She certainly did, and she didn’t like her either.

“Did you know her?”

“She was all over William. I mean, sometimes they’d go in the back while Vincent was deliverin’ the sermon for him. It was
just sad the way they was.” Dorthea curled her lip the same way that Shirley had.

“Did they do anything but sermons there?”

“What you mean?”

“Anything illegal?” I was thinking that the church had something to do with the money or bonds or whatever and maybe Dorthea
had heard about it.

She said, “No,” but there was something else on her mind.

“Come on, Dorthea. Ten bucks.”

“You won’t tell?”

“Swear,” I said, drawing an X across my heart with my finger.

“Brother Bigelow from over there sold me a pearl ring one time for fifteen dollars. It was a real nice one. He said that he
got stuff like that sometimes and that if I knew ladies in the beauty shop wanted some good jewelry cheap, I should bring
them to him.”

“Did you?” I asked.

“Uh-uh. It’s one thing just buyin’ a ring, but I didn’t want to be a fence.”

Fearless turned to her and smiled.

“Good girl,” he said.

She would have beamed at any compliment he gave.

“Why did the church move away?” I asked.

“I don’t know. Really. But it was all of a sudden. One day they was just gone. Everything. You remember.”

“Do you know where they went?”

Dorthea looked me in the eye. She was measuring me.

“Why should I tell you, Paris?”

Before I could think of a lie Fearless said, “You can tell me, honey.”

“Well,” she said. “I like you, Fearless, but I wanna see my money before I say anything else.”

I counted out five wrinkled one-dollar bills followed by a five.

“They was in Compton three weeks ago, down on Alameda somewhere. At least that’s what I heard.”

“You know the address?”

“Uh-uh. But you could find it if you looked.”

“When do they have meetings?”

“Every night they can.”

Fearless pulled up in front of The Beauty Shop and parked.

“Is that it?” Dorthea asked.

“You know how we can find Elana Love?”

“That bitch? No.”

She grabbed the handle and opened the door, but before she could exit, Fearless reached out for her shoulder.

“You wanna go to Rackman’s tonight?”

Looking at his hand, Dorthea said, “Yeah.”

“Paris and me gotta do somethin’ at eight, but I could be down to get you by ten-thirty.”

“You could pick me up at the Charles Diner on Eighty-ninth. I’m supposed to see my sister there.”

They lingered for a moment, him looking at her and her looking at his fingers, and then she climbed out. Fearless watched
her Chinese shuffle into the shop before he drove off.

“Man, don’t we have enough to do without you makin’ dates in the middle?” I asked.

“I been in jail for three months, Paris. You know I’m starvin’ for what Dorthea can feed me.”

“Oh,” I said. “Oh, yeah.”

“Paris?”

“Yeah?”

“Where’d you get that money?”

“What money?”

“That money you give Dorthea.”

“Borrowed it from Milo.”

I could see in Fearless’s eyes that he knew I was lying, but he didn’t press it. That’s the kind of friends we were.

RYA MCKENZIE WAS
a stern young woman with close-cropped hair and walnut-colored eyes. Her skin was the color of forest shadows, and her judgment
was swift. If she didn’t like you, you knew it and stayed away, but if she was your friend, you’d never want for anything
that she could provide.

She kissed Fearless and shook my hand, greeted us both with brief hellos, and then led us from the nurses’ station for pediatrics
to a small room furnished with a long, rickety table that supported a coffee urn, three boxes of sugar-glazed doughnuts, and
a small stack of paper cups and plates next to a jumble of disposable utensils made from wood.

“When did you get out of jail?” Rya asked Fearless when we were all seated on folding chairs.

“Yesterday. Paris paid my fine.”

“So what kinda trouble you in then?” she asked me.

“Conrad Till,” I said, as blandly as I could manage. It was nice to see her disapproval turn into something wary.

She half rose from her squeaky chair and looked around for spies.

“What you got to do with that?”

“Conrad was a friend of a woman I need to find. His name came up when I was lookin’ for her, and then I heard he’d died.”

Fearless nodded, going along with my half-lie. He had a philosophy about lying.
It’s okay as long as you ain’t hurtin’ nobody,
he told me one drunken night.
Matter’a fact a lotta times a lie is better’n the truth when the whole thing come out.

“I don’t know nuthin’ ’bout no foul-mouthed murdered man,” Rya said.

“You say he’s foul-mouthed,” I said. “But the evenin’ papers said that he never regained consciousness.”

“So they said. But you know you cain’t believe all that you read in no papers.”

“Did a lotta police come?”

“No. I mean there was cops in when they first brought him. But they left. Then that one officer, that Sergeant Latham come
in. He went to talk to Till, and then, a little while later, Ginny Sidell found him dead.”

“They talked?” I asked, just to be sure.

“Conrad Till was awake and cussin’ two hours after they brought him in. That’s when Latham come.”

“What did Till die of?”

Rya looked away at a blank wall and said, “Heart failure.”

“He had a heart attack?”

She shrugged.

“That’s it? A man comes in shot and they say he had a heart attack?”

“Heart failure,” she said, correcting me. “That’s what always kill ya. That’s how we know. A truck could hit ya and your spleen
be in your lap, but you still ain’t dead unless your heart stop.”

She looked at me with her walnut eyes. Fearless checked out the clock on the wall.

“Is somebody going to investigate the death?” I asked.

“Somebody who?”

“I mean, if everybody’s talking about it…”

“Everybody around here got a real job, Mr. Minton. Real jobs and apartments and mouths to feed. Conrad Till was just a year
outta prison, an ex-con with a bullet in his chest, found after an anonymous call.”

Fearless didn’t have a job or an apartment or kids to feed. She wasn’t talking about him though.

“Thanks, Rya,” Fearless said. “We really appreciate it.”

“You better watch out where you stickin’ your nose, Mr. Jones,” Rya warned. “Some people might get you all caught up in somethin’
you can’t get out of wit’ a fine.”

Fearless laughed.

“Baby,” he said. “If I was to worry about me gettin’ pulled down under the trouble I see, I’d be in my bed from mornin’ to
night. Man wanna kill me or put me in prison, he’s welcome to try it. But, you know, I draw from a deep well, deep as a muthahfuckah.”

It was the profanity that clued me in to how serious Fearless felt. He rarely cursed, almost never in front of women. But
when he did, you knew that he meant business.

“
YOU KNOW
we killed him, Fearless,” I said on the drive back from Mercy. Blood was pacing impatiently in the backseat.

“Killed who?”

“Conrad Till.”

“How the hell you figure that?”

“He was hurting but not dying when we left him. It was the report from the hospital that brought Latham into it. He probably
knew that Till was Leon’s buddy. And you better believe that he was the cause of Till’s demise.”

“Why you think?”

“I don’t know. Maybe the questioning got outta hand. Maybe there’s somethin’ we don’t know about Latham. I mean he’s a Hollywood
cop, so what’s he doin’ down near Watts and East L.A.?”

“Man, Paris, you got us into a real mess here.”

“I didn’t get into no mess. Mess just fell right on top’a me. I was sittin’ in my store readin’ a book.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know. But you could’a walked away. Could’a taken that five hundred dollars you used to pay my fine and started
a new store somewhere.”

He was right. There I was bound up with murder and arson and even in trouble with a maybe crooked cop when I could have walked
away. Could have but couldn’t anymore. I was no hero but I was stubborn, and, anyway, my five hundred dollars were gone.

“Fearless.”

“Yeah, Paris?”

“I’m sorry, man. Sorry I didn’t get you outta jail before you went in. Sorry I got you thinkin’ you gotta stay with me. I
fucked up, man.”

Fearless stretched out his right hand while keeping his left on the wheel. I clasped it.

“You my friend, Paris. An’ this mess ain’t so bad. I was in a war eight thousand miles from home with white men talkin’ German
in front’a me an’ white men talkin’ English at my back. They was all callin’ me nigger. They all wanted me dead. You know
I wasn’t scared then, baby. This ain’t no more bad than a night with a girlfriend like to bite.”

THE CHARLES DINER
was a night haunt. They didn’t have live music, but they had waitresses and drinks. The Charles was the place you went if
you didn’t have the cover charge in your pocket. Fearless and I double-parked out front, and he ran in.

While waiting I tried to screw up the courage to do what I knew had to come next. I knew from experience that Fearless could
be gone for a few days once he was off with a woman. He’d lose track of time, and how could I blame him? Ninety days was a
long time to go without love, even for me.

I watched the blinking neon sign that lit up the old-time diner. The facade of the restaurant was made to look like a train
car detailed in chrome. Now it was a place for the end of the night, when jukebox tunes would do. Thousands of people passed
through those doors every week. Working people and gangsters, women looking for love or money and men looking to throw love
or money away. You didn’t go to the Charles to see old friends; no, the Charles was where you went to seek out somebody who
wanted to help you with your problem, somebody who wanted to give you something or take what you had to give.