Fear Itself

6

MY EYES WERE WATERING and I couldn’t stop yawning by the time Fearless and I got to Ambrosia Childress’s house. We went to the front door together because I needed her phone number to stay in touch with my friend.

She answered in a bathrobe that was open just enough to snap me out of my lethargy. She had deep chocolate skin, dark red lips, and bright brown eyes. When she looked at Fearless her lips parted.

“Hi,” she said.

I might just as well have been a tree.

“Hey, Ambrosia. I’m sorry to drop in on you like this but I need a place to stay for a day or two.”

“Okay,” she said. No question why. No coy hesitation. I do believe that her nostrils widened and her chest swelled.

“Thank you, honey,” Fearless said.

He was swallowed up whole by her doorway and I was left at the threshold with a scrap of paper in my hand.

We’d decided that it would be dangerous for Fearless to travel the streets with so many people looking for him. I could make the rounds asking questions while he suffered the four walls of Ambrosia’s protective custody.

“GOOD AFTERNOON. BERNARD ARMS,” a friendly young woman said in my ear.

I was down the street from the residence hotel, closeted in a sidewalk phone booth.

“Brian Letterman,” I said in a tone completely drained of my Louisiana upbringing. “Pasternak Deliveries. With whom am I speaking?”

“Susan Seaborne. Yes, Mr. Letterman. What can I do for you?”

“I got a new guy at the front desk here, Sue. You know how it goes. Some guy in a hundred-dollar suit came in and dropped off a parcel without leaving the proper information. Lenny didn’t know. And now I have a problem.”

“Oh,” Susan Seaborne said. “I see.”

“I’m glad you do, because my boss wants to fire me. Can you believe that? Lenny takes down two lines for an address and Pasternak wants to put it on me.”

“I really don’t see what we have to do with your trouble at work,” the young woman said.

“Oh, yeah. I’m sorry. It’s just that my wife’s pregnant, and if I lose this job —”

“Are you looking for a new job?” the operator asked, trying to urge me toward clarity.

“I got two lines here,” I said. “Actually three words. Hercules and Bernard Arms. That’s all the address that the suit gave Lenny. If I don’t get a proper address my new baby will be suckling cheap wine on Skid Row.”

“Lance Wexler,” the woman said brightly. “You’re looking for Lance Wexler. He’s got a penthouse suite.”

“Is there a number on that suite, dear?” I asked in the wake of a deep sigh.

“P-four. That’s his apartment.”

“P-four,” I said, pretending to write it down. “Can you connect me to his room, please? I need to see when he wants to take delivery.”

“We can take the package at the front desk.”

“I know,” I said. “But Mr. Pasternak wants me to go there myself and get the man’s signature. Either I put the package in his hand by four o’clock today or I can kiss sweet butter good-bye.”

“But Mr. Wexler isn’t here,” my new friend Sue said.

“Are you sure? Or is it that he just doesn’t want to be bothered?”

“No. He’s out. I’m sure of it. No. He’s definitely not here. He hasn’t been in for a few days.”

THE BERNARD ARMS RESIDENCE HOTEL was nowhere near any colored neighborhood. They wouldn’t have rented a toilet to Kit Mitchell.

Next door on the right was a florist’s shop called Dashiel’s. On the left was a stationery store with no name posted. I went into the stationery store and bought a big blue envelope and a small stack of gummed labels. I attached one of the labels to the envelope and wrote the name Mr. John Stover. Beneath that I penned The Bernard Arms.

With the envelope under my arm I went around to the alley behind the building.

The back door of the residence hotel had a concrete platform in front of it. On that dais stood six large metal trash cans. Next to that was a double doorway. The doors were unlocked. They opened onto a hallway that smelled of garbage with a hint of freshly hatched maggots. The walls down that passage were painted dark brown to waist level and light blue the rest of the way up. It was as if the management had decided to make the working environment as hard and ugly as they possibly could.

At the far end of the unsightly corridor was a doorway that had a red-and-white sign that read FIRE EXIT attached to it. The stairwell beyond the door was also of utilitarian design. Filthy bare wood stairs led me past rough plaster walls that were painted a shade neither yellow nor green but a color that took on the worst aspects of both hues.

With the blue envelope securely nestled under my arm, I walked up the zigzag stairwell until it came to an end. I opened the door and came out on a tar paper and gravel roof. Realizing that I had overshot my goal by one floor I was about to turn back, but then I heard a sound, what a poet on my bookshelves might have called a susurration.

I looked around the side of the small structure that housed the doorway and saw the tan shoes and bare butt of a very white man humping away between a woman’s shuddering legs. She was wearing a maid’s uniform and he was most likely the valet. They were going at it on a sheet spread out over the gravel and tar.

“Warren. Oh, oh, Warren,” the woman moaned.

It was her calling out a name that was common but not someone I knew that struck me. The name Wexler came back to me. Hercules’s name suddenly seemed familiar.

I backed toward the doorway and descended a floor to the penthouse.

The penthouse hall had emerald carpeting and muted lime walls. There were potted ferns between the entrances to the suites and crystal chandeliers hung every six feet or so. The window at the end of the hall looked out over the tops of trees. It was more like a view of Paradise than some upstart brick-and-plasterboard city.

I thought about the lovers wrestling above me—Warren and the woman who called his name. Again I thought of the name Wexler. Where had I heard that name before?

My heart was thumping by then. I had made it all that way by using stealth that would have been better suited to a much braver man. I had planned my steps carefully, all the way down to the envelope under my arm. Hercules wasn’t home but Kit might be up there with some railroad prostitute. And all I had to do was mention Fearless’s name to keep him from doing something violent. Everyone who knew Fearless also knew not to cross him.

But the lovers on the roof had disconcerted me.

The cream yellow door sported the characters P4 cut out of mother-of-pearl. I felt my heart leap when I knocked. A moment went by. I knocked a bit harder. More time passed.

I sighed out loud. What the hell was I doing there anyway? I wasn’t Fearless Jones’s father. What did I care if he had to leave California? I had gone further than many a friend would.

But who was Hercules Wexler? I could see his family name printed somewhere.

I grabbed the knob, remembering my nightmare, and turned it. The door was unlocked. There was nothing left to stand in my way but common sense.

I entered Suite P4.