I plan for calamity. The roof I was on covered the back porch of my house. There were three beams along it that could bear the weight of a man. I knew the route of those beams and went quickly along the center timber and into the apple tree in the yard.
A great bellow came from the house as I stepped onto the top pole of the wire fence that separated my backyard from the alley behind Florence. The volume of that shout made me lose my footing. My bare foot got tangled up in the top mesh, and I fell to the asphalt below.
The fence was only six feet high, but I landed on my right shoulder blade and it hurt like hell. For a moment I lay there feeling as though I could never get up. But then I saw my maple desk chair crashing through the window I had just gone through.
I dropped my underpants and jumped into my jeans as I ran.
I came out on Central in a matter of moments. I couldn’t hear Tiny, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t after me.
There I was in the twilight, wearing only my jeans with no shoes or socks. The pain from the fall was returning. Somewhere on the run I had cut my right foot, so I was limping now and trailing blood behind me on the white sidewalk.
I looked like a hobo. And not only that, I looked like trouble and so I had to figure what establishment I could duck into that wouldn’t eject me into Tiny’s murderous embrace.
“Paris!” a voice called. I nearly fainted.
“Paris, what’s wrong?”
The voice was coming from the street, not the alley. There was a yellowy green Studebaker, maybe ten years old, right there in the left lane. Sir Bradley was sitting behind the wheel.
I heard a shout. It might have been anybody, but I couldn’t take that chance.
“They tryin’ to get me, Sir,” I cried.
“Jump on in, boy. Let’s move.”
I opened his car door and hopped into the backseat. Before the door was closed, Sir hit the gas and we were off across the intersection. I heard a loud thump, turned, and saw Tiny running only a foot or so behind us. Cars were honking in the intersection, and Sir swerved to avoid a collision. Tiny swung his fist and struck the trunk of the Studebaker again.
“Oh, shit!” Sir screamed.
The tires squealed loudly, and we were off down Central, leaving Tiny to swing his fists in the crossroads.
“Wow,” my savior said. “That suckah’s big. What he after you for, Paris?”
“His girlfriend forgot to tell him about me.”
“White girl?”
“Yeah.”
The woman sitting next to him gave a disapproving grunt.
“Hm. That’s what you get runnin’ ’round with them white women,” she said.
“Paris, meet Sasha,” Sir said.
“Pleased to meet ya,” I said while glancing out the back window and putting pressure on the cut on my foot. Now that I was safe from immediate harm, I began to worry about what Tiny would do to my store.
Turning my attention to the front seat, I saw that the woman with Sir was a deep chocolate color, with big eyes and high cheekbones. She was a beauty by any standard — except for the sour twist of her lips.
Sasha was born to be a queen and Sir was just a pawn. He was medium brown, middlebrow, and five eight in street shoes. His forehead was low, but he had a long skull from front to back. His eyes were crafty and his smile ever present. He was a union man from the first day he got a job at the Long Beach docks and he voted Democrat without even a glance at the candidate’s name.
Mrs. Bradley, Sir’s mother, had christened him so that no white person could insult him by refusing to call him Mister. He might have been a peasant by breeding, but there was a natural genuflection in just the mention of his name.
Maybe that’s why the sour-faced beauty had hooked up with him: because saying his name did her honor.
“That boy was out for blood,” Sir said.
“Uh-huh,” I agreed.
Crossing the cut foot over my knee, I began teasing out the splinter of glass.
“You wanna call the cops?” Sir asked.
“A white cop?” Sasha said. “And tell him what? That he been sleepin’ with a white man’s girl and the white man wanna kick him? The police probably hold him down.”
She was more than half right.
“Naw. I don’t wanna go to no cops,” I said. “Take me over to Slauson.”
“Where?” Sir asked.
“Milo Sweet’s new office. Fearless is there playin’ bodyguard for a little while.”
“Fearless Jones?” Sasha asked.
I recognized the longing in her voice. Fearless was coveted by women all over South L.A. and beyond. They liked his power to begin with and then his heart once they got to know him.
“Hear that, Paris?” Sir said. “I’ll let you off on the corner. Either that or I’ll be sleepin’ alone tonight.”
Chapter 4
Sir lent me a beat-up yellow sweater so that I wasn’t bare chested walking down Slauson. When he and Sasha let me out on the darkening corner, I was almost shaking. I was feeling the exhilaration of survival and mortal fear at my close call. I was proud of myself for my letter-perfect escape, knowing all the while that I was a fool to be in a situation that could bring me so close to pain.
Milo sweet’s bail bond office was upstairs from the haberdashers Kleinsman and Lowe. They specialized in old-world hats that they exported throughout Europe and the Orient. At one time they had used the third floor for the managing office, but when they decided to move the nerve center of their operation downtown, they let the space to Milo Sweet and his jack-of-all-trades assistant, Loretta Kuroko.
I climbed the outside staircase to the third floor and knocked.
After a few moments Loretta opened the door and smiled for me.
That day she was wearing a green ensemble. The jacket was silk and so was her skirt. The black blouse might have been cotton, and the hand-carved jade rose that hung from her neck was exquisite.
Loretta was ten years my senior but looked younger than me. She was beautiful and smarter than her boss. But Loretta revered Milo Sweet, and I do believe that she was the only person in the world he would have laid down his life for.
She had long dark hair rolled up into a bun at the back of her head and eyes that looked at you from some other epoch, when there were no cars or jitterbugs, no white people at all, and when men, once they made up their mind to fight, would not give up until they had bled their last drop.
“Hello, Paris,” she said.
I felt something then. It was the feeling I’d had as a child when I returned home after a long day away. My mother would be there waiting for me, and I felt a joy that I had not expected to feel. Loretta’s greeting was a delight. And I think that she saw my reaction.
She smiled and nodded by moving her head in an elegant semicircle.
“Are you here to see Milo?” she asked.
“No.”
Her lips pursed. “Fearless?”
“Have I ever told you how happy I am to see you whenever I come to this office?” I asked.
“Come on in, Paris,” she said.
I followed her up the three steps to the circular room that she and Milo shared.
When Milo told Loretta that they were moving offices again, the thirteenth time in nine years, she informed him that she would only go if he let her find the place and design and furnish it. What came of it was a thing of beauty.
The room wasn’t actually round. It had eight walls of equal size. Every other wall had a large window with a roll-up bamboo shade. The floor was the most wonderful part. It was a perfect circle, twenty feet in diameter, raised half a foot above the original floor and made from cherrywood. Fearless had constructed it. He had also built the oak file cabinets that sat against the windowless walls and on the floor outside the circle.