Walter Mosley - Fearless Jones

I had been so concerned that trouble was coming that I didn’t look out for it. The police came up behind me using my car to hide from Fearless. I wanted to curse out loud, but instead I bit my tongue and moved behind a group of three men who had witnessed the arrest from the street.

They searched Fearless and then they searched the car. They cuffed Fearless and put him in the backseat of one cruiser and Elana in the front seat of the other. That was strange right there. Elana was being treated differently.

I walked back and forth, up and down the avenue, putting on a baseball cap that was in the backseat of Layla’s car. I took the hat off, turned up a collar. I don’t know if my disguises were working or if the police weren’t worried about anybody watching them in broad daylight while they made an arrest. That was still a time when white policemen handled blacks in public with impunity. They were, after all, the law.

I had crossed the street maybe a dozen times when Bernard Latham pulled around the corner. He drove right past me.

He got out of his deep blue Chevrolet and sauntered over to the cops who had been waiting. He looked into the backseat that contained Fearless. He asked Fearless a question, then moved toward Elana Love.

Something was wrong, I was sure of that. I ran to my car and started it up, then did a U-turn on Central and came back to turn down the street. I drove past the cops, my best friend, and that woman, pretending to be a commuter coming home from work. None of them registered my passage, so I picked an empty-looking house halfway down the block and backed deep into the driveway.

By the time I was crouched down into position Elana was walking toward Latham’s car. Fearless was out too, his hands free. Latham put Elana in the front seat and then leisurely walked around to his side. He drove down past my hiding place.

I had to make a decision then. Actually I had to make three decisions. The first was whether or not to leave Fearless in the hands of the cops. It didn’t look like they were about to arrest him, and it was unlikely that they’d shoot him in broad daylight. And even if they were going to shoot him, there was little I could do to stop it. The second decision was whether or not to follow Latham. He was a cop and there was something crooked about him; even his fellow cop Lieutenant Binder thought so. A gun license for a policeman was like a permit to kill Negroes, and for a crooked cop that permit was just a formality.

The first two decisions were simple. Of course I had to leave Fearless and follow the girl. Latham might have taken the bond. If he was dirty, maybe there was still a chance to steal it back. But the final resolve, to actually drive the car out of that driveway, that was the hardest decision of all.

When Latham’s car drove by me I decided to count to eight before following, telling myself it was to keep from being seen. I had gotten to fifteen before I got the courage to move. Down in the street I was panting, driving not more than ten miles an hour. My car sped up and then slowed. There was a lump in my throat and spots before my eyes. I had faced death earlier that day in the shape of Leon Douglas, but Leon didn’t scare me nearly as much as Latham’s taillights.

I’ve never respected law enforcement, merely feared it. I’m an honest man as far as it goes, meaning that I’d rather make my own money than take somebody else’s. I’m almost always on the right side of the law, but lawmen scare me anyway, they terrify me. I have always believed that more black folks have been killed by those claiming to be enforcing the law than by those who were breaking it. So following that man I felt like a deer stalking a tiger, or a leaf pretending that it was driving the wind.

LATHAM DOUBLED BACK to Central and cruised toward downtown. I couldn’t tell if he and Elana were talking, much less sharing secrets. There wasn’t much movement between them. Of course I couldn’t see them very well because I lagged pretty far behind most of the time.

When we hit the outskirts of downtown, Latham headed north toward the swankier districts. We went up through the center of the city and then west on Beverly. We finally ended up on Shatto, a street that looked almost residential. Four blocks up we came upon a small hotel, the Pine Grove. A man in a partial uniform rushed out and opened Elana’s door. Even though the valet was colored, you could see that he was surprised to see Elana’s hue. But he swallowed that and ushered the cop and his prisoner in through the cast-iron front doors.

The valet took Latham’s car to park it, so I knew where to wait for his return. But I was worried about Fearless. Had they taken him to jail?

I was afraid for my friend and feeling guilty too. What good was it for me to bail Fearless out of jail if it was just to get him thrown into prison?

I watched the front of the hotel for a minute, a minute that felt like the first sixty seconds of a twenty-year term at Alcatraz. There was no pay phone in sight and I knew that the hotel staff would be unlikely to let me make a call from the desk; and even if they were feeling generous, I didn’t want to take the chance of running across Latham and Elana.

I knew that the longer I waited, the more likely Latham was to come out and drive off, so I made my decision. I walked over to the valet who had returned from parking the cop’s car.

“Hey, brother,” I hailed.

The man’s coat was a conservative dark red and the buttons were metal but not shiny. His features were large for his face. The big eyes and expressive mouth added a startled tinge to his distrust of me. He was my size, that is to say small and slender, and suspicious of any man who claimed a relation.

“What?”

“My car broke down,” I said, pointing across and partway down the street to Layla’s gaudy Packard.

The valet, whose name tag said George, looked suspiciously at the car and back at me.

“This ain’t no garage,” he said.

“Even if it was it wouldn’t help me, ’cause I ain’t got no money for a mechanic,” I said, filling my mouth with words and self-deprecation.

“So what you want from me?” George asked sensibly.

“I wanna call my cousin,” I replied. “He come over and gimme a jump or whatever.”

“There ain’t no phone here for you,” he said. “Phone for guests or people who work here.”

“I know you got a phone at your station, man. I’ll give you a dollar and you can dial the number yourself.”

Dollar was the magic word in porter/valet/waiter language. A dollar was ten tips. A dollar bought six packs of cigarettes, enough to last a week if you didn’t have any broke friends.

George snuck me into a little cubby where he had a chair, a desk, and a phone. I fed him Milo Sweet’s number. He dialed and then handed me the receiver.

“Sweet’s,” Loretta Kuroko said pleasantly.

“You sayin’ that in my ear almost makes everything else okay,” I said.

“Hold on.” Her reply was cold and curt. I wondered if she was insulted somehow by my friendliness. I knew they didn’t have another line that she needed to answer.

“Paris,” Fearless said into the phone.

“You okay, Fearless?”

“Yeah, yeah. When the detective took off, the other cops just let me walk. I looked for you and then figured that you came here, so I did too. I’m sorry, Paris, I really am.”

“About what?”

“The bond.”

“They took it?”

“Naw. The girl saw the cops behind you. She told me an’ I saw ’em too. She said that she could hide the bond in the linin’a her purse and so I give it to her —”

“I know what happened after that,” I said.

George tapped on the door, indicating that my time was up.