Walter Mosley - Fearless Jones

Milo was always the darkest man in the room, except when he was in the room with Fearless. He was taller than I but not six feet. He had big hands and long arms, bright white eyes and teeth and the complexion of polished charcoal. His short hair was always loaded with pomade and combed to the right. He knew the definition of every word in the dictionary and every once in a while managed to beat me at a game of chess.

“Milo,” I hailed. “How’s it goin’?”

“Must be good for somebody, somewhere. Must be. But don’t ask me where.”

I sat down and submitted to the scrutiny of those bright eyes.

“What’s wrong, Paris?”

“Who said anything was wrong?”

“Your eyes is red. Your head is hangin’. You don’t have a chessboard or a book under your arm, so you must be here on bidness.” Milo paused and looked a little harder. “And if it’s bidness you here for, it can’t be for you because if it was, you’d be in jail and callin’ me on the phone. It ain’t tax time, and you sure don’t make enough money to need financial advice. So if it ain’t you, then it must be Fearless.” Milo enjoyed reading between the lines. He was good at it, I had to admit that. “But you refused to come up with his fine before, so now something must have changed. That means I was right in the first place and you are in trouble. So, what’s wrong, Paris?”

“Believe me, Mr. Sweet, you don’t wanna know. I got to get Fearless outta jail and I got to do it fast. Will you help me?”

“I ain’t no bank.”

“You’re not a German insurance salesman either.”

Milo didn’t bother to answer that swipe. I put a stack of five one-hundred-dollar bills on the table and then placed a twenty crosswise on that.

“It’s all I got,” I apologized.

“You expect me to spring him for just twenty?”

“I’ll pay the rest in four weeks’ time.”

I had done work for Milo in the past. Asked a few questions, come up with an address or two on bail jumpers, but it still burned him when he felt that he was being had.

“I can’t do it, Paris,” he whined. “It would set a bad example.”

“I’m not tellin’ anybody, Miles.”

“Can you at least make it thirty?”

“They burned down my store, man,” I said. “They took my money and my car and burned down my goddamn store.” My voice cracked and I had to blink hard to shut down my tear ducts.

Milo began rapping his knuckles on the desktop. His look changed. It was no friendlier, but the animosity was now aimed at some unknown perpetrator.

“Your bookstore?”

“Yeah.”

“Why?” There was pain in Milo’s voice.

“I don’t know, but if I don’t do somethin’ soon, they might burn me down too.”

“Shit, Paris. What did you do?”

I pondered his question. I had asked it a hundred times of Fearless Jones. I couldn’t believe the trouble he’d get into and all he would say is, I didn’t do nuthin’, Paris. I was just mindin’ my own business. But what had I done? How could I have avoided Elana Love and Leon Douglas?

“I’on’t know, man. Maybe God looked down and saw all the shit I done got away wit’ an’ decided to mete out my punishment just when things started to get good.”

“Amen,” Milo said. “Amen to that.” He shook his head and smiled, then he looked at his watch. “It’s too late to get him out today. I’ll drop by the courthouse on my way home and make the arrangements, but we have to go get him tomorrow mornin’. Where you gonna sleep tonight?”

“I don’t know.”

“Loretta,” Milo called across the room.

“Yes, Mr. Sweet?” she replied.

“Pull out the cot. Paris is gonna be our watchdog tonight.”

“Yes sir.”

AT FIVE-THIRTY, when Milo and Loretta went home, I started going through the phone books of L.A., looking for Love. I found four listings. I called the numbers, asking for Elana, but of the two that were still connected there was no clue. The two that had been disconnected were an Alvin Love in Santa Monica, which I doubted would be fruitful, and an E. E. Love on Twenty-eighth Street.

I lay back and read the newspaper after exhausting the phone book. Then I had a notion. In the phone book there was only one Tannenbaum. The first name was David, not Sol, but his address in East Los Angeles was the same one Elana had given to me the day before, on Hazzard. We’d been headed to his house when Leon and his friend tried to run us down. I considered dialing the number, but then I held back. One thing I was sure of: surviving Leon Douglas was going to take more subtlety than a call announcing how smart I was.

I turned out the lights at about nine. Milo’s canvas cot was no more than a stretcher held aloft by crossed sticks of oak at either end. I lay there, the wounded soldier, the man who never asked for war and wouldn’t benefit from its outcome.

Up until that moment I had been going on reflex: running and hiding. But on that stretcher, in that coffin-shaped room, with only the occasional squawk of a dreaming hen to break the silence, I decided what I needed and what I had to do. It didn’t matter that I was small and weak or even that I begged for my life when that man was slapping me. None of that mattered because that bookstore was what made me somebody rather than just anybody. Burning down my store was just the same as shooting me, and somebody would have to make restitution for that crime.

LORETTA WAS in at eight o’clock exactly. I made coffee for her in the little kitchenette that they had built in the closet.

“Nine years with Mr. Sweet and he never even bought me a coffee,” she said, smiling at me.

I had put away the folding cot under the kitchenette counter and returned all of the phone books. Loretta went to her desk and started working immediately. I sat at Milo’s desk, thinking how lucky I was to have friends.

Milo shamed me with his generosity. Here I was trying to bail Fearless out of jail, but there was no kindness to it. I needed his protection and peculiar kind of smarts.

Fearless wasn’t a bright man, at least not in straightforward thinking. He only read at a sixth-grade level even though he had finished high school. A child could beat him at checkers two times out of three. But Fearless could survive in the harshest environments. He could tell you if a man was going to pull out a gun or cry. You could fool Fearless Jones sometimes, but he always seemed to make the right choices when the chips were down. And he had eyes in the back of his head.

But the best thing about Fearless was the attribute he was named for; he didn’t fear anything, not death or pain or any kind of passion. That’s why women loved him unconditionally. Because he wasn’t afraid of their fire.

MILO CAME IN at ten-thirty, but he didn’t even sit down.

“Messages?” he asked Loretta.

“Nothing to look at,” she said without looking up.

“Come on, Paris,” Milo said.

I followed him out the door into the strong smell of chickens.

Milo drove a green Ford Fairlane with bright chrome details. It was a fine car to ride in, but I missed my red Nash Rambler. I thought about going to the cops over the car theft, but then I worried about what they’d find and what Elana would say if she were caught.

We arrived at the county jail downtown half an hour later. Milo had set up the release by phone, so all we had to do was go to an oak-framed window that was the only opening in a huge wall facing an empty chamber on the basement floor of the county courthouse and jail building. A small white woman with gold-rimmed glasses sat on a high stool on the other side of the window ledge.