“I remember you,” he said.
I reached for Sol’s pistol, then remembered that I’d left it under the front seat of Layla’s car.
Leon Douglas saw my futile gesture and smiled a smile as cruel as Elana Love’s laugh.
Elana gasped. I looked at her, and so did Douglas.
She was looking toward the wall where Fearless had regained his feet.
The grunt of amazement that issued from Douglas’s deep chest was probably the closest thing to a compliment that he ever gave. He closed on Fearless again and connected with a left hook that even Rocky Marciano would have feared. Fearless went down halfway, but this time he was up before Douglas regained his balance.
Again Douglas lunged, but this time it was with the intention of catching Fearless in a bear hug. Before the thug could get his arms into position Fearless connected with a one-two to the head. The gangster leapt again. This time he got his arms around Fearless and squeezed. He would have certainly broken Fearless’s back except that my friend had his left hand free. With that mighty mace he landed body blows to Douglas’s right side. One, two, three — and there was no effect — four, five, six — Leon went down on one knee. By seven and eight Douglas let go and fell back with his fists up but his speed greatly diminished.
Fearless smiled.
That was the exact moment of the greatest elation that I had ever experienced. Leon Douglas had already beaten me. He had defeated my heart and my spirit. I couldn’t imagine anyone standing up to his murderous brutality.
And then Fearless smiled.
Leon came at Fearless again. But Fearless was connecting with his own hands of steel. He hit Douglas again and again. You could see the ugly man’s body shake under the power of the war hero’s blows. In a final act of courage Douglas raised both arms and came after Fearless. The latter opened up with a barrage of blows to the rib cage. Douglas crumbled, tried to rise, fell to the floor again, and began to shake as if he were entering the throes of death.
“Where he got the bond?” Fearless demanded of Elana as he flipped Leon over on his back.
The loser had his arms clenched tightly around his ribs and he was talking to himself, though I couldn’t understand what he was saying.
“In his, in the back of his pants,” Elana stuttered.
Fearless tossed Douglas back over on his stomach and pulled up his gaudy shirt. There was a brown envelope stuffed halfway down the back of his pants.
Fearless took the envelope, jammed his hand into Leon’s pocket and came out with my key ring, and said, “Let’s go.”
“Hold up,” I said. I took the envelope from Fearless and ripped it open.
The bond was no larger than a dollar bill. It was printed on high-quality paper in blue ink. On the left side of the bill there was the image of a hatless, bearded, and mustachioed man who wore a monocle and some kind of jacket that was buttoned up to his throat. On the right side was the denomination — 2500 Fr. With a lot of blue curlicues around it. The opposite side of the bond was written all over in German. All I could make out was Wetterling Bank and the name David Tannenbaum, which had been written by hand. It didn’t look like it was worth killing over or dying for.
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s get outta here.” I handed the bond and its envelope back to Fearless. I figured that if it needed protecting, he was a better guard than I.
“Take me,” Elana cried.
Fearless and I looked at each other then. He gave no inkling of what he felt, but I guess I seemed unsure.
“Let’s take her if you want, man,” Fearless said. “But hurry. ’Cause if he get up again, I’m’a have to kill ’im.”
Fearless took Elana in my car, and I followed in Layla’s pink Packard.
WE DECIDED ON the lawn to make it to Milo’s office, but as soon as Fearless took the lead, I knew it was a mistake. He cut over to Central, which was a cruising street at that time. Everybody you knew turned up on Central sooner or later. There were churches, nightclubs, liquor stores, and open-lot bazaars up and down the street. Fearless had been in jail and he had just bested a warrior in battle. He was feeling cocky and sure of himself. And even though he showed no interest in Love, she was still a beautiful woman that he could show off. The flowery dress she’d put on was revealing and festive.
Now and then Fearless would toot the horn at someone he’d recognize. People waved and said hello. I followed along, worried about something going wrong, not knowing what that wrong might be, and helpless, at any rate, to make any difference in the outcome.
After a mile or two on Central, Elana Love looked back at me and then said something to Fearless. Two blocks past Gage, Fearless took a left. I was going to follow, but a car sped up on my right, hitting its siren as it did. Automatically I hit the brakes. The police car was joined by a second one that veered and bounced over the curb on my right side.
The cruisers cut Fearless off on the side street. Four cops raced out with their guns drawn, yelling and moving toward the car. I drove past the turn and pulled to the curb just beyond the street’s line of sight. I jumped out and crossed over to the other side of the street just in time to see Fearless thrown over the hood of my car and Elana being relieved of her purse.
I had been so concerned that trouble was coming that I didn’t look out for it. The police came up behind me using my car to hide from Fearless. I wanted to curse out loud, but instead I bit my tongue and moved behind a group of three men who had witnessed the arrest from the street.
They searched Fearless and then they searched the car. They cuffed Fearless and put him in the backseat of one cruiser and Elana in the front seat of the other. That was strange right there. Elana was being treated differently.
I walked back and forth, up and down the avenue, putting on a baseball cap that was in the backseat of Layla’s car. I took the hat off, turned up a collar. I don’t know if my disguises were working or if the police weren’t worried about anybody watching them in broad daylight while they made an arrest. That was still a time when white policemen handled blacks in public with impunity. They were, after all, the law.
I had crossed the street maybe a dozen times when Bernard Latham pulled around the corner. He drove right past me.
He got out of his deep blue Chevrolet and sauntered over to the cops who had been waiting. He looked into the backseat that contained Fearless. He asked Fearless a question, then moved toward Elana Love.
Something was wrong, I was sure of that. I ran to my car and started it up, then did a U-turn on Central and came back to turn down the street. I drove past the cops, my best friend, and that woman, pretending to be a commuter coming home from work. None of them registered my passage, so I picked an empty-looking house halfway down the block and backed deep into the driveway.
By the time I was crouched down into position Elana was walking toward Latham’s car. Fearless was out too, his hands free. Latham put Elana in the front seat and then leisurely walked around to his side. He drove down past my hiding place.
I had to make a decision then. Actually I had to make three decisions. The first was whether or not to leave Fearless in the hands of the cops. It didn’t look like they were about to arrest him, and it was unlikely that they’d shoot him in broad daylight. And even if they were going to shoot him, there was little I could do to stop it. The second decision was whether or not to follow Latham. He was a cop and there was something crooked about him; even his fellow cop Lieutenant Binder thought so. A gun license for a policeman was like a permit to kill Negroes, and for a crooked cop that permit was just a formality.
The first two decisions were simple. Of course I had to leave Fearless and follow the girl. Latham might have taken the bond. If he was dirty, maybe there was still a chance to steal it back. But the final resolve, to actually drive the car out of that driveway, that was the hardest decision of all.
When Latham’s car drove by me I decided to count to eight before following, telling myself it was to keep from being seen. I had gotten to fifteen before I got the courage to move. Down in the street I was panting, driving not more than ten miles an hour. My car sped up and then slowed. There was a lump in my throat and spots before my eyes. I had faced death earlier that day in the shape of Leon Douglas, but Leon didn’t scare me nearly as much as Latham’s taillights.
I’ve never respected law enforcement, merely feared it. I’m an honest man as far as it goes, meaning that I’d rather make my own money than take somebody else’s. I’m almost always on the right side of the law, but lawmen scare me anyway, they terrify me. I have always believed that more black folks have been killed by those claiming to be enforcing the law than by those who were breaking it. So following that man I felt like a deer stalking a tiger, or a leaf pretending that it was driving the wind.
LATHAM DOUBLED BACK to Central and cruised toward downtown. I couldn’t tell if he and Elana were talking, much less sharing secrets. There wasn’t much movement between them. Of course I couldn’t see them very well because I lagged pretty far behind most of the time.
When we hit the outskirts of downtown, Latham headed north toward the swankier districts. We went up through the center of the city and then west on Beverly. We finally ended up on Shatto, a street that looked almost residential. Four blocks up we came upon a small hotel, the Pine Grove. A man in a partial uniform rushed out and opened Elana’s door. Even though the valet was colored, you could see that he was surprised to see Elana’s hue. But he swallowed that and ushered the cop and his prisoner in through the cast-iron front doors.
The valet took Latham’s car to park it, so I knew where to wait for his return. But I was worried about Fearless. Had they taken him to jail?
I was afraid for my friend and feeling guilty too. What good was it for me to bail Fearless out of jail if it was just to get him thrown into prison?
I watched the front of the hotel for a minute, a minute that felt like the first sixty seconds of a twenty-year term at Alcatraz. There was no pay phone in sight and I knew that the hotel staff would be unlikely to let me make a call from the desk; and even if they were feeling generous, I didn’t want to take the chance of running across Latham and Elana.
I knew that the longer I waited, the more likely Latham was to come out and drive off, so I made my decision. I walked over to the valet who had returned from parking the cop’s car.
“Hey, brother,” I hailed.
The man’s coat was a conservative dark red and the buttons were metal but not shiny. His features were large for his face. The big eyes and expressive mouth added a startled tinge to his distrust of me. He was my size, that is to say small and slender, and suspicious of any man who claimed a relation.
“What?”
“My car broke down,” I said, pointing across and partway down the street to Layla’s gaudy Packard.
The valet, whose name tag said George, looked suspiciously at the car and back at me.
“This ain’t no garage,” he said.
“Even if it was it wouldn’t help me, ’cause I ain’t got no money for a mechanic,” I said, filling my mouth with words and self-deprecation.
“So what you want from me?” George asked sensibly.
“I wanna call my cousin,” I replied. “He come over and gimme a jump or whatever.”
“There ain’t no phone here for you,” he said. “Phone for guests or people who work here.”
“I know you got a phone at your station, man. I’ll give you a dollar and you can dial the number yourself.”
Dollar was the magic word in porter/valet/waiter language. A dollar was ten tips. A dollar bought six packs of cigarettes, enough to last a week if you didn’t have any broke friends.
George snuck me into a little cubby where he had a chair, a desk, and a phone. I fed him Milo Sweet’s number. He dialed and then handed me the receiver.
“Sweet’s,” Loretta Kuroko said pleasantly.
“You sayin’ that in my ear almost makes everything else okay,” I said.
“Hold on.” Her reply was cold and curt. I wondered if she was insulted somehow by my friendliness. I knew they didn’t have another line that she needed to answer.
“Paris,” Fearless said into the phone.
“You okay, Fearless?”
“Yeah, yeah. When the detective took off, the other cops just let me walk. I looked for you and then figured that you came here, so I did too. I’m sorry, Paris, I really am.”
“About what?”
“The bond.”
“They took it?”
“Naw. The girl saw the cops behind you. She told me an’ I saw ’em too. She said that she could hide the bond in the linin’a her purse and so I give it to her —”
“I know what happened after that,” I said.
George tapped on the door, indicating that my time was up.
“Listen, Fearless,” I whispered. “I’m at a hotel called the Pine Grove up on Shatto. I don’t know how long I’ll be here, so you sit tight until I call back.”
“You got it.”
I cut the connection with my finger and said in a slightly louder tone, “Well when is she comin’ in?… No?… Shit!” Then I hung up the phone.
I opened the door, looked at George, and said, “Never let one’a your relations marry a woman think she’s a beauty queen.” I gave him the dollar and went back across the street.
23
I PUT UP the hood on Layla’s pink Packard and stood behind it, pretending to be working on the engine. From there I could watch the front of the hotel without causing too much concern in the staff or the chance police cruiser. I had to wait about an hour before Latham and Love came out. They were escorted by a tall white man in a gray suit.
They all spoke at the curb while the valet ran to retrieve Latham’s car. Latham and the man clasped hands, then the man took both of Elana’s hands in his and said something that was meant to be sincere. It was odd to see a black woman so well treated at a fancy Hollywood hotel. I didn’t even think that a police detective had the clout to make a place like that serve a Negro. That made me wonder about the man they were talking to. But there was no time for thinking. I jumped in my car and made a U-turn. By the time Latham and Elana were ready to go, I was too.
