Fearless Jones

18

THE FIRST THING I did when I got back to the car was to slip Sol’s pistol from under my shirt and shove it beneath the driver’s seat. The Greenspans sat in the backseat on the ride to their home. Morris laid his meaty head against the window, and Gella was wound so tight that she shook slightly, like a palsied old woman. Half the way there Fearless turned around and took her two slender hands into his one big one.

“You gonna make it through this, girl,” he said. “You gonna make it.”

I don’t know how she responded because I was looking in the rearview mirror at Morris to make sure he wasn’t going to start swinging because another man, a black man, was holding his wife by the hand. But Morris didn’t even budge. He was more shattered than my grandfather had been when his wife of sixty-three years had passed.

When we stopped in front of their house Morris stumbled out of his side and fell on the lawn. He got to his feet and strode up to the door like a toddler whose gait changes every three steps. Fearless walked Gella slowly to the door, still holding her by one hand. Morris had worked his key on the lock and blundered in by the time they reached the single stair. Fearless lifted Gella’s chin and kissed her on the lips. When he whispered something, she leaned into him for another osculation and an embrace. He ushered her through the door and closed it behind her.

Back next to me he took the posture of someone waiting for the car to begin moving. I didn’t engage the gears.

“Somethin’ wrong with the car, Paris?”

I didn’t answer.

Fearless turned to me.

“Something wrong?”

“What was that?” I asked.

“What?”

“With that white girl. Jail so hard on you that you got to take a woman right out from under her husband?”

“What?” Fearless complained. “Naw, man. I ain’t interested in that crooked-nosed girl.”

“You could’a fooled me and about half the neighborhood too.”

“She needed a kiss, Paris. That’s all. A kiss and a kind word. She just lost her family, man. That big bum of a husband don’t care. I just kissed her and told her that I was there. That’s all.”

“And if she still felt bad,” I taunted, “you’d take her up in the bed but still that wouldn’t be nuthin’?”

“Maybe. Sometimes you got to give, Paris. Sometimes a man or a woman needs the opposite sex to say, hey it’s okay. But she don’t mean nuthin’ t’me. Neither do that dumb husband. If he was holdin’ her, then she wouldn’t’a needed me to do it.”

I shifted into first and drove off.

Fearless had a smart heart. He had a brave heart too. When he talked to me like he did about Gella, I never understood, not really, a word.

WE MADE IT to the Charles Diner by nine-fifteen. The place was alive. The girls couldn’t help but move their butts, even if it was just in their chairs, when Big Joe Turner was playing on the jukebox, and the men couldn’t help but watch. At the Charles men dressed as differently as the women did. From T-shirts to tuxedos the fashions ranged. The women sat in groups at the small tables in the great round room while solitary men smelling anywhere from Classic Gent to hard-earned sweat came up and made their offers for a little wiggle on the dance floor in back.

“At the table over next to the plastic palm tree,” the bartender told Fearless when he asked if anyone was looking for Tyrell Lockwood.

A woman was sitting next to him, leaning toward him like a sailboat under a squall.

“Reverend Grove?” I said in greeting. There was only a faint light of recognition in his eyes for me, but I knew him. The minister was the cock of the walk down around Central and 101 when the Messenger had its doors open.

“Get yourself another fizz and park it at the bar, babe. I’ll be there in a minute,” the reverend told the girl.

He handed her a two-dollar bill. She kissed his fingers before taking the money with her teeth. I think she was a pretty girl. She might have been a knockout. But I couldn’t tell. My mind was going over and over the lies and questions I had for the holy man.

His suit was three-button, maroon, and silk. He was a hair shorter than Fearless and more substantial but not portly or fat. He had a full face that was medium brown and diabolical in a mild way. Everything turned up: the almond eyes, the slightly receding hairline, the corners of his smile; all like small horns on a masquerade devil or, more likely, a minister who had studied sin for too long and who was finally overwhelmed by its beauty. The left side of his jaw was a little larger than the right, and that eye was bloodshot, and not from lack of sleep.

“Tyrell Lockwood?” the devil inquired of either of us.

“Me,” I said. “This is my friend.”

Grove motioned for us to join him. A waitress wearing a black T-shirt and a tight white skirt came up. There was a nasty-looking scar that came from the bottom of her chin to the middle of her generous lower lip. On that lip the scar took a left turn and went all the way to the corner of her mouth. It made her look vulnerable, so I looked away.

“Drinks?” the waitress asked in a husky voice.

Fearless looked to Grove, who shook his head slightly. Fearless showed two fingers and said, “Beers.” The waitress went off.

“Where is she?” Grove asked.

“Didn’t Vincent tell you what I said?”

“He said some nonsense about her paying you to find me.”

“Well I found you now, didn’t I?”

The waitress came back. She tried to look me in the eye while serving the drinks, but I looked away again. Fearless gave her something and then tapped the table for her to bring more when the time came. She said thanks, so I supposed he had tipped her nicely.

When the waitress had gone Grove lowered his voice and said, “Don’t try and fool with me, niggah.”

“Don’t fool yourself,” Fearless interjected, his cool certainty bringing doubt to the reverend’s eye.

He gazed over toward the door. Maybe he thought it was foolish to come alone to meet two strangers in that dangerous business. Maybe he recognized that his arrogance didn’t carry any weight outside of his red-draped storefront church.

“You lookin’ for Elana. Elana lookin’ for you. Why?” I asked.

Grove didn’t respond. He was trying to figure out what to do. He spent as much time looking at the door as he did at us. Louis Armstrong was singing duets with Billie Holiday on the box. Fearless stretched out on his chair like a cat. I think he was just enjoying being free.

“She promised me five hundred dollars,” I told Grove. “I already put in my time.”

“I don’t believe you,” the Holy Roller replied.

Fearless straightened up in his chair.

“Leon Douglas.” I spoke Elana’s ex-con boyfriend’s name as if it were a complete sentence. “And a bearer bond. How about that?”

“Do you know where she is?” Grove asked, no longer looking for a way out.

“I might know how to find her,” I said. “But I wanna know what I’m gettin’ into before I take another step.”

“Tell me where she is.”

“No, uh-uh. I put my money on the table, man,” I said. “Now it’s your turn. If you got somethin’ I could use, then maybe we could do somethin’ together.”

“The bond,” he said, his voice changing this time to a breath of air. “It’s worth a lot more than she said.”

“She lied?”

“Sister Love was made to lie. Prob’ly half’a everything she told you was a lie,” Grove said. “But she didn’t lie about the bond. She just don’t know. It’s worth ten times what she thinks.”

Using gangster logic I figured he meant a hundred times what she said.

“How’s that?” I asked.

“That’s for me to know.”

“Well how’s this?” I added. “Elana told me that you were the one had the bond. She said that she left it with you, but that —”

“It’s all a lie,” the preacher said. There was the musical note of a sermon in his voice.

“There ain’t no bond?”

“Oh yeah. There’s a bond all right. Damn sure enough. But I don’t have it. I did have it but not no more.”

“All you’re sayin’ is what isn’t and what’s lies and what didn’t happen. What me and my friend here need to know is what is.” I felt confident when Fearless was at my back, smart too.

Grove took me in for a moment or two.

“I remember you now,” he said. “At the bookstore. Vincent told me you worked there, but I didn’t remember the name.”

I nodded and waited.

“Leon,” he said, “sent Elana a letter askin’ her to come see him in prison. She was stayin’ with me at that time but still had her own place.”

“And you didn’t mind her gettin’ mail from an old boyfriend?”

“I saw my fortieth birthday two years ago, son. I know that women go to the bathroom and everything. I wasn’t her first man. I wasn’t her best man. Leon mentioned a thousand dollars in the letter, and so she took a day trip. Three days later we had the note.”

“Tell me about the note,” I said.

“What about it?”

“What country it come from? What’s the face value?”

“Ten thousand Swiss francs,” he said.

I was happy because at least one thing Elana said might be true.

“And she give it to you?” Fearless asked.

“It was new love. She saw in me what a woman wants to see in a man when they first start out.” Grove spoke from experience. “I could do anything at first. But then, when the bank told me on the phone that I had to have proof that I was David Tannenbaum, she saw a little tarnish here and there. I wanted to keep on the good side of a woman like that, so I go down to see the wife — Fanny.”

“You went to the Tannenbaum house?” I asked.

Fearless tensed up and then began his descent into a crouch.

“Yeah,” Grove said.

“When?”

“That was maybe four months ago,” he replied. “I went there to find out why her husband was in jail, the particulars.”

“Why she wanna talk to you?” Fearless asked.

“I said that I was the visiting chaplain at the prison. I said that her husband wanted me to tell her that he was okay.”

“Why she gonna believe that shit?” Fearless had no love lost for this messenger.

“Her husband forbade her to go up to the prison. That’s why Elana had to go up, to get a letter from the Jew to give to his wife. So all I did was say that he was doing okay and that he was safe and missing her.”

“And what she give you in return?” I asked.

That was the heart of our talk — what Fanny told Grove. He knew it and he knew I knew it. I was riding high on the powerful presence of Fearless and the fact that Grove was a little shy.

“It wasn’t nuthin’,” he said. “She didn’t know a thing.”

“That’s why you ran out on Elana? That’s why the Messenger packed up its drapes and ran?”

Grove took a deep breath, reaching for strength and conviction. “Elana got the bond. No matter what she told you, she got it. You find her, you find the bond. You do that, and you come to me. I can make ten times ten thousand.”

“How?”

Grove shook his head while looking me in the eye.

“So now what?” I asked.

“I know how to make the money. You bring me the bond.”

“Maybe I should go to the cops,” I speculated.

Grove decided on that moment to stand up.

“Messenger of the Divine is where you could get in touch with me. I might be a little bit scarce the next week or so, but Vincent knows how to get to me,” he said. “Going to the cops might get me in trouble, but it’ll get you boys killed.”

Fearless blew Grove a kiss in reply. I wasn’t feeling so cocky.

The self-proclaimed minister walked away from the table and to the woman who was waiting for him at the bar. Together they went out the front door. I sat there wondering, was there a dollar amount worth my life?

FEARLESS AND I FINISHED our drinks in silence. Then we went toward the door. He was the first one through, and I was just about to follow when someone grabbed me, roughly, by the shoulder. It was the waitress with the scarred lip.

“Excuse me,” she said.

“Uh-huh?”

“Why cain’t you look at me? I’m so ugly that you got to be rude?”

I looked at her then. I saw a lovely female face, except for that scar, on a woman not over twenty. Her expression was petulant but sweet; that face had seen some life.

“It ain’t that, sugar,” I said.

“Then what?”

I brought a finger to her face, tracing the scar up to her lip. She didn’t move away.

“I wanna kiss that streak. I wanna bite it. But you know I don’t even have a roof or rent for a room. That scar meant that somebody hurt you, so I looked away. I wanted to say somethin’ nice, but what use is a man smooth talkin’ when he ain’t got two nickels to rub together?”

The woman didn’t believe me, but she wanted to. One brow was knitted in anger, but the other one was wide with hope.

“I’m Charlotte,” she said.

“Paris. Paris Minton. You be workin’ here in two nights, Charlotte?”

“Uh-huh.”

“I’ll drop by.”

“Sure. I bet.”

“You got a pencil?” I asked her.

She took out her yellow number two and her bill pad. I gave her Milo Sweet’s phone number and said, “You can call there if I don’t show, but don’t worry, I’m comin’ back around.”

“HEY, PARIS,” Fearless said in a shy tone. We were in the car driving toward Milo’s office.

“What?”

“I just remembered somethin’.”

“Yeah?”

“I know Leon Douglas.”

“Say what?”

“I know ’im, Paris. He went in for armed robbery. But he was in the city jail ’cause he got a fancy new lawyer and a retrial. His cell was just down the hall from me.”

I pulled the car to the curb and turned off the ignition. I put my head on the steering wheel and closed my eyes. The darkness called me toward sleep, but I sat up again and asked, “Why the hell you wait till now to tell me this?”

“I just didn’t think of it. In the can they called him Big Bama ’cause he was from Alabama an’ he was big. I hardly even knew him.”

“So? What do you know about him?”

“Nuthin’. He was smug about bein’ down at the jail. He did a payroll robbery and shot two men. They had him for thirty at San Quentin, but the evidence wasn’t hard. The gun they found on him when he was arrested was the wrong caliber. He did it, but this new lawyer was trying to get the case thrown out.”

“Who’s the lawyer?”

Fearless shrugged his shoulders.

“What kinda dude is he?” I asked.

“Armed robbery, single-handed, two men shot. Three-quarters bad if he can blindside ya. Half bad face-to-face.”

Fearless considered himself and maybe three other people he’d ever met to be full bad: Jacob Trench, Doolen Waters, and, of course, Raymond Alexander. But three-quarters was plenty scary enough for me.