Fearless Jones (13 page)

“Leon Douglas?” he whispered.

“She didn’t yell his full name.”

Vincent took a chair for himself. He was staring hard at me. I wasn’t scared though. He was an old guy, sixty or more, and
I always felt comfortable if given the time to roll out a lie. I’m good at lying. My mother always said that it was because
of all those lying books I read.

“You lyin’,” Vincent said.

“Why you say that?”

“Why would she trust you? Why she gonna offer you good money like that to find William?”

“She didn’t trust me completely, that’s why I don’t know why she wanted you guys. You know, I’ve done some findin’-people
work for Milo Sweet, the bail bondsman.”

“Why you believe her? Did she pay you anything?”

“Man, the curves on that woman and the way she moved ’em, damn, five hundred dollars was the least she had to offer.”

“You go to the law?”

“No.” I made eye contact with the holy man as I said so.

“Why not?”

I shrugged, looked at him again, and then said, “If she offered me five, there had to be more, and if I went to the cops,
there was no chance of being paid a dime. What I figured was that I’d find the reverend and see what was what.”

Vincent held out his hands in a show of helplessness. “I haven’t heard from Sister Love in more than two months, and I don’t
know anything about any money. All I do is God’s work. I spread His word.”

Like a boxer getting on his bicycle and putting out the jab, that was Vincent. I had staggered him with my information, and
all he could fall back on was his everyday con.

“Well, if you can’t help me…” I stood up.

“But I could ask Brother Grove,” Vincent offered.

“Maybe I should ask him.”

“Maybe,” the canny man of God replied. “If you got here five minutes earlier, you would’a seen him. But he’s gone now, won’t
be back for a few weeks.”

“Where’d he go?”

“Church business, in Tulsa.”

“Oh. Well I guess that’s that.”

“But he’s gonna call me. When he gets there he said he’d call. I could ask him then.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe I should just go to the police.”

“Better no,” he said.

“Why?”

“Let me ask William first. Maybe he could shed some light on it. I’ll tell you what, you go home and get some sleep, and when
I talk to William sometime tomorrow night, next mornin’ at the latest, I’ll call you.”

I thought about sleeping in that lilac-scented, apricot-colored room. It sounded pretty good. I mused on that for a few seconds,
pretending that I was thinking about Vincent’s selfless offer.

“Call you by ten day after tomorrow,” he added.

“All right,” I said, nodding. “All right. But I’ll have to call the cops if you don’t call me by then. You know it’s a crime
not to report a crime.”

Vincent was scanning the tabletop until he located a short pencil and a paper matchbook. He took the nub and said, “Tell me
your number.”

I gave him the Tannenbaum phone number.

“What’s the address?”

“Why you need my address?”

“Well, uh, we might have to run over there or somethin’.”

“No, uh-uh. You just call me. Call me by ten day after tomorrow.” I stood up.

“We could use the address too,” he said with no apology or excuse.

“I’ll give you what you need after I talk to Grove.”

I had a question in mind, and it must’ve shown on my face.

“Something else?” he asked.

“Why did you pull up your red skirts and run from the old church so fast?”

Father Vincent blinked twice but said nothing.

“I mean,” I continued, “you ran outta there in the middle’a the night. The landlord came around askin’ everybody if they knew
where you’d gone.”

“A misunderstanding about the rent,” the elder Holy Roller said. “Anderson made some promises about work that he was gonna
do to the buildin’. After a year we told him that we
wouldn’t pay, you know, the rent until, uh, he did what he said he would.”

“Hmm.” I pondered his lie. “Only time I ever seen people pull up stakes that fast they were either runnin’ from the law or
from a loaded gun.”

“Nuthin’ like that,” Vincent assured me. “Just a misunderstanding is all.”

“All right,” I said, still leery. “You call me when you’ve talked to Grove.”

I turned and walked out of there, feeling in charge for the first time since Elana Love walked in the door. I didn’t look
back at Father Vincent. I was sure that he’d be on the phone to Grove as soon as I was gone. But that was okay. I wanted them
upset. I wanted them to feel like I felt.

JOHN-JOHN
’
S ALL-NIGHT HAMBURGER STAND
on Slauson was the right place for me. Their hamburgers came with beefsteak tomatoes, Bermuda onions, sour pickles, mustard,
mayonnaise, and homemade chili. You had the choice of cheese. My fries always had chili and cheese on them. A strawberry malted
for my milk and I was on cloud nine.

The only two things that I was proud of consistently were that I could eat anything and never gain an ounce and that I’m extremely
well endowed in the sexual organ sort of way. My manhood was questionable as far as courage or strength, but once in the bed
I could out-joust the best of them.

I once thought that all I had to be was slender and sexually imposing and women would love me for that alone. But I realized
as time went on that women, though they were often excited
by my size, got used to it pretty quickly and were willing to leave me for what I thought were lesser men.

I guess I was thinking about Fearless. He was with a woman right then, and there I was eating a chili burger at four-thirty
in the morning.

Sal Grimaldi, the night manager of John-John’s, liked to play chess. He pulled out his small wooden board and sat across from
me in the courtyard space that they covered with canvas on a cold night like that. He said that I looked tired and maybe he
could beat me.

He couldn’t. Grimaldi was a white guy from outside of Barre, Vermont. He always loved telling me that he had never even seen
a Negro until after his twenty-first birthday.

“I mean,” he said more than once, “I knew you guys existed in theory, but seeing a real black man shocked the shit out of
me the first time.”

I believed him. Over the years I had come to realize that people who had no experience with each other rarely hated with the
vehemence that I had experienced from some southerners. Sal didn’t have any preconceptions about blacks. Because of that he
was critical in ways that other people weren’t. He loved to talk to me about how he didn’t understand why Negroes didn’t make
more out of themselves.

“I mean, why don’t you guys just go to school and buy the businesses and take over your own communities like the Catholics
and the Jews?” he’d ask.

He didn’t believe that racism existed except in the southern fraternities. He was a nice guy, but just like the libraries
of the North and South, he had very little information about me.

I BEAT SAL
seven games straight. It took until just after nine. He stayed to play out the last game when the breakfast man came in.
He wasn’t perturbed at losing to a Negro, and so I felt friendly toward him. Sometimes it’s just a little something that makes
a man feel good.

I was exhausted, but I never liked to sleep in the daytime. And even if I’d wanted to take a nap, the only options for a bed
I had were the backseat of Layla’s car or the upstairs bedroom at Fanny Tannenbaum’s house. Both of those choices had serious
disadvantages. If the police found me curled up in the backseat of a car I didn’t own, they could take me to jail for vagrancy
or worse. Fanny’s was no safer; Leon Douglas or at least one of his friends had already been there once.

I went over to a small shoeshine-and-magazine stand on Florence. I hung around there a couple of hours reading
Jet
magazine and shooting the breeze with a few other men like me, men who were between here and there. For a couple of hours
I loitered, joking with those young men. I was free of bookstores and killers and ladies so beautiful that they could make
you bleed. It was another world, where there were good laughs and no immediate danger, where nothing was different from yesterday
and tomorrow promised the same.

WHEN I PULLED UP
in front of the Greenspan house it was almost eleven o’clock. My intention was to take Fanny back home and spend the rest
of the afternoon in bed. I was so tired that I wasn’t even afraid of running into Leon Douglas.

Gella came to the door all awkward and timid, ready to run.

“Mr. Minton?” she said.

“I came by for Fanny,” I told the girl. She wore a medium gray dress cut from coarse material with dark gray buttons up the
middle. The sagging hem came down to her shins. It was a dowdy dress without style or promise. I couldn’t understand who would
make such an ugly piece of clothing, who would sell it, much less walk into some store and decide that this was the rag they
wanted to hang on their shoulders.

“She went home early this morning,” Gella said, half grinning, half looking away.

“She walk?”

“Morris drove her when he went to work.” She couldn’t help but smile and puff up a little when saying her lard-bottomed husband’s
name. “I’m going over there now myself. We’re going to visit Uncle Sol.”

“I’ll follow you,” I said. “Maybe Fearless is over there too.”

“He wasn’t when I called.”

“When was that?”

“About seven-fifteen. I called to make sure that everything was okay.”

Fanny’s husband was just out of prison and in the hospital with knife wounds inflicted by a criminal who was still on the
loose — and her niece calls to ask is everything okay. I could see why that old woman turned to Fearless and me for help.

GELLA PARKED
in the driveway, and I pulled up to the curb. By the time I got to the front door, she’d had enough time to ring the bell
and knock.

“Nice day,” I said while we waited for Fanny to answer.

“What? Oh yes. Yes it
is
nice.” She pressed the doorbell again.

I could hear the three short notes, then the long tone — then an even longer silence. Gella looked at me, and I tried to look
unconcerned.

“She probably in the bathtub or something,” I said.

“Aunt Hedva never bathes in the daytime,” Gella pronounced with all the weight of a hanging judge.

I took out the key Fanny had given me and used it in the lock. When I pushed the door open the girl ran in.

“Hedva! Fanny!” She ran up the stairs in great galloping bounds.

I wandered into the den. For some reason I expected her to be there.

Her foot, half in a blue canvas shoe, was visible from around the cushioned chair.

“She’s here,” I said loudly enough for Gella to hear.

I didn’t move. Gella’s heavy feet hurried quickly to the stairs and down. When she got to my side she froze.

The wail from Fanny’s niece was enough to break anybody’s heart. She threw the chair aside and fell in a heap next to the
corpse. There was no question about Fanny being dead. Her small face was a dark blue, and her tongue protruded. She looked
like some demented soul from an old Bosch painting.

I moved backward and lowered myself toward the chair. But the chair wasn’t where I remembered it, so I fell to the floor.
It didn’t bother me to sit there, flat on my ass.

As I said before, I’ve been around hard times, but the death of that tiny woman who had taken me in without the slightest
hesitation hit me hard. It was like I was groggy or something. I crawled over to Gella and put my hands on her shoulders.
She rose and we held each other, her for a shoulder to cry on and me so I didn’t fall again.

“What can we do?” she wailed.

“Cops,” I said. “Call ’em.”

She went to use the phone in the kitchen while I remained, silent witness to an old woman’s death. From various windows
sunlight poured into the rooms. Blobs of light and hard-lined shadows were everywhere. Birds were singing. Cars going up and
down the street made the sounds of rushing wind. There was a mambo band playing on a radio somewhere down the block. I wouldn’t
have heard any of it if it weren’t for the silence imposed by death.

Gella came back into the room. When she saw Fanny she fell to her knees again.

“There’s nothing we can do until they get here,” I told her. “Why?” she asked me.

I was looking at her, trying to think if there was an answer in the world to fit that question. My mouth opened and I was
about to say something, but I had no idea what.

Just then the phone rang. I went into the kitchen as much to get away from the body as to answer the phone.

“Yeah?”

“Mr. Lockwood?”

“Who?”

“Tyrell Lockwood?”

“Who is this?”

“William Grove.”

“I thought you was on your way to Tulsa.” Though my mind was still numb from the grisly death, my tongue was on automatic.

“I had a change of plans,” the reverend said.