32
“THAT SOUNDS pretty okay, huh, Paris?” Fearless said on our way down the block to our car.
“What?”
“Thirty thousand. Even split three ways you could still start a new bookstore with that kinda scratch.”
“That was just talk, Fearless. We don’t know where the money is. And what the fuck were you doin’ in there anyways?”
“Pushin ’em a little,” Fearless said almost innocently. “Pushin ’em to work with us on this thing.”
“Why you after Zimmerman? You don’t know him. You ain’t even ever met him.”
“It’s Zimmerman had Sol killed.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Yes I do, Paris. And he gonna pay.”
“Pay how?”
“With blood and money, his freedom or his life,” Fearless said.
“And what’s all this stuff about money?”
“It ain’t about money, it’s about the man who destroyed Fanny and Sol.”
“Morris killed Fanny.”
“’Cause Zimmerman drove him crazy.”
“What does that have to do with you tellin’ them spies up there that we know where the money is? Now they gonna be after us.”
“Not after I told ’em I lied,” Fearless said.
“And what if they don’t believe you?”
“You give ’em the note that Morris wrote and say you sorry.”
HALF AN HOUR LATER we cruised past Gella’s home. Three black-and-white police cruisers were parked out front.
“I guess they must’a found Morris,” I said.
“She must be hurtin’ over that,” Fearless said. “That was the last family she had in life.” There was an indictment in his tone.
“And how would me draggin’ her upstairs to see his corpse make it hurt any less?”
“You could have comforted her, Paris.”
“No, no. That’s you, Mr. Jones. You the one talk to corpses and kiss married women under their husbands’ noses. It’s you who walks into a room full’a spies and puts
Fearless’s response to my tirade was to light up a cigarette. “Where to now?” he asked half a Camel later.
“Milo might have something, but he could wait. There’s one thing in all this that don’t fit,” I said. “It might be a long shot, but then again, maybe not.”
I drove back to south L.A., back to a nameless alley off of Slauson. It was mostly backyards and trash cans in that alley, but there was one doorway that led to a flight of rickety unpainted stairs. At the top of those stairs was a hallway of apartments. The front of the building, on Avalon, was condemned, but the landlord, a man named Mofass, let the units illegally for fifteen dollars a month.
Theodore Wally had lived in number three since his mother died six years earlier. I knew that because I had a girlfriend who used to live there until she got TB and went back to Lake Charles.
Wally took a long time to let us in. We heard him scurrying around in there. When he opened the door, he had on pants and nothing else. His yellow chest was almost concave, and the hickey on his neck was so purple that it might have bled. I imagined some fat girl pinning him down with her girth while sucking mercilessly on his neck.
“Mr. Minton,” he said, near tears it seemed. “Fearless. What can I do for you?”
“Let us in, Wally,” I said.
“I-I-It’s n-n-not really a good t-t-time for me,” he stuttered. “The house is a mess and… and… and I got a cold. I promised my uncle that I’d help him move.”
“Move it, man,” I said.
Theodore made room, and we came into his wreck of a home. His once-upholstered sofa showed its cotton
