past Caucasian on the way to chalk.
“They were trying to rob you?” I asked Sol.
“They vanted the bond, the money.” There was a dreamlike quality to his voice. He was going into shock.
He reached up and grabbed Fearless by the fabric of his silk shirt.
“Don’t let them rob Fanny,” he said.
“It’s a bet,” Fearless said.
“Oh God,” the wife cried.
Sol shuddered and tried to rise, but the pressure I was putting on his shoulder restrained him. The pain of the exertion made him wince, then he passed out.
There was a grim look on Fearless’s face. I knew from experience that that meant trouble for someone.
“He’s dead,” Mrs. Tannenbaum said simply and quietly. A whole lifetime of dread ending with a hush.
“Police!” a man’s voice commanded.
I tried to think my way back to the bookstore when it was still standing, but there was no escaping the hand that caught me by the shoulder and flung me to the floor.
7
“WHY DID YOU KILL Sol Tannenbaum?” Sergeant Bernard Latham asked for the fourteenth time.
“All I did was try and stop the bleedin’, man,” I said. Then I squinched up my face, preparing for the blow. But that time he didn’t hit me.
“Tristan confessed,” Latham said instead. The sergeant was a blocky-looking specimen. He was like the first draft of a drawing in one of the art lesson books I sold in my store. Block for a chest, squares for the pelvis, and cylinders for legs. A cube for a head. The only thing that humanized him was a protruding gut.
“Confessed to what?”
“He said you did the stabbing.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I don’t think you understand, Paris,” Latham said, pretending that he was my friend. “If he says that you did it and testifies to that, you get the gas chamber and he goes free. We don’t believe him, so what do you have to say?”
“Whatever Fearless says,” I replied.
“What?”
“Whatever Fearless says. If he said I did it, then okay, let’s go to court.”
Latham’s backhand was in great form. He could have gone pro. His blow reopened the cut that Leon Douglas had made in my mouth the day before.
A knock came on the door of the eight-by-eight gray room that the East L.A. cops used for questioning. Another white policeman stuck his head in. I was sprawled out on the painted concrete floor. Latham was deciding between a kick or another backhand.
“They want him for the lineup, Sergeant,” the head said.
When the sergeant didn’t answer, the head asked, “Should I tell them you need a few more minutes?”
It had to be a nightmare. Nobody had luck this bad.
“No,” Latham said. “We want him walking for the lineup. I can work on him some more after that.”
With that he lifted me by the shoulder and brought me to another room where a variety of black men about my size were milling around. A couple of them registered shock when they saw my face.
“Just goin’ on ugly, you the one to pick,” one man in a brown T-shirt and green pants said.
We lined up against a blank wall. A severe light came on, and we stood there. A few seconds grew to a minute. One minute became three. The light went out, and we were led from the room.
Latham came up to me, and I remembered his promise to
It had to be a nightmare.
“Come on,” a small uniformed cop next to the sergeant said in a loud, officious voice.
