“HE’S SURE ENOUGH DEAD,” Fearless was saying. “No doubt about that at all.”
I had pulled up a chair next to the corpse while Fearless examined the body.
“I didn’t mean it,” I said.
I had been saying things like that since Fearless got there. I said I was sorry. I said I didn’t mean to kill him. I asked Fearless why did he have to try and hurt me like that.
“You didn’t kill him,” Fearless said.
“What you talkin’ ’bout, man. I hit and hit and hit and hit, and he fell dead.”
“If anybody killed him,” Fearless said, “I’m the one. I’m the one threw that stone. I’m the one threw him down and tied him up. But Paris, we took him to the hospital. We called to make sure he got a bed. What else could we do? And what was you supposed to do wit’ him stranglin’ you like that? I mean, if there was ever a case of self-defense in Los Angeles, it’s this right here.”
“Yeah I . . . Yeah I . . . guess.”
Fearless put his hand on my neck. I thought he was trying to console me, but then I felt a pinch on a muscle next to the big vertebra. A pain went down my back and up into my head that was beyond any physical hurt I had ever known. I cried out and tried to get away from the hold but Fearless would not let go. It seemed as if he had taken up Timmerman’s job and planned to kill me too.
Finally he released his grip and I fell to the floor writhing. Fearless picked me up and carried me to the bathroom in the back of the store. He turned on the shower I had installed over the bathtub and threw me in, clothes and all.
The water was freezing!
I tried to climb out but Fearless wouldn’t let me. He held on to my arms and legs until I was almost numb with the cold. After long minutes he pulled me out and said, “Dry off and then go upstairs and change, Paris. We got business to take care of here.”
“Man, what the fuck you do that to me for?” I shouted, sputtering with rage.
“You was slippin’, Paris,” he said, giving me a one-shoulder shrug. “Shock, man. You know I been on the front lines. I seen boys experience death for the first time. And here you think you killed that man. We ain’t got time for no sanitarium, so I just put you through the crash course.”
I was so cold that I was shivering. The quavering in my chest and Fearless’s offhanded manner made me laugh. I did that a bit and then stopped for fear that my friend might throw me back in the shower.
It was at that moment that I accepted myself as a killer.
40
I CHANGED CLOTHES QUICKLY, not thinking about the dead white man downstairs at all. Fearless had been busy too. He’d found two old blankets and some rope and trussed the body up so that now it looked like an oversized, unfinished doll.
“Here, Paris, let me take care of that finger.”
While he bandaged up my torn nail he kept talking. “I emptied his pockets. It’s all on the table in your kitchen. Now I’m gonna take him out somewhere and get rid of him.”
“Don’t you think we should call the cops?” I asked.
Fearless just shook his head.
“I, I’ll go with you, though,” I offered.
“No, Paris. I don’t need you and it’a be bad enough if one of us is found wit’ a dead man in the trunk. I know what I’m doin’, brother. You just do what you do with his things.”
I watched as Fearless carried the man-doll down to the street and dumped him in the trunk. I didn’t worry about the money or even my book in there. I was a new man, at least for the moment, concentrated on the task at hand.
ALL THEODORE TIMMERMAN LEFT in the world was a package of mint gum, a roll of nickels, one of his own fake insurance cards with Craighton at pull lay 10:30 scrawled on it, and a ring of three keys. The keys were probably to his apartment, but the address would have been in the wallet that Fearless had confiscated before taking him to the hospital. We’d tossed the man’s pants, wallet, and shoes in a bin downtown. There was no finding his address.
And why would I still be chasing him down anyway? He tried to kill me three times already. There was no reason for me to put us into further jeopardy. The one real threat to me was dead. I had killed him with my own two hands.
The memory of the fight flooded my mind. For my entire life I had imagined what it would be like if I would fight to the death against some tough and come out victorious. But the reality was empty. I still felt guilty, even though he was a bully and white and had intentions of killing me. I felt I owed something to the world because I was a murderer and Fearless Jones was out covering my tracks.
I GOT TO MILO’S OFFICE at about four in the morning. The streets were empty of traffic. It didn’t take me long to locate Milo’s operatives file. The problem was that it was in one of the cabinets that Timmerman had overturned when he went after Milo to find out Winifred Fine’s identity.
Hindered by my sore finger, I took a while to flip the metal cabinet, but I finally got it.
Timmerman had his checks mailed to an address on Ogden Drive just north of Venice Boulevard.
IT WAS A HOUSE, not an apartment, on a street that was empty of any potential witnesses. The first key I tried in the lock fit. The numbness of my near-death experience kept me from fear or common sense. I went inside without even knocking. What if he had a girlfriend or a roommate? But those thoughts didn’t cross my mind until weeks later. At that moment I was a fool on a mission. And all the bricks of the road to hell were falling right into place at my feet.
The house was dark and so I ran my hand along the wall until I found the switch.
Mr. Timmerman hadn’t cleaned up once since the day he had moved in. The sink and tables were full of crusty dishes. The garbage stank and he had forgotten to flush the toilet before leaving his house to hunt down Bartholomew Perry, Kit Mitchell, and me. There was a rug in the bathtub, I never did figure out why. His bed was littered with half-filled potato chip bags and magazines with pictures of nude Negro women on every page. The floor was his hamper and every shade and curtain in the house was drawn.
Sherlock Holmes would have been at sea in that grubby hole. The skip tracer’s papers were in among the dishes and newspapers and scattered with coffee grounds.
Some mothers think they’re showing love by cleaning up after their sons, but in the long run they make them into feral things, growing bacteria in their bedrooms and filling the air with fungus and dust.
I looked around aimlessly for a while and then concentrated my search. I figured that even a slob like Timmerman would have a special place for important papers and projects. I was looking for a trunk or a briefcase, a filing cabinet, or maybe just a corner of a closet that didn’t have the clutter of the rest of his house.
Over an hour later I hadn’t found a thing.
The back door of his kitchen led to a small walkway in a yard overgrown with weeds and the branches of an untrimmed oak. Through the leaves and boughs I found another door. This one opened into his garage.
I knew from the moment I flipped the light switch that Theodore Timmerman was insane. The garage was neat as a pin. The floor was tiled with black and white squares that had been perfectly laid. He had three different desks, a telephone, one white upright filing cabinet, and over four thousand watts of light to illuminate every corner.
The life of his mind was in the garage, whereas his house was a trough where he ate and masturbated. Looking over his files I could see that he was a man of many faces. He used jobs like Milo’s to worm his way into more lucrative, if less legal, activities. He had files on dozens of men and women he had chased down, and scams that he ran through the mail on a regular basis. There was one whole file of photographs. Most of these were of the incriminating variety: people in places they shouldn’t have been, men and women making love, grinning so wide that you just knew they weren’t married—at least not to each other. But then there were other pictures that were more disturbing: men in sexual situations with young boys, over two dozen photographs of corpses, with detailed notes about the circumstances of their deaths. One photograph was of a young woman who I had first read about in the L.A. Times. Minna Wexler was stripped to the waist. One of her large breasts had been marred, maybe burned. Lance Wexler looked just as he had when I came across him in his apartment. Kit Mitchell was also pretty much the same as I had found him.