“Take the money, man.”
Theodore had gathered the cash again. He clutched it in both hands. I couldn’t take it, so Fearless collected it for me.
While he was straightening out the bills I asked, “How much did you say it is?”
“Eight hundred dollars,” Wally said, “near about.”
“To burn down my life?”
“I’m sorry.”
“I bet ya he paid you more than that,” I said. “’Cause you had to pay somethin’ for them flowers and that monkey bite.”
“I got them from my girlfriend,” he said, finding some backbone. “She kiss me for nuthin’ and tried to make my house like a home.”
By then there was the ice of murder in my veins. Not murder that I wanted to commit, but the murder I had almost done. I had almost killed Theodore, and that frightened me. I never believed it when people said that they lost control, that they blacked out like Morris said and killed without volition. Until that very moment I believed that a man made his own decisions, that the excuse of passion was just a lawyer’s lie.
I WAS TOO worked up to drive, so Fearless took the wheel. He cruised down Slauson, keeping quiet while I fumed.
After a few blocks I said, “Damn. Damn.”
“He couldn’t help it, Paris. You know Antonio been good to him. He probably never even read a book.”
“What difference does that make?”
“He didn’t know what he was burnin’, man.”
“Let’s go see Milo,” I said to my friend. “Maybe he got somethin’ for us.”
“Whatever you say, Paris.”
33
MILO WAS LEANING back in his chair with his fingers laced across his belly and a smile on his lips. He wasn’t on the phone or reading. He wasn’t doing a thing. I got the feeling that he was sitting there, being smug with himself, waiting for us to arrive and hear his glad song.
“Fearless. Paris. How you’all boys doin’?”
“I hope you don’t choke on that canary you swallowed,” I said.
“It’s more like a goose, son. The goose that lays the golden egg.”
“Where’s Loretta?” Fearless asked.
“I thought it was best if she took a few days off,” Milo said, his voice suggesting more.
“I’ll bite,” I said.
“I went to see Lawson and Widlow,” Milo admitted. “I took a business card that said my name was Brown. I told them that I had a client named Love who had found a bearer bond worth a few thousand dollars to the owner.”
I could see that Milo intended to earn his thirty-three percent.
“And what did they say?” I asked.
The bailbondsman sat forward. “At first they acted like they weren’t too concerned. But when I suggested shopping the bond around, they said that that wouldn’t be such a good idea. They let it drop that I could get in trouble if the wrong people found out about the bond. I said maybe I should go to the police. They offered me a finder’s fee right then and there.”
“How much?” Fearless asked.
“Five thousand dollars.”
“What then, Milo?” I wanted to know.
“I said some names then. Leon Douglas. Fanny and Sol Tannenbaum. I said that that wasn’t all, and I wanted some real money for my client or they was gonna be up to their elbows in J. Edgar.”
“So where’d you leave it?”
“I got a answerin’ service under the name’a Brown at a switchboard downtown. I gave Widlow the number and told him to call me inside of a day.”
“Have they called yet?”
“I was waitin’ for you’n Fearless to come ’fore I checked.” With that he picked up the receiver and dialed. He waited no more than the span of a ring and said, “Brown, sixteen-sixty-four.”
Milo looked up and started snapping his fingers at me. He made the motion of writing and pointed at Loretta’s desk. I ran over, finding a yellow pencil and an unused envelope. I brought these back to Milo’s desk.
“Hold on, hold on,” Milo was saying into the receiver. “I got to get a pencil. All right, go on. Yeah. Three-two-one? Oh. Uh-huh. Is that all? Well then I thank you.”
Milo frowned at the words he had written down, then he smiled and said, “They wanna meet us at their office tonight at eight-fifteen. They said that the security guard’ll meet us at the side door in the alley and let us upstairs. What do you think about that?”
“We ain’t got the bond,” I said.
“A sheer technicality, my boy,” Milo responded cheerfully. “If Lawson and Widlow are still looking, it means that your girlfriend hasn’t brought it to them yet.”
“The bond’s worthless,” I said. “Well, not worthless, but only worth the face value.”
“How would you know that?”
I related the improbable tale of two American Negroes and the Israeli secret service.
Milo wasn’t phased. “Well,” he said. “Lawson and Widlow don’t know that. We just jack up the price to ten or fifteen thousand and let them find out on their own.”
“Yeah,” Fearless added. “But we tell ’em that it ain’t no deal unless we sit down with Zimmerman.”
“Why complicate matters, Mr. Jones?” Milo asked. “Get the money and get out, that’s what I say.”
“Money ain’t everything, Milo.”
Milo tried to argue, but Fearless wouldn’t budge.
MILO GAVE Fearless a small .32-caliber pistol that he had taken as a payment from a man charged with distributing counterfeit bills. It was not the kind of weapon Fearless commonly used.
“I usually like somethin’ wit’ more bite,” he said. “But in a sitchiation like this, somethin’ small is even better.”
“Situation like what?” I asked. We were driving toward downtown. Fearless was testing different places to conceal his weapon. He tried his belt, the sleeve of his windbreaker, even in the elastic of his sock.
“Whenever a man tell ya he gonna meet you at the side door, you know he got somethin’ t’hide,” Fearless said. “An’ if he’s hidin’ one thing, then he might be hidin’ somethin’ else. An’ then you got to worry. Me, I don’t like to worry, so I just hide somethin’ myself.” With that he shoved the pistol in his pocket and shrugged.
“Well, you just keep that thing in your pocket, Mr. Jones,” Milo said from the backseat. “This here is just business. Plain and simple business.”
“Okay,” Fearless replied.
I remembered something that my uncle Lonnie used to say. Trouble with a friend who stand by you in time’a need is that you usually got to be in trouble to enjoy his company.
LAWSON AND WIDLOW’S OFFICE was in a six-story stone building on Wilshire. There was a big glass door and vines trained to cover the walls. The windows were large. Garish floodlights bathed the edifice so that it looked official and important on the otherwise dark street.
A big and brawny white man met us at the side door. His face was bland with smallish features. It wasn’t a face that I recognized, but still I thought that I’d seen him before.
“What, three?” he asked. “There’s only supposed to be one.”
His accent sounded European, but I was no expert. It was familiar, though I couldn’t remember where I’d heard the cadence before.
“These are my partners,” Milo said in an officious tone, as though he expected the stranger to hop out of the way. He was acting like a black man who had never experienced racism, who expected his due with no arguments or questions.
The white man didn’t like the idea of partners but finally decided that he couldn’t make us disappear.
“Come,” he said gruffly.