Fearless Jones (8 page)

“I’d like my store back,” I agreed. “At least I’d like a new place. But like I said, Leon is three kinds of bad. It might
not be worth —”

“I will pay you.” It was the kind of interruption that I didn’t mind.

“What?”

“You don’t have money, Mr. Minton. You will need something.” She got everything right, right down to calling me mister. “Now
that Solly’s in the hospital, I have to do something. My nephew is a fool, and Gella is just a girl. I don’t trust the police.…
All I have is you and your friend. I heard those men shouting at Solly too. They said they wanted the money he stole.”

“I thought you said he didn’t steal anything?”

“He told those men that they were the thieves. He told them they were
gonif
and they worked for thieves.”

“You tell the cops that?” I asked.

“I was afraid to tell them anything.”

“So what can I do?”

“You said they were looking for a bond. I gave a bond to that woman. Sol had given it to me. I asked him if it was stolen,
and he told me no.”

“And you believe that even after those men came in here after him?”

“Solly would never lie to me,” Fanny said with dignity. “He’s in trouble, but he wants to protect me. I want you to help me
find out what kind of trouble he’s in.”

“But I could tell you that right now,” I said. “It’s that bond.”

“No,” she said. “It is more than that.”

“What?”

“I don’t know. He told me the bond was nothing but in a way that I knew there was something he wouldn’t say.”

“You don’t think Leon came here after the money Sol owed him?”

“He wanted money stolen,” Fanny said stubbornly, “not money owed.”

“How much money we talkin’ about here?” I said. “I mean, what will you pay me?”

“I have one hundred dollars. I will give that to you and then, when you tell me what she says, I’ll give a hundred more.”

“And all you wanna know is why are they coming back after Sol?”

Fanny nodded.

“There’s just one thing,” I said.

“What?”

“Fearless thinks he can live on air, but we need that money. After what he told Sol, he won’t let you pay us a dime.”

Fanny nodded again and patted the back of my hand.

“Leave me your pants and shirt,” she said.

“Say what?”

“Leave your clothes out here when you go to bed. I’ll wash them and iron them in the morning and then I’ll put the money in
your pockets.”

Fearless came in only a few moments after the deal was sealed.

“All clean and dry,” he announced. “I stacked ’em in the dryin’ tray though, ’cause I didn’t want to put ’em away wrong.”

“That’s okay.” Fanny was beaming. “I can do that.”

I jumped up then. “But it better wait till tomorrow.”

“Why?” both Fearless and Fanny asked.

“If we wanna protect Fanny, then we got to find out what they came here for,” I said. “And one thing about crooks, they don’t
stay in one place too long.”

WE DROPPED FANNY OFF
at her niece’s house, which was only three blocks away on Marianna Avenue. It made sense not to leave her at home with Leon
Douglas on the loose.

Fanny gave us the keys to her house.

“We’ll call you in the mornin’, Mrs. Tannenbaum, ’cause you know we’ll probably come in late at night,” Fearless told her
at the front door. Fearless was a gentleman and would never just leave a woman off at the curb. I wandered up there with him.

Morris Greenspan answered the door.

“What do you want?” he asked us.

“They’re my houseguests, Morris,” Fanny said.

“You can’t come in my house,” he said, somehow taking Fanny’s explanation as a request.

“Then we’ll leave you here,” I said to Fanny.

“No,” Fanny said. “Morris, apologize to my friends.”

“You don’t even know them, Aunt Fanny. They aren’t family.”

“We better be goin’, Mrs. Tannenbaum,” Fearless said. He hated seeing any man get humiliated.

“These men are my guests,” Fanny repeated, looking up at her nephew-in-law.

The glower on the young man’s face was the same when he was eight, I was sure. Sullen and on the verge of a pout, he might
have stood there for half an hour before saying hello like a good boy.

“Mr. Minton. Mr. Jones,” Gella Greenspan said as she appeared at her husband’s side. The homely girl and her bearish, sullen
husband made an ungainly pair. She took the big baby’s arm. “Would you like to come in for coffee?”

It wasn’t that Gella was any less afraid of us. She was just raised better.

“We have to go,” I said. “Thanks anyway. See ya, Fanny, Morris.”

The sloppy bowling pin grimaced.

“Call me if you need anything,” Fanny said.

“We’ll pick you up in the morning,” Fearless promised.

Then we left the unmatched set of relatives to argue manners and race over coffee and rolls.

I HAD THE ADDRESS
of E. E. Love written down on a scrap of paper. Fearless drove us to the Twenty-eighth Street abode. The small, single-story
gray house was surrounded by sagging trellises that were heavy with vines of golden roses. There was
no light on, no car in the driveway, but still we knocked at the front door.

No answer.

A big dog came strolling down the street. It was a light-colored, short-haired and meaty mutt that nearly shimmered under
a granite streetlamp. I saw him before he saw us. He did an almost human double take and then started barking for all he was
worth.

“We better get outta here,” I said.

“We ain’t even got here yet.” Fearless went down on one knee and held out his hand.

The barking dog got braver and braver. Growling and gurgling murder he advanced on Fearless, who for his part looked like
a modern-day African saint. The dog snapped and then he sniffed. He pushed his nose against Fearless’s hand, then plopped
down on the ground, turning over onto his back to show his belly.

Fearless scratched the dog and then stood up, his new best friend at his side.

There was a black, lift-top mailbox attached to the wall next to the front door. It was stuffed with mail. I pulled out an
envelope wedged in at the side. By match light I read the name Miss Elana Love scrawled in purple ink.

“This is the right place,” I said.

Fearless’s dog growled in anticipation. Fearless pushed him by the neck toward the front walk, and the mutt seemed to understand
the command. He padded his way to the curb and stood there daring some phantom intruder to try and go by.

I went around the side of the house, testing windows. On the third try I was successful. Once inside I went straight through
the
gloom to where the front door should have been. It was there. Fearless snaked in, closing the door behind him. I found a lamp
on a table and turned it on.

After making sure that the house was empty we decided to separate to make our search. The whole front of the house was the
living room. It was just a couch and two chairs with a stand-up maple bar on top of two mismatched blue throw rugs. The rugs
were ugly. One had a diamond pattern, and the other was covered in small white dots.

At either end of the living room was a door. One led to the kitchen, the other to her bedroom. Between these two rooms was
the toilet.

Elana’s bedroom was simple enough. A single bed with pink sheets and a dresser with a mirror and chair. The window looked
out on a fence cordoning off her three-foot-deep backyard. I went through the drawers of the dresser, the closet, the pockets
of her clothes. I checked under the sheets and between the mattresses, on the window ledge and under the bed. There was nothing
there. Nothing. She had three dresses in the closet and only one pair of shoes.

Fearless and I met in the bathroom. Two towels on a chrome rack, a half-used bar of white soap, and no floor mat. In the trash
can there were a towel and a wad of cotton bandages clotted with a good deal of partially dried blood. I poked at the dressing
with a handy toothbrush, but Fearless reached in and pulled out the bloody rags.

“Somebody been wounded pretty good,” he said.

“No shit,” I replied.

I went over the kitchen again because Fearless didn’t have the patience to search for anything smaller than an elephant. There
wasn’t much to see there either. A jar of instant coffee, white bread, and an open can of condensed milk.

“I bet she only stays here now and then,” I said. “She probably only keeps the place in case her boyfriend of the week has
a change of heart.”

“You think?”

“No clothes to speak of, no food,” I said. “And even a blind man wouldn’t have carpet like that under his feet.”

Fearless laughed at that. He was slender, but he had a fat man’s laugh. For a moment there I realized how much I had missed
my friend.

“Come on,” I said. “Let’s get outta here.” I led the way through the kitchen door back into the living room. We were almost
out of the door when I stopped.

“What is it, Paris?”

“I didn’t look under the kitchen sink. Did you?”

“No.”

“I better look.”

“You think she under there?” I couldn’t tell if he was serious or joking.

I FOUND
a tin wastebasket beneath the sink drain and dumped the contents out on the kitchen table. There were tiny bits of paper,
coated with once-wet coffee grounds, torn from several notes and at least one letter. I pulled up a chair and started sifting
through the mess.

I had been working for all of five minutes when Fearless started yawning. “What you doin’, Paris?” he whined.

The letter was impossible to reconstruct in the time I had. It
would have probably taken two or three hours, seeing that it was scrawled in small pale blue letters on both sides of at least
three pages. To make it even more difficult, the words had blurred from the moisture of the coffee grounds.

The notes were written in black ink on white paper except for one that was written in pencil and another that was written
on yellow paper. I concentrated on these two.

Fearless opened the front door and whistled for the dog, who came bounding in like the loyal family pet.

“Hey, boy. Hey, boy,” Fearless chanted from the living room.

I didn’t have to go far to see that the penciled note was a shopping list — scouring powder and Modess napkins were all I
needed for that.

The yellow note had San Quentin Prison printed across the bottom. Above that, in black letters, the initials C.T. were printed
slantways, along with a phone number that had an Axminster exchange.

There was a phone in Elana’s bedroom, but it was dead, so we let Fearless’s new pet into the backseat and drove toward a gas
station on Slauson. I didn’t want to bring the dog, but I didn’t have the time to argue with Fearless either.

I did say, “Don’t you think somebody’s gonna miss his pet?”

“If he had a collar or license I’d take him home right this minute,” Fearless replied. “You know a dog catcher could be givin’
him cyanide tomorrow if we just let him go.”

That was the end of our discussion.

When we got to the gas station I put a nickel into the slot. C.T., whoever that was, was a long shot. But it was the only
shot we had.

He answered on the first ring. “Leon, is that you, man?” His voice sounded like a metal file rasping against stone.

“C.T.?” I asked, disguising my voice just in case this rough man ever heard me speak again.

“Who is?” he asked.

“It’s me — Dingo,” I said. I regretted the name as soon as I said it. I was scared stupid.

“Who?”

“Leon told me to call you up. He wanted me to come and get you but —”

“Get me? Man, I could hardly sit up straight.”

“Leon said to come help —”

“You a doctor?”

“I can take care’a you,” I said, trying to make my fake voice sound certain. “I got a brother used to be a medic in the army
with me.”

There was silence on the line.

“C.T.?”

“Why you callin’ me that?”

“That’s what Leon wrote on the paper, man. Ain’t that you? I mean if —”

“When you gonna get here?” he asked, interrupting me for the third time.

“That’s why I called. He wrote down your initials and phone, but I can’t read the address. Clinton sumpin’.”

“Clinton?” C.T. moaned. “Denker, man. Twenty-nine sixty-nine Denker. Super’s apartment.”

“Be right there,” I said in a husky voice that would have fooled even my mother.

“YOU GOT
my pistol, Paris?” Fearless asked over the loud barking in the backseat.

“I told you already, the girl stole it.”

“That was my gun she took from you?”

“Yes.” I took the left onto Denker.

“An’ now you want me to walk unarmed into the house of a friend of a ex-con nearly killed you yesterday?”

“He don’t know me, Fearless. I’ll just walk in there an’ tell him I’m Leon’s friend.” Finding that phone number and fooling
C.T. had given me a sense of control.

“What if he was the one sittin’ next to Leon when he was chasin’ yo’ ass down the street?”

“Shit.” My fingers went suddenly cold.

“That’s okay, man. I’ll go in first. But you owe me a pistol.”

THE ADDRESS
C.T. had given us was a court of apartments at the corner of Horn. We left the dog in the car. The super’s apartment was
listed under the name of Conrad Benjamin Till. Whoever designed the court must have been a fan of Minos’s maze. After every
two doorways there was another turn. I lost my sense of direction almost immediately.

Most of the apartments were dark, as the next day was a workday. We went past a pair of teenagers having some kinda sex behind
a skimpy rosebush. I don’t know if they saw us, but they sure didn’t stop.

NO ONE ANSWERED
when we rang Conrad’s bell. No one called out when we knocked. Fearless had brought Layla’s tire iron in lieu of a pistol
and used it on the door. The sound of that doorjamb being wrenched open by that twelve-pound tire iron
was frightening; loud and whining with reports like small-caliber gunshots now and then. I looked around to see if anyone
had turned on their lights; no one had, but that didn’t mean we hadn’t been heard or seen.