“She promised me five hundred dollars,” I told Grove. “I already put in my time.”
“I don’t believe you,” the Holy Roller replied.
Fearless straightened up in his chair.
“Leon Douglas.” I spoke Elana’s ex-con boyfriend’s name as if it were a complete sentence. “And a bearer bond. How about that?”
“Do you know where she is?” Grove asked, no longer looking for a way out.
“I might know how to find her,” I said. “But I wanna know what I’m gettin’ into before I take another step.”
“Tell me where she is.”
“No, uh-uh. I put my money on the table, man,” I said. “Now it’s your turn. If you got somethin’ I could use, then maybe we could do somethin’ together.”
“The bond,” he said, his voice changing this time to a breath of air. “It’s worth a lot more than she said.”
“She lied?”
“Sister Love was made to lie. Prob’ly half’a everything she told you was a lie,” Grove said. “But she didn’t lie about the bond. She just don’t know. It’s worth ten times what she thinks.”
Using gangster logic I figured he meant a hundred times what she said.
“How’s that?” I asked.
“That’s for me to know.”
“Well how’s this?” I added. “Elana told me that you were the one had the bond. She said that she left it with you, but that —”
“It’s all a lie,” the preacher said. There was the musical note of a sermon in his voice.
“There ain’t no bond?”
“Oh yeah. There’s a bond all right. Damn sure enough. But I don’t have it. I did have it but not no more.”
“All you’re sayin’ is what isn’t and what’s lies and what didn’t happen. What me and my friend here need to know is what is.” I felt confident when Fearless was at my back, smart too.
Grove took me in for a moment or two.
“I remember you now,” he said. “At the bookstore. Vincent told me you worked there, but I didn’t remember the name.”
I nodded and waited.
“Leon,” he said, “sent Elana a letter askin’ her to come see him in prison. She was stayin’ with me at that time but still had her own place.”
“And you didn’t mind her gettin’ mail from an old boyfriend?”
“I saw my fortieth birthday two years ago, son. I know that women go to the bathroom and everything. I wasn’t her first man. I wasn’t her best man. Leon mentioned a thousand dollars in the letter, and so she took a day trip. Three days later we had the note.”
“Tell me about the note,” I said.
“What about it?”
“What country it come from? What’s the face value?”
“Ten thousand Swiss francs,” he said.
I was happy because at least one thing Elana said might be true.
“And she give it to you?” Fearless asked.
“It was new love. She saw in me what a woman wants to see in a man when they first start out.” Grove spoke from experience. “I could do anything at first. But then, when the bank told me on the phone that I had to have proof that I was David Tannenbaum, she saw a little tarnish here and there. I wanted to keep on the good side of a woman like that, so I go down to see the wife — Fanny.”
“You went to the Tannenbaum house?” I asked.
Fearless tensed up and then began his descent into a crouch.
“Yeah,” Grove said.
“When?”
“That was maybe four months ago,” he replied. “I went there to find out why her husband was in jail, the particulars.”
“Why she wanna talk to you?” Fearless asked.
“I said that I was the visiting chaplain at the prison. I said that her husband wanted me to tell her that he was okay.”
“Why she gonna believe that shit?” Fearless had no love lost for this messenger.
“Her husband forbade her to go up to the prison. That’s why Elana had to go up, to get a letter from the Jew to give to his wife. So all I did was say that he was doing okay and that he was safe and missing her.”
“And what she give you in return?” I asked.
That was the heart of our talk — what Fanny told Grove. He knew it and he knew I knew it. I was riding high on the powerful presence of Fearless and the fact that Grove was a little shy.
“It wasn’t nuthin’,” he said. “She didn’t know a thing.”
“That’s why you ran out on Elana? That’s why the Messenger packed up its drapes and ran?”
Grove took a deep breath, reaching for strength and conviction. “Elana got the bond. No matter what she told you, she got it. You find her, you find the bond. You do that, and you come to me. I can make ten times ten thousand.”
“How?”
Grove shook his head while looking me in the eye.
“So now what?” I asked.
“I know how to make the money. You bring me the bond.”
“Maybe I should go to the cops,” I speculated.
Grove decided on that moment to stand up.
“Messenger of the Divine is where you could get in touch with me. I might be a little bit scarce the next week or so, but Vincent knows how to get to me,” he said. “Going to the cops might get me in trouble, but it’ll get you boys killed.”
Fearless blew Grove a kiss in reply. I wasn’t feeling so cocky.
The self-proclaimed minister walked away from the table and to the woman who was waiting for him at the bar. Together they went out the front door. I sat there wondering, was there a dollar amount worth my life?
FEARLESS AND I FINISHED our drinks in silence. Then we went toward the door. He was the first one through, and I was just about to follow when someone grabbed me, roughly, by the shoulder. It was the waitress with the scarred lip.
“Excuse me,” she said.
“Uh-huh?”
“Why cain’t you look at me? I’m so ugly that you got to be rude?”
I looked at her then. I saw a lovely female face, except for that scar, on a woman not over twenty. Her expression was petulant but sweet; that face had seen some life.
“It ain’t that, sugar,” I said.
“Then what?”
I brought a finger to her face, tracing the scar up to her lip. She didn’t move away.
“I wanna kiss that streak. I wanna bite it. But you know I don’t even have a roof or rent for a room. That scar meant that somebody hurt you, so I looked away. I wanted to say somethin’ nice, but what use is a man smooth talkin’ when he ain’t got two nickels to rub together?”
The woman didn’t believe me, but she wanted to. One brow was knitted in anger, but the other one was wide with hope.
“I’m Charlotte,” she said.
“Paris. Paris Minton. You be workin’ here in two nights, Charlotte?”
“Uh-huh.”
“I’ll drop by.”
“Sure. I bet.”
“You got a pencil?” I asked her.
She took out her yellow number two and her bill pad. I gave her Milo Sweet’s phone number and said, “You can call there if I don’t show, but don’t worry, I’m comin’ back around.”
“HEY, PARIS,” Fearless said in a shy tone. We were in the car driving toward Milo’s office.
“What?”
“I just remembered somethin’.”
“Yeah?”
“I know Leon Douglas.”
“Say what?”
“I know ’im, Paris. He went in for armed robbery. But he was in the city jail ’cause he got a fancy new lawyer and a retrial. His cell was just down the hall from me.”
I pulled the car to the curb and turned off the ignition. I put my head on the steering wheel and closed my eyes. The darkness called me toward sleep, but I sat up again and asked, “Why the hell you wait till now to tell me this?”
“I just didn’t think of it. In the can they called him Big Bama ’cause he was from Alabama an’ he was big. I hardly even knew him.”
“So? What do you know about him?”
“Nuthin’. He was smug about bein’ down at the jail. He did a payroll robbery and shot two men. They had him for thirty at San Quentin, but the evidence wasn’t hard. The gun they found on him when he was arrested was the wrong caliber. He did it, but this new lawyer was trying to get the case thrown out.”
“Who’s the lawyer?”
Fearless shrugged his shoulders.
“What kinda dude is he?” I asked.
“Armed robbery, single-handed, two men shot. Three-quarters bad if he can blindside ya. Half bad face-to-face.”
Fearless considered himself and maybe three other people he’d ever met to be full bad: Jacob Trench, Doolen Waters, and, of course, Raymond Alexander. But three-quarters was plenty scary enough for me.
19
LORETTA WAS SHUFFLING papers on her desk before Fearless and I awoke the next morning. We had decided that sleeping at the Tannenbaum house was too much for either of us, and I still had Milo’s key.
“Morning, Mr. Jones, Mr. Minton.” Our presence held no surprise for her.
“Mornin’,” we said together.
I had let Fearless have the couch because he was just out of jail, and I was still feeling guilty for not helping him sooner.
“When’s Milo due in?” I asked the Japanese passe-partout.
“Soon, I think,” she said. “He has a problem with a client who has to show up for sentencing at three. A friend of yours.”
“Who’s that?”
“Lucas North.”
“Luke?” Fearless smiled. “What’s that boy up to?”
“He was with some friends in a stolen car. He wasn’t driving. He didn’t even know the driver. They had gotten drunk together and were taking some high school girls for a ride. The judge had seen Lucas before and decided to scare him, I guess. He found him guilty but postponed the sentencing. Milo thinks it was just to make Lucas sweat, but if he doesn’t show up, there’s six hundred dollars on the bond.”
Fearless scratched his head. I stifled a yawn. It wasn’t our problem.
MILO CAME IN at around nine. Fearless was taking his dog over to Dorthea to keep for the day. I was reading about Chichikov, the con man protagonist of Dead Souls.
“Hey, Paris,” Milo said. “You gonna have to start payin’ rent you keep warmin’ my couch.”
“I got a problem, Milo.”
“One shot to the temple and problems just go away,” the bailbondsman replied. Then he turned to Loretta. “We hear from Mr. North?”
“No sir, not yet.”
“Shoot.”
“Milo.”
“What, Paris?”
“I got a problem, man.”
The china whites of Milo’s eyes flashed out from his coal-black face. “I’m out six hundred dollars at three o’clock, and you want me to worry about you?”
“Lucas North,” I said. “Fearless and I will look for him if you do somethin’ for us.”
LUCAS’S MOTHER, Inez North, was in her late thirties. Lucas was maybe twenty-one, at least in years. He was an immature boy who got into trouble as a kind of hobby. He worked at that pursuit twenty-four hours a day because he couldn’t hold a job for over a week.
I first met Lucas when he was only fifteen. His mother and Fearless had a thing going for a while. In the middle of it Lucas got arrested for knocking down an ex-girlfriend’s fence with his mother’s new used car.
The girlfriend’s father wanted to press charges, and as much as Fearless tried to argue with him, old Landry Lamming wasn’t buying. Fearless came to me because he was on the verge of coming to blows with Landry and he knew that that would have been wrong.
I asked around about Landry and found that he was from Guyana originally and was so conceited about his lineage and education that most of the people in the neighborhood were happy to run him down.
“He jes’ fulla himself, that’s all,” Lana Rudd confided in me. “Always away on business and comin’ home like he was king’a the hill.”
“What kinda business?” I asked. Lana wasn’t the first to talk about Landry’s out-of-town business.
“Don’t ask me,” she replied, waving her hands as if deflecting fists. “He got a job with the city but he down there in San Diego every other week, seems like.”
Fearless needed me to save Lucas from prosecution because he had grown tired of Inez and he believed that saving her son would lessen the sting of their breakup. So I broke into Lamming’s car one night when all the hardworking people were in their beds dreaming about money. I found four bills addressed to a Laval and Kyla Biendieu, on a 24th Street address in San Diego.
I spent the next few days watching Landry. When he threw a small suitcase in his trunk and kissed his daughter and wife good-bye, I followed him down the coast highway toward the city in the sun.
I was stopped on the way by an overzealous highway patrolman. He needed to check my tires and brake lights, my spare in the trunk, and my license, license plate, the contents of my lunch bag, and what destination I had that day.
“The zoo, officer,” I said with a smile. “My auntie and sister, her husband and kids, they went down earlier, but I just got off work. I heard that they got a two-headed snake in the snake house. You know I’d pay money to see anything with two heads.”
“Where do you work?” the young white behemoth asked. He had blue eyes and broad shoulders and he didn’t like me one bit.
“At a beauty parlor on Slauson,” I said. “I do hair and nails for men and women.”
That made the motorcycle cop wince.
“It’s called Charlene’s,” I added. “Do you ever come up to L.A.?”
“Make sure you check the pressure in those tires,” he replied.
I drove off glad that I had had the foresight to break into Landry’s car.
Landry’s new turquoise Bel Air was parked in front of Laval Biendieu’s home address. I walked up to the front door and read the name on the iron mailbox that was nailed to the wall: Laval and Kyla Biendieu.
“Yes?” Landry Lamming asked, answering the door in his bathrobe. He was a small man. His English-like accent seemed incongruent with his dark Negro features. I never have gotten used to black men who don’t speak in the dialect of the American South.
“Mr. Beendoo?” I asked, mauling the pronunciation terribly.
“What do you want?”
“Are you Mr. Laval Beendoo?” I insisted.
“Yes,” he said reluctantly.
“Because I fount somethin’a yours and I wanted to give it back.”
“What do you have of mine? How would you know something was mine? I haven’t lost my wallet.” Even as he spoke he reached for his back pocket to make sure, but, since he was in his robe, there was no back pocket to be found.
“My sister’s kids is nine an’ eleven,” I said, as if those facts should have cleared up everything.
