“Nice place,” Fearless said as we walked up the concrete footpath to the door.
“Any place is nice if it got walls and don’t smell like smoke,” I said.
“Any place is nice if it ain’t got bars an’ it don’t smell like piss an’ disinfectant,” Fearless corrected.
I knocked on the door, wondering what kind of lie I could use on whoever answered. I expected thirty seconds at least before anyone showed. But the door swung open immediately. A tiny woman wearing a white blouse like a man’s dress shirt and a long flannel gray skirt stood there. There were spots of blood on the blouse.
When she saw our faces she was petrified. An elderly man lay on the floor behind her dressed exactly the same as she was, only the skirt was a pair of trousers instead. There was blood coming from the side of his head and also from his left shoulder.
“Leave us alone!” the woman cried, trying to push the door closed. “Don’t kill us!”
“What happened?” Fearless asked. He held the door open against her feeble shove and took a step across the threshold.
“I called the police,” the woman warned.
Fearless hesitated a moment, no more, but in that delay I realized that jail had hurt him.
“Go away!” the woman cried.
Fearless was already kneeling down over the man and peering into his pained face. I came to his side. I mean, I couldn’t very well run when I had brought us to that door. At any rate, Fearless had the keys to Layla’s car, and running on foot in L.A. is like bullfighting in a wheelchair.
“Get me something to put under his head, Paris,” Fearless said.
Behind me was a parlor of some sort. I grabbed the cushion off of a couch while Fearless said to the woman, “I need a bandage, something to stop the bleeding.”
“Please don’t kill him,” she cried.
Fearless grabbed her arm, forcing her to look down into his eyes. “I’m not gonna hurt him, but he might bleed to death if you don’t bring me a bandage or sumpin’ to stop the bleedin’.”
“Oh,” the woman uttered. “What should I do? What should I do?”
Looking around for an answer, her eyes lit upon me.
“Go get the bandages, lady,” I said.
“Oh. Oh yes.” She scurried along, slowed by the long skirt, through a door that swung open and back.
“Who are you?” the man was asking Fearless as I shoved the cushion under his head.
“Fearless Jones.”
“Are you here to rob me?”
“No.”
The man turned his head to me and asked, “What about him?”
“That’s Paris,” Fearless said. “He’s a friend.”
The pale man nodded in relief.
“What happened to you?” I asked.
“They came to take the money,” the man said to Fearless. “They vanted to, but I said no.”
“Here it is! Here it is!” Mrs. Tannenbaum said, rushing through the swinging door. In her hands was a small white pillowcase.
“Take it, Paris,” Fearless snapped. “Put some pressure on that shoulder.”
“Why did they do it? Why did they do it?” Mrs. Tannenbaum was chanting. I didn’t like her color. It was way past Caucasian on the way to chalk.
“They were trying to rob you?” I asked Sol.
“They vanted the bond, the money.” There was a dreamlike quality to his voice. He was going into shock.
He reached up and grabbed Fearless by the fabric of his silk shirt.
“Don’t let them rob Fanny,” he said.
“It’s a bet,” Fearless said.
“Oh God,” the wife cried.
Sol shuddered and tried to rise, but the pressure I was putting on his shoulder restrained him. The pain of the exertion made him wince, then he passed out.
There was a grim look on Fearless’s face. I knew from experience that that meant trouble for someone.
“He’s dead,” Mrs. Tannenbaum said simply and quietly. A whole lifetime of dread ending with a hush.
“Police!” a man’s voice commanded.
I tried to think my way back to the bookstore when it was still standing, but there was no escaping the hand that caught me by the shoulder and flung me to the floor.
7
“WHY DID YOU KILL Sol Tannenbaum?” Sergeant Bernard Latham asked for the fourteenth time.
“All I did was try and stop the bleedin’, man,” I said. Then I squinched up my face, preparing for the blow. But that time he didn’t hit me.
“Tristan confessed,” Latham said instead. The sergeant was a blocky-looking specimen. He was like the first draft of a drawing in one of the art lesson books I sold in my store. Block for a chest, squares for the pelvis, and cylinders for legs. A cube for a head. The only thing that humanized him was a protruding gut.
“Confessed to what?”
“He said you did the stabbing.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I don’t think you understand, Paris,” Latham said, pretending that he was my friend. “If he says that you did it and testifies to that, you get the gas chamber and he goes free. We don’t believe him, so what do you have to say?”
“Whatever Fearless says,” I replied.
“What?”
“Whatever Fearless says. If he said I did it, then okay, let’s go to court.”
Latham’s backhand was in great form. He could have gone pro. His blow reopened the cut that Leon Douglas had made in my mouth the day before.
A knock came on the door of the eight-by-eight gray room that the East L.A. cops used for questioning. Another white policeman stuck his head in. I was sprawled out on the painted concrete floor. Latham was deciding between a kick or another backhand.
“They want him for the lineup, Sergeant,” the head said.
When the sergeant didn’t answer, the head asked, “Should I tell them you need a few more minutes?”
It had to be a nightmare. Nobody had luck this bad.
“No,” Latham said. “We want him walking for the lineup. I can work on him some more after that.”
With that he lifted me by the shoulder and brought me to another room where a variety of black men about my size were milling around. A couple of them registered shock when they saw my face.
“Just goin’ on ugly, you the one to pick,” one man in a brown T-shirt and green pants said.
We lined up against a blank wall. A severe light came on, and we stood there. A few seconds grew to a minute. One minute became three. The light went out, and we were led from the room.
Latham came up to me, and I remembered his promise to work on me after the lineup.
It had to be a nightmare.
“Come on,” a small uniformed cop next to the sergeant said in a loud, officious voice.
“I wanted to talk to him a little more,” Latham complained.
“This man is under the authority of this precinct, Sergeant. When you arrest someone in Hollywood, you can have a shot.” Obviously Little Big Mouth didn’t like the sergeant.
I followed him to a large room that was cut in two by a metal grate. On the other side of the grate were large metal shelves with cardboard boxes stacked in them.
A door to my left opened. A lanky police officer walked in, followed by Fearless. My friend was glowering until he saw me. Then he smiled.
“Hey hey, Paris.”
I sighed in response. He knew how I felt. His jaw was lopsided from some heavy questions they asked him.
I looked around for Latham, but he was nowhere to be seen.
“All right,” the cop who accompanied Fearless said. “You guys can go now. But we know where you live.”