Fear Itself Read online

  “Who knows? Maybe he don’t have nuthin’ to do with it.”

  “Anyway,” I said. “Let’s be careful. You go out and climb the back fence. I’ll pick you up in five.”

  Fearless just nodded. He went out the screen door, which I latched behind him.

  ***

  MY FORD WAS A SICKLY BROWN COLOR that might have gone well with Theodore Timmerman’s suit. But that was all right, because the poor paint job helped cut down on the price. It was a used 1948 model and only cost me two hundred and fifty dollars. It ran well and gas was cheap, so transportation was no problem at all. I pulled around Mace and drove up the alley between Seventy-first Place and Florence. Fearless was nowhere to be seen as I approached, but when I got to the back of my place he jumped out, opened the passenger’s door, and hopped into the seat like an eel gliding into a resting place between stones.

  After a few blocks Fearless said, “It’s nice to be ridin’ again. You know it took me so long to get to your place last night ’cause I had to walk.”

  “You don’t even have bus fare?”

  “Not right now, Paris. You know the day Kit skipped out was my payday.”

  “I can’t believe it. Don’t you have a bank account?”

  “What for? I make money and I spend it.”

  “But you don’t have anything.”

  “I got as much as any other man, more than many.”

  If anybody ever wrote a book about our friendship they would have called it The Businessman and the Anarchist. Fearless lived from day to day and here to there. His life in California was the dream that so many others had been shattered by. One night he slept on the beach, snoring by moonlight, and then he’d spend a week lying in some pretty girl’s bed. If he had to work he could swing a twelve-pound hammer all day long. And if work was scarce he’d catch a dozen sand dabs from a borrowed canoe, come over to my house, and trade that succulent entrée for a few nights on my front room sofa.

  O’BRIEN’S WAS UP ON COCKBARROW, a few blocks from the train station. The entrance was no wider than a doorway, and the sign could have been for a professional office rather than a bar. But once you got past the short hall you entered a large room built around the remnants of a large brick oven that had once been used to make bread for Martinson’s Bakery in the twenties.

  The oven had been twelve feet in diameter. Hampton James, the bar’s owner, cut the bricks down to waist level and installed a circular mahogany bar around the inside. On busy days he had as many as four bartenders working back to back, serving the colored employees of the railroads.

  O’Brien’s was the place that colored train professionals patronized. All porters, waiters, restroom attendants, and redcaps went there when the shift was finished or when a layover began. There were a dozen cots in a back room where, for three bucks, a porter could get a nap before heading off on the next outbound train.

  There were no windows in the walls but the roof was one big skylight, and so the room was exceptionally sunny. Hampton used the exhaust fans left over from the bakery to keep the place at a reasonable temperature. And he had a red piano on a wide dais for one jazzman or another to keep the mood cool.

  Hampton was the only bartender working at that time of morning. A solitary customer sat at the bar. That patron was dressed in a porter’s uniform, drinking coffee.

  “Hampton,” I said as Fearless and I approached.

  He winced, straining to find my name, and then said, “Paris, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What you boys drinkin’?”

  “That coffee smells good.”

  If it had been later Hampton would have told us to go to a diner. But he was just getting warmed up at eight-thirty. We could have ordered ice water and he wouldn’t have cared.

  “Regular?” he asked.

  Regular in California meant sugar and milk, so I said, “Black.”

  “Nuthin’ for me,” Fearless added.

  “You’re Fearless Jones, right?” Hampton James asked.

  “Yes sir.”

  Hampton was a nearly perfect specimen of manhood. He was five eleven with maple-brown skin. He was wide in the shoulder, with only ten pounds more than he needed on his frame. He had a small scar under his left eye and eyebrows that even a vain woman wouldn’t have touched up. His lips were generous and sculpted. And his oiled hair was combed back in perfect waves in the way that Hindu Indians draw hair on their deities.

  “I saw you get in a fight one night down on Hooper,” Hampton said to Fearless. “Down at the Dawson’s Market.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Don’t you remember?” Hampton asked.

  “Did I win it?”

  “Oh yeah. Yes you did. It was a big dude named Stern but you put him down and they had to carry him off.”

  “I don’t remember any fights but the ones I lost,” Fearless said in a rare show of pride.

  “How many you remember?”

  “None comes to mind.”

  Hampton had a sharp laugh, like the chatter of a dozen angry wrens. I laid down two dimes for my twelve-cent coffee. He pocketed them, keeping the change for his tip.

  “What you boys want?” Hampton asked. He was looking at me.

  “Why you think we want anything other than coffee?” I asked him.

  “No Negroes drop in here for coffee, brother. An’ even if they did, it’s cause they work for the trains. Any civilian knows about my door would come at night or on his way to someplace else.”

  “We could be on the road somewhere,” I speculated.

  Hampton looked at my clothes, which were only made for working, and shook his head.

  “Dressed like that,” he said. “And with not even a valise between you. I don’t think so.”

  “Yeah,” I admitted. “You right. The reason we’ve come is that Fearless here owes me twenty dollars.”

  “So?”

  “He don’t have it, but he told me that his friend Kit owed him for a week’s work he did out in Oxnard. Kit was supposed to pay him Wednesday last but he never showed up.”

  Hampton’s only imperfect features were his eyes. They weren’t set deep into his head like most people’s. They were right out there competing with his nose for facial real estate. As a result even I could easily read the hesitation when it entered his gaze.

  “What’s all that got to do with me?”

  “Light-colored man name of Pete,” I said. “You know, he has a hot dog cart downtown. He said that he’d seen Kit in here more than once.”

  “Kit who?”

  “Mitchell,” Fearless said. “Kit Mitchell. Sometimes they call him Mitch. One’a his front teeth is capped in silver.”

  It was always good to ask questions when in the company of Fearless Jones. Women liked answering him because of his raw power and sleek appearance. Men stopped at the power. They didn’t know that a man as dangerous as Fearless would never bully his way through life. All they knew was that if they had that kind of strength and skill they’d never take no for an answer again.

  “I don’t know really anything,” Hampton James said. “I mean, Kit ain’t been in here since he started that watermelon business. But I heard from one of the bar girls that he took her up to a room he had at the Bernard Arms over on Fountain.”

  “Sounds like a white place,” I said.

  “Yeah,” the bar owner said. “That’s why she was talkin’ about it. She said that he went in an’ asked for Hercules and they showed him up to a penthouse apartment that was all nice with a stocked bar and everything.”

  “Hercules?”

  “That’s what she said.”

  The bartender glanced at the porter and moved in that direction. He seemed worried. Looking at him, that all but perfect sampling of humanity sidling away fearfully, gave me my third chill of the day. It was as if he were scuttling away from some danger that was coming up from behind me. The feeling was so strong that I turned around.

  There sat Fearless Jones, staring up inn
ocently at the skylight.

  6

  MY EYES WERE WATERING and I couldn’t stop yawning by the time Fearless and I got to Ambrosia Childress’s house. We went to the front door together because I needed her phone number to stay in touch with my friend.

  She answered in a bathrobe that was open just enough to snap me out of my lethargy. She had deep chocolate skin, dark red lips, and bright brown eyes. When she looked at Fearless her lips parted.

  “Hi,” she said.

  I might just as well have been a tree.

  “Hey, Ambrosia. I’m sorry to drop in on you like this but I need a place to stay for a day or two.”

  “Okay,” she said. No question why. No coy hesitation. I do believe that her nostrils widened and her chest swelled.

  “Thank you, honey,” Fearless said.

  He was swallowed up whole by her doorway and I was left at the threshold with a scrap of paper in my hand.

  We’d decided that it would be dangerous for Fearless to travel the streets with so many people looking for him. I could make the rounds asking questions while he suffered the four walls of Ambrosia’s protective custody.

  “GOOD AFTERNOON. BERNARD ARMS,” a friendly young woman said in my ear.

  I was down the street from the residence hotel, closeted in a sidewalk phone booth.

  “Brian Letterman,” I said in a tone completely drained of my Louisiana upbringing. “Pasternak Deliveries. With whom am I speaking?”

  “Susan Seaborne. Yes, Mr. Letterman. What can I do for you?”

  “I got a new guy at the front desk here, Sue. You know how it goes. Some guy in a hundred-dollar suit came in and dropped off a parcel without leaving the proper information. Lenny didn’t know. And now I have a problem.”

  “Oh,” Susan Seaborne said. “I see.”

  “I’m glad you do, because my boss wants to fire me. Can you believe that? Lenny takes down two lines for an address and Pasternak wants to put it on me.”

  “I really don’t see what we have to do with your trouble at work,” the young woman said.

  “Oh, yeah. I’m sorry. It’s just that my wife’s pregnant, and if I lose this job —”

  “Are you looking for a new job?” the operator asked, trying to urge me toward clarity.

  “I got two lines here,” I said. “Actually three words. Hercules and Bernard Arms. That’s all the address that the suit gave Lenny. If I don’t get a proper address my new baby will be suckling cheap wine on Skid Row.”

  “Lance Wexler,” the woman said brightly. “You’re looking for Lance Wexler. He’s got a penthouse suite.”

  “Is there a number on that suite, dear?” I asked in the wake of a deep sigh.

  “P-four. That’s his apartment.”

  “P-four,” I said, pretending to write it down. “Can you connect me to his room, please? I need to see when he wants to take delivery.”

  “We can take the package at the front desk.”

  “I know,” I said. “But Mr. Pasternak wants me to go there myself and get the man’s signature. Either I put the package in his hand by four o’clock today or I can kiss sweet butter good-bye.”

  “But Mr. Wexler isn’t here,” my new friend Sue said.

  “Are you sure? Or is it that he just doesn’t want to be bothered?”

  “No. He’s out. I’m sure of it. No. He’s definitely not here. He hasn’t been in for a few days.”

  THE BERNARD ARMS RESIDENCE HOTEL was nowhere near any colored neighborhood. They wouldn’t have rented a toilet to Kit Mitchell.

  Next door on the right was a florist’s shop called Dashiel’s. On the left was a stationery store with no name posted. I went into the stationery store and bought a big blue envelope and a small stack of gummed labels. I attached one of the labels to the envelope and wrote the name Mr. John Stover. Beneath that I penned The Bernard Arms.

  With the envelope under my arm I went around to the alley behind the building.

  The back door of the residence hotel had a concrete platform in front of it. On that dais stood six large metal trash cans. Next to that was a double doorway. The doors were unlocked. They opened onto a hallway that smelled of garbage with a hint of freshly hatched maggots. The walls down that passage were painted dark brown to waist level and light blue the rest of the way up. It was as if the management had decided to make the working environment as hard and ugly as they possibly could.

  At the far end of the unsightly corridor was a doorway that had a red-and-white sign that read FIRE EXIT attached to it. The stairwell beyond the door was also of utilitarian design. Filthy bare wood stairs led me past rough plaster walls that were painted a shade neither yellow nor green but a color that took on the worst aspects of both hues.

  With the blue envelope securely nestled under my arm, I walked up the zigzag stairwell until it came to an end. I opened the door and came out on a tar paper and gravel roof. Realizing that I had overshot my goal by one floor I was about to turn back, but then I heard a sound, what a poet on my bookshelves might have called a susurration.

  I looked around the side of the small structure that housed the doorway and saw the tan shoes and bare butt of a very white man humping away between a woman’s shuddering legs. She was wearing a maid’s uniform and he was most likely the valet. They were going at it on a sheet spread out over the gravel and tar.

  “Warren. Oh, oh, Warren,” the woman moaned.

  It was her calling out a name that was common but not someone I knew that struck me. The name Wexler came back to me. Hercules’s name suddenly seemed familiar.

  I backed toward the doorway and descended a floor to the penthouse.

  The penthouse hall had emerald carpeting and muted lime walls. There were potted ferns between the entrances to the suites and crystal chandeliers hung every six feet or so. The window at the end of the hall looked out over the tops of trees. It was more like a view of Paradise than some upstart brick-and-plasterboard city.

  I thought about the lovers wrestling above me—Warren and the woman who called his name. Again I thought of the name Wexler. Where had I heard that name before?

  My heart was thumping by then. I had made it all that way by using stealth that would have been better suited to a much braver man. I had planned my steps carefully, all the way down to the envelope under my arm. Hercules wasn’t home but Kit might be up there with some railroad prostitute. And all I had to do was mention Fearless’s name to keep him from doing something violent. Everyone who knew Fearless also knew not to cross him.

  But the lovers on the roof had disconcerted me.

  The cream yellow door sported the characters P4 cut out of mother-of-pearl. I felt my heart leap when I knocked. A moment went by. I knocked a bit harder. More time passed.

  I sighed out loud. What the hell was I doing there anyway? I wasn’t Fearless Jones’s father. What did I care if he had to leave California? I had gone further than many a friend would.

  But who was Hercules Wexler? I could see his family name printed somewhere.

  I grabbed the knob, remembering my nightmare, and turned it. The door was unlocked. There was nothing left to stand in my way but common sense.

  I entered Suite P4.

  7

  THE LARGE ROOM WAS STIFLING, filled with sunlight pouring in from at least a half-dozen closed, unshaded windows. The walls were yellow cream and the carpet royal blue. The ash furniture was heavy and bright. Glass-door cabinets exhibited fine china and porcelain knickknacks. Copies of Renaissance paintings in ornate gold frames hung here and there. A glossy finished dining table in the middle of the room supported a large vase with at least three dozen long-stemmed, once-red roses displayed like peacock feathers.

  The only problem was that the roses had blackened and died and the hot room smelled sour.

  I didn’t know what I was looking for exactly. Maybe some envelope or receipt that would give me and Fearless a line on Kit Mitchell. Just something so that when the police came down on Fearless he could
give them a lead.

  I could have been arrested for burglary, but I only planned to spend five minutes searching.

  The first thing I did was to locate the fire escape. Then I leaned the back of a chair under the front doorknob. If somebody tried to get in I could be down in the street and off before they saw my face.

  The dining room had a wide doorway, with no doors attached, which connected it to a living room that was two steps down. This room was also yellow and blue with windows and light. The paintings here had the same garish frames, but these copies were from the Postimpressionist period. Cézanne and Lautrec, Manet and Monet, but no Van Gogh or Gauguin. I knew about paintings. I once got a whole boxful of art books discarded by the Santa Monica library. They were mostly in black and white and had been thrown out in favor of the color plates found in newer texts.

  There were no books or bookshelves anywhere in Mr. Wexler’s home.

  There was a swinging door that was partly open. The temperature in that apartment must have been at least ninety-five degrees, but the wedge holding the door ajar made me cold enough to crave a sweater.

  The foot that kept the door from closing was bare, connected to a large white man with a butcher’s knife buried in his chest. All he wore was a pair of brand-new blue jeans. His arms and legs went in all directions. His eyes were open and he was beginning to stink. His wrists were bruised and bloody, as if he had been struggling with tight bonds. There was a balled-up knot of white cloth wedged in his mouth. The open mouth, puffed-out cheeks, and bulging eyes made him look somewhat like a gasping fish.

  My first instinct was to run. I even turned and took three steps. But then I stopped myself. The man was obviously dead. From the smell he had been there awhile. A killer wouldn’t stay around the body, I thought. And I’d seen worse. Less than a year before, I’d searched a room full of slaughtered men, looking for the fingertip that Fearless had gotten shot off.

  The man was partly on his side, so I didn’t have to move him much to get the wallet out of his back pocket. There was a driver’s license for a Lawrence Wexler.