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All of this I could see from the window of my car. It was just after ten. The street was almost empty of traffic. Now and then a car would rush past. But there was nothing to look at. My lights were off.
The leaves on the walkway to the front were in an undisturbed, haphazard pattern. Here and there in the iron fence there were delivery menus and supermarket ads that had been shoved in. No one was home, I was fairly sure of that. But who was that no one and why was this address in the pocket of a man who had just offered me and my friend eleven thousand dollars?
Man offer you a dollar for a day’s labor, my mother used to tell me, he’s a man you could trust. But a man offer you a hundred dollars for a short night’s work, you better run until you can’t see him and then hide in amongst the trees.
The eleven thousand dollars BB promised us had blood on it already. Anybody who wanted to earn it had to be ready to bleed. I didn’t covet that money. I didn’t care if it ever came my way. But I had to play along with the young Prince Perry, because as long as he thought I was in thrall to his riches he’d try to keep me in the game.
It was going on fifteen minutes that I had been watching the house. I had come all that way. It would be childish of me to leave empty-handed when all I had to do was walk up to the gate, at worst the door, and see whose name it was on the mailbox. There was no one home. Nobody had been there for days. I could trust my own logic on that score.
Even if the cops happened by and stopped me—it wasn’t breaking and entering to ring somebody’s bell.
The only thing to fear . . . they had said when I was a child.
I walked up to the gate and pushed it open. The rusty hinges let out a long screeching note that could have been heard three blocks away. I froze there, waiting for some punishment to descend. My heart was racing and my fingertips tingled. The chill of the desert night pricked at the sweat on my neck. My bowels rumbled but I still took a step onto the path of round stones that led to the front door.
A thick bundle of mail was jammed into the small box on the front door. The name of the addressee was Rikki Faison. Another name in the ever-growing cast of characters in the Fearless Jones Drama. I didn’t try the knob. At least I’d learned that lesson.
I turned to leave and came face to face with fear itself. It was in the shape of a tall shadow, framed by darkness, with two glittering circles that took the place of eyes about a foot above my head.
Nigger, the eyes said, and then I felt a sharp pain on the left temple.
“NIGGAH TOLD ME that I had to come up wit’ fi’e hunnert dollars if I wanted to see my farm again,” a man said.
I knew him but couldn’t recall his name.
“I will not discuss anything with you if you gonna use language like that,” my mother replied.
“Language like what?” the man protested. “I done told you the niggah done stoled my farm. Went to county court and told them that I owed him money that he knows I’m gonna pay just as soon as the crop come in.”
“I told you already that I will not listen to that kind of language.”
I must have been very young, because my mother and the man she was refusing to talk to were giants. He was dressed in farmer’s clothes and she had on her green Sunday dress with the white edges and seams. I was very upset because both of them were being so obstinate. The farmer was too angry to stop calling his nemesis a nigger, and my mother was too critical to break her rules long enough to understand his rage.
I wanted to talk but my voice was somehow silenced. I tried to think if I was too young to be able to speak, but it seemed to me that I was old enough—the words were in my head. But for some reason they refused to come out of my mouth.
I was so angry that I started hitting myself in the head so that my mother would look at me and both of them would agree on the rules of conversation. But they didn’t notice and so I kept on hitting myself until it began to hurt.
That’s when I woke up. I couldn’t have been hitting myself, because my hands and feet were tied. The reason I couldn’t speak was because of the gag in my mouth. My nose was partially stuffed up, and so I found it extremely difficult to breathe. I tried to spit out the gag but it was tied tight around my head. There were rags stuffed into my mouth. I got so frightened that breathing became even harder. That’s when I started kicking and flailing around. I was in a tight space. There was the smell of gasoline and rubber around me. I was in the trunk of a car. This new bit of knowledge brought on my first-ever attack of claustrophobia. The word went through my mind, its definition and Latin root claustrum, a closed space, but that didn’t keep the level of anxiety from rising to the color of red in my mind. I kicked and bucked and screamed silently.
The trunk came open and a tall man with thick glasses that had round lenses smiled down at me. I was writhing like an earthworm freshly exposed to air. The man grinned. All of his teeth had spaces between them. His lips quivered with amusement at my plight.
“Stuck?” he asked, and I stopped struggling.
He took out a large pistol and pointed it at my head.
“I’m going to untie you and take the gag out. But if you run or raise your voice I’m going to kill you with this here howitzer. You understand?”
I nodded as best I could and he pulled the gag from my mouth.
I gulped in air, realizing that it was the most precious commodity in all the world. Air. More valuable than gold or sex. It was delicious, rich. I lay there almost happy in spite of my predicament.
The white kidnapper had a thick mop of brown hair that seemed to grow only from the top of his head. He wore a blue suit on a long and elegant body that didn’t belong to the big head and ugly face. He dragged me from the trunk and untied me. Then he pushed me so hard that I fell to the floor. He yanked me up and pushed me again, just as hard. I didn’t fall that time because I was ready.
“Get moving, nigger.”
The word brought back my dream.
We were in a cavernlike garage. The thug in the blue suit shoved me toward an external staircase that must have gone up at least two-and-a-half floors. At the top was a door. The goon pressed a jury-rigged button but I heard no ring.
“Louis?” a voice asked from the other side.
“Yeah.”
The door opened inward. A small man was standing there. I say small because he was an inch or two shorter than I.
“You got somebody?” the short man said.
“Come on, Eric. You see him don’t ya? He was sneakin’ around the bitch’s front door. I threw him in the trunk and brought him over. He up?”
“I woke him when you called. He’s in the big room.”
“Lead the way,” Louis said.
Eric rubbed his hands together and led us through a maze of short hallways and across nondescript little rooms. We finally came to a broad corridor with thick burgundy carpeting and gold-and-yellow walls. This led into an antechamber whose only purpose was to bring many different hallways into the presence of a large, unfinished oaken door.
Eric allowed Louis and me to go ahead. I noticed that Louis hesitated before raising his knuckles to rap out our request for entry.
I was in a world that was completely strange to my experience. I understood men like Louis and Eric. I understood petit bourgeois pretenders like Bartholomew Perry. But that lobby was the largest room I had ever been in in a man’s home, and it was just the appetizer for what was to come.
I realized that the main course in a house like this might well be a human life.
27
THE ROUGH-HEWN DOOR opened inward. The man standing there surprised me. He was a timid-looking guy in a shabby green suit. He looked like a bookkeeper or a door-to-door salesman—certainly not the monster that I felt must lay beyond that great door. The timid man stood aside and we entered a room that any king in Europe would have been at home in. There were rows of red velvet-covered chairs along the walls and an incredibly long and wide table, cut from a single great tree, down the center of the chamber. Above each chair hung an antique tapestry, each one depicting a different hunting tableau. At the far end of the table sat a throne. That’s the only thing I can call it. You had to ascend three steps to get to it, and it was plush with golden velvet and ornately carved wood.
The man who sat there had a lean, leonine face and long, thick brown hair that flowed backward. He wore a red shirt and white trousers, no shoes or socks, rings or glasses. He was over forty and under sixty.
His eyes were mad.
“Who is this?” the king asked his vassals.
“The driver’s license in his wallet says Paris Minton,” Louis said.
“Where did you find him?”
“Checking out the mailbox at the Faison girl’s house. I figured since it’s niggers in this that you’d wanna see him.”
The king looked at his lackey with something like disdain in his nutso gaze.
I wanted to scream.
“What’s your name?” the king asked me.
“Paris, like the man said. What’s yours?”
Louis’s hand, which still gripped my biceps, tightened. The man on his throne sat up straighter. He frowned for a moment and then he laughed.
“They call me Maestro,” he said, and my heart sank. “What were you doing at my daughter’s sublet, Paris?”
“I don’t know anything about your daughter, sir. All I knew was that it’s an address that a man I’m looking for had left behind in his hideout.”
“What man is that?”
“Young Negro name of Bartholomew Perry,” I said as bravely as I could.
“And where was he?”
I gave the address, certain that the bookkeeper or Eric would write it down.
“But,” I added, “he was already gone from those premises. We got there maybe three hours too late.”
“We?”
“Me and Fearless. Fearless Jones.” Just saying the name gave me hope and maybe even a tiny bit of nerve.
“And why were you and this Fearless looking for Mr. Perry?”
“A man named Milo Sweet was looking for him. He’s a bail bondsman but sometimes he agrees to look for missing persons. Me and Fearless work for him now and then.”
“What did he want with Perry?”
“He said that it was a missing person case. We figured that it was family lookin’ for him.”
I was walking a tightrope with the make-believe king and his subjects. I didn’t know what they knew, so I decided to lie by leaving out any direct involvement we might have had with the Wexler clan. Fearless knew how to take care of himself and Milo was tucked away with Fearless’s mother. The only person I had to worry about was Loretta Kuroko. But all I had to do was call her. That would be easy, if I lived to dial the number.
“How did you find Perry’s hiding place?”
“Milo called me at my house and told me. He said that one of his informants had given him the tip.”
“Who?”
“He didn’t say.”
“Didn’t you wonder why he’d call you if he knew where his quarry was?”
“I was just happy to stay on the payroll, Maestro.”
Louis’s hand tightened again.
“Do you know who I am, Paris?”
“No sir. I mean, I figure you’re rich and all, but I never heard’a you that I know.”
“My last name is Wexler.”
I squinted and then shrugged.
“No sir. I don’t remember that name in any of this.”
“My daughter and son have been murdered. I believe that this man you’re chasing has something to do with the people who killed them. So you can see why I’m suspicious about anyone coming to her sublet home or anyone looking for Bartholomew Perry.”
“Oh yeah.”
“Do you have anything else to tell me?”
“No sir. All I know is that Milo Sweet hired me, then he told me where to find Bartholomew, I found what you tell me is your daughter’s address and came to see if I could get a lead.”
Silence filled the room. My ears got terribly hot, burning hot. I had spun my lie and now all I could do was hope the line would lead me out of there.
“How much is this Milo Sweet paying you?”
“Hundred and fifty if we find BB. Ten dollars a day for our trouble if we don’t.”
“I’ll give you ten thousand dollars if you find him. Will you work for me?”
I looked over at Louis, then at his fist wrapped around my arm.
“Let him go, Louis,” the king commanded.
The brute did as he was told.
“Sure,” I said. “Yeah. Hell yeah.”
“You would betray your employer?”
“The way I look at it, Milo gave up my trust when he didn’t tell me how serious this problem was. He knows, I’ve told him before, that I never wanna get messed up with any problem got a killer in it somewhere.”
“But you would do it for me?”
“The most money Milo ever offered me was for this job here. I’m already in it so why not go for the big payday?”
Maestro Wexler studied me then. He was a man who demanded allegiance from his employees and I was obviously not the faithful sort. But he needed me. Why harm me when I could still be of some use?
“Louis, give Mr. Minton your number and drive him back to his car.”
“No,” I said.
“What is it, Mr. Minton? Do you require a retainer?”
“A retainer sounds nice but that’s not what I was talkin’ about. I already been on a ride with this mothahfuckah right here. I don’t need that again.”
Maestro laughed.
“I’ve told you about your manner, Louis. Bradford.”
“Yes sir,” the bookkeeper intoned. He walked into my line of vision.
“This is Bradford,” Maestro said. “He’s my private secretary.”
I nodded and so did the secretary. I liked him then. Maybe it was because he was the only man in the room who didn’t seem to pose some kind of threat. But I also thought that he resembled me. Quiet and withdrawn from the brutish world. I was glad to have him in the room.
“Take Mr. Minton where he wants to go and give him a thousand dollars from petty cash.”
“Yes sir,” Bradford said. And then to me, “This way, Mr. Minton.”
Eric piped up then.
“You want I should go with ’em?” the scrawny henchman asked.
“No, Eric. Mr. Minton works for me now.”
I followed Bradford from the room, happy to leave the company of madmen.
IN THE LIGHT OF THE KITCHEN I could see that Bradford’s pants and coat were darned here and there. His dress shoes had a high shine but they were shapeless from many years of use. His face was what I can only call a faded white. He had a long nose and an accent that wasn’t quite English.
He entered a walk-in pantry and came out with a cardboard cigar box that held three stacks of cash. Half of one of these heaps was the thousand dollars the king had earmarked for me.
After paying me and returning the cash box to its unlocked closet, Bradford led me through a back door and down a series of stairs toward the vast garage. We got into an old Bentley and drove down a driveway that was a quarter mile or more.
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