“Then the old woman invited you to stay at their home?” He had the satisfied grin of a crocodile.
“We needed a place to stay,” I said.
“Because of a fire, I believe the young lady said.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Sit down, Mr. Minton,” Binder said.
“No, thank you.”
“Sit, please.”
“No,” I replied.
That was the test. If I were close to arrest he would have made me bend. That’s how it worked: a cop pushed you to the limit but never more unless he could turn a key on you.
“Okay,” Binder said. “Have it your way. I just wanted to ask you a few more questions.”
“Shoot.”
He didn’t jump right off. First he gauged me with those shiny blue eyes of his. His orbs were so bright that it was hard for me to imagine that there was intelligence behind them.
“What do you think of these Jews?” he asked. He twisted his lips on the last word as if it was a lemon peel in his mouth.
“Like you say, I’ve only been there two days. That whole time the old man’s been unconscious in the hospital. Fanny’s okay, though.”
“Did she get along with her niece and her nephew-in-law?”
“Yeh. Sure. I mean, she thought Morris was kind of a fool. But I guess he kinda is.”
“Do you think that either one of them might have wanted the old Jews harmed?”
Jew turned to nigger in my ears, and I started disliking the cop.
“No,” I said. “No. The girl and Fanny really loved each other. And Morris is more broke up than Gella over Fanny bein’ dead.”
Binder wasn’t really listening. He didn’t really care about the people in this case. But he seemed to want something. He regarded me again with those beautiful but stupid eyes.
“What about Bernard Latham?” he asked.
At first I thought we were experiencing an earthquake. The ground seemed to swell under my feet. I regretted my decision to stand.
“What about ’im?”
“What did he ask you?”
“He wrote it down, man.” I got dodgy, hoping to figure out where these questions came from — and where they were going.
“Don’t get wise, son,” the uniform said.
“He wanted to know why we were at Fanny’s house. He thought maybe we were the ones who stabbed Sol.” I decided to skim the truth off a little at a time.
“Who’s we?”
“Me an’ Fearless.”
“Fearless the other boy outside?”
“Latham brought us here,” I said.
“Who was he riding with?” Binder asked.
I tried to remember. I was handcuffed and in the backseat next to Fearless.
“He was in uniform,” I ventured. “White guy. Pink really.”
“Billings?” Binder asked. “Pullman? Nazareth?”
It’s a mess, Naz, I remembered Latham saying to the cop next to him in the front seat. At the time it meant nothing to me.
“I think I heard him call somebody Naz,” I said.
Binder considered me then. He could have delved deeper into my story, or he could let me go.
“And…,” I said.
“And what?”
“I seen where Sergeant Latham been all over town. I mean I saw in the newspapers that he was interrogatin’ that guy who got shot down in Watts and died over in Mercy Hospital. I just figured that he was on some kinda citywide police unit to be showin’ up all over.” I was hoping that Binder didn’t read all the papers. He probably didn’t. He probably didn’t know any more about that crime than any other citizen.
“What paper did you read that in?”
“I forget. Either the Times or the Examiner. It was just on the counter in a coffee shop I was at. You know I was surprised to see Latham’s name over south when I knew he was a Hollywood cop and I had just seen ’im in East L.A.”
Again those eyes considered me. They probed so deep that I began to wonder what he could have on me. I hadn’t done anything wrong except maybe to take that money from Sol’s drawer. That’s when I remembered the pistol I had hitched up in my belt. They wouldn’t frisk me unless I was going to be arrested, but if they found an illegal, and stolen, concealed weapon on me, prison was right around the corner.
I cursed Elana Love in silence.
“Anything else?” he asked.
“Like what?”
He stuck out his lower lip and raised his right shoulder an inch or two. “I don’t know. Maybe something Latham asked you. Something the Jews might have said.”
I counted three breaths and considered my situation. I wanted the policeman to trust me, to think that I was too scared to be anywhere but on his side.
“Latham said that the old man stole some money,” I said. “A lot of it. And they never recovered it even though they caught him and had him in jail.”
“Did the sergeant say that he was investigating the case?”
“He didn’t say, but I guessed he was.”
“Did you find out anything?”
“I asked Fanny about it, but she said that her husband would never steal a thing.”
Binder snorted his contempt and then asked, “What about the niece and her husband?”
I shook my head. “I ain’t really talked to them at all. Morris didn’t like us much, and Gella’s kinda scared.”
Binder frowned, and then he smiled. He offered me his hand, but when I took it he pressed down hard with his thumb.
“If you’re in this, it’s gonna hurt,” Binder said.
“The way you mashin’ on my hand it hurts right now.”
“It could get worse,” he said and then let me go.
“I don’t know nuthin’ more, man,” I said.
The lieutenant smiled and then gestured, telling me that I could go.
I left the police station, thinking again about the Greyhound Bus Company. This time I thought maybe I’d return to Louisiana. A white man would have to look pretty hard down around the colored parishes of southern swamps to find a little black man like me.
18
THE FIRST THING I did when I got back to the car was to slip Sol’s pistol from under my shirt and shove it beneath the driver’s seat. The Greenspans sat in the backseat on the ride to their home. Morris laid his meaty head against the window, and Gella was wound so tight that she shook slightly, like a palsied old woman. Half the way there Fearless turned around and took her two slender hands into his one big one.
“You gonna make it through this, girl,” he said. “You gonna make it.”
I don’t know how she responded because I was looking in the rearview mirror at Morris to make sure he wasn’t going to start swinging because another man, a black man, was holding his wife by the hand. But Morris didn’t even budge. He was more shattered than my grandfather had been when his wife of sixty-three years had passed.
When we stopped in front of their house Morris stumbled out of his side and fell on the lawn. He got to his feet and strode up to the door like a toddler whose gait changes every three steps. Fearless walked Gella slowly to the door, still holding her by one hand. Morris had worked his key on the lock and blundered in by the time they reached the single stair. Fearless lifted Gella’s chin and kissed her on the lips. When he whispered something, she leaned into him for another osculation and an embrace. He ushered her through the door and closed it behind her.
Back next to me he took the posture of someone waiting for the car to begin moving. I didn’t engage the gears.
“Somethin’ wrong with the car, Paris?”
I didn’t answer.
Fearless turned to me.
“Something wrong?”
“What was that?” I asked.
“What?”
“With that white girl. Jail so hard on you that you got to take a woman right out from under her husband?”