Walter Mosley - Fearless Jones

“This is all I wanted to start with, Father Vincent. I don’t want any trouble.”

“What’s this about a policeman?”

“There was a cop killed with Grove.”

“How do you know that?”

“It’s in the late edition of the Examiner, ” I lied. But it was late enough for me to have seen an afternoon article. “Where’d you find out?”

“The police came. They told me what happent. They didn’t say nuthin’ ’bout no policeman gettin’ killed.”

I hunched my shoulders.

“What do you want, Mr. Lockwood?”

“I wanna know what that white man had to say to you.”

“What white man?”

“The one who you talked to the night that I came knockin’ at your door.”

“You were spying on me?” The Holy Roller’s voice rose, promising righteous retribution to follow, but I wasn’t impressed.

“There’s a lotta money in this, Vincent. And at least four dead people —”

“Four?”

“A woman was murdered too. And a man, an associate of Leon Douglas, died of gunshot wounds in a hospital a few days ago.”

The mention of Douglas hit Vincent like a slap.

“What does any of this have to do with me?” he asked.

“To begin with,” I said. “You don’t want the people who killed Grove to kill you. And to end with, you might be concerned at the worth of that bearer bond.”

“Do you have it?”

“Have what?”

Vincent pinched his lower lip and tugged at it.

“You know what,” he said.

“Who was that white man?” I asked again.

“You aren’t the one in power here, Lockwood,” the minister said, seeking strength in his own words. “This is my stronghold. Those men outside answer to me now that William is gone. At just a word I can bring a terrible wrath down on you.”

I took my time before answering, allowing the air to seep out of his hollow threat. “Yeah, yeah,” I said. “Bigelow breathes on me hard and I tell ’im that there’s a bond somebody wanna buy for a hundred thousand dollars and then he kills me. And then he grabs you and says, ‘We all get a taste’a this pie.’ And if you’re lucky, you see a few bucks. That is, if one of the deacons don’t off you, or if they don’t do somethin’ stupid and get you arrested.”

“You should be careful what accusations you make, boy.”

“I’m not the one who has to be careful, Reverend. It’s you who’s got to watch out. ’Cause the man you set up with Grove might figure out that it was you called the crooked cop and told him they were comin’.”

“What kinda stupidity are you talkin’?” Vincent’s eyes grew wider with each syllable.

“A man called Latham at the motel he was at,” I said, holding up a finger as if I were the elder’s teacher. “Right after that, Latham tore outta there. Grove was already outside, though, Grove and a partner. The way I see it, Elana put Latham to sleep with a special wiggle she got, and then she called you, because she heard somewhere that Grove could turn that bond into gold. You called Grove, and him and a friend went over there. But then you called Latham to warn him. That’s the way I see it.”

“Th-th-that’s crazy,” he said. “Crazy.”

“No, it ain’t. Not crazy, it’s evil.” Those words broke down the minister’s defenses. “And if somebody find out about it, retribution gonna belong to them.”

“I ain’t sayin’ that anyone called me,” he said. “But even if they did, and even if I did send William down there, why would I turn around and warn the cop that I sent him?”

“Because Grove stole your congregation,” I said. “Because he brought in those goons callin’ themselves deacons, because they were using your church to sell stolen merchandise. But mostly just because you saw the opportunity and you took it.”

It could have happened differently, but Vincent’s frightened eyes told me that I was right.

“It had to be that white man with him,” I said. “ ’Cause Grove was afraid of Leon, and, anyway, Sol didn’t take no millions from some Negro.”

My voice was strong, but my knees were weak. I swore to myself that if I got out of the building and into my car, I would drive to Chicago, change my name, and end my days as a dishwasher on the southside.

“You cain’t prove that,” Vincent said.

“I don’t need to,” I replied. “You’re the one gonna be in trouble if anyone hears that Latham was warned. All I have to do is cast blame, and your goose is cooked.”

“What do you want from me, Lockwood?”

“I want you to answer my questions. No bullshit.”

“What you wanna know?”

“First of all, why did you run from your place on Central?”

Father Vincent glared at me with something close to hatred in his eyes.

“William’s girlfriend, Elana Love, got hold of a bond,” he said. “Through her old boyfriend, who was in prison. William decided that he was going to cash it in. He went to a bank, but they told him that they could only cash it for the man it was signed to. He should have let it alone right there, but William was a greedy man, he had to have everything he saw.

“The man the bond was made out to was a Jew in jail with Elana’s boyfriend. William went to the Jew’s wife with some lie and got her to tell him who it was the old man stole from.”

“So what?” I asked. “What good would that do?”

“He goes to ’em —”

“To who?”

“Lawson and Widlow, the accountants. He goes to ’em and says he got their money in a bond. They tell him that they’re all so interested and make a meeting at the church to see the bond —”

“He didn’t show it to ’em?”

“William was greedy to a fault but wasn’t stupid. He kept the bond safe in case they tried to use muscle or the law on ’im. Anyway, the next thing we knew, they had three white hoodlums down there knockin’ at our door. Real thugs. Me and William could see through the curtains that they didn’t come to negotiate, so we made it out the back and had the deacons move us out overnight.”

“That’s it?” I asked.

Father Vincent looked in my eyes and saw that he had to give more to be let off the hook.

“Elana got mad ’cause William wouldn’t tell her why we were runnin’ or who was after him.”

“She didn’t know about the accountants?”

Vincent shook his head. “William didn’t trust that girl. He just wanted to be on her good side.”

“Did he stay there?”

“No. Elana took the bond back and left him.”

I realized that Elana had known where Grove was the whole time she was crying in my bookstore.

“Good riddance to bad garbage,” Vincent said. “Everything was okay for a couple’a months. We moved out here, and William kept a low profile. He still did some fencin’, but not so much as before. But then that Leon Douglas, Elana’s old boyfriend, got outta jail. Douglas beat William somethin’ terrible. He beat him so bad that he realized that Elana had to be lyin’ about him havin’ the bond, so they left — leavin’ William to bleed.

“After that, William called the accountants again. He told them that he was in hidin’, that they couldn’t find him, but maybe he could still get their bond.”

“Why he say that?” I asked.

“ ’Cause he was a fool,” Vincent declared. “The only thing he got outta that beatin’ was that the bond must’a been worth somethin’ more than what Elana said. Two days later the accountants sent over the man, and we had a meetin’.”

“What was that about?”

“It was a man named Holderlin,” the minister said. He sat back against a shelf, weak himself from the strain of our bluffs. “He told us that Leon had been working for him to get the bond but that Leon lost the girl, so he needed our help to find her. Holderlin said that he was working for the Jewish government, that money was stole from them by this Tannenbaum guy. He said that the bond was probably one of many, that they were probably printed in sequence. He said one bond would lead to the rest and that there would be a finder’s fee.”