Fearless Jones

24

IT WASN’T UNTIL I was parking down the street from Arthur’s Pet Shop and Animal Grooming that my hands stopped shaking. The side door to Arthur’s led to three rooms that made up an after-hours club that a few dozen regulars kept in business. In order to get to Arthur’s you had to come in the back alley and park at least a block away. It wasn’t a party place or a music hall; there wasn’t any dance floor. All it was was a jukebox and Nathan Wellman, an insomniac tailor who ran the place to make a few extra dollars while having people to talk to between midnight and dawn.

Nathan brought two generous shots of whiskey to our table.

“You boys look serious,” Nathan said as a conversation opener.

“I need to use the phone, Nate,” I replied.

He gave me a sour look and went over to the mahogany bar, returning with a baseball bat that had a hole drilled in the handle. Through the hole was knotted a string that held a single brass key.

Nathan’s place was a dive. The wood floor wasn’t sealed or waxed, the walls were devoid of paint. The tables and chairs were mismatched and wobbly. But for all that it was primitive, Nathan’s had something that even the Waldorf Astoria in New York City couldn’t brag about; he had a telephone room. It was rustic and spare, but it was a whole room, six feet square with a pay phone on the wall and a table and chair. There was a phone book too.

I dialed a number.

“Las Palmas,” a woman said, after answering on the sixth ring.

“Certainly,” I said, doing my best to mimic the snooty Landry Lamming. “Helen Huggins,” I continued, cursing myself for making up such dumb names, “in room twelve B, if you please.”

“Uh… well… hold on,” the night clerk said.

There was silence and then a series a clicks and bangs. A man’s voice finally said, “Who is this?”

“Excuse me,” I said primly, “but I asked for Miss Huggins in twelve B. They must have connected me with the wrong room.”

“Who is this?” the man repeated. “Are you the one who called twelve B earlier tonight?”

“Who, may I ask, are you, sir?”

“Police Sergeant Bryant,” he said. “Did you call earlier tonight?”

“I was looking for my friend,” I said. “Miss Huggins.”

“Did you ask for a man named Latham?”

“No. Who is he?”

“He was with the woman in twelve B.”

“Oh my,” I said in a fey tone.

“What’s your name, sir?”

“Is Miss Huggins in trouble, Officer Bryant?”

“I’m asking the questions, Mr...?”

“Is Miss Huggins there, Sergeant?”

“Two men have been shot,” Bryant said, trying the frank approach. After all, maybe I really was a foreigner, far from home and unfamiliar with the legal customs of America.

“And Miss Huggins?” I asked, all aflutter.

“There was a woman. She fled the scene. You say her name is Huggins?”

I chose that moment to hang up.

Nathan and Fearless were having a good old time talking about Fearless’s experience in the county lockup. I came back and downed my drink. Fearless took that as a cue to stand.

“See you later, Nathan,” Fearless said.

“But you didn’t finish your story.”

“Save it for the next time.”

Fearless clapped Nathan on the shoulder, and we left.

WE MADE IT back to Fontanelle’s court near five. I let Fearless have the mother’s bedroom. I took the child’s bed, just a urine-stained mattress on the floor, because I was the smaller of us two. As scared as I was, I needed sleep. We had nothing to go on. Elana’s purse was ripped open and the bond was gone. The bond was gone and we didn’t know who had it. I had a pretty good idea that it was in Elana’s possession, but at five in the morning I hardly even cared.

I slept soundly until I felt a tongue on my face. I opened my eyes and saw Blood, Fearless’s adopted dog. I sat up and pushed him away. Fearless was drinking some hot liquid out of a cup and relaxing, slouched back in his chair. From his demeanor you would have thought that we were on vacation.

“What time is it?” I asked.

“’Bout twelve-thirty.”

“Where’d this dog come from? I thought you left him with Dorthea.”

“I called her, and she told me to come get ’im.”

“What you think Fell gonna say when we got pets in her court?”

“That’s three questions wit’out you sayin’ good mornin’,” Fearless said.

“Good morning,” I said.

Fearless’s face broke out into a friendly smile. “Fontanelle said it was okay. She said that she might even want a good watchdog to protect her garage when she holdin’ stuff fo’ people.”

I got up and pulled on my pants. After using the toilet and washing up, I was almost ready for the day. Fearless was sitting in the blue chair, so that left me the red one. They were both wooden and badly painted. My chair wobbled whenever I shifted.

“Tea?” Fearless asked me.

“Since when do you drink tea?”

“My auntie Leigh Lenore used to drink tea with lemon every mornin’.”

“What’s that got to do with you?” I asked.

“In that jail cell I used to think how much I missed Leigh. I really loved her, and that made me think about tea. You want some?”

I took the tea but turned down the lemon.

“I bought milk,” Fearless said.

“What did Latham say?” I asked.

“I think it was Man. Jam. Manjam,” Fearless said. “Jamman. It was the name of somebody or something, I’m pretty sure.”

“You really think so? All it sounded like was a cough to me.”

“I listened to a lotta dyin’ men, Paris. The trick is you got to keep your heart open. You got to listen wit’ your heart. That’s the trick.”

The tea, from the cracked pottery crock that Fearless had found on some shelf, was hot and made me feel good. I let my eyes close for a moment, which was a mistake because William Grove’s death stare came up in my mind.

I sat up quickly and said, “Let’s get over to Milo’s.”

“SO WHAT YOU THINK we got here, Paris?” Milo Sweet asked me.

We were sitting in his office, listening to the gentle clucking of hens through the heating vents. Loretta was there and so was Fearless, but the discussion was between me and Milo.

“I don’t know, man,” I said. “I mean really — I don’t know.”

“One always knows something,” the bailbondsman replied. “It’s just that we don’t know it all. What is it that we do know?”

I got his meaning and so tried to think. Sometimes I find thinking out loud is the best way to solve a problem. Of course, I’ve also found that thinking out loud is the best way to get yourself into trouble too.

“Well,” I said. “We know that there are people, white people, looking for a bond that Sol Tannenbaum gave to Leon through Fanny and Elana for protection in the joint.”

Milo nodded. Fearless sat back and laced his fingers behind his neck. Loretta let her eyes run up and down his long, strong body.

“We know there’s a real bond because we saw it.”

Again Milo nodded.

“We know that Leon was after Elana, but then they were together, that there was a white man at the Pine Grove Hotel who met with Latham and Elana probably about the bond. Maybe he even has the bond now. Maybe he’s the one with the money. If that’s true, then Elana’s long gone. There’s another white man, John Manly, he said, who knew that Sol wasn’t home. He wanted to talk to Fanny in the worst way, but he was probably just a real-estate agent who heard about Sol somehow and thought he might find someone who needed to sell off their house for hospital bills. And then there’s the little old white man named Zev Minor, who came to their house and opened the front door without ringing the bell. Latham is dead. William Grove is dead. Fanny Tannenbaum is dead. My bookstore done burned, and Sol is in the hospital — and it’s him probably that stole the money in the first place. And, oh yeah, whatever money there is, it’s between ten thousand francs and ten million dollars.”

“Shouldn’t you just drop it?” Loretta Kuroko said.

“What’s that, Loretta?” Milo asked. He didn’t sound angry or brusque at his secretary for interrupting our talk. He was sincerely interested in her opinion.

“A policeman is dead, Mr. Sweet. A cop. They can come and take you away over that, take you away for good.”

Fearless sat up. I began drumming my fingers on Milo’s desk.

“But he was a crooked cop,” Milo said. “The newspaper didn’t even identify him as an officer. You know somebody’s hidin’ somethin’ behind that. And this is real money too.”

“Anyway,” Fearless added. “We didn’t shoot him.”

“Why would any’a these people burn down your store, Paris?” Milo asked. He blew out a thick cloud of cigar smoke.

“Man as mean as Leon Douglas, he might burn the muthahfuckah down just outta spite,” I said.

“Maybe it was an accident,” the ex-lawyer suggested.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “Theodore said that the police thought it was started with gasoline. But I should probably check that out anyway. I mean, maybe somebody saw something.”

Milo nodded.

“But what I wanna know,” I continued, “is why should we even be talkin’ ’bout this? I mean, the bond is gone, and we don’t even know who has it. It could be Elana, it could be the man Fearless saw running down the alley. And whoever that was, it might be somebody in on it or just some bum got scared when he heard shots.”

“It wasn’t no bum,” Fearless added.

“How you know that?” Milo asked.

“ ’Cause Latham was farther up the alley. He was runnin’ an’ I don’t see Latham runnin’ from one man. He was tough. There was two men after him, and the one who got away was the one who kilt the cop and tore open the purse.”

“You don’t know that,” I said, but I wasn’t sure that he was wrong.

“If Grove’s partner has the bond, then it’s over,” Milo said.

“We don’t know if that was his partner,” I said. “And we don’t know if he got the bond. Elana took off in Latham’s car. She lit outta there wit’out lookin’ back. Maybe she got it.”

“Maybe,” Milo said. “But that’s an if even in the best light. The real way to the money is this Tannenbaum man. Maybe if we went to him and told him what happened, he’d give us somethin’.”

We turned to Fearless then.

“What?” he complained.

“You the one he likes,” I said.

“I told him that I’d protect his wife, and you see what that did?”

“You couldn’t help that, son,” the suddenly paternal Milo Sweet said.

“He’s right, Fearless,” I added. “Sol’d want you to tell him about what’s happenin’. He would. You don’t have to tell him about Fanny.”

“You think he don’t know? You think he don’t know that his wife for forty-some years ain’t comin’ to the hospital t’see ’im? He knows. But you right, I should go there. I should go there an’ make sure nobody else come into that room.”

“You’ll ask him about the bond?” Milo suggested.

“I’ll tell ’im what I know,” Fearless said. “And then he can tell me what he wants.”

“I’ll go back over to the bookstore,” I said. “Maybe somebody knows about the fire, if it was set like the cops and the firemen suspected.”

“Okay,” Milo said. “Okay, you guys go out and do what you think is right, what you think is gonna get somethin’. But remember, this is money here. Money. Don’t go out there actin’ like this is everyday goin’ to work or throwin’ some dice. This is the big time. You go out there and your life is on the line. So try an’ bring somethin’ back wichya.”

I was moved by Milo’s pep talk, but I doubt if Fearless was. From the few political books I had read I knew Fearless was a natural-born anarchist. If he had what he needed, he thought of himself as a rich man; if he had less, well, that would have to do.

“What you gonna do, Milo?” I asked our partner.

“Ask a few questions. Get a few lies. Ask somethin’ else and then see what don’t jibe.” He was a poet of the lawyer’s caste.