Fear Itself

18

THE DOOR TO MILO’S OFFICE WAS OPEN wide, but Loretta’s front room looked none the worse for wear.

Going through the hall to the office I tripped over my own feet and Fearless had to catch me. I held on to him for a moment, because it was hard for me to regain my balance. I was so scared after being shot at that my internal organs were quivering.

Milo’s office had seen some violence. One of his files was overturned and the spindly visitor’s chair was upside down. Milo was not in sight.

Then we heard a deep bass moan that could have been a sea lion sunning himself in Monterey Bay.

Bloody and bruised, Milo was on the floor behind his desk.

“Thug,” he said. “Try and bully me. See what that gets him.”

Fearless lifted the portly bail bondsman with one hand and his chair with the other. It was a show of strength that was almost impossible, but he did it with such ease that most people wouldn’t have even noticed.

Once he was seated, Milo began to cry. It wasn’t fear or weakness but rage at being so mistreated.

“You hurt?” I asked our sometime employer.

“He wanted Miss Fine’s name and address,” Milo said. “Said he was gonna kill me if I led him wrong.”

“I thought he worked for you.”

“Me too. I used him before. He’s always good if I got a white jumper, and he’s even proven all right on Negro cases. But he got somethin’ up his nose out there. A way to make some money, you better believe that.”

Milo loved money. He would be balancing a checkbook on his deathbed.

“Is he the reason you called me?”

“Yes sir,” Milo intoned. “He called up last night and asked me for the client’s name. At first he was all friendly, but when I didn’t give him what he wanted he got rude. And when that didn’t work he said that he’d be down here, like he was the father and me the wayward son.”

“What did you have him doing for you, Milo?” I asked.

“Lookin’ for somebody,” he replied.

“Kit Mitchell?”

“Who it was don’t matter,” Milo said with an attempt at finality in his tone.

“If it were Kit it do,” Fearless said simply.

Milo heard the threat in those words. He knew that he was a small fish and that Fearless was a man-eater. He knew when to back down.

“Yeah. It was Kit,” he said.

“And what does Kit Mitchell have to do with that white man?”

“It’s all the same thing. Bartholomew, Kit. Miss Fine wanted them both.”

“I thought you said that Winnie wanted to find Bartholomew.”

“Yeah, yeah. That’s right. She wanted to find both of them.”

“Why didn’t you tell me that?” I asked, trying to get some threat in my own voice.

“Because it wasn’t none of your business.”

“People shootin’ at us on the street is too our business,” Fearless said.

“He shot at you?” Milo asked, showing his first inkling of the trouble we were in.

“Uh-huh.”

“I didn’t know it was gonna come to gunfire, Fearless,” Milo said. “I mean, I thought it was just business as usual. Miss Fine wanted Kit and BB. Theodore was on Kit, and when you come in, Paris, I put you on the boy.”

“If Miss Fine wanted Kit too, why didn’t she tell me that?” I asked the bail bondsman.

“Because I called her,” Milo said. “I called her and said that you good, too good to know all her business. I said she could send you out after BB but to let Kit alone.”

“So why did you send Theodore to my door?”

“He heard about Fearless workin’ for Kit and came to me an’ asked did I know where he could find him. I didn’t think there was anything wrong with givin’ him your address. I mean, he was workin’ for me.”

“Now why is he after Miss Fine’s address?”

“He don’t know that he is,” Milo said. “He just come in here an’ tell me he wanted to speak with my client.”

“Why?”

“Because if I didn’t, he said he was gonna kill me. But hell if I was gonna give in to that garbage.”

“So why you still breathin’, Milo?” Fearless asked.

“After I realized that he meant to beat the answer outta me, I decided to send him on a wild goose chase,” Milo said. “I did some bail work for a nice white woman used to live up in Beverly Hills. She had a maid that had been with her family for forty-some years. That was Phyllis Noreen.”

“Bobby Noreen’s mother?” Fearless asked.

“Yeah. You know Bobby be in jail every time you turn around. And every time Bobby went in, Phyllis got so upset that the only way to calm her down was to get her son out. Then the white woman, Belinda Thurman, would call me.”

“So you sent a gunman to that good woman’s house?” Fearless was not happy.

“Belinda died three years ago last March. They sold her house, knocked it down, and built a six-story apartment building.”

“Damn, Milo.” That was me. “You lie in the face of Death just to keep that millionaire black lady on your side.”

We heard the front door to the office slam open, followed by hard footsteps of more than one man. Fearless swiveled like a big cat while I took a step backward, looking for an exit.

“Police!” an adolescent voice yelled, and the room was invaded by half a dozen pairs of wide blue shoulders.

***

FEARLESS AND I WERE IN HANDCUFFS before Milo could convince the cops that we had saved his life.

“No sir, officer,” Milo said for the thirteenth time at least. “Paris and Tristan here are freelance operatives. They were comin’ over to see if I had any work. The thief shot at them, and then they came in to make sure that I was okay. We were just about to call the police when you busted in.”

“Who was the man that attacked you?” a uniformed sergeant asked.

“I don’t know, officer. Just a big white man. Said he wanted the bail I’d been collecting. I told him that I don’t keep cash on the premises. But he said he didn’t believe it and hit me a couple’a times.”

“Did you know him?” the sergeant asked again.

“No sir, officer. I did not.”

“What about you two men?” the sergeant asked.

“No, man,” Fearless said. “We just come lookin’ for work. That’s all.”

“What about you?” The sergeant with the boy’s voice turned his attention to me.

“I was um, I came here, um, you know, to see Milo.”

“Did you come here looking for work?”

“Man, right now all I’m thinkin’ about is that man shootin’ at me, Milo laid up behind his desk, and you comin’ in here shoutin’ at us with guns in your hands.” When I get really alarmed like that all I can tell is truth. If that cop had pressed me on Timmerman I would have folded. So instead I just told him how I was feeling, hoping that he wouldn’t push any harder.

It worked. Most of the policemen left and a bored detective came by. He questioned us for about half an hour, taking down details of the attack and attempted robbery.

“There’s one thing that doesn’t make sense in your story,” the short and fat detective said to me.

“What’s that?”

“If this armed robber was after Mr. Sweet’s money, then why would he start taking potshots at you in the street?”

The policeman, I don’t remember his name, had a porcine face marked by small ears and tiny, suspicious eyes. When he squinted at me, I got so nervous that my lie reflex froze up.

“I pointed at him, officer,” Fearless said. “That must be why he shot at us. Because he knew that he just did somethin’ wrong and there I was pointin’ at him.”

“Did you know him?” the detective asked.

“No sir.”

“I don’t get it. Why would you point out a stranger just walking down the street?”

“Because he was white,” Fearless said. “I don’t see too many white men takin’ a stroll down by Milo’s.”

The detective was still suspicious, but he let it slide.

Loretta Kuroko came in at nine. She wore a light emerald green blouse and a darker skirt of the same color. She had been with Milo through all of his different professions and so knew how to keep quiet.

When the detective left, Milo sent Loretta home, telling her not to come back until he had worked out a few “details.” Then Fearless and I followed his burgundy ’48 Cadillac to his apartment on Grand.

***

MILO’S PLACE WAS A STUDIO designed on the same principle as his office. It was dominated by a big oak desk, which was surrounded by oak filing cabinets. The sofa against a far wall might have opened out into a bed. Next to that was a small walnut cabinet that opened up into a bar.

“How do you cook?” Fearless asked.

“Cook? A man cain’t cook. I go down on Century when I need a meal, Johnny’s Restaurant Grill. I pay ’em twenty dollars a week and they always have something for me—breakfast, lunch, or dinner.”

“What if you wake up in the middle’a the night and want a sandwich?”

“I close my eyes and go back to sleep.”

“Milo,” I said. “Why’d you hire that man Timmerman to look for Kit?”

“I already told you,” he replied. “Because Miss Fine wanted to talk to him.”

“That’s a lie, man. You said you put Timmerman mostly on white cases.”

Milo hesitated a moment before saying, “I usually do use him for whites, but he could find a black man too.”

“Come on, Milo,” Fearless said. “Don’t be lyin’ an’ that man out there ready to kill you. How come you used him and not a colored man?”

“You’re a tough man, Fearless. I know that. But I also know you ain’t gonna do nuthin’ if I don’t wanna talk.”

“That’s true,” Fearless said. “But you better believe that I won’t show up if you call on me neither. If that man Timmerman is after you, he know where you live. He might already have found out you lied and be on his way here right now.”

Milo’s eyes moved to his front door.

He shifted in his chair and then clasped his hands together. He pressed his thumbs on the bones just above his eyes and muttered something that might have been a prayer.

“I said I wouldn’t tell anybody,” he said at last. “You know I like to keep my word.”

“Dead man keep a secret like motherfucker,” I said.

Milo nodded.

“Miss Fine told me that BB and Kit were messed up in somethin’ that could prove harmful to the family name. They stole something from her and she was very upset about it. I made a few calls around and found out that Kit had been seen in the company of a white man name of Lance Wexler. Once I knew that, I called Theodore, because he could cross the color line with no problem. If anybody could find them men it was him.”

“And what was that something Miss Fine was talking about?” I asked.

“She didn’t say. All she let on was that it was very important to her and that she would be very grateful if I put her in contact with either Kit or BB or both.”

“And what about Wexler?” I asked.

“She didn’t say anything about him,” Milo said. “I just saw him as some kinda background information.”

“Did you ever find out who he was?”

“No. I told Miss Fine about him, but she didn’t seem to care. But the way I figured it was, if he did turn out to be important Timmerman was my man.”

“And just what was it that you were supposed to do, Mr. Sweet?” I used the proper address because I knew that was the way that Fearless liked to comport himself, with respect.

“She wanted me to find them and give her the information I gathered.”

“What information?”

“Where they lived, their phone numbers if I could get ’em, and their situation. You know, did they live with anybody, if they had a house or an apartment, like that.”

“Sound like a setup,” Fearless speculated.

“No, man,” Milo said. “This is Miss Winifred L. Fine, the richest Negro lady in the forty-eight states. She’s not no thug or gangster. There ain’t even no way that you could tell what she’s thinkin’ about. You know people like that different than you and me.”

“I don’t know, Milo,” Fearless said. “I once had a girlfriend was a millionaire. White girl name of Bell, Solla Bell. She told me that her father had had two men killed that she knew of. She said it so that I would keep my head down when we were around where he had eyes lookin’ out. You don’t have to be a poor man to wanna kill somebody.”

“I don’t know about no rich white girls or their fathers, Fearless. All I know is that Miss Fine has pedigree and social standing,” Milo said, holding up his right hand as if he were swearing under oath. “She ain’t got nuthin’ to do with no lowlife element like we used to bein’ around.”

“Like Teddy,” I suggested.

“We got to move you, Mr. Sweet,” Fearless said. “Put you someplace that that white man cain’t kill you.”

“Yeah,” the bail bondsman agreed. “I’m beginning to think that Theodore Timmerman is a very dangerous man indeed. Where you think I could go?”

“My mama got a house I bought with the money we made last year. She wouldn’t mind you campin’ out a few days or so.”