“Hercules,” I said to no one.
He was big enough for a Hercules. Well over six feet and bulky with both muscle and fat. And he was bloated from many hours of being dead in that heat. There were bruises and burns all down his right arm. I suppose he gave up whatever information it was that he had before the left arm had to be mutilated.
The wallet was real alligator. Even back then it had to cost fifty dollars or more. It held three twenty-dollar bills and a packet of business cards bound together by a rubber band. There were liquor stores, furniture movers, and Madame Ethel’s Beauty Supply among the cards. There were also six business cards for the same man—Lawrence Wexler. It seemed that he was a salesman for Cars-O-Plenty, a used automobile business.
My stomach started churning and I ran to find a bathroom. I told myself to wait, but the call of nature was too strong. A door leading from the kitchen went into a small toilet. Seated there on the commode, I placed the wallet on the floor before me. Madame Ethel’s sounded familiar to me, but at first I couldn’t place it. Then I remembered that Kit had done a delivery for that company.
I considered taking the wallet with me. I didn’t care about the money but maybe there was something in there that I needed.
But what if I got caught?
I’d tell the truth.
That thought made me laugh.
It seemed like I was on the commode for hours. The fear in my gut was worse than many intestinal viruses I had contracted. I felt relieved and weakened when the bout was through. I’d had enough time to check everything, so I just took one of Wexler’s business cards and returned the wallet to the dead man’s pocket.
I passed through the house wiping every surface that I had touched and many that I might have touched. I put the dining room chair back in its place and moved out of Suite P4 with less fuss than a butterfly leaving a dank cave.
I made it down the stairs without taking a breath. I was at the swinging doors to the back alley entrance when a man yelled, “Hey you!”
I turned, seeing a tall and slender white man dressed all in white. He wasn’t a cook but it certainly was a uniform he was wearing.
“Yes sir,” I said. The words just came out of me. Betrayed by four centuries of training, but I didn’t worry about that right then.
“Who are you?” the white man asked.
He had a pencil-thin mustache and a crooked face, though you could see by the tilt of his brimless hat that he thought he was handsome. There was a thin gold band on the ring finger of his left hand.
“Cort Stillman,” I said, hoping that he didn’t wonder about a Negro named Cort.
“What are you doing here?”
“Looking for a Mr. John Stover.” I handed over the blue envelope.
Lance Wexler’s business card felt like a bomb in my pocket.
“There’s no John Stover living here,” he said, twisting his already ugly mouth. “And even if there was, what are you doing out back?”
“The lady out front said that there was no Stover. And I told her that I knew that he was staying with a woman on the fourth floor. That’s what they said when they brought the package in. You know it’s my job to make sure the package gets to the man it was addressed to. They told me at the front desk that they wouldn’t take it, so I came in the back way to sneak up and knock on some doors.”
Sweat dripped down my spine. I hoped that my face was still dry.
“Let’s go down to the front desk and ask them about this,” the man said.
He was taller than I and probably stronger. At any rate, I’m not good at hand-to-hand combat. No good at fighting, period. I looked around, hoping for a miracle.
I found it on his feet. I was sure that there weren’t three men in six square miles wearing that particular hue of tan shoe.
“Listen, Warren,” I said. “We could do each other a favor here.”
“How you know my name?”
“If they call my boss and tell him that I snuck in like this, he’d be forced to fire me. You know I cain’t have that,” I said, ignoring his question.
“How you know my name, man?”
“And there’s a certain young lady who would be very thankful that you kept it quiet about what you were doin’ to her up on the roof.”
Old Warren turned as white as his jacket.
“I don’t know if she’s married, but I bet your young wife might be upset with you bein’ unemployed and a cheat all at once.”
Warren looked like he wanted to hurt me, so I grabbed the envelope from his hand and walked out through the swinging doors, leaving him to consider the consequences of lust.
8
I MADE IT TO THE CAR and headed down toward my own neighborhood. As soon as I saw black faces on the street I parked and practiced breathing. My gut was still writhing, and my heart knocked against my chest like Fearless Jones at the door.
Fearless Jones was my best friend and more trouble than a white girl on the prowl in Mississippi. Here I thought I was smart, sneaking into a white residence, ringing a white man’s bell. But I should have known—whatever the worst could have been behind that door, it would have to come to pass if Fearless brought me there.
It was September. September is often L.A.’s hottest month. Eighty-five degrees. And still I was shivering on the inside.
Fear is the motivating force behind most of my actions. Whatever it is I’m most afraid of takes all of my attention. Right then I was afraid that the cops could place me at the scene of a murder. Forget that the man had been dead at least two days when I was caught by Warren at the back door. Forget that I had probably erased any scrap that might have put me in the dead man’s suite. If the police liked me for the murder, then I would be the murderer in their book—and their book was the only one that mattered.
I had to know why Kit Mitchell was missing, why Leora and Son were looking for him, and why he would have had free entrée to a murdered car salesman’s apartment.
To answer these questions I pulled back into traffic and drove off toward the office of the bail bondsman—Milo Sweet.
MILO HAD MOVED from his Hooper address, over the illegal chicken distributors, to an apartment building on Baring Cross Street between 109th Street and 109th Place. Loretta Kuroko—Milo’s secretary, girl Friday, and final hope—was sitting in the little front room of the domicile-turned-office. She was forty with the skin of a twenty-year-old and the eyes of some ancient sage. She lived and worked down among black people because of her hatred for the white men who imprisoned her and her family during the war. And she adored Milo with a passion that could not be understood in contemporary terms. It wasn’t sexual, or at least I didn’t think it was. Their bond was like some ancient myth about two ideal characters carrying on their labors through the centuries, living out the drama and foibles of the whole human race.
“Hello, Paris,” Loretta said. “How are you?”
“Fine, Loretta.” I proffered a bunch of dahlias that I’d bought from a florist on Century Boulevard.
“Oh,” she said with light in her deep eyes. “Thank you so much.”
Milo never brought Loretta flowers or chocolates or even a paper cup of coffee—that wasn’t a part of their mythology.
“He’s back there. Go right on in,” she said. “I’ll put these in water.”
The hallway, from the front room to the back, was exactly two and a half paces. On the way you passed the door to a toilet on the right. That was where Loretta would get her water.
The back room was larger than the front, but it seemed smaller because of the eight file cabinets that Milo had against three walls. In those archives he had the records of his days as a lawyer—before he was disbarred—and as a restaurant owner, bookkeeper, and car insurance salesman. He’d also been a fence and a bookie, but I doubted if those records were still intact.