“If I didn’t trust you, I’d be the one meetin’ Delroy.”
“Okay,” she said, only half convinced. “Should I keep Clemmie on the front desk?”
“Of course. You’ll be out doin’ detective work.”
Later, I went outside with the three dogs and played fetch for an hour. The little guys got tired after ten minutes or so. They spent the rest of the time around my feet chewing on dried-out cowhide. But, like his wolfen ancestors, Valiant was tireless. He ran back and forth, barking and baying like a bloodhound. He retrieved that stick again and again till my throwing arm went numb.
After the dogs had eaten and fallen into a heap at the door next to the terrace, I went upstairs and made the call.
“Hello?” Amethystine Stoller purred into my ear.
“Hey.”
“You get my message?”
“I did.”
“So, when are we gonna get to it?”
“I’m workin’ right now, juggling jobs like a full rack’a bowlin’ pins.”
“Do you wear a circus costume when you do that?”
“Always.”
“Always?”
“Yeah.”
“Even with me?”
“Probably.”
“You know, it doesn’t have to be that hard, Easy.”
“So they tell me.”
I was up at 5:00 a.m., dressed by 5:09, and on the road at 5:29.
By 6:31 I was at Maynard’s Coffee Cart, down around Seventy-Sixth Place and Central. Fearless Jones was already there, perusing a copy of Jet magazine.
I bought my coffee from Maynard, who spent every morning, except Sunday, selling coffee and doughnuts to whoever needed them.
Maynard was a short guy with good eyes — eyes, he claimed, that could see everywhere all at once. Medium brown of color, he’d spent some time in prison for a felony that he never talked about. May, as we called him, hailed from Austin and had come north at the age of fourteen, the day after his father was beaten and stomped to death for talking back.
“Is that you, Easy?” Maynard asked.
“In the flesh.”
“Fearless told me you was gonna be here. I bet him a dollar that you wouldn’t come.”
“Com’on, May, why you gonna do me like that? I come to see you... sometimes.”
“You haven’t been here in four months. Too busy bein’ a fancy detective on the west side’a town.”
We laughed and then I went over to Fearless, who was reclining on a concrete bench that seemed to have no other purpose than to provide seating for Maynard’s Coffee Cart.
“Fearless,” I said.
“Easy.” He sat up to make room for me.
“Paris Minton told me that you was down Texas.”
“I took the overnight bus day before yesterday after Earline Pickens called.”
“Earline? I thought you guys didn’t speak anymore.”
“We don’t.”
“Then why she call you?”
“Orem Diggs.”
“What’s a Orem Diggs?”
“He’s what the white hoodlums call a — a middleman.”
“Middle’a what?” I asked, even though I knew the answer.
“If somethin’ need to be done but it ain’t in yo’ family, then Orem the man that makes it happen.”
“And what does Earline say he’s makin’?”
“She know a guy who know a guy who Orem aksed to tell ’im ’bout you.”
“Me?”
Fearless nodded. He was long and lean, black as a man could get. If we were standing upright, we’d be eye to eye, but if the measure was courage, then I’d be down to Pygmy size in comparison.
“What’s this Orem want with me?”
“I don’t know exactly, but it’s some kinda hoodlum shit. And you know it’s serious ’cause it would take a sitiation of life and death for Earline to look for me.”
Women loved Fearless. He was courteous, truthful, the baddest man in almost every room he ever walked into, and his intelligence was emotional, not intellectual. His eyes and hands, and his words, all spoke to what almost any woman was feeling.
The problem with all that love and affection was when those same women couldn’t get Fearless to be what they wanted him to be.
One day, a few years before, Earline told Fearless that he was the only man that she ever truly loved. When he didn’t say those words back, she threw him out of her house and her life.
“Okay,” I said, thinking that my plate was already full. “What do I need to do about Orem Diggs?”
“I’d lay low if I was you.”
I had rarely heard Fearless suggest retreat. He’d participated in three wars and the only gear on his utility belt was attack.
“He’s that dangerous?” I wondered.
“He ain’t scared’a you and so he’ll do whatever he please. I don’t know if goin’ up against him would be worth the aggravation.”
“What kinda aggravation we talkin’?”
“The kind where a whole bunch’a blood gets spilt.”
If Fearless cared about you, he became the closest thing you’d ever know to a guardian angel. To ignore his advice would always be the wrong choice. But I was in love for the first time in a long, long while, and that would not be denied. Love made me brave, foolhardy, and wrong.
“So,” my friend asked. “What you gonna do?”
“I got a couple’a jobs right now, Fearless. I can’t drop the ball on them.”
He shrugged, gave me a grin, and said, “Okay. I’ll stick with ya, then.”
“It’s that bad?”
“Or worser.”
“You got a car around here?”
Shaking his head, he said, “I slept last night on Paris’s bookstore floor. I walked to here from there.”
“Okay. But I got a place or two to get to before we get serious.”
The next stop was a small house on Alcott Street, near Casio — a block south of Pico Boulevard. I pulled to the curb in front of the cottage-style home.
“I probably should go in here alone, Fearless.”
“That’s okay. I got a call to make.”
“Good. I don’t think it should be more than a half hour.”
“See ya then.”
It was a nice property. Six feet back from the curb, sporting a manicured lawn, it was a perfect little box with a pointy roof, its teal-green walls fringed by bushy blue dahlias.
A small white woman answered the doorbell. She was in her forties, most probably, and shaped like a pear. The faded gray-and-green dress she wore was what Eastern European Jews called a schmatta. I thought of that because this was a Jewish neighborhood.
“Yes?” she asked timidly. “Can I help you?”
“Ms. Ellenbogen?”
She gasped silently, I assumed from hearing her name spoken aloud.
“Y-y-yes?”
“I’m Ezekiel Rawlins. The social worker, Mrs. Fabricant, told me to drop by,” I said, and then added, “For Gigi.”
“Oh. You.”
I smiled and nodded. “Yes. Can I see her?”
“Oh.” She backed away from the door and I strode in, feeling like some kind of brigand or barbarian in the process of razing the town.
The living room I entered was small, maybe twelve feet by ten. There was a sofa and a sofa chair set against each other at a right angle.
“Teddy,” the small woman called out.
“What, Trude?” came a man’s voice from a doorway on the opposite side of the sitting area.
It was a surprise seeing him come in. He was very tall, thick-limbed like a lumberjack, and clean-shaven. He wore a lime-green T-shirt and blue jeans. His walnut eyes wondered about me while I speculated on how such a big man negotiated that tiny home.
“Yes?” he asked me.
“I’m here to see Gigi.”
It was like the murder mansion all over again. Gigi ran out from somewhere and slammed into me. She held on tight, my own private barnacle. I lifted her into my arms again, holding her to face me. There were tears in her eyes.