When I’d met her, she talked all the time about how she’d never seen a black man up close. She’d play with my hair and place her white hand against my skin to marvel at the contrast.
And Jessa was a brass tacks kind of girl. I paid her rent and made an exotic entry in her life. If she was working with somebody who was counting money in the thousands, she wouldn’t have had a moment for me.
No. Jessa had nothing to do with Useless and Useless had nothing to do with the murder of Tiny Bobchek.
But where had Jessa gone?
I closed my eyes, but I could tell by the thrumming at the back of my head that sleep would not be coming any time soon.
I had an inspiration then. So I got dressed, went down to my car, and drove over to the blue house in front of Man’s Barn.
It was almost nine, well beyond the time when decent people dropped in on one another. Man might have turned me away, but I had a plan to get by him.
I rang the bell and stood there in my brown jacket and black trousers. I was sporting alligator shoes and a blue pullover shirt that had a one-button collar.
Man wore a white T-shirt and navy blue pants that had a drawstring at the waist.
“What the hell do you want?” he asked me. “Do you know what time it is? My little girl was asleep before you started pushin’ on that bell.”
I twisted my face into a wordless apology. “I didn’t wanna disturb ya, but I thought you’d appreciate me coming here over the alternative.”
“What the fuck are you talkin’ about, Negro?” he said. He grabbed the door as if he were about to slam it in my face.
“Fearless Jones,” I said.
For a moment time ceased to pass on Man Dorn’s face. Then he looked at me, wondering how to avoid the two words he’d just heard.
“What’s Mr. Jones got to do wit’ me?”
“You know that woman I was here wit’ today?” I asked. “The one that paid Useless’s rent?”
“Yeah?”
“She took me ovah to Mad Anthony’s, and he got kinda riled...”
“That don’t have nuthin’ to do wit’ me,” Man claimed.
“Yeah. I know.” I was feeling sorry for Man. “But then Three Hearts went to Fearless and Fearless broke Tony’s jaw. Then she said that she was here and she thought that you knew more about Angel than you was sayin’ and that maybe he could come on by. I told Fearless that we didn’t need to go through all’a that. I said that I was sure you’d give Three Hearts what she needed.”
“Hold on,” he said, retreating into the blue home.
He left the door open. There was a television on in a room next to the one the door opened onto. Through the second doorway I could see two black women sitting on a couch, illuminated by the light of the TV. They were peering out at me. They looked like dark sisters, maybe a year or two apart. I tried to think of what their relationship to Man might have been but failed.
I did know that neither one of them was his wife.
Man returned with an eight-by-six glossy photograph. It was of a stunningly beautiful woman. She had medium brown skin, straight or straightened hair, eyes filled with knowing surprise, and parted lips that could teach you how to kiss a Greek goddess.
“This Angel?” I asked.
“When she told me that she was a actress,” Man said, “I asked her if she had a publicity picture. You know, a lotta these girls got bikini pictures for their Hollywood agents. It wasn’t that, but she’s pretty, though. Nice girl. She just had bad taste in men.”
“Anything else?”
“Naw, man. That’s it. I told you everything else.”
“How about the car the guy drove her off in?”
“I don’t even know, brother. I didn’t really care.”
“Man?” a woman said. She was standing at the inner door.
She was a shortish woman with big kissy lips and startled eyes.
“Go on back in the TV room, Doretha,” Man said. “We almost through here.”
She backed away fearfully.
“Couple’a my tenants come up to watch TV,” he told me. “So Fearless don’t have to come by now, right?”
“No, sir, Mr. Dorn.”
Chapter 16
There weren’t too many joints where a woman like Angel would belong. Of course there were all kinds of men who would have wanted to go there with her: garage attendants and gangsters on the Negro side; directors, producers, and other high rollers on the white. But black men couldn’t get into the places she would have wanted to be, and white men couldn’t take her there — at least not for very long.
In 1956 a sophisticated and beautiful black woman had very few choices unless she wanted to be a good girl and wear midcalf skirts and milky rimmed glasses. I didn’t expect that Angel was that type of woman. If she was, I wouldn’t find her and I wouldn’t need to.
The only black club that would fit her bill was Apollo’s at the Knickerbocker Hotel off Central down in the forties. Apollo’s had jazz and fine food for black and white patrons. That was before the black part of town became off-limits to the casual white devotee.
I pulled up to a liquor store called Kenny’s Keg on Figueroa. I got a pack of Lucky Strikes and a pint of Greeley’s whiskey with a short stack of paper cups and a quart bottle of seltzer. I put the booze and water in the trunk, lit a cigarette, and then walked across the street to a glass-encased phone booth. I looked up a number by the yellow electric light and dialed.
“Hello?” a frightened elderly voice inquired.
“Kiko, please.”
“What?”
“Kiko.”
“Kiko?”
“Yes.”
A few hard knocks sounded in my ear and then, “Hello,” came a sultry voice.
“Loretta?”
“Paris?” she managed to evince both surprise and joy in her tone.
“You said call you, right?”
“I’m surprised you did,” she said.
“Why’s that?”
“I don’t know. You seem to think about some things until all the color is washed out, I guess. What do you want?”
“I got fifty dollars and a yen to hear some jazz.”
“The High Hat?” she suggested.
“I was thinkin’ more in the line with Apollo’s.”
“You know you need a reservation to get in there,” she said.
“I do, but Milo don’t.”
“And you just came up with this idea on a whim?” she asked. She was playing with me, but even when playing, cats use their claws a little.
“No,” I admitted. “I got to find out some things there, but I promise you a good dinner and fine companionship.”
“I’m not a cheap date, Mr. Minton.”
“I know how to act.”
I picked her up at her parents’ house twenty-five minutes later. They lived just south of Venice Boulevard on the west side of town.
That night Kiko “Loretta” Kuroko was a sight to behold. She wore a tight-fitting green gown that had sequins here and there, with a black velvet-and-silk shawl draped on her shoulders. Her black high heels made her taller than I by two inches, and her makeup was just enough to make any man from six to sixty-six skip a step in his gait.
I opened the door for her as her frightened parents gawped from a window of their small house.
Loretta’s whole family had been imprisoned in an American-run concentration camp during World War II. This caused her parents to be afraid of anything outside their small circle and it made Loretta hate all white people.
“Damn,” I once said to her. “My people been under a white man’s thumb for three hundred years an’ I don’t hate all of ’em.”
“That’s because they never lied to you,” she said on that weekday afternoon at Milo’s office. “But I always believed that I was accepted as a person and a citizen. After what I saw, I don’t care what happens to them.”