Fear of the Dark

Chapter 4

Sir lent me a beat-up yellow sweater so that I wasn’t bare chested walking down Slauson. When he and Sasha let me out on the darkening corner, I was almost shaking. I was feeling the exhilaration of survival and mortal fear at my close call. I was proud of myself for my letter-perfect escape, knowing all the while that I was a fool to be in a situation that could bring me so close to pain.

Milo sweet’s bail bond office was upstairs from the haberdashers Kleinsman and Lowe. They specialized in old-world hats that they exported throughout Europe and the Orient. At one time they had used the third floor for the managing office, but when they decided to move the nerve center of their operation downtown, they let the space to Milo Sweet and his jack-of-all-trades assistant, Loretta Kuroko.

I climbed the outside staircase to the third floor and knocked.

After a few moments Loretta opened the door and smiled for me.

That day she was wearing a green ensemble. The jacket was silk and so was her skirt. The black blouse might have been cotton, and the hand-carved jade rose that hung from her neck was exquisite.

Loretta was ten years my senior but looked younger than me. She was beautiful and smarter than her boss. But Loretta revered Milo Sweet, and I do believe that she was the only person in the world he would have laid down his life for.

She had long dark hair rolled up into a bun at the back of her head and eyes that looked at you from some other epoch, when there were no cars or jitterbugs, no white people at all, and when men, once they made up their mind to fight, would not give up until they had bled their last drop.

“Hello, Paris,” she said.

I felt something then. It was the feeling I’d had as a child when I returned home after a long day away. My mother would be there waiting for me, and I felt a joy that I had not expected to feel. Loretta’s greeting was a delight. And I think that she saw my reaction.

She smiled and nodded by moving her head in an elegant semicircle.

“Are you here to see Milo?” she asked.

“No.”

Her lips pursed. “Fearless?”

“Have I ever told you how happy I am to see you whenever I come to this office?” I asked.

“Come on in, Paris,” she said.

I followed her up the three steps to the circular room that she and Milo shared.

When Milo told Loretta that they were moving offices again, the thirteenth time in nine years, she informed him that she would only go if he let her find the place and design and furnish it. What came of it was a thing of beauty.

The room wasn’t actually round. It had eight walls of equal size. Every other wall had a large window with a roll-up bamboo shade. The floor was the most wonderful part. It was a perfect circle, twenty feet in diameter, raised half a foot above the original floor and made from cherrywood. Fearless had constructed it. He had also built the oak file cabinets that sat against the windowless walls and on the floor outside the circle.

Loretta’s desk was a simple plank of ebony wood on white ash legs. She had no drawers or doodads to obstruct the elegant lines.

On the other side of the circle, Milo had his hideous drab green desk made from sheet metal. His chairs didn’t match, and he was perpetually swaddled in a thin blanket of cigar smoke. When you looked at the room you got the feeling that it represented a planet, one side of which was in permanent midnight and the other washed in eternal noon.

No one would have expected this particular meeting of East and West in a third-floor office in black Los Angeles. It might be that no one, outside of Milo’s clients and friends, ever knew it was there. People from the style section at magazines went to see how John Wayne and Clark Gable lived. They wanted to see foreign queens’ palaces when they should have been looking at that bail bondsman’s office on Slauson.

When i took a step and faltered, Loretta noticed my bare feet. A moment after that she saw that I was bleeding on her cherry floor.

“What happened?” she asked.

“It’s kinda hard to explain,” I said. “But it’s not all that bad.”

“Come sit down.”

Milo had a favorite guest chair. It was a spindly light brown creature that most resembled a half-starved dog. The legs didn’t look as though they could bear the weight of a big cat, but there Fearless sat with his feet on Milo’s desk, leaning back on the two quivering hind legs of that chair.

Fearless wore a charcoal shirt and blue jeans. He was drinking a glass of water.

“Paris,” he said with a true friend’s smile.

“The prodigal son,” Milo rumbled. If they ever put him in a choir, he’d have to be placed somewhere behind the bass section.

“Gentlemen,” I hailed, allowing Loretta to help me to a red stool that Milo had also refused to give up. Behind him there was an open window with a fan blowing out; another demand of Loretta’s.

“What happened to you, Paris?” Milo asked.

Looking at Milo you would have thought he was once tall but somewhere along the way he’d gotten jammed up in a compactor that had made a shorter, broader specimen.

He had the big hands of a heavyweight and the shoulders of a bull. For all that, Milo was not a physical man. Nine times out of ten when I saw him he was sitting, and the only sport he excelled in was darts. He was most often the darkest man in the room, that is unless he was in the room with Fearless.

“Cut myself runnin’ barefoot through an alley,” I said. I didn’t need to say any more.

Loretta came up with a glass of water and a first aid kit. She knelt down in front of me and started ministering to my wound.

“I come to borrow my friend,” I said, wincing from a dab of iodine.

“This is prime time right here, Paris,” Milo said, shaking his big head at me. “And Fearless is on the clock.”

“What you need, Paris?” Fearless asked, as if Milo had not said a word.

I told them the story. It didn’t bother me that Loretta was there listening. Milo’s assistant never passed judgment on someone for being the victim of his instincts.

“Unless the man come to your house is Albert Rive, Fearless ain’t goin’ nowhere,” Milo said when I finished my tale.

Fearless had grinned now and then while I spoke, and Loretta had let out with an “Oh, no” here and there. But Milo was all business.

There was a thug in Los Angeles named Albert Rive. He was an armed robber who got caught, tried, and sentenced to fifteen years in the California penal system. But before he could be sent away, his lawyer, Philip Reed, a friend of Milo’s, got the conviction set aside on a technicality. Rive came to Milo for bail with his mother’s mortgage in hand. Then he went somewhere down South and disappeared.

Milo was out fifteen thousand dollars when Rive jumped bail. And though he hated to do it, he had to foreclose on Mrs. Alberta Rive’s home. She lived there with her daughter, granddaughter, and four great-grandchildren. Milo was about to put them all out in the street.

Somehow a message came to Milo that he had better lay off Mrs. Rive or Albert would make a surprise stop at his doorstep.

Milo was a thinking man, but he was also almost as brave as my friend Fearless. He had hired Mr. Jones to be his bodyguard until the Rive property was liquidated and hoped that Albert would make a move so he would get caught and Alberta could remain in her home.

Toward this end, Milo had hired the only official black private detective in Watts, a man known as Whisper Natly.

Whisper was a man with no distinguishing characteristics. You never saw him even when he was right there in front of you. He wore a short-brimmed brown hat that was a shade darker than his skin. He had a gray hatband but no feather. His shoes were dark, maybe brown, and his clothes were neither new nor old, natty nor disheveled. He spoke in a low voice, not a whisper, and no one I knew had ever seen where he lived.

Whisper was the kind of man who could get information out of a deaf-mute. He moved quietly, always paid his bills, and never bad-mouthed anyone.

If Albert Rive was anywhere near Watts, Whisper was sure to sniff him out.

“Get your hat, man,” Fearless said to Milo. “We gonna take a ride with Paris.”

My friend rose from his leaning position effortlessly, like some being more graceful than a human. When he squared his shoulders, I spied Loretta appreciating him.

“I’m the one payin’ you, Fearless,” Milo reminded him. He stayed in his chair.

“If I was wit’ Paris here doin’ sumpin’ for him,” Fearless said, “an’ you come to me an’ say your house was on fire, I’d tell Paris to get his hat. Now, if you want me to leave you a gun, I’ll be happy to do it.”

Fearless wasn’t the smartest man I ever met. I sometimes wondered if he could do long division. But whatever he said was usually the last word in any argument. That’s because Fearless thought with a pure heart.

Milo got up.

“Come on, Loretta,” he said. “Get your bag and go on home.”

“But what if someone needs bail?” she asked.

“Have the answering service call you at home. I don’t wanna leave you here with that killer runnin’ free out there.”

“Wait a second,” she said, jumping up from her knees.

She’d done a good job cleaning and bandaging my foot. She went behind Milo’s desk and came out with a beat-up pair of light brown slippers.

“Put these on,” she told me, tossing the house shoes to the floor.

I glanced at Milo, but he just shrugged resignedly. He knew better than to argue with Miss Kuroko.

When we got to the street, I told Loretta that I’d walk her to her car. She was driving a tan Volkswagen Bug. At the door she reached out and touched my upper lip.

“What’s this?” she asked.

“Mustache.”

“It looks good.”

We stood there for a moment longer than was necessary.

“Call me,” she said.

I breathed in and forgot about expiration. Loretta gave a little laugh. It was as if I had never heard her laugh. It was wonderful.