I had been working for all of five minutes when Fearless started yawning. “What you doin’, Paris?” he whined.
The letter was impossible to reconstruct in the time I had. It would have probably taken two or three hours, seeing that it was scrawled in small pale blue letters on both sides of at least three pages. To make it even more difficult, the words had blurred from the moisture of the coffee grounds.
The notes were written in black ink on white paper except for one that was written in pencil and another that was written on yellow paper. I concentrated on these two.
Fearless opened the front door and whistled for the dog, who came bounding in like the loyal family pet.
“Hey, boy. Hey, boy,” Fearless chanted from the living room.
I didn’t have to go far to see that the penciled note was a shopping list — scouring powder and Modess napkins were all I needed for that.
The yellow note had San Quentin Prison printed across the bottom. Above that, in black letters, the initials C.T. were printed slantways, along with a phone number that had an Axminster exchange.
There was a phone in Elana’s bedroom, but it was dead, so we let Fearless’s new pet into the backseat and drove toward a gas station on Slauson. I didn’t want to bring the dog, but I didn’t have the time to argue with Fearless either.
I did say, “Don’t you think somebody’s gonna miss his pet?”
“If he had a collar or license I’d take him home right this minute,” Fearless replied. “You know a dog catcher could be givin’ him cyanide tomorrow if we just let him go.”
That was the end of our discussion.
When we got to the gas station I put a nickel into the slot. C.T., whoever that was, was a long shot. But it was the only shot we had.
He answered on the first ring. “Leon, is that you, man?” His voice sounded like a metal file rasping against stone.
“C.T.?” I asked, disguising my voice just in case this rough man ever heard me speak again.
“Who is?” he asked.
“It’s me — Dingo,” I said. I regretted the name as soon as I said it. I was scared stupid.
“Who?”
“Leon told me to call you up. He wanted me to come and get you but —”
“Get me? Man, I could hardly sit up straight.”
“Leon said to come help —”
“You a doctor?”
“I can take care’a you,” I said, trying to make my fake voice sound certain. “I got a brother used to be a medic in the army with me.”
There was silence on the line.
“C.T.?”
“Why you callin’ me that?”
“That’s what Leon wrote on the paper, man. Ain’t that you? I mean if —”
“When you gonna get here?” he asked, interrupting me for the third time.
“That’s why I called. He wrote down your initials and phone, but I can’t read the address. Clinton sumpin’.”
“Clinton?” C.T. moaned. “Denker, man. Twenty-nine sixty-nine Denker. Super’s apartment.”
“Be right there,” I said in a husky voice that would have fooled even my mother.
“YOU GOT my pistol, Paris?” Fearless asked over the loud barking in the backseat.
“I told you already, the girl stole it.”
“That was my gun she took from you?”
“Yes.” I took the left onto Denker.
“An’ now you want me to walk unarmed into the house of a friend of a ex-con nearly killed you yesterday?”
“He don’t know me, Fearless. I’ll just walk in there an’ tell him I’m Leon’s friend.” Finding that phone number and fooling C.T. had given me a sense of control.
“What if he was the one sittin’ next to Leon when he was chasin’ yo’ ass down the street?”
“Shit.” My fingers went suddenly cold.
“That’s okay, man. I’ll go in first. But you owe me a pistol.”
THE ADDRESS C.T. had given us was a court of apartments at the corner of Horn. We left the dog in the car. The super’s apartment was listed under the name of Conrad Benjamin Till. Whoever designed the court must have been a fan of Minos’s maze. After every two doorways there was another turn. I lost my sense of direction almost immediately.
Most of the apartments were dark, as the next day was a workday. We went past a pair of teenagers having some kinda sex behind a skimpy rosebush. I don’t know if they saw us, but they sure didn’t stop.
NO ONE ANSWERED when we rang Conrad’s bell. No one called out when we knocked. Fearless had brought Layla’s tire iron in lieu of a pistol and used it on the door. The sound of that doorjamb being wrenched open by that twelve-pound tire iron was frightening; loud and whining with reports like small-caliber gunshots now and then. I looked around to see if anyone had turned on their lights; no one had, but that didn’t mean we hadn’t been heard or seen.
Fearless went in first, but I was right on his heels, running my hands along the wall. I didn’t find a light switch, but Fearless snagged the overhead cord and said, “I got it.”
Yellow light flooded the small sitting room as I was closing the front door.
Fearless said, “Dog.”
There on a low, modern couch sat a fresh corpse.
He probably had been darker before all the blood drained out, but he’d always be a light-skinned Negro with brown freckles across his wide nose. His face seemed to belong on a fat man, but he was of normal build. He wore a light-colored jacket, blood-soaked T-shirt, and threadbare jeans. Till must’ve died right after we got off the phone.
I was looking at the dead man, but my mind was working overtime trying to believe that he wasn’t there. I’d happened upon dead bodies before in my life: three children in a car wreck outside of Turner, Texas, the body of a sailor I saw on the shore at the Gulf of Mexico, and there’s been a murdered body or two on the street. I once saw the victims of a double lynching hung from an ancient live oak not two miles from my mother’s home. I’ve seen a good many deaths, but none of them, with the exception of those cops that Fearless killed, had anything to do with me.
I had sought out Conrad Till. And if I wasn’t careful I’d end up just like him.
“The first one’s always hard,” Fearless said.
“Say what?”
“When me and my squad’d go out in Germany it was always the first man get killed get to us,” he said in an impossibly calm voice. “Didn’t matter if it was one’a us or one’a them. It’s just that first dead man that reminds you that this is serious business.”
With that Fearless moved to inspect the room. I moved too, his nonchalant bravery having turned my terror into mere heart-pounding fear.
Till’s tan jacket had as much wet blood on it as dry. There was a lot of blood, down on his blue jeans and coagulated in the spaces between the fingers of his left hand. There was also a burned-out cigarette between those fingers. It was as if he’d been sitting there listening to music but then all of a sudden broke out in an attack of bleeding. The blood had come from a wound in the left side of his chest.
We didn’t split up in the super’s pad. I went with Fearless into the kitchen. I forced my eyes to look everywhere, but they didn’t see much. I had forgotten that I was looking for Elana Love.
A doorway from the kitchen led to the bedroom. There was nothing there except a bloody towel in the middle of an unmade bed.
“Let’s get outta here, man,” I whispered to Fearless.
He nodded sagely, and we went back the way we came.
I expected to see the corpse, but not standing up in front of me.
He still looked dead, and that scared me more than his size. I don’t think he expected someone to come out of the kitchen. Maybe he was going for some water to replace all the blood he’d lost.