She hadn’t taken the five-dollar bill that I keep in my shoe. I always thought it would come in handy if I was mugged late one night and had to pay for a taxi ride home. I never imagined that a mugging would come in the form of sex. And, as much as I wanted to be mad, as much as I was mad, I still appreciated the way she had robbed me. At least I did until I realized that she had also stolen my car.
The blacktop lot to the motel was completely empty. It was ten A.M. and I was marooned in Venice for no reason other than I was a fool.
I took a bus directly to the Bank of America branch on Normandie. I made a withdrawal, which took a while because I was closing out my account, and carried my money back home.
THERE WAS no crowd, and so I figured the fire must have happened either the night before or early in the morning. Whenever it happened it must have raged, because there weren’t ten books out of over three thousand that survived the blaze. My storefront rental was razed to the ground. Only the metal fixtures and the extra thick wood of my desk and filing cabinet left any vestige of the life I had been trying to build.
I wept like a child. The tears ran down my cheeks, and my hands hung down. I stood there in the middle of the blackened lot that had been my future, quivering from the diaphragm.
“Mr. Minton.” It was Theodore Wally from the Superette. He was standing at my side ready to catch me in case I were to fall again.
“What happened?” I asked.
“It was a fire last night,” the old-faced youth told me. He seemed almost as upset as I was. He might have even shared a tear or two with me. “The fire inspector came and asked me questions about you. I told him what happent yesterday. I hope that wasn’t bad.”
“What am I gonna do now?” I moaned. “That was everything I ever owned.”
“Your insurance’ll pay for it, won’t it?” Theodore asked hopefully.
“Insurance? Man, I didn’t have no insurance.” I laughed a little too loudly.
“Can I do something for you?” Wally asked. “Anything you want.”
“Did the inspector say anything about the fire?”
“He said suspicious. Suspicious.”
I didn’t need to ask him any more questions. Wally went back to the store and brought me a Royal Crown cola and a ham sandwich. I sucked on the bottle and inhaled the odor of my life gone up in smoke.
5
MILO SWEET’S bail bonds,Tax Filing, and Financial Advising office was on the fourth floor of a warehouse building on Avalon. At that time an illegal poultry distributor occupied the ground floor, so there was the general odor of chicken shit and grain feed throughout the upper rooms.
Milo’s office had a frosted glass door with black letters stenciled at the top:
OTTO RICKMAN
LIFE INSURANCE AGT.
&
NOTARY PUBLIC
I was never sure if that was the old sign or if Milo purposely had it printed to mislead creditors and others who might have held a grudge or a marker.
The room was maybe twenty feet wide and ten deep. There were three windows across the back wall and a desk on either side of the room. Wooden filing cabinets filled in the spaces between the windows.
“Hello, Mr. Minton,” Milo’s secretary, Loretta Kuroko, said from the desk on the right. She’d been Milo’s secretary since his lawyer days. She stayed with him after he’d been disbarred, imprisoned for three years, and then when he went through a series of professions. She was a hostess when he had been a restaurant owner, a bookkeeper when he’d tried car insurance sales. Even in Milo’s brief stint as a fence Loretta answered his phone and ran interference with the fiercest of clients.
They had never been lovers as far as I knew, and that was odd because Loretta loved Milo and she had a kind of perpetual beauty, thin and elegant with no wrinkles or lines. She was Japanese-American, a victim of America’s little-publicized Japanese internment camps during World War Two.
“Loretta,” I replied.
“Hey hey, Paris,” Milo growled from his desk to the left. He sat in a haze of mentholated cigarette smoke, smiling like a king bug in a child’s nightmare.
Milo was always the darkest man in the room, except when he was in the room with Fearless. He was taller than I but not six feet. He had big hands and long arms, bright white eyes and teeth and the complexion of polished charcoal. His short hair was always loaded with pomade and combed to the right. He knew the definition of every word in the dictionary and every once in a while managed to beat me at a game of chess.
“Milo,” I hailed. “How’s it goin’?”
“Must be good for somebody, somewhere. Must be. But don’t ask me where.”
I sat down and submitted to the scrutiny of those bright eyes.
“What’s wrong, Paris?”
“Who said anything was wrong?”
“Your eyes is red. Your head is hangin’. You don’t have a chessboard or a book under your arm, so you must be here on bidness.” Milo paused and looked a little harder. “And if it’s bidness you here for, it can’t be for you because if it was, you’d be in jail and callin’ me on the phone. It ain’t tax time, and you sure don’t make enough money to need financial advice. So if it ain’t you, then it must be Fearless.” Milo enjoyed reading between the lines. He was good at it, I had to admit that. “But you refused to come up with his fine before, so now something must have changed. That means I was right in the first place and you are in trouble. So, what’s wrong, Paris?”
“Believe me, Mr. Sweet, you don’t wanna know. I got to get Fearless outta jail and I got to do it fast. Will you help me?”
“I ain’t no bank.”
“You’re not a German insurance salesman either.”
Milo didn’t bother to answer that swipe. I put a stack of five one-hundred-dollar bills on the table and then placed a twenty crosswise on that.
“It’s all I got,” I apologized.
“You expect me to spring him for just twenty?”
“I’ll pay the rest in four weeks’ time.”
I had done work for Milo in the past. Asked a few questions, come up with an address or two on bail jumpers, but it still burned him when he felt that he was being had.
“I can’t do it, Paris,” he whined. “It would set a bad example.”
“I’m not tellin’ anybody, Miles.”
“Can you at least make it thirty?”
“They burned down my store, man,” I said. “They took my money and my car and burned down my goddamn store.” My voice cracked and I had to blink hard to shut down my tear ducts.
Milo began rapping his knuckles on the desktop. His look changed. It was no friendlier, but the animosity was now aimed at some unknown perpetrator.
“Your bookstore?”
“Yeah.”
“Why?” There was pain in Milo’s voice.
“I don’t know, but if I don’t do somethin’ soon, they might burn me down too.”
“Shit, Paris. What did you do?”
I pondered his question. I had asked it a hundred times of Fearless Jones. I couldn’t believe the trouble he’d get into and all he would say is, I didn’t do nuthin’, Paris. I was just mindin’ my own business. But what had I done? How could I have avoided Elana Love and Leon Douglas?
“I’on’t know, man. Maybe God looked down and saw all the shit I done got away wit’ an’ decided to mete out my punishment just when things started to get good.”
“Amen,” Milo said. “Amen to that.” He shook his head and smiled, then he looked at his watch. “It’s too late to get him out today. I’ll drop by the courthouse on my way home and make the arrangements, but we have to go get him tomorrow mornin’. Where you gonna sleep tonight?”
“I don’t know.”
“Loretta,” Milo called across the room.
“Yes, Mr. Sweet?” she replied.
“Pull out the cot. Paris is gonna be our watchdog tonight.”
“Yes sir.”
AT FIVE-THIRTY, when Milo and Loretta went home, I started going through the phone books of L.A., looking for Love. I found four listings. I called the numbers, asking for Elana, but of the two that were still connected there was no clue. The two that had been disconnected were an Alvin Love in Santa Monica, which I doubted would be fruitful, and an E. E. Love on Twenty-eighth Street.
I lay back and read the newspaper after exhausting the phone book. Then I had a notion. In the phone book there was only one Tannenbaum. The first name was David, not Sol, but his address in East Los Angeles was the same one Elana had given to me the day before, on Hazzard. We’d been headed to his house when Leon and his friend tried to run us down. I considered dialing the number, but then I held back. One thing I was sure of: surviving Leon Douglas was going to take more subtlety than a call announcing how smart I was.
I turned out the lights at about nine. Milo’s canvas cot was no more than a stretcher held aloft by crossed sticks of oak at either end. I lay there, the wounded soldier, the man who never asked for war and wouldn’t benefit from its outcome.
Up until that moment I had been going on reflex: running and hiding. But on that stretcher, in that coffin-shaped room, with only the occasional squawk of a dreaming hen to break the silence, I decided what I needed and what I had to do. It didn’t matter that I was small and weak or even that I begged for my life when that man was slapping me. None of that mattered because that bookstore was what made me somebody rather than just anybody. Burning down my store was just the same as shooting me, and somebody would have to make restitution for that crime.
LORETTA WAS in at eight o’clock exactly. I made coffee for her in the little kitchenette that they had built in the closet.
“Nine years with Mr. Sweet and he never even bought me a coffee,” she said, smiling at me.
I had put away the folding cot under the kitchenette counter and returned all of the phone books. Loretta went to her desk and started working immediately. I sat at Milo’s desk, thinking how lucky I was to have friends.
Milo shamed me with his generosity. Here I was trying to bail Fearless out of jail, but there was no kindness to it. I needed his protection and peculiar kind of smarts.
Fearless wasn’t a bright man, at least not in straightforward thinking. He only read at a sixth-grade level even though he had finished high school. A child could beat him at checkers two times out of three. But Fearless could survive in the harshest environments. He could tell you if a man was going to pull out a gun or cry. You could fool Fearless Jones sometimes, but he always seemed to make the right choices when the chips were down. And he had eyes in the back of his head.
But the best thing about Fearless was the attribute he was named for; he didn’t fear anything, not death or pain or any kind of passion. That’s why women loved him unconditionally. Because he wasn’t afraid of their fire.
MILO CAME IN at ten-thirty, but he didn’t even sit down.
“Messages?” he asked Loretta.
“Nothing to look at,” she said without looking up.
“Come on, Paris,” Milo said.
I followed him out the door into the strong smell of chickens.
Milo drove a green Ford Fairlane with bright chrome details. It was a fine car to ride in, but I missed my red Nash Rambler. I thought about going to the cops over the car theft, but then I worried about what they’d find and what Elana would say if she were caught.
We arrived at the county jail downtown half an hour later. Milo had set up the release by phone, so all we had to do was go to an oak-framed window that was the only opening in a huge wall facing an empty chamber on the basement floor of the county courthouse and jail building. A small white woman with gold-rimmed glasses sat on a high stool on the other side of the window ledge.
“Dorothy,” Milo said in greeting.
“What is your business?” the woman asked, as if she’d never laid eyes on the ex-lawyer.
“Fine for 63J-819-PL48C.” Milo handed over my money, and Dorothy counted it.
Without jotting down a note or looking up a file she said, “Have a seat. Someone will be with you in a while.”
At the far left end of the huge plaster wall there was a small bench, just large enough for one big man or two smaller ones. Milo and I sat side by side. I could still see the window from where I sat. Dorothy sat there placidly staring out on the empty floor.
It was a surreal experience: the bench made to fit Milo and me, the empty room, the robot bureaucrat, and a big clock the size of a cargo plane’s tire above us on the wall. Eighteen minutes after we sat down a man appeared from across the hall. He must have come out of a door, but I didn’t see it open or close.
He was a white man in an all-purpose suit made from a rugged material. He wore a white shirt but no tie and carried a worn leather satchel. There was a large bunch of keys hanging from his belt.
“Mr. Sweet,” the man hailed when he came within five feet of us.
“Warden Kavenaugh.”
“Follow me.” Mr. Kavenaugh turned and marched across the empty space.
There was a door there. I hadn’t seen it because it was painted the same light green color as the wall. Even the door knob was painted. We went into a hallway with a low ceiling and walls that felt like they were closing in. The hall went for quite a long way. There were no more doors or decorations. These walls were a darker green. The floor was green too.
Finally we came to a dead end. There was a door there. This door opened onto another hallway. This underground lane had many twists and turns, but it too was doorless and without marking. At some point the hallway widened and we found ourselves in a largish room with a door on the opposite side. Warden Kavenaugh, a ruddy and unpleasant-looking man, knocked on this door. When no one answered the knock, Kavenaugh muttered something sour and then began trying the hundred keys on the lock. After about twenty, finally one fit.
We came into a hall that was all metal, like a chamber in a battleship or a submarine. It too was painted green. I felt as if we were far below ground even though we’d only gone one floor below the surface of the court building. There was another door. Kavenaugh knocked on this one, and someone did answer.
“Captain?” the unseen sentry said.
“Kavenaugh,” Kavenaugh replied.
