Walter Mosley - Fearless Jones

“What if he was the one sittin’ next to Leon when he was chasin’ yo’ ass down the street?”

“Shit.” My fingers went suddenly cold.

“That’s okay, man. I’ll go in first. But you owe me a pistol.”

THE ADDRESS C.T. had given us was a court of apartments at the corner of Horn. We left the dog in the car. The super’s apartment was listed under the name of Conrad Benjamin Till. Whoever designed the court must have been a fan of Minos’s maze. After every two doorways there was another turn. I lost my sense of direction almost immediately.

Most of the apartments were dark, as the next day was a workday. We went past a pair of teenagers having some kinda sex behind a skimpy rosebush. I don’t know if they saw us, but they sure didn’t stop.

NO ONE ANSWERED when we rang Conrad’s bell. No one called out when we knocked. Fearless had brought Layla’s tire iron in lieu of a pistol and used it on the door. The sound of that doorjamb being wrenched open by that twelve-pound tire iron was frightening; loud and whining with reports like small-caliber gunshots now and then. I looked around to see if anyone had turned on their lights; no one had, but that didn’t mean we hadn’t been heard or seen.

Fearless went in first, but I was right on his heels, running my hands along the wall. I didn’t find a light switch, but Fearless snagged the overhead cord and said, “I got it.”

Yellow light flooded the small sitting room as I was closing the front door.

Fearless said, “Dog.”

There on a low, modern couch sat a fresh corpse.

He probably had been darker before all the blood drained out, but he’d always be a light-skinned Negro with brown freckles across his wide nose. His face seemed to belong on a fat man, but he was of normal build. He wore a light-colored jacket, blood-soaked T-shirt, and threadbare jeans. Till must’ve died right after we got off the phone.

I was looking at the dead man, but my mind was working overtime trying to believe that he wasn’t there. I’d happened upon dead bodies before in my life: three children in a car wreck outside of Turner, Texas, the body of a sailor I saw on the shore at the Gulf of Mexico, and there’s been a murdered body or two on the street. I once saw the victims of a double lynching hung from an ancient live oak not two miles from my mother’s home. I’ve seen a good many deaths, but none of them, with the exception of those cops that Fearless killed, had anything to do with me.

I had sought out Conrad Till. And if I wasn’t careful I’d end up just like him.

“The first one’s always hard,” Fearless said.

“Say what?”

“When me and my squad’d go out in Germany it was always the first man get killed get to us,” he said in an impossibly calm voice. “Didn’t matter if it was one’a us or one’a them. It’s just that first dead man that reminds you that this is serious business.”

With that Fearless moved to inspect the room. I moved too, his nonchalant bravery having turned my terror into mere heart-pounding fear.

Till’s tan jacket had as much wet blood on it as dry. There was a lot of blood, down on his blue jeans and coagulated in the spaces between the fingers of his left hand. There was also a burned-out cigarette between those fingers. It was as if he’d been sitting there listening to music but then all of a sudden broke out in an attack of bleeding. The blood had come from a wound in the left side of his chest.

We didn’t split up in the super’s pad. I went with Fearless into the kitchen. I forced my eyes to look everywhere, but they didn’t see much. I had forgotten that I was looking for Elana Love.

A doorway from the kitchen led to the bedroom. There was nothing there except a bloody towel in the middle of an unmade bed.

“Let’s get outta here, man,” I whispered to Fearless.

He nodded sagely, and we went back the way we came.

I expected to see the corpse, but not standing up in front of me.

He still looked dead, and that scared me more than his size. I don’t think he expected someone to come out of the kitchen. Maybe he was going for some water to replace all the blood he’d lost.

“Hold it, man,” Fearless said.

The corpse swung his heavy fist, but Fearless leaned back and then pushed the man with the flat of his hand. A variation on that dance step happened again and again. The dead man kept swinging, and Fearless kept pushing off of him as gently as possible.

“You gonna hurt yourself, man,” Fearless kept saying. “Stop it.”

And he was right too. The man could only swing with his right. He was holding his left hand at a high point on the left side of his chest to keep the blood in. That tactic was not working. The blood cascaded through his fingers, and as the life fluid went, the one-handed fighter started flagging. He wound down like a child’s toy until he was on his knees. Finally he lunged with a roundhouse right that would have clocked Fearless on his left hip if he hadn’t stepped out of the way. The man fell on his face and went back to mimicking the dead.

Fearless quickly turned him over and applied pressure to the wound.

Twice in one day. I should have been at the racetrack. Luck that consistent needed a horse to bet on.

Fearless removed Till’s jacket, T-shirt, and a blood-soaked bandage. He then fashioned a new dressing from the sheet I got off the unkempt bed.

“Let’s get outta here,” I said when he was done.

“We got to call an ambulance,” he said.

The man was on his back on the floor, bare-chested with one arm straight out to the right and the other down at his side. I knew Fearless was right. But if I had been alone, my moral responsibilities wouldn’t have become apparent until I was far away and safe.

We made the call from the phone in a corner of the living room, then hurried out toward the car.

There was a siren blaring somewhere off in the night. The young lovers were gone, and we weren’t far behind them.

9

THE DAPPLED SUNLIGHT on apricot-colored walls was the most delicate thing I had seen in a very long time. The lilac-scented sheets were soft and light. Even the mosquitoes silently batting against the outside of the window were a feathery tickle in my mind. But mosquitoes led unerringly to the notion of blood, and blood would always remind me of Conrad Benjamin Till.

Someone dragged a chair across a floor downstairs, and a dog barked. The aroma of coffee blended with lilac. I sat up and looked out of the window. There I saw East L.A. with its carob and magnolia trees, its unpaved sidewalks, and tiny homes flocked with children. Pontiacs and Fords and Studebakers drove slowly toward their goals. Brown- and white-skinned people made their way.

“Hey, Paris,” Fearless hailed when I came to the doorway of the kitchen. He was sitting just outside the back door in boxer shorts and a T-shirt on a chrome-and-vinyl chair, drinking coffee from a porcelain cup.

“Good morning,” Fanny Tannenbaum said. She was standing at an ironing board, working the wrinkles out of my pants.

I was in my underwear like Fearless, but I wasn’t embarrassed.

“What time is it?” I asked.

“Almost nine,” Fearless and Fanny said together. It was like they were old friends, even family.

I walked into the room and then jumped across the floor because of the low growl to my right. It was the mongrel from the night before, chewing on a big beef bone and warning me to keep my distance.

Fearless got up from his perch and came in to join us. “Shut up, Blood,” he intoned. The dog whimpered and ducked his head.

“I named him after last night,” Fearless continued.

“Mr. Jones told me that I should ask questions to you, that he didn’t explain things so good,” Fanny said.