Fearless Jones

19

LORETTA WAS SHUFFLING papers on her desk before Fearless and I awoke the next morning. We had decided that sleeping at the Tannenbaum house was too much for either of us, and I still had Milo’s key.

“Morning, Mr. Jones, Mr. Minton.” Our presence held no surprise for her.

“Mornin’,” we said together.

I had let Fearless have the couch because he was just out of jail, and I was still feeling guilty for not helping him sooner.

“When’s Milo due in?” I asked the Japanese passe-partout.

“Soon, I think,” she said. “He has a problem with a client who has to show up for sentencing at three. A friend of yours.”

“Who’s that?”

“Lucas North.”

“Luke?” Fearless smiled. “What’s that boy up to?”

“He was with some friends in a stolen car. He wasn’t driving. He didn’t even know the driver. They had gotten drunk together and were taking some high school girls for a ride. The judge had seen Lucas before and decided to scare him, I guess. He found him guilty but postponed the sentencing. Milo thinks it was just to make Lucas sweat, but if he doesn’t show up, there’s six hundred dollars on the bond.”

Fearless scratched his head. I stifled a yawn. It wasn’t our problem.

MILO CAME IN at around nine. Fearless was taking his dog over to Dorthea to keep for the day. I was reading about Chichikov, the con man protagonist of Dead Souls.

“Hey, Paris,” Milo said. “You gonna have to start payin’ rent you keep warmin’ my couch.”

“I got a problem, Milo.”

“One shot to the temple and problems just go away,” the bailbondsman replied. Then he turned to Loretta. “We hear from Mr. North?”

“No sir, not yet.”

“Shoot.”

“Milo.”

“What, Paris?”

“I got a problem, man.”

The china whites of Milo’s eyes flashed out from his coal-black face. “I’m out six hundred dollars at three o’clock, and you want me to worry about you?”

“Lucas North,” I said. “Fearless and I will look for him if you do somethin’ for us.”

LUCAS’S MOTHER, Inez North, was in her late thirties. Lucas was maybe twenty-one, at least in years. He was an immature boy who got into trouble as a kind of hobby. He worked at that pursuit twenty-four hours a day because he couldn’t hold a job for over a week.

I first met Lucas when he was only fifteen. His mother and Fearless had a thing going for a while. In the middle of it Lucas got arrested for knocking down an ex-girlfriend’s fence with his mother’s new used car.

The girlfriend’s father wanted to press charges, and as much as Fearless tried to argue with him, old Landry Lamming wasn’t buying. Fearless came to me because he was on the verge of coming to blows with Landry and he knew that that would have been wrong.

I asked around about Landry and found that he was from Guyana originally and was so conceited about his lineage and education that most of the people in the neighborhood were happy to run him down.

“He jes’ fulla himself, that’s all,” Lana Rudd confided in me. “Always away on business and comin’ home like he was king’a the hill.”

“What kinda business?” I asked. Lana wasn’t the first to talk about Landry’s out-of-town business.

“Don’t ask me,” she replied, waving her hands as if deflecting fists. “He got a job with the city but he down there in San Diego every other week, seems like.”

Fearless needed me to save Lucas from prosecution because he had grown tired of Inez and he believed that saving her son would lessen the sting of their breakup. So I broke into Lamming’s car one night when all the hardworking people were in their beds dreaming about money. I found four bills addressed to a Laval and Kyla Biendieu, on a 24th Street address in San Diego.

I spent the next few days watching Landry. When he threw a small suitcase in his trunk and kissed his daughter and wife good-bye, I followed him down the coast highway toward the city in the sun.

I was stopped on the way by an overzealous highway patrolman. He needed to check my tires and brake lights, my spare in the trunk, and my license, license plate, the contents of my lunch bag, and what destination I had that day.

“The zoo, officer,” I said with a smile. “My auntie and sister, her husband and kids, they went down earlier, but I just got off work. I heard that they got a two-headed snake in the snake house. You know I’d pay money to see anything with two heads.”

“Where do you work?” the young white behemoth asked. He had blue eyes and broad shoulders and he didn’t like me one bit.

“At a beauty parlor on Slauson,” I said. “I do hair and nails for men and women.”

That made the motorcycle cop wince.

“It’s called Charlene’s,” I added. “Do you ever come up to L.A.?”

“Make sure you check the pressure in those tires,” he replied.

I drove off glad that I had had the foresight to break into Landry’s car.

Landry’s new turquoise Bel Air was parked in front of Laval Biendieu’s home address. I walked up to the front door and read the name on the iron mailbox that was nailed to the wall: Laval and Kyla Biendieu.

“Yes?” Landry Lamming asked, answering the door in his bathrobe. He was a small man. His English-like accent seemed incongruent with his dark Negro features. I never have gotten used to black men who don’t speak in the dialect of the American South.

“Mr. Beendoo?” I asked, mauling the pronunciation terribly.

“What do you want?”

“Are you Mr. Laval Beendoo?” I insisted.

“Yes,” he said reluctantly.

“Because I fount somethin’a yours and I wanted to give it back.”

“What do you have of mine? How would you know something was mine? I haven’t lost my wallet.” Even as he spoke he reached for his back pocket to make sure, but, since he was in his robe, there was no back pocket to be found.

“My sister’s kids is nine an’ eleven,” I said, as if those facts should have cleared up everything.

“So?”

“They fount some bills and was playin’ with ’em like they was money.” I’ve found that talking in a way that sounds ignorant makes arrogant people like Landry feel like they are in charge.

“Let me see,” he commanded, opening the door three inches.

I handed him the envelopes I had stolen from his glove compartment.

“Where did your nephews find these?”

“Niece and nephew,” I corrected.

“Where did they find them?” he asked with greater volume.

A light-skinned young woman with a baby in her arms appeared behind Landry/Laval.

“Somethin’ wrong, Lal?” she asked.

“Go back in the other room, Kyla. Go on now.”

The baby started yowling and Kyla faded beyond the range of the screen.

“Now will you answer my question?” Lal asked.

“They just said that they fount ’em in the street,” I said.

He wanted their address, and I made up a 23rd Street location. He wanted to go over there right then, but I told him that they were at church.

“On Wednesday?” he asked.

“God don’t take no days off, Mr. Beendoo,” I replied piously.

After that he said thanks, that he would go talk to the parents later that day.

I didn’t leave when he said good-bye.

“Is there something else?” he asked.

“Well,” I hesitated. “Wasn’t there some kind of reward?”

Laval/Landry regarded me with disgust. He looked around and reached for a coin that was on a lamp stand next to the door. Fifty cents! He deserved the trouble I represented.

Fearless told Landry to drop the charges or else he’d have to tell somebody about the bigamy. Milo got involved, leading Landry through how he could make sure that Lucas wasn’t charged with a crime.

Some months later Fearless told me that Landry had offered him a thousand dollars to keep quiet.

“And you didn’t take it?” I said.

“That would’a been wrong, Paris,” Fearless told me. “You know I just wanted to do right by the boy.”

FEARLESS AND I DROVE over to a small house on Ninety-second Place. That was Elbert’s house. I knew that all the comic book kids congregated there when they weren’t at my bookstore. I knocked on the front door, but no one answered. We went around the side driveway. In the back was a red garage. The carport door was pulled down, but there was a side door that was open. We walked in on seven little boys and a full-grown man handing comic books back and forth.

“Hey, Mr. Minton, Fearless,” one of the boys droned.

The man stood up and looked at us angrily.

“Hey, Elbert,” I said to the lanky eight-year-old who had greeted us.

The man squatted back down and started putting his comic books into a brown paper bag.

“Where you goin’, Luke?” one of the boys asked.

“Home,” the man said petulantly.

He was a beautiful young man, tall and muscular with large eyes and lips that belonged on a sculpture entitled Negro Perfection. Even his white T-shirt and torn jeans didn’t take away from the image. Lucas North was made for trouble. But that wasn’t my problem.

“You got to go with us, Luke,” Fearless said.

The young man’s face broke into tears.

“Why?”

“’Cause if you don’t go to court, then Milo’s gonna have to get the cops after your momma for the bail money.”

The little boys started snickering. I could hardly blame them.

“I don’t want my momma to go to jail,” Lucas whimpered.

“Then come with us,” I said.

Lucas was just one of the kids when it came to the comic books at my store. He dropped by as much as the little ones, wanting to trade old ones for ones he hadn’t read yet.

Most of those comics were torn and tattered. But the ones on the floor were brand-new.

“Where’d you boys get new comics?” I asked Elbert.

“Mr. Wally from the market give ’em ’cause he said he was sorry that our store burned down,” the gawky, fish-eyed boy said.

“Maybe he buy you a new store,” Fearless said.

“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, when his boss giv ’im a little raise.”