Walter Mosley - Fearless Jones

Then a thought hit me. Most of the time a married man taps on a woman he has easy access to. Wedlock keeps him from going out every night prowling the bars and nightclubs; he meets his girlfriends at work or next door. Maybe Lily works on the third floor, I thought. Maybe that light up there is them.

LIGHT FROM a single bulb spilled out from the crack into the gloomy hallway. To my disappointment the word JANITOR was stenciled on the red-brown door. There was no sound coming from anywhere.

I pulled the door open, expecting to see a deep-basined sink and a worn-out collection of mops and brooms.

I wondered how long he knew about the exposed beam that ran across the ceiling of the third-floor hopper room; the perfect timber to hold the rope firmly.

His face was darker than mine, and his inelegant hands were now stiff from the onset of rigor mortis. His skin was room temperature. The pants were unzipped and his grayish pink penis poked out. Morris looked as uncomfortable in death as he had in life. Under his feet was an overturned step ladder he had used to reach up with the rope and then kicked away to end his life. In the corner was a dwindling puddle that had the strong stench of urine. In the opposite corner was a cream-colored envelope that, I found, held the suicide note.

A few weeks later, when I was taking a forced vacation, it came to me that the piss in the corner was Morris’s last act of sloppy rebellion, the comment that summed up his life and then evaporated. The suicide letter was just a footnote to that metaphor.

I squatted down outside of the janitor’s door and read the five sheets of small, surprisingly neat, print. Then I read it again. The words were craftily penned, but the mind that wrote them was still a mess.

Morris was filled with fears and hallucinations, delusions of grandeur and deep self-hatred. His girlfriend, it seemed, was a prostitute, his dreams empty and pitiful.

I’m a fast reader, so I read the letter a third time and then put it in my pocket. I went all the way down to the front door and then stopped. Ever since Elana had come into my store I had been making the wrong decisions, going in the wrong direction. Therefore my next choice had to be considered. What would I say to Gella Greenspan? If I told her about her husband, she would want to call a hospital, and they would call the police. The police would want to know her movements that night, and those movements included me. Simon Jonas would be happy to press charges of assault, and if I didn’t ditch the pistol, they’d also have me on theft. On the other hand, if I didn’t tell her, it would be up to strangers, cold-hearted cops who’d just as likely accuse her of some crime connected to the idiot’s demise.

Pat Boone was fumbling a note when I opened the door to the car. Gella was asleep in the passenger’s seat. The sound startled her, but when she saw my face she smiled.

“Did you find anything?”

“No,” I said. “Nothing.”

31

FEARLESS AND DORTHEA were asleep in the bedroom when I got back to our apartment at a little past five. I’d dropped Gella off at her place twenty minutes earlier. When we neared her house she worried that maybe Morris came home while she was gone and that he’d be worried about her. I kept my silence, telling myself that it would be less painful this way.

“Paris?” Fearless said from the bed.

“What time is it?” Dorthea groaned.

“Go back to sleep,” Fearless told her.

He threw on his clothes and met me in the kitchen of our little unit. I breathed Morris’s suicide in a whisper. It wasn’t until we got in the car and were driving that I told him the rest.

“And you didn’t tell her that her husband was upstairs,” he said, “dead?”

“I told you, man. It was nighttime, and they had already called her about Sol. And the dude was stone-cold dead. She couldn’t’a helped him. How would it have been good for her to see the husband she loved with his neck stretched out a foot long on a hemp rope, his dick stuck out, and his piss all over the floor?”

“I don’t know about all that,” Fearless chided, “and neither do you. All I know is that a man’s wife deserves to know when he’s dead.”

“He left a suicide note too,” I said.

“He did?”

“Yeah. I took it.”

“Now why you wanna do that?”

“’Cause sometimes I must think that I’m you,” I said.

“What’s that s’posed to mean?”

“First off, he wrote it to a prostitute named Lily. The whole thing was written to her.”

“Girlfriend?”

“By the hour,” I said. “And that ain’t all. Morris the one killed Fanny.”

“No.” Fearless turned to me in wonder.

“Morris wrote it down that he told her on the drive over to her house that the man he had been working for, Zev Minor, a man she had never met, was actually a guy named Zimmerman. He was feeling guilty over what happened to Sol and scared about what might happen still. Fanny went a little crazy when Morris told her that. She screamed at him and yelled at him and said that she was going to raise hell. He dropped her off and then got scared. He said that he went to his car and then came back to knock on the door, but she wouldn’t let him in.

“And then he went around to the back to kill her?” Fearless asked.

“No. At least he said it was just to talk her out of going to the police. It seems that the policies that Minor had been writing weren’t exactly legal and Morris was listed as the agent for all of them. He said that he went to the back door, but she wouldn’t let him in. Then she said she was calling the police. When he saw her pick up the phone he went crazy. He broke the window in with a rock. After that he said that he didn’t remember anything until he came back when we were there.”

“I don’t get it,” Fearless said. “Why would Fanny go to the police? She said she didn’t like the cops. An’ even if she would go, why would she tell on her own family? I mean, I know she didn’t like the boy, but damn.”

“It’s ’cause of Minor. Morris wrote it in the note,” I said. “He said that he’d been working for the man who called himself Minor. But his name was really Zimmerman, a Jew that worked with the Nazis to fool wealthy Jews who had hidden their wealth from the Germans. He told the Jews that they could buy their freedom, but it was a lie.”

I glanced over at Fearless. His jawbones were standing out because of his clenched teeth. No black man liked the notion of the concentration camps; we had lived in labor camps the first 250 years of our residence in America. And for Fearless it was even worse; he had actually seen the camps. He knew the price of this treachery firsthand.

“Why would Gella’s husband work for a man like that?”

“He didn’t know at first. Minor came to him after Sol was convicted and gave him a part-time job working as an art insurance agent. Then, after a few months went by, Minor told Morris that he was working secretly for the Israeli government. He said that Sol had embezzled money that was meant to go to Israel. Sol was already in prison, and Minor wanted Morris to find out from Fanny what he’d done with the money. Slowly Morris figured out that Minor was Zimmerman, but by then he got greedy. Morris tried to find out from Fanny where the money was. But Sol was too slick, he had covered up his business. Fanny didn’t know anything, and there were no records left to be found.”

“And where was this money that Sol could steal it?” asked Fearless.

“I don’t know for sure, but as close as I can figure, Minor was selling off the art treasures through Lawson and Widlow and then giving the buyers some kinda fake history through his insurance company. Lawson and Widlow must have been holding the money, and when Sol found that out, he embezzled it and converted it into bonds. When Morris couldn’t get a line on the dough, Minor came up with Plan B.”

“Leon,” Fearless said with conviction.

I nodded. “Reverend Grove went to Lawson and Widlow with the bond he was holdin’ for Elana. They went to Minor or Zimmerman or whatever you wanna call him. He must’a told them about Leon’s deal with Sol, and Minor went to work getting Leon outta prison.”

“All that was in the note?” Fearless asked.

“Naw. Just about Minor, and Morris workin’ for him. I been figurin’ the rest out myself. Minor figured that the bond was linked somehow to the rest of the money that Sol stole.”

“But that don’t make no sense, Paris,” Fearless said after a long ponder.

“What?”

“Minor spendin’ all that time and money to get at the bond. By the time Leon got outta jail, it should’a been gone.”

“No. The bank needed Sol to cash it, and even if Elana had passed it on, she might have written the numbers down or at least remembered who she gave it to.”

“Oh,” Fearless said. I don’t think that Fearless was incapable of understanding me, he just wasn’t interested in my puzzler’s mind.

“Minor and Leon still lookin’, but I just might know where the bond landed.”

“Oh yeah?” Fearless said.

THE EXETER HOTEL ON Hooper had a red velvet phone booth with a louvered door that shut out all noise and gave the caller a good deal of privacy. I dialed the phone number that I’d put in my pocket for safekeeping four days before.

“Pine Grove Hotel,” a fresh, young female voice declared.

I hung up.

“JOHN MANLY,” I said to the hotel clerk.

“And to what is this pertaining?” the snooty, suited white man asked.

“He the one wanna see me, man.” I was being needlessly argumentative. “Just tell him that I have something to tell him about Sol Tannenbaum.”

“Maybe you’d prefer to leave a message,” the coal-eyed, hollow-chested clerk suggested.

“Maybe you don’t understand English,” Fearless said.

The clerk dialed a few numbers. He picked at the cord nervously while shooting glances at my friend. I thought he was calling for help, but instead he said, “Mr. Manly? I have two men down here who want to talk to you about a Mr. Tannenbaum.”

I smiled and nodded.

“But sir,” the clerk said. “Wouldn’t you prefer to come down and meet them first?”

The clerk didn’t like the answer he was getting.

“Yes sir. I’ll send them up directly.” He put the phone down behind the counter somewhere, then took up a brass bell, which he shook, causing a shrill ring.

A Negro bellman came running from somewhere. Ignoring us he spoke to the hotel clerk. “Yes, Mr. Corman?”

“Not you, Randolph. I want Billings.”

“Yes sir,” Randy said, and he darted away.

While we waited, Mr. Corman became very interested in a loose thread on his jacket sleeve. He took out a pair of scissors and tried to see if he could cut the errant strand at the root. But the run was halfway between his wrist and elbow and it was impossible to hold the thread and cut it at the same time. It was a dilemma. He couldn’t cut the string without taking off his jacket and couldn’t take off his jacket while standing at the front desk. But he couldn’t leave his desk with two Negroes standing there unattended.

“Are we waiting for something?” I asked.

Mr. Corman concentrated on his sleeve.

A new bellman, white this time, came to the desk.

“Yes, Mr. Corman?” he asked, just as fawning as Randolph had been.

“See these gentlemen up to three-twenty-two.”

“Yes sir.”

The walk through the lobby with its plush carpets and potted bird-of-paradise plants was even more humiliating than Corman’s condescension. The women wore fine clothes and all the men had suits on. I was in the same tired slacks and loose shirt, in shoes that had done more than their share of walking. It felt like going to church in your dirty work clothes.

We didn’t molest our escort. It wasn’t his fault that he had to accompany us every step of the way. He knocked for us. The door was answered by a handsome and well-built white man in his late twenties. The same man I had seen bidding farewell to Sergeant Latham and Elana Love.

“Mr. Manly?” I asked affably.

“Thank you,” the bellman Billings was saying to Fearless, and I realized that my friend had given our warden a tip.

“Mr. —?” Manly hesitated.

“Minton,” I said. “And this is Mr. Jones. May we come in?”

“What is this about?”

“It’s about a Jewish fortune stolen by Nazis and one turncoat Jew named —”

“Come in,” the man who answered to the name John Manly said. He backed up, ushering us into the sitting room of a large suite. A yellow couch and four blue chairs were arranged around a table with all kinds of official-looking papers on it. The room was heavy with strange-smelling tobacco smoke. It wasn’t an American blend.

From a side door two more men entered. One was short with heavily muscled arms. He wore a gray T-shirt and ocher pants with no shoes. He had a big belly and a hawkish nose. He wasn’t happy to see us, but from the look of that scowl, I doubted if much made him happy. The third man, and the youngest of the three, was taller and sleeker than Fearless. His skin was pale, and he wore a small black cap on the back of his head.

“This is Ari,” Manly said, pointing at the shorter man, “and Lev.”

We stood there for a moment, wondering what manners to follow.

“Would you gentlemen like to sit down?” Manly asked us.

Fearless moved for a blue chair, I followed suit. Manly took a seat on the yellow couch, but Lev and Ari stayed on their feet.

A pair of glass doors led out to a vine-encircled patio. The sun shone in, slightly green from the vines.

“What do you have to tell us?” Manly inquired.

I was getting ready to launch into the business at hand, but Fearless beat me to it.

“Sol an’ Fanny Tannenbaum’s dead,” he said, “an’ I don’t like it one bit. They was good people, and I promised to look after ’em. I got a pretty good idea’a who killed ’em, but I want to get the man that was the cause of their death.”

Manly glanced at the stocky Ari. The latter hunched his shoulders and turned down his lips.

“That has nothing to do with us,” Manly said.

“That’s a bunch’a shit,” Fearless said. “You want the lost money, the money that Sol took. Whoever killed him was after that. An’ if it’s you, I’m’a find it out.”

I came for a parley and found myself on the verge of war.