“So that was seven-fifteen?”
“Maybe. About then. What does it matter what time it was?”
The doorbell rang, and I realized that I was about to be arrested for murder. I was so shocked by the death that I had forgotten to run. A dead white woman, and there I was, a black man already suspected in an attack on her husband. I should have run out the back door at that moment, but I didn’t. I didn’t have the strength in my legs.
Gella went to the door. I trailed in behind her. Seven uniformed cops came in and spread out through the lower floor.
“Who are you?” the lead cop, a sergeant, asked me.
“Paris Minton,” I said.
“What are you doing here?”
I tried to think of a reason but failed.
“He was my aunt’s boarder,” Gella said, neatly explaining what for me was inexplicable.
“Where were you when this happened?”
“I wasn’t here last night,” I said. “This morning I was playing chess with a friend over on Slauson, at John-John’s.”
“The chili burger place?” a corporal asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “I was playing chess with the night guy. After that I went over to the shoeshine stand on Florence near Central. I got here about eleven.”
“Gino, right?” the corporal asked.
“Say what?”
“The night guy at John-John’s.”
“Salvatore,” I said.
“You found her?” the sergeant asked.
I told him the events as they occurred. I guess I was pretty broken up. Not blubbering or even crying but still deeply hurt and sad.
They questioned me, but there was no edge or threat involved. They got my name and looked at my license. They probably called into the station to make sure that there weren’t any warrants out on me. I wondered why Bernard Latham wasn’t with them, but I didn’t ask.
“Why are you living here?” the sergeant asked me. He didn’t need to add a black man with two old Jews.
“My place had a fire.”
“And they just happened to have a room?”
“Fearless, my friend, did Fanny a favor, and so she did us one in return. Anyway, she was scared after her husband was attacked, and she wanted us around to protect her.”
“Her husband was attacked?” The sergeant had four dark brown moles on his face. They made him ugly. “He dead too?”
I gave him a brief version of Sol’s attack, leaving out Elana Love and adding the lie that Fearless and I were gardeners.
“For protection, huh?” the sergeant sneered. “You did a helluva job, didn’t you?”
The questions switched over to Gella after that. She told them that Fanny had stayed at her house the night before, that her husband brought her over early.
“Why was she at your house?” a policeman in a suit asked. “Why didn’t she stay at home?”
Gella said that it was because of the stabbing.
“Then why leave her here when there was no one else around?” the detective asked reasonably.
“She wanted to come,” Gella said weakly. “She would have walked if Morris didn’t take her.”
They asked her about the night before and the early-morning ride to Fanny’s house. They were asking the questions again and again in different ways. That’s the way the cops work; they try and trip you up, make you say something and then say it wrong from another viewpoint.
But because of the shock Gella answered every question mechanically and exactly the same. Her husband, Morris, took Fanny to her house sometime around seven. At seven-fifteen or thereabouts Gella called to see that Fanny was safe. Morris was already gone off to work, and Fanny was making noodle pudding for me and Fearless.
“Where is this Fearless?” the sergeant asked me.
“He spent the night with his girlfriend,” I said. “Dorthea.”
“Where can I find her?” he asked me.
“I don’t know, officer,” I said. “She’s his girlfriend and all, but I don’t know her.”
It was a lie but not that bad. I didn’t want the cops coming down on Fearless before I got to talk to him. That is, if I could keep out of jail myself.
The ambulance arrived soon after that. The attendants came running in, but they slowed down after they saw the body. No mouth-to-mouth or injection was going to save this patient’s life.
A police doctor came and checked out the corpse. After he did that the cops all stood around me. They wanted to see my hands. The doctor looked at my fingers and then measured the length of my hand.
Finally he turned to the sergeant and said, “I don’t think so, no.” The police moved around the house looking for clues or something. They checked the doors and windows for signs of break-in.
They found the broken glass and fussed around but never took fingerprints that I saw.
“Are you staying here?” the sergeant asked me.
“I guess. Nowhere else to go,” I said.
“Lay off anything around the back door,” he said. “Crime scene.”
They asked me more questions without aggression or anger. They seemed more interested in Gella. They kept asking why Fanny left so early. They wondered why she was so frightened when Fanny didn’t answer on the first ring of the doorbell.
She had good reason to be nervous. Those cops had just as much reason to be suspicious. But I knew that Gella would never have harmed Fanny. I saw her fall apart; nobody could fake that. And I could tell by the way they talked to each other that there was a deep love between those women.
Gella went with the ambulance, and the police finished their searches.
16
I PACED the somber house, taking inventory of the tokens of the Tannenbaums’ life. On their bedroom dresser were more than a dozen photographs in little stand-up frames. Old black-and-whites, and even older sepia-and-whites showing stern-faced, soft-skinned people in dark clothes. Even the children put on frowns for the camera. I didn’t know which one was Sol Tannenbaum, but I recognized Fanny sitting in a high-backed chair, holding a bouquet of lilies. Her face was so sour in that picture that I had to laugh. I knew her well enough that I could see past the pose into the woman who was now dead.
Her rings and bracelets were in a jewelry box. Perfume was a single bottle. One scent was enough at her age. On matching night tables on either side of the bed there were pictures of Gella. Fanny’s photo was a more sedate one of the girl becoming a woman with someone else’s baby in her arms. Sol had one of her in a flaring summer dress, smiling and impatient. I imagined the plain girl was feeling beautiful that night, and she wanted to run away to dance.
Sol’s top drawer had about sixty dollars in bills and change in it. I took the money without feeling like a thief. The money Fanny had given me wouldn’t last long, and I needed cash to keep me and Fearless afloat.
There were papers of many sorts in Sol’s drawers. Mixed in among them were cuff links and thick rings, keys, and a pocketknife. Many of the papers were letters in foreign languages. I made out postmarks from Israel, Germany, and Argentina. There were old newspaper clippings of many things, including a recital that Gella had performed on the violin at a Jewish temple not far away. There was one article, clipped and circled in red, about Lawson and Widlow, the accounting company Sol had worked for. The firm was acting as broker for a French company that was selling an antique collection of jewelers’ tools to a museum in New York. The Cuthbert and Rothstein Museum of the Jeweler’s Art had purchased the eighty-seven instruments that were used to create the crowns of French royalty in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The article was a few years old and yellowing. I put it in my pocket and opened the bottom drawer.