“We have to go,” I said. “Thanks anyway. See ya, Fanny, Morris.”
The sloppy bowling pin grimaced.
“Call me if you need anything,” Fanny said.
“We’ll pick you up in the morning,” Fearless promised.
Then we left the unmatched set of relatives to argue manners and race over coffee and rolls.
I HAD THE ADDRESS of E. E. Love written down on a scrap of paper. Fearless drove us to the Twenty-eighth Street abode. The small, single-story gray house was surrounded by sagging trellises that were heavy with vines of golden roses. There was no light on, no car in the driveway, but still we knocked at the front door.
No answer.
A big dog came strolling down the street. It was a light-colored, short-haired and meaty mutt that nearly shimmered under a granite streetlamp. I saw him before he saw us. He did an almost human double take and then started barking for all he was worth.
“We better get outta here,” I said.
“We ain’t even got here yet.” Fearless went down on one knee and held out his hand.
The barking dog got braver and braver. Growling and gurgling murder he advanced on Fearless, who for his part looked like a modern-day African saint. The dog snapped and then he sniffed. He pushed his nose against Fearless’s hand, then plopped down on the ground, turning over onto his back to show his belly.
Fearless scratched the dog and then stood up, his new best friend at his side.
There was a black, lift-top mailbox attached to the wall next to the front door. It was stuffed with mail. I pulled out an envelope wedged in at the side. By match light I read the name Miss Elana Love scrawled in purple ink.
“This is the right place,” I said.
Fearless’s dog growled in anticipation. Fearless pushed him by the neck toward the front walk, and the mutt seemed to understand the command. He padded his way to the curb and stood there daring some phantom intruder to try and go by.
I went around the side of the house, testing windows. On the third try I was successful. Once inside I went straight through the gloom to where the front door should have been. It was there. Fearless snaked in, closing the door behind him. I found a lamp on a table and turned it on.
After making sure that the house was empty we decided to separate to make our search. The whole front of the house was the living room. It was just a couch and two chairs with a stand-up maple bar on top of two mismatched blue throw rugs. The rugs were ugly. One had a diamond pattern, and the other was covered in small white dots.
At either end of the living room was a door. One led to the kitchen, the other to her bedroom. Between these two rooms was the toilet.
Elana’s bedroom was simple enough. A single bed with pink sheets and a dresser with a mirror and chair. The window looked out on a fence cordoning off her three-foot-deep backyard. I went through the drawers of the dresser, the closet, the pockets of her clothes. I checked under the sheets and between the mattresses, on the window ledge and under the bed. There was nothing there. Nothing. She had three dresses in the closet and only one pair of shoes.
Fearless and I met in the bathroom. Two towels on a chrome rack, a half-used bar of white soap, and no floor mat. In the trash can there were a towel and a wad of cotton bandages clotted with a good deal of partially dried blood. I poked at the dressing with a handy toothbrush, but Fearless reached in and pulled out the bloody rags.
“Somebody been wounded pretty good,” he said.
“No shit,” I replied.
I went over the kitchen again because Fearless didn’t have the patience to search for anything smaller than an elephant. There wasn’t much to see there either. A jar of instant coffee, white bread, and an open can of condensed milk.
“I bet she only stays here now and then,” I said. “She probably only keeps the place in case her boyfriend of the week has a change of heart.”
“You think?”
“No clothes to speak of, no food,” I said. “And even a blind man wouldn’t have carpet like that under his feet.”
Fearless laughed at that. He was slender, but he had a fat man’s laugh. For a moment there I realized how much I had missed my friend.
“Come on,” I said. “Let’s get outta here.” I led the way through the kitchen door back into the living room. We were almost out of the door when I stopped.
“What is it, Paris?”
“I didn’t look under the kitchen sink. Did you?”
“No.”
“I better look.”
“You think she under there?” I couldn’t tell if he was serious or joking.
I FOUND a tin wastebasket beneath the sink drain and dumped the contents out on the kitchen table. There were tiny bits of paper, coated with once-wet coffee grounds, torn from several notes and at least one letter. I pulled up a chair and started sifting through the mess.
I had been working for all of five minutes when Fearless started yawning. “What you doin’, Paris?” he whined.
The letter was impossible to reconstruct in the time I had. It would have probably taken two or three hours, seeing that it was scrawled in small pale blue letters on both sides of at least three pages. To make it even more difficult, the words had blurred from the moisture of the coffee grounds.
The notes were written in black ink on white paper except for one that was written in pencil and another that was written on yellow paper. I concentrated on these two.
Fearless opened the front door and whistled for the dog, who came bounding in like the loyal family pet.
“Hey, boy. Hey, boy,” Fearless chanted from the living room.
I didn’t have to go far to see that the penciled note was a shopping list — scouring powder and Modess napkins were all I needed for that.
The yellow note had San Quentin Prison printed across the bottom. Above that, in black letters, the initials C.T. were printed slantways, along with a phone number that had an Axminster exchange.
There was a phone in Elana’s bedroom, but it was dead, so we let Fearless’s new pet into the backseat and drove toward a gas station on Slauson. I didn’t want to bring the dog, but I didn’t have the time to argue with Fearless either.
I did say, “Don’t you think somebody’s gonna miss his pet?”
“If he had a collar or license I’d take him home right this minute,” Fearless replied. “You know a dog catcher could be givin’ him cyanide tomorrow if we just let him go.”
That was the end of our discussion.
When we got to the gas station I put a nickel into the slot. C.T., whoever that was, was a long shot. But it was the only shot we had.
He answered on the first ring. “Leon, is that you, man?” His voice sounded like a metal file rasping against stone.
“C.T.?” I asked, disguising my voice just in case this rough man ever heard me speak again.
“Who is?” he asked.
“It’s me — Dingo,” I said. I regretted the name as soon as I said it. I was scared stupid.
“Who?”
“Leon told me to call you up. He wanted me to come and get you but —”
“Get me? Man, I could hardly sit up straight.”
“Leon said to come help —”
“You a doctor?”
“I can take care’a you,” I said, trying to make my fake voice sound certain. “I got a brother used to be a medic in the army with me.”
There was silence on the line.
“C.T.?”
“Why you callin’ me that?”
“That’s what Leon wrote on the paper, man. Ain’t that you? I mean if —”
“When you gonna get here?” he asked, interrupting me for the third time.
“That’s why I called. He wrote down your initials and phone, but I can’t read the address. Clinton sumpin’.”
“Clinton?” C.T. moaned. “Denker, man. Twenty-nine sixty-nine Denker. Super’s apartment.”
“Be right there,” I said in a husky voice that would have fooled even my mother.
“YOU GOT my pistol, Paris?” Fearless asked over the loud barking in the backseat.
“I told you already, the girl stole it.”
“That was my gun she took from you?”
“Yes.” I took the left onto Denker.
“An’ now you want me to walk unarmed into the house of a friend of a ex-con nearly killed you yesterday?”
“He don’t know me, Fearless. I’ll just walk in there an’ tell him I’m Leon’s friend.” Finding that phone number and fooling C.T. had given me a sense of control.
“What if he was the one sittin’ next to Leon when he was chasin’ yo’ ass down the street?”
“Shit.” My fingers went suddenly cold.
“That’s okay, man. I’ll go in first. But you owe me a pistol.”
THE ADDRESS C.T. had given us was a court of apartments at the corner of Horn. We left the dog in the car. The super’s apartment was listed under the name of Conrad Benjamin Till. Whoever designed the court must have been a fan of Minos’s maze. After every two doorways there was another turn. I lost my sense of direction almost immediately.
Most of the apartments were dark, as the next day was a workday. We went past a pair of teenagers having some kinda sex behind a skimpy rosebush. I don’t know if they saw us, but they sure didn’t stop.
NO ONE ANSWERED when we rang Conrad’s bell. No one called out when we knocked. Fearless had brought Layla’s tire iron in lieu of a pistol and used it on the door. The sound of that doorjamb being wrenched open by that twelve-pound tire iron was frightening; loud and whining with reports like small-caliber gunshots now and then. I looked around to see if anyone had turned on their lights; no one had, but that didn’t mean we hadn’t been heard or seen.
Fearless went in first, but I was right on his heels, running my hands along the wall. I didn’t find a light switch, but Fearless snagged the overhead cord and said, “I got it.”
Yellow light flooded the small sitting room as I was closing the front door.
Fearless said, “Dog.”
There on a low, modern couch sat a fresh corpse.
He probably had been darker before all the blood drained out, but he’d always be a light-skinned Negro with brown freckles across his wide nose. His face seemed to belong on a fat man, but he was of normal build. He wore a light-colored jacket, blood-soaked T-shirt, and threadbare jeans. Till must’ve died right after we got off the phone.
I was looking at the dead man, but my mind was working overtime trying to believe that he wasn’t there. I’d happened upon dead bodies before in my life: three children in a car wreck outside of Turner, Texas, the body of a sailor I saw on the shore at the Gulf of Mexico, and there’s been a murdered body or two on the street. I once saw the victims of a double lynching hung from an ancient live oak not two miles from my mother’s home. I’ve seen a good many deaths, but none of them, with the exception of those cops that Fearless killed, had anything to do with me.
I had sought out Conrad Till. And if I wasn’t careful I’d end up just like him.
“The first one’s always hard,” Fearless said.
“Say what?”
“When me and my squad’d go out in Germany it was always the first man get killed get to us,” he said in an impossibly calm voice. “Didn’t matter if it was one’a us or one’a them. It’s just that first dead man that reminds you that this is serious business.”
With that Fearless moved to inspect the room. I moved too, his nonchalant bravery having turned my terror into mere heart-pounding fear.
Till’s tan jacket had as much wet blood on it as dry. There was a lot of blood, down on his blue jeans and coagulated in the spaces between the fingers of his left hand. There was also a burned-out cigarette between those fingers. It was as if he’d been sitting there listening to music but then all of a sudden broke out in an attack of bleeding. The blood had come from a wound in the left side of his chest.
We didn’t split up in the super’s pad. I went with Fearless into the kitchen. I forced my eyes to look everywhere, but they didn’t see much. I had forgotten that I was looking for Elana Love.
A doorway from the kitchen led to the bedroom. There was nothing there except a bloody towel in the middle of an unmade bed.
“Let’s get outta here, man,” I whispered to Fearless.
He nodded sagely, and we went back the way we came.
I expected to see the corpse, but not standing up in front of me.
He still looked dead, and that scared me more than his size. I don’t think he expected someone to come out of the kitchen. Maybe he was going for some water to replace all the blood he’d lost.
“Hold it, man,” Fearless said.
The corpse swung his heavy fist, but Fearless leaned back and then pushed the man with the flat of his hand. A variation on that dance step happened again and again. The dead man kept swinging, and Fearless kept pushing off of him as gently as possible.
“You gonna hurt yourself, man,” Fearless kept saying. “Stop it.”
And he was right too. The man could only swing with his right. He was holding his left hand at a high point on the left side of his chest to keep the blood in. That tactic was not working. The blood cascaded through his fingers, and as the life fluid went, the one-handed fighter started flagging. He wound down like a child’s toy until he was on his knees. Finally he lunged with a roundhouse right that would have clocked Fearless on his left hip if he hadn’t stepped out of the way. The man fell on his face and went back to mimicking the dead.
Fearless quickly turned him over and applied pressure to the wound.
Twice in one day. I should have been at the racetrack. Luck that consistent needed a horse to bet on.
Fearless removed Till’s jacket, T-shirt, and a blood-soaked bandage. He then fashioned a new dressing from the sheet I got off the unkempt bed.
“Let’s get outta here,” I said when he was done.
“We got to call an ambulance,” he said.
The man was on his back on the floor, bare-chested with one arm straight out to the right and the other down at his side. I knew Fearless was right. But if I had been alone, my moral responsibilities wouldn’t have become apparent until I was far away and safe.
We made the call from the phone in a corner of the living room, then hurried out toward the car.
There was a siren blaring somewhere off in the night. The young lovers were gone, and we weren’t far behind them.
9
THE DAPPLED SUNLIGHT on apricot-colored walls was the most delicate thing I had seen in a very long time. The lilac-scented sheets were soft and light. Even the mosquitoes silently batting against the outside of the window were a feathery tickle in my mind. But mosquitoes led unerringly to the notion of blood, and blood would always remind me of Conrad Benjamin Till.
