The house that fit the address Friar had given us was a small cottage with white plaster walls and a green thatch roof. Twenty blocks south and it would have cost less than five thousand dollars, but its location made it worth seven times that.
I rang the bell, and the door came open almost immediately. Maybe he was expecting someone. Maybe in this house he ignored the criminal circumstances of his life — I don’t know. All I can say is that the tall and handsome silver-haired white man was smiling when he opened the door. The smile faltered at first and then turned into a panicked grimace. He gasped and turned to run. Given no choice, Fearless lunged after the probable Mr. Sterling, grabbing him by the collar of his white dress shirt. One tug and he was on his back. I was inside the door by then, pulling it shut behind me.
“Please don’t kill me,” the white man whined. “Please.”
“Get his wallet,” I said to Fearless.
“Take it,” the terrified man said, almost throwing the wallet at me. “Take everything; just don’t kill me.”
I opened the billfold and pulled out his business card. It read: Lionel Charlemagne Sterling, Realtor.
“We got to talk, Lionel,” I said.
“Please, please,” he replied, staying down on his knees.
“Get up,” I said. I couldn’t stand to see a man kneeling and begging — not even a white man.
“Please.”
“Get up,” Fearless said in a voice he never used on me.
The sobbing extortionist rose to his feet, his head bowed and his shoulders sagging.
We were standing in an entranceway. To the right was a sunken living room. I thought he was going to lead us in there, but instead he leaned against a small waist-high table that stood against the wall. There was a telephone sitting there.
“I never meant to hurt anyone,” he said. “It was just too much.”
“Where’s Three Hearts and Angel?” I asked him.
“In Pasadena,” he said. “Thirteen twenty-nine Hugo.”
That was easy.
“Tell him that I would never turn him in,” Sterling said. “Tell him. Call him.”
“Why don’t you call him?” I said, wondering who it was that frightened Sterling so.
“Can I?” he sobbed. Mucus was running from his left nostril. Tears flowed from both eyes.
“Sure,” I said. “Calm down, Mr. Sterling. We’re not here to hurt you.”
My assurances seemed to frighten him even more. He began to tremble.
He turned to the telephone table, but instead of grabbing the receiver he pulled open the drawer. He turned quickly, but Fearless was even faster.
If I had been alone I would have died in that overpriced entranceway. But my friend, with his catlike instincts and reflexes, grabbed the gun and tore it from Sterling’s grip.
Sterling fell to his knees and screamed like a woman. He grabbed me by my thigh and yelled again, not so loudly this time. His eyes were popping out and the rictus of his smile was the epitome of terror.
Not knowing what else to do, I grabbed his face and leaned forward.
“It’s okay, man,” I said to him. “We’re not here to hurt you.”
His grin began to quiver, and his eyes fixed on a place that was far away from that room. The grip on my thigh loosened, and Mr. Lionel Charlemagne Sterling began to fade.
“No,” I said. “No, man. We’re not here to hurt you.”
The death grin was accompanied by a nod that did not comprehend my words.
He let go of my leg, but I grabbed his forearms in a hopeless attempt to keep him alive. But the blackmailer was dying, and nothing I could do would keep him from that fate.
When he’d fallen down on his back, Fearless touched his throat and put an ear against his mouth.
“Dead,” my friend said. Then he looked up at me. “Damn, Paris.”
“What? You think I knew somethin’ like this was gonna happen?”
“You the one brought us here, man,” he said.
“He killed himself,” I said. “He was scared because’a what he did.”
“Are we standin’ ovah a dead white man in Beverly Hills?” he asked me.
“He died of a heart attack or somethin’ like that. We didn’t kill him.”
Fearless just shook his head.
“Damn,” he said again.
There was over forty thousand dollars laid out on a bed in one of the house’s smaller bedrooms. I looked at it, counted it, placed it in a pillowcase, and put it down.
There was no other indication of Sterling’s criminal activity in the house. We left him where he had fallen in the foyer. If we were lucky, a housecleaner or relative would find him and that would be it — Death due to heart attack, the coroner’s report would read.
“Should we take the money?” I asked my friend.
“Yeah. Yeah, sure,” he said. “Maybe we could find somebody he robbed an’ pay ’em back.”
We watched the street until no one was out and no car was coming and then made our escape.
While driving toward Pasadena we had the following conversation:
“You really blame me for this?” I asked.
“I don’t think you knew what was gonna happen,” he said. “I don’t think you wanted him to die. But it’s just the way you go about things, man. You too much. You too hard.”
“Hard? Me? Man, I couldn’t beat up two outta three high school kids.”
“Not hard fists, Paris. It’s your mind. You treat people like they was books, man. You just open ’em up and start goin’. But really you should come up slow an’ check it out first.”
I didn’t know what he was talking about. I had the feeling that he was telling me the truth, that I was at least partly the cause of Sterling’s death. But what could I do about it? He was the criminal. Wasn’t he?
Chapter 36
It was evening before we arrived at 1329 Hugo Place. The address sounded as if it belonged on a small house like Sterling’s cottage. But this was a mansion. There was an eight-foot salmon pink adobe wall around the property and wrought-iron gates blocking pedestrian and vehicular passage.
There was a button for a buzzer to the right of the gateway.
“Okay, Fearless,” I said. “What do you say? Do we knock or not?”
“They got your people in there, man,” Fearless said. Then he tried the pedestrian gate — it wasn’t locked.
A hundred feet from the entrance stood the house.
It was a big house, three floors in places. There were no lights on, no cars in the driveway.
My heart was pounding like John Henry’s hammer, and I worried about a heart attack. Maybe I’d die like Sterling had, from fear. Even Fearless couldn’t protect me from my own heart.
The moon was bright enough to light our way and expose us to invisible assassins. Every footstep we took on the gravel path was like a giant maraca announcing us to our enemies.
“There’s a way round back,” Fearless hissed.
I went with him from the lunar shade of a large stand of bird-of-paradise to the shadow of the house.
Behind the house stood a smaller, two-story building. There was a faint light coming from a few of its many windows.
We made our way to the front door, which was locked, and then around the sides, looking into windows as we went.
There was one window near the ground that was to the basement. There was a slightly stronger light coming from there. I peered into that portal, down into a room that was at least twenty feet below. There I beheld Three Hearts and Angel sitting across from each other at a wooden table. The room they were in was small and, I thought, probably locked.