Walter Mosley - Fearless Jones

Again Milo nodded.

“We know that Leon was after Elana, but then they were together, that there was a white man at the Pine Grove Hotel who met with Latham and Elana probably about the bond. Maybe he even has the bond now. Maybe he’s the one with the money. If that’s true, then Elana’s long gone. There’s another white man, John Manly, he said, who knew that Sol wasn’t home. He wanted to talk to Fanny in the worst way, but he was probably just a real-estate agent who heard about Sol somehow and thought he might find someone who needed to sell off their house for hospital bills. And then there’s the little old white man named Zev Minor, who came to their house and opened the front door without ringing the bell. Latham is dead. William Grove is dead. Fanny Tannenbaum is dead. My bookstore done burned, and Sol is in the hospital — and it’s him probably that stole the money in the first place. And, oh yeah, whatever money there is, it’s between ten thousand francs and ten million dollars.”

“Shouldn’t you just drop it?” Loretta Kuroko said.

“What’s that, Loretta?” Milo asked. He didn’t sound angry or brusque at his secretary for interrupting our talk. He was sincerely interested in her opinion.

“A policeman is dead, Mr. Sweet. A cop. They can come and take you away over that, take you away for good.”

Fearless sat up. I began drumming my fingers on Milo’s desk.

“But he was a crooked cop,” Milo said. “The newspaper didn’t even identify him as an officer. You know somebody’s hidin’ somethin’ behind that. And this is real money too.”

“Anyway,” Fearless added. “We didn’t shoot him.”

“Why would any’a these people burn down your store, Paris?” Milo asked. He blew out a thick cloud of cigar smoke.

“Man as mean as Leon Douglas, he might burn the muthahfuckah down just outta spite,” I said.

“Maybe it was an accident,” the ex-lawyer suggested.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “Theodore said that the police thought it was started with gasoline. But I should probably check that out anyway. I mean, maybe somebody saw something.”

Milo nodded.

“But what I wanna know,” I continued, “is why should we even be talkin’ ’bout this? I mean, the bond is gone, and we don’t even know who has it. It could be Elana, it could be the man Fearless saw running down the alley. And whoever that was, it might be somebody in on it or just some bum got scared when he heard shots.”

“It wasn’t no bum,” Fearless added.

“How you know that?” Milo asked.

“ ’Cause Latham was farther up the alley. He was runnin’ an’ I don’t see Latham runnin’ from one man. He was tough. There was two men after him, and the one who got away was the one who kilt the cop and tore open the purse.”

“You don’t know that,” I said, but I wasn’t sure that he was wrong.

“If Grove’s partner has the bond, then it’s over,” Milo said.

“We don’t know if that was his partner,” I said. “And we don’t know if he got the bond. Elana took off in Latham’s car. She lit outta there wit’out lookin’ back. Maybe she got it.”

“Maybe,” Milo said. “But that’s an if even in the best light. The real way to the money is this Tannenbaum man. Maybe if we went to him and told him what happened, he’d give us somethin’.”

We turned to Fearless then.

“What?” he complained.

“You the one he likes,” I said.

“I told him that I’d protect his wife, and you see what that did?”

“You couldn’t help that, son,” the suddenly paternal Milo Sweet said.

“He’s right, Fearless,” I added. “Sol’d want you to tell him about what’s happenin’. He would. You don’t have to tell him about Fanny.”

“You think he don’t know? You think he don’t know that his wife for forty-some years ain’t comin’ to the hospital t’see ’im? He knows. But you right, I should go there. I should go there an’ make sure nobody else come into that room.”

“You’ll ask him about the bond?” Milo suggested.

“I’ll tell ’im what I know,” Fearless said. “And then he can tell me what he wants.”

“I’ll go back over to the bookstore,” I said. “Maybe somebody knows about the fire, if it was set like the cops and the firemen suspected.”

“Okay,” Milo said. “Okay, you guys go out and do what you think is right, what you think is gonna get somethin’. But remember, this is money here. Money. Don’t go out there actin’ like this is everyday goin’ to work or throwin’ some dice. This is the big time. You go out there and your life is on the line. So try an’ bring somethin’ back wichya.”

I was moved by Milo’s pep talk, but I doubt if Fearless was. From the few political books I had read I knew Fearless was a natural-born anarchist. If he had what he needed, he thought of himself as a rich man; if he had less, well, that would have to do.

“What you gonna do, Milo?” I asked our partner.

“Ask a few questions. Get a few lies. Ask somethin’ else and then see what don’t jibe.” He was a poet of the lawyer’s caste.

25

FEARLESS, MILO, AND I WERE all set to go, Fearless to ride shotgun on Sol’s hospital bed, and Milo to gather information in his own secret ways.

Milo’s gas tank ran on schemes. He was into clandestine realestate deals, small-business investments, and some more shady enterprises. He was serious about everything he did, and most projects he got involved with, I felt, had a good chance of making it. But Milo was impatient. He wanted to see the money. He wanted a Cadillac and a fat Cuban cigar. After a few months he’d always start pushing. He’d expand before the business showed a profit or sell out for another, more promising scheme before the one he was into had a chance to grow.

When I first met Milo I wanted to do business with him. I was always asking his advice and suggesting that he take me in as a partner. But as time passed and I saw how he never got past the first stages, I was happy that he was too jealous to let anybody else in on his deals.

So when Milo left for one of his clandestine negotiations, I didn’t expect much. I had business of my own, business in which failure was not an easy pill to swallow.

“Paris,” Loretta said to me as I was following her boss out the door.

“Yeah?”

“Hold on a minute, will you?”

The door shut behind Milo, and I went back to Miss Kuroko’s desk.

“I didn’t want to say anything in front of Milo,” she said hesitantly. “You know how he gets when he thinks that he’s being taken advantage of.”

“What’d I do now?” I asked.

“It’s the phone calls.”

“What calls?”

“The women.”

“Oh shit,” I said. “Here we go. Women got a whiff that Fearless is over here?”

“They’re calling for you too, Paris,” Loretta said, as if I knew it all along. “And you know how Milo feels about using his office for personal affairs.”

“Women? What women? Ain’t no women callin’ on me.”

“Charlotte Bingham,” Loretta said.

“Who?”

“She said you knew her from the Charles Diner.”

“The Charles…” I stopped when I remembered the young woman with the scar. “Oh. Uh, did she leave a number?”

Loretta handed me a small orange slip of paper with the waitress’s information.

“And what about this Gella Greenspan calling for Fearless?” the secretary asked.

“Who? Oh.”

“You don’t have to pretend, Paris.”

“I’m not pretendin’, Loretta. I can’t remember all these names. Gella is the woman whose aunt got killed.”

“Oh.” An urgency entered the woman’s tone. “She said that it was important to get in touch with Fearless, but I thought…”