Walter Mosley - Fearless Jones

She poured me a shot of peach schnapps in a cute little crystal thimble. Gella didn’t understand drinking the way her auntie did. I was sitting in the alcove, her standing before me. I downed the shot and put the thimble down in plain view, hoping that she’d get the hint.

“Sol is dead,” she said.

“When?”

“They called just before you got here. He died in his bed. Heart attack.”

I remembered what the maternity nurse, Rya McKenzie, had said about heart attacks but kept my silence on the subject.

“What did we do to deserve this?” she asked.

I got up and put my arms around her. She was a little taller than I, but still she got her head on my shoulder. I realized what Fearless meant about being there for someone who needs it. It was a small lesson on a bad day, and I wondered if I would remember it later on.

We stood there breathing, sobbing, being silent in the embrace. I was thinking about what I had to do next to keep out of trouble and to help Fearless realize that we were in over our heads. I pulled half away from the clinch, still holding on to her upper arms.

“He have any friends?” I asked.

“Sol?”

“Morris.”

“Oh.” That was a more difficult question. “Morris never had many friends. He was too serious for the young people who came to shul. He was always nervous and shy about how big he was. He was all the time saying how people made fun of him.”

“You got somethin’ to eat in the icebox?” I asked about food because I didn’t want to hear any more about how her Sad Sack husband didn’t have any friends and because I didn’t want to run him down in front of probably the only person who ever loved him since his mother.

“Oh yes,” she said brightly.

There was leftover meat loaf and stuffed cabbage that Fanny had made for them four days before. That and a Cel-Ray soda from the Jewish market was my dinner.

“She was a great cook,” Gella said, trying not to cry over the food. “They were both wonderful. He saved my father and me from the Nazis. He was a great man who would die for what is right.”

She switched over from meat loaf to heroism in wartime so quickly that I almost missed the meaning of her words.

“Some people said that it was because my father was rich that Sol saved us. But all our money was stolen by a man named Zimmerman. Sol knew that.”

“Who’s Zimmerman?”

“A Jew who worked with the SS men that sought out and deported Jews. They knew that some Jews had hidden their jewelry and valuables from German banks because they didn’t want to be robbed by the Nazis. Zimmerman came to my father and offered him our freedom for Papa’s art collection. But my father found out that Zimmerman lied and ran with me. After the war my father was broken. He lived with Sol and Fanny until he died.”

There was nothing for me to say. Sol and Fanny were saints.

“There’s a man named Jonas,” Gella said after a while.

“Who’s he?”

“Simon,” she said. “I think that’s his first name. He’s one of Mo’s friends. He’s not Jewish and so…” She let her own ideas of race and separation hang in the air a moment.

“Would Morris go to see his friend if he was upset? Somebody to talk to and drink with?” I suggested, indicating my empty glass.

“I don’t know,” she said, shaking her head. “Maybe.”

“Did you call him and ask?”

“I don’t know his telephone number. Morris never writes numbers down, he has a perfect memory.” She was proud of him, and scared for him, but still she wouldn’t call this non-Jewish man.

“You want me to see if I can find this Simon guy and ask him somethin’?”

GELLA BROUGHT ME the phone book. Simon was the only Jonas out of over eighty thousand entries.

“Is he married?” I asked Gella.

“No.”

Maybe it wasn’t only his religion she didn’t like, I thought. “Well then maybe I better go knock on his door.”

I stood up, and so did Gella.

“What’s wrong?” I asked her.

“Nothing.”

“Don’t you want me to go?”

“Yes, but…”

“Don’t you want me to find Morris?”

“I’m afraid.”

“You think he might be with another woman?”

“No.”

“What then?”

“I want to go with.”

“You mean ride with me down to Culver City in the middle’a the night?”

She nodded innocently.

“I cain’t do that.”

“But I must go.”

“Why?”

“Hedva was killed in her own home. In her own house.”

I looked around Gella’s identical dwelling and knew that she was right.

“Listen,” I said. “You might not know this, but cops like to get target practice on Negro men when they see ’em with white women. You get me?”

She nodded.

“So you have to lay low in the backseat if you gonna ride with me, okay?”

“Yes.”

I wanted her to say something else, something to reassure me, but I didn’t know what that could be.

“Okay then. Now go get that bottle’a schnapps, close it tight, and bring it along.”

“You want to bring liquor to find Morris?”

“Medicine,” I said. “Just in case you or me, or Morris when we find him, gets a case’a the nerves.”

30

I WAS DRIVING in a white neighborhood in the middle of the night with an open bottle of peach schnapps in the glove compartment, a married white woman hiding in the backseat, and a stolen .38-caliber pistol next to the gearshift on the floor. It was a far cry from my bookstore days, selling Popular Mechanics and Batman.

“Tell me somethin’,” I called to the backseat.

“Yes, Mr. Minton.”

“Why you gonna trust me?”

“What do you mean?” she asked.

I didn’t know if it was the question or the articulation of black English versus her own Europeanized English that she wondered about.

“I mean, why would you call me or Fearless when your husband goes missin’? Why not call somebody you know, or the cops?”

“I don’t know many people,” she said. “Just Hedva and Sol, and Morris. We don’t have many friends. And the police didn’t like Morris. That’s why he was upset, because they weren’t trying to find the black man who stabbed Sol.”

“I’m a black man.”

“But Fanny trusted you. She told me that it wasn’t you who came after Sol. And I can see that you and Fearless are good men, not murderers.”

I have never been as certain of anything as Gella was of me.

SIMON JONAS LIVED on the left side of a one-story two-family house on Cassidy in Culver City. The light was on, but that didn’t mean that Morris Greenspan was around. Gella didn’t want to go to Jonas’s door, so I went alone.

“Yeah?” a very large and blond specimen of Americana said. He answered after the fourth ring. “What do you want?”

“Morris Greenspan.”

“Who the fuck are you, nigger?” He enjoyed the last word. It brought a grin to his big mouth. He was wearing blue jeans and no shirt. His skin was streaked with oily grime.

“Byron Leeds,” I said in an amiable enough tone. “I’m a friend of the aunt and uncle of his wife. He drove off, and his wife hasn’t seen him. She said you and him were friends, and, well, I was in the neighborhood.”

“His aunt got killed,” Jonas said. Light began to dawn on his filthy face. “Hey. He said it was a nigger did it, stabbed his uncle too.”

“When did he tell you that?”

“What you say?”

Mr. Jonas and I were at a crossroads. He was measuring my size and disposition while glancing behind me to see if I had come alone. I, on the other hand, had split into two separate personalities. The first and foremost of these was the one that felt an intense hatred for the blond mechanic who hated me and insulted me without the slightest knowledge of my personal worth.