Fear Itself fjm-2 Read online

  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.

  “Hercules,” I said to no one.

  He was big enough for a Hercules. Well over six feet and bulky with both muscle and fat. And he was bloated from many hours of being dead in that heat. There were bruises and burns all down his right arm. I suppose he gave up whatever information it was that he had before the left arm had to be mutilated.

  The wallet was real alligator. Even back then it had to cost fifty dollars or more. It held three twenty-dollar bills and a packet of business cards bound together by a rubber band. There were liquor stores, furniture movers, and Madame Ethel’s Beauty Supply among the cards. There were also six business cards for the same man—Lawrence Wexler. It seemed that he was a salesman for Cars-O-Plenty, a used automobile business.

  My stomach started churning and I ran to find a bathroom. I told myself to wait, but the call of nature was too strong. A door leading from the kitchen went into a small toilet. Seated there on the commode, I placed the wallet on the floor before me. Madame Ethel’s sounded familiar to me, but at first I couldn’t place it. Then I remembered that Kit had done a delivery for that company.

  I considered taking the wallet with me. I didn’t care about the money but maybe there was something in there that I needed.

  But what if I got caught?

  I’d tell the truth.

  That thought made me laugh.

  It seemed like I was on the commode for hours. The fear in my gut was worse than many intestinal viruses I had contracted. I felt relieved and weakened when the bout was through. I’d had enough time to check everything, so I just took one of Wexler’s business cards and returned the wallet to the dead man’s pocket.

  I passed through the house wiping every surface that I had touched and many that I might have touched. I put the dining room chair back in its place and moved out of Suite P4 with less fuss than a butterfly leaving a dank cave.

  I made it down the stairs without taking a breath. I was at the swinging doors to the back alley entrance when a man yelled, “Hey you!”

  I turned, seeing a tall and slender white man dressed all in white. He wasn’t a cook but it certainly was a uniform he was wearing.

  “Yes sir,” I said. The words just came out of me. Betrayed by four centuries of training, but I didn’t worry about that right then.

  “Who are you?” the white man asked.

  He had a pencil-thin mustache and a crooked face, though you could see by the tilt of his brimless hat that he thought he was handsome. There was a thin gold band on the ring finger of his left hand.

  “Cort Stillman,” I said, hoping that he didn’t wonder about a Negro named Cort.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Looking for a Mr. John Stover.” I handed over the blue envelope.

  Lance Wexler’s business card felt like a bomb in my pocket.

  “There’s no John Stover living here,” he said, twisting his already ugly mouth. “And even if there was, what are you doing out back?”

  “The lady out front said that there was no Stover. And I told her that I knew that he was staying with a woman on the fourth floor. That’s what they said when they brought the package in. You know it’s my job to make sure the package gets to the man it was addressed to. They told me at the front desk that they wouldn’t take it, so I came in the back way to sneak up and knock on some doors.”

  Sweat dripped down my spine. I hoped that my face was still dry.

  “Let’s go down to the front desk and ask them about this,” the man said.

  He was taller than I and probably stronger. At any rate, I’m not good at hand-to-hand combat. No good at fighting, period. I looked around, hoping for a miracle.

  I found it on his feet. I was sure that there weren’t three men in six square miles wearing that particular hue of tan shoe.

  “Listen, Warren,” I said. “We could do each other a favor here.”

  “How you know my name?”

  “If they call my boss and tell him that I snuck in like this, he’d be forced to fire me. You know I cain’t have that,” I said, ignoring his question.

  “How you know my name, man?”

  “And there’s a certain young lady who would be very thankful that you kept it quiet about what you were doin’ to her up on the roof.”

  Old Warren turned as white as his jacket.

  “I don’t know if she’s married, but I bet your young wife might be upset with you bein’ unemployed and a cheat all at once.”

  Warren looked like he wanted to hurt me, so I grabbed the envelope from his hand and walked out through the swinging doors, leaving him to consider the consequences of lust.

  8

  I MADE IT TO THE CAR and headed down toward my own neighborhood. As soon as I saw black faces on the street I parked and practiced breathing. My gut was still writhing, and my heart knocked against my chest like Fearless Jones at the door.

  Fearless Jones was my best friend and more trouble than a white girl on the prowl in Mississippi. Here I thought I was smart, sneaking into a white residence, ringing a white man’s bell. But I should have known—whatever the worst could have been behind that door, it would have to come to pass if Fearless brought me there.

  It was September. September is often L.A.’s hottest month. Eighty-five degrees. And still I was shivering on the inside.

  Fear is the motivating force behind most of my actions. Whatever it is I’m most afraid of takes all of my attention. Right then I was afraid that the cops could place me at the scene of a murder. Forget that the man had been dead at least two days when I was caught by Warren at the back door. Forget that I had probably erased any scrap that might have put me in the dead man’s suite. If the police liked me for the murder, then I would be the murderer in their book—and their book was the only one that mattered.

  I had to know why Kit Mitchell was missing, why Leora and Son were looking for him, and why he would have had free entrée to a murdered car salesman’s apartment.

  To answer these questions I pulled back into traffic and drove off toward the office of the bail bondsman—Milo Sweet.

  MILO HAD MOVED from his Hooper address, over the illegal chicken distributors, to an apartment building on Baring Cross Street between 109th Street and 109th Place. Loretta Kuroko—Milo’s secretary, girl Friday, and final hope—was sitting in the little front room of the domicile-turned-office. She was forty with the skin of a twenty-year-old and the eyes of some ancient sage. She lived and worked down among black people because of her hatred for the white men who imprisoned her and her family during the war. And she adored Milo with a passion that could not be understood in contemporary terms. It wasn’t sexual, or at least I didn’t think it was. Their bond was like some ancient myth about two ideal characters carrying on their labors through the centuries, living out the drama and foibles of the whole human race.

  “Hello, Paris,” Loretta said. “How are you?”

  “Fine, Loretta.” I proffered a bunch of dahlias that I’d bought from a florist on Century Boulevard.

  “Oh,” she said with light in her deep eyes. “Thank you so much.”

  Milo never brought Loretta flowers or chocolates or even a paper cup of coffee—that wasn’t a part of their mythology.

  “He’s back there. Go right on in,” she said. “I’ll put these in water.”

  The hallway, from the front room to the back, was exactly two and a half paces. On the way you passed the door to a toilet on the right. That was where Loretta would get her water.

  The back room was larger than the front, but it seemed smaller because of the eight file cabinets that Milo had against three walls. In those archives he had the records of his days as a lawyer—before he was disbarred—and as a restaurant owner, bookkeeper, and car insurance salesman. He’d also been a fence and a bookie, but I doubted if those records were sti
ll intact.

  “Paris,” Milo shouted. It was his normal voice, but even Milo’s whisper was loud. “Have a seat.”

  “Thank you, Milo,” I said.

  He was sitting behind a maple desk, in a red leather recliner, under a naked hundred-watt bulb dangling from bare black cord. The chair in front of the desk looked like some sort of starved four-legged animal. I was afraid that even my few pounds would be the last straw.

  But I sat anyway. The legs strained but held.

  “What can I do for you?” Milo asked.

  Milo’s skin color wasn’t as dark as Fearless’s, but it was close. He was a couple of inches taller than I and a few inches shorter than Fearless. His feet and hands belonged on someone who was much larger, and his body was naturally powerful. But Milo wasn’t a physical man. He was a thinker, a reader, a man who understood power but who was forever blocked from holding its reins.

  Milo could quote passages from a thousand poems, do problems in calculus and trigonometry, but if you waved a stack of hundred-dollar bills under his nose he would forget his own name.

  “Kit Mitchell,” I said.

  The delay between hearing the name and his next breath was enough to let me know that Ted Timmerman had something to do with the Watermelon Man.

  “Who?”

  “Don’t fuck with me, Miles,” I said. “You know as well as I do that you done sent Fearless down a dangerous road. You know it.”

  Milo pulled out a cigar.

  If I didn’t know that I was in trouble before, that stogie was the final proof. Milo smoked to hide his nervousness—and he never got nervous until the walls were caving in.

  “Talk to me, Milo.”

  “What do you know, Paris?”

  “Enough to put you in prison.”

  The bail bondsman’s eyes widened. I liked that for two reasons. One was that I had gotten to him, raised the stakes. And also I liked to see bright white eyes against black skin—it made me feel like home.

  “I don’t know nuthin’ ’bout no prisons,” Milo said. “I know money and I know power, that’s all.”

  “So which one did you send Ted Timmerman out after?”

  “You met Mr. Timmerman, then?”

  “Milo, do I have to go get Fearless? I mean, do you want to do this song and dance with him?”

  “I’m not afraid. I haven’t done anything wrong.”

  I snorted.

  Milo blew out a cloud of smoke.

  It was hot in that room. I was sweating even though all I had on was green gardener trousers and a white T-shirt. Milo wore a three-piece suit with a red tie knotted up to his throat, but he was still dry as a bone.

  “What’s goin’ on, Milo?”

  “Money, son,” the dark-skinned ex-lawyer proclaimed. “Only money, and nuthin’ else.”

  “I got twenty-three dollars seventy-five cents in my pocket,” I said. “And compared to Fearless I’m a millionaire.”

  “I know you got money in the bank,” Milo said. “Money in the bank and papers on that bookstore. You ain’t broke.”

  Milo had been an equal third partner when Fearless and I got our thirteen thousand dollars and almost killed. His money was gone too. But Milo had squandered his cash on foolish investments. He wanted to be rich so bad that he never had a dime.

  “Winifred Fine come to see me four, no five, five days ago,” he said.

  “And?”

  “That’s Winifred L. Fine.” Milo pronounced the name as if he expected me to faint dead away.

  “Yeah. I know her. The one own that fruit market down on Avalon.”

  “And three gas stations, two hardware stores, and Nathan’s Bakery,” Milo added.

  “She own Nathan’s too?”

  “She also make Madame Ethel’s Beauty Supply line.”

  “Never heard of it,” I lied.

  “Black women all over Georgia, Tennessee, Florida, and Alabama use Madame Ethel’s.”

  “When did you get to be such an expert on women’s beauty products?”

  “I’m an expert on money,” Milo said. “Money, boy. Big money. And when Miss Fine come to me five days ago and says that she needed to locate her nephew, I knew that big money was on the rise.”

  “What nephew?”

  “Bartholomew Perry.”

  “BB’s her blood?”

  “You know him?”

  “Seen ’im around. He come down Watts all the time, thinkin’ he’s slummin’ just ’cause his daddy owns that used car lot.” An alarm went off in my head but I didn’t let it show.

  “So you know where he hangs out?”

  “Naw. I just seen him. At Baptiste’s mainly. That’s all.”

  “What was he doin’ when you seen ’im?”

  “Stuffin’ his fat face,” I said. “He’d bring his high-yellow and white girlfriends down there.”

  “All right now,” Milo complained. “Ain’t no use tryin’ to run a man down like that. I’m sure he got black girls too.”

  “Not that I ever saw.”

  “But you don’t know everything. You don’t know shit.”

  “Whatever you say, Miles.”

  “How would you like to have a real bookstore?” he asked me. “New books on finished oak shelves with a real cash register, not just some cigar box with the lid ripped off?”

  “Sure.” My pulse quickened in spite of common sense.

  “Winifred L. Fine can do that for you. She can take a hole in the wall like you got and make it into a co-orporation.”

  “What you sayin’, Milo?”

  “Like I said—Miss Fine asked me to find Bartholomew.”

  “He jump bail or sumpin’?”

  “No.”

  “Then how did Miss Fine get to your door?”

  “You might not know it, but I got a reputation for finding people, Paris. Most the times it’s bail jumpers, but I do other kinds of searches too. I can be discreet.”

  “Discreet about what?”

  “Miss Fine needs to have a private talk with her nephew. I didn’t ask her why.”

  “So you agreed to find a man for somebody and you don’t even know what for?”

  “She wants to talk to him. That’s all I need to know.”

  “And what’s she gonna pay you for that?” I asked.

  “This ain’t about no fee,” Milo said. He shrugged just as if he had already made it rich. “This is gettin’ in good with the richest black woman in Los Angeles, maybe even the whole country. A man could become a millionaire behind a woman like that.”

  “Listen, Milo. A missin’ nephew ain’t no million dollars unless there’s somethin’ serious goin’ on.”

  “There isn’t,” he said.

  I sat back in my spindly chair. The joints creaked and the backrest sagged, but I started to get the feeling that that little chair would hold up under a man Milo’s size, or bigger.

  What I had to figure was how much to tell Milo. How much could I trust him?

  We were friends—after a fashion. I had done some work for his bail bonds business when men awaiting trial went on the run. Usually I’d just find out where they were hiding and tell Milo. Nothing dangerous.

  We played chess now and then and had political and philosophical debates. But we didn’t share the life-and-death kind of friendship that Fearless and I had.

  “What does BB have to do with Kit Mitchell?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” Milo said. “I hired Timmerman to find BB and he came up with Kit and BB hangin’ out together a few months ago. I think they were doin’ some kinda business.”

  “What kind of business?”

  Milo pursed his lips and rubbed his thumbs and forefingers together.

  “BB might’a crossed the line a li’l bit, but that don’t have nuthin’ to do with Miss Fine and why she wants to talk to him,” the bail bondsman said.

  “What kind of business?” I asked again.

  “Kit needed some trucks for his melon business and BB knew how to
get ’em on the cheap.”

  “Hot?”

  “There ain’t no proof of that one way or t’other,” the lawyer turned skip chaser said.

  “Is that why the police are lookin’ for Kit?” I asked.

  Milo shrugged. “Kit’s a businessman and black. You know all businessmen cross the line now and then. But when a black one do it the cops on him like white on rice.”

  What Milo said was true but it didn’t explain the dead man nicknamed after a Greek demigod.

  “You know a woman named Leora?”

  “Never heard of her.”

  “She has a young boy-child named Son. Says she’s Kit’s wife.”

  “I don’t have any personal information on Mr. Mitchell. He could have five wives as far as I know, and two heads for all I care.”

  As Milo sat back in the red leather I wondered if he knew anything more. I couldn’t ask him about Wexler because I shouldn’t have known anything about a murdered man. As far as I knew, Lance Wexler was still decomposing in secret, his foot holding open the door.

  “Where does this Winifred L. Fine live?” I asked.

  “Why should I tell you?” Milo said.

  “All I can say is that you have to trust me. Fearless might be in some trouble around Kit and I agreed to help him out. If I run across BB along the way I’ll make sure you know about it.”

  “What kind of trouble?” Milo asked.

  “This woman Leora come around and asked Fearless where was Kit,” I said. “She said that she was his wife. She said that he abandoned her and his child. After Fearless asked a couple’a questions the cops come around his place and asked about him. Now the next morning your boy Timmerman comes to my house askin’ about Fearless too. You know neither one of us believes in coincidence, Milo.”

  “Maybe not,” he said. “But if there’s a word for it in the dictionary then there’s a chance that it could happen.”

  “Tell me where I can find Miss Fine.”

  “But you could get to Winifred if I give you her address. You could make all her fortune work for you.”

  “Milo, I wouldn’t even know what to do with a beauty product distribution company. All I care about is my books.”