“You want me to see if I can find this Simon guy and ask him somethin’?”
GELLA BROUGHT ME the phone book. Simon was the only Jonas out of over eighty thousand entries.
“Is he married?” I asked Gella.
“No.”
Maybe it wasn’t only his religion she didn’t like, I thought. “Well then maybe I better go knock on his door.”
I stood up, and so did Gella.
“What’s wrong?” I asked her.
“Nothing.”
“Don’t you want me to go?”
“Yes, but…”
“Don’t you want me to find Morris?”
“I’m afraid.”
“You think he might be with another woman?”
“No.”
“What then?”
“I want to go with.”
“You mean ride with me down to Culver City in the middle’a the night?”
She nodded innocently.
“I cain’t do that.”
“But I must go.”
“Why?”
“Hedva was killed in her own home. In her own house.”
I looked around Gella’s identical dwelling and knew that she was right.
“Listen,” I said. “You might not know this, but cops like to get target practice on Negro men when they see ’em with white women. You get me?”
She nodded.
“So you have to lay low in the backseat if you gonna ride with me, okay?”
“Yes.”
I wanted her to say something else, something to reassure me, but I didn’t know what that could be.
“Okay then. Now go get that bottle’a schnapps, close it tight, and bring it along.”
“You want to bring liquor to find Morris?”
“Medicine,” I said. “Just in case you or me, or Morris when we find him, gets a case’a the nerves.”
30
I WAS DRIVING in a white neighborhood in the middle of the night with an open bottle of peach schnapps in the glove compartment, a married white woman hiding in the backseat, and a stolen .38-caliber pistol next to the gearshift on the floor. It was a far cry from my bookstore days, selling Popular Mechanics and Batman.
“Tell me somethin’,” I called to the backseat.
“Yes, Mr. Minton.”
“Why you gonna trust me?”
“What do you mean?” she asked.
I didn’t know if it was the question or the articulation of black English versus her own Europeanized English that she wondered about.
“I mean, why would you call me or Fearless when your husband goes missin’? Why not call somebody you know, or the cops?”
“I don’t know many people,” she said. “Just Hedva and Sol, and Morris. We don’t have many friends. And the police didn’t like Morris. That’s why he was upset, because they weren’t trying to find the black man who stabbed Sol.”
“I’m a black man.”
“But Fanny trusted you. She told me that it wasn’t you who came after Sol. And I can see that you and Fearless are good men, not murderers.”
I have never been as certain of anything as Gella was of me.
SIMON JONAS LIVED on the left side of a one-story two-family house on Cassidy in Culver City. The light was on, but that didn’t mean that Morris Greenspan was around. Gella didn’t want to go to Jonas’s door, so I went alone.
“Yeah?” a very large and blond specimen of Americana said. He answered after the fourth ring. “What do you want?”
“Morris Greenspan.”
“Who the fuck are you, nigger?” He enjoyed the last word. It brought a grin to his big mouth. He was wearing blue jeans and no shirt. His skin was streaked with oily grime.
“Byron Leeds,” I said in an amiable enough tone. “I’m a friend of the aunt and uncle of his wife. He drove off, and his wife hasn’t seen him. She said you and him were friends, and, well, I was in the neighborhood.”
“His aunt got killed,” Jonas said. Light began to dawn on his filthy face. “Hey. He said it was a nigger did it, stabbed his uncle too.”
“When did he tell you that?”
“What you say?”
Mr. Jonas and I were at a crossroads. He was measuring my size and disposition while glancing behind me to see if I had come alone. I, on the other hand, had split into two separate personalities. The first and foremost of these was the one that felt an intense hatred for the blond mechanic who hated me and insulted me without the slightest knowledge of my personal worth.
The second character in my internal drama was experiencing pure amazement at this hatred I felt. I never knew that such an emotion was in me. My whole life I had merely been cautious of whites, like I was cautious in a thunderstorm. I didn’t hate lightning but merely took cover when rumblings came in off the gulf.
“I said, tell me when Morris talked to you about his uncle.”
“Or what?”
Simon Jonas reached out for me as he asked his question. I, in turn, leaned away from the clumsy lunge, stuck my hand into my pocket, and pulled out Sol Tannenbaum’s .38.
“Or no more Simon,” I said, pointing the muzzle at one blue eye.
The fear that came into that eye was immediate and absolute.
“Wh-wh-wh-what do you want?” His voice, his posture, even the color of his grimy face changed just that quickly.
“Morris Greenspan,” I said again.
Someone might think that I would feel on top of the world at a moment like that. There I was, alone with the drop on somebody who represented the enemy of the spirit of my whole race in this inhospitable country. But all I was thinking was that with that gun in my hand, there was a good chance for it to go off.
“I don’t know where Mo is,” he stammered.
“Has he been here today?”
“Yeh. Yeh. We had a drink about noon.”
“Where’d he go?”
“I don’t know. Really.”
“Guess.”
“He’s got a girl.”
“A girlfriend?”
“Yuh. A girlfriend named Lily. He said that he was fed up. He said that he was tired of trying so hard and that he was going to leave, go away, maybe to Mexico.”
“And you think he went with this Lily?”
Simon didn’t answer. I don’t think he even heard me. The skin about his eyes had begun to cringe, telling me in its wordless way that it was time for the gun to go off.
“Simon.”
“What?”
“Where does Lily live?”
“I don’t know.” He was near tears. “I’m sorry.”
Then came the hard part. I wanted to get out of there without getting killed. The blond bully was six two at least, and he did hard labor for a living. I was five eight, a bookseller by trade, and a bookworm by nature. I didn’t think that I could swing the piece of iron in my hand hard enough to stun the mechanic. And I had to believe that he had a gun somewhere in his little apartment. If I just walked away, he’d get to that gun before I could drive off. I was pretty sure that I could nail the guy point blank, but at six paces away I might as well have been packing a cap gun.
Killing him was the best option, that was my first thought. But there was Gella sitting in the car. I couldn’t expect her to be quiet about murder. So then I thought about wounding him, shooting him in the thigh, after that maybe hitting him in the head.
Then I came to my senses. I brought up my left hand to steady my aim. Tears sprouted from Simon Jonas’s eyes, and the high-pitched sound of a small animal came out of his throat.
“Get down on your belly, boy,” I said.
The little animal screeched from under his tongue.
“Get down.”
Simon did a belly flop right there in his doorway. The moment he was down I turned tail and ran for the car. I jumped into the driver’s seat, slipped the key into the ignition, and turned over the engine in record speed. I had taken four sharp turns before Gella could sit up in the backseat.
“What happened?” she asked.
“Get down!”
She obliged and asked again, “What happened?”
“He doesn’t know where Morris is, but he saw him.”
“When?” she sat up again.
“At lunchtime.”
“Was he all right?”
“I guess not if he left you all alone. But Simon seemed to think that he was just fine.”
“Where did he go?”
“Don’t know.”
“Did you ask?”
“Why you think I was there?”
“Why were you running?”
“Because Jonas is a big white boy not too pleased with a black man ringin’ his bell in the middle’a the night.”
“You’re scared?” she said. “But you have the gun.”
“And so you think I can just go up and down the street shooting anybody I want?”
“I just think that you don’t need to be scared.”
“Jonas didn’t know where Morris was,” I said, not wanting to discuss my lack of bravery, “but I’d like to look around the office he has with Minor. Do you have a key somewhere?”
“There’s a duplicate key in the big plant outside the front door,” she said. “Mo leaves it there because he forgets to bring his sometimes.”
IT WAS a four-story office building made from brick; not tenement or factory brick, but solid, English-manor-house blocks. They were red, even in the night, and flawless. There was no fancy entranceway, but the door was flanked by five-foot pine trees set in gigantic terra-cotta pots. There were three windows stacked above the front door, each looking into the hallway of that floor. There was a dim light shining somewhere on three.
“What floor does Morris work on?” I asked Gella. We were parked across the street from the building, on Melrose. There was nobody out at that time of night.
“Two,” she said.
“So the key is in that pot on the right?”
“Under the inside lip of the one on the right as you face the door,” she said, obviously parroting something that her husband had told her many times, “toward the back.”
“Okay. I’m’a go in alone.”
“I’ll come with,” she said.
“No.”
“Why not?”
I had the whole ride up from Culver City to think about that question. I didn’t want Gella to find out about Lily unless she absolutely had to; not that I cared that he had a girl on the side or even how Gella would feel about that, but we were in a tight situation, people were getting killed, and I didn’t need any excess passion boiling in the backseat if the cops pulled us over.
“I’m gonna leave the key in the ignition,” I said, “so that if we have to leave fast again, I can just jump in and hit it. But if I leave the keys and ain’t nobody in the car, then when we come out, there might not be a vehicle to get away with. That won’t do.”
“But there’s no one to run from here,” she argued.
“Maybe not for you alone, but if you’re with a black man, at night, in a closed office building, going through a man’s papers and such without his permission — then maybe there might be a reason to move fast.” By the time I had gotten through that mouthful I had convinced myself.
“Can I turn on the radio?” she asked in defeat.
“Knock yourself out.”
THE KEY WAS where it was supposed to be, which made me think that I was not where I should have been. Everything so far that had worked out right had ended up wrong. I went through the front door anyway.
The second floor was dark. The key that opened the office building was also designed to work on the Minor Insurance Company door. The office was one middle-size room with two desks, one ash and the other constructed from sheet steel that was painted light gray.
I knew from first glance that the wooden desk belonged to Morris; it was as sloppy as he was. It was covered with candy bar wrappers, Men at War magazines, and a thin layer of dirt comprised of eraser dust, crumbs, and good old L.A. soot. He had a few files for insurance policies in one of the lower drawers. Mostly art items were covered: paintings, rare books, and the like. The policies were all pretty thick, mainly with pages detailing the authenticity of the piece covered. Some of the histories dated back to the sixteenth century. The values attached to these works of art were staggering.
Morris was the executing agent on all of them. He was also the signatory agent of a dozen or more European and British insurance companies. I knew that Morris couldn’t have been the agent of such expensive policies. Therefore he had to be a patsy; a big dodo sitting on a swan’s clutch.
I went through every gritty, chocolate-stained file but came up empty. No Lily or secret apartment to be found.
I had to jimmy the file drawer on Minor’s desk. At first I was surprised that the boss would have taken the uglier piece of furniture for himself, but then I realized that it was for the enhanced security. I wouldn’t have bothered at all except that I had a notion.
Minor’s lower drawers had more policies. These also listed Morris Greenspan as the agent. Rodin, Kandinsky, Picasso were but a few of the names that I recognized from the cheap art picture paperbacks I sold in my store. Policies ranged from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars. The owners were people from around the world. I sifted among the files and folders until I came upon a policy for a set of jewelers’ tools. I took Sol’s newspaper clipping from my wallet and checked it against the last entry on the documentation section — the dates coincided with the auction that caught Sol’s attention. The sale was brokered by Lawson and Widlow, the accounting firm Sol had worked for. Ten or eleven other policies had Lawson and Widlow mentioned one way or another; brokers, gallery representatives, collateral holders.
There was fraud in there somewhere, I was certain of that; not that I cared. All I wanted was the cost to set up a new bookstore. The rest they, whoever they were, could keep.
I knew that Minor had something to do with the bond; that’s why he came to see Fanny. Or maybe he knew that Fanny was dead and he intended to search the house personally. There was nothing about it in his desk. The only connection I could make to Sol and Fanny were Lawson and Widlow, the article that Sol had clipped, and the fact that Morris Greenspan coincidentally worked for Minor.
The putz, as Fanny called him, wasn’t there, but I didn’t expect that. The way I figured it he was at Lily’s house unleashing his laments upon her bosom. The only reasons I helped Gella were that I hoped she could get me closer to the bond and to keep Fearless from getting distracted. It would have been good to have found an address or number for Lily. That way I might have had some leverage over Morris; maybe I could have even turned him against Minor.
