Fearless Jones

7

“WHY DID YOU KILL Sol Tannenbaum?” Sergeant Bernard Latham asked for the fourteenth time.

“All I did was try and stop the bleedin’, man,” I said. Then I squinched up my face, preparing for the blow. But that time he didn’t hit me.

“Tristan confessed,” Latham said instead. The sergeant was a blocky-looking specimen. He was like the first draft of a drawing in one of the art lesson books I sold in my store. Block for a chest, squares for the pelvis, and cylinders for legs. A cube for a head. The only thing that humanized him was a protruding gut.

“Confessed to what?”

“He said you did the stabbing.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I don’t think you understand, Paris,” Latham said, pretending that he was my friend. “If he says that you did it and testifies to that, you get the gas chamber and he goes free. We don’t believe him, so what do you have to say?”

“Whatever Fearless says,” I replied.

“What?”

“Whatever Fearless says. If he said I did it, then okay, let’s go to court.”

Latham’s backhand was in great form. He could have gone pro. His blow reopened the cut that Leon Douglas had made in my mouth the day before.

A knock came on the door of the eight-by-eight gray room that the East L.A. cops used for questioning. Another white policeman stuck his head in. I was sprawled out on the painted concrete floor. Latham was deciding between a kick or another backhand.

“They want him for the lineup, Sergeant,” the head said.

When the sergeant didn’t answer, the head asked, “Should I tell them you need a few more minutes?”

It had to be a nightmare. Nobody had luck this bad.

“No,” Latham said. “We want him walking for the lineup. I can work on him some more after that.”

With that he lifted me by the shoulder and brought me to another room where a variety of black men about my size were milling around. A couple of them registered shock when they saw my face.

“Just goin’ on ugly, you the one to pick,” one man in a brown T-shirt and green pants said.

We lined up against a blank wall. A severe light came on, and we stood there. A few seconds grew to a minute. One minute became three. The light went out, and we were led from the room.

Latham came up to me, and I remembered his promise to work on me after the lineup.

It had to be a nightmare.

“Come on,” a small uniformed cop next to the sergeant said in a loud, officious voice.

“I wanted to talk to him a little more,” Latham complained.

“This man is under the authority of this precinct, Sergeant. When you arrest someone in Hollywood, you can have a shot.” Obviously Little Big Mouth didn’t like the sergeant.

I followed him to a large room that was cut in two by a metal grate. On the other side of the grate were large metal shelves with cardboard boxes stacked in them.

A door to my left opened. A lanky police officer walked in, followed by Fearless. My friend was glowering until he saw me. Then he smiled.

“Hey hey, Paris.”

I sighed in response. He knew how I felt. His jaw was lopsided from some heavy questions they asked him.

I looked around for Latham, but he was nowhere to be seen.

“All right,” the cop who accompanied Fearless said. “You guys can go now. But we know where you live.”

I had given them my address but neglected to say that the building had burned down.

A man from behind the grate brought our confiscated belongings to the window. There wasn’t much. Twenty-nine dollars in my wallet, the keys to Layla’s Packard, and Fearless’s empty paper wallet.

We went out through the door where Fearless had entered and then to a door that led to the street. It was a side door, so it was fortunate, or maybe unfortunate, that they saw us.

“Gentlemen,” she called from down the street.

At first I didn’t know who it was. I saw two white women with a big white man, that was all.

“That’s the old man’s wife,” Fearless said. He waved at her and took me by the arm.

A thought crossed my mind: for seven dollars I could catch a bus to Frisco and get a room for two dollars a night until a dishwashing job came through. It was the thought of a job, though, that reminded me of my bookstore.

“Come on, Paris,” Fearless said. “I gave my word.”

The women approached us. One was indeed the old woman who cried so hard over her dead husband that she couldn’t tell the arresting cops that Fearless and I were not the attackers. The other woman was taller and awkward looking, somewhere in her twenties. They were accompanied by a big, dumpy-looking guy who wore black slacks with a white shirt that wasn’t tucked in very well. The pale skin around his chin was blue, though I would have bet that he had already shaved for the second time that day. He was taller than Fearless but soft looking, shaped something like a bowling pin. His big hands were worth looking at; the fingers were long and held out straight, making his hands resemble those of a stroke victim.

But he was not paralyzed. He shrank back, clutching those hands to his chest when we moved to meet them.

“I’m so sorry,” the elder woman said. “I saw what they did to you. I’m sorry.”

“We’re sorry about your husband, ma’am,” Fearless said gallantly.

“You the one who looked at me in the lineup?” I asked.

“Both of you,” she said. “They kept trying to make me say that you were the ones who attacked Sol. One of them was tall like you,” she said, looking at Fearless, “but he had a bigger face and dead eyes, and he wore a cowboy hat.”

“A cowboy hat?” I said, thinking about the horns in my side mirror.

The old woman nodded. “When I said no, they told me that you would never be able to hurt me again. I was afraid that they were going to kill you.”

“Are you all right?” the younger woman asked. Her homely face made her concern seem that much more sincere.

“We have to go,” the man said, putting his discomfort into words.

“No, Morris,” the older woman said. “I have to talk to these men.”

“You don’t know them, Aunt Hedva. The police said that this one just got out of jail.”

“Didn’t my Sol just get out of prison?” the diminutive woman asked.

“That was different,” Morris said. “You don’t know them. Why were they even at your house?”

“We were makin’ the rounds,” I said. “Askin’ some’a the older white folks if they needed a gardener, and we stayed to try and save his life.”

The younger woman said, “Hedva told us that these men helped Sol.”

“Be quiet, Gella,” Morris ordered. “For all you know they could all have been working together.”

The sloppy man looked at us then and flinched, not, I thought, because he was ashamed of treating us like we were invisible but instead because he realized that we really could have been in on it with the man who stabbed his uncle.

Morris didn’t seem to fit with the women. He was right there, and scared. They were someplace else altogether, like characters from a romantic novel who found themselves in a fast-paced crime story.

It’s not that the two women were cut from the same cloth. No. Gella and her aunt were as much opposites as people of the same race can be. The younger woman was tall and lean. Her ears and nose were large and so were her lips. Every movement she made was executed in two operations. If she reached out to touch her aunt’s shoulder, her hand would make it half the way, stop, and then go the final distance. If she spoke, first she’d lift her head and open her mouth, then she’d lower her chin and do it all over, ending with whatever she had to say.

The older woman was short and round with small features. She had beadlike eyes and almost no lips. Her motions were quick and accurate. I had misjudged her earlier in the day. It was the shock of seeing her husband bleeding that had made her scared and confused.

“We have to go now,” Morris said to the women.

It was almost as if Fearless and I weren’t there on the corner. As if our dark skins somehow blended with the dusk and whisked us away.

“These men did not hurt us,” Hedva said, still involved in the earlier argument. “What they say is true. They saved Solly’s life.”

“Saved his life?” I said. “The cops told us that he was dead.”

“No.” Hedva shook her head. “Not dead. He’s in the hospital. They can’t wake him up, but he’s still alive.”

“Which one of you is Fanny?” Fearless asked.

“I am,” Hedva said. “That’s what they called me when I was a child.”

Fearless nodded, staring straight into the older woman’s face. She was his charge now. Fearless would never forget that Sol, lying bleeding on the floor, had instructed him to protect Fanny from being robbed.

“Well, I’m glad it turned out all right.” What I wanted was to break up our little powwow and get on with the business at hand. Sol wasn’t dead, but he could still die. I wasn’t dead either but, the way my luck was going, staying alive had become a long shot.

“Can I help you?” the older woman asked. “Something to make up for what they did?”

“No thank you, ma’am,” Fearless said out of reflex. “But can we do anything for you?”

“Excuse me, Mrs. Tannenbaum,” I interjected, “but my friend here and me don’t have anything to help with. We don’t even have our car. If you and your family could give us a ride back to your place, at least we could get that.”

“Of course,” Fanny assured me.

“There’s no room,” Morris, the bowling pin, said. “I have boxes in the backseat.”

“You can put them in the trunk.” Fanny waved her hand dismissively. I’d’ve bet it wasn’t the first time she treated him like that.

“No,” Morris said sternly. It might have been the first time that Morris stood up on his hind legs. Fanny’s small eyes widened an eighth of an inch.

“I, I have a spare in the trunk,” Morris said. “There’s no room.”

“I can take them,” the younger woman said. “I drove my car from home.”

“I forbid it!” Morris shrieked.

He took a step toward her. She shrank back a half step. Morris grabbed her by the arm, and Fearless tensed up. I was afraid we’d be right back in jail, but Fanny saved the day.

“Get your hands off of her,” she commanded.

Morris clenched his fist hard for a moment, then he let his wife go. He locked eyes with me. I could see his rage at being forced into line by a woman. He muttered something and then stalked off down the alley.

“I’M GELLA, the younger woman said on the way to the car. “Hedva’s niece.”

“Paris Minton,” I said. “And this here is Fearless Jones. Thanks for takin’ us.”

Gella smiled and looked away. She was shy and near ugly, but there was something fetching about her awkwardness, something that made your hands feel that they wanted to reach out to make sure she wouldn’t fall or get lost.

Gella drove an assembly-line prewar Ford. It was painted black and didn’t even have a radio installed. A spare machine, it was spotless and unadorned. Fearless and I sat in the backseat, while Fanny and her niece rode up front in silence. It was only a short ride, ten or eleven minutes. On the way we passed many white and turquoise and blue little houses, all sporting neat lawns and white cement driveways. It was around six o’clock, dinnertime for working people. Through many windows and open doors, you could see brown-skinned and some white-skinned people eating at family tables.

A few men were standing out in front watering the grass, or maybe lugging a trash can. Any man that saw us drive by stopped what he was doing and looked. That’s because Los Angeles was still a small town back then, and most residents were from the country somewhere. They treated their surroundings as familiar and friendly, and they wanted to know who was driving on their street.

There I was swallowing the slow trickle of blood from the cuts inside my mouth, being driven through a blue-collar paradise. I had the irrational notion that I could just ask that gawky white woman to stop the car and I could open the door and walk out into a peaceful life, leaving the trouble I was in behind. But before I could speak up, we were pulling into the Tannenbaum driveway. Layla’s pink car was still parked at the curb. Fearless was there next to me, pressing his swollen jaw. There was no escape.

When we were all out of the Ford, Fearless went up to Fanny and shook her hand.

“I promised your husband that I wouldn’t let anybody rob you, Mrs. Tannenbaum,” he said. “So if you need me…”

Fanny looked up at Fearless with an expression that many women had for him. There was trust and hope and even faith in that gaze. Gella and I exchanged worried glances.

“Have you eaten?” Fanny asked us.

“Why no, ma’am,” Fearless said.

“Hedva,” said Gella.

“What, dear?”

“I have to go home.”

“Go on then, I’ll call you.”

“But…” Gella let the word hang in the air, obviously meaning that Fearless and I were the reason she could not leave.

I didn’t blame her. Her uncle had been stabbed, she had just been to the police station, her husband was angry and scared enough to have raised his hand to her. And then there we were with our disheveled clothes and bloody faces, looking like thugs.

“Go home to your husband,” Fanny said flatly. “I’m fine.”

“But…” Gella said again.

Fanny raised her voice and fired words in a language I did not understand. The meaning was harsh though — that was evident by the lowering of the younger woman’s gaze.

“I’m sorry, Auntie,” the girl said. She looked at us and hunched her shoulders in an apologetic sort of way. Then she went to her car and got in.

As the engine turned over, Fanny said, “Come in, gentlemen.”

We followed her through the front door we’d been to earlier that day. This time we were ushered in with a smile.

Fanny was five feet tall, tops. Her husband had maybe an inch on her. The house reflected their height with its low ceilings and small chairs. The rooms were tiny, even for me.

She sat Fearless and me down at a round table in an alcove off of the kitchen. The meal came quickly and in courses. We had cabbage stuffed with ground beef, potato dumplings that she called knishes, chicken soup with rice, and chopped chicken livers on white bread. It was all delicious. For me, a man who had faced death twice in the last two days, it was a king’s feast.

After she made sure that we were eating, Fanny made a call. She wasn’t on the phone very long, and when she got off she was weepy and sad.

“That the hospital?” Fearless asked.

Fanny nodded and took a chair.

“Is he okay?”

“He came awake for a little while,” Fanny replied. “They said that he’s sleeping now and shouldn’t have company. Not even me. Not even me.”

“I’ll go down there and wait with you if you want,” Fearless said. “We could just sit outside and wait. If you’re close family, they’ll let you wait all night.”

“No,” she said. “I’ll sleep tonight and go in the morning. But thank you.”

It was kind of quiet after that. Fearless got up and served himself more soup, and I played with my fork, wishing I had a home to go to.

“Your niece didn’t want to leave you alone with us,” I said just to make some noise.

“You’re not white and not Jewish. She’s heard all kinds of stories, and she’s a suggestible girl. But she has a good heart.”

“But maybe she’s right,” I said. “You don’t know us. Don’t you think it’s strange that two black men show up at your door after another black man tries to murder your husband?”

“Stop tryin’ t’scare her, man,” Fearless told me.

“No,” Fanny said. “No, it’s all right. I’m not afraid of you, Mr. Minton. You helped Sol even though I was screaming and yelling. You did too, Mr. Jones. If I would have come on a bleeding man and somebody yelled at me, I would have run away. You went to jail. They beat you. I’m not afraid of you. It would make more sense if you were afraid of me.”

“Why we gonna be afraid of a pretty young girl like you, Fanny?” Fearless asked with a grin.

“Because all I had to do was nod my head and you would be murderers in jail.”

That pulled Fearless up short a second, but then he smiled again.

“Well, I ain’t ascared’a you, and you don’t need to be ascared’a us,” he said. “We wouldn’t hurt nobody like you. It’s like I said, I’m gonna make it my business that nobody else messes with you.”

“How you plan to do that, man?” I said, fed up with how silly they both were. She shouldn’t have been taking strangers into her home, and Fearless was nuts to want to protect somebody he didn’t even know.

Fearless gave me his sour look. For someone else that look could have meant trouble, but it was nothing to me.

“You got a wallet with no money in it,” I continued, “a borrowed car that’s low on gas even when the tank is full, you don’t have an apartment, and my place is burnt to the ground. You an’ me lucky to keep anybody from messin’ with us.”

“Oh my,” Fanny declared.

“It don’t matter about a house, Paris. I’ll find us some place to stay. And I don’t need no money to stand up to some coward wanna be messin’ wit’ old folks. If I have to, I’ll pitch a tent right here in the front yard and take a shovel for my bayonet.”

“Grass salad and earthworm steak, is that what you gonna eat?” I taunted.

“Excuse me,” Fanny Tannenbaum said in a small voice.

Fearless and I both turned our heads toward her. It was an odd thing to realize that we had begun to ignore her the same way that her nephew-in-law had ignored us earlier, the same way that white people had been ignoring us our entire lives.

“Yes, Fanny?” Fearless said.

“You gentlemen can stay here for a few days if you wish.”

I was stunned by that. I had done some traveling in my life. Fearless had been on three continents and then some, but neither one of us had ever experienced that kind of generosity. White people didn’t open their doors to questionable young black men. Hell, there weren’t many black folks I knew that would be so brave, or foolish.

“It’s the least I can do,” Fanny said. “You saved Solly’s life and… and…” — she hesitated and then drew a deep breath — “… and I am afraid to stay here alone.”

“You got your niece and nephew a couple’a blocks away,” I said. I was surprised that she offered us a place to stay, but that didn’t mean I wanted to take her up on the offer.

“That putz couldn’t save himself from walking down a hill,” she said disdainfully.

It wasn’t that funny, but Fearless laughed loud and long.

“What’s that you say, Fanny?” he crooned. “He can’t walk wit’out fallin’ down?”

The old lady started laughing too. She laughed so hard that she doubled over in the chair with her head on her knees. She forced herself to stand, still laughing, and went to a cupboard where she located a pint bottle of peach schnapps. She poured all three of us generous shots in squat glasses. The liquor was strong, and good. We finished off the first pint and put a serious dent in a second.

I was smiling with them after a while, feeling pretty good. So when Fearless said, “Sure, Fanny, we’ll stay here with you,” I didn’t see anything wrong with it. After all, we were already there, and it was after nine; we didn’t have a home to go to, and I still had some questions to ask about Elana Love.

I made a little nod and said, “Well, if we got to go, we might as well be eatin’ good and feelin’ high.”

FEARLESS GOT IT into his head to wash the dishes. Fanny offered to help, but he said that he missed simple chores after his twelve weeks in jail. He’d already explained to her that he’d gotten into an altercation with three mechanics that tried to cheat him. I thought that that would turn the sweet old lady against us, but instead she said, “My Sol was in jail. It’s a bad place where many good men go.”

SHE AND I RETIRED to the sitting room while Fearless hummed and played in the soapy water. Sol had a glass box filled with English Ovals, an imported cigarette. I smoked a few of these while we talked.

“I take it you don’t like Gella’s old man,” I said.

She made a quizzical face that suddenly became bright. “Oh,” she said, “you mean the putz.”

“Yeah.”

“He’s a coarse man,” Fanny said. “Not rude or foul-mouthed but unfinished, without manners, like a pig farmer or a policeman.”

“You don’t like the cops either?”

The schnapps made conversation easy.

“When I was a child,” she said, “the police, the army, and the pig farmers were our enemies. Morris isn’t bad, he’s just stupid about things. He’s always coming around offering to work on the house, to cut the grass. He’s telling me that he wants to help when Sol” — she sighed and looked to the ceiling — “when Sol was in prison. He’s always telling me he wants to help, but I tell him no. He thinks I’m too old to be bothered with a checkbook or the plumber, but I’m not.”

“What was that he said just before he stomped off?”

“I don’t remember,” Fanny said, but she did.

“Swatted?” I prodded. “Swear?”

“Svartza,” she whispered.

“What’s that mean?”

“It means black, but not in a nice way,” she admitted.

“Oh.”

“I would never be bothered with him, but Gella loves him — because he’s fat.”

“Huh?”

“That’s true,” she said, widening her eyes as much as she could. “She loves him because he’s so big and fat she thinks that he can protect her.”

“Protect her from what?”

“Her family was from Estonia, like us. Only they moved to Germany after the First World War. Her father, Schmoil, Solly’s brother’s son, was a rich man and smart.” Fanny pointed at her temple to show me the degree of his intelligence. I realized then that she also had had a good share of schnapps. “We left Europe after they moved. Schmoil stayed on and did business. He owned three newspapers but sold them when he saw what was coming. He put all of his money into his art collection and moved it to Switzerland. Then he moved his wife and kinder to Vienna. He thought that they would be safe there.”

“That don’t sound too safe.”

“A wife, a grandmother, three uncles, and seven children,” Fanny said, “and only him and Gella survived. They were all betrayed by a Jew, but my Solly saved Schmoil and Gella.”

“He did?” I said. I found it hard to believe that the little old man I’d seen could have saved anybody.

“When Schmoil and Gella ran, my Sol hired smugglers in Italy to put them in barrels and take them to Africa. Then he bought them passports and brought them here.” Fanny had been whispering, and I could see why. Whatever he did, it didn’t sound legal.

“Wow,” I said. “Damn. That’s a great thing. That why they put him in jail?”

“No. They said he was a thief,” Fanny said sadly. “I don’t know. He sold his tailor’s shop and went to work for those goy accountants.”

“Who?”

“Lawson and Widlow. He went to work for them.”

“If he was a tailor, why’d they need him?”

“He did his own bookkeeping for years, and he went to work for almost nothing. He stayed late every night finishing everything they gave him. He stopped laughing with me, and then one day the police came and take him away.”

“And then,” I said, seeing my opening, “after he was in jail a while, a woman named Elana Love came to your door.”

“You know her?” There was surprise and anger in the old woman’s voice.

“You see, Fanny,” I said, “Fearless an’ me aren’t really gardeners…” I related, more or less, the story of me and Elana Love.

“And this man, her boyfriend,” Fanny asked when I was through, “he’s the one that hurt Sol?”

“I don’t think it was him in the cowboy hat, but he was probably the other one. I’d bet on it.”

“But you will find out because you want the money back for your store,” she said.

“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.”