Fearless Jones

25

FEARLESS, MILO, AND I WERE all set to go, Fearless to ride shotgun on Sol’s hospital bed, and Milo to gather information in his own secret ways.

Milo’s gas tank ran on schemes. He was into clandestine realestate deals, small-business investments, and some more shady enterprises. He was serious about everything he did, and most projects he got involved with, I felt, had a good chance of making it. But Milo was impatient. He wanted to see the money. He wanted a Cadillac and a fat Cuban cigar. After a few months he’d always start pushing. He’d expand before the business showed a profit or sell out for another, more promising scheme before the one he was into had a chance to grow.

When I first met Milo I wanted to do business with him. I was always asking his advice and suggesting that he take me in as a partner. But as time passed and I saw how he never got past the first stages, I was happy that he was too jealous to let anybody else in on his deals.

So when Milo left for one of his clandestine negotiations, I didn’t expect much. I had business of my own, business in which failure was not an easy pill to swallow.

“Paris,” Loretta said to me as I was following her boss out the door.

“Yeah?”

“Hold on a minute, will you?”

The door shut behind Milo, and I went back to Miss Kuroko’s desk.

“I didn’t want to say anything in front of Milo,” she said hesitantly. “You know how he gets when he thinks that he’s being taken advantage of.”

“What’d I do now?” I asked.

“It’s the phone calls.”

“What calls?”

“The women.”

“Oh shit,” I said. “Here we go. Women got a whiff that Fearless is over here?”

“They’re calling for you too, Paris,” Loretta said, as if I knew it all along. “And you know how Milo feels about using his office for personal affairs.”

“Women? What women? Ain’t no women callin’ on me.”

“Charlotte Bingham,” Loretta said.

“Who?”

“She said you knew her from the Charles Diner.”

“The Charles…” I stopped when I remembered the young woman with the scar. “Oh. Uh, did she leave a number?”

Loretta handed me a small orange slip of paper with the waitress’s information.

“And what about this Gella Greenspan calling for Fearless?” the secretary asked.

“Who? Oh.”

“You don’t have to pretend, Paris.”

“I’m not pretendin’, Loretta. I can’t remember all these names. Gella is the woman whose aunt got killed.”

“Oh.” An urgency entered the woman’s tone. “She said that it was important to get in touch with Fearless, but I thought…”

“I’m sure it’s okay. Just gimme that number too.”

I went to Milo’s desk and dialed Gella Greenspan’s number.

“Hello,” a timid voice said upon answering the phone.

“Gella?”

“Mr. Jones?”

“No, it’s Paris. Paris Minton — the one who was with Fearless.”

“Oh. Is he with you now?”

“No. No, he went out to visit your uncle. He was worried after what happened to Fanny and decided to make sure Sol is safe.”

“Oh. Yes. Yes, I guess that’s more important.”

“More important than what?” I figured that the distraught young woman wanted to see what came after the first two kisses. I hoped to head her off before we got sidetracked into some kind of domestic mess. A kiss could be like a loaded gun, Fearless’s words came back to me.

“It’s Morris.”

“What’s wrong with him?”

“He’s gone.”

“Gone where?”

“I don’t know. The police came to ask questions about Fanny and the black man who stabbed Sol, and Morris yelled at them that they had to find him and put him in jail. I never saw him so upset.”

“We’re all upset. Damn, I haven’t been this worried since the bogeyman used to live under my bed.”

“I know,” she said. “I know. But it was more than that with Mo.”

“What do you mean?”

“He stayed in bed a whole day. He just lay there in the dark, looking up at the ceiling. He wouldn’t talk to me.”

“He wouldn’t eat or anything?”

“When he went for water, he didn’t turn off the faucet, he didn’t even flush the toilet. And then I was in the kitchen, and I heard his car start in the driveway. When I got to the front door he was already going down the street. I called for him, but he didn’t hear me.” The desolation in Gella’s voice reminded me of her lost European family.

“Was he that close to your aunt?”

“He liked her, but she didn’t have much use for him. Uncle Sol and Aunt Fanny liked people with more of a sense of humor. But Morris always wanted to do things for them. When Sol was in prison, he would go over and take care of things. If something broke, he fixed it, and if there was some problem with the bills, he took care of it.” She paused and then said, “Do you think Fearless might come over and help me look for him after he sees to Uncle Sol?”

The thought of Fearless holding that awkward girl and then Morris stumbling in was like a train wreck in my mind.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe I could come by if he’s too busy. Maybe, yeah, I could come over.”

“Okay,” she said, accepting second best.

“But first I got to look into a couple’a things. First that, and then I’ll come by.”

“Okay. But please hurry.”

“If Morris comes back, you go up and sit with him when you can, okay?” I said. “I know it doesn’t seem like he notices you, but he does. He knows you’re there, but he’s just too sad to say it.”

“Thank you,” Gella said, sighing. “Thank you for that.”

We hung up on that high note, but I knew that she was still scared.

“Is she okay?” Loretta asked.

“Oh yeah. She just needed to talk to somebody.”

MILO HAD AGREED to take Fearless to retrieve Layla’s car from the street in front of the Las Palmas, where we’d left it when we took off after Latham and Grove were shot. Fearless had called Layla to apologize for keeping the car for so long. She was mad at first, but after a few minutes of Fearless saying he was sorry, she let him keep it a while longer. I left Milo’s place in my own car. That felt pretty good, me sitting behind the wheel, not on anybody’s tail and nobody on mine. That was fine. I drove over to the burnt-out lot that had been my bookstore only a few days before. Fontanelle was right. The few standing timbers of the frame had been torn down and dragged off. The lot had been raked so clean that it almost looked as if it had been swept.

I went inside expecting to see Theodore Wally in his blue T-shirt and green apron standing behind the candy-crowded counter. But instead, an older white man stood there. It was Antonio, the owner. Antonio had a bulbous face with a pencil-thin mustache that didn’t fit at all. You got the idea that he grew the lip hair when he was a younger, thinner man.

“Can I help you?” he asked in a tone that was anything but helpful. Antonio had seen me a few dozen times since I had been his neighbor. He took my money, gave me change. But he never recognized me, never learned my name.

“Where’s Theodore?”

“He doesn’t work here anymore.”

“Say what?”

He looked away from me instead of answering.

“Excuse me,” I said.

“What?”

“I’m lookin’ for Wally.”

“I told you —”

“Listen, man. Theodore has been workin’ in this store for more than ten years. He worked here four days ago. Now I know he didn’t just disappear.”

“He does not work here anymore,” the store owner said as if he were talking to an idiot. “He quit his job this morning. Just wrote a note and locked the door behind him. He didn’t even call. So now I have to come here every day because there is nobody else. If you know him so well, then you must know where he lives, so why don’t you go there and leave me in peace?”

I thought, Oh my achin’ back, but I said, “My name’s Paris Minton.”

Antonio gave me that blank look that said, Don’t know you and don’t care to.

“I had the bookstore next door.”

“Oh,” he said, nodding. “So it was you. You’re the reason I don’t have my insurance.”

“What?”

“I got damage,” he said, the hint of an Italian accent coming through. “I called the insurance company and they send a man down here. He finds violations. Violations and he says that they won’t pay and that my insurance is canceled.”

“I didn’t make your violations, man. I lost my whole store.”

“But you were illegal. You slept there. You had a hot plate, maybe. Because you were careless, they punish me, a real businessman.”

It was the real businessman crack that got to me. I mean, what did he think? Didn’t he realize that I was in business too? Maybe I wasn’t making big money or anything like that, but I had regular hours and customers and fair prices. I was in business just like him. But that wasn’t the time for a philosophical discussion on the nature of business.

“Did somebody say that the fire was caused by a hot plate?” I asked.

“They don’t know. Maybe a cigarette, they said. Or maybe something with the wires. One man said something about gasoline.”

“Are they investigating?”

Antonio had small eyes. Between the bulge of his forehead and the chubbiness of his cheeks, they seemed gleeful in an evil sort of way. He homed those eyes in on me and said, “It wasn’t no more than an empty room. Why they want to investigate?”

I didn’t like what I was hearing. But I heard something even worse, something he didn’t mean to say. I didn’t like that either.

“Who cleaned off the lot next door?” I asked.

“How should I know? They were workmen. The landlords over there had insurance too. But their insurance agents couldn’t see the violations you had.”

It was my turn to stare. I looked hard at the store owner. He took out a small green rag with which he began to wipe the small space of the glass counter before him.

“Did the fire investigators come over here to talk to you?” I asked.

“Why would they?” he said, more defensive than angry.