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She answered in a bathrobe that was open just enough to snap me out of my lethargy. She had deep chocolate skin, dark red lips, and bright brown eyes. When she looked at Fearless her lips parted.
“Hi,” she said.
I might just as well have been a tree.
“Hey, Ambrosia. I’m sorry to drop in on you like this but I need a place to stay for a day or two.”
“Okay,” she said. No question why. No coy hesitation. I do believe that her nostrils widened and her chest swelled.
“Thank you, honey,” Fearless said.
He was swallowed up whole by her doorway and I was left at the threshold with a scrap of paper in my hand.
We’d decided that it would be dangerous for Fearless to travel the streets with so many people looking for him. I could make the rounds asking questions while he suffered the four walls of Ambrosia’s protective custody.
“GOOD AFTERNOON. BERNARD ARMS,” a friendly young woman said in my ear.
I was down the street from the residence hotel, closeted in a sidewalk phone booth.
“Brian Letterman,” I said in a tone completely drained of my Louisiana upbringing. “Pasternak Deliveries. With whom am I speaking?”
“Susan Seaborne. Yes, Mr. Letterman. What can I do for you?”
“I got a new guy at the front desk here, Sue. You know how it goes. Some guy in a hundred-dollar suit came in and dropped off a parcel without leaving the proper information. Lenny didn’t know. And now I have a problem.”
“Oh,” Susan Seaborne said. “I see.”
“I’m glad you do, because my boss wants to fire me. Can you believe that? Lenny takes down two lines for an address and Pasternak wants to put it on me.”
“I really don’t see what we have to do with your trouble at work,” the young woman said.
“Oh, yeah. I’m sorry. It’s just that my wife’s pregnant, and if I lose this job —”
“Are you looking for a new job?” the operator asked, trying to urge me toward clarity.
“I got two lines here,” I said. “Actually three words. Hercules and Bernard Arms. That’s all the address that the suit gave Lenny. If I don’t get a proper address my new baby will be suckling cheap wine on Skid Row.”
“Lance Wexler,” the woman said brightly. “You’re looking for Lance Wexler. He’s got a penthouse suite.”
“Is there a number on that suite, dear?” I asked in the wake of a deep sigh.
“P-four. That’s his apartment.”
“P-four,” I said, pretending to write it down. “Can you connect me to his room, please? I need to see when he wants to take delivery.”
“We can take the package at the front desk.”
“I know,” I said. “But Mr. Pasternak wants me to go there myself and get the man’s signature. Either I put the package in his hand by four o’clock today or I can kiss sweet butter good-bye.”
“But Mr. Wexler isn’t here,” my new friend Sue said.
“Are you sure? Or is it that he just doesn’t want to be bothered?”
“No. He’s out. I’m sure of it. No. He’s definitely not here. He hasn’t been in for a few days.”
THE BERNARD ARMS RESIDENCE HOTEL was nowhere near any colored neighborhood. They wouldn’t have rented a toilet to Kit Mitchell.
Next door on the right was a florist’s shop called Dashiel’s. On the left was a stationery store with no name posted. I went into the stationery store and bought a big blue envelope and a small stack of gummed labels. I attached one of the labels to the envelope and wrote the name Mr. John Stover. Beneath that I penned The Bernard Arms.
With the envelope under my arm I went around to the alley behind the building.
The back door of the residence hotel had a concrete platform in front of it. On that dais stood six large metal trash cans. Next to that was a double doorway. The doors were unlocked. They opened onto a hallway that smelled of garbage with a hint of freshly hatched maggots. The walls down that passage were painted dark brown to waist level and light blue the rest of the way up. It was as if the management had decided to make the working environment as hard and ugly as they possibly could.
At the far end of the unsightly corridor was a doorway that had a red-and-white sign that read FIRE EXIT attached to it. The stairwell beyond the door was also of utilitarian design. Filthy bare wood stairs led me past rough plaster walls that were painted a shade neither yellow nor green but a color that took on the worst aspects of both hues.
With the blue envelope securely nestled under my arm, I walked up the zigzag stairwell until it came to an end. I opened the door and came out on a tar paper and gravel roof. Realizing that I had overshot my goal by one floor I was about to turn back, but then I heard a sound, what a poet on my bookshelves might have called a susurration.
I looked around the side of the small structure that housed the doorway and saw the tan shoes and bare butt of a very white man humping away between a woman’s shuddering legs. She was wearing a maid’s uniform and he was most likely the valet. They were going at it on a sheet spread out over the gravel and tar.
“Warren. Oh, oh, Warren,” the woman moaned.
It was her calling out a name that was common but not someone I knew that struck me. The name Wexler came back to me. Hercules’s name suddenly seemed familiar.
I backed toward the doorway and descended a floor to the penthouse.
The penthouse hall had emerald carpeting and muted lime walls. There were potted ferns between the entrances to the suites and crystal chandeliers hung every six feet or so. The window at the end of the hall looked out over the tops of trees. It was more like a view of Paradise than some upstart brick-and-plasterboard city.
I thought about the lovers wrestling above me—Warren and the woman who called his name. Again I thought of the name Wexler. Where had I heard that name before?
My heart was thumping by then. I had made it all that way by using stealth that would have been better suited to a much braver man. I had planned my steps carefully, all the way down to the envelope under my arm. Hercules wasn’t home but Kit might be up there with some railroad prostitute. And all I had to do was mention Fearless’s name to keep him from doing something violent. Everyone who knew Fearless also knew not to cross him.
But the lovers on the roof had disconcerted me.
The cream yellow door sported the characters P4 cut out of mother-of-pearl. I felt my heart leap when I knocked. A moment went by. I knocked a bit harder. More time passed.
I sighed out loud. What the hell was I doing there anyway? I wasn’t Fearless Jones’s father. What did I care if he had to leave California? I had gone further than many a friend would.
But who was Hercules Wexler? I could see his family name printed somewhere.
I grabbed the knob, remembering my nightmare, and turned it. The door was unlocked. There was nothing left to stand in my way but common sense.
I entered Suite P4.
7
THE LARGE ROOM WAS STIFLING, filled with sunlight pouring in from at least a half-dozen closed, unshaded windows. The walls were yellow cream and the carpet royal blue. The ash furniture was heavy and bright. Glass-door cabinets exhibited fine china and porcelain knickknacks. Copies of Renaissance paintings in ornate gold frames hung here and there. A glossy finished dining table in the middle of the room supported a large vase with at least three dozen long-stemmed, once-red roses displayed like peacock feathers.
The only problem was that the roses had blackened and died and the hot room smelled sour.
I didn’t know what I was looking for exactly. Maybe some envelope or receipt that would give me and Fearless a line on Kit Mitchell. Just something so that when the police came down on Fearless he could give them a lead.
I could have been arrested for burglary, but I only planned to spend five minutes searching.
The first thing I did was to locate the fire escape. Then I leaned the back of a chair under the front doorknob. If somebody tried to get in I could be down in the street and off before they saw my face.
The dining room had a wide doorway, with no doors attached, which connected it to a living room that was two steps down. This room was also yellow and blue with windows and light. The paintings here had the same garish frames, but these copies were from the Postimpressionist period. Cézanne and Lautrec, Manet and Monet, but no Van Gogh or Gauguin. I knew about paintings. I once got a whole boxful of art books discarded by the Santa Monica library. They were mostly in black and white and had been thrown out in favor of the color plates found in newer texts.
There were no books or bookshelves anywhere in Mr. Wexler’s home.
There was a swinging door that was partly open. The temperature in that apartment must have been at least ninety-five degrees, but the wedge holding the door ajar made me cold enough to crave a sweater.
The foot that kept the door from closing was bare, connected to a large white man with a butcher’s knife buried in his chest. All he wore was a pair of brand-new blue jeans. His arms and legs went in all directions. His eyes were open and he was beginning to stink. His wrists were bruised and bloody, as if he had been struggling with tight bonds. There was a balled-up knot of white cloth wedged in his mouth. The open mouth, puffed-out cheeks, and bulging eyes made him look somewhat like a gasping fish.
My first instinct was to run. I even turned and took three steps. But then I stopped myself. The man was obviously dead. From the smell he had been there awhile. A killer wouldn’t stay around the body, I thought. And I’d seen worse. Less than a year before, I’d searched a room full of slaughtered men, looking for the fingertip that Fearless had gotten shot off.
The man was partly on his side, so I didn’t have to move him much to get the wallet out of his back pocket. There was a driver’s license for a Lawrence Wexler.
“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.
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