Under the fear of impending death and with the recognition of Christopher, who I would have bet was the Nazi Holderlin, everything else fell into place in my mind. I wondered if the nearness of death caused some chemical reaction in the brain that increased intelligence, as some scientists say that adrenaline increases physical strength in times of great stress.
I sat forward and said, “We know where Elana Love is at, and she has the bond.”
“Where?” Leon asked from the sidelines.
“My colleague has a good question, Mr. Minton,” Minor said.
“What’s it worth?” I asked.
The little man pressed out his lips and shrugged. “My patience is wearing thin, my friend. Sol Tannenbaum stole my money. It took me many years to get to this moment. Don’t press your luck.”
“You mean the art treasures you stole from the poor people that Mr. Christopher sent to the gas chamber?”
Mr. Christopher said something in German.
“What’d he say?” Leon demanded. “I told you muthahfuckahs I don’t want you talkin’ that shit around me.”
Fearless’s hand was at the opening of his pocket.
I felt my own pistol pressing into my stomach at the belt line.
I wanted to get us up on our feet and going through the door. That was a natural advantage that I was sure Fearless could capitalize on.
“We could take you to her,” I suggested to Minor, “but we’d have to get something for that.”
“Why bother, Paris?” Fearless said. “Go on, tell him.”
I turned to Fearless, speechless.
Fearless smiled.
“Tell him what the Israeli guys said.” Fearless leaned forward across the desk, reaching into his pocket as he did so. “Elana took the bond to these Israeli guys been lookin’ for you. She showed ’em the bond, and they found out that it wasn’t part’a the big money you lost.” Fearless nodded toward Leon and Tricks. “That means he don’t need you no more, Leon. If there ain’t no treasure, then there ain’t no cut. He’ll probably tell that fancy lawyer you got to cut you loose.”
“What’s he sayin’, Minor?” Leon said.
“It’s nothing. It’s a trick.”
“That cop, that Latham, he was workin’ for the Israelis,” Fearless went on. “He took Elana there before Grove called you. You know I ain’t lyin’.”
Minor’s eyes showed uncertainty. I remember thinking that Fearless had probably succeeded in getting us killed.
Mr. Christopher chose that unfortunate moment to practice his German.
“I told you to talk English,” Leon shouted. He pulled a pistol from under his shirt.
“Get down!” Fearless screamed.
He grabbed my chair, upturning it into Milo. We both tumbled over, shouting. Mr. Christopher shouted something else in German. One shot was fired. I was turned on my back, facing Minor, who stood erect like a soldier holding a pistol at arm’s length. He fired and I turned, expecting to see Fearless die.
He was already firing when the bullet entered his forehead. Then the tall and slender black man named Tricks fell straight down in a heap.
Fearless, was on my lips when I realized that it was the cowboy who’d gotten shot. Leon had pressed Mr. Christopher against the far wall and was just firing the bullet into that man’s temple. With terrible quickness he fired randomly in my direction. I didn’t know if he’d hit me or not, but Milo screamed out loud. Two more shots fired. I grabbed for my pistol, but I pulled it out with such force that it went flying out of my grasp into a far corner. Fearless was bleeding, but the baby gun was in his hand rapping out reports. Leon lowered his gun and got a strange look on his face. When he remembered that he was supposed to be shooting, the gun was already too heavy. He slumped down and expired, beaten for the second time in a row.
Suddenly I remembered Minor.
“Fearless! Watch out!” I yelled.
I stumbled up on top of the desk and then fell right on the corpse of the traitor. The shot from Tricks’s gun had found the mark.
“Shit!” Fearless shouted.
“I’m dyin’,” Milo moaned.
Both men were bleeding — Fearless from his left hand and Milo from his upper arm. I went to Milo and pulled off his jacket, then I ripped the shirt off his back. I wadded the shirt up and pressed it against the wound.
“Hold it tight,” I told him.
“I can’t,” he cried.
“You don’t and you’ll keep on bleedin’,” I said. “An’ you know there’s only so much you got to give.”
Milo grabbed the bandage, and I went to Fearless. He was holding a handkerchief on the wound of his left hand and searching the floor with his eyes.
“Damn!” Fearless cursed. “Damn!”
“What, man? What!” I cried.
“My goddamned baby finger,” Fearless said. “Muthahfuckah shot it off!”
“We got to go, man!”
“Not without my finger.”
“What?”
Fearless grabbed my shirt with his good hand and pulled me up close. “Wake up, Paris. That finger got my fingerprint on it.”
I took a deep breath, and in that forced semblance of calm I said, “You get Milo to the bottom of the stairs. I’ll find the finger and be down in a minute.”
Milo yelled in pain when Fearless helped him to his feet. They struggled over the four dead men, climbed through the door, and went shuffling and groaning down the hall.
I turned on the overhead light and searched the bloody scene. I looked all over the floor, under the desk, and even under the four corpses. I was in a kind of shock, sifting around. I got lost there among the dead. At one point I sat down on the floor next to Tricks. He had collapsed into a seated position, looking like a puppet waiting for someone to pull his string. I looked at him, wondering who he was and what had brought him to this final moment. Then I thought that if I was lucky, I’d read about it in tomorrow’s evening edition; if not, I’d find out at my trial.
Down on the floor, next to the man’s knee, was a finger, a curved little digit with a wad of bulging red flesh pressing out where the knuckle should have been. I picked it up and put it in my pocket. Then I got to my feet. I retrieved my discarded pistol and headed for the stairs.
As I walked from the room, Tricks fell over on his side.
34
I JOINED Fearless and Milo, who were hunkered down by the side door. Being the only man not wounded, I was elected to get the car. I drove up to the sidewalk, and Fearless hustled Milo out and into the backseat. They both laid low back there while I drove down the fairly empty streets.
We weren’t out of the woods yet. There I was, a black man driving down the streets of white Los Angeles with no reason that a cop could imagine — except mischief. And what could I say if he pulled us over and found two wounded men in the backseat?
“Fearless.”
“Yeah, Paris?”
“You still got that gun?”
“Naw, man. I wiped it off and dropped it next to the big white dude while you was workin’ on Milo’s arm.”
That was one thing at least. My pistol hadn’t even been fired.
Maybe, if we got away, the cops wouldn’t suspect that there had been others in the room.
“Take Hauser down to Olympic and hang a right,” Milo said. “Take it to Sierra Bonita and go all the way south down to three blocks past Venice. It’s the only two-story house on the block.”
I KNOCKED ON the front door. After a few seconds Loretta Kuroko said, “Who is it?”
“It’s Paris, Lo. Me and Milo and Fearless.”
The door opened. Loretta was wearing a blue terrycloth bathrobe. Beyond her were two small Japanese, a man and a woman, huddled together.
“What happened?”
I told her about the wounds but not how they were inflicted. She had me drive through the driveway and into the backyard. From there we went through the back door and into the kitchen. Loretta’s parents didn’t speak any English, but they showed surprisingly little fear of blood and gunshot wounds or desperate men in the middle of the night. Both Fearless and Milo were washed up and bandaged within a quarter of an hour. Milo, who knew enough Japanese to say may I and thank you, made his bed on Loretta’s couch.
Fearless and I said our thank-you’s and left. I dropped Fearless off at Dorthea’s and then drove over to our apartment at Fontanelle’s court, where I slept fitfully until late the next morning.
When I got up, I knew what I had to do.
So, dressed in the same funky clothes, I drove over to an alley off Slauson and climbed the back stairs to the third floor.
Theodore Wally’s door was unlocked, but that didn’t matter much because you can’t steal from a dead man.
The bullet wound had been fatal but not immediately so. He had been cleaned off and bandaged and put into the ratty sofa’s foldout bed. The covers were pulled up to his chin. His skin was still warm.
There was a bloodstain in the middle of the floor. That’s where they shot him and left him to die. I sat on the side of the bed and lowered my face into my hands. I don’t know how long I sat like that.
When I felt a gentle breeze on my skin I looked up, and Love was standing there. She wore a yellow dress with low-heeled orange shoes. Her pocketbook was black though. The fact that she hadn’t color-coordinated her bag was the only clue that she was pressured or rushed.
“I’m surprised you came back,” I said.
“I’m surprised you did too.” She closed the door, and when she turned back, there was a small pistol in her hand.
“Wally tell you that we were here ’fore you killed him?”
“I was hiding behind the sofa,” she said. “When you almost beat him to death.”
“I smelled your perfume,” I said. “But I mistook it for roses at first. And I had the club in my hand, but I didn’t kill him.”
“Neither did I.”
“Then who?”
“Leon,” she said with distaste. “Leon or his friend Tricks. I don’t know which one because they were both here together.”
“So why are you still breathing?”
“I wasn’t here. I came in after they had shot him.” Her sorrow seemed sincere. “He went to meet them, to make a deal about the bond. I guess they followed him after they met, and they left him for dead.”
“How’d you hook up wit’ Wally?” I asked.
“I was looking for you like I said before, and I remembered him from the day he helped you. I saw his profile, and you told me that he worked at the store. He was all sad. I talked to him a little bit, he was nice. Then, when I went out to look for you, Leon grabbed me.”
“Then you were with me and Fearless and then with Latham,” I said. “So how’d Wally fit in all that?”
“I wanted to find you again,” she said. “I thought Theodore could help me, but he was so upset when I went to the store that I offered to take him out for a coffee. He decided right then to quit his job. He wrote a note, and we went off together. He was very sad about what he did to you. I gave him a shoulder to cry on and offered to help him.”
“Some help,” I said.
“I tried to save him.”
“A doctor would have been better.”
“He didn’t want a doctor,” she said. “He wanted the money from the bond and the police would have messed all that up.”
I grunted, and Elana looked away. She wanted the money so bad that she had a dead man begging for it.
“You gonna shoot me?” I asked.
“Only if you want me to,” she said.
“No thanks.”
“Why don’t you join me, Paris? We could make this money together. We could split it,” she smiled, “or share.”
“I don’t know if I like the odds.”
“What odds?”
“I was sitting outside of the motel when Latham and Brother Grove got laid low. I saw you driving in the opposite direction.”
“When Bernard fell asleep I called Father Vincent. He said he’d call Grove,” she explained, “but he brought that big white German dude. They were gonna rob us, but somebody called Latham and warned him. The pig, he ran out with my bag ’cause he thought the bond was in there.”
“But I bet you took it out while he was sleeping off that thing you do with your tongue.”
I regretted what I said immediately because it made her angry. And it doesn’t pay to make a woman angry when she has a gun pointed at your head.
“No thank you, Elana,” I said. “I don’t think I could survive a partnership with you. But you could tell me something.”
“What?”
“Why you messin’ around with Leon when you already been to see the Israeli guys?”
My knowledge of her actions disconcerted Elana a little. But she was a smart enough cookie to keep cool even in surprise.
“They say they payin’ like two percent for a finder’s fee. But Leon’s connection was talkin’ about a share.” She hesitated a minute and then continued, “You could get your friend, Paris, we could go to Leon and get him to tell who the connection is. You might as well, ’cause you know Leon’ll try an’ kill the both of you after you shamed him like you did.”
“Lawson and Widlow,” I said.
“Say what?”
“Lawson and Widlow. Accounting. Somewhere in Beverly Hills. That’s Leon’s connection. It’s on me.”
Elana got that tight look around her eyes. Every time I’d seen it before, she was soon to figure out my angle or meaning. But not that time.
“You wanna come with me?” she asked.
“Not for a hundred thousand dollars,” I said.
She almost said something. But words failed.
“Where’s your friend?” she asked, moving away from the door cautiously.
“Fearless is in his girlfriend’s arms. I wish I was too.”
“Why you tellin’ me about Leon’s connection?” she demanded.
I gestured at the cooling corpse. “I done had enough shit.”
For the next few seconds my life was in the balance. Killing me might have been a good idea. But I had played my best card. I didn’t want any more to do with Elana Love. Sitting there next to Theodore was the safest thing I could do. The money, even if we could have found it, stolen from doomed men, was itself a kind of doom. Maybe Elana Love could ride that kind of storm. I sure couldn’t.
“You’re a fool, Paris.” Elana Love was neither the first nor the last woman to think so or say it.
I nodded.
She backed toward the door and let herself out.
I DON’T KNOW what happened for a while after that. I suppose that Elana went to the accountants’ offices and saw the aftermath of the carnage we had witnessed. Maybe, after a day or so, she was able to speak to the principals. I doubt if that meeting did much for her wealth.
