Walter Mosley - Fearless Jones

“You know better than that,” I said.

“We are not murderers, Mr. Minton. We would not kill a man who has not committed a crime against us. The policeman was, how do you say, suggested to us by people we know. We did not trust him. We did not tell him to kill. We only wanted the bond that Fanny Tannenbaum gave to Leon Douglas.”

“Okay,” I said. “Now here you guys is livin’ in the lap’a luxury, fresh off the boat from Israel, don’t know a damn thing and ain’t got no friends to help you, except one crooked cop; but still you go lookin’ for a bond changed hands between Sol Tannenbaum and Leon Douglas’s girlfriend. That don’t even add up to numbers, man.”

John Manly spoke up then. “Mr. Latham was not an honest man, but he was a good detective. When David Tannenbaum was still in prison, the good sergeant found out that Leon Douglas was his protector. When Leon was released, Latham became suspicious. He was already keeping an eye on Hedva and David through a friend of his who was a policeman in their neighborhood.”

Ari muttered something in Fanny’s tongue. I didn’t understand a single word except for svartza.

“You ain’t listenin’ to me, brother,” Fearless said. “We want the dude caused it all; we want him to pay for what he did. Money’s nice — we could all use some, I’m sure — but this is about making the traitor Jew pay for what he did.”

“But we don’t know where he is,” Manly insisted.

“If we did, we would have him already,” Lev added.

“Are you after the thief or the money he stole?” Fearless impressed me with his question.

Lev hesitated a moment too long before replying, “Both of course.”

“You tell us where to find Zimmerman, and we give you the suicide note,” Fearless said.

The men were all silent. I couldn’t tell the mood of the room, so I decided to concentrate on the kid. If a fight broke out, I figured I could take him — at least I could try.

“He’s with his old Nazi overboss, Otto Holderlin,” John Manly added. “If we knew where he was, we would demand his arrest. But I doubt that we will find him.”

“Why’s that?” I asked.

“From what we could find out, his accountants were moving his monies to Equador, Brazil, and Panama. Herr Zimmerman is moving south for the weather.”

“How much you pay for the money if we lead you to it?” I asked.

“Thirty thousand dollars.”

“But you don’t get a thing,” Fearless said to the Israelis, “till we see about Zimmerman.”

32

“THAT SOUNDS pretty okay, huh, Paris?” Fearless said on our way down the block to our car.

“What?”

“Thirty thousand. Even split three ways you could still start a new bookstore with that kinda scratch.”

“That was just talk, Fearless. We don’t know where the money is. And what the fuck were you doin’ in there anyways?”

“Pushin ’em a little,” Fearless said almost innocently. “Pushin ’em to work with us on this thing.”

“Why you after Zimmerman? You don’t know him. You ain’t even ever met him.”

“It’s Zimmerman had Sol killed.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Yes I do, Paris. And he gonna pay.”

“Pay how?”

“With blood and money, his freedom or his life,” Fearless said.

“And what’s all this stuff about money?”

“It ain’t about money, it’s about the man who destroyed Fanny and Sol.”

“Morris killed Fanny.”

“’Cause Zimmerman drove him crazy.”

“What does that have to do with you tellin’ them spies up there that we know where the money is? Now they gonna be after us.”

“Not after I told ’em I lied,” Fearless said.

“And what if they don’t believe you?”

“You give ’em the note that Morris wrote and say you sorry.”

HALF AN HOUR LATER we cruised past Gella’s home. Three black-and-white police cruisers were parked out front.

“I guess they must’a found Morris,” I said.

“She must be hurtin’ over that,” Fearless said. “That was the last family she had in life.” There was an indictment in his tone.

“And how would me draggin’ her upstairs to see his corpse make it hurt any less?”

“You could have comforted her, Paris.”

“No, no. That’s you, Mr. Jones. You the one talk to corpses and kiss married women under their husbands’ noses. It’s you who walks into a room full’a spies and puts our lives on the line. Me, I just hold tight and try not to get washed overboard.”

Fearless’s response to my tirade was to light up a cigarette. “Where to now?” he asked half a Camel later.

“Milo might have something, but he could wait. There’s one thing in all this that don’t fit,” I said. “It might be a long shot, but then again, maybe not.”

I drove back to south L.A., back to a nameless alley off of Slauson. It was mostly backyards and trash cans in that alley, but there was one doorway that led to a flight of rickety unpainted stairs. At the top of those stairs was a hallway of apartments. The front of the building, on Avalon, was condemned, but the landlord, a man named Mofass, let the units illegally for fifteen dollars a month.

Theodore Wally had lived in number three since his mother died six years earlier. I knew that because I had a girlfriend who used to live there until she got TB and went back to Lake Charles.

Wally took a long time to let us in. We heard him scurrying around in there. When he opened the door, he had on pants and nothing else. His yellow chest was almost concave, and the hickey on his neck was so purple that it might have bled. I imagined some fat girl pinning him down with her girth while sucking mercilessly on his neck.

“Mr. Minton,” he said, near tears it seemed. “Fearless. What can I do for you?”

“Let us in, Wally,” I said.

“I-I-It’s n-n-not really a good t-t-time for me,” he stuttered. “The house is a mess and… and… and I got a cold. I promised my uncle that I’d help him move.”

“Move it, man,” I said.

Theodore made room, and we came into his wreck of a home. His once-upholstered sofa showed its cotton stuffing and at least one spring. The wood floor was uncovered, unpainted, and un-swept. There was a console radio against the wall and a boarded-up window that allowed a few shafts of sunlight to poke through. The room was longer than it was wide, and it wasn’t that long. There were two chairs and a table with a hot plate and various dirty dishes thereupon. But there was also a tall glass vase holding three long-stemmed white roses that were as big as apples and lovelier than summer clouds. They released an odd but still sweet odor that seemed familiar but not like roses.

“What you want, Mr. Minton?”

“Call me Paris,” I said.

“Okay.”

“Call me Paris.”

“Okay… Paris.”

“Now talk to me about my store,” I said.

“What you mean?” The clerk hunched up one shoulder and listed to that side. He smiled like a fool who couldn’t possibly know anything. But that act wasn’t going to work on me.

Fearless strolled over to one of the chairs and sat down. The movement seemed to alarm Wally.

“What you talkin’ ’bout Mr. — I mean, Paris?”

“I mean that dude beat on me didn’t burn down my store. He said he didn’t, and he had no reason to lie. So somebody else must’a did it.”

“I don’t know who did it,” Wally claimed.

“Now that’s a lie.”

He was trembling there in front of us, looking around as if he expected some accomplice to jump out and save his life. But no one jumped, and we were still there.

Wally belched loudly. His face contorted with nausea.